Guild Wars 2

I remember a time when karma kept flowing like water. Unfortunately, times have changed. I currently am working to make a legend and unlike ever other case i had in making a legendary, i had problems with karma. Not gold. So here are a couple of reasons why karma is kittenedly hard to get in it’s current state

1. Daily/Monthly liquid karma ~ Remember when you actually got 5500 karma everyday and 10 of those jugs for monthly? What do you get now? Err…. 600 karma? And 6k for monthly? I get that the developers thought of nerfing this because of the introduction of the new account bound MF and essences of luck. But really considering MF only improves your luck which is totally unstructured and not a guaranteed improvement, and the fact that the progression of Luck is getting steeper, how does 50 luck make up for 4900 karma really?

2. Dungeon bosses/champs dont give guaranteed karma anymore ~ Before champ boxes, every other dungeon champ/legend mini boss dropped 400 liquid karma off their Boxes of Wondrous Goods which could lead up to ~3k karma on every dungeon run (without DR). When champ boxes was introduced karma was still very abundant too considering every champ box had a guaranteed 400 liquid karma. However, now the liquid karma you’d get from these champs are not guaranteed and have very small percentage to actually drop it. Considering again, that champ farm is possibly the most viable way to get gold as you get guaranteed silver+craft mats+gear, you still have a sliver of luck to get more gold if you get say, a rare or an exotic. Karma however, is totally structured and there is totally NO room for luck whatsoever so the grind would be indefinitely more hardcore than farming gold.

3. No viable way of attaining karma in current state other than events ~ Well i guess this one is a bit subjective. i find that the only viable way to get karma now is to farm events (well, duh) but the supposed “best” place for this is usually forsaken; the cursed shore. I remember when half the server population actually farmed here and while its abit of a grind, it was actually pretty fun compared to the grind i currently am running. Again this is just a personal opinion mostly.

4. Karma boosts not affecting liquid karma ~ Well not really important now considering attaining liquid karma is kitten now.

Well these are just the few problems i have with karma… im currently farming champs in queensdale in place of frostgorge’s champs (which undoubtedly drops more silver and better crafting mats) cause the champs here are mostly events… I am just a casual gamer so i only have 3-5 hours of gameplay and largely is spent on farming this karma till i manage to make my legendary or when i decide to actually give up which is practically ~15k karma a day on weekdays which means i probably need <8weeks to get all the karma i need. i actually remember the time where grinding actually felt fun as every activity had its incentive. GW2 has an abundance of activities with much potential lost (IMO). All these activities definitely are fun and exciting, in all my years of playing MMOs never had my interest be so piqued with the uniqueness of the game against MMORPG tropes being cloned every other year. PvP too is fun, but it lacks incentive other than a cool title. Then again maybe its just me. Do discuss as i am interested in the community’s methods and perspective as well

The karma nerf was way to hard. I was one of those people swamped with karma and nothing to spend it on. Now I actually HAVE something to spend karma on (obsi) and now also have extremely limited karma income. The net effect is that I have gone from near 2 million karma to………40k.

Yes thats a LOT of karma to spend. You see, due to Anet’s failures to address the issues with the Balthazaar event chain, the temple itself is almost never open on my server. On top of that when it is open on other servers it has been almost always outside of my playtimes. The effect of this is that I had no option but to buy orrian boxes and “RNG” obsi from those. And with the amount you actually get from boxes and the costs involved my karma went fast. (Oh and I have 7 extra crappy mini’s I dont want)

So now I have 40k karma, which is a pitance in the game and no real way to recoup what Ive lost.

It is my considered opinion that the daily/monthly allotment of karma needs to revert to its previous amounts (jug etc) at the minimum.

pretty much too much nerf happened happened within the last few patches and even the compensation hardly made up for it… IMO we should maybe have the choice to getting the original liquid karma in place for the essence of luck

I dont understand…am i missimg something? Why did they nerf karma?! Out of all the things they nerf the one currency which you can barely buy anything with..

Artiyum.7062:

I dont understand…am i missimg something? Why did they nerf karma?! Out of all the things they nerf the one currency which you can barely buy anything with..

