Guild Chat - Episode 118

Guild Chat - Episode 118

Title

Jade Tech Mastery Preview

Host

Rubi Bayer

Guests

Indigo Boock
Benjamin Phongluangtham

Date

February 11, 2022

Official video

YouTube

Previous

117

Next

119

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 118th episode of Guild Chat aired on February 11, 2022.

"Jade tech powers Cantha’s most impressive advancements, but what can it do to improve your daily life? Say hello to the jade bot! This compact and customizable technological marvel is indispensable in both battle and travel, and you can welcome one into your world through the Jade Tech Mastery track.

Join Rubi and her developer guests for this episode of Guild Chat and learn all about the friendly and helpful jade bot."

Transcription

Trailer [14:01]

Voice over: Xunlai Jade is always refining the products that make Cantha more accessible advanced nation. With creative and thoughtful design, the same technology used in jade mechs can almost fit in the palm of your hand. Say hello to your new adventuring companion. We all have different needs, so you can customize your jade bot with a module. Let them speed up your skiff, energize your mount, recycle items, scavenge for you, and more. Equip it with a robust power core, and your bot can even enhance your vitality. Your jade bot will always be there to give you a boost, save you time, and pick you up when you're down. It's great company when you just want to take in the view. Make a little room in your heart for jade bots. They'll be available to unlock and customize soon.

Introduction [15:15]

Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, happy Friday, and welcome to Guild Chat! I'm your host Rubi, and I'm so glad you're here with us today to talk about jade bots. Real quick before we get into that, I just want to point to the adorable Plush Griffon that you saw during countdown, and the Siege Turtle pin, just in time for Cantha. The new For Fans by Fans items are available at Good Smile Now, so you can get that little extra addition of real life preparation for End of Dragons before we go live. Alright, that said, we are going to talk about jade bots today. All of us here at ArenaNet have been so excited watching how much you all were interested in the jade bots, and how cool you thought they were. I also have been watching all of your questions and keeping track of them. Hopefully today, we’re going to answer as many of those as we can because we're going to give you a step-by-step walkthrough of everything these little helpers can do, what you can use them for, and how you get them. So, with me today are our two dev guests to help me do that walkthrough. Let’s start with Indigo. Hey, hi!

Indigo Boock: Hi! I'm Indigo. I was the narrative owner for the New Kaineng map and I also helped with a bunch of the system-oriented things for End of Dragons like the elite specs and most importantly the jade babies that we're going to talk about today, rather the "jade bots" more professionally.

Rubi: Awesome. I'm so glad you're here and Ben also. Hi, thanks for joining.

Ben Phongluangtham: Everyone, I'm a design manager here at ArenaNet. I was part of the team that worked on jade bots.

Rubi: Cool, all right. Thank you both for being here and thanks to all of you for hanging out with us. Let's get started with what exactly jade bots are. Indigo, why don't you kick us off from the lore side of this.

Jade Bot Lore [16:57]

Indigo: Yeah, absolutely, so it is kind of a high overview for our new viewers. I will not only go on about bots but jade technology as a whole in Cantha. So where we are standing right now, where Rubi and I are in the game, are the first gardens of enlightened thought, which is one of the uppermost layers in New Kaineng City, which might sound a little ritzy, and it is. This is a trade show slash tech demo for Xunlai Jade. This area is one of our renown hearts, which are activities that the player can do to learn different mechanics. And we will talk about that a little more in a bit, but this one specifically focuses on jade bots. A quick high overview of Cantha tech in jade bots before Ben dives in. As we've been teasing a pinch, as some of you might have noticed during the new Kaineng City livestream last week, the empire is filled to the brim with jade technology. Xunlai Jade is a tech mogul of the world and it's going to be introducing a lot of cool new things to Tyria. All of this tech is powered by a resource called dragonjade which is magically infused jade left over from an event called the Jade Wind in Guild Wars Factions, which happened when Shiro Tagachi was killed, and he basically petrified everything in sight. Really tragic event, definitely recommend reading up on it. We will learn a little bit more about it in End of Dragons. But dragonjade powers just about everything you see in Cantha and New Kaineng. There are holo projectors telling the news, ziplines wink wink wink wink. We'll talk about those in a second. Giant field holograms that Rubi, Connor and I streamed about last week and a bunch of other super necessary innovations that are meant to kind of help stream the day-to-day in Cantha. But speaking about the day-to-day, jade bots, they are great, they are cute, they are my favorite thing in the world, they are just adorable. But most importantly they do aid the day-to-day of the Canthans. Now, as opposed to in Kaineng, jade tech can be extremely expensive, though getting your own bot is not. It's tied to story; we will talk about that in a second. But for the people in Cantha, it can be a pretty hard technology to attain, and it's often found in some of the richer districts as you travel up in New Kaineng. You will see them in Echovald, you will a couple in Jade Sea and Shing Jea as well. But they are used for all sorts of things. They are mainly used for public transportation. They are kind of the key to the ziplines and teleporters. They are used for security purposes too. Some of our super astute observers may have even noticed that in the Kaineng stream last week when we were in Cobble Ward, the Tengu district, the bird race in Cantha. They were using jade bots to kind of help identify some Jade Brotherhood threats that were lingering in the area and that is part of renown hearts. There is a bunch of different uses, but I know players are really excited to learn about what all these things can do so I will pass it over to Ben and we can just start digging into them a little bit.

