Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the input, guys!

I realize that currently, pve currently rotates almost entirely around the “bring zerk everything, stack properly, dodge properly, kill it before it kills you” mindset, but I was hoping to find something that was a little less..bland, I guess?

But maybe PvE’s just not the right place for that. What about as part of a WvW zerg, then? (I know you mentioned healing is okay in sPvP, but I’ve never really ventured there yet, and I’ll be honest, I’m not sure if I’m good enough to hold my own in pvp anyway.)

Would it be at all useful (vague, I guess, since technically anything is useful in wvw, /somewhere/) to aim for a supporting role again with mace/shield+staff, but 20066? Fiery wrath to make up for some lost damage, but otherwise, all three Writs, UC/master of consecrations, shielded mind?

Grabbing as much celestial stuff as I can find seems to set me at 800-900 healing power, which is ~1k heal per roll, ~160 per tick from WoM, and ~550 or so from Sigil of Water. Assuming that I’m not attempting to get up in people’s faces and play it safe from staff range, maybe this could contribute without feeling as if I’m leeching off other people’s efforts?

After running full zerk on my guard, I wanna try something different. Namely, I want to experiment with a healing power build that revolves around Selfless Daring.

Current thought is 0/0/4/6/4, picking up Mace of Justice from Valor, Persistence/Merciful, and Absolute Resolution; even though I’m not a huge fan of the virtues traits for this build, boon duration seems like it’d be pretty useful anyway. And even if I dropped points from Virtues, I’m not sure what I’d take instead.

Plan would be to run mace/shield as primary, with staff on swap for empower/swiftness(which, coincidentally, also heals now), with a full set of Zealot gear with Monk runes; Zealot for the str/pre/hp, and monk for the hp/boon/10% outgoing heals.

Any chance anyone’s experimented with this/has any thoughts/suggestions?
Apologies in advance if this question’s already been answered; I did a brief check, and didn’t see anything in the stickies/search.

Many thanks for the links! Looking through them now. :]

I used to use longbow, but the inability to have a fire field on demand – since it’s adrenaline dependent – seemed pretty limiting.
That said, I’m currently running FGJ / SoR; but if I axe+axe, I could probably swap out SoR for parties and whatnot and take Warbanner instead.

I’m sort of considering axe+axe / axe+mace, though -because as you mentioned, vulnerability – but that said, the 30% vuln on crit trait seems to proc a whole hell of a lot off axe/axe 5, so the additional 4 stacks of vuln off mace offhand might not really be that much of a benefit.

The other obvious offhand to consider would have been shield, though there really isn’t much to block, aside from when I’m running through enemies to get to the next area or something.

I’ve only recently gotten my warrior to 80, so my apologies in advance if this is a question that’s been answered to death already.

As of right now, I’m using axe/sword+GS, with 6/2/0/0/6; dual wielding, zerker power, and heightened focus. Current gear is a 2/4 mix of zerker/valkyrie with 6/6 rune of the pack.

I rather like my axe/sword setup as a general thing, though on the one hand I feel as if I use the sword skills next-to-never. I was only axe/axe for short time, and might end up reverting to that – but at the same time, I want to swap out GS for another dual wield set to make use of that 5% increased dual wield damage.

Assuming I go axe/axe as one pair, would would work as my second? a/a only really seems useful for the fury on demand; otherwise, my autos outdamage my skills by a wide margin. Axe/mace, then? Or shield?

…Or warhorn?

@Tallis:
Do you have to make more than 2g an hour?
Do you have to have (insert gear here), (insert item here), (insert amount of money here)?
Do you have to have things absolutely right here, right now?

As far as I can tell, even a casual player can buy a full set of exotics off the TP in about a month of casual farming, or even less if they bother just getting exotics from dungeons with tokens. You could make your own exotic weapon with ~1.5g last week, and that’s buying everything off the TP. Not even one hour’s worth of farming, casually.

You can argue until you’re hoarse that ANet overcharges for their gold, their gems, their everything – but for the casual player that isn’t pretending to be a top-tier player, it doesn’t really stop them from doing anything they wouldn’t be able to accomplish…casually.

To check prices, obviously.

It’s well known – and has been well documented – that there’s a difference in the gold→gem and gem→gold transfer rates. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t stumble on any of the previous threads on this topic, but it’s…old news. :/

I’ve been doing my clovers in sets of ~10-15 or so, when I get the ectos for it, and nearly every time, I’ve come out at the expected 33%.

