Guild Wars 2

I thought Arena net did a really neat thing with previous magnetite shard drops:
1. Wiki said cap of 100 is per wing? So you cap out by:
a) killing bosses if you can
b) helping your friends kill bosses
c) trying to kill bosses

It took a lot of raiding to cap out with previous drops, but it was feasible. I had to raid maybe 3 nights per week extensively.

If you capped out 100 per week, it’ll take you 3 months approximately to be able to buy a full ascended set from merchant. So I had this brilliant idea:

Anet made 1st wing dps-oriented, aka zerk required. (or condi) Knowing that current meta is zerk, which meant majority of the community could try the raids and have a good chance to participate/beat them in current gear => no gear grind to get into raid.

In 3 months => wing 2 comes out, that requires some new funky builds, but if you raided in a dedicated way, you could get that new stat ascended set from merchant and try new things!
If 100 shards is per wing, and you got 200 per week, who cares anymore all that stuff is account bount and after gearing out 9 toons in 3 sets, you just hoard them and spend them on minis. Or salvage them down to build legendary armor. All that would take a few years, and I thought a few years is enough time to dedicate to a game (how much more time can a game ask for?)

And I thought that was amazing. Getting shards still felt like a lot of work in raids, but it felt rewarding, and I had a nice goal to work towards => having that extra set to play with.

Now => after spending 7h in Sabetha in 2 nights I got 2 shards. Which is basically equivalent to 0.
:|

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3xe1dp/change_to_magnetite_shards_drop/

What this tells me is there was no calculation targeted at 3 month to get ascended armor set, or even 6 months, and that next wing will most likely be zerk as well. Disappointing. Not to mention annoying because I want to get those shards even if I fail because that felt deserved. We got Sab to 25% consistently during the night and getting nada for it => bad change.

1) It’s a bug
2) To prevent the fail farm state of only running VG and gaming the system.

TexZero.7910:

1) It’s a bug
2) To prevent the fail farm state of only running VG and gaming the system.

But there’s nothing wrong with only failing VG to get shards. It takes time, it’s a fail attempt, it’s legit, You still gotta be good to get to last phase to max out shards you get, and it still takes a while to cap your 100. Any sane person would clear the raid and then either fail VG repeatedly, or help other people and fail VG/Gors/Sab repeatedly. Don’t see any issues. Cap’s there for a reason.

If people ONLY farm VG, that’s their choice. They don’t even want a shot at any loot on Sab/Gors. And as I said it takes 3 months to get a full ascended set => where’s the issue?

Once cap is above 100, ppl will still clear all the raids, then farm the easiest boss. Unless they want to give 0 shards to people who cleared which would discourage people from going in again to help others, which’d be a bad thing imho.

The only issue I see here is Anet being opposed to people getting any reward whatsoever for doing content. Horrifying isn’t it :P
As long as VG isn’t being cheesed and Akitten in one place to get shards => people are doing stuff. Who cares which boss it is. And it’s a nice way for those who can’t clear VG to keep trying at it.

This is incredibly annoying and upsetting and I’ve noticed it as well.
From what I gather they’re calling it a bug – but honestly i do believe this is another stealth nerf.

This might be tin foil but it would be possible for them to avoid the backlash of “nerfs” but disguising them as bug fixes.

Look at the TD meta event – it was apparently a “bug that caused incorrect scaling” and thus it was made easier but you’re not calling it a nerf and upsetting people – you’re fixing a bug.

Same thing here – you can pretty much nerf/change anything in the game and say you were fixing a “bug” that was causing unwanted behavior.