Ben: Yeah there is kind of three different big parts to the jade bots. There is the in-world interactions that people can do around Cantha, stuff like Jade Batteries, turrets and so forth. There is the skills you get and the abilities you get from the mastery track. And then the big part for me is actual equipment slots that jade bots adds: power cores, mods and the two different module slots.

Rubi: Awesome, so we are going to jump into all of those. How do you- I want to touch on first, how do you get started, how do you unlock this thing in the first place and this is in the story step right?

Indigo: Yeah absolutely, so when you start on the End of Dragons story, eventually you will get to it pretty early on in the story step, where you will get your own bot. One of our characters is going to lend one to you, no spoilers, and you are going to get to keep it. I feel like being the commander should come with some perks. So you get your own jade bot, and it all just kind of unfolds from there and there is some really fun instances we will talk about today. There is some super fun story interactions that you will have with the jade bot but they are super useful in so many different ways.

Rubi: Okay, alright as we get ready to go through all of these details that Ben mentioned. Ben where is this- Just to get that first question out of the way, where are jade bots? Where can you use your jade bots?

Ben: So most of the functions are all available in open world. Some of them are also functional in other areas, but it's on a kind of case-by-case basis. Some of the things obviously wouldn't work. We wouldn't want to work in PvP and World vs World for example, and a few other things we wouldn't really want to work in like strikes, raids and fractals either. But open world: pretty much everything is functional, then everything else is case-by-case basis.

Jade Bot Direct Control [21:16]

Rubi: Okay and we'll touch on some of those case-by-case things as we go. So let's start right over here with the first part which is direct control. I'm going to come over to this jade bot terminal and let you all talk about what is what I'm doing here.

Ben: Yeah, oh yeah, go ahead sorry.

Indigo: Go ahead, Ben. (laughs)

Rubi: I was unhelpful there. I am sorry. (laughs)

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Indigo: That is okay, we're all just super excited.

Ben: Yeah so we have a few specific areas set up around the world for you to take direct control of your jade bot. Because this is kind of some new tech, and we were a little conservative with it so there's a few story instances where you can take direct control and then a few areas in the open world where you can take direct control. But then your jade bot can fly around and do a bunch of stuff like interact with these lanterns and stuff like that, or take cool screenshots.

Rubi: Yeah, this is this is awesome for open world screenshots just for getting like those beauty shots of the world. And I'm gonna be a little bit careful not to go up too far. Ben, I will let you talk about this, it is a little bit limited, you can't completely traverse Cantha from a single terminal.

Ben: Yeah, we have a few boundaries in place to make sure you can't fly absolutely anywhere at this time.

Rubi: There we go.

Ben: Just because there's so many areas that you probably get to that we don't want people to necessarily see, but it's a pretty... as you can see from this one this area, the area is pretty large that you can fly around.

Rubi: Yeah and I did just light up this jade lantern. This is... Now Indigo you talked about this with me earlier, this is kind of a training area, right?

