Guild Wars 2

Solo.9027:

Do not salvage cloth or leather, the mats are worth less than the pre-salvage items. 99% of the time even selling on the TP is a loss, just vendor everything, save kits for metal items.

Hopefully Anet figures out that trash loot makes the game less fun and reduces the amount of thick leather and silk that drops.

I would note for this that it applies at the t5 level of salvage…. lower levels of cloth and leather are of more value to people leveling crafting.

Wetpaw.3487:

Crafting is only worth it if you want to lvl your toon w/o leaving LA, or if you are going for a Legendary…..that is all.

You just keep believing that…. those of us who craft for profit will continue to sell our goods to people who believe that…..

runeblade.7514:

Obtena.7952:

Yes, completely useless. Move along and let the people willing to rake in …err I mean, lose all their money to continue crafting.

Did you hear what I said?

CRAFTING IS NOT USELESS IN MAKING MONEY!

Methinks it was missing the sarcasm tag :P

Having built both Volcanus and Destroyer weapons…. just farm money and buy cores, then upgrade them to lodestones. I get some destroyer lodestones from Orrian jewelry boxes, but I’ve opened hundreds of boxes and gotten less than a dozen lodestones.

darkace.8925:

Jeweler is one of the two crafting disciplines I’ve not leveled, but I can see, hypothetically, how the introduction of Ascended gear would seriously hurt Jewelers.

Hypothetically… and yet, lvl 80 exotic jewelry is where I make a lot of my money….. lots of people not willing to do the work for ascended gear

I wanted to chime in because my small / average sized guild just managed our first successful T1 bounty.

Our first attempt failed sunday night, we tried with 6 people, split in two teams of 3, and only found one of the two bosses (2nd one was the guy who’s hidden in a Karka….)

The second time we had Half Baked and one out in Frost Gorge. Our prep went like this:

1 hour before I started the bounty, I notified the guild that we would be doing the bounty hunt, allowing people to finish dungeons and make sure they were available.

10 minutes prior, people logged on to the guild vent server (some with no mic, but they could listen) and we formed 2 parties. The sum total of our attendance for the bounty hunt was 10 people. We formed 2 parties, and I designated a leader for the 2nd party (another guild officer.)

When we triggered the bounty, we each moved to our assigned zones…. I had one person in my party who was level 40 and we had decided that whichever boss was lower level, that party would go to. Everyone else was lvl 80.

Once each team hit their assigned map, they spread out to scout, one person per team looking at the guide, and in general feeding info to everyone else.

We found the frost gorge boss first, and the 5 man team killed it before joining the rest of us in Maelstrom. Once we had 9 people on the map looking (our poor lvl 40 still trecking down there…. he actually gained a level from exploration xp alone just running to the event!) we were able to find the boss. Chatting about where we were going helped a great deal so we could maximize the search.

As soon as one person found the boss, they linked the nearest WP to guild chat and started the bounty. Everyone managed to get to the boss before he died.

No pre-scouting, just solid team work and good communication.

The guild had a great deal of fun with it, people hung out afterwards to do jumping puzzles together, they were linking loot and laughing…. we ressed the poor lvl 41 who got 1 shot and everyone congradulated him just for making it out there….

Your mileage may vary, but thus far, I can only say its been a positive experience for my guild.

Ooshi.8607:

Agree with you there Sinergy.
Would really like to see at least one interesting skin being added for armorsmiths, leatherworkers and tailors. Some interesting weapon skins would be a welcome addition as well.
But I feel that they should be same difficulty/expense as corrupted weapons atm, so as to give them some sort of “prestige”.

Also, why do all gladiator armor has to share the same skin throughout every level? We have different “themes” for weaponsmith/artificer/huntsman, why do armors all have to look exactly the same no mater what level they are?

I would love to see more skins along the line of Corrupted / Destroyer…. please, some weaps that use Crystal Lodestones.

I do, however, understand why (from a dev perspective) why we get a different theme of rare weapons every level bracket, but not rare armors: Weapons are easier to build than armor. A weapon skin uses the same model (size scaled, which is easy) regardless of race or gender. For armor skins, you have to rescale / adjust at a mesh level for each race, and have to build male and felame versions of such….. an armor set is a great deal harder to produce than a weapon set. (I can model a sword in an afternoon, modeling and rigging a skirt that will correctly parent / colide with the base figure is more work.)

