General Stuff from Colin
- More polish in the next quarterly update. Spring update is chance to address some of the feedback from HoT. You should be able to play in a short of amount time and make meaningful progress. We are going to take a look at that. Some areas ended more grindy than we would like.
- Finish the fractal backpack.
- Spring update is to fix things in HoT that didn't really align with our vision.
- We are able to talk about the WvW resurgence update earlier than we thought. Details coming soon. WvW took 5 years to develop and we are working on it as fast as we can. WvW player culling took 1 year of our most senior engineer to fix.
- Sean Hughes - Game Designer. Worked on the new branded that spawn in the fight. Alot of the open world mobs are boring and follow a regular pattern of attack you, wait for 3 seconds, and then attack you again. The HoT mobs were more interesting and we remade branded mobs based on that.
- McKenna Berdrow - Game Designer. Worked on achievements and decorations.
- Andrew Gray - Game Designer - Worked on the Shatterer abilities, gliding and the siege weapons
- How did the shatterer revamp came about?
- One of the legendary precursor collections was blocked by the old Shatterer since you could perm blind it. There were also a few safe zones that people could stand in and cheese the fight. These were simple fixes that would take only a few days. Then we added breakbar and gliding.
- We already have a few world bosses that need organized map/guild to beat it. Since it was a level 40-50 zone, we didn't want it to be overly difficult. The achievement are difficult.
- We are looking into scaling issues with his breakbar since no one has broken his bar yet and there is a cool animation associated with it.
- We wanted the achievements to guide players through the fight and all the mechanics. The achievement for getting smashed by Shatterer is kinda trollish and was designed by McKenna since she liked the one in Jormag and she is abit of a troll.
- For sieges, Mortar had the most changes. Before you had a button to turn left, a button to turn right and a button to guess how far to shoot. It turned really slow and was really ineffective. The med kit skill was also changed to apply protection/splash heal on hit and also drop a med kit. Turrets have a CC skill added to help with breakbar and now has a longer range.
- Non HoT players can still get the branded backpack since there is only one achievement that requires gliding and you only need 10/11 of the achievements for the meta.
- Branded mobs such as the elite Minotaur have a mechanic where it would pin a player down and pound them to death unless the player stun break or others break its breakbar. The elite Griffion would do more damage flying but if you break its bar, it would land and do less damage.
- The Shatterer can imprison players in crystals while they are gliding in the air. If this happens, they would plummet to the ground and act as a bomb, dealing AoE damage to players when they land on the ground.
- The developers loved the Gorseval tentacle stairway to Heaven that was posted on reddit.