It was a blatant attempt to suck karma out of peoples wallets, and massively reduce the karma in circulation in order to slow people down on ascended crafting. The rediculous thing is that it only half worked. It did NOT slow me down in the slightest, because I had enough in my wallet to splurge and get a fair whack of obsi to craft 3 ascended weapons and have enough left over for a 4th, but I am now “out” of karma.

The people this nerf really affects are newer players who will find themselves having leveled to 80 with enough karma for either an armor set OR an ascended weapon. The chances of having enough for both is extremely slim.

Run fractals below your reward level for karma.

colesy.8490:

Run fractals below your reward level for karma.

I already do. Even still, the current karma levels for everything else are still too low.

Your number 3 is flowed.
Events are not the only way.
Fractals give a lot of karma.Each tier can give arround 10k karma

The karma situation basically shuts down some parts of the game. Getting a legendary is now pretty much impossible, unless you had a large stockpile of karma prior to the nerf.

While fractals may still give decent karma, I don’t consider it an answer. We all know the hassles of putting together a functioning group to run dungeons…sometimes it is next to impossible to do.

I wonder if Lexandro’s theory is correct, that karma was nerfed to slow the acquisition of ascended weapons? When Anet makes major game changes like this, without a word of explanation, I always assume it is not an attempt to improve the game from the player’s point of view, but an attempt to maximize profit from gem sales.

So lets give it a few weeks, when everyone is completely karma starved, and see if a “workaround” miraculously appears that can be purchased from the gem store. Something must have driven this nerf, because it makes no sense whatsoever from a gameplay standpoint.

These karma threads seem to keep getting deleted. Lets see if this one lasts…

Fractals as the only reliable karma source gets old fast (there are more annoying and long fractals than fun ones, dredge fractal makes me bang my head against my desk ;-) )

The biggest gripe I have with karma nerf is that dungeons now give ZERO karma :-(
This needs to be changed, at least a karma reward once per day per path per account .

try a karma train in wvw.

ive made well over 1m karma in the past month. i mostly play wvw. i dont always karma train.

My PC doesn’t support WvW (even on minimum) but I dislike pvp anyway.
Well with my playstyle I do very few events. I do dungeons, frostgorge champ farm, and sometimes fractals at level (i.e. no karma) plus leveling alts mostly via personal story and fast map running (mainly skillpoints and waypoints)- So my karma was reduced from 10k a day without trying to like 1k

But I just adapt for now and am very stingy with karma spending, so it’s not that bad :-) (I just ditch going for ascended and legendary .. too much grind anyway) I miss buying armor, weapons, skins, gathering tools, salvaging kits without worrying at all since I always had a ton of karma but it’s pretty easy to adapt and buy with money (and money is easier to come by now) ;-)

I recently attained a precursor and with luck, it was for the legendary I want to go for (Quip). I only have about 10k karma and I still need massive amounts of karma to get my 37 remaining clovers, and 250 obsi shards. This will take about a year+ of grinding karma (I can only play a few hours a day because I work 40-50 hours a week) to obtain my legendary. This serious lack of karma is absurd. Anet. Please recognize your mistake and change this to where karma is again more easily obtainable. If anything, just boost the price of jewelry boxes because you know this nerf was because of them.

Yeah, this is stupid. Lexandro mentioned this hurting the new player. Well, I came back and started at level 1 with next to zero karma. I did map completion and events through the norn areas and through Orr. I didn’t even have enough for a set, so it’s worse than what Lexandro describes.

I had enough for 1.5 pieces of temple gear. The thought of grinding out that much karma when exotics sell for 1-2 G on the TP…ummm….you’d better really like the appearance of temple gear to go through all of that. I broke down and just bought the Khilbron set (Anet’s true intent maybe?). I don’t regret it because I really like that set and it has the stats for a conditionmancer. (You can’t get all 5 pieces with those stats via temples.)

So, now I’m working toward the last thing that I need which is the temple backpiece. (I’m spending laurels on materials.) I just realized that running the crab toss over and over and over is the most efficient way to get the karma. So, now I need 30 more rounds of crab toss and I’ll have that back piece. But I have to say…if I was a new player, I’d feel like this was one of those free-to-play games where they say “well, yeah, free if you want to grind for a zillion hours, but you’ll just break down and buy it”.