Currently at 29 clovers, but that’s a third of the way there!

I’m a few hundred fine mats short anyway, so I’m in no rush. Packing stacks of mithril/leather/silk to forge into t6s when I get there, too – so s’all good. I’ll get there when I get there, and I’m super casual.

@Falcon:
Keep in mind that you can do dungeons with people cross-server, so you could very well join a guild not on CD, and find people to run with. :]
Best guess would be the guild in the forums, as per https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/OPERATION-UNION-Bringing-Players-Together/first though admittedly it’s still just a guess.

@Capzero:
Well, I’ll be! Interesting stuff in that article, though I still feel in my gut that if it wasn’t for the community, it wouldn’t be the same. It might not be sufficient on its own, but I feel it’s still integrally necessary. (Then again, I’m also happy to admit that we might just be players of completely different playstyles altogether, since I’m much happier doing anything in a group.)

That said, one of my main concerns about a LFG tool is that it might encourage people to start grouping along certain lines, IE “LF support guardian” or anything similar. An updated version of GW1’s tool might work out rather well, but in the same way that I feel like any metric of gearscore is poisonous, I feel like giving people a way to build parties that don’t have the same level of I-got-this-random-group-of-classes-together-now-let’s-do-a-dungeon feeling would detract from the overall experience.

Then again, maybe it wouldn’t. Gut feelings, instincts, etc; I could very well be wrong – these’re just the things that bothered me most from the LFG tools in other games.

Did this Fractal again yesterday, no problems.

Well, comparatively speaking, at least.
Started boss fight as per usual, got him down to 75%, didn’t spawn minions. Team suicide to reset fight, and things were fine.

@Issues with explosions on the ramp:
Sometimes the ramp lets off double-sets of explosions, one like, 1.5s after the first. It should only have one set of explosions, I’m guessing, but it’s a relatively minor bug, considering. Just watch your step a little more than usual and it’s np.

That said, both times I’ve done this recently, I was playing on Fractals level 1/7 respectively, so the mechanics might be oddly tweaked to allow for agony. Not sure if that’s what might be causing more instability than expected.

Being able to solo fractals would further fracture the game’s community. Seriously?

Join a guild, any guild. Even the one in the Players Helping Players forum; I’m sure there’s plenty of people looking for others to run Fractals with.

Heck, I did a level 1 fractal as a level 31 elementalist last night, and the three 80’s in the party didn’t seem to mind at all. It’s really not as big of a deal as people make it out to be.

Made a huge post about how I 3-manned this Fractal last night, but the thread’s been deleted/moved/something.

PM’d Robert about it, though; maybe he can find it. The Fractal isn’t completely borked, and there’s definitely ways you can get around it being “bugged”, though it takes some creative thinking.

All in all, it was the most enjoyable puzzle GW2’s put before me for a very long time, and my party had a wonderful time solving it. If I can find a way to get my thread back, I’ll link it here and let you all know.

There’s literally no jumps in cliffside that you can’t just walk. The jumps in Rata Sum can be cleared by having someone stand on the platforms and show the others where to jump. None of the jumps require swiftness, and none require toeing the edge to make it; so so long as you show them where to jump from, and where to jump to, there shouldn’t be any issues at all.

Similarly, Swamp is about as teamwork-y as you could possibly get from a dungeon. Five party members, three wisps, one champion drake, one mossman. One person to each, and you’re golden. Don’t know the paths? Scope out which wisps spawned, and show people first. Don’t know how to handle mossman/drake? Swap off with someone that can. If you’re super cool and can have people either avoid the bosses/trigger pathway snares so the wisp-carriers don’t accidentally fall over, so much the better.

Teamwork? Awwwwyeah.

@Capzero:
The entirety of GW2 is shaped so as to encourage people to play solo whenever they want, but not punish them in any way for playing in groups, as other games so often do. If you wanted to be able to solo dungeons, you’re playing the wrong game. As far as bosses/events/anything else goes, sure; you can do it all yourself.

“MMOs require interaction” isn’t a myth in the sense that I haven’t seen any evidence that would suggest otherwise. The above posted noted that area/map chat devolved into nothing but auction chat when henchmen were introduced, strongly suggesting that, in fact, introducing henchmen killed the community.

Aside from your personal anecdote, what evidence do you have?
You might very well be the outlier here, keep in mind.