I like to think our ‘one interesting skin’ for armorsmiths and weaponsmith is the lvl 80 exotic skin, which is at least a departure from what we made with blues / yellows.

Morpheus.6401:

Worst crafting system ever. I have never seen a game make crafting so useless in my life. The only use you have actually is either to level up or to make your legendary. Otherwise is a total waste of time and gold.
The price of materials is so high that makes the whole system pointless. Why would I craft if it is cheaper (some times way cheaper) to buy the item on the market?
I wonder what Anet think about it, it’s impossible they think is anything positive to the game and still never heard of any plans to improving it.
I think one of the problems is the lack of resources. The lack of resources make their prices too high on TP and so it makes crafting unprofitable. Resources should be way more abundant that way a lot of people could really start enjoying crafting.

In a game where anyone with a pick / ax / sickle can gather mats, loot bags drop like candy, and most drops from mobs can be salvaged, how are resources not abundant? Seriously, it’s beyond easy to get crafting mats, why anyone looks to the TP to get 100% of their mats is beyond me.

Morpheus.6401:

The price of materials makes crafting useless but to level up or to get your legendary.
It is simple and sad as that.
Maybe if the resources were more abundant that would change but I’m not sure.

1) Resources are abundant, that’s part of why crafted goods are so inexpensive.
2) If you made resources more abundant, the selling price of crafted goods would fall to match the reduced cost of materials, and nothing would change about the status quo.
3) Crafting is a perfectly viable method of both generating profit and supplying gear to your own characters. If you do not enjoy crafting, the alternative is to use the trading post, where I will happily sell you the things that I craft for a 25% markup

Rezz.8019:

GW2 spidy doesnt help at all, as it’s not realistic. No one actually buys those items. But you can still try

Depends on the velocity of items, gw spidy doesn’t track volume of trades, so just because the supply doesn’t seem to be changing, doesn’t mean that items aren’t being traded. Speaking as someone who recently sold Volcanus, I watched new buy orders and new sell orders frequently enough to see movement…. also changes in the number available on the TP.

Items with the largest profit margin tend to move with the lowest velocity…. you may have a 100g profit, but it takes 2 days to sell. On the flip side, I can craft 100 items with a 5s profit and liquidate them within a few hours, and a far lower initial investment.

Buy orders is a great way to source mats…. especially when there is a wide spread between lowest seller and highest buyer. Also, while working in bulk. I find that if I place a buy order, then do a dungeon or fractal run, my buy order has usually filled while I was off enjoying the game.

Also, sub lvl 80, you can use the Mystic Forge to source awkward tiers of mats. T1 is way easy to farm… t2 mats suck to farm, but you can promote T1 → T2 at a reasonable rate via the mystic forge.

In other areas, buying cores and upgrading them to lodestones can save you money that rolls into your profits (essentially, you’re selling skill points.)

Finally, there are a few mats that can be very quickly gathered when you hit the right locations (I’m looking at you Strawberries….. and the lovely unidentified masterwork red dye you make!)

Being a crafter for profit means knowing how to find what you need, and doing some leg work that the lazier crowd doesn’t feel is worth while. Let them buy stuff off the TP and say it’s better that way…. I’ll keep selling stuff to ’em!

Last time I ran on gear I crafted while leveling…. would have been earlier today. Used crafting to gear both my project alts when they dinged 30, I’ll loop back to craft rare armor for them at lvl 35.

Sure, I could TP the gear…. but the mats pile up as I’m leveling, and if the finished product isn’t at least 15% cheaper than the sum I would get for selling the mats…. I not only save money by crafting myself, I get xp boosts all along the leveling curve. I could save crafting to make 60-80 fast…. but I enjoy it more if I use it all along the leveling curve.

Just my experience, but I find crafting offers a lot in GW2.

Several. The key, really, comes down to how you source your materials, and crafting the things that people want to buy.

RickyNo.5834:

I am looking to outfit my medium armor character with an eyepatch. The only ones I have found so far are ones that I believe a sniper would wear. They only seem to cover the left eye as well.

Are there any plain eyepatches that cover the right eye?

My thief wears a Nightmare helm (TA Dungeon armor), might fit your needs.

Gratz! I just finished making one of these as a guild project, so I know how hard the effort is. I think it’s well worth it though, so congrats on an awesome looking weapon.

Nihevil.8024:

30-40 min for all three paths? How long does p1 speedrun take?

