Guild Chat - Episode 109
Guild Chat - Episode 109
- Title
- Fishing and Skiffs
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Nick Hernandez
Tracey West
John Hargrove
Paul Quin - Date
- September 10, 2021
- Official video
- YouTube
The 109th episode of Guild Chat aired on September 10, 2021.
Transcription[edit]
Skiffs and Fishing trailer [4:38][edit]
Trailer guy: You've mined, harvested, and foraged your way through the deadliest terrain. Now it's time to kick back and relax. In Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons, you'll learn how to gather a new resource: fish. Always pack your fishing pole for quiet, contemplative moments wherever you find water. Keep an eye out for fishing holes to hook more impressive catches. Your real adventures begin out on the water. With your personal skiff, you can venture straight to the best fishing holes or just hang out with up to four friends. Haul your catch back to shore, and chefs can use it to prepare delicious, new seafood dishes. Whether you're looking for peace and quiet or valuable resources, Tyria's fish will never be safe from you again.
Introduction [6:00][edit]
Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, and welcome to Guild Chat. I'm your host, Rubi. Thank you all for joining us today. I'm super excited about today's show, because I know a lot of you have had questions about how skiffs and fishing work, and we are here today to show you answers to hopefully all of those questions, if not most of them. With me in the studio today is Nick Hernandez. Hey Nick.
Nick Hernandez: Hi, I'm Nick Hernandez. Nice to meet you, everybody.
Rubi: And joining me in game, our Senior Environment Artist Tracey West, Game Designer John Hargrove, and Senior Gameplay Engineer Paul Quin. So thank you, all three, for joining us in game to help us with skiffs and fishing today. We're going to jump right in after two quick things before we get started. End of Dragons is a work in progress. You know it's not done. We're still working on it. We are playing in a development environment today. So you're going to see things like temporary text and placeholder icons and placeholder NPCs here and there. Just pardon our dust; we're working to make End of Dragons awesome for you. And also, there are still a lot of things that we don't want to spoil for you, so we are going to be hiding a few things from you here and there. If it looks like we're hiding something, that's because we are. But we have some more surprises to share with you down the line.
Nick: It's on purpose.
Rubi: It's on purpose. We're crafty like that.
Nick: Yeah, actually, something additional that I'd like to note is that in a lot of the promotional material that we've been having recently, a lot of it's been based around Shing Jea, and we're actually getting to kind of exist in that space, a little bit of that space, at least, very, very tiny portion. So it's just really neat to be able to play around in it.
Rubi: Yeah, I'm excited to do that. Mark, we might be having some audio issues.
Nick: From me?
Fishing [7:50][edit]
Rubi: No, just John is letting me know. So I'm going to have, Mark is looking into that while we get started fishing. Nick, why don't you start us off with how you begin fishing, how you get your first fishing gear and all that good stuff.
Nick: Yeah, for sure. So basically, very similar to the way you get raptors within Path of Fire, within this expansion, we wanted to have fishing be something that you could unlock pretty much right off the bat. So as you progress through the initial parts of the story within the first chapter, at some point once you've completed specific instances, you're going to just be able to unlock fishing right off the bat. And it'll reward you with your first fishing rod, and starting like lure as an example, to make sure you can just go out into the world and start whenever you want. Just toss it in there and get to fishing. They are of course going to be like the base level ones, but something to note is that with fishing rods specifically, they do not have any durability, which is different to other kind of resource node gathering tools that you would see within the game like the mining picks or the sickle. So with fishing rods, specifically, the fishing rod will not break. We do have charges for the lures and the bait, but that's because they have different tiers and things like that which we'll see a little bit later.
Rubi: Awesome. All right, so why don't we first let's go through the fishing mastery line so you all can see what the fishing masteries are and you'll have a little bit of context for what we talk about as we're fishing.
- The first one in the fishing mastery line that you're going to unlock is Fishing Hole Master, and that gives you faster catches and triple XP at fishing holes.
