Guild Wars 2

I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get 100 charged lodestones. In every game I play there is a way to move towards a goal. This just seems ridiculous. 100 lodestones will potential take hundreds of hours of grinding the same mobs.

I thought this wasn’t a grinding game?

I DON’T WANT to buy my mats, I want to earn them myself. How the hell?

I am on the same page as you with these.

Currently I’ve heard them dropping from high level Sparks in Malchor’s Leap and Cursed Shore areas… but after farming many of those mobs the drop rates on charged lodestones are VERY VERY small (maybe 1 in 100-200?)

They can also be found in Crucible of Eternity’s dungeon as well… so you may also want to check there (I have found only Charged core’s in CoE so far… but have had team mates confirm that charged lodestones do drop in CoE) your mileage may vary.

If anyone has any input on this topic, please chime in… as I’d like to farm for my own mats instead of buying them also. Ty

Yeah but it’s not just Charged, its all lodestones in general. Some weapons need 350. How would someone realistically farm those? That could take literally a full year of a casual player’s time of killing the same mobs. But Anet has diminishing returns? It seems very hypocritical.

The only ‘fast’ way of acquiring lodestones is through buying them which is pretty unfortunate.

I also disagree with the whole diminishing returns set up because if someone wants to put in 13+ hours of gameplay + farming why should they be punished for their hard effort?

If you NEED to buy them then that’s your little weird issue tbh. EARN money and go BUY them. Only way it’s done atm.

Other then that the drop rate of those things need to be increased obviously.

Really don’t get people who want to buy all mats :/ You realise farming all the mats doesn’t make your weapon ‘free’ ? or you just wanna get them all yourself for the sake of farming ?

It’s fun being able to farm your own materials as it adds to the personal sense of achievement.

Of course people can use real life money to convert to gems to convert to gold and then buy almost everything that’s needed for the ingrediants but that doesn’t give you the same sense of accomplishment, would it now? Yes you do end up with the same result… but the feeling of earning it is part of the overall satisfaction (this is just an example – as there are many ways to make gold in the game)

You’ll be farming for months with the current drop rate of lodestones.

For most people time > money.

Want =/= Need. This is not a grinding game if you don’t want it to be. Grinding is also person dependent. My Grind doesn’t equal your grind but anyways.

Your not being forced to get the lodestones you want them and to get them you have to go down a path which you and I’m sure many other consider a grind. You are not forced to do this though.

You can uptier or run Twilight arbor in MF. I got 5 just running it for the head, chest, boots and leggings and gloves. Im sure there are other places it drops but I know it drops there for sure and the cores also.

Its not like TA is a hard dungeon when you learn the place.

According to the wiki all the onyx crafting materials drop from anything in TA and earth elementals.

I’m in the same predicament.. I’ve gathered all the other mats by now, the only things i still require are 79 charged lodestones. I’ve ran CoE 9 times, and I’ve so far recieved 2 cores. That’s 1 lodestone for 3 days farming. So 237 days of farming CoE to get them all. It’s not possible, imagine how bored you’d become of that dungeon :P

I’ve long since given in to farming money and buying the lodestones, but thing is, they are currently at 2 gold a piece. This’ll be an expensive weapon, but imagine the sense of accomplishment when you acctualy craft the weapon

It’s both positive and negative. I really dread the time it will take to make them, but I’m still really psyched to keep going, as I want my Foefire’s Power!

Kind of an incomprehensive rant, I apologize.

I can tell you that when Dwayna’s Shrine is held in Malchor’s Leap there will be Air Elementals in the areas south of her…including a few veteran level ones near a chest. There are also some that show up around the outer ring of Lyssa’s area in the same zone. They can drop the lodestones at a pretty low rate…along with pretty regular drops of Opal gemstones. I have also seen some show up in the Cursed Shore in fewer numbers, it’s rumored they’re linked to Dwayna too but I can’t confirm as most of my time in CS is spent elsewhere (Grenth…).

At the current point I am afraid you don’t have much choice in how you get them. It’s either farming these mobs until your eyes bleed, running CoE until your fingers bleed, or buying them from the Trading Post. Sadly the latter is becoming more and more difficult to do since more items are being discovered that use them. It was nice when they were around 50s a pop but now you’ve got them at around 2g and climbing. To make Mjolnir at current auction prices you’re talking around 700g in cores without adding in any of the other materials. And that’s a non-legendary.

Personally I am putting it on the backburner. I figure one of two things has to happen, either they become easier to acquire (more mobs or better drop rates) or they become so ludicrously over-priced sales plateau from people losing interest, and then maybe start to sink back down to normal levels. Much like with the precursors something eventually has to give. You can charge 500g all day long, doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. I’m all for grinding for my shiny and certainly done my share in my day, but this one could use a tweak.