I don’t know about groups doing 30-40 min for all three paths…. depending on method, p1 can be done in a single omnomberry bar, but as others have said, the bosses are huge pools of HP…. you spend a long time burning down the HP with little serious threat. Maybe full ’zerker groups are faster, my guild tends to do p1 in around 25-30 minutes and we kill everything. If you skipped a few of the fights, you could probably shave 5 minutes off that, maybe a bit more.

Lucas Ashrock.8675:

Admirable story of a guild effort. I wish i met this kind of guilds, so much bond together on a single big goal: their guild’s status. I just hope you all are real life friends. Would be so unpleasant to be kicked..
I have good memories about it on WoW, your post made me remember some threads of people talking about the vanilla legendary/horse got with his guild, and how his guild worked hard all together for this goal.
I was for sure the last to give a kitten to contribute about nothing the guild leader was asking, like his legendary weapon, a horse during vanilla etc, hehe. Didn’t regret my choice for sure. Discovering later the guild became just a bunch of idiots where i was wasting my time, leaving. As you see, as much i admire your story, all the efforts your guild’s members made could end up just on thin air, tomorrow, when kicked/leaving the guild.
Noone will remember him, nor throw a thanks 6 months later, be sure.

Given that the guild has been functioning across multiple guilds for nearly 10 years…. not too worried. Half the guild is real life friends and co-workers, but what amazed me is the number of new members, people who have only been members in GW2 who also chimed in and contributed. It was really nice to see interest from the get go

I wanted to share this story because it was a powerful experience for my guild.

At the announcement of Guild Missions requiring Art of War level 5, my guild had been playing since launch, and had managed to get Art of War level 3, and most other things at level 4. We spent most of our influence on guild bonuses (+Magic Find, etc) and didn’t have a huge pile of influence sitting there. The cost of getting to guild missions staggered our small guild (30ish total members, not all of them very active.)

Early in the process of working to unlock guild missions, we tried running events / dungeons together, and just farming influence… but that was pretty slow. There just weren’t enough of us playing. We started to ask if people would buy influence, but very few people were happy to let go of hard earned coin to unlock content.

Finally, I proposed a notion: We would craft a high end exotic that sold for hundreds of gold, and use the proceeds to buy influence. Our target was Volcanus.

Here was the staggering thing: People who would not spend gold on influence, were happy to donate mats! The guild bank started filling up with Molten and Destroyer cores, people went out to Orr and ran from node to node gathering Ghost Peppers…. it was something to do and it didn’t require them to just flush coin into influence.

As the process went on, we ran CoF as a guild, and any cores or lodestones gathered were given to the guild, but all other drops were kept by the players. People were happy to do it, and we did it together.

When it came down to crunching cores, we found several members who were cash poor, and skill point rich. They were happy to be able to contribute in a way that wasn’t giving up mats, because it was a currency they had little use for.

Everything that went into volcanus had value. You could argue that people could have just promoted cores and sold them, then bought influence with the money and you wouldn’t be wrong. But people didn’t find motivation in that. When I would log on and update the guild: “Destroyer lodes at 57/100, Molten at 225/350, we have 60 cores to compress and 25 dust to work with…” people got excited. We had a goal, and they were helping!

It took us two weeks, the end result is that the guild has over 350g to spend on influence, and has been able to fund other guild event prizes. It made us more active, brought our guild together in positive ways, and people were happy to contribute.

TL:DR — By using crafting, people came together as a guild, contributed each in different ways to a guild effort, and the guild now has more than enough influence for guild missions.

Welcome and thank you for taking a look at the thread.

Five Fold Heroes [Rook] is a Casual / Family friendly guild, seeking to grow a friendly community for PvE, Dungeons and Guild Missions.

Guild is primarily active evenings and weekends, many guild members are working professionals. If you’re looking for a fun group to hang out with, run dungeons, fractals, or events with, or just have a fun evening chatting, we would love to welcome you to the guild.

Requirements: None. We ask you to rep whenever you can, but as the primary focus of the guild is PvE, we understand if people want to rep another guild for PvP or while guesting on another server.

What we offer:
Guild is currently building the Guild Bounty unlock and will be running guild missions on a regular basis.
Vent server, including channel for RP for those who are so inclined (Vent not required, helps for dungeons.)
Community that understands you need to afk mid dungeon to feed kids / pets, or take care of life

*In game contacts: * Guild lead – Pentar, Officers – CassieGold & Zechsword.

