Guild Wars 2

It has become very clear through the introduction of the memory boxes that Anet will intervene in the user economy when a item have become too restricted in terms of number of sellers and price.

We saw a early experiments where they silently added Halloween skins as extremely rare skins in in the mystic forge. The drop rate was less than precursors, but the effect was enough to push down prices. For reason unspecificed, this was the only attempt using the mystic forge.

An other experiment was to silently introduce aetherized skins as rare fractal rewards. This made the set go from one of the most expensive to the least expensive set.

With the memory boxes was at least not completely silent, but there is still problems. The market intervention is still very blunt, with no warning to buyers and sellers. It also rewards those that are quick to be first the buy the boxes and sell to those people who were uninformative to have put up buy orders.

It would be nice if this effort from anet were a bit more transparent. For example, they could state that items older than X might become a memory box item at any time in the future. This would effect the market by having a transparent system, declaring that such items is a risky investment, and to buyers that such items is a risky purchase, causing the user economy to incorporate that risk into the price.

Most classes has this kind of combo available to them. Guardians has traps. Thieves has back stab. Warrior has kill shot.

Prepurchase for new games is bad and should be avoided at all costs, since you have no rational reason to place your trust in a company. Some games are good, some bad, and every studio has their up and downs.

But expansions in an online game is a bit different. You don’t buy it because you expect the product to be good, but rather buy it because you want to continue playing the game you already have. Not buying is for all practical purposes the same as quitting the game, as the majority of the community that you exist in now will move on to the new content.

PoF can be crap. It can be great. The quality of the expansion will impact my future decision to continue playing the game or not, and in the long run if I will buy the expansion after PoF.

Someone please bring him down.

Before dps meters we had party search requirement that tried to do the exact same thing. You had to have over 30k achievement points, the right titles that prove that you have finished the content on challange mote, Legendary insights/kill proofs from raids, and in some cases you also had to ping gear on joining. Failing any of those resulted in a kick.

On the more extreme end you had people that wouldn’t even let you in their group to start with until you filled in an application, soloed a 5 man boss encounter, and preferable been personal recommended by someone they trust. The distaste for “pugs” was real and very noticeable.

DPS meters mitigate the need for all that. Some people still behave like that but in my personal experience it is much less common now after DPS meters have become main practice, and I rather not go back to how it was before. Pugs are no longer hated for being pugs, but rather people are judged based on metrics. Those metrics could be flawed, but no one need to solo lupi or MAMA.

The two irreplaceable support classes in the game is currently PS and chrono memser. The only game mode where ele are used for support is wvw, because they have most access to condi cleanses and water fields.

Druid is the lonely king at the healer throne.

Elementalists is a pure DPS class, with the lowest health and armor, and are completely and utterly replaceable if any other DPS build is better.

“best-in-slot for damage, support, and survivability” is a joke, and one in a bad taste.

Rigom had a long invuln before the patch. The patch did nothing except remove it, but the consequences of it is that conditions from one burn phase will carry on to the next. This is why he looses health so fast, and why he almost instant die for each 66/33 phase.

What they could have done is to give him a condi cleanse each time he get back to full health. He could also use some more base health.

Its not that tempest could loot as good as the loot stick, it is that tempest has been made to be the new loot stick. Fresh air tempest is the large AoE low damage choice.

There can only be one loot stick, so unless the also buff air overload they can’t revert the range on the loot stick.

What they really need is to normalize the starting values. Critical Chance starts at 5% while condition duration starts at 0%. That is 105 “free” attribute points to power builds.

The normalization is great, but the direct nerf to condi dps vs power dps is heavy handed and has the now expect lack of gradient that this game balance patches is infamous for.

It does however have a few bigger drawbacks. Infusions are now much closer to power level in comparison to food, by now being 33% of the effect from food. People have in the past generally ignored infusions as something that mini-maxers do, so either food will have a marginal effect (6% could be said to have that), or we are entering a place where every marginal effect is required to do advanced content.

My question however is, when will we see a nerf to banners and PS? A warriors role in a group is dictated by those two items, and is it not time now to finally get rid of the highest dps increases overall?

Same bug for me. Got all the previous nodes.

Since when is farming against the rules? Anet has nerfed different farming techniques since the start of the game, such as adding diminishing returns, but its not against the rule to farm.

Is fractal 40 farm against the rules? What about mining rich iron with multiple characters? Winterberries farm? TP speculating (ie gold farming)? PvP daily farm? Karma trains (which has had a long line of past nerfs to it, and which anet has addressed explicit as something they want to limit)?

Farming is not against the rules and never has been, but it is if someone is using an exploit to do it. Using an alt account to refresh participation might be against the rules, but had they just taken down a camp every 10m it would definitively not be.

I am one of those players that farm pips on off hours so let me share my methods and how this patch effected it.

I start by raising max participation as fast as possible to 195, mostly by solo capping camps, sentries, the occasional tower and player. A few times the late night crew is still there which speeds up this step.

At this point, I start a alarm for 4m 45s and as soon the tick pops I activate it and switch out of WvW and start farming nodes/give apples to npcs/do hot events/ectra. When the timer is close to 0, I jump back to wvw and get my first free tick. Click on the alarm again and jump back out of WvW, and only return when the timer is at 1:30. At that point I go and look for a objective, usually a camp, and restart the process hopefully at the next tick.

The reason why I in the past already targeted camps is that the tick and the decay are not always in perfect sync, so I usually need to recover a bit of lost participation every 10th tick or so, and a camp with a few yaks do this perfectly.

The point of the farm is to sacrifice a bit of farm time to get “free” tickets/reward track skins. As it stands, it slows down gold farming by about 20%, which I consider a fair trade.

The participation patch had a very minor effect on my pip farm. Today when I ran my farm it had no noticeable effect, and if anything it seems that there were less roaming defenders in the camps which resulted in better reliability in refreshing participation. The only effect the patch had was on outnumbered which for me represented about 2 pips or about 20%. It means that I will likely finish diamond rank a day later than normally, through that is based on summer times when the zerg commander is on vacation.

I have this very simple script that requests the same api page (/guild/membership) using the access token as a get parameter. This work perfectly except that once in a while (about 2-4 times per week) I get HTTP Error 400: Bad Request. 10m later when it reruns everything is general works again with the identical request, which implies that the Error should not be 400 but rather 503: Service Unavailable.

1. Cap on max health loss per second. No instant gibs without any counter-play options.

2. Food/siege free zone on activators. Neither are designed as a activator disabler.

3. Que indicator for commanders so they can see if the zerg can move map or not.

Arcaedus.7290:

Belorn.2659:

Have you tried to ask them nicely to leave when the map is full? Some people will respond friendly when friendly spoken to.

This is adorable

We could treat everyone as evil robots, but wvw is built on cooperation between players. Some server have a community built on the game mode, fostering a friendly environment for new and old players.

For example, people have now started to go the obsidian sanctum to leech those last rewards when logging off from wvw, rather than staying on a active map. Help your fellow wvw players understand why a full EB map is the wrong place to leech rewards and they might just join in active play or find a outmanned map.

The problem is on their end for inviting a person who is asking “training guild for raids”, as a guardian, and then kicking you. That is not the expected behavior for a training raids or a training guild, for which I have had some experience in helping.

I suspect this group was looking for more players to beat the boss rather than train, and in failing to find people they picked up you. Thats on them.

As for the class choice, guardians is currently the least wanted class in raid. Like anchovies on pizza you either need to find a group of people who wants it or level up a more mainstream choice. Alternative you could wait for the expansion and hope that anet changes the dynamic in raids.

Have you tried to ask them nicely to leave when the map is full? Some people will respond friendly when friendly spoken to.

The final reward in the hero reward track is a weapon that still reference the old recipe that used the gift of heroes. The question I have now is if those weapons can be now salvaged/forged tossed, as the merchant that sells the upgraded version don’t require the item as part of the cost?

Why should a single person be able to defend against massive blob with 6 catas?

I never ecto salvaged, and I still reached max. The ab and silver waste just gave a insane amount of gear to salvage.

Being afk is not botting. It do not involve any macro, third-party programs, auto-clickers, ectra.

Here is the details:
After 15m a client get kicked out of wvw. It is speculated that you can extend the timer by some extents by either auto-running (toggleable movement, see shortcuts in game) or auto-skill (right-click a utility skill). If those work, and how much they extend the inactivity timer is unknown, through its mostly just theoretical since you don’t need it. In order to keep max rewards you still need to refresh participation every 10m, and that will automatically reset the inactivity timer.

So if you are playing a second game where each match takes about 10m, or watch a TV show, go and kill a NPC, cap a camp, or take a sentry every 10m mark. Rinse and repeat. Nice as a break when the commander tags down and you want a break from the game.

On a ethical level, don’t do this on full maps and do join the active play when a commanders logs on and either need help defending or mustering up a force for an attack. Pip farmers are a great resource to use in an emergency when they could just as easily been logged off and not in game.

I am going to assume some good faith here and assume that someone somewhere really do wonder how to get into raids, but is confronted with all the barrier to entry that exist.

Step 1: find someone who can teach about the fight and the role that you want to do. To learn it the hard way (by trial and error) just takes too long that it is unlikely that you find 9 other people who want to do it. Thankfully there is a bunch of people who do enjoy teaching raids to people, mostly located in those “Raid Guilds”.

Optionally you can try to find training raids in LFG, but it is more of a gamble since training can be everything from completely new to raids to people who done raiding for years but want to test out a new character. As soon you join one be sure to instantly say that you know nothing about raids and have no idea about what build to use. Do not delay, be honest, be direct, and download the communication tool that the group use.

A more guarantied way to find 9 people is to join a raid guild that regularly runs training raids. To find one, ask in map chat (since the answer depend if you are NA, EU, and which time zone and days you are online), or ask in the “looking for…” section here on the forums.

Step 2: Listen to the one teaching the raid and be honest when they ask you for information. Youtube videos, rotations, equipments and builds are all secondary to good communication with someone who want to teach you raids. As a bonus you might find a new friend, share a laugh, and enjoy all those things which is part of being in a guild.

Step 3: Have fun and don’t be discouraged. Raids might not be for everyone, but few things in the game can be as fun as finishing that first kill.

If they removed the cap they also need to add more skins and rewards when the regular wvw players have finished all the current rewards. No rewards is worse than time gated rewards

I would much more prefer if the repeatable diamond chests gave rewards geared towards continuing playing the mode, like banners, squad food/utility, and personal food/finishers for roamers.

I wish we could go back to the days when we could use skills like Dragon’s Tooth or Tornado & meteor shower as AC counter. Had a more visual effect than burn block.

But my personal preference would be to make anti-projectile fields work against AC fire. Its non-obvious that Catapult and Golem shield have no effect.

To put some direct numbers, 5 tomes and 500 badges per level. All it would do is increase the leveling speed to similar that of a booster, but paid through game play rather than cash.

Challenge mote is a hard fight to learn if you never done it before. Bring pots, bring best and most expensive food, and bring res orbs, and show the rest of the group that you are willing try your best (by spending resources on it) while they are carrying you. Most important, be honest to your fellow party members and honest to yourself if you keeping getting downed or failing the dps check of boss #2.

Going to a pots/food/exp/title group to learn is like going to the racing track to learn horse riding. It’s better to just wait for a group that does not have this requirement, which is not hard to find during days that have nightmare as a daily fractal. Just be willing to stay in the group for several hours, even if you don’t reach the end reward. Many people who are part of those pots/food/exp/title groups had to do that once also, fighting the same boss for hours on end until one attempt succeeded.

Just be honest and don’t join groups which want you to be something you are not. If a group want a pug group to finish challenge mote nightmare fractal with zero downs and under 25m, then bringing anything that fails either two requirement is dishonest. Meta build requirement and DPS meters are just proxies for such requirements. They also allow groups to pinpoint problems to player mistakes rather than build issues. Missing a dodge is acceptable and hopefully a problem that get fixed during the run. Bringing a broken build isn’t fixable.

It would be great if we could get some use of all those tomes that the reward track spams out to speed up wvw ranking, but would still require playing in the game mode. Those tomes are currently just piling up, and changing the item so it can be used to rank up would make the wvw reward track to feel a bit more rewarding.

I don’t dislike the cap either. Veteran WvW players did get extra pips as a reward, but players who already dedicated thousands of hours for the game mode need an incentive to continue dedicating new thousands of hours for the game mode, and having them finish all the rewards in a few months would not help in that goal.

But that said, pips should not go to waste so some repeatable reward for siege prints and tactics should be added for those that have caped their tickets.

Must be different on other servers, but each night since the update there have been some maps thats been mostly new players and other server where everyone else is queuing to get in. As a result you get very different average skill levels on the four maps, but also some great fun in attacking and defending on that one map.

It is not every day that a massive patch add a bunch new rewards to wvw. The storm will pass.

If you got BGDM running, turn it off.

Agree. Gem store items should not be this inconvenient to use. Please change the cooldown or the mechanic by increasing the eat cost and the buff rate.

Wonder how many will try to create 4 free accounts and in-game mail them gold to level-craft until lvl 60. At that point they got their own reward squad.

“hurting the game’s health and players’ health”

The part of the game is explained in that other power food was significant out competed by the 10% buff. The next best was around 6% effective buff.

The part about the players health reference the constantly clicking in order to keep the character in movement while not actually moving. Naturally this completely overlook the issue that dps engi has, but it still is an rather unnecessary strain on peoples fingers and keyboards. I doubt anyone will miss that part of seaweed salad, even if we all miss the 4% dps.

Epidemic was the highest single skill dps in the game and as the rule go, who ever has the crown will be nerfed.

A indirect nerf compared to condi dps, but big is the impact?

The 72hrs is as “Just a flesh wound” said, to detect stolen credit cards. If the card is stolen it usually take a bit of time for the owner to see the fraudulent charge and notify their bank, which is why they take your money but let you wait. If they waited 3 days to take the money the original owner would not notice it in the case of theft, which is the whole point.

A rather imperfect system.

The harder a raid becomes the more randomness harm the enjoyment and fun.

Removing part of that randomness is in my view good. Not a perfect solution, but good. A more perfect fix would be to mimic mechanic like those in VG and Sab where some mechanic look random but in reality has some degree of predictability (which quarter green spawn, which player get a bomb, and so on). This reduce variability in the ability of the players that has successfully finished the challenge. The higher randomness a achievement has, the lower the floor will be of those who randomly manage to do it.

It is a bit ironic that which ever class is the most favored dps class will always, without exception, be seen as overpowered compared to all other classes. First it was warriors. Then ele took the spot with FGS, then it was icebow, then it was lavafont, then it was meteor shower and air overload, and now finally a third class has taken the crown. I don’t even know if its been two months yet and apparently some wants a new class.

Nerf it and an other class will take its place. Do changes to traits, runes, or skills and people will theory craft what is the best dps class and highest consistency. Nerfs has so far mostly resulted in less class diversity and cemented druid, mesmer and PS warrior as the holy trinity of healer, support, and support. The DPS choice is not what I would focus next balance on, and it would be fun to see the raid meta change in such drastic way that we could see alternative composition and classes. For example, maybe kill the PS trait and actually make it useful to bring skills and trait that generate might. PS trait do order of magnitude more dps increase than the torch skills will ever do.

> My advice for other ele’s is to choose a new profession, and wait for the balance

People being main ele should have a lot of ascended boxes since ele was a excellent choice in wvw, fractals and raids for a very long time. I can strongly recommend condi ranger while waiting, being one of the best dps choices and relative easy to learn.

KC encounter is the only place now where ele still feel like an ele.

Please do not change the iconic nature of those legendarilies. The effect they have is a big reason why people make them in the first place. That said, based on the vision of the original artist, an update to the sound quality would be nice.

For those complaining or worse, kicking players from parties, this no different than other items in the game that is designed to cause sound in the game environment. We have a “Player instrument volume” setting for a reason, and a more correct solution to those complains is to add a similar slider. Similar problem should have similar solution.

Agree. This version has worst of both worlds, with the unrealistic feel of meteors that has no damage and random effect.

Lets assume some good faith here and that the person is trying to do something which qualify under fair use (or something which don’t involve copyright).

But as the others say, there is no 3d models available to use. You can always ask anet, but otherwise you are just stuck eyeballing it and creating your own interpretation.

Logic? There is none of that. FA is now significant behind other single target dps builds and will likely be put to the dust heap by speed run players, which will then “inspire” a new meta.

We did have a long period to gear up and train the other classes. Instead of being at top and put far behind, it was a nerf to a class already barely viable in most raid encounters.

Just in spite of the leak, they should instantly make a karma vendor producing account bound version of the food for cheap, thus killing the price.

Doing CC in KC don’t hurt the dps since most of the dps comes from the burn. If a persons has low KC dps on a tempest dps role, its because they are using the wrong rotation and have not switched to air when orb pushes are at ~3th last location, and not pre-casting overload when the orb is half between the two last locations. The ghost will die from cleave regardless, so dps on the ghost at the point is pointless and it will die when KC is being burned.

Gor is a more interesting example where tempest is actually in charge of doing as little as possible orb killing but always enough orb killing. If too few orbs is being killed, its the tempest fault. if they have too little dps because they focus too much on orbs, its the tempest fault. The only saving aspect is that most dps on gor is from large hit box skills, and those shouldn’t be used on orbs in the first place.

Basically every other boss is less valuable when looking at the dps meter. VG is slightly interesting to compare people with the same role (ie, green dps with green dps, non-green dps with non-green dps). Same for sab (ie, the two turret people can compare, and non-turret dps with other non-turret dps).

Xera is a good example where dps almost say nothing, since shard clearing is such key team aspect.

People figured out the right build for it. QT has a table at http://qtfy.enjin.com/DPS and the realistic version is somewhat useful for estimating raid dps (considering you are going to also handle mechanic, dodging, phase switching, and not every buff from every profession).

Even in the perfect situation with unrealistic buffs, the dps is less than 1k between ele single target and ranger single target. Ranger rotation is also much easier than FA ele, and ranger got more health and armor, so consistency is much better.

But for those two large hit box raid bosses, tempest ele is really good, which hopefully mean that ele won’t be completely scraped after one more nerf.

DPS meters are superior in every way over LI requirements. A new player can do the same dps as an experienced player, but there is a game limit of 13 LI per week. A group requirement of 200LI is impossible unless the player actually play raids 15 weeks or more, which given the trouble of finding groups is a much more toxic problem than reaching any dps requirement that a group want.

Of course they could remove dps meters and LI, and raid titles (or we get the situation as with unclean title and cm 100 fractal), and the API key for gw2 efficiency stats, and AP (which was used as a requirement in dungeons back in the days), and we might end up where groups can’t put up toxic requirements (except that they can simply require that players are part of “good” guilds).

Creating a toxic free pug environment is a hard game design problem, and I am unconvinced that dps meters are in any way effecting the problem in a negative way.