Guild Wars 2

I come from a background of playing WOW, LoTRO, Rift, FFXI, FFXIV and GW1 (I still play all except GW1), so I’ve seen a variety of mechanics where ‘etiquette’ plays as big a role if not more so that the game itself; generally in three areas which are my initial concern, where players interact with others in the open world:

1) loot
2) experience points
3) resource nodes

In most of the games I’ve played when it comes to killing mobs, a few different mechanics apply to mob drops: only one player can ‘claim’ a mob and others can’t damage it at all, anyone can damage but only the player doing initial damage gets rewards, or it’s a free-for-all where the person doing the most damage gets the drop (which leads to screams of ‘kill stealing’).

In GW2 clearly anyone can do damage, and it APPEARS to be the case drops are per-player so that ‘helping’ someone else doesn’t risk ‘stealing’ their drops, however I’d not read anything yet that confirms this.

Is this the case?

Secondly, in games where more than one person can damage a mob, XP is ‘adjusted’ (ie. reduced), which leads to endless complaints in places like the LoTRO forums about players running past someone killing a mobs, doing 1 HP’s worth of damage and halving the XP the player that ‘tapped’ the mob receives.

Again, in GW2 it seems this isn’t the case, but again I can’t find confirmation.

Basically, is it ever wrong to attack mobs others are fighting, especially when those are quest mobs, either from the perspective of loot or XP: in other words, in GW2 is there any chance one can be accused of ‘ninja looting’?

Finally, with resource nodes (ore, etc.) these seem to spawn per-player, similar to the way FFXIV works, so that if a player is mining a node it’s also possible for another player to mine it, with both players getting a full number of ores/gems; unlike in WOW where this situation used to cause grief.

Again, am I right in thinking this is how the game works and it’s fine to farm a resource someone else is also farming?

I just want to ensure I don’t get shouted at for doing something that appears to be ‘allowed’ without having it confirmed.

Cheers

If you see a resource node, it’s yours. Sometimes you’ll see other players mining ore nodes that are “expired” to you. So definitely no stealing there.

I don’t know exactly how XP and loot is calculated… But I haven’t run into any trouble. It seems that whoever gets a reasonable amount of damage on a monster gets the reward for it, and I don’t think it is diminished by “helpers”.

I have heard reports of you being more likely to get loot in very crowded areas if you are in a party. You probably have to do a certain percentage quota of the damage to get the credit… Partying helps meet the quota. Not usually a huge problem, though. And due to the level scaling mechanism, even in low-leveled areas, a level 80 can’t just waltz through and kill everything in sight.

In general, it is perfectly acceptable for players to jump right in and work on events, monsters, etc. together… and then split up the next moment. It’s all fair in GW2 – which I think is fantastic! The system isn’t perfect, but it works pretty darn well… Not much (if any) kill-stealing here.

Yeah, the resource nodes spawn per player, so no worries there.

From what I understand, loot as well as experience points are per player also. Generally, I don’t think anyone would mind if you helped them kill something. If it’s for a heart, both players get progress. The only scenario I could imagine where people would mind is if you’re level 80 and walking through a level 1-15 zone, killing everything in your way before other players can get a chance to do the minimum amount of damage required to get loot/exp. (You do get downscaled for the zone, but you’re still significantly stronger.)

As has been stated, nodes are individual.

Everyone who has “tagged” a mob gets full xp from it and loot. Tagging means you’ve done 5-10% damage (IIRC, I’d guess it might be different for champions and such). No idea about having a higher percentage of damage done increases the chance for better loot but I doubt it although it would be kinda difficult to reliably test. It seems that in WvW you have a higher change for badges if you do more than just the minimum to tag an enemy but this is purely subjective speculation that has been going around in zergs.

1.) If you are getting your butt handed to you and you decide to run away. DO NOT run at and then PAST another player. All you’re doing is dragging that mob to an unsuspecting gamer. Way uncool if you don’t hang around.

2.) If you’re downed and someone risks their butt to help you DO NOT just hop up and run away. Make sure your savior isn’t needing help. Oh, make sure to say thanks. It’s easy, type “/s ty”. It will appear above your head and the person that helped you will be able to see it.

-Even if you can solo a champ or event boss, it’s common courtesy to do a zone shoutout first to see if anyone needs or wants it(especially if it’s in zones like Orr where sometimes you need to clear a boss to get to a skill point). This will not take away your rewards and might even make it more fun if enough people show up and the boss scales up in difficulty.
-As many stated there’s no kill stealing or node stealing that can be done in the game. Everyone has their own loot and experience. Being in a party or not doesn’t really make a difference.
-Pay attention when you die and have your map up about to waypoint, someone might have busted their kitten to get to you in a hurry to get you back up and save you a waypoint cost and if you map out while they are rezzing you, well not very nice (when you have the map up and are being rezzed you will see a message “A noble soul is trying to heal you!” so keep an eye out for that)
-When doing dungeons or large events with 1-shot boss mechanics, unless there’s massive amounts of people that can rez you, or you’re in a fairly safe spot, rez out to the waypoint and run back when you die. It’s not nice to lay there the entire event waiting on a rez, or even worse, make people try to rez you and put them in danger and possibly get them killed too.