And if not, oh well. It’s all just appearances with that gear. You can dress my warrior in banana leaves and give him a dead armadillo on a stick for a hammer, he’s still gonna break anything in sight :-D

Well I was super happy with acquiring the recipe for the gift of spiders.. But then I was looking for a way to aquire a 100 lodestones, and that seems impossible now. This is not really a complaint, but I hope they will tweak this or give us more opportunities to farm them .. Well hopefully A’net will read this!

They are quite rare… Lodestones mostly drop in specific dungeons right? Wonder if a good idea would be to make Cores/Lodestone available from the Dungeon Token Merchants. 1 core = 60 tokens and 1 lodestone = 150 tokens. It would help speed up the rate at which people are able to get the 100 or more that they need :-)

I’m suggesting that drop rates remain the same, so that’s why the token prices are somewhat high. This would just be in addition to the amount everyone is already receiving from drops.

The design is that you play the game and via gold (or in some cases xp or karma) you’re always progressing towards what you want.

It is rather silly to admit you know something is grindy boring and inefficient, then insist on doing so anyway and complain that it is that way. Design doesn’t support what you want to do. You can constructively ask for different design but you shouldn’t just complain as if there isn’t a better way to play towards your goal (via obtaining gold).

This isn’t something new by the way. Lots of games have “unique world drops” which tends to mean items that drop in lots of places but not particularly often from anything specific. This makes them really difficult to specifically farm for but in aggregate the players are looting a certain amount of them and they change hands via trading. Guild Wars 2 makes extensive use of this which I think is intended to help you avoid burning yourself out on something repetitive – you cannot efficiently farm it thus you should go out and play the game and obtain it via gold regardless of what diverse content you’re actually choosing to play. Sadly MMO players may need rescuing from their own tendency to optimize the fun out of their gameplay.

If anything, I’d like to see Mystic Clovers, the Gift items (badge and dungeon ones for example) and dungeon token gear made tradable as well.

I really do wish it was more efficient to farm appropriate mobs/dungeon for these lodestones than it is to farm gold, but that is simply not the case. Either method is tedious, but farming gold by farming cursed shore events is hardly even playing the game when you are just running around trying to tag mobs before they disappear lol.

The silver lining that keeps me from getting too discouraged is that GW2 is still really in its infancy. More than one MMO has had those little eye-twitch causers like certain high-demand items being glacially slow to acquire…eventually though it all gets better. Perhaps not to the satisfaction of every last person, but that’s just not realistic. These things are just constant iteration though.

In fact I have noticed a lot in common in terms of “problems” with Vanilla GW2 and the early days of another MMO that shall not be named. MMO that shall not be named though is still going strong after a good number of years. The far and away majority of those vanilla issues are now fixed…and players have all new issues to be concerned about :-P

I figure GW2 will follow in the same path. They’ve made a very impressive game to my eyes…I think it will have some life for a while. So for now I would propose if you don’t have the time or energy to mess with things as they are now…do what you’re doing now and voice your concerns here, then just see what happens. Contrary to popular belief they do listen to their player base.

Darx.9842:

I don’t understand how I’m supposed to get 100 charged lodestones. In every game I play there is a way to move towards a goal. This just seems ridiculous. 100 lodestones will potential take hundreds of hours of grinding the same mobs.

I thought this wasn’t a grinding game?

I DON’T WANT to buy my mats, I want to earn them myself. How the hell?

This game is all about inflating grind and frustrating you enough to either quit or buy gems.

Thanks for all the good replies. I wish we could get some sort of response from the Devs.

The last game I played was FFXI, and if you wanted something, you could go out and work towards it and make progress every day, and that game is now 10 years old. I feel GW2 is not like that. GW2 was supposed to progress the genre into the future, but it seems like we’re taking a step back.

I don’t mind grinding. I’ve done hundreds of hours in my life of grinding, maybe thousands. But for what I want to accomplish, it doesn’t seem realistic.

I like to earn my keep. Buying stuff on the trading post seems lame to me. I want to create my weapons from my own work. And 100 to 350 lodestones isn’t realistic.

Spent a few days farming sparks nonstop. Droprate varies based on RNG. For me it was perhaps 1 charged lodestone every 1.5-2 hours. I’m considering just saving up and buying them since I get gold 10x faster than farming lodestones. Although the prices for them are slowly increasing as more people are almost done with their legendaries and the supply is very very low.

Darx.9842:

Thanks for all the good replies. I wish we could get some sort of response from the Devs.

The last game I played was FFXI, and if you wanted something, you could go out and work towards it and make progress every day, and that game is now 10 years old. I feel GW2 is not like that. GW2 was supposed to progress the genre into the future, but it seems like we’re taking a step back.