I’m really put off by this 900% decrease in karma. I’ll be ok…not going to the ER over it (haha)…but it is pretty nauseating.

kbenton, before this, earning the legendary was a huge accomplishment that very few had the patience to do without outright buying it. I would just put it on hold or forget it. I think that if they saw this as an “oops”, they would have hotfixed it by now. This is intended for whatever reason. Probably some economic simulation.

I agree. They went WAY overboard with the karma nerf. As you said, it flowed like water before. I had over 2mil and I never farmed Karma. Since the update I’ve only gotten around 120k karma… Not cool.

So ANet made a whipsaw change in the game to totally flip flop the dynamic. Who would ever have thought that could happen.

I’m not an expert in marketing, but this is all striking me as bad moves. It reminds me of two other companies whose games I simply won’t play because they got into a habit of making extreme changes but then reversing course. They aim to please the old-school crowd (grind a million boars the next thing you won’t need after a patch). But you really can’t take a game that has already given out a fair amount of candy, and then try to go back to something like that. Now, you can start out that way from the start like some game attempt to do. But this roller-coaster ride….whew…I just want to grind out that one piece of karma gear and finish the set and move on.

I might play GW1 where I expect the grind. Y’know though, when I over-analyze this, I imagine a bunch of disgruntled employees who are sick of customers complaining and then pulling this as some kind of passive-aggressive punishment. It may or may not be true…but impressions lead to long-term positive or negative branding. I think that when I do switch to another game it may be very difficult to consider just logging into this one to see what’s changed, which implies that I probably won’t support the two main companies involved.

Yes, I was one person fortunate enough to have saved up, and I must say that if I ever hope to get a legendary, I cannot spend any of it. Either the person that gave this move the go-ahead had no grasp of the amount of karma needed for a legendary or they just assumed the player-base would be more than happy to get obsidian shards another way.

They are gravely mistaken. Need to reduce some costs somewhere if this is to stand.

A lot of players are just running on reserves at this point.

lol, I have better things to do. I like doing the daily activities because they are just for fun and maybe competition….now I’m running around with a crab (or without one) for no reason other than karma. I have to draw the line somewhere. I’ll come back if and when they change this. Just venting…there are about ten other similar threads going on and no comments from a moderator.

Karma needed a nerf but they went way overboard. I had loads of Karma stockpiled so the change didn’t affect me but new players are screwed. The worst thing is I haven’t heard a single word on the matter and there have been multiple threads about this. I believe this was done for the ascended carrots, as if they didn’t have enough requirements already.

My respect for Arenanet is slowly fading away.

I remember the time when karma didn’t even come in jugs and had to be farmed by actually doing events in Orr.

The nerf was way too harsh. I’m not even sure I want to make a 3rd legendary anymore. :/

Nothing has to be changed imho. Karma lost all meaning and became a forgotten currency. Making a legendary was never supposed to be easy, and karma is the one part that shows you actually played the game. Furthermore, temple gear finally recouped some of its rightful prestige.

While karma has become a bit more difficult to get, it didn’t become impossible. Let’s not forget that obsidian can be got from at least 3 other means (laurels, baubles, fractal relics).

The nerf was harsh but necessary.

They never said why it was nerfed but I think it’s for the good for 2 reasons.

1. We simply had way to much karma to the extent that it really became pointless.

2. Karma was supposed to be a reward from DEs, with stuff like dungeons and dailies giving you a bit extra, but instead, it became the other way around where you can get karma fast enough from doing anything else other than DEs that no one bothered with them.

Finally I have the gold for Twilight, but not enough Karma. Months ago, I couldn’t imagine that this would ever happen.

All I know is that I gained ~ 60,000 Karma by just getting 100% map completion on 3 characters through Queen’s Dale in the last 6 weeks. So yeah, they nerfed it, but, it doesn’t seem like it was a horrible nerf.

congratulation ANET. with the recent karma nerf you’ve succesfully scared away new players from the game.

azizul.8469:

congratulation ANET. with the recent karma nerf you’ve succesfully scared away new players from the game.