In game messages or forum PMs welcome, along with replies to this thread.

Looking forward to meeting new people and having fun in game!

Reaver of the Mists is pretty…. dunno what stats it comes with stock, but you can transmute the ones you want on to it.

So, I’m hosting guild events, and I’m looking to reward people in the guild who have made significant contributions to guild efforts, and that participate frequently in events.

My guild is small and semi-casual, and lately, people have put significant time and resources towards the influence needed to unlock guild missions…. I’d like to share out some love for people who worked hard and send them a little goodie surprise.

The first thing that comes to mind is a small pile of un-identified dye (20-30.) It’s not something many people treat themselves to, and most people can find an alt or two that could use some more dye even if their main is tricked out.

But what else would make a good ‘thank you’ gesture? I would love to be able to send BL Keys or other gem shop items, but that’s a no-go, and there’s no way to send gems…. like most gifting, sending cash feels cheap.

What would you like to find as a surprise in your inbox from your guild officers? Any ideas?

Welcome to the game!

As many have said, any race can be any profession, Asura make great rangers, if you like them, go for it!

In terms of servers to avoid or play for, the only question I would ask is: Do you want to do PvP? If you’re big on World Vs World (3 servers all duking it out), then take a look in the WvW forums for the current world rankings and aim for a top tier server. If that’s not important, then server choice matters less, I’ve met great people from several servers, and you can always guest to another server if you’d like.

Happy gaming and I hope you enjoy your time in GW!

Hematuria.4051:

I have no idea where to start looking up info so I can try my hand at crafting. Is there a website or post or tutorial I should look at?

The question that I would ask you is: What do you want to get out of crafting? Crafting has several viable uses, from making money to gearing your characters…. the question is: What do you want to do with it?

If you’re trying to decide between MF and Gold Find on a utility slot, remember: Open world Farming benefits from Magic Find (more drops) dungeon runners benefit from the Bonus Gold from mosters (bosses drop lots of coin.)

Unless you’re heading deep in fractals, I wouldn’t worry about offensive or defensive slots.

To answer:

1) Many professions are solo friendly. I do most of my open world solo play from a Thief because it gives me a great deal of maneuverability and the ability to escape things if I bite off more than I can chew. My guardian also solos well by being very durrable and having the endurance to hang in for the long haul. The key is that you find a profession you like to play, and learn to solo with it.

2) Depends what you want out of crafting. There are dozens of threads in the crafting forum about weather or not you can profit via crafting, buy things vs craft things….. if all you want is the gear, just buy it. If you like crafting, then craft. I make money crafting frequently, but if I look at the time I spend to earn 10 gold crafting…. I could spend the same amount of time throwing myself at CoF p1 farming and make the same 10 gold. It’s just about what you like doing.

3) No, missing the events won’t hurt you. You missed out on an earring that can be crafted, and can only be worn 1 per character, a free 20 slot box, and some seasonal mini-pets. That’s about it.

4) Use gw2lfg.com for finding groups. Story mode is harder to find groups for, but on the flip side, many people are still running alts through story mode & story mode dungeon comes up on the new dailies. Just take advantage of the opportunity when it comes up.

Happy gaming and welcome back to GW2!

I’m pretty understanding of internet issues. I would generally prefer to stick it out with a guy who’s got a rough connection but has worked with the group so far than to have to fill a spot part way through the dungeon. I hate to see someone not get rewards they’ve worked towards.

When running fractals or other dungeons, a lot of the groups I’ve been in have waited while someone relogs / reboots in an attempt to clear those kinds of problems. But if you need that kind of opportunity, it’s always best to ask the group, maybe offer up to leave if the group would prefer to replace you.

Of course, if the problem is making your game play so frustrating that you’d rather not deal with it and would prefer to leave, that’s something to make sure the group understands.

And if you’re the instance owner…. ouch man, that’s rough for the group, but kitten happens.

I want to toss in a few things here, and some of this is old hat because as Ooshi said, there are several really good threads about how to profit via crafting.

Skills that are important:
#1: Knowing how to source your mats. If you buy at lowest seller price instead of working with buy orders, you’re missing the point. Also, know what mats can be quickly gathered with a little sweat-equity, and how to promote mats. For things that use lodestones, buying cores and using the MF to improve them is one method to improve your profit margin. There are others.

