Guild Wars 2

I don’t like jumping puzzles, so I will not do them for badges. Seems kind of lame anyway to do a jumping puzzle for Honor Badges which should come from players. The past 100+ players and X amount of Keep Lords have yielded 0 badges. Not to mention the drop rate overall is horrendous. How am I supposed to get a Gift of Battle?

I had only negative comments about the love for WvW that ArenaNet is showing.
I had to “kitten” my comments.
I’ve got lots of kills and piddling badges, in 300 hours of this place. And OP, I got more from JP at one time, than any other 4 hour period in combat. Sad.
I hope that February does make things better.

Agreed. I have a couple thousand kills in WvW, and I only have around 350 badges. The poor drop rate conbined with poor system of needing to loot the bags probably contribute to this. IMO it’s a terrible system and drop rate combined that make it so bad.

There’s been several times where I have several bags around my corpse. Or I had to leave badges behind since I play a very mobile/evading build.

So here’s a tip for people that, like me, aren’t ever going to go into the jumping puzzle.

Four step process.
1. Get a couple of friends together.
2. Everyone create new characters and finish the tutorial.
3. Enter WvW in your own borderland.
4. Map your own borderland.

Home borderlands tend to be the safest and most secure. Grab some supply so that you can repair things as you see them, or so that you can help commanders build siege or whatever’s going on when you’re in the area. You’ll want to be in a small group so that you can get your skill points more easily (one of them requires you to kill something) — you’re going to be in terrible gear with terrible stats, so having 3-5 of you will keep you mobile.

Completely mapping any borderland map grants you some random siege, some badges of honor and some money. Throw the badges and money in the bank, then have everyone drop their siege for others to make use of. Either give it to a commander on the map or give it to someone in your guild. When you’ve done all of that, delete the characters and do it again.

The advantage to doing this over the jumping puzzle is the ability to do it more than once per day. You also have much less fighting to overcome/deal with and less chance of being griefed. The biggest time sink will be running between points, and helping reclaim towers/keeps if they’re taken. If your world controls its own home then you can finish everything within an hour.

If you’re going to spend 4 hours in the jumping puzzle getting kitten off and using portals, then you’ll probably find this to be easier and more rewarding. I’m not happy with the fact that I’m posting this and I’m not proud of myself for sharing it, but until collecting badges is trivialized or the drop rate improves we’re going to keep hearing people kittening about the jumping puzzle or about disconnecting or whatever.

They really just need to give up and turn the jumping puzzle loot into a daily quest reward instead and make everyone happy. Personally I think that badges of honor should have a 100% drop rate from players but hey what do I know.

Fomby.4295:

Agreed. I have a couple thousand kills in WvW, and I only have around 350 badges. The poor drop rate conbined with poor system of needing to loot the bags probably contribute to this. IMO it’s a terrible system and drop rate combined that make it so bad.

There’s been several times where I have several bags around my corpse. Or I had to leave badges behind since I play a very mobile/evading build.

Totally true. The system is pretty unsophisticated.

It’s because the skins for lvl 80 badge gear are the same as the highest rank spvp gear, and anet associated cost around this comparison like morons, instead of making unique skins.

I got over 700 badges in less than a month.

I believe the badges drop more to the party that did more damage to the objective, atleast that’s what I heard.

Yamiino.1827:

I got over 700 badges in less than a month.

I believe the badges drop more to the party that did more damage to the objective, atleast that’s what I heard.

From past experience, this seems correct. I think when a person is killed, people who did higher damage have a higher chance of receiving badges. I don’t think it is an equal chance for everyone that tagged the kill.

I could be wrong and it might just have been a lucky RNG streak, but I say this due to the following. Initially I did WvW for about 2500 kills on a guardian that usually ran in whirl wind/binding blade and tagged many people in zerg battles, but in 10 kills I might get 1 loot bag. In 2500 kills I got around 250 badges. Then, I decided to try a glass cannon rifle warrior. I only hit 1 person at a time, but I hit like a truck and usually took well over half of each person’s hp. And badges dropped like candy. Got a brand new stack of 250 badges to finish off my gift of battle in only 700-800 kills. Also, I found I got a lot more loot in general as well.

Again, it could be strictly RNG, but give it a shot. It worked for me so it might for you as well.

Arenanet dropped the ball on rewards in WvW, completely dropped it. Like, out of the hands, down the stairs and into a stormdrain.

They seem to be aware of it however, so im hoping they got some plans to overhaul it in febuary. But its likely theyll do this along with changes to how Ascended gear is earned, to get it all done and sorted.

Dmg definitely is the main contributing factor, id go so far as to say it even calculates dmg for people that are in the down state so while people are running around trying to stake downed players if u are blazing away with DPS you will get the reward. This is a terrible way to reward people, you would like to think 10 years along that the same mistakes made in DAoC would be gone(the healing/CC classes not getting much in the way of rewards despite being the lynch pin of any group). Eventually this was altered in DAoC to better represent the contribution as a whole to the group that these classes performed.

The bags dropping to the ground(even after you have ticked autoloot YES) is also something that needs to be addressed, to inventory in a sack would probably be a better way for it to be implemented.

I feel WvW needs a RA system like DAoC, this would give us something to spend badges on, buying cool abilities or different sets of gear, these abilities could be strictly for WvW, not PvE, not sPvP. Something to draw people back to play, approaching 5000 kills in WvW and getting kinda bored. But if there was some kind of stuff i could buy with badges(other than armour as i have all the invader gear i want) it’s another hook for players to stay.

I have the opposite problem to the op with badges piling up in my inventory and nothing to spend them on other than cosmetic changes.

As for farming badges, roll up warriors in every spare char slot you have, train them the horn for charge, go to the jump puzzle in EB, see if any mesmers from your realm are porting, port up, finish off puzzle(wont take long, maybe a minute or 2 depending on skillz), open chest 10-15 badges or there abouts, do this for every char on ur account, if you have extra char slots go crazy. Oh and dont forget to tip your friendly mesmer a couple silvers for the port

as usual, any support build is not rewarded for the trouble.
If you don’t go full out damage, you’ll see almost no badges drop at all, even in bigger fights.

That’s for support builds, support roles in WvW are even worse.
Sieging up towers don’t give anything, nore does upgrading them, or guarding them…
Guarding dollies doesn’t even give karma even though it’s an ’even’t in theory, let alone that you get badges for it.

Pure damage builds, and preferably in the biggest zerg you can find…
Just like the spvp glory, this whole system is so outdated and simplistic, it’s a shame for an MMO as innovative as GW2!
Harsh, but it really is a shame for this game.

And what’s the deal with map completion on deletable alts, as well as the jumping puzzle being the BEST ways to gather badges???

This alone is beyond my comprehension.
How can a feature like the World versus World strategic large scale battle, have the best rewards in useless npc’s like the Grub, jumping puzzles and map completion on alts?

What on earth were you thinking here devs?

my advice is find out when your server is porting the EB jumping puzzle regularly and you’ll quickly build up a decent stock pile. Kills gets you nothing.

i have no idea, what u guys are talking about 500 badges takes me a couple days

I’ve gotten roughly 1700 Badges so far. But that’s because I’m actually active in fights, rather than hiding in the zergs.

The more you play, the better you get. And the better you get, the more damage you deal without dying. That’s when loot drops.

Note – I’m mainly a PvEer. I do WvW part time with my Guild, yet I can manage to stockpile more Badges than I can use. I believe the game rewards you based on what you’ve done. So if you’re running around with a zerg, and you fire off a couple shots here and there, you won’t be seeing many drops.