lol, I agree with everyone.
It’s great fun when you’re 3/4 of the way through rezzing someone, and they wp away!
yeah: running for your life? don’t make it someone else’s problem. at the least, stick around and kill it or make sure they get away too.
it’s to everyone’s advantage to revive people during battle. The reviver gets experience, and the battle gets easier for them with you there. That said, if the battle is too demanding then it’s likely no one will have a chance to revive you. in that case, the best thing you can do is warp to a wp and run back. you or your corpse being there makes the enemies harder.
just don’t be a leach and do nothing and you’ll be happily thanked
as far as I’m aware: everything is individual. resource nodes are there and each person mines their own. anyone who helped kill the mob gets equal exp and loot. “helped kill” means damaging it ~5% of it’s health, but I don’t think this is absolute (fighting dragons, frequently much more than 20 people, and it seems like everyone gets loot)

There is one situation in which your participation will decrease someone else’s reward: dynamic events. however, no one is going to complain if you help out, they will probably thank you immensely. a 2nd person means it’s completed twice as quick, and at worst they would get like 15% less reward. Basically, there are 3 tiers for rewards on dynamic events: gold, silver, bronze. which tier you get is determined by your participation. Say you’re defending an area. If someone is just standing there, they’ll probably get bronze. If they’re there the whole time and killing everything: gold. If they kill half and you kill half, you both might get silver. I’m not even close to 100% sure on this, only that that’s how it sounded when reading the wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event)

Don’t worry about the Dynamic Events, either. I’m always happy when nearby players join in. It is perfectly possible—and I’d say even likely—that everybody gets gold. My spouse and I often adventure together, and we almost always both get gold on the same DE. The level you get is dependent on your level of participation, but having others join in no way ruins your chance of gold as long as you are participating fully, too.

The only thing to be careful of is training mobs onto other players, as has already been mentioned. One of the aggro criteria in this game is simple proximity. If you train a mob near another player, it can switch to them even if they don’t attack first.

Other than that, this game has the most PVE world-friendly mechanics I’ve seen.

The only time I hesitate to jump in and help kill mobs is when I’m in a starter zone just because at 80, even downscaled, I pretty much demolish them before other players get a chance to get a couple hits in.

That is unless they want my help or it looks like they are struggling with taking down a Champion or doing a difficult skill point, then I jump in to help

Mystic.5934:

There is one situation in which your participation will decrease someone else’s reward: dynamic events. however, no one is going to complain if you help out, they will probably thank you immensely. a 2nd person means it’s completed twice as quick, and at worst they would get like 15% less reward. Basically, there are 3 tiers for rewards on dynamic events: gold, silver, bronze. which tier you get is determined by your participation. Say you’re defending an area. If someone is just standing there, they’ll probably get bronze. If they’re there the whole time and killing everything: gold. If they kill half and you kill half, you both might get silver. I’m not even close to 100% sure on this, only that that’s how it sounded when reading the wiki (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event)

I don’t think this is correct. I’ve been in plenty of dynamic events with a large number of PCs contributing and still got gold. It’s all about how much you individually put in. If you only get a few hits in, you’ll get bronze; if you get a lot of hits in, you should get gold.

with lots of people, 1 more is not going to matter. With my example, it was 1 person doing the event and 1 more joining them. With so few, it becomes likely that each will take half the responsibility. maybe they each defend a different side of the onslaught and each end up killing half of the mobs that attack.
I have no idea how they define ‘participate’, but with other things (like mob loot), they tend to do it based on hitting a mob. so if you only hit half of the mobs that attack, maybe you only participate 50%?
I’ve never actually noticed if I got gold, silver, or bronze from any event I’ve done. nor do I want to be that nit-picky :P

Just be active and you usually get the gold. Active in this case means hit the target(s). There is one abominable creature in Cursed Shore that selects one person and laches onto that unfortunate for the whole time. When that was me, I had to run and dodge for several minutes and thus didn’t get many hits. Ended up getting silver for the sweatiest job of them all. It doesn’t matter much though, the difference between the medals at lvl 80 is 50 copper, which is basicly nothing.

There are rare cases where people have gotten upset that someone turned out to help them with a kill. “I wanted to kill this one myself, so that I can brag about it.” Unless the person is actively saying this, there is no way to know what is going on in anyone’s head. Therefore I don’t worry about it and help if I happen to be there. Of course if someone states their wish to be left alone with the enemy, I will respect that. Usually that ends with me resurrecting them after they die.
If someone starts to yell about unwanted help and taking their ‘glory’, they are really out of line. All the mobs belong to all of us equally. And they respawn fairly quickly anyway.