Indigo: Yeah, absolutely. So we set up this renown heart, it's actually one of my favorite renown hearts because you're not really fighting, well there is fighting in it possibly, but most importantly it really just kind of helps you get into the motions of picking up Jade Batteries, using them to light the lanterns, there's some ziplines in the area, a lot of the NPCs give you some some cute little info on the jade bots. When I was writing this event I kind of wrote them all like Apple Genius Bar workers, so they're all super enthusiastic and want to tell you about jade bots all the time. They're sales people, they're doing their job, but yeah there's a bunch of different activities unrelated to jade bots. If you're not interested in that, there's also just kind of another jade tech homage. There's some training panels too where you can fight some of the jade mechs, which by the way are some of the most terrifying things in this game. They're super cute, they're friendly, but when they want to fight you, it's scary when they come running at you.

Rubi: It is terrifying.

Indigo: But most importantly... It's scary! I watched one like drop from the sky and land like a superhero and then came running at me the other day and that's when I screamed.

Rubi: (scared noises)

Indigo: Oh so it's very scary. But yeah this this whole area is it's really it's just a gorgeous opulent garden that's just meant to really like encourage you to explore, and get in your jade bot in the drone mode, and look around, so lots of exciting stuff.

Rubi: Alright, so where are direct control terminals located? Where can where can players do this?

Indigo: Yeah, so the- I'll pass it to Ben in a sec, there's- Actually, Ben do you want to talk about this?

Ben: Yeah, there's a couple hearts like this one, and then there's a couple areas in the the personal story that you can interact with and then there's one that I don't really want to talk about too much because it's a little bit of a spoiler. I think people will be a little bit surprised about it.

Rubi: All good.

Ben: Yeah, pretty limited right now we may add more later depending on how things go.

Rubi: All rightm and Indigo you were going to say?

Indigo: Oh, I was just gonna say it's, one of my favorite things about these locations, even though right now it's quite limited using these panels in the drone areas, in both this our area and the garden and then one of the other open world occurrences of it. There's just a really great opportunity to get to look at the environment and take some really beautiful screenshots and test the boundaries of how far you can fly a jade bot.

Rubi: All right, well let's go ahead, I'm like preparing for this next part. I'm getting up here as high as I can. Let's go through the mastery track and Ben, will you walk us through these as I show them off?

Ben: Yeah, we get five masteries. The first one you get is the Glide Booster that everybody's kind of seen on a lot of the promotional material. At its basic level, it just gives a real quick boost straight up like what you're about to do right now. Well you actually have the enhanced version, but-

Rubi: Yeah. I have the enhanced version, we'll get to there soon.

Ben: By default, they don't go quite that high by default, but it's just a fun way to get a little extra distance out of your glide and, if you're really good with the timing, I've kind of practiced a little bit of going on the mount, gliding, boosting up and getting back on the mount to get that little extra altitude. It's kind of fun.

Rubi: Alright. You can super take advantage of that then.

Ben: Yeah, for sure.

Rubi: Alright, let's look at the- So that's the first one you get and then the next one.

Ben: So Multicharge doesn't give you an actual skill. This allows you to carry more jade energy charges. And kind of what those are is your jade bot can store energy for interacting with objects in the world like the turrets and the jade tech teleporters and the boon consoles. A lot of the stuff actually requires energy so your your jade bot can gather that and then transfer it into those other objects to power them up.

Rubi: And I'm just picking up some charges there. Alright! Let's- Oh, go ahead.

Ben: So what this mastery does is it gives you the ability to get an extra charge compared to what you start off with.

Rubi: Yeah. I have four now, so I've charged him up all the way. Alright and let's go to the Jade Tech Waypoint.

Ben: Yeah, this is one of my favorite ones: Jade Tech Waypoint. Basically you can put a waypoint anywhere in the open world. So if you're like me and really bad at jump puzzles, this will be really handy for getting back. The one thing is there is a fairly lengthy cooldown and you can only use it once. When you go back and use it, there's a little prompt that lets you know that you're about to consume the waypoint and you won't be able to do another one for a little bit. Not super long, but you won't be able to like use it to like spawn rush boss encounters or things like that.

Rubi: Over and over and over.

Ben: Yeah, 'cause it behaves pretty much like any other waypoint where if you're downed then you way— use it, it'll— it'll bring you back, but we don't want people to be able to obviously do that over and over again on a boss encounter.