- The second one is Angler Sense, which unlocks a skill that detects nearby fishing holes. I'm going to show you on my map. This detects nearby fishing holes and lights them up on the map so you can find where the fishing holes are. You can see that right down here in front of Nick. There are shore fish: 471 away.
- The third one is Fishing on a Full Tank. This gives you +50 fishing power if you are nourished. Fishing power is a new stat that is going to come in with this mastery line that grants a higher chance of catching rare fish and makes fishing a little easier in difficult regions.
- So the fourth one is Master Caster: that increases your maximum fishing range.
- And the final one is Local Legend: fish mongers and fishing merchants in Cantha will give you exclusive selections.
With that said, let's go fishing. Fishing nodes like this one that we are standing in front of now have the best chance of giving good rewards and the highest rarity fish. You can fish anywhere in the game world that there is water though. Fishing is not only in End of Dragons; it's going to be throughout the game world. And that means also in the water in your Guild Halls. Let's get started. Nick, why don't you run us through how to fish.
Nick: For sure. So basically, as I mentioned earlier, very similar to other areas, you want to make sure that you can equip things like your rod and your lures and your bait. And you can just do that right from your inventory. But the way that you actually access your rod is a bit different. So we introduced the novelties button... hah, I'm like trying to figure out what the right name is for it, but the button on the bottom right under the mount section. But now we have another button under the swap weapon select that is specifically for fishing and summoning your skiff. So what happens is when you click on the start fishing one, it'll actually give you your fishing rod and give you the ability to utilize skills. In this case right now, we have Cast Line and as we've mentioned before, we have the Angler Sense on your fishing rod. Whenever you choose to Cast Line, it will give you this little bobber that you'll see, and it just kind of shows you where you'll be able to put it. So as you can see, on terrain, you won't be able to put it in so it turns red, and in the water it will turn the appropriate color blue. Once you actually put it out there, it'll do a quick animation, and what you'll see is that the bob will show up. As you can see mine over here, it's currently sitting there and whenever it splashes with the water ripples, that's when you know that there is a fish on the line. So I'm going to wait for mine. And then you click on 1. And what happens is that then this UI appears where there is a bar that fills up to success. There is this yellow thing called the sweet spot and then this low green thing we call a fish marker. So what happens is you can use your 2 and 3 buttons to keep the sweet spot on the fish marker. And what happens is, as you continue to keep doing that, it will build up this bottom bar, which is your success bar. And then once that has filled up completely, what you'll see is that you will get the fish and you'll have succeeded in fishing. And that's pretty much the overarching way of being able to do it. Just as other crafting things you know within this game, with these fish, you will actually be able to use them as crafting reagents and things like that and materials. So what happens is whenever you click on the fish after you've caught it, you will filet the fish and you will get crafting materials that you then can use to cook and also trade in to fishing NPCs and things like that.
Rubi: I'm sorry, I'm struggling over here!
Nick: You're good. It can be a little tricky sometimes. And yeah, that's pretty much it, right? You've got your fishing mini game, and then you've got the ability to actually do things with the fish once you've caught them.
Rubi: Yeah. All right, fish are also part of collections. There are fishing collections all around the world. These are repeatable collections. The first time you finish one of the fishing collection, it will give you achievement points and another reward that we're not going to tell you about quite yet. And then subsequent completions will give you more of that reward. You'll find out eventually. It's not just that we're never going to tell you. I do have a couple of fishing collections to share with you as a little preview today. Shing Jea Fisher is one of obviously the first ones that we will come to. And I wanted to share Shiverpeaks Fisher is another one that's available. I kind of like this one because somebody, John, got a little punny with it. So you have fish in there like Lornar's Bass and Beacon's Perch. Those are... I just like puns. They're dumb, and I love them.
Nick: There's nothing wrong with a good pun.
Skiffs [14:54][edit]
Rubi: So we've been fishing from shore here, and I think I have fished this node out while you were talking. But that is not the only way to do it. You can also fish from your skiff. So let's talk about that. Nick, do you want to walk us through how you get your first skiff?
