Guild Wars 2

What has Anet done to Ember Bay? This place used to be fun and rewarding. Now it is a mostly-empty map.

The drop rate of Petrified Wood seems to have been nerfed to Blood Ruby level. I have been farming here for the past 2 days and managed only 38+38 petrified wood total (this includes all 5 hearts each day and every single node I can find + guild gathering boost).

The Jade Construct is an impossible or unrewarding fight now. Either there are not enough people to take it down, or you die and do not get Heart-credit for the kill.

This now looks to be the least played map of LWS3. Attention is needed here.

I am actually wondering if the guild gathering boost has been nerfed also. This “boost” (actually looks like a non-boost) plus Unbound Magic Gathering tools NEVER gives extra swings/chops anymore … for months now. Might have to make a separate thread for this separate issue.

Power of the Mists was removed from the game (and sort of replaced with various buffs/rewards in WvW directly). That has meant a 20% reduction on Wed-Fri/reset of a chance to get bonus gathers. That’s why you’re seeing less petrified wood.

Ember Bay seems as rewarding as it ever did to me. People are working on events for the map dailies, for Aurora, for P-wood. There’s competition, however, with the PoF demo and other maps.

And the Jade Construct fight has always been like that. If people know what they are doing, it’s an easy-ish, quick-ish fight (although the slowest/hardest of the EB bosses). But if people don’t know how to fight there, it drags and drags and drags. That was true the first day, the first month, and doesn’t seem to have changed.

Jade Construct was always the toughest boss in that map. I think the lower levels is just because of folks getting what they wanted out of the map by now (plus the beta weekend events drawing folks away).

As for the extra swings from gathering tools – that was tied to the WvW rewards stuff which got removed when they added the pip reward system. It was never tied to gathering boosts of any sort (those boosts give extra drops in the same swing, not extra swings).

I’ve been there all week (EU) and activity has been very high, largely to due to Aurora. The reason it probably seems less active is that the Aurora achievements are quicker and easier to do there, so players are in/out in a shorter time frame and it was never a challenging map versus the others (except Jades and the Jade boss which was always like you are seeing it)

Strange to have no one, since the Aurora these maps always have people. it can be a timezone issue?