I wouldn’t like to see a LFG tool, myself. The disadvantages to it that I’ve seen far outweigh its benefits, especially when joining a guild to find people to consistently run dungeons(Including Fractals) with is one of the simplest things in GW2.

@Bruno:
D2 wasn’t gear-dependent so much as it was skill-dependent. If it was gear dependent, you wouldn’t be able to solo things with skill alone.
Similarly, WoW was RNG, and unless you ran 25s and ONLY 25s, you always stood the risk of getting raid tokens that nobody could use. Or wanted to use, if they had that piece already. It’s still RNG regardless of how you look at it.

Also, if you’ve done enough runs, you could pretty easily just get one of the Capacitors and slap an infusion in there, giving you wiggle room to get into the 20s just fine. (That said, there’re people in the 20s that have no agony resist at all, so people complaining about Fractals being gated for people without resist are kidding themselves imo.)

You’ve got RNG on one hand, you’ve got tokens on the other. What’s really the problem here? :/

I’ve never managed to do it before – nor have I seen it done – so I haven’t a clue if it was a one-time deal or something that’s actually reproducible. I hit RTL, but for some reason or another I could still control my movement using WASD, such that I was able to direct myself around even while in RTL form.

Moreover, the ride lasted much farther than would be expected; I was in the Plains of Ashford at the time, and it took me all the way from the exit from the cave where the south skill point is to the point below the cliffs where the vista is.

One of the best RTL rides I’ve ever had!

That feel when you’re dealing with powersuit and land that clinch reflect shield on him while he’s superheated and watch all six explode for tens of thousands of damage all at once ____

The feel of rust on my…salad fingers…

Alternative possibility:

What if someone were to continually buy up all the precursors off the TP, and then summarily destroy them all?

The example of destroying ectos is slightly undermined by the ease with which people can “make” ectos; but since precursors aren’t nearly so reliably/easily created, would that be more of an upheaval since people seem to want them so much, or so little of an upheaval because not many people can afford them in the first place?

I suppose the only reliable way to try and crash the economy would be to find a low-drop, high demand (read: necessary for crafting or something or another) item that either can’t/is extremely difficult to craft, and destroy them all. Hm.

Thoughts, anyone?

Most unusual sigils have to be found off weapons randomly; my super sigil of Demon Summoning occupies a fancy little spot in my bank, ‘cause I’m relatively certain it’s worthless, but it’s still cool all the same

Fabsm.5897:

I probably will stop doing fractals at lvl 10 for this reason. And then move to my long-term goals, building a legendary, a good tPvP team, and a good WvW squadron.

Oh, the last two things don’t drop in dungeons. Nor do skill. And i am glad that in PVP, all your rings and backpieces mean nothing.

I hope this could make you think twice on this insane WoW-style grinding.

There’s people at Fractals higher than 20 without any agony resist.
Keep thinking that it’s absolutely necessary, lol. If you don’t have the proper resists, you can always just grab more healing and regenerate your way through it. Or, y’know, die in a safe location, down, and let someone pick you up for free EXP.
(Or if you have even one guardian in the party, collapse all your non-Agony-resist people during Jade Maw phase changes, pop guardian heal aoe, and heal the hell through it. You might lose one person, but that’s it.

Getting downed isn’t a problem, unless you somehow can’t manage to think your way out of it.

There’s plenty of solutions; it’s up to you to figure them out.

Currently on Fractal 11, myself, with ~450-500ish tokens earned.

I’ve gotten three vials of mists essence, and all of it from mob drops; if there’s any real argument for “Wear at least a little MF in fractals”, that’s my input.

I don’t have any real issues with agony on anything besides Jade Maw at the end. No agony resist, no rings, no nothing. It’s ~1800 relics to get the ascended backpack, but I fully expect to spend my relics on Obs. Shards instead, so I doubt I’ll be getting any real agony resist anytime soon.

Guardians OP etc etc, sure, but that’s what I’ve seen so far. I intend to head into Fractals with some friends with a bunch of lowbies soon, so if we get into 10+, I’ll pop back in then.

Dredge midboss can be made infinitely simpler if you drag him out of the room and into the tunnel. There, the dredge spawns won’t aggro, so it’s just you, midboss, and the veteran. Kite the veteran away so he doesn’t buff boss, and have the rest of the party beat the midboss into the dust.

Most certainly not a long/difficult fight.

