Guild Wars 2

Let me preface this with saying that Colin Johanssen (sp?) stated years ago before GW2 came out that there would be NO GRINDING. A GW2 developer said this, not me.

For one of the recipes for the Bifrost Part III you need 10 vials of Manganese Dioxide. These vials cannot be purchased in the TP. The ONLY way to get them is through gathering/harvesting coral (you get a vile during the act of gathering IF you have Bifrost Part III active).

I’m not sure if anyone has ever actively gone out and tried to harvest coral but there are VERY few nodes on the world map. The drop rate for these vials, even with the achievement in play is atrocious. I am 7/83 (8.4%). This IS grinding. I have now memorized all the node locations and have to wait for them to reset.

This is tedious and boring gameplay. Many of the other objectives simply require skill and research but you do have control over them. This particular requirement is Las Vegas. The Legendary achievement tracks are plenty hard enough without this sort of nonsense thrown in.

Anet either needs to improve the drop rate (like on the globs of ooze that are also needed – it was fun hunting ooze down) or offer an alternative method of acquiring the ingredient.

For example I needed 400 obsidian shards as part of the track. I had saved up over 1.4 million karma. This paid off as There is ONE vendor that will sell you obsidian shards for nothing more than karma at the Temple of Balthazar. Of course the temples are almost always contested so I joined a squad that was taking the temples one at a time. Not only was it a blast running with the squad (love cooperative pve), but I got my 400 shards at the end.

THAT is how questing should be. Not this luck of the draw nonsense that harvesting coral time and time again and coming up empty is turning out to be. This is not whining about difficulty, whining that this is too hard. For something to be hard, skill has to be involved. There is no skill involved here. Simply luck. I like hard, I don’t like random. Random turns into grinding which was the WHOLE point of changing how Legendary items are acquired.

Please fix this Anet.

It was stated, well before the game came out, that there would be grinding but that it would be restricted to cosmetic items, like legendaries.

Not sure if you are aware of the new Coral nodes added in Ember Bay and especially Bitterfrost, but…lots more Coral to harvest now.

Also, as stated above, the statement about grinding was in reference to gaining XP to level, etc.

Good luck.

As one who just finished Bifrost III, I hear you. Those corals were quite tedious, and as Inculpatus cedu mentioned, make sure you farm Ember Bay too.

I found that at that point in collecting the Dioxide, that I primarily did a couple other things and then swung by a couple coral farming routes. This reduced my frustration with it.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/ArenaNet's_MMO_Manifesto_trailer
“We just don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No one enjoys that. No one finds it fun. We want to change the way that people view combat.”

You are mistaken about the grind. Grind in that quote means killing mobs over and over to level. They don’t want you to grind like that to level. They never said there wouldn’t be grind to get cosmetics.

Maybe going forward ANet could change it so that you are able to obtain these vials of manganese dioxide as soon as you have unlocked Bifrost 1? That way they don’t necessarily have to increase the drop rates (You have a pretty small sample, but an ~8% drop rate isn’t actually that bad considering that you will only ever need 10 of these at most) but it still wouldn’t feel as grindy since players would have more time to gather it before it becomes the one part of the collection gating them.

There are more coral nodes in the Bitterfrost map. I too found it difficult to finish the Bifrost III collection of these manganese vials before that map was released.

Gussy.3907:

I’m not sure if anyone has ever actively gone out and tried to harvest coral but there are VERY few nodes on the world map. The drop rate for these vials, even with the achievement in play is atrocious. I am 7/83 (8.4%). This IS grinding. I have now memorized all the node locations and have to wait for them to reset.

The wiki tends to lag behind in matters of node placement, but after the initial outcry regarding vials I started updating the Coral page with potential locations. This only narrows locations down to an area, which I understand isn’t particularly helpful in a huge underwater setting, but it’s a start. The high end nodes also provide orbs for you poor fellas needing them for amalgamated gemstones.

BTW, you can check the nodes on multiple characters.