Rubi: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense.

Ben: Yeah, and like I said, only available in open world, no PvP, World Versus World, story instances, anything like that where you could potentially break things pretty badly.

Rubi: [Laughter] Um, actually, you know what, I do want to just back up because there is something that I am sure people have questions about. When we were talking about multi-charge and charging up your Jade Bot, you— and Ben, you can confirm this for me— you will always have a battery, a way to charge, available in the map where it is needed, correct? You're not going to have to, like, travel halfway across the world to get a new charge?

Ben: No, they shouldn't be too far, and we made the charges pretty plentiful. The one thing is that the Jade Bot charges won't stick with you on map movement. This is for a couple different reasons I won't go into here but anywhere where you'll need one you should be able to find one. Sometimes they're specifically limited, a lot of the story instances might specifically limit the number of charges in the map, for puzzle reasons, but yeah. Anywhere in the Canthan maps you should be able to readily get charges.

Rubi: All right, that works. Okay. Sorry for interrupting, but I did want to cover that question because I want to make sure we're telling all of you as much as we possibly can. So, how about Energy Efficiency? Let's look at that one.

Ben: So, Energy Efficiency lets your Jade Bot get extra charges from batteries. Usually you just get one but this lets you get another one. The other kind of cool thing it does is that on zip lines, uh, your Jade Bot will actually gather energy charges from the zip line now. You can use zip lines without charges; it's not something that costs anything, but if you're— if you have that mastery, your Jade Bot will actually gather charges while you zip.

Rubi: Nice. This seems like a good place to talk a little bit about transportation in Cantha, since we're on these zip lines.

Indigo: Heck yeah! So, there are the the zip lines and teleporters all throughout Cantha to kinda help better society navigate these sprawling landscapes, which is especially pertinent in New Kaineng because the citizens, I mean, I'm sure that mount license for normal Canthan citizens are really expensive, so they need a way to be able to navigate all of these districts so much easier. But for the players specifically it's a really fun way to kind of experience the verticality that's not related to a mount, and it just takes, like— like Ben has said, with a lot of these things you just pick up a charge, you can take it and zip. I think the zip I used in a lot of the VO for the area in the Garden, actually, too, to sell people for zip lines.

Rubi: Oh, really?

Indigo: I did, I think, um, one of them is like, "Zip! You're at your next meeting! Zip! You get noodles for lunch!" and I've had so much fun writing this.

Rubi: Okay, I love that.

Indigo: But, yeah.

Rescue Protocol [30:38]

Rubi: All right, so that's Energy Efficiency. And let's go to the last one, where I've seen a whole lot of questions. Let's talk about Rescue Protocol and how that works.

Ben: Yeah I saw a lot of comments about this one. As an Ele main, this is going to be probably one of my favorite ones (Rubi laughs), because I spend way too much time in downstate. But as it's stated, Rescue Protocol just let your jade bot pull you back up from the brink of death. It's on a fairly lengthy cooldown, so you can't spam it, though you can alter that cooldown later. This skill is also not available in fractals and raids and strikes, PvP, world versus world. It is available anywhere open world and story instances.

Rubi: Yeah. And, but it just replaces that skill, and the thing about that is, you don't have to use this isn't... This is this doesn't replace anything that already exists, this is an additional option that you have, if you want to use that thing.

Ben: Yeah, it does go over your normal Bandage skill, but it's just a probably a way more effective Bandage skill, and you don't have to use. It it doesn't work automatically.

Customization [31:45]

Rubi: Okay. Alright. If you two are ready, I want to move on to the part that I am super excited about, which is customization of your jade bots. That's something that we talked about in the video, and that's something that I noticed a lot of you watching had called out, so I want to make sure that we give you all the details of what my inventory full of goodies is all about here. Um, so I'm going to head over to this Jade Bot Workbench, and let's get started um with our uh with our jade bot power core first, right Ben?

Ben: Yeah, uh so you get three inventory slots; you get a power query slot, and then uh what we collectively call modules: the sensory arrays and service chips. The power core is what fictionally allows your bot to function, and it needs a power core to do almost anything that you want it to do.

Rubi: Makes sense.

