Guild Wars 2

Since this kind of thread keeps reappearing, I figured I’d throw together something that might be stickied to answer this question each time it comes up.

Where did the vendor go that allowed me to buy a Gift of Battle for 500 Badges of Honor?

It was removed from the game, the only way to obtain a Gift of Battle is now is to complete the Gift of Battle Reward Track.

Why did anet make this change?

They haven’t said for sure. Conjecture varies, but some think it’s to make legendaries more… legendary and requiring mastery across game modes. Some have speculated it was a way to encourage people to play wvw.

It may have always been their intention to have it harder to acquire from the beginning and never had a meaningful way to do it, and the vendor was always a temporary solution to solving the problem; allowing people to obtain a legendary.

How long does it take to finish the track?

It requires 20,000 reward points to finish any wvw reward track. The maximum acquisition rate is 195 points every 5 minutes at maximum participation, and would take slightly over 8.5 hours to complete while maintaining maximum participation.

This can be sped up by using an experience booster (50% gain) and Guild WvW Reward Track Boost (3-10% increase). With these 60% increases, at maximum participation it would take just shy of 5.5 hours to complete the track.

Increasing participation requires you to… do stuff in wvw. If there is a commander tag on the Eternal Battlegrounds or your server’s borderlands, following them will usually provide some quick participation gains, depending on the quality of the commander and zerg and the opponent you’re facing.

Some commanders will gladly share squad participation (if you ask for it) with scouts and roamers. If you offer to watch over an important objective (and call out enemy activities nearby!), most commanders will gladly share participation with you. This is a vital role while defending any of the 3 keeps in your home borderlands.

There are 4 wvw dailies, 2 rare and 2 exotic chests. The rare chests give 250 points each, the exotics 500 points each. Only doing dailies would take 14 days to complete the track, not counting the points you acquire actually doing the dailies.

Why’s it take so long?

That’s a matter of perspective, world competition and time-gated prerequisites already take a long time (ever make Astralaria?), with many taking far longer than the reward track.

So are all my badges of honor worthless now?

No, there’s still lots of useful things you can buy with them.

• Badges of Tribute are required to level scribing and sell well on the trading post.
• Cultural armor is available for a combination of badges and coins that are cheaper than just coins. Completing the cultural armor collection grants a mastery point.
• Exotic armors and weapons can be acquired for various (but not all) stat types.
• Some Laurel items are cheaper with Badges + Laurels.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Badge_of_Honor#Vendors

Ugh, I hate wvw

Many who enjoy wvw don’t enjoy all the pve activities required to obtain a legendary and still “suffer” through them, in particular map competition. If you go into it with the mindset that you hate it, you will hate it. If you go in with an open mindset you might find you enjoy aspects of wvw. Give it a shot, you might like it.

One other thing to consider is that it’s efficient to obtain karma in wvw (karma training is a derogatory term from more battle-oriented wvw players), and you need a lot of karma for legendaries. I have watched pve players have trouble obtaining the required karma required, take advantage of it while you’re here.

Great post. One minor adjustment: it took me ~60 minutes to reach maximum tick while consistently taking objectives without being in a zerg.

So at the extremes, I’d estimate total completion times as:

• Max buffs, focused participation, no more than 5- minute breaks: 6+ hours.
• No buffs, indiscriminate participation, can’t play more than 2 hours/night: 12+ hours

In other words, 5.5 (buffed) & 8.5 (unbuffed) are only theoretical minimums — actual players who are unfamiliar with WvW (or can’t play very long) are going to need a little more time.

That doesn’t change the OP’s general conclusions: GoB acquisition is still far quicker than Gift of Exploration; it’s just longer than going to a vendor to cash in tokens acquired from achievement chests.