Nick: For sure. So contrary to how you get fishing, with the skiffs themselves, it's more like how you would get other mounts within Path of Fire like the skimmer or the jackal. They had hearts that you would utilize the jackal or the skimmer in like rentable versions. And once you've completed it, you would have the ability to unlock the skimmer or the jackal. With this expansion, you do the exact same thing with skiffs. So there is a heart specifically within Shing Jea that once you enter and complete the heart, you will gain access to your own skiff, then you can utilize across the board. Something to note though, is that we are not showing that heart today because the fact that it does have narrative tie-ins, and we want to make sure that we don't spoil those things for you all.
Rubi: All right, so once you have your skiff, you can summon it one of two ways. We're going to show you the first one is from shore. And this one is kind of fun because you can set the direction of how and where you want your skiff to be pointing when you get it in the water. And you can just see as I'm turning it, you have the directional arrow showing you. So once you have it where you want it... I don't want to run over Nick.
Nick: It's okay. I'm backing out.
Rubi: I'm sorry.
Nick: It's all good.
Rubi: You also don't want to drop a boat on your friend's head. It's not going to hurt them, but it is kind of rude. So I'm going to try to avoid that. So once you've got that set, drop it in the water. And one quick thing: This is the Shing Jea Dragon Boat Skiff Skin. If you have pre-purchased the Deluxe or Ultimate editions of End of Dragons, this is what you're getting. It's a little different than the picture because I played fun with dye. You can also summon it from the water wherever you are, and Nick is going to do that.
Nick: Yeah. Mine's not as pretty as yours, but I think it has some charm.
Rubi: I kind of love it. John was talking earlier about how he made his look like it was covered in algae by the dye that he used. So I like the variety. I'm having fun with my big aqua-colored theme boat. All right, so let's go through the skiff masteries real quick. So again, you have context and you know what all you're going to be unlocking and you understand what you're looking at when we go through this.
- First one that you will unlock for skiffs is Full Throttle. This gives the ability to go faster in your skiff.
- Next one is Depth Charges, which is the one that I super like. If you are just trying to get somewhere, enemies approach, you can drop a depth charge and sink them to get them out of the way.
- Speed Boost gives you a short burst of speed.
- Fishing Party is cool. While you're on your skiff, you and your party receive additional fishing power equal to the number of catches from fishing nodes that you make.
- And finally, the last one is Reinforced Hull. This gives +5000 HP to your skiff. Somebody has called target on me, and I'm very afraid. Hahaha! So let's all hop into the skiff. I am the captain.
Nick: You are the captain.
Rubi: I ran us aground earlier, so this should be interesting. Let's go over more details and do some fishing. Nick, why don't you walk us through what all's going on here? Everybody is very excited with me behind the wheel again.
Nick: Yeah, for sure. So basically what you're seeing right now is that our entire party is on the skiff. With these skiffs, the max amount of individuals that you can actually have on them is going to be five, which is your entire party size, and that is including the driver. What you'll probably notice though, from my perspective, is that there's this giant rainbow of different icons here. The reason for that is that anybody who is a passenger in the boat actually has the ability to have different emotes that they can use as they're going through. And that's just that way you know people have the ability to do some fun stuff while they're sitting on the boat being driven around. But there is also a functional reason for it as well, which is the turbo mastery that Rubi had mentioned earlier, where it's basically like a nitrous boost for your skiff. Whenever your party members utilize those emote skills, what it does is it completely refills the stamina bar that gets utilized with that, which means that you can just keep on pumping the Turbo Boost as much as you want.
Rubi: If we want to look at mine just real quick, we can show what that looks like. All right, turbo. I need people to emote. Thank you.
Nick: Also, as Rubi mentioned, these icons are not final, because I know they look very similar right now compared to on your bar versus my bar, but they all are different skills. But yeah, that's pretty much it. We can also, so what I'm going to do real quick, I'm actually going to dismount and be left to drown.
Rubi: No!