IMO, the effects of the nerf are over exaggerated. If 3 characters are making an average of 20,000 Karma each in Queen’s Dale, then how much can 1 character make by the time they complete their storyline at level 80? How much can they easily make by going to the other zones their storyline doesn’t take them to? /shrug

Agree it was nerfed, but doesn’t seem like it was overly nerfed to the point of “scaring away new players”

I dunno bout new players, but im seeing my karma drying up with so much obsidian shards being used for ascended crafting :P I stored enough jugs for another legendary if i so chose though, and im gonna be really careful before using those.

speaking of which, where can we get jugs of liquid karma now?

I came back to the game after not playing for more than 6 months finding all this karma bs i guess if i want legendary may aswell move along to play something else, not gonna waste years farming mindlessly. “casual game” they said

Dieni.2860:

I came back to the game after not playing for more than 6 months finding all this karma bs i guess if i want legendary may aswell move along to play something else, not gonna waste years farming mindlessly. “casual game” they said

Legendary has always been a grind, and nothing more than a grind. Since day 1 getting a legendary is something a truly casual player would not get for years. By the time you get everything else needed for a legendary, you should easily have 525,000 Karma to buy the obsidian shards. Like I said earlier, I got ~60,000 Karma by just have 3 new characters going through Queens Dale. Imagine how much you would have by the time you get 100% world completion, and working on getting all the materials needed, plus using the mystic forge to get your precursor. Chances are you’ll have more than 525,000 Karma before you even get your Precursor through the mystic forge.

Yeah I feel sorry for anybody contemplating starting this game, karma is going to be really hard to obtain, it’s going to be a long hard grindfest, oh wait, Anet said it wouldn’t be a grind.

Luckily I have only bought one set of armour with karma, so have a bit left over.

eisberg, sorry I don’t believe it. You are suggesting 20,000 karma per character in a level 1-15 zone at low-level. That’s how it used to be. I do agree with this part though: “Chances are you’ll have more than 525,000 Karma before you even get your Precursor through the mystic forge.”

gumoor.5674:

eisberg, sorry I don’t believe it. You are suggesting 20,000 karma per character in a level 1-15 zone at low-level. That’s how it used to be. I do agree with this part though: “Chances are you’ll have more than 525,000 Karma before you even get your Precursor through the mystic forge.”

All I know is that I haven’t played for many months, and came back recently. I had 218,000 Karma when I came back. Since I had come back, all I had done is level 3 different characters in Queen’s Dale, all 3 ending Queen’s Dale at around level 21-24, and now I have 282,000 karma. I think I tend to get at least 1600 a day from drinking Karma alone; 600 from completing the daily and getting 1000 because of the activities, and that doesn’t include the karma I get from hearts and dynamic events. I have been playing for about 6-8 weeks weeks, so about 10,000 karma each week (assuming 6 weeks), so about 1400 Karma each day, which is about 467 Karma per character per day. Breaking it down that much 467 karma per day per character is really not all that much.

But yeah, getting 525,000 Karma is probably the easy part of getting a legendary, even with the nerf.

you get exactly 2318 karma from doing queensdale map completion. You probably did get 60,000 karma but that surely isn’t from map completion.

renown level karma
12 165
15 188
11 158
8 135
9 142
7 128
2 90
3 98
4 105
5 112
6 120
10 150
13 172
14 180
9 142
8 135
3 98
2318

ps do fractal for karma. And persuading your frostgauge zerg to go cursed shore might work too. Or do wvw train.

Ah, when you break it down over time, it makes more sense. Please don’t get me wrong. I don’t want Anet to just spoon-feed everything, and I’m not a grinder. As a new player, if someone said it would take 6 weeks per piece of temple exotic, I would figure out quickly that I’d better take crafting seriously and craft my own or be ok with buying from TP. I would see this as a bit of a grind and may or may not make it a priority depending on how much I liked the appearance of the gear. (It starts to come across as what they want cultural armor to be.)

The problem is that they set a very different level of expectation. They created a flow where you can really just enjoy the game and have enough karma when you ding 80 to get all five pieces right away. That took out much of the grind and made the game more enjoyable for me. So, what happened? You had three groups….those begging for temple clears to get that gear, those seeing the boxes as a reasonable way to save up obsidian shards, and those who were seeing boxes as an easy way to convert karma to silver. Someone at Anet must have eaten a bad hamburger and decided to punish everyone on account of the third group. This much of a nerf to karma is hardly trivial, and I’m not going to grind activities ad nauseum just to get the temple back piece. Feeling forced to do something in a game has never turned me on, and this company was not aiming for that type of game.