Adding

How to get participation and not anger WvW players

• Don’t complain in /map or /team chat that you are forced to play WvW for a Legendary item.
• If you decide to stand on Monuments only, at least flip the two sentry positions in the ruins back to your team’s colours when they are lost.
• You have a good scouting position on most monuments, report enemies running by in /team chat. (numbers, direction etc.)
• Help allies that get ambushed right outside your weapon’s range. Gaining their gratitude will be worth more than watching them die (because they might help you flip a camp for faster rank gain & better participation.)
• If your server’s scouts beg for help, move and try to save a keep/tower. Just you being there showing strength in numbers can help, even if you don’t want to PvP at all.

Good guide.

A few tips: Soloing a supply camp raises quite a lot of participation (i’s say 120% of the earlier bars wich is a lot).

Sentry is quite good. Monuments surprisingly good, and very easy. Killing players also works pretty well.

I didnt play wvw all to much but got 2 gifts of battle already! And I got bloodstone fen reward track completed (means i’ve could have gotten a third). I got 25000 badges of honour felt a bit bad at first, but it makes me like wvw more again and play it more this implementatino of anet.

My recommendation: Do wvw daily ap each time you can. It’s the fastest way to do it. If you are still ‘slowly farming gold’ for legendary, you will get de gift of battle before you get the gold if you do the easy wvw dailies (camps, sentry, dolyak, master of monument).

I think Edge of the Mists should be brought up as an option. The gain is slower, but it’s also a lot softer which may be needed if they’re on a server that can’t karma train effectively. Chances are any level 80 in exotic-ascended gear will feel godly.

Also, I would go for Mesmer (Chrono) as the class of choice because I feel it’s the most flexible class given the situation especially if there train is far away. The use of stealth can get one away from a lot of bad things if you’re trying to get to the tag and it’s also very good if you just came in for dailies and to get some track pts. Thief can use stealth better but they’re not as good in zergs especially if you are inexperienced. If you know you can get a reliable crowd, then naturally guardian is a very convenient option. however it can be problematic if you’re getting to your zerg and are inexperienced on one.

Great additions!

I just realized that doing events like “Kill the Veteran Warg” award participation. Just to let some of you know if you’re really that afraid of leaving spawn and it happens to be a daily.

With the re-introduction of DBL, it can be much easier to get 195 participation as there are more solo objectives in this map than ABL (the keep shrines). You can just circle around taking sentries, shrines and the veteran creature events (you can skip the camps if you’re afraid it will take too long).

Thanks for this thread OP.

I’d also like to add getting participation by going into your home borderlands during off peak (less enemies and you own 90%+ of the map) just escorting dolyaks is a great way to gain reward track progress and actually helps your server without even engaging in combat if you don’t want to.

Nice job op, we should be encouraging those people who want gift of battle but don’t like WvW to instead help their server instead of hinder it.

Forcing players into a game mode they dislike is never a good idea.

And it goes both ways.

Instead of forcing PvE players into WvW, they should have given the opportunity to WvW players to obtain legendaries without having to do Pve chores.

I just decided to go for a new legendary and was shocked that they removed the vendor. I am fed-up, I’ve long accepted that this game won’t be a true GW successor and have been able to roll with the punches over the years but enough is enough.

I don’t want to play WvW for the foreseeable future. I’ve played it for years now and experienced the highs and the lows but I’m burnout of the game mode. I’m mentally taxed at the thought of hitting another sentry or tower door (which is 85% of WvW). None the less, I’ve EARNED enough tokens that I would be able to claim many, many Gift of Battles for all my time spent helping my server with epic sentry and door slayings in the past. No one can tell me I’m not a veteran at WvW. However, now I must play WvW again if I want to ever earn another GoB. The same WvW from 2012 that I’ve played for many, many hours and saved up many, many tokens.

If you want veterans in WorldvsWorld DO SOMETHING NEW (like a large sandbox or a well-written temporary story event) with it INSTEAD OF REVOKING OLD reward systems. Hell, you could just wait for us to get over being burnt out of the game mode.