Ben: In addition to powering your modules and stuff like that, it also gives the user a vitality boost. You can see you have a tier 10, which is the max tier. It gives you a 235 points of vitality. We don't have any other stats that you can get right now. It is something that we're considering, but something we'll be taking a look at probably later. The next thing is... (Rubi interrupting)

Rubi: So...

Ben: I'm sorry, go ahead.

Rubi: No, go ahead. I think we're probably gonna say the same thing, but let's find out.

Ben: No I was going to, uh, mention that if you don't want to use your jade bot, uh, for whatever reason, all you really need to do is unequip the power core. I'll be really sad about it, but uh you can turn off pretty much ever-all jade bot functions by removing the power core.

Rubi: Okay. Yeah, that is that is true. If you, if you do not love the cute little friend, and, but you want to fill out your mastery track, because completionists exist, and I might be one of them, you just don't have to equip the power core. I do want to touch on, you don't have to, you will get a power core, and that's part of the method I've been talking about in a second. This is a stat increase, so we didn't want to lock people out of that. So you have you need to be level 80. You don't have to have End of Dragons. You're going to get the power core and Ben you can touch on that a little more.

Ben: Yeah. Because, like you mentioned, this gives additional stats, we didn't want to gate it behind anything, because we didn't want, we don't want to make the people feel like you had to buy the expansion to get that, those extra stats, so while you won't get one for free if you don't have, uh, jade bots unlocked, and you don't have End of Dragons, they are tradable, so you can get them on the Trading Post. You do have to be level 80 to equip them, uh, but, yeah, anybody level 80 can equip a power core whether they have jade bots or End of Dragons.

Rubi: Perfect! Alright, well, let's start looking at these modules and what you can do with them. We'll start with sensory arrays, and that unlocks as soon as you get your jade bot, right?

Ben: Yeah, sensory arrays, you don't have to have a high tier power core to get or to unlock that slot, and you'll get your first sensory array along with your jade bot power core when you unlock it in the story.

Rubi: Okay. Well let's talk about what they are. I've got the scavenger protocols up first.

Ben: Yeah, so what the scavenger protocols do, you can basically command your bot to search enemies you kill for additional loot. So like the one you had, right there, leather, if you have this equipped, every once while your jade bot will scan a corpse and find a little extra leather. It's on, it's somewhat rare. We didn't want people to be just able to gather, you know, tons of extra resources by doing this, but getting a little bonus every once in a while definitely is a is pretty helpful especially if you're trying to craft something that requires a lot of a specific resource.

Rubi: Yeah, and there are six of those sensory arrays available with the scavenger protocol, so you can kind of customize that and get exactly the kind of thing that you're after. Alright, let's look at the next one, which is the recycler; something that I saw a lot of questions about too, so I'll let you run with that, Ben.

Ben: Yeah, for the recyclers, basically any if you have this equipped, your jade bot will be scanning for any really cheap junk items that you get, like the really low value stuff; and as you get it, it'll just transform it into whatever your you ask it to. So in this case, you know, Bloodstone Dust, Dragonite. I think what most people will probably end up using is the, you can get it karma from it, or uh, for me, the most interesting thing is the Jade Slivers, because that's actually a new currency that you can go to a vendor for and get useful items from with these slivers.

Rubi: Nice! Yeah, and this doesn't replace, the things this doesn't replace, it's kind of like the Rescue Protocol, it doesn't replace things you already have. This just ensures that the low value junk items turn into something that you specifically want, and we're giving you that choice.

Ben: Yeah. The higher value junk items we didn't want to have it recycle mainly because for the most cases, you'd probably rather have the gold when it's really high value, but

Rubi: Yeah

Ben: You know, it's meant to be just the really small junk items.

Rubi: Alright, so that's, those two, those um, let's see recycler and scavenger protocols. Ben, where all are those available? Because this is one of those exceptions we talked about.

Ben: Yeah um, those actually work in World versus World. That's kind of the one exception for a lot of these, for things to work in the world world. A lot of this other stuff doesn't, like the power core stats are only available in PVE. They're not available in world versus world or pvp, but for the scavenger and recycler there wasn't any reason why they shouldn't work in World versus World, and the strikes and fractals and all that, so they definitely will work there.

Rubi: Awesome! Alright, let's touch on these last couple, and then we will move on to the other half of this. So the first one in the sensory array aside from that is the turtle siege enhancer.