#2: Market analysis is important. There is no push-button profit. The market shifts quickly as people see an opportunity and jump on it. Some items have consistent high demand (look at the most expensive precursor weapons and then look at the selling price of the lvl 80 rares that people buy in bulk to chuck into the forge,) some items have demand increased because patches change the drop rate of the item or the components. Know what people want to buy and make that.

#3: Recognize that as a crafter, working in bulk is in your favor, but beware of saturating the market. If your profit per item is 5s, then your profit for making 20 of that item is 1g, just make sure it’s something you can sell 20 of. Given that crafting is pretty push-button easy, it doesn’t take much more effort to make and sell 50 of an item than it does to sell 5.

#4: Profit exists in all crafts, and at multiple levels of the craft. Some times, you can also profit by selling un-finished goods (sword blades, insignia, etc), and some times the secret to profit by crafting is to realize that sourcing the pre-built components is cheaper than buying the raw material. If you want to make a lvl 80 exotic great sword, and the cost of Orichalcum Ore to make a blade is 27s, but you can buy the blade for 24s…. buy the blade! (I use this example because the price of ore relative to the price of blades flip / flops frequently….)

GL out there, and happy crafting. As always, if you have questions, ask, there is a lot of help to be had in the community here.

Lysico.4906:

I make solid money off rares still. First off make stuff folks might actually use.

Zerk stuff sells well along with Knights. Make things like GS, Pistols or Daggers.. Those always move really quick.

I’d agree with this in general, though I’ve found that the velocity is slower, I’m waiting longer for the same things to move…. the profit margins haven’t changed, but it feels like demand is down.

The rare market is struggling at the moment, not because of inflation, but because of the improved drop rate of rares in the world event chests.

That being said, when I need quick coin, I usually log on to a character with lvl 400 crafting and start banging out a few items that I can sell for more than the cost of mats…. there’s profit to be had there, you just have to look for it.

I’ve run both this set and Cleric’s armor. In the end, it comes down to two things:

1#: Are you traited / skilled to take advantage of it, ie: do you use healing skills. As an example, my guardian rarely ever activates her healing skill since I use virtues for most of my active healing and I let my signet carry passive condition removal. She would never trigger the benefit of 6 superior runes of Dwayna. On the other hand, my mesmer uses the healing mantra, so it becomes a party wide buff on demand activated frequently.

#2: Are you in a profession that can leverage the bonuses of the armor. I use this armor on my thief for a ‘tanky’ set because I like the healing power boost to my Signet of Malice and the regen duration when I Shadow Refuge a party. Also, Thief gets a really good return on investment for vitality, not all professions do.

Hope that helps. Both are good approaches, just depends on how you use them.

rozcinana.7249:

I’d say crafting as well as dungeons. Some people will do most of the dungeon on their 80 then switch to an alt when the boss is almost dead to get the xp at the end. Each run gets you about 70 or 75% of your level, can’t remember the exact number. If she’s going to go that route it’s essential to make sure your party members are okay with it first, before you even start the run.

My best suggestion for using dungeons for XP gain is CoF p1 for the levels 75-80… it runs fast and you can easily handle them on a lvl 75 character in blue armor (it’s how I finished off my mesmer)

Switching to an alt in the wrong PUG can get you kicked because there are people who consider it an exploit. Robert Hrouda (dungeon dev) is okay with it happening, but if you PUG with him, he may dance around you and do silly emotes at you if you bring something to the party that contributes nothing (lvl 20 character in CoF.)

I always tend to do this in the ‘move around the room in a circle’ method. For myself, as the person managing buckets (Guardian), I slot a speed boost (retreat) and use the speed boost on my weapon as well (Staff #3), and I make sure I have handy condition removal incase I get chilled. My job is to keep moving and not get bogged down. My team’s job is to get the boss to where I need to drop hot metal on him.

When I’m not running buckets, it’s all about ranged damage as the group falls back to the next bucket. To me, it’s actually more important to have people in position to draw the boss then to do max damage while moving between buckets, You have a chance to apply heavy DPS when he’s standing where you want him and you have a 2-3 second window while the bucket turns over, then, back to running!

50 Tiny Fangs
1 Small Claw
5 Piles of Shimmering Dust
5 Philosopher’s Stone

XP gain from mobs is based on character level, so no, playing in higher level areas will not really help. If anything, it may hurt if her character does not do enough damage to the higher level mob to get kill credit.

