Guild Wars 2

We are now 3 weeks into Guild Wars 2’s Heart of Thorns expansion. My guild is level 23 and I am 125 scribe. Now, it’s time for me to sit down and give feedback about my experiences as a guild leader and scribe for my guild.

For starters, Arena Net did an amazing job on these environments. Gilded Hollow and Lost Precipice are just so beautiful. My guild personally chose the latter one just for the gliding opportunities around the map. The hidden areas and things around the hall are so fun to find and share; as you train your masteries (as I have advanced gliding), you get more fun around the hall!

The new panel is cleaner and easier to navigate and I am really happy about the fast travel option in the panel to the guild halls. Certain areas are all centrally located and other, more specific buildings have their own dedicated areas that add a completely different feel to the hall. The arena is really cool to glide over and see all the action as you glide into the spectator area. The ability to fully customize your decorations adds a personal touch to the area that your guild calls “home”.

But as always there are still some things that made into the official release that need to be addressed. Namely the scribing discipline and the vast redistribution of wealth that will come when guild reach level 30+.

For starters, I want to address scribing and what I call “a QA nightmare.” Now, I premise this by saying that I am unsure if Anet intentionally mishandled scribing because decorations are required or they just ran out of time and pushed it as is. As scribing stands, most players have stalled out around 50 to 75. Occasionally, players with more resources are able to get up to 125 to 150. Now, this is nice because when scribing gets fixed, we’ll be able to craft some high tier items out of the gate. However, the current state of scribing eats too many resources and leaves too many items uncraftable:

1.Resonating Fragments- A Scribe 75 craftable item that is completely missing it’s recipe.
2.Bags of Mortar- A direct purchase item missing from the master scribe’s inventory.
3.Decorations- Some basic decorations unlock at scribe 25. But the prerequisite decorations are not buyable until guild level 34.
4.Sand/Flax/Flax Fibers- John addressed the flax issue in a forum post hinting about a missive flax stash in VB. However, sand is now the next common rarity that permeates the economy. And such, finishing kits will require more and more flax/sand as we scale up. This will be a serious blow to the economy when scribing actually becomes a legitimate profession. In addition, flax fibers will soar in price as it requires 50 fibers just for one WvW schematic; which most WvW guilds cannot PvE to get.
5.Wood Cost- Soft, seasoned, and hard wood logs are already expensive as all hell to get. Requiring five pulps, as it sounds reasonable, is just too much for one paper.
6.Inks- No. I get the idea to upgrade your inks, but no. 10 brown and 10 red inks for one basic ink well is not okay for anyone. And I can only imagine the 325 and 400 scribe ink wells. So far ink is not growing on trees and I do not see any reason for the drop rates to get changed anytime soon.
7.Crafting Itself- I know crafting is hard to keep pace on but I cannot even craft linseed oil as a scribe. Scribes use it too, and it should be craftable. But as I click on craft, it processes and stops before I get the refined product. Which means I need another crafting discipline that is already 400 to craft linseed oils.
8.Crafting Unusable Items- I can craft Boxes of Banner Supplies at 125 scribe but cannot use them in recipes until 200 scribe. So it’ll just sit in my inventory until I can use them? Just something that seems rather redundant.

Now, I go onto the guilds and halls themselves. As it seems the halls do have their ups, they also have their downs.

One such issue I see with my hall is that there is little incentive to use this hall other than for the occasional refresh of my map bonus buff. The hall has little to offer and does not seem like a central place of gather like Anet was aiming for. They are dwarfed compared to the availability of resources in cities. No bank, no TP, and nothing in crafting. All of which the players of GW2 use on a more-that-constant basis. I remember the blog post about not wanting to oust cities but in doing so, Anet ousted their own new content.

Lastly, I want to address this wild assumption that there are massive amounts of spare resources in the GW2 economy. In this, I am looking toward John to lead the support of my argument. Guild hall upgrades are unbalanced to the extreme! Sure, basic starter upgrades are all fine and easy, but come guild level 25 and the progression of finalized buildings, you are looking at stacks and stacks of items that are expensive to acquire.

Example: Workshop Restoration 2. 500 Watchwork Sprockets (okay), 500 mithril (easy), 400 Linseed oil?!…further down the list…400 ori ingots, 50 elonian leather… (cheapest ascended mat but still expensive)

I know anet has not outright said what they call a guild but the mat costs really can tell how they view guilds.

Another example: Tavern Restoration 2. 1000 elder and mithril (okay), 200 elonian wine (little expensive, but okay), 200 kegs and 300 glass mugs… That is quite a jump from 10 kegs and 50 mugs for restoration 1.

I am not trying to rag and rant and gripe and complain. This is structured feedback from a guild leader. I would like to voice my thoughts on this issue and thoughts about the work I have ahead of me. I like HoT and the guild halls, but I think that the QA department and other departments need to sit down and rethink the material cost and overall design of halls and scribing. Just like they did with elite specializations. There is a fine line between what is and what the player base thinks it should be. Maybe the player base can work something out with Arena Net because as it stands, a lot of <50 player guilds are at risk of falling behind in the guild race and will dissolve as quickly as they can type up a kitten storm on the forums.

I think you make some good points about things that should have been addressed already in terms of broken recipes and such. To me, it’s a shame they decided to use guild halls as a way to pull materials out of the economy instead of making activities for the guild to do together to level up the guild.

I think it would have been more fun for players if they had put in more content like the content for actually acquiring the hall itself. My guildies had an absolute blast getting the actual guild hall. After that, there isn’t any fresh content for players to do to level the guild together.

I think the guild halls also should have had activities inside of them such as adventures, races, and jumping puzzles that counted as guild missions. Lost Precipice seems ripe for gliding puzzles. All they would have to do is add floating rings to make a course. They could make several of these. You could activate them whenever and have races etc.

They seem very reluctant to add sand box style framework for halls to let guilds go wild with it. Everything is gated and measured and it seems to be designed more with the economy in mind than it does for guilds to just have fellowship and fun and that in my opinion is a huge shame and a waste because these are gorgeous spaces.

One last thing I forgot to mention, and this is really a grievance for me, a charr player. The decorations in the hall are so small. They come up to my hip. So tiny for tiny asura~ Not for big charr

Nice post there. My guild is currently 21 or 22. And i can only chime in with the second restorations for workshop and tavern.
That amount of linseed oil and coarse sand is more of a time gate for our small to medium guild than aetherium is. Although it seems to get even worse later on when i glanced at things like decoration trader 2 and 3.

Not to mention that linseed oil takes 20! Flax seeds and kegs need 3 oil and 10 mithril and elder wood. So for tavern 2 we’re looking at nearly 3000 elder wood and mithril. But also 12000 flax seeds (on top of everything else that needs the oil) and 2700 coarse sand (meaning at least 27000 silky sand though probably more like 35000 to 50000 depending on RNG)
The decoration trader 1 is somewhere around 2000 flax seeds piles and 1000 coarse sand. Also not that little in my opinion.

Opposed to the warroom 2, market 2 and arena 2 being a tenfold below that. Hence we set out to do those first now. And then see from there.

In their current state Guild Halls while beautiful environments lack any actual functional guild use except the personal buff, the arena and general sitting in the gold treasure room,

Almost all the guild hall features that sound promising by name (example Guild Portal) just aren’t worth a second though after building it to get guild level up xp.

Decorating and scribing could have been interesting, but in their current state they are just the Mystic Forge of Item Sinking 3.0 minus the opportunity to win the precursor lottery.

In my max size topped up guild no one ever goes there other than for donating mats and getting the buff at the tavern at all.

If at least the guild portal would be useful, so you could enter/launch instances for coordinated play from there like dungeons/fractals/world bosses/missions/fresh meta maps etc… then it could be a nice hub for guildies and guests partaking in such event activities.

At the moment Guild Halls mostly show lots of great potential that does not come to fruition.

Also I’d love to see personal housing sub-instances added to the Halls

i didnt bother with scribing yet because i know that thing isn’t completed
u can get sand easily from a pvp reward trek
flax if are easy if u hav hard working ppl

SkyShroud.2865:

i didnt bother with scribing yet because i know that thing isn’t completed
u can get sand easily from a pvp reward trek
flax if are easy if u hav hard working ppl

I get where you are coming from and yes there are ways around this. But with guilds <50 people, you are looking at weeks of works. Whether PvP for the sand or daily looting of the therein mentioned flax farm in VB.

Still the issue is that the materials cost was rushed. With 3 weeks out now and the current state of the economy for these new items leveling out, you can see how hard it is to acquire these items and how much players value their supply. Flax is still 5s a piece and sand is twice that at 10s a piece. Either way, the cost in time or gold is too high for medium sized guilds to work at if the halls are just going to be buff factories.

A little rework and thorough brainstorming is all I ask.

Yes, it has been 3 weeks but remember, is 3 weeks.
Looking at the TP graph, the supply for these items have been steadily increasing over the 3 weeks and the price will expect to go down further with the current trend. It won’t happen immediately, you are also not expected to upgrade your hall immediately but these items will go down in price.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/71641-pile-of-coarse-sand
https://www.gw2tp.com/item/74090-pile-of-flax-seeds

Atros.9607:

No bank, no TP, and nothing in crafting. All of which the players of GW2 use on a more-that-constant basis. I remember the blog post about not wanting to oust cities but in doing so, Anet ousted their own new content.

This is an incredible post that I’ll upvote but wanted to say all guild halls have a hidden bank, when they unlock workshop. Use the scribing station, you can access everything for your bank by using the crafting station. A side note, I find coarse sand AND ley line tools to be problematic. Ley line tools are problematic due to the Ley Line sparks not consistently dropping from the caches.

Ley line tools are not hard at all. Unless you’re doing it by yourself. We got our tools with 4 people in a few days after we had the nuhoch language unlocked. Ley line sparks are not in every chest but at least every other.

The bloodstone dust was just as hard to get at the point we wanted mining rate 3.
Ofc. Varying experiences happen with RNG i guess

Update: Looks like a few issues with the scribing profession were handled with the raiding update launched today. But reading the patch notes, I still sense some deflection in the decoration crafting and some of the costs for the scribes (namely the nerf to sand drops in SW)

Hopefully this feedback thread will stay afloat through today’s patch.

Atros.9607:

Update: Looks like a few issues with the scribing profession were handled with the raiding update launched today. But reading the patch notes, I still sense some deflection in the decoration crafting and some of the costs for the scribes (namely the nerf to sand drops in SW)

Hopefully this feedback thread will stay afloat through today’s patch.

I love nondescripive patch notes like “an incorrect amount of sand”

That should read “not enough sand” or “too much sand”

We as players have no idea what the “proper” amount is, so this is a useless bullet point.

PopeUrban.2578:

Atros.9607:

Update: Looks like a few issues with the scribing profession were handled with the raiding update launched today. But reading the patch notes, I still sense some deflection in the decoration crafting and some of the costs for the scribes (namely the nerf to sand drops in SW)

Hopefully this feedback thread will stay afloat through today’s patch.

I love nondescripive patch notes like “an incorrect amount of sand”

That should read “not enough sand” or “too much sand”

We as players have no idea what the “proper” amount is, so this is a useless bullet point.

Prevent speculation in the market is my best assumption. Can’t have those pesky TP players ruin the economy

Atros.9607:

I am not trying to rag and rant and gripe and complain. This is structured feedback from a guild leader.

Of course you’re not. Why would anyone read your post and think that? Oh, are you talking about the white knights that think anyone who has any feedback other than “Anet is perfect and can do no wrong” will flame you? Don’t worry about them. No one listens to or likes white knights, anyway.

Your post was very organized and coherent and fair. It’s one of the best rundowns of Scribing’s issues that I’ve seen. If these are the requirements at 125, then it stands to reason that 400 Scribing or even higher will be completely ridiculous when it comes to materials and upgrades.

It’s tough even for a large guild, and the small guilds are really hurting. Their “9 months to an upgraded guild hall” is way off base. For some guilds, 9 years is a more likely scenario, which imo, is outrageous, even for a long-term gaming goal.

Iason Evan.3806:

To me, it’s a shame they decided to use guild halls as a way to pull materials out of the economy instead of making activities for the guild to do together to level up the guild.

Boom – we have a winner. HoT has been detrimental to guild activities with the changes and bugginess of guild missions along with the well documented WvW issues. And then you have the concern of some players doing all the heavy lifting on the guild upgrades, leading to hostility within the guild (my guild hasn’t seen this much but I can easily see it happening with the costs of these upgrades.) And that grind! Everybody is off gathering mats up, but we are all doing it separately. There is no togetherness in getting this grinding done.

Last night we finally did a PVP fundraiser together in a desperate bid to get Heavy Supply Bags. (Supply Bags that are going for 5 g on the TP that Anet wants players to happily hand over to their guild.)

The changes today ungated the scribing profession from the level 34 balloon upgrade so at least there is now valid scribing progression. It .is. expensive but so was ascended crafting when it first hit. I’m now at 275 and waiting on guild missions for slivers.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Ley line tools are not hard at all. Unless you’re doing it by yourself. We got our tools with 4 people in a few days after we had the nuhoch language unlocked. Ley line sparks are not in every chest but at least every other.

The bloodstone dust was just as hard to get at the point we wanted mining rate 3.
Ofc. Varying experiences happen with RNG i guess

Thanks, yup, right now I am doing it by myself but it won’ be that way for too much longer. I have a ton of bloodstone dust from doing World Bosses, I would recommend that method if you need more.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Atros.9607:

I am not trying to rag and rant and gripe and complain. This is structured feedback from a guild leader.

Of course you’re not. Why would anyone read your post and think that? Oh, are you talking about the white knights that think anyone who has any feedback other than “Anet is perfect and can do no wrong” will flame you? Don’t worry about them. No one listens to or likes white knights, anyway.

You seem to have issues with labeling others as “white knights” and have a personal gripe with said, “white knights.”

MaximillianVonSchatten.6278:

Iason Evan.3806:

To me, it’s a shame they decided to use guild halls as a way to pull materials out of the economy instead of making activities for the guild to do together to level up the guild.

Boom – we have a winner. HoT has been detrimental to guild activities with the changes and bugginess of guild missions along with the well documented WvW issues. And then you have the concern of some players doing all the heavy lifting on the guild upgrades, leading to hostility within the guild (my guild hasn’t seen this much but I can easily see it happening with the costs of these upgrades.) And that grind! Everybody is off gathering mats up, but we are all doing it separately. There is no togetherness in getting this grinding done.

Last night we finally did a PVP fundraiser together in a desperate bid to get Heavy Supply Bags. (Supply Bags that are going for 5 g on the TP that Anet wants players to happily hand over to their guild.)

There is that sort of stress with the newness of HoT and guild halls. I feel the squeeze and many others do too (especially with those that are active in 2+ guilds). The economy for T6 mats is falling due to map bonuses but it seems all the mats for upgrades for the halls did not make it into the map bonuses.

So it really seems that the economy for legendaries and the sort is going to plummet while the economy for these new mats is going to stay at the 10 silver range for the foreseeable future.