Guild Wars 2

Would be nice to know you can get some spirit shards by doing some stuff other than the random loot in a bag or a monster. Especially since extra experience doesn’t grant you anymore “skill points” like they used to.

How about adding some in the big daily chests at the end of dungeons/world bosses/fractals levels, etc.

wouldn’t be worse than grinding SW chest runs for a 1/6 chance @ a shard for sure, and you might collect some for doing other things than just that.

you also get some doing three of the daily achievements and also using Tomes of Knowledge on a lvl 80 if you’re into doing PvP at all, you get a good amount from that.

I’ve had no problems getting spirit shards from just playing normally

I completely agree on the “Certainty” aspect. With the past system when I was making an ascended or legendary piece I knew exactly how many levels/skill points I needed to complete before I could buy the ingredient I needed.

Other than the 3 per day now from the daily it’s just a crap shoot with the RNG on how long it will take. For those who like to lay out their goals and work towards them this is a pretty big wrench in the works. Yes it’s easy to get them still but there’s no focal point to put your efforts towards.

Zev.3407:

I’ve had no problems getting spirit shards from just playing normally

Me neither, but some people obviously are.
“i don’t have bad luck” is not a good counterargument to “i’m having bad luck”

Before, gaining exp/levels would yield a skill point but now xp past 80 seems pointless, and if you do pvp matches, you still have to do quite a bit to get 1 tome, it is in no way a comparable alternative to farming chests in SW where you average 1 SS/6 bags. @ 30-35 bags per run, that’s ~6-7 SS from bags alone.

you will not be able to approach that doing anything else even with some better ratios on bag opening because you’ll never get as many bags as needed to have an equal ratio.

That apart.

I feel it quite reasonable that you could get ~4-6 SS/hour doing dungeons or World Bosses or anything else for that matter.

I’m currently working on crafting some legends, and the thought of the task ahead to get the that I need seems quite daunting as it is now. Before, you had more alternatives to gather SP. You could say run world completion with a toon, spend only SP for your needed build and cash in the rest. That aspect is now gone, along with reduced drop rate…I would like to have other ways that feel like I can still achieve my goals all while not feeling restricted to grinding SW because nothing else feels like it’ll help along the way.

not looking forward grinding an other 300 SS for 1 legend…1800 bags->~55 SW chest runs->over 24hrs straight of grinding…

I got to time a chest run to give more accurate numbers, I been putting it off a bit because it’s not an attractive task…

Certainly, here’s some certainty:

• Tomes of Knowledge, used by L80 characters
• Daily Completion
• PvP rewards

Keep in mind, before skill points were split into spirit shards and hero points, it wasn’t significantly easier to get skill points, outside of from challenges. Most veterans didn’t care, because they just accumulated without paying any attention, and most people don’t use them on a daily basis. Unless you paid to unlock traits, you had no reason to spend them.

Since the update, spirit shards have a greater variety of sources, with the exception of post-80 “leveling”. Plus, now they are useful for converting stats on ascended gear.

tl;dr there are plenty of sources; it just seems different now because it doesn’t happen automatically.

Only places I get spirit shards as loot is in low level areas and that is a super rare occurance; think I have looted a total of 3 since that patch. I have never found one these in lvl 70+ zones so idk what is going on.

I don’t know what to do with mine, they are completely useless for me. Unless there is a way to convert them to gold.

The problem with certainty, from a game design standpoint, is once players get what or as many what they want, they’re done. Not important for a single player RPG but a major problem with MMORPGs as a robust active player population is needed not only as an income source but as an actual form of content. Where would PvP or WvW or instanced party content or boss group events be without a large population of players to draw from to do this with?

As for Spirit Shards proper, well previously I might get one SP an hour from leveling from play and XP rewards from dailies. Now I get 3 guaranteed. Personally I’m satisfied.

You get 3 a day minimum from the daily and 10/28 days from the tomes. That’s a guaranteed 94 per 28 days. If you do the PvP dailies that’s an additional 1 from that and if you get a tome a day, a second. So that’s up to 150 per 28 days. If you do the PvP daily in one of the daily arenas it’s pretty fast. 150 per 28 days just by logging in and doing the PvP daily until you get a tome isn’t that bad. It’s a little over 5 a day. After that you’ll get any that drop from regular play.

Saying you are short on spirit shards is like saying you are rich in gold.

I usually make more spirit shards than I make gold. Besides TP, t6 farm, selling dungeon, you should gain spirit shard faster or roughly at the same rates as you progress your legendary.

you can try just buying the legendary if you have much more gold. or buy a few legendary and craft a few.

Another certainty in getting spirit shards is doing personal story. I recently leveled up an alt and it seems you get around 8 for chapter 1-3

Humm seeing the list of replies here maybe I should have named the post something else…

In short, Chest farm in SW is a good source of SS income, timed a good run @ 21 mins, for 5~6 shards, that’s 15~ 18 shards per hour.

Now there isn’t anything else that seems to be able to provide something comparable the way the current rewards are, and that means if you want shards you should do SW, cause nothing else will really give you nearly as much. I was proposing about having alternatives where you could get more shards for doing different content than the obvious SW Chest farm, even if the yield was lower.

The part about certainty was more in regards to managing expectations as a viable alternative to get shards, albeit maybe not as much, but with LOT more content variety and still be able to achieve your goals, in maybe twice the time?

For example, I’d prefer it take me twice as long to get shards if I could run dungeons, WvW (@ a fast pace like EoTM or other maps depending on trains and etc.) or even PvP.

But the variance right now is quite huge, I doubt you can get 15-18 yet alone 7-9 shards per hour doing any of the other type of content.

I hope this clarifies things up.