A few things that may help:

#1: Crafting is worth 10 levels per craft that you level to 400. That being said, you get more XP from taking a single craft to 400 than you do for taking 4 crafts to 100. The cheapest crafts to max are Chef, Jewel Crafter and Artificer…. maxing those three can be done for around 12-15g and will get you 30 levels.

#2: The longer a creature is on a map, the more bonus xp you get from killing it. Those Moas that everyone ignores? Goldmines of bonus xp. Likewise, playing on under-played maps in less visited areas can get lots of XP via this method.

#3: Event chaining has often been shown to be highly effective for leveling. Look for areas with events that spawn close together and frequently. (The north end of Sparkfly Fen is one of my favorites for this at lvl 55-65, Centaur events in Hrathi Hinterlands are good for this in the 35-45 range, etc.)

The best thing you can do is look at ways to make sure she
1) Stays alive when playing in areas above her level (5 levels up is fine, more than that is pushing it a bit)
2) Work to make her killing more efficient. If you can kite / pull mobs to her, great. I
3) Escort her to waypoints so that she can WP to events quickly…. you may burn more silver on the WP than you get back from the event, but who cares? You’re there for the XP.

Hope that helps and happy leveling!

Here’s why Red Dye is my go to for a rare dye: Your mats are all things you can gather without RNG or buy for Karma:

Cherries: Karma in bulk
Tomato: Karma in bulk
Strawberries: Farm (in starter zones)
Raspberries: The only hard part…. you can gather from bushes, but you have to find them, or you can just buy them. WAY EASIER THAN CORIANDER.

Here’s the other thing about why people buy Rare Red and Rare Blue dyes…. People don’t know that what they’re looking for isn’t there. Contrary to what you would think, Midnight Fire and Midnight Ice are grey dyes not Red or Blue dyes.

So, if you want to convert a little coin or gather time + some karma into more coin, rare red dye is a good idea…. until everyone reads this, floods the market, spikes the prices of raspberries, etc, etc.

Anyway, GL out there and happy crafting.

Ugh, kind of what I was afraid of. My guild is small enough that we’ve been working since the announcement that AoW 5 would be required to build the influence for guild missions. AoW5 is a few days from finishing, but we’re still 17k short of the influence for the first guild mission unlock, and I’m feeling like I’ve done my guild a serious disservice by stopping my normal Guild Dungeon runs in favor of getting people up to FotM 10 and doing guild FotM runs instead.

If it gets any dev attention (hint hint Robert), I’d like to suggest that each fractal gets treated like a dungeon path, 100 influence for a full guild group, so a full run (3 fractals + maw) would reward 400 influence. It feels like the same amount of effort as running 4 dungeon paths. Some are easier, some are harder, but the same is true of dungeon paths.

Alternately, would love to see influence gain from fractals scale with the fractal level.

Thanks for the answers all, it’s appreciated!

Welcome Crazylegsmurphy, you’ve come to a good place to get help. I wanted to chime in and offer up a few suggestions for general effectiveness. First, to answer your question about builds: Each sub-forum has a sticky “share your build” thread. I’ve linked the thief forum’s thread below. It’s a good place to start because people will in general, explain the build, how it works, and you will frequently find good discussion about the builds posted.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Post-Your-Build-Thread/first#post206151

To gear itself, there are a few things I wanted to suggest / point out that are good starting points. As you get better at the game, and more refined, you will start to develop some builds and gear choices of your own.

#1: Exotic Armor. You commented that the armor you can craft is not better than the armor you can find elsewhere and this is true. All lvl 80 exotic armor shares the same quality. You can get the same stats of armor you can craft for dungeon tokens. Some combinations of stats are only available for Karma, but the armor is no better and no worse than what you get elsewhere.

#2: Choosing Stats. Here, I will speak only to the thief as I do not play an engineer (though my fiancee does.) The current trend for thieves is to focus on Berserker stats (+Power / +Precision / + Critical Damage), though there are certainly other options. The goal here is to hit hard, and Precision ups your critical rate, the power makes you hit harder in general, and when you crit (which will be often) it hits even harder. This is also referred to as ‘glass cannon’ because you hit hard & break easy. A Thief is built on hit / run, with lots of mobility and stealth to escape, so it tends to work well. Again, it’s not the only method, but it is a fairly straight forward one.