Your experience in FFXI and mine differ tremendously. My experience was that I needed to run no fewer than 3 accounts simultaneously since the community has so far surpassed the content I needed to do (quests like get a secondary class, bag space, etc) that I could not overcome the imbalance. Thi is a symptom of mudfltion and a non-responsive development team (they really didn’t care about attracting new players).

Other games that have had mudflation and similar setbacks did revamp their early content so that new players are not lost.

GW1 and GW2 do not need to do this, because the design eliminates mudflation.

You can make progress on your goals every day. I’ve made enough progress in the past week that I’ve decided to reconsider whether or not to pursue a legendary (I had been set on ‘no’ but it is more viable within a reasonable timetable—still measured in years—than I had thought). Not purchasing these items is a self-imposed restriction (what else do you do with the coin from all the drops that are not what you were looking for?). Similarly getting a legendary is a self-imposed goal. Sure, you get acheivement points for that, but I can almost guarantee you haven’t exhaused all the easier-to-obtain points.

The fact that the most sought-after weapons are as in demand as they are is staggering—you can buy one that is just as useful in combat for just a gold or two. People throw away hundreds of weapons, trying to get one with the exact same stats. It is absurd to think that this is a backwards step in game design, since this is among the few games where stats and desirability are decoupled.

It’s only going to get worse as gold farmers (and gold buyers) drive inflation

It is absurd to think that this is a backwards step in game design, since this is among the few games where stats and desirability are decoupled.

It IS a step backwards and let me explain why. And I mean this specifically for weapons. To attain them relies too much on RNG, chance, luck. Yes FFXI had alot of this. But over the years they improved by making the mobs drop tokens instead of gear so you always progressed. And you could work towards creating a spawn item for big bosses instead of competing for them against others. They WERE improving the game, it sounds like you didn’t get to endgame, which is where 99.9% of the players were. The tokens are much like the GW2 dungeon system, which I think is great, you are always making progress.

The weapons are a different story. Throwing 1000 weapons into the forge to get back nothing is not progress, its a humungous waste, because it’s not like the NEXT time you’ll have a better chance, you could very well waste another 1000 weapons just the same.

And I’ve gone 3 hours without a lodestone. Thats about the max I can play per day anyways. So I just spent 3 hours of my life not accomplishing anything? Yes. That is not progress. It is a step back.

I think you and I are looking at different design decisions.

Acquisition of a specific, desirable item depends on chance.

You are positing that the dependency on chance is a backwards decision.

I am claiming it is a step forward because the most desirable items confer no benefit over common items.

To go back to the FFXI example: Nobody would group with me because I lacked a secondary class (Obviously, I was a noob). I could not complete the quest to unlock a secondary class solo (it would have been a relatively simple matter, had I already done it). This is a bad design decision because new players are forced to rely on an existing community to advance. After beating my head against this for a month, I gave up and canceled my two accounts.

In GW2, once you equip that level 80 exotic, you have advanced to the end. You have the best. Legendaries are not desirable beacuse they are better than exotics, they are desirable because people want the rare weapon skins. In pretty much every other MMO out there, desirability is linked directly with numeric gains (possibly not in FFXI, I never got far enough to find out). This is the step forward (admittedly, one that was made back in GW1) that I am talking about—casual and hardcore players can experience the same content (because they have the same stats) but the hardcore players still have that badge to show off the fruits of their efforts.

To buy the lodestones is not unreasonable—yes, you are compelled to rely on a community that may or may not be there, but the only thing that is blocked is your advancement towards an optional goal. Not having a legndary doesn’t exclude you from content.

fruits of their efforts.

So, one guy gets a precursor from a random drop in orr. Another guy puts in 2000 rare swords and finally gets it.

Would you consider that the same “fruit of effort”?

I would say no. Because it is not equal. Getting these weapons should be a journey, with a visible light at the end of the tunnel. Currently it’s a maze with a 1000 sided die roll chance at seeing a light.

They come from elementals (Sparks and Air Elementals) that spawn in Malchor’s Leap and Cursed Shore when the Cathedral of Zephyrs (in Malchor) is uncontested. If people don’t defend the cathedral and it goes contested again, the elementals are replaced by other mobs. The Sparks in northern Cursed Shores are linked; you must keep Zephyr’s if you want to keep the Sparks around.

So the problem is not just the absurdly low drop rate; the issue is compounded by the fact that the mobs are only up for a few hours each day. I have a grand total of 5 lodestones at the moment. Ugh.

I’m not certain if the Earth elementals that spawn near the Sparks (behind them by the mountains) are also linked to control of the cathedral.