Nick: And the reason for that is that way what we can use what we can showcase is that players actually have the ability to swap seats whenever there's one that's open. If there are no open seats, you won't be able to swap around. But when there is an open seat, you can kind of move around for people who want to sit in the front, want to sit in the back, et cetera, et cetera. Another thing that is really interesting about skiffs specifically, is that you actually have the ability to anchor your skiff, which is something that's a bit newer with this expansion. Because what that does is it actually generates party specific collision within any part of the world. And what that means is that when the owner anchors their skiff, players can actually run around on it like it's just a normal platform. What's also really cool about this is that it's a bit troll-proof in that sense, because if there's anybody that's not in your party, they don't have the ability to hop onto the boat. They don't have the ability to run their boats into yours, et cetera, et cetera. But there's also some other functional reasoning for why we have it based around your party, and that's has to do with the tie in to fishing more specifically. So we wanted to kind of blend these two features together as best as we could. And the way that we did that was by having fish parties. So once your skiff is anchored, you have the ability to fish off of the sides. And whenever somebody successfully fishes from a node, they will get a buff called "Fish Party", if I'm not mistaken.
Rubi: I am fishing right now to try to get that up and running. So if I can stop struggling with my fishing pole long enough, we can ...
Nick: I'm sure that one of us will succeed.
Rubi: Probably.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: Yay! I got it!
Nick: Okay, so as you can see on the bottom right, it's called Fishing Party. And basically the way the Fishing Party works is that it increases the fishing power that you have per stack of the buff. And it's a three times multiplier. So for each one, I think it's multiplying whatever your base value was by three. And currently, the max stack size is like 99 stacks. So you and your party can just go from node to node, get up a huge amount and just be absolute fishing legends, which is pretty fantastic. I think another thing to note actually from this is that if you look, so this one's called shore fish and there's a shore fish node, and that's because we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just specifically you had to fish from skiffs. So you just saw me cheat a little bit there, but there are some nodes like shore fish nodes which you can fish from without needing to utilize your skiff. You can just go to wherever there is land, wherever there is a thing, and then toss the line into there. There are also offshore nodes, and those ones specifically are going to need you to utilize your skiff because of the fact that they're just in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of deep water. What's also really interesting about those things is the fact that each one has different kinds of fish that you can catch from it. So these shore nodes have different fish that you can acquire than the offshore nodes. And what that allows for is just a bit more diversity in each area.
Rubi: Sorry. I was like, "Hey, let's have a boat race."
Nick: It's okay.
Rubi: I'm sorry, I've gone completely off script, but you know, whatever.
Nick: So something else to note is that you can be a little trolly with your friends. So Tracey just parked her boat, and because it's party specific collision, if Rubi tries to drive into her boat, what happens is that...
Rubi: I can't.
Nick: It runs into it, so you do have the ability to be a little goofy with your friends. And if they're going full turbo speed, you can, if you're in the same party, just quickly park yours in front of them and have them crash or ramp up off of it, and it allows for some really interesting experiences.
Rubi: Just your friends that you're partied with.
Nick: Yeah, just your friends that you've partied with. I think that's pretty much it for all of the extra details for now though. I think I got through all of them.
Rubi: Yeah. Did we talk about when you raise the anchor everybody has to sit down because safety?
Nick: We did not. Yeah, so with this specifically, because of the fact that you have a party and you're trying to keep them all within a specific boat, we wanted to try to remove as many edge case situations and edge case bugs as possible. So because of that, once the boat gets un-anchored, it checks to see how many players are within the area that are part of the party and then it sits them down. It's just like, everybody sit down, we're driving, we're moving.
Rubi: Hands and arms inside the boat.
Nick: Seat belts.
Rubi: Seat belts.
Nick: Safety first.
Rubi: All right, I do want to call out one just little thing on mine and you can see on my screen, Mark, if we can look at mine: There is a cool little animation deal. Turn my boat around. Where if you turn, my character is pulling the rudder and she's leaning, and it's just a fun, little animation thing that I appreciate you all on the dev team thought about. All right, I think we have fished that node out. I'm just checking to see if there's another one nearby.