The one related “bug” that I’ve seen, unfortunately, relates to the event where you blow the door up with bombs – after clearing the door and starting the midboss event – and having a new set of spawns, sometimes the tunnel mobs don’t despawn and it’s an insta-wipe due a hilarious number of rifle shots. Hardly kills the experience, though. (Get it? Kills? Hahaha, I’m so witty.)

…I can’t say I’ve had any experience with any other bugs/exploits/glitches, though. I haven’t even been DC’d once, and I’m on fractal 11. Granted, that might not be very far, but it seems about as RNG as the MF, from what I can tell.

Poor Scholar Prott also has issues saying the right lines in the next cutscene, “The Dredge Hideout”, too.

As a norn, after choosing the “Lost an heirloom” background, progressing to the Armaments cutscene is rather odd; the words on the screen don’t at all match what’s being said by one of the NPCs: Scholar Prott.

The voice actor says, “The dredge attacked our monastery as well. Killed our scholars one and all. I shall have to report this to the Priory.”
On the other hand, the text both in-game in chat and on the screen says: “So you’ve said, repeatedly. But the Priory was attacked, too. We can’t just reflectively lash out.”

It’s not game-breaking by any means, but it’s sort of…confusing from an immersion point of view.

Sorry if I’m naming something that’s already been on the to-fix list!

3 yellows in a boss chest is sort of a hell of a lot.

Then again, I felt pretty privileged to get a rare drop from a random mob, ‘cause chests weren’t dropping yellows for me at all, pretty much.

Mmmyeah that RNG.
Really though, you’re probably gonna wanna do more actual testing before you try and claim the RNG got broke’d again. :/

@MrTastix:
Having an event be repeatable for everyone sort of really kills the impetus behind it all. Coming from a guy who was there for opening events, one-day things, and personalized-instance-events in WoW, RO, and TERA, I can say that I subjectively vastly prefer the one-time events.

Yes, it might be terrible that you don’t get to participate in the event, but you’re missing the bigger point of it all – what you’re actually missing is the ability to join OTHER people in going through that sort of story.

To that end, what I’d honestly suggest is a slight modification of what Vahkris put forth: an instanced version of events for people to go back and re-experience isn’t a bad idea, but it’s incomplete, imo. Instead, expand it to a party concept, so that you;re at the very least doing the event with other people, much like the original event was. Make it a ticket, something that each player has to have in their inventory that gets consumed upon entering the instance, but let players – if possible – explore all the various areas that the original event opened up.

Things like one-time-only events definitely give the game a sensation of life that’s hard to find, but it’s admittedly hard to schedule things so everyone gets a chance. Short of running the event more than once – and somehow ensuring that people don’t get rewarded twice – I think having the ability to re-experience things after the fact is as good as it could get.

phanmc.6759:

Maybe you’re right, maybe people like me who are staunch supporters of their manifesto and vehemently against the gear treadmill should have been more vocal against the cries to change this game into something it was not.

Maybe all the people up in arms about the sudden introduction of a “gear treadmill” are seeing something that I’m really not.

For me, knowing that I can do any non-Fractals dungeon on any mode in un-upgraded blues is a source of comfort, because that means that I can do…well, pretty much anything I need to do in normal PvE without any significant amount of gear. (It’s been done, if you can’t l2p, etc etc.)
Similarly, it’s also a source of comfort to know that people can run around with legendaries, but they’ll still die just as quickly to an organized force and/or siege equipment in WvW. Honestly, your personal items don’t really matter so much when you’re using siege; I haven’t seen any difference when I was manning the ram at level 30 as compared to manning the ram at 80. Did just shy of 9k a hit in all cases, with a swing of maybe a couple hundred hp a hit. On a target with likely 200k+ hp, a couple hundred is pretty negligible.
Thirdly, since Agony is only going to be present in the Fractals dungeon and is ALSO only going to be present in the Fractals dungeon when you pass a certain point in the dungeon, I’m pretty unconcerned. The way I see it, if you can get the point in the dungeon where you need Agony resistance, you’ll have had many opportunities to get it before then. That’s how everything (read: crafting, soloing, questing, doing dungeons, etc) has been up until this point, and I don’t see any reason why it’ll be different now.

I do think, at some level, it’d be a bit of a “safer” bet if Ascended gear was only usable in the Fractals dungeon, as in the case of your Town Clothing set and just auto-swapped to that armor when you entered; but even if you can run around in Ascended gear in WvW, who really cares? Anything you can get, I can get too.

It’s not legendary-quality stuff, it’s just “stuff that’s slightly better than what you have now”.

I repeat:
Not having ascended gear isn’t going to magically make you non-viable in dungeons, WvW, or soloing things. I pretty much solo’d my way to 80 wearing blues that were generally 20-30 levels below my actual level, and I had no issues whatsoever.

@Ahm:
I’m sorry that you’re unhappy, but I’m unhappy that you’re unhappy because you’re somehow unable to just be satisfied with what’s already been presented to you.
I neither love nor hate the patch; I just don’t see what all the hubbub is about.

I’m seeing fine crafting mats drop all over the place now.

It’s sort of really uncomfortable.

Ah ha! Got stuck on the “Connection failed…reattempting connection” bit for a while, but it’s working! If you’re having issues, just minimize the loader and let it go – letting mine sit there for a few minutes fixed it up.

Good work, ANet!

Er, when they say “level”, they mean “what level is your character”, not “what level of the dungeon have you gotten to”, I’m relatively certain.

When they say “We’ll scale to the highest obtained level”, it’s saying “how much are we down-leveling the higher-level people”, not…

…There’s no dungeon that saves your progress after you leave, as far as I know. Maybe I read it wrong, but there’s no reason to think you don’t start on Dungeon Level 1 every time you start, though the dungeon /difficulty/ might get scaled differently depending on who’s in your party.

That said, I rather wonder if it’d be feasible to have 4 80’s and 1 level 1, just to forcibly down-level the dungeon and try for an easier dungeon run…

I highly suspect that most people that think GW2 is a grindfest don’t have any idea what a real “grindfest” is.

Risky.4132:

Except that legendary items just became practically unobtainable, with vials of powerful blood skyrocketing to 27 silver, along with other items needed for crafting a legendary its basically impossible for even semi hardcore players like myself to craft one. Especially when theres 50 other people farming plinx, and I cant even tag anything.

Practically unobtainable?
Have you even tried hunting monsters for drops, or do you just want to buy everything off the TP? I’ve got blood, scales, bones, and everything else piling up in my bank while I run around killing dragons for rares to salvage for ectos.

And then when I fail to make my Lucky Clovers, I get even more mats.

Seriously, a shortage of mats on the TP shouldn’t even really be a concern. If you wanna complain about something, complain about how you can’t TP your way into a mountain of gold easily for those rune/lodestones.

I’d thought that ANet only put in a base amount of gems into the market at the start, and backed out from there? You can claim that they’re fudging with the market all you want, but I don’t really see any evidence for shifts in prices that can’t be more easily explained by someone else playing the market in a smarter way than you, or me.

I don’t think many people understand the BLTP currency exchange.
I also don’t think most people care.

Is ANet responsible for the cash value of every item? Yes, in a sense, because they’re profiting off people buying gems and injecting them into the market. Are they themselves injecting gems/removing gems from the market arbitrarily? I don’t believe so.

Why farm solo? Farming with friends is pretty awesome. (Unless you have no friends to farm with, in which case )

If you’re looking at things from the viewpoint of “I don’t care who I buy from, I just want it to be cheap”, then yes, banning bots and removing a large amount of supply from the market is going to seem like a bad idea.
On the other hand, if the viewpoint of “I would much rather buy things from real people than bots” suits you, then the idea of things costing twice as much when you buy/sell doesn’t really change much at all.

At the end of the day, the farming grind is just another facet of the game. No less integral to the health of the game, in that sense, than WvW or dungeons; if all you did was dungeons every day, you’d get bored. And more than that, you’d buy out everything you cared to get from the dungeons and never want to do them again.

What removing a bit of the supply on the TP did, in effect, was give real players (as opposed to bots) an incentive to actually go back to farming again. It’s not a “LOL YOU GUYS SHOULD JUST FARM FOR YEARS LOL”, it’s a “Man, if almost nobody is farming because they’d rather just buy things from bots, that’s a pretty bad mindset, lol”.

tl;dr
Yes, it actually is an improvement to the gaming experience overall. Try looking less in the short-term.

Ever since I started running Save Yourselves + Condition cleanse on Virtue of Purity, I feel like I’ve become incredibly more useful for Balthazar fights.

Not quite four hundred percent more awesome, but pretty close. Hire out your local guardian for condition purging!

I’ve actually…

…I’ve actually had some pretty varied experiences with the Melandru fight, unless for some ridiculous reason I’m thinking of the wrong bosses and Lyssa/Melandru are in the same place.

One time when I helped clear the event, the Risen Priest did nothing but spam summons at us, making the entire thing chaotic beyond reason, between wolves and elementals and random spiders/undead spawning on the platform. Enjoyable, though it was a pretty tough fight since we had people going down pretty often.

..On the other hand, I’ve also helped clear the event when the Priest kept on critter’ing us. It took a while, but we eventually collected enough (read: ~15-20 or so) people to just eat all his acolytes before he could heal through it all. That said, I’ve never seen him use anything that seemed like it could be interrupted, so maybe I’ve just been blind to the mechanic the whole time…

And here I thought people found gems too expensive to buy. Huh.

..Can anyone translate the rest of that post? Aside from “gems are too cheap, this isn’t about entitled babies”, I…can’t get anything out of that.

Theplayboy.6417:

Will never happen because of the sugar crash. There are free profession based speed boosts that are faster, longer, and contain no negative side effects. If you don’t have your inventory open into a small window and aren’t weapon swapping out of combat specifically to use speed buff skills you’re playing the game wrong.

There are profession-based speed boosts that are faster/longer, yes. No negative effects, sure.
Except that candy corn stacks with profession boosts afaik, and you can also purge sugar crash/sugar rush with more candy corn. The puking removes the boon, so just pause a moment to puke before the zerg hits, and you’d be set.

For the record, it’s still rather impressive that GW2 legendaries doesn’t actually require a person to beg their guild to tag along for months on end to complete.

I mean, really? Look at all the recent counterparts in WoW. Dragonwrath? Fangs of the Father? Try as you might, there’s nothing you can do about any of that solo.

Yeah, sure, you can get items that were legendary for their tier maybe six years ago by yourself. Cool.

Realistically speaking, I much rather prefer GW2’s alternative.

Nimraphel.7819:

I think 3 months – 6 tops – is what can be required of a legendary, provided one plays 3 hour every single day. No, that is still not casual by the way. What you seem to argue is that that is too easy. I’d argue it precludes any sensible individual with anything even remotely resembling a life.

3 months for 3 hours a day is 550 hours, give or take. 6 is ~1000.
That’s…that’s not really all that much if you think about it, given that a good number of players hit up GW2 on the weekends for upwards of 5-6 or so, though they’re admittedly not spending their time HARDCORE GRINDAN or something.

If you intend to bum it out and burn your time grinding because you refuse to use the TP or anything else, I suppose that’s…well, that’s just your own decision. It doesn’t have to be that hard, and for many people, it really isn’t.

Also, for anyone complaining about fine mats:
1. Make your clovers first, you get free mats.
2. If you’re still somehow lacking in mats, promote some t5s to t6s. It ain’t that hard, folks.

Ectos depend on rares, which are admittedly rare. Then again, a full MF set cost me something like 1g to buy off the TP a few weeks back, and that included 5/6 Superior Pirate, +3%MF gems for all my accessories, and Superior Luck on my weapon.

I’m hardly rolling in drops, but it’s mostly because I’ve been leveling alts, instead of grinding away. Now that it’s profitable to start hunting up drops, though, I may just start.

1. There’s already recipes that need skill points.
2. If there was a system to get karma from delivering materials, you’re effectively putting a market price on karma = bad idea.
3. Skill points continue to be awarded past 80, because you keep leveling up with experience. Case in point: I’m still at 60% world completion, but I have something like 100 skill points that I haven’t used, and I’ve already spent a good 30-40 points buying stuff from the MF vendor.

4. “Alter item appearances”
Actually, this might be rather interesting. Why not give crafters the ability to add special visual “modifiers” to their gear by consuming a number of resources? Something like, oh, say, extra shoulder spikes, or a small pennant you can fly from your backpack in WvW.

…Hm.

Why can’t I eat my pants and gain 30% magic find?

Man, if I couldn’t recoup the 28c I make back from selling my worthless crafted items and eat them for 30% more magic find + increased gold drops, I’d be more than happy.

Not all crafting professions are made equal. At the very worst, you can CHOOSE to level cooking by cooking only things that you can use, whereas for things like weapon/armorsmithing, the vast majority of things I make are realistically worthless. My leveling speed is leagues beyond my ability to keep up with crafting, and even attempting to salvage the things I make puts me at a loss.

There’s also no real option for me to just “set stuff aside”, because even while leveling characters, there’s no need to use crafted items until 80 or so. At least you can keep eating food all the way to 80, instead of just starting by the time you get there. :/