Ben: Yeah, so the siege enhancer, for anybody who likes to uh be a gunner on the siege, the turtle mounts, if you equip one of these modules, you'll get a damage boost to the, to the bombardment skill. Like you'll notice, this is, you have a tier three one here. Uh, there's three tiers for for the non-scavenger and the non-, uh, recycler modules. There's always three tiers.

Rubi: Yeah, and I've got the tier three. I am ready to make a mess, and I'm incredibly excited about it. Also, for your other mounts, you have the energy booster. Same, same thing: the three tiers, right?

Ben: Yeah, three tiers, and this one, you'll get the tier one version of this for free in the story. This is probably what I'll mostly default when I'm not looking for loot, because this basically just lets your mount regenerate energy faster. You know, do all the cool movement mechanics a little bit more often.

Rubi: Okay. Alright, so that is the sensory arrays that we have available. We talked about the 10 tiers of power core. Once you have a tier 6 power core, you will unlock these Service Chips, which make your jade bot even more versatile, and I will let Ben run us through each of these.

Ben: Yeah. We have, right now we have four different types of service chip, each with three tiers like with the other ones. The one you have right now, the glide boost, that's one that lets you basically increase the height that your jadebot can boost you up. Tier three goes pretty significantly higher than a standard glide boost.

Rubi: Yeah uh, now just to be super clear, even if you don't have this particular service chip equipped, you still get that glider boost, because it's part of the mastery track. This just enhances it, right?

Ben: Right. Yeah, this is just an enhancement to the base one, because the base one is, while it's fun, it's pretty, pretty limited in general.

Rubi: Okay. Alright, let's touch on these other three: the skiff supercharger.

Ben: So you probably all saw the skiff supercharger in that promotional video that we put out. It's a real fun one if you plan to be doing a lot of, uh, boating around on your skiff. Uh, pretty straightforward just increases the base speed of your skiff. You can get going real quick if you have (Rubi laughing), especially with a tier three going max speed, all your boat, uh, masteries and then you use the turbo boost. You go fast enough that you can actually beat yourself with the skiff, which is actually kind of a fun way to dismount rather than just a normal dismount.

Indigo Yeah, yeah, it's efficient.

Rubi: Every time you talk about that I laugh, (Indigo and Ben laughing) because all I can picture is a player character, like, beaching his skiff (muffled), throwing the keys to the valet, and, like, strutting away after leaving just destruction in their wake.

Indigo Yeah, that's how I enter every single event.

Rubi: Right? (Muffled) I can't wait to see players actually making this happen, Ben, now that you have explained how this can be done. Let's make a mess. Alright, uh, next up is the rescue protocol recharge, and Ben, you mentioned the cooldown; this helps with that a little bit.

Ben: Yeah, the base cooldown on rescue protocol is 10 minutes, and you can shave time off that with these Rescue Protocol modules. This is definitely one, in combat, I'll probably use, because like I said, I'm an, I'm an Ele, and I end up in downstate quite often, so you can get downed, and get it down to six minutes with the tier three.

Rubi: Alright, and finally the Treasure Hunter Protocol.

Ben: Uh, the treasure hunter protocol, uh, basically has your jade bot scanning for treasure chests in the world and drawing their location on your map. The higher rate, the higher tiers give a larger radius. Very handy, and to make it clear, it's not actually spawning the chest; it's telling you where chests that already exist are. The one cool thing is this works on any chest in the game, so we did a pretty concerted effort to try to mark every chest, even in older parts of Tyria. So this should work there. It was a kind of a hand process. If you do find a treasure chest (Ruby laughing) that doesn't, uh, doesn't mark, let me know, and I'll, I'll get it added. Uh, yeah. It makes finding treasure a lot easier, because I, I'm not the type of person who really likes to do the the search and find type thing. I just like somebody to tell me where it is, and I'll just go get it. So this is pretty helpful when you want to find those chests.

Rubi: And you are the person who spent a lot of time looking for these chests, right? So I feel like you're done searching for chests for the (Ben laughing) until the end of time.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. I went through pretty much everything; everything marked as a chest in the game I, I basically altered over the past few months. That being said, sometimes we name things weird, so if it wasn't named chest, I might have missed it. (chuckling)

Rubi: Let us know if you find one that the jade bot did not find. Alright. So, that's your customization. One more note on the modules these are all craftable and tradable, right?