Nick: What you could do is you could use the mastery skill.
Rubi: The Angler Sense. Yeah, that's what I was doing. Don't look at my screen right now because ... hey, I found another fishing node. I'm going to go there.
Nick: What's really cool though is that with Angler Sense, I think John wanted us to also mention this as well, is that it's, I think if I remember currently, it's one of the first masteries that actually has that skill show up in multiple areas. You can use it while you have your fishing rod out, but you can also use it from the skiff itself. So there's a bit of a dual usage there whenever you have it unlocked. But Angler Sense, I think specifically, you'll need to unlock it from the Fishing line and then you'll get that skill in both areas.
Rubi: I lost it. All right, so that is the basics of skiffs and fishing. I am excited to see everybody's party boats and how they're tooling around, emoting, and how people use fishing and skiffs. Make your skiff races. I want to see. I'm just watching to see what Nick's doing.
Nick: Actually, if we want to show showcase this real quick as well, so what's really interesting as well, is that if we all anchor our skiffs... Why does it say I'm moving? Oh, it's because I'm too close to Tracey, one second. Or am I too close to you? Arrgh.
Rubi: I don't know, but...
Nick: Stop moving.
Rubi: We have like the dance party boat over here in Tracey's.
Nick: I'm not moving. Okay, y'know, so as Rubi mentioned: development branch, some stuff happens.
Rubi: It's very true.
Nick: There we go. Okay, so what's really cool is that you could basically in maps, build bridges, barges, right? We can pull our boats right next to each other and have a little boat barge party. In fact, let me actually try to see if I can get mine in the middle of y'alls.
Rubi: Okay.
Nick: Thread the needle, as they say. Did we talk about the different speeds as well? I think that it was probably mentioned within the mastery area.
Rubi: We did within the mastery area, but there's a little more to it. So why don't we look at yours and you can show them off on yours.
Nick: Yeah, for sure. As seen, you can park all the boats next to each other, run across them. You can create these party specific platforms. That's really interesting. But what's really cool.
Rubi: Going for a ride.
Nick: Come on, come on, come on... is that there are three speed settings and the third one gets unlocked with the mastery line. But you've got your Slow Cruise and you've got your Moderate Clip, which increases speed a little bit, right? And then you've got your Full Throttle, and Full Throttle is just like, "Hey, we're going fast. We're zooming," as they say, right? And then of course you can utilize your Turbo Boost. And it just turns into like, y'know, some dynamic control.
Rubi: I'm over here spam cheering to keep your energy bar full.
Nick: Oh, that's right. So as you see, Rubi's using her emotes, and it's just emote, emote, emote.
Rubi: Yeah. With multiple party members, you can chain emote just for an endless Turbo Boost.
Nick: And it's all a grand time, honestly.
Rubi: Ooh, okay, still not as bad as what I did earlier. I just tried to drive right up onto an island before.
Nick: Total anchor.
Rubi: All right, so I think that covers fishing, skiffs, how you get them, all of the mastery lines, all of the abilities, where you can fish, fishing collections, all that good stuff. I hope that answered a lot of your questions. We are excited to see what all you do with these new features in End of Dragons. That's your rundown of fishing and skiffs in Guild Chat. Thank you, Nick, for joining.
Nick: Thank you for having me.
Rubi: Thank you, Paul, John, and Tracey for joining us in game. And thanks to all of you for watching today. Before we go, I have a couple of other things: Do not forget that we still have more things coming in September. The DirectX 11 beta begins on September 21st, and the first WvW Alliance beta starts on September 24th. Also on September 21st is the start of the second End of Dragons Elite Specialization Beta event. As before, the event is open to all of you with a Guild Wars 2 account in good standing. And join us right here next Friday on the 17th on Guild Chat for a preview of that Elite Specialization Beta event. For now, we'll leave you with a little preview, and I will see you next week on the seventeenth.
Nick: Have a nice weekend.
Rubi: Have a good weekend.
Nick: Yeah.