They could have easily raised the price on the boxes. They also could have been a bit more reasonable and just nerfed karma in half.

They should just boost the karma for DE’s, and let neglected DE’s store a higher amount.

gumoor.5674:

So, what happened? You had three groups….those begging for temple clears to get that gear, those seeing the boxes as a reasonable way to save up obsidian shards, and those who were seeing boxes as an easy way to convert karma to silver. Someone at Anet must have eaten a bad hamburger and decided to punish everyone on account of the third group.

Actually they probably just want people to do event and fractal.

If you don’t notice every activity give very specific reward. If you want karma you have to do fractal. Obsidian shard from temple. Emph fragment from JP or dungeon. Wvw people kind of can get everything since they don’t pve anyway.

I doubt it have anything to do with converting karma to gold, consider how much money you can make from champ farm or dungeon run.

That’s one possibility. And then there’s the monthly reward. I can run around just smashing crates and punching random people in the crab toss for just 60 minutes….about the same time to complete one daily….and have the same reward in karma monthly.

You really just need to do 2 fractal a day for a month and you have enough karma for a legendary.

So, what you are saying is that if you don’t have the friends or are older and less reflexive or have some other reason for not wanting to do dungeons/fractals, you are kitten-out-of-luck.

The first dungeon was when I started the game…dropped after the first death realizing that, after playing other mmo’s for years, I was not going to go through the whole noncommunicating-pug thing again. The second was with a guild. Their idea was to find a way to bring in another guildie for the final boss. The third was with another guild whose other four members gave up on the final boss. Whether it’s me, the guilds, the people or whatever…I’m not wasting time on that for karma. If I ever do them again, it will just be for the achievement.

Besides, the karma-nerf affected fractals too, so I think that crab-carrying is still the better investment of time.

I see an incoming nerf to activities now….[1 Molecule of Karma]

If you can persuade people to champ farm in curse shore it might work. I’m not entirely sure but I think the champ there are events. I think the gold income is about the same, but I’m not sure if it give karma.

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/guides/basics/cursed-shore-champion-farming-guide

I actually used karma to buy temple armors for my characters but now its almost impossible to do so because its pretty hard to even get 42K for one piece of armor let alone over 200K for five pieces (trinkets not included).

Well, I needed about 12,000 more for Lysss’a rabid back piece. Even though I was ready to start leveling in a different game today, I got the idea to go over to Metrica and just test something. There are a ton of events there that go quite fast at 80. I did map completion in a few hours including FE and the pre-events, jumped in on a Scarlet and wound up with 1,000 more than I needed.

So…my conclusion is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. But, I still think the nerf is too much, and I wouldn’t gear an alt that way….not with needing 6+ pieces.

i agree that cs farming is great for karma. here, tarnished coast’s frostgorge champ train is consistently zerg-y but its hard to convince these “bots” to go to cs instead to farm and yes cs doesnt only have good karma but the champ skins that drop from cs champ boxes do sell higher than frostgorge’s (other than quaggan’s shell pouch)

wvw is good karma in bulk but considering it takes time and a tad luck for getting a good zerg really is a factor as well. thus i think queensdale champ train still generates more guaranteed karma per hour. and also considering that my server (tc) is currently against BG and SOR (not to mention JQ and BG the week before) it really is pretty hard. these and sadly my computer cant handle wvw either crashing every 15 minutes —

fotm is undoubtedly the best source of karma, but unfortunately there are just some of us who dont have the time to commit to fotm either.

honestly im interested in starting a fotm swamp fractal karma farming. just keepin to reroll a low level swamp fractal to get optimum karma… anyone interested?

with this karma nerf ANET has a great chance to make CS and ML lively again, by doubling the karma from event in those areas . will they do that ? i hope they do, but most likely they’ll not…..

I have a dawn, the legend, gift of bifrost, a gift of sunrise, 2 gifts of mastery, 4 gifts of exploration, 2 gifts of battle, 2 bloodstone shards.

There is a distinct lack of obsidian ore for my gift of mastery. This is absolute torture. I’m an active player who doesn’t do a lot of grinding. I’ve managed to come up with about 100k karma since the nerf and that was with me doing every temple and world boss every day for a while there.