Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: I love this game.

I’m grinding karma for an armour set at the moment, and I just don’t see why Orr is necessary to do this. Of course the XP is better, and the loot is better, but if I want to grind for karma, I just don’t see Orr as a viable time investment.

I can hang out in Queensdale and do 4 or 5 events (for an admittedly lesser karma reward), in around the same time as 1 or 2 Orr events. Or even better, I could head over to Sparkly Fens and do even better.

What do you guys think? Given that Orr is supposed to be the end-game area for 80s, should the karma rewards be higher or is it working as intended?

The answer is drops. I was earning good karma when I was going through the low-level zones for my map completion, but the amount of gold I was making was next to nothing. It makes more sense to farm your Karma in Orr because there you can get a level 80 Rare or even Exotic drop, and even the vendor trash sells for a lot more. The only problem is that the anti-farming mechanic becomes painful after a little while because all the Orr mobs are classified as Risen.

I appreciate what you say, but if I am just out for Karma, Orr isn’t worth it. Yes, there’s more XP, Gold and Loot to be had. But as my original post states, if you’re after karma it’s not really worth the hassle.

Granted, this game IS about mixing and matching activities (I do it all the time!), but the karma rewards versus effort in Orr just seem, off to me.

I’m in all the zones pretty much collecting materials for crafting and doing Dynamic Events. I agree you don’t make a whole lot while doing it this way. On the other hand, I’m not spending anything either. So far I have 1 piece of Karma gear so I have a lot more to go. It takes a while but if I was able to get it all in one day I’d be bored silly.

I love Orr, though it’s frustrating how many dynamic events are left untouched for hours on end. Not many players have an interest in doing pretty much any of the underwater events, or so it seems. I’d love to do them myself, but I’ve seen people just laugh and ignore me when I’ve asked around for some help with them. Increasing the karma rewards given in Orr would make it all the more tempting for players to band together for such things. It makes sense, considering Orr is a group zone.

I don’t think increasing the karma in Orr is the answer. I think they need to scale karma. Make it scale with the amount of time/difficulty in completing an event. Champion events should reward more karma than veteran events and because they don’t spawn wave after wave of mobs like the defend and escort events (all of which drop loot) they should reward a chest – not a big one, but something to make the decision to take them on more rewarding compred with spending all your time dropping AoEs at Penitent Camp. Veterans killed by the zerg in seconds should reward less karma than veterans that are killed by a few people but it took them a few minutes (to solve this, scale veterans up a lot more in health and power when the zerg comes to them so they last longer and reward similair karma to people who three man it, firstly so some people can get a hit in before it’s down, and to make sure it’s not a trivial encounter).

A tonne of tuning is needed in Orr. Karma rewards need to scale with difficulty/length of the encounter, mob health needs to scale to counter the zerg, the loot efficiency of events needs to be equalised (or at least close to it – champion chests are one way). Don’t make Orr reward more karma, that will just shoehorn more people into the monochrome abyss of boredom, fix the problems with karma disparity and event diffculty, karma and loot scaling. Try and equalise the rewards of the area and you will make big steps in bringing it back to a more fluid play area rather than a mechanised karma farm. Straights of Orr is doomed unless they destroy the karma zerg path somehow, and even then some place else will replace it. All of this grinding is a direct and proportionate response to the grind ArenaNet placed on the karma armour and weapons. More people would feel less pressured to zerg if karma costs weren’t so high and a normal play style could attain non-legendary karma goals in a couple weeks.

Why don’t people go elsewhere? Orr rewards more karma and has the most reliable events. A lot of places on the map after the first 30 levels become very event starved. Orr has the best loot, the best karma and is the most event dense. With a zerg, it’s mind numbingly boring and skilless gameplay, so difficulty isn’t a factor. It’s all down to efficiency.

I’d say that karma rewards in areas OTHER than orr are too small. I want to be able to hang out anywhere I want instead having to do high-level areas.

Check out my post here if you want to contribute to discussion about an endgame with broader content:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Solution-Endgame-Karma-farming-zerg-bots-scaling/first#post276331

it’s the respawn time in orr, that makes it the place to farm karma, there that near perfect loop in first orr zone where you can get a chain of 6-7 events with no down time. Anti farming code is annoying but a relog or so and you can do it all over again. I haven’t found anywhere else where you could chain together so many events in same time frame

I agree with the events giving different amounts of karma. The defending Arah gates, which is on a long fixed timer, gives you the same karma as something that takes much less time.

Not sure how possible this is, but for chain events…. players get bonus karma the more they participate in the chain. So if I do a chain start to finish, and it’s 5 parts, I get the karma from the events + a substantial bonus (let’s say it’s like a multiplier effect, so that after the first event I get 50% more from the second, 100% more from the third, etc. etc.). Smaller chains give smaller bonuses.