Guild Wars 2

I found today that the exotic spinal blade back piece is no longer account bound, but soulbound on use. It’s extremely disappointing, because I liked the idea of having the back piece traded among alts. It’s very sad, and I’m wondering, since it wasn’t in the patch notes, could a dev let us know if this is intended or a bug?

Okay can you not post before you know the facts? I literally passed his backpack back and forth between my Mesmer and guardian yesterday.

The spinal blades exotic were account bound, permanently which was the real attraction of them. This is a fact. Then, today’s patch changed it.

I’m not a person who would just say something without knowledge of it.

My son just walked in and told me he just now moved it from one character to his Charr. He said he had picked the stats (previous to today’s patch), but had not equipped it.

He said that it did warn him previous to the patch, and today, that when you pick the stats, that it would soulbind the item in bright red and that it was a bug that these were not soulbound, but were account bound after choosing the stats. Sounds like today was a stealth fix for something that was previously bugged.

Dehuang.2053:

Every piece of equipment in this game is soulbound on use

Not so. I’ve mailed leveling stuff to guild-mates after I’ve surpassed it’s usefulness on baby characters. Perhaps past green quality it’s soulbound, or meant to be but not all.

I was really starting to enjoy the exotic versions being account bound :-( but then I logged on today to find the ones on my characters soulbound, and that we weren’t given any opportunity to atleast remove them and put onto other characters :-( really annoying tbh.

Yeah I wish my spinal blades did not end up on the character I placed them on for a quick dungeon. sad me. Would really like an official response.

It said it would soulbind when you picked the stats, it’s safe to say that it not doing was thus a bug.

Just to add a small notion, there are actually pieces of equipment of exotic grade that stay accountbound if equipped like the Ancient Karka Shell or the Sclerite Karka Shell so it was a possibility that this applied to the spinal blades as well.

Anyway when I chose stats it never said the soulbound thingy. So there’s that.

I have the same problem. The wiki and dulfy said that only the ascended version becomes soulbound, and indeed it didn’t happen for me.
I don’t like the design of this backpiece, so i made only the initial version (blue rarity) and gave it to my level 25 character.
Now i need it back on my lvl 80 to enter the story instance, but it became soulbound to the lvl 25 through this patch. So i have to make another one for 3 gold worth of iron, or upgrade for a similar price of steel.
Since this was changed without warning before, i consider it rather unfriendly and inconsiderate.

The wiki also says:

“Anomaly: The stat selection process indicates that resulting item will be soulbound, but it is actually account bound, and does not even become soulbound upon equipping”

Serval.6458:

The wiki also says:

“Anomaly: The stat selection process indicates that resulting item will be soulbound, but it is actually account bound, and does not even become soulbound upon equipping”

I was under the impression that the pop-up warning of it stating that it would become soulbound upon selecting stats was the bug/oversight and not that it failed to soul bind and instead became account bound.

The reason this seemed logical was the fact that, previous to the patch, the back item came out of the mystic forge as “Account Bound” only, not “Account Bound – Soulbound on Use” like it became post-patch. I believed they had simply copied the stat selection coding used on legendaries or other items with stat selection and they neglected to remove the warning from it considering it was flagged as being “Account Bound” from day 1 and not “Account Bound – Soulbound on Use”.

Had it been an issue of a bug that was causing it to not properly soul bind upon selecting stats, then the initial item from the forge would have correctly stated “Account Bound – Soulbound on Use”, it would just be that it wasn’t properly soulbinding upon selecting stats as it should have.

So it was not that it was not properly soulbinding upon use, it was that they failed to mark it as being “Account Bound – Soulbound on Use” in the first place and instead marked it as only being “Account Bound”. That was their fault and it should have remained as it was.

Limiting the binding to being “Account Bound – Soulbound on Use” without warning (2 weeks after they were made available to craft and not in a hotfix the next day) led to thousands of equipped spinal blades to already be Soulbound upon logging in. If they wanted to change the bindings then the only decent way I could see that as being not as bad as what they have chosen to do, would be to force all spinal blade back items to be unequipped to the character’s inventory or to the players bank so they could chose which character they actually wanted to soulbind the back item to. Or give us a head’s up in-game mail about the impending change. After thousands had already been made at different quality stages (fine -> Exotic) that were produced to the players as Account Bound and remaining as Account Bound after use over the past 2 weeks, removing our ability to move it between characters without warning after already allowing it to move freely between characters for 2 weeks is very, very wrong.

StinVec.3621:

The reason this seemed logical was the fact that, previous to the patch, the back item came out of the mystic forge as “Account Bound” only, not “Account Bound – Soulbound on Use” like it became post-patch.

Even if it didn’t say “Soulbound on Use” it did say it would soulbind on the stat selection screen.

If someone wanted to be pedantic, “Soulbound on Use” could also be a mixed message as selecting stats doesn’t mean you’ve “used” it yet. It does serve to let people know that when they buy something they won’t be able to sell it after using it, but since you don’t get to preview the items before making them that is less relevant here.

Stinvec I totally agree with your last point… Because now my exotic piece is on a character it wasn’t intended to stay on. They should have informed us, not just ignore it and stealth “fix” it.