Cele boosters, while some might consider a waste, and in their stead birthday boosters give +10% to reward tracks as well which were forgotten so theres more to be decreased from time.

I was gonna add this into the original thread but the devs locked it because they don’t want to hear anyone’s ideas but their own as per usual. The fact that they don’t care that people are quitting this game in mass because of this change (including myself, I have not played since they made the change because I a disabled person can not do WvW or PvP) speaks volumes about the direction of their company lmao. I was gonna come back for Halloween but hey since when do we care about anything except gemstore and expacs and PvPeen content amirite guys? Anet you are alienating a significant portion of your playerbase and when you get valid critical feedback you plug your ears and lock the threads. These are sad, sad business practices. Put the vendor back. Keep the reward track. Stop cutting out content when you barely have any to begin with.

FireCrescent.6512:

I was gonna add this into the original thread but the devs locked it because they don’t want to hear anyone’s ideas but their own as per usual. The fact that they don’t care that people are quitting this game in mass because of this change (including myself, I have not played since they made the change because I a disabled person can not do WvW or PvP) speaks volumes about the direction of their company lmao. I was gonna come back for Halloween but hey since when do we care about anything except gemstore and expacs and PvPeen content amirite guys? Anet you are alienating a significant portion of your playerbase and when you get valid critical feedback you plug your ears and lock the threads. These are sad, sad business practices. Put the vendor back. Keep the reward track. Stop cutting out content when you barely have any to begin with.

I think Anet has wanted to go back to the point of you have to do WvW to build a legendary, and the track was a great way of doing that. Before you got the achievement chests the only way to get Badges and the Gift was to WvW, as it should be.
In hindsight it was probably a bad idea to put Badges of Honor in Achievement chests because that devalued the effort people went to to get the Gift of Battle. Now, it’d be difficult to remove that aspect from accounts so severing the Gift from Badges was a logical choice.

I don’t see how it is “removing content” as if buying a Gift with free to earn currency is something exciting, challenging or engaging. It was adjusted to go back to its old values of being a legendary component requiring time in that particular game mode to attain.

If you really can’t bring yourself to WvW you can skip the process of building your own and buy first gen legendary on the trading post. I just don’t think a disability is that bad that it cuts you off from one part of the game, it kinda sounds fishy. You can still play in PvE so why not WvW? I just really don’t get that, there’s probably other disabled people that LOVE PvP/WvW and play it daily.

ArenaNet could make everybody happy by offering 2 paths to getting the “Gift of Battle”. 1 pathway for PVP and WVW players, and another path for PVE players.

Still pushing the sellable option.

Would be a boon to WvW players… especially who accidentally get that track selected for the 10th time. cough

I also think that there needs to be an alternative way for players to get the gift. Some people can’t or don’t want to play WvW for whatever reason and I respect that.

Add the reward track in pvp and make a repeatable mini collection in pve or something like that.

I don’t disagree that also adding it to spvp would be a right thing to do.

I will say a pver in my guild went into wvw recently to get gift of battle and is falling in love with the game mode.

I honestly don’t mind the track much, I kinda wish that doing objectives should also provide something to the track rather than just maintaining a ticking performance. Kinda like how in PvP you still get points from what you do.

Ookamikun.6472:

I honestly don’t mind the track much, I kinda wish that doing objectives should also provide something to the track rather than just maintaining a ticking performance. Kinda like how in PvP you still get points from what you do.

I can get behind this, even if it’s only a small increment of +40 or something per event. Or scaling, like +40 per defense/capping towers or keeps, +30 for camps, +20 for dolyak kills/escort, +5 for ruins/shrines.
I really really would like if building seige and repairing walls would keep your participation up too, the amount of times I’ve seiged some t3 keep/tower to then see my participation decaying is a bit annoying

Just add the wvw,pvp,pve items for legendary weapons/items to gem store so those that hate one or the other dosnt have to bother with them it’s simple