Ben: Yeah, you basically, the first tiers, I think they're all on this vendor, but the ones after that will require crafting research, and then the tier three ones actually require both crafting research and for you to get a loot drop from the world. So there's specific monsters that will drop specific pieces for the tier three versions of the recipes.

Rubi: All right and then to upgrade

Ben: (speaking over Rubi) three versions of the modules yet

Rubi: So you'll need some random drops. Keep an eye on what you're rounding up as you're out in the world doing your damage.

Ben: Yeah, for sure.

Rubi: So there's our walkthrough of jade bots. There are a couple of other questions that I do want to touch on and make sure that you all get the answers to those that you wanted. Can I hide if I don't want a sea of jade bots in front of me? Can I hide other players jade bots?

Ben: You can't hide other people jade bots. One of the reasons why their jade bot isn't up all the time is that we realized how messy it would make things look. So your jade bot pretty much only takes or only spawns in when it's taking a specific action like you're having to gather power from a battery, or you're using a a zipline. The one thing like you can do is that you can do, like we said, you can disable your own through removing the power core. But the the kind of interesting thing, one of the reasons why the jade bot isn't up all the time is we we're concerned about server performance of having another entity spawn. So we actually and this might be revealing a little bit too much, but we actually fake most of the jade bot animations with effects. It's not actual thing spawning in the world. To make it a little bit easier on the server.

Rubi: OK, so it's.

Ben: So we kind of invented a new art pipeline.

Rubi: That works like. All right, so it's kind of a skill effect. So while you can't hide other people's jade bots, we did keep in mind that they don't need to be out there in the world all the time constantly. So yeah, if they're actively doing an action or if, like I'm doing right now, if they're in direct control mode, you can see them. Otherwise, it's not going to be jade bot world as far as the eye can see. And Ben, you touched on this earlier, if you don't want to use the jade bot at all, just don't equip the power core and it will not be a thing for you. Oh my gosh, she's dancing. Sorry, that was completely beside the point. But he did a little bit all right. And I have one more question. Since you need the Jade Bot Workbenches to switch out your modules, where are those located?

Ben: Currently they're just in Cantha. That might change later on, like Indigo can kind of talk about maybe the potential future around that.

Indigo: Yeah, absolutely. So they're mostly in Cantha right now. And that's just because, I mean, camp has been closed off for the last 250 years. So Jade technology isn't going to be present in the rest of Tyria yet, but it's definitely a discussion that we're starting to explore and what the story looks like in a post End of Dragons world. I know, I know that I'm really specifically excited to see what Char and Asuran technology. Through not just with the jade bots, but with the holo projectors, and we're going to start to see kind of what happens as that technology becomes more widespread. So not yet but soon.

Rubi: Perfect. And the incredibly important question, can I name my jade bot?

Ben: Unfortunately, because the jade bots are mostly skill effects and the you know we can't name skill effects, right? Well, we didn't put that feature in, but as I've told people, you can name it in your heart. Decide what you want to call it in there? That's what it is.

Rubi: And explaining that there are skill effects, But I thought I would touch on it anyway. OK. So I hope you all enjoyed your overview of the jade bots and how they work and how you can get your very own. Ben and Indigo, thank you both so much for spending time to walk us through all of this and thanks to all of you for hanging out with us today and watching and learning all about jade bots. You are 17 days away from your very own jade bots. End of Dragons is out on the 28th. Today is the 11th. We are so close. Prepurchase is available now. If you want to hop over to the End of Dragons website, Prepurchase the expansion get ready for your jade bot and scoop up some cool in game rewards now that you can use in the live game including the title and the cape and the weapon chest. Thank you all for hanging out with us. Next week we have our audio livestream with composer Drew McLean. Wow, Drew McLean?. It's been a long day, Maclaine Diemer and our audio director. I probably go laughing and then I'm dying.

Indigo: We're like, yeah, that's fine.

Rubi: Just like man. Have you known me? And our audio director Drew Katie. They're gonna be joining us to talk about the audio side of Guild Wars End of Dragons. So come hang out with us next week, I will see you then, and thank you all. Bye.