#3: Runes. I suggest starting with something that is both simple and straight forward. You can craft Superior runes of both The Thief & The Engineer. Honestly though, you could also just buy them. You want 6 of them, one for each piece of armor to get the full bonuses from the runes. There are other ways to go, and I suggest browsing the list of runes that PinCushion linked to see if any hold more appeal, but when getting started, using the rune set named for your profession generally works.

#4: As a jeweler, you can craft items with the same general stats as the armor you craft. To mirror Berserker stats, you would want to craft jewelry with Rubies.

The game has an overwhelming (at times) amount of depth and flexibility, take your time, and don’t ever worry that you’ve gone down a wrong path or wasted things. If you craft a Berserker set and decide later that you want something that’s tankier, keep the ‘zerker set for when you want that much offence, and build a 2nd armor set that suits those needs. My thief has 1 set that is 50% Berserker / 50% Rampager and a 2nd set that came from one of the temples in Orr. My temple armor gets dragged out for dungeons and WvW where I like to be able to take a bit more damage, but for all my open world event farming, it’s all about offence.

I hope that helps, and as always, happy crafting!

Sauzo.6821:

And personally i think 500ish for one of the big 3(dawn,dusk,legend) is a fair price. I picked up dawn on a buy offer of 473g.

I would add The Lover to your list, it hovers around the same price. And agreed, it feels about fair.

Depends on your play style:

Extra Gold gives the greatest benefit to people who run Dungeons. Dungeon bosses that drop 10s every time become even more rewarding under the extra goold boost.

Magic Find gives the greatest benefit to open world event farming. If you slay hordes of risen, the extra magic find kicks in every time you kill a mob giving you a better chance at better loot.

So far as I am aware, the only AR infusions for these items are the ones you get for fractal relics.

Nikaido.3457:

I already had a really, really strong distaste for full tank groups because of the wipes they have during the grawl frac, not at the end boss, but the veteran shamans spawning in high numbers because those tank group can’t kill them quickly enough. But now I just won’t be able to group up with anything but a well balanced group. It’s just no fun. It’s fine to have one anchor in the group, like a good guardian, but a full tank group has absolutely no place whatsoever in any dungeon, not even FOTM.

I think you hit on the most important part here…. Full Tank is a problem, but having a balanced team is very smooth.

I’ve had people drop out of FotM Daily groups when they said ‘too many guardians, I don’t think there’s enough damage here,’ and I definately get that. Too much of any one thing (damage or support) can be a problem.

Likewase, a group full of glass cannons works until Something Goes Wrong. And whatever it is (lag spike, missed dodge roll, or other oops) things tend to go from fine to very bad very quickly.

Want the cool part? Unless you’re really hankering for a shade of Yellow (or red, or whatever) you can sell some of those Unidentified Rare Dyes for more than regular Unidentified Dye…. then buy the Un-IDed dye and have about the same chance at a rare

that’s anecdotal evidance, your mileage may vary, and for all I know, you may have a greater chance of a rare dye from the chef rare dyes…. hasn’t felt like it to me though.

Bravo Dusk, well said.

I also run a support guardian for fractals, where I bring either a utility mesmer or a ’zerker warrior to most other dungeons.

A good support / healing character can be the glue that keeps a marginal PUG moving past things like the Legendary Grawl Shaman. I tend to pop my party wide heals, or heal on dodge far more often because 2-3 other people have low health than as a method of saving my own sorry hide.

If you have a good group, you can run with less support. If you PUG frequently, you start to find more value in the well run support character.

I will admit that the damage output on my guardian is laughable when compared to my warrior…. but, I’ll take a party that doesn’t have to stop to res, doesn’t have to reset a failed encounter after a wipe, and in general takes a a minute or so longer per encounter over one that has to achieve perfection in personal damage mitigation by all 5 team members any day of the week.

Two things:

1) UW didn’t scale in difficulty, it was what it was. When it was changed, it was changed for everyone. You had Normal Mode or Hard mode, and those were your only options.

2) If there is nothing else up there, why go further? Wouldn’t it be equally rewarding (from a gameplay enjoyment perspective) to run lvl 48s repeatedly?

I see one big reason for A-net to hard cap it: When new loot is available at higher tiers, it means that progression towards the new loot starts from the same starting point…. problem is, it wasn’t hard capped to begin with, so some people got past lvl 50 and defeat that purpose.

Here’s the deal with chef ‘rare’ dyes. It’s not a garuntee of a rare. It’s a chance of anything up to rare. Likewise, if you craft one of the masterwