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Showing Posts For Buford.2954:
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Forced? None force you to do them. Not like you need all masterys for anything else then legendarys anyway. And imo legendarys should include everything in the game. Stop complain and do silver once. Takes maybe 4-5 min each. Very easy for 1 mastery point imo.
And if you are making a legendary and find out 500g+ into the collection that you need silver for a particular adventure that you can spend hours on and still can’t get silver in because your reaction times aren’t good enough for an arbitrary time limit? That is a recipe for outright quitting the game out of disgust.
When the best option is to have a friend who plays platformers and is good at them just do it for you instead because otherwise you will just say to hell with the game over a stupid time trial platformer minigame that is no way shape or form core content gating your progress is when the game design needs a serious looking into.
HOPE step IV Problems: Succeeding at Failing
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Buford.2954
I managed it last night, but under these circumstances:
It was 3 AM
Map had been marked as closing and was a ghost town
There were three people including myself working on HOPE IV at Union WP, and no one was doing the temple capture event after the risen priestess of Lyssa showed up. We ran back and forth doing the seal defense events while the priestess was up until the wraith event spawned, and had to get through the other Union seal event first where a horde of risen try to build a barrier, so it took a bit of waiting.
It really boils down to getting lucky and being on at the right time and in a dead map to get it done as if anyone is actively doing the Lyssa event the priestess will likely die before the event you need shows up – I have experienced this. If the map is active you have a slim chance of success.
I’ve been running HoT maps with a dragonhunter in full ascended (soldier trinkets and armor, zerk bow and GS). It’s not optimal damage but you can survive a bit longer running solo in soldier gear. Traps do help stall mobs that you are running from because sometimes you just have to nope out of an encounter. I’ve managed full HoT map complete on that character.
I’ve been running Dragon’s Stand with multiple XP boosters (the laurel one, guild banner, halloween food, etc.) on organized maps. There are a lot of mobs and events that give XP, you just have to get on a good map to make it worthwhile. As a bonus you get decent loot and machetes for the pods at the same time.
I just realized how casual this community can be , i mean seriously?!?!
*Q: Why are we forced to do Adventures, why do we need silver rank to complete collections/acquire mastery points?
A: Nobody forces you , if you are too lazy and want to get gold rank from the 1st try this thing won’t get you far.
Yep, I’m lazy and casual. I’ve logged in to play practically every day for two years, full ascended on my guard and most pieces on my mesmer, map completion more than once, map completed the new HoT zones.
I played A Fungus Among Us several hours straight (or at least when the map would let me) over two days AFTER watching videos and still couldn’t make silver for HOPE III. All I accomplished was wanting to put my foot through the monitor. It’s a requirement for HOPE III, which by that point I had already sunk a massive amount of gold into.
Fast forward to last night when I handed over the keyboard to a, I don’t know, I guess they’re a “hardcore, non lazy player” in your view, person who barely plays GW2 but is a master at platformers and they blitzed through and completed silver after a few tries so I could get the kitten collection item.
Lazy and casual, that’s me. Or maybe I HATE TIME TRIALS AND DID NOT SIGN UP TO PLAY ARCADE GAMES IN A MMO.
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One has to do basically every kind of content for a legendary, no matter if he likes it or not. Ask me about WvWvW.
Not entirely. If you don’t like PvP you can buy shards of glory. If you don’t like WvW you can buy memories of battle. Sure you need a minimum WvW rank to buy the gift of battle, but if you’ve been playing any amount of time and run some ktrains in EotM you will have vastly surpassed that. You’d get all the badges of honor you need from achievement boxes. I have only ever dabbled in WvW here and there (mainly when there was a tourney and I wanted a mist weapon skin so I ran EotM for achieves, and rarely in WvW proper unless a guild group wanted to go take camps for lack of anything better to do during the content drought this year) and have vastly more BoH than I’ll ever need and rank way higher than the requirement.
You do need to have actually have set foot in WvW, but you barely need to put forth any effort. The PvP requirement and some of the WvW one can be bypassed with gold.
Actually if you want to get all the maguuma masteries, you need to get almost all the adventures to Silver. It is impossible to learn all the maguuma masteries without adventures.
And this is the reason I have started to hate their presence in the game. If they had been optional it would be fine as little side games with leaderboards, but making silver on them a requirement for both masteries and certain collections was a terrible design decision. Some of them are just not fun and are nothing more than an exercise in frustration. Let the people who enjoy arcade-y stuff play them and leave the rest of us who want to play a MMORPG alone.
Was it ever stated by Anet that adventures would be optional though in the sense that you wouldn’t need to do them for mastery points?
No, they didn’t explicitly say that. They also didn’t say they would be required either. They did say masteries would be used or necessary for completing them, but nothing about them granting mastery points. Mostly they pitched it as repeatable content with leaderboards that was there to fill in gaps when there is a lull in the map due to there being no events up.
I’m not against adventures, in fact I find some of them an interesting diversion from the normal map events. I also like how it has a fast reset if you mess it up. I, however, dislike adventures not being optional content so I feel forced into having to do the ones I hate. I play GW2 to play my class, to get better with the skills I use all the time, not to learn odd skills to propel a mushroom to a finish line under a set amount of time that have no application anywhere else in the game.
And besides that, the necessity of the mushroom race for HOPE III seems tacked on as well, so that bothers me. Use a device after defeating Teq to test energies? Okay, residual undead Zhaitan magic, I can get that. Use it at the top of Goemm’s Lab after defeating Goemm to test weird energy? It’s a weird floaty Asura lab, so I can get that too. Use the same device to test… something after making it through an area in under an arbitrary time limit as a mushroom? Now that makes no sense. Apparently mushroom energy is only collectable if you turn into one and can hop from a giant frog to a log in under 1:40.
And before anybody says making a legendary is also optional, so you don’t really have to do it, I’m already on step 3 so 40 or so deldrimor ingots have already been committed to making an account bound exotic. I don’t call it optional anymore especially since the mushroom race isn’t listed as a requirement until part 3. It’s either do it, or forfeit a ton of gold with basically nothing to show for it or any way to recoup the costs. Effectively forcing a player to engage in something that is extremely frustrating and unfun (and not being able to progress until they do) is a really good way to make them lose interest in your game.
Up until yesterday I had been spending multiple hours a day playing the game and generally having fun with the xpac. Yesterday I could barely muster the interest to even log in to do dailies since the progess on the goal I was aiming for has pretty much ground to a halt unless I 1) rage at the screen repeatedly and still fail because I’m rubbish at the mushroom race, or 2) let someone borrow my account who has better reaction times than I do. Neither of those should even have to be an option.
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I made a couple mistakes and still made it.
That’s great for you, but this thing is seriously making me feel like the effort and non-trivial amount of gold I have expended thus far on legendary was a total waste if having to slog through these personal hells is what I have to look forward to. It’s extremely frustrating and really dampening my want to even bother logging in. Not a lot of point in doing the map events to grind out the rest of those crystalline ingots if I can’t even get to that step because of a kitten mushroom with awful skills.
I was enjoying the expansion until now, but after realizing these things that I at first thought were little side mini-games like Sanctum Sprint or Keg Brawl (and could be safely ignored because I really hate timed 3D platsformery things) are basically requirements for mastery points and collections I have a hard time wanting to continue because progression is locked behind doing them.
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That’s one of the annoying ones. You’re required to use the skills in certain spots to save time and hope that the bounce/leap skill works properly. On top of that, the timer is incredibly tight compared to some of the other adventures.
Tight is an understatement. One minor mistake and you might as well retry. If completing the thing I have sunk time and gold into is going to be gated behind this kind of unfun garbage I may as well say heck with it and play something actually fun.
The requirements for adventures to be completed need to die in a fire. They are fine for side things with leaderboards, but making completing them a requirement is not okay when they are so completely different from any other aspect of the game. I’ve already sunk who knows how much gold into making HOPE and now I’m stuck on trying to get silver on A Fungus Among Us, which is like the worst combination of a jumping puzzle and race with horrible tonic skills. I can make it to the end, but I have not as of yet managed to have the twitch factor to make the time required for even silver; I did manage bronze. Getting to the point I want to break my keyboard.
I play the game to have fun, not to yell expletives at the screen. Adventures are fine if you want to compete for best times. They are NOT fun if they gate your progress.
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You auto-learn the recipe instead of getting a recipe sheet when you interact with the bag, so make sure you do it on a character with huntsman.
It’s mail and not chat, but my guild leader got a suppression message the other night after sending out ingame mails with rewards from our Halloween costume contest to members of his own guild.
I believe you can start refining T2 mats at lvl 75 (although soft wood plank says scribe 50). I’m at scribe 125 and could still progress a little if I wanted to keep churning out world events, but I’d rather make furniture or banners as I already made a ton of world events… but I can’t because there is no way to make resonating fragments (for the basic scribing kit) or buy tubs of wood glue.
Tenebrous is a weapon set. It probably also becomes available at a higher market level. I think that one is tied to Gilded Hollow, while Lost Precipice gets the Shimmering weapons.
I’m also in the “bought Ultimate on Saturday after the release date announcement, intending on using gems on sale items” boat.
I have had a ticket open regarding my concerns on gem delivery time vs. sale duration since 22 hours before the sale ended. I also still haven’t got my gems yet, and the sale ended almost 5 hours ago.
Items being hard to get and impossible to get are entirely different things. I don’t really have a problem with hard to get; I have a major problem with impossible.
I have an Immobulus that I made in the forge. Is it an exclusive item? No. Is it time limited? No. Was it hard to get? It wasn’t as bad when I made it, but now it takes a pretty decent gold outlay to forge the thing. You don’t see it very often, but there is nothing stopping anyone from making their own if they want to go for it but somehow I still think it’s neat to have. Maybe it’s because I don’t have this attitude of “I have this thing that you can never get and that makes me better than you”.
Last I checked you can still play GW1. HoM rewards are still broken, but that will be fixed eventually.
By “exclusive” I think you really just mean “time-limited”. As in you had to be around when the item was available. You know what that means accomplishment wise, other than something that had a level of skill attached to it like Liadri? Jack squat. it means you happened to be playing the game on a set date. There’s no reason that sort of thing shouldn’t come back, especially considering that this game is based heavily on making your character look awesome. If you need that one last piece to complete your look, and you can’t get it because you weren’t on for the couple weeks you could acquire it, that’s just not cool.
Here’s what it boils down to for me:
If the xpac standard version comes with a character slot, Anet will get $50.
If it doesn’t, and I need to buy one, they will not get a total of $60. They will get $0.
If I don’t like what they’re selling, I simply won’t buy it.
Ahhh, so you enter games thinking you lost already and all nice to people huh?
Me…. same way.
NOT.
I enter games, I play to win, I come in expecting to win, I expect everyone else to be a newb compared to me.
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I can’t help but read the entirety of that post as if it is being said by Scott Steiner doing a wrestling promo.
“You know, they say all men are created equal, but you look at me and you look at Samoa Joe, and you can see that statement is not true! See, normally if you go one-on-one with another wrestler, you got a 50-50 chance of winnin’.
“But I’m a genetic freak, and I’m not normal, so you got a 25% at best at beatin’ me! And then you add Kurt Angle to the mix? Your chances of winnin’ drasticly go down. See the three-way, at Sacrifice, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winnin’. But I, I got a 66 2/3 chance of winning, cause Kurt Angle KNOWS he can’t beat me, and he’s not even gonna try!
“So, Samoa Joe, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25 percent chance, and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winnin’ at Sacrifice! But then you take my 75 perchance chance at winnin’, if we was to go one-on-one, and to add 66 2/3 ch… percents, I got a 141 2/3 chance of winnin at Sacrifice! See, McJoe; the numbers don’t lie, and they spell disaster for you at Sacrifice!”
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Repetitive, yes, but some dialogue just becomes classic with repetition like the “BY OGDEN’S HAMMER WHAT SAVINGS” guy. That sylvari is not in any danger of becoming that.
My favorite dialogue from old LA, that was a response to just about everything asked:
Skritt in BLTC: No.
They also don’t have outhouses, they have water closets.
Just from a purely story perspective, the Pact is now stationed in the Silverwastes and using the new weapons there. There are no bodies of water in that area, so there is no need for them to requisition underwater weapons.
That being said, I’d like more BL sets to include underwater weapons too. I love my Tormented spear.
It’s getting to the point that I dread any content or “feature” patches because they always come with crap like this.
A bare-chested male is not the equivalent of a bare-chested, or even partially bare-chested, female.
The female breasts are sexualized to a degree that the male chest is not. A more likely male equivalent to this would be his junk almost sticking out. Which it is not.
Modern romance novel covers would like to have a word with you for declaring male chests as not being sexualized.
The old minis they are referring to bringing back are account bound and can not be sold, so they have no gold value in the first place.
I spent some money occasionally on gemstore stuff at one time, but my wallet has been locked since April and the horrid trait changes with a note tied to the key saying “unlock me once the trait system is reverted”. After yesterday’s patch, the key has been melted down for scrap and said locked wallet has been bolted inside a sealed container designed to store high-grade nuclear waste and dropped in the Mariana Trench, never to see the light of day again.
Since the first “feature” pack the mere utterance of that word in relations to an upcoming patch on the official site has been an experience of dread instead of excitement. It’s hard to be excited about needed changes like bugfixes, actual enhancements and additions, and balance fixes when there is this concerted effort to break the main foundation of the game itself and lock things behind walls so you feel “accomplished” when you unlock something that was already in the game and easily accessable pre-patch.
Wanze, I generally like your posts, but this is a legit bug so don’t be a jerk. Gem store items should have NO level requirement, and this one did not before the patch.
The image of my character in the hero panel is showing as oversized, such that I can not see their feet as they are taller than the window they are in. Hard to dye something you can’t see.
(Character in question is not large like a norn or charr, they are a human female.)
I have this as well – a Jade weapon skin and a Zodiac one in the collection (but not wardrobe), neither of which I own.
Given the history of changes in the April patch (arbitrary walls to getting traits), and the recent announcements (arbitrary walls to new characters, besides the terrible trait acquisition system we are still stuck with from April, and the likely death of key farming), I am expecting nothing better than disappointment. Waiting for the next blog post is more of a dread than an anticipation.
There were good changes in the April patch. There were also some good changes announced for this patch. That doesn’t make negative changes any easier to swallow.
The best time I have managed on human commoner warrior is 17 minutes, on an older PC with slow load times. Part of that is luck at catching the boss event in-progess in the starter instance after the elemental appears so you don’t have to complete the defend event, which can happen if someone gets there before you. Also you are somewhat dependent on the NPCs in the level 10 step “The Commander” targeting the troops correctly; occasionally they want to target Serentine during her invulnerable phase and waste time hitting her and can go down. Best solution to that is to run through the middle of the room after removing armor and distract the guards. If they kill you (in no armor at level 4 it takes 1 hit) it’s no big deal as you have no repairs to do and the checkpoint is upstairs.
Warhorn for speed and minor sigil of speed (swiftness on kill) help cut time down, and a minor sigil of bloodlust + rice balls + power armor and weapons + mixed runes that all give power on the first slot means you can kill things faster.
I’ve read through this thread several times and can only conclude that it is an attempt at a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Throwing roadblocks up to “regulate” a system that is working just fine as-is only serves to reward those who have already made their money as opposed to those doing it currently, and smells of protectionism for the old guard. If there were an actual problem, I could see trying to find a fix. However, there isn’t one that has been proven, and any such “solution” only serves to limit the potential profit for newcomers in a way the old traders never had to contend with. I generally appreciate Wanze’s posts, but I have to give a big thumbs down to this.
Getting to cooking 400 is a piece of cake, but even so I mostly use it to make food to sell. Upon seeing that the new cook recipes make account bound foods, I can’t be bothered to even try for T4 in Dry Top as these recipes would provide no benefit to me whatsoever.
My biggest complaints about the outfit system is that you have limited color channels and can’t show glasses with them. Before, glasses were only on town clothes, and now it’s the opposite as they are a headpiece armor skin.
I think what they mean is, if you buy them they go in the wardrobe, but if you do not have them they are not even there greyed out like other locked skins so you can’t easily preview them. I noticed this myself before I bought the ancestral outfit.
But I worked pretty hard to get the Mini Liadri and she came back this time around. I also had to do 25 Secret of the Southsun achievements over 2 weeks to get the Sclerite backpack, now people just toss in 1600 festival tokens to a vendor.
I don’t like it when Anet make a call which unique skins should return for everyone to get and which should remain unavailable. They’re all unique skins and to players some skins will be more unique than others, but Anet just cut through and said, “nah, this lot of LS1 skins aren’t unique enough, here, have them for a few festival tokens”.
Secret of Southsun was a long time ago. Anyone who wasn’t playing then would never have the option to get it as the achieves for that have long since been unavailable. Same goes for any LS meta rewards – you hadn’t started playing yet? Tough luck! You’ll never get these items. I’m personally not a fan of that model.
When Fallout New Vegas came out, there were packs of items that were exclusive to preordering the game from certain retailers. You couldn’t get but one of the four sets (that had unique items) unless you ordered multiple copies of the game or bought/was given a code from elsewhere. After the final DLC was released an “Ultimate Edition” was released for a reduced price that contained not only the base game and all DLCs, but all four of the exclusive pre-order packs as well. Exclusivity had run its course and served its purpose by then, and there was no reason to not give the items out to players after a couple years. If you got in early you got your items and could use them from that moment forward. Your “reward” was getting it before anyone else could.
I’m already on the fence as to whether or not I want to even continue playing this game after the patch, and I NEVER want to bother with levelling anything again due to this change. Applying this trait hunt to 80s that already have their traits would cement my decision to quit altogether. If it were an optional thing you could choose to do that would be fine, but if it were mandatory it’d be the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
A rollback to the state of the game prior to the April 15th patch. For every good thing added or changed, there’s a complete bucket of fail that came with it. I really have no desire to even log into the game anymore I’m so annoyed with it right now.
Even the clothes that are dyeable aren’t worth bothering with. There are 4 dye channels for the Wintersday outfit – the whole outfit – and the channel for the trim on the top is not the same as the channel for the trim on the skirt, so making the trim on the bottom white makes a completely different part of the top white. There is pretty much nothing I can do to get my old color scheme back, and as such I’m going to ask for a refund on an item that no longer functions properly. Seriously, only 4 channels that function for the WHOLE outfit? How was that in any way a good idea?
The day the trading post goes away for good is the day I uninstall the game.
The interesting thing about all this is that it functions just like a commodities market in real life. You can learn from it. I have in the past bought gold Kruggerands and silver rounds from a dealer at a premium over spot price (ask price), as that is what you have to go with as a customer that goes through a middleman, and after waiting for a market shift resold them to another dealer at bid price. Even so, I managed to turn a profit due to a market shift. I managed to pay off a loan with the proceeds. The “tax” in this case was the cut the dealer takes as their premium to offset their own risk, and the 15% TP cut functions in much the same way as it cuts into your expected ROI and has to be accounted for. No matter if you’re the buyer or the seller, in the end the house always wins. The TP even as it stands now siphons gold out of the economy; money changes hands but the total transferred decreases with each transaction.
In the case of the TP, the power buyers and sellers are playing the part of a commodities dealer and get a better deal buying at bid and selling at ask, but even buying at ask and selling at bid can be profitable if you wait until there is a market shift upwards. It all comes down to research and buying when you expect a market shift, which is what specualtion is.
Okay, here’s a question for you flipper-haters:
I personally don’t do much in the flipping department, but I still bring in a decent income by crafting and materials promotion via the mystic forge. These activities remove mats from the game and replace them with more in-demand or useful items. Crafting has a karma investment (in the case of cooking) as I do it in mass quantity. Material promotion involves burning skill points. Both of these currency items can not be acquired without playing the game. Crafting and forging are considered “playing the game” as both show up as daily achievements. That being said, my activities over the course of a day involve standing in DR and placing/cancelling/re-placing bids on goods as buy orders and waiting for stock to roll in, crafting up the items from said stock, and listing the result on the TP at a price that will bring in a profit and still move fast. I typically make more on a daily basis than running dungeons for a lot less effort because I have figured out a working strategy based on what is currently in-demand. This may adjust over time but I have done it before, as my primary activity over Wintersday was salvaging for profit due to the demand for linen. (Salvaging is also considered playing the game – it is even a monthy achievement for April.)
Would you consider this to be an activity that is “playing the game”? ArenaNet certainly seems to think it is. I provide services to those that can’t be bothered to do a little research and do it themselves, and my profit is a laziness tax.
My profit margins are not huge (generally about 2%), but I ENJOY crafting and I find doing it to be fun. I just do it in a much larger scale than the average player, crafting around 600-800 items a day. There are quicker ways to make gold, and it does require research and a decent amount of capital to buy the mats required, but it’s a method that works for me and adds to my personal enjoyment of the game.
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Catastrophic failure of carefully constructed economy. Done.
You want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break a few eggs.
Closer to “I want to make an omelet, so I’m going to burn down the kitchen because, hey heat + eggs = omelet, right?”. Just because it sounds good in theory (if you don’t think about the long-term consequences for more than five seconds) and fits into your worldview of “this is how it SHOULD be” doesn’t mean it’s a good idea by any stretch of the imagination.
Bind on Purchase. Done.
Catastrophic failure of carefully constructed economy. Done.
The only problem comes when people buy not to use, but to sell higher. Of course they won’t always make a profit, but in the process they still make things more expensive for others, when they didn’t even need the stuff, and just bought the entire stock of something cheap just because they could.
Make any item acquired in the trading post account bound (that’ll unfortunately require duplicate slots for tradable collectibles, one account-wide one tradable) and people can only buy or sell, but never buy to sell.
Anyone wanting to make a profit from stuff sold in the trading post would then have to process it and sell the results, and not nearly as many people with higher acquisitive power would affect the prices for the rest without actually wanting to use the stuff.
This comes up it seems at least once a week. There should be an Econ 101 sticky at the top of the forum that you have to read before you can post. I’m not trying to be snarky, but this very suggestion comes up ALL THE TIME in various flavors and there are many reasons as to why that is an unworkable idea.
Taking advantage of this flatline in pricing at the moment, I managed to pick up the focus, torch, staff, pistol, and spear (best looking spear in the game IMO) for decent prices on buy orders. I’m not stocking up, as I don’t like to risk speculation on higher-value items, but I did get the ones I wanted because I knew I’d kick myself later if the price went up. Glad I waited on some of them as the prices have been in a slow decline the longer they’ve been available as one ticket.
Nope. It’s black lion keys. Hahaha
And Communal Boost Bonfire and the return of Scarlet’s Champs minis 3-pack.
The mini pack is not a return, it’s just the last day it’s available. But of all the things to be on the last day, BL keys? Really?
The airship doesn’t have an actual asura gate – but talking to the helmsman NPC serves the same purpose as the terrace’s gate, i.e. free travel to any racial city.
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