Mystic.5934:

with lots of people, 1 more is not going to matter. With my example, it was 1 person doing the event and 1 more joining them. With so few, it becomes likely that each will take half the responsibility. maybe they each defend a different side of the onslaught and each end up killing half of the mobs that attack.
I have no idea how they define ‘participate’, but with other things (like mob loot), they tend to do it based on hitting a mob. so if you only hit half of the mobs that attack, maybe you only participate 50%?
I’ve never actually noticed if I got gold, silver, or bronze from any event I’ve done. nor do I want to be that nit-picky :P

When my spouse and I (just us 2) tackle an event together, we’ll both get gold as long as we’re both doing damage for much of the duration of the event. It is mathematically impossible in this case for both of us to be doing >50% of the overall anything, and we still each get gold. It is possible that we each hit over half of the creatures since we both do AOEs, but in a large group of people for an event, I know I won’t hit anywhere close to half, and I still get gold.

The gold medal seems to be based on how much of the duration of the event your character spends in doing damage.

So, having another character join in does not negatively affect your chance at the gold level.

Jinx.7945:

Mystic.5934:

with lots of people, 1 more is not going to matter. With my example, it was 1 person doing the event and 1 more joining them. With so few, it becomes likely that each will take half the responsibility. maybe they each defend a different side of the onslaught and each end up killing half of the mobs that attack.
I have no idea how they define ‘participate’, but with other things (like mob loot), they tend to do it based on hitting a mob. so if you only hit half of the mobs that attack, maybe you only participate 50%?
I’ve never actually noticed if I got gold, silver, or bronze from any event I’ve done. nor do I want to be that nit-picky :P

When my spouse and I (just us 2) tackle an event together, we’ll both get gold as long as we’re both doing damage for much of the duration of the event. It is mathematically impossible in this case for both of us to be doing >50% of the overall anything, and we still each get gold. It is possible that we each hit over half of the creatures since we both do AOEs, but in a large group of people for an event, I know I won’t hit anywhere close to half, and I still get gold.

The gold medal seems to be based on how much of the duration of the event your character spends in doing damage.

So, having another character join in does not negatively affect your chance at the gold level.

That’s good to hear

I’m necroing this thread of mine because last night while introducing a friend to this game I found that actually it IS possible to ninja in this game.

We were doing one of the very early events in Ashford,one where you have you an item to pop some purple objects (can’t remember the details, I was simply looking out for mobs aggroing him).

Anyhow, he uses the item to pop these purple object you have to turn in (it’s one of those “your contribution is” type events) and gets aggro from two mobs that spawn.

While he’s fighting some guy comes in and takes all the purple objects that popped. My friend got none, these are NOT per-player they global.

This is the epitome on ninjaing as far as I’m concerned and was upset to have to tell him “sorry, they lied to me, you can apparently ninja in this game too”.

Kraggy.4169:

I’m necroing this thread of mine because last night while introducing a friend to this game I found that actually it IS possible to ninja in this game.

We were doing one of the very early events in Ashford,one where you have you an item to pop some purple objects (can’t remember the details, I was simply looking out for mobs aggroing him).

Anyhow, he uses the item to pop these purple object you have to turn in (it’s one of those “your contribution is” type events) and gets aggro from two mobs that spawn.

While he’s fighting some guy comes in and takes all the purple objects that popped. My friend got none, these are NOT per-player they global.

This is the epitome on ninjaing as far as I’m concerned and was upset to have to tell him “sorry, they lied to me, you can apparently ninja in this game too”.

Yeah, there are two ways that (sadly) contribution quests are a bit of a bummer. The items themselves, and the way the timer works relative to the number of people in the area. If there are only 2 people around, and you have 15 things on you headed back to turn them in, and it’ll probably ‘finish’ the quest and start the timer, and someone else comes in the area, the timer will only be maybe 10 seconds. If I am aware of my surroundings and see someone come by and I’m fairly certain I’ll ‘finish’ the quest, I’ll just go up and sit by the turn in, and maybe send the person a tell asking them if they are doing it, and then wait until they come turn in, then finish turning mine in.

As far as being able to ‘steal’ the items, it is an oversight.

Having said that, all the ‘other’ mechanics with respect to stealing, loot and experience distribution, they did ‘so’ many things right. The only ‘sad’ thing is the discovered ‘bonus’ to partying, which often ends up being a mechanism of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in situations like Claw of Jormag, where everyone is grouping up in the pre-event to make sure they get as much loot as possible, and sometimes you go without getting a group.

I personally wish that part didn’t exist. I understand why they did it. The alternative would be to have the looting mechanism be dynamic in that you get a loot roll even if you didn’t necessarily contribute but were ‘in the area’. That would allow people to just stand around and do nothing and pick up loot.

I do with they had found a ‘non-grouping’ solution for that, though. Other than going to a dungeon or a raid (which then just becomes a flagging mechanism to let the game know together you are one entity doing something), I think the ‘party’ mechanic is outdated and unnecessary, as warm and fuzzy as it makes some people feel.

If i remember that heart correctly, it’s the one with the eggs, correct? Well you need a TON of eggs for that heart, so I find it was your friend’s fault completely for not turning in any at all.

But it’s not as if my judgement matters so meh