Guild Wars 2

Everything wrong with the Predator I : Experimental collection.

Warning : Spoilers and opinions/complaints. Level of justification may vary.

Scarlet’s prototype mechanism. Just, why did they feel the need to hide it from the Ctrl search? Did they think that was clever? Well they’re wrong, it was a cheap and annoying way to try hiding it amongst the junk. Thankfully it at least looked similar to its appearance on the icon, otherwise I’d have spent longer combing the room with my cursor to find it.

Nilkemia.8507:

Everything wrong with the Predator I : Experimental collection.

Warning : Spoilers and opinions/complaints. Level of justification may vary.

Scarlet’s prototype mechanism. Just, why did they feel the need to hide it from the Ctrl search? Did they think that was clever? Well they’re wrong, it was a cheap and annoying way to try hiding it amongst the junk. Thankfully it at least looked similar to its appearance on the icon, otherwise I’d have spent longer combing the room with my cursor to find it.

You’re angry because you couldn’t cheat on a scavenger hunt for a legendary item?
?????

The Asuran Experimental Weapon from the weapon rack in Quandry Scratch (not “near” it like the description claims).

So, just get the weapon from the rack….wait, I can’t. After searching around and looking it up, it turns out that I’m at the right one…except since I filled the heart already, I can’t interact with the rack now. Better get someone that didn’t fill that heart already and come back. -.-

I was under the impression that map completion, while not required, would be encouraged, given how I’m going to have to do quite the traveling around Tyria. Here, it becomes a slight, but unnecessary roadblock. And while there is a way around it, the point is that this issue shouldn’t be there to begin with.

Nilkemia.8507:

The Asuran Experimental Weapon from the weapon rack in Quandry Scratch (not “near” it like the description claims).

But..but if you take it literally-

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/b/b7/Quandry_Scratch_map.jpg

It’s literally ‘near’ “Quandry Scratch”

Also if the quest requires you to not have a full heart just to get it, then that is a bug and should be fixed.

The Salvaged Aetherblade Power Source…from their base in Gendarran Fields.

Well, this one will probably be hidden from Ctrl’s sight as well, but maybe it’ll be okay, if I keep a sharp eye…

Okay, it’s not in the control room, just some Aetherblade Cache. But maybe the ship. That would make sense to salvage it off their ship, right? Maybe the cache in the ship…

Nope, still nothing. Maybe it’s somewhere deeper. Maybe that cache I found underwater…no. Sigh, where is it then? Time to look this up, because clearly I’m too stupid for this.

Of course, it’s at the end of the jumping puzzle, because having it in the base or ship would’ve made too much sense and been too simple. Of course whatever bunghole was behind this couldn’t pass up the chance to force the jumping puzzle on people again. And I have no idea where to go beyond the ship. Sigh. Better wait for a mesmer to port people up there, because this puzzle is one of the worst in the game.

Nilkemia.8507:

Everything wrong with the Predator I : Experimental collection.

Warning : Spoilers and opinions/complaints. Level of justification may vary.

Scarlet’s prototype mechanism. Just, why did they feel the need to hide it from the Ctrl search? Did they think that was clever? Well they’re wrong, it was a cheap and annoying way to try hiding it amongst the junk. Thankfully it at least looked similar to its appearance on the icon, otherwise I’d have spent longer combing the room with my cursor to find it.

That’s odd, I was just in that room (not trying to do the collection, just exploring Lornar’s) and I noticed immediately that the prototype was the only thing in the room you could select other than the chests.

I thought it was really weird, but now I know it’s for the collection it makes sense.

(And I agree that if you can’t select the weapon rack that’s probably a bug and should be reported, using the in-game bug report option, so it can be fixed.)

The Experimental Rifle bundle, sold by Agent Livilla, after dealing with the chickens, then that annoying champion Inquest Ornithologist. At first I noticed I already had some Experimental Rifles and wondered why it wasn’t counting. Turns out you have to equip the bundle for it to count, which I figured out after buying one, deleting that stack when that didn’t work, and then buying one again. Bit bizarre when all the other ones so far require you to just acquire the item and nothing more. :/

The other one from Malchor’s Leap, the Intercepted Inquest Calculations, is potentially more annoying, because while the experimental rifle is gotten from a two event chain that pops up on a regular basis, this item comes from a multi event chain over at Bauxite Alchemicals, which most probably don’t go to except for the waypoint and POI. On top of that, it tends to seemingly bug out quite a bit, as shown below.

Well, I guess I could go to Professor Portmatt’s Lab and get the Decrypted Weapons Reasearch.

Except I have no idea what to do. While I think I know where to go, since I stumbled across it long ago, I have no idea what to do or if I’m even at the right console, and nothing inside the cavern tells me how to solve the puzzle on that console. Sigh. Time to look this up again, because once again I’m either too stupid to understand their design, or whoever designed this did it badly, as usual.

……and it still makes no sense. From what I can see on the wiki, I cannot see how they expected anyone to reasonably figure this out without looking it up first. Whoever designed this puzzle should’ve been sent back to make it make sense, or fired, along with whatever sadist who decided to put part of the collection behind this. In the end, I had to get help from a mesmer who already knew the process by heart and could do it fast enough.

Some legendary journey.

There are some things about bugs for Predator in this thread with a dev reply. Not sure what they’ve actually fixed yet.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3qveea/rant_can_we_not_have_precursor_collection_depend/

By the way you know you will be wasting gold if you craft The Hunter right?

The Hunter can be bought for 548g.
Just the first tier will require items that can net you 591g when sold.

Well, that leaves Fractals, because of course those had to be shoehorned in somehow as far as whoever designed this crap scavenger hunt was concerned. Specifically the Molten Furnace Fractal (fine), the Thaumanova Fractal (crap), and the Mai Trin Boss Fractal (cheap gimmicky crap). The lowest scales for each being 9, 15, and 25 respectively, so hope you already ran up the scales a bit with LFGs or a fractal group or this becomes another exercise in tedium. The collection pieces, of course, come from the chests from completing those fractals.

Well, I think I’m ready to start, I have the chest with the recipes, now maybe this won’t be so bad righ—-

You have got to be kidding me. After all that hunting, after all those stupid things I needed a group or mesmer to help with, (since this “legendary journey” being done by yourself just isn’t allowed, clearly), I am rewarded with crap.

30 Deldrimor Ingots, 30 Spiritwood Planks, 10 Elonian Leather Squares, really? No, an exotic should NOT require ascended materials, especially this much. I could make maybe 5 ascended rifles with some of that, and they expect me to waste it on an exotic?

It’ll also require Shards of Glory from PvP reward tracks and dailies, which isn’t too bad, but also Memories of Battle, only from WvW rank up chests….from WvW, the worst, worthless mode of which nearly nothing of value is within. Sigh.

But the real kicker? This isn’t for the Hunter. It’s for the Hunter Experiment, a crappy broken version of the Hunter that you need to salvage to get the component for the next tier. All that above and then some for something I’m just going to salvage.

What the F***!?

No. Forget it. I’m done. Wow…this is just horrible. It started out okay, but then partway through they just went “How can we make this tedious, annoying, and just no fun” and rolled with that. I just wanted to make the Predator because I felt it would fit well with the aesthetic of my character. But if this the kind of garbage I have to go through just to even make the precursor, I’m not interested anymore.

As someone else mentioned in the thread, it is actually cheaper to just buy the precursor outright than it is to gather/buy what you need for the first tier.

Khisanth.2948:

By the way you know you will be wasting gold if you craft The Hunter right?

The Hunter can be bought for 548g.
Just the first tier will require items that can net you 591g when sold.

Well then, time to check that… all these prices are from the moment I checked before posting this. I also used the amounts to buy them immediately as the price too, so ordering them at lower prices might lower the cost, but not by much.

30 Deldrimor Steel Ingots is 275 gold, 92 silver, and 57 copper.

30 Spiritwood Planks are 439 gold, 12 silver and 20 copper.

10 Elonian Leather Squares are 108 gold, 49 silver and 79 copper.

200 Shards of Glory are 25 gold, 98 silver and 75 copper.

200 Memories of Battle are 15 gold, 35 silver and 8 copper.

I’m not factoring in the Ectoplasm/Crystal Dust and Orichalcum Dowel, since one can easily make those and their price won’t be much compared to all this, but the point is that all that stuff up there adds up, and what is the price of the Hunter?

The price of the Hunter, at this time, is 545 gold straight. All of that stuff up there, just for the broken crap version?

864 gold, 88 silver, and 39 copper. All that, for the first tier of the precursor crafting process, not counting extra tiers, let alone any legendary crafting preparations. That is just horrible.

So, the only people who can bother with the crafting method are those whom are very rich or already have a lot of material saved up, and in either case it is just easier to buy the precursor off the Trading Post outright or sell things to buy it outright. Pretty much the only scenario where this method is better is if there are none on the Trading Post. And there are 50 Hunters up right now, and seeing as precursors probably don’t sell too often and there’s been 3 years for that to add up, I find the chance of them all vanishing unlikely anytime soon.

Well done, you made a process of acquiring precursors that is so bad that relying on Mystic Forge RNG almost seems like a good idea now.

Yeah, seems like a few (quarter maybe?) of the legendaries are not even work building, since they’re cheaper on the TP. I wonder when the Anet dev/marketing people looked at the precursor prices to determine the quantity of mats needs…

skullmount.1758:

Yeah, seems like a few (quarter maybe?) of the legendaries are not even work building, since they’re cheaper on the TP. I wonder when the Anet dev/marketing people looked at the precursor prices to determine the quantity of mats needs…

Grindy, time gated and more expensive than buying from TP was all expected long before HoT was released so there isn’t really much surprise here.

On the other hand coming up with a crafting system where it can be reliably cheaper than buying from the TP is probably next to impossible when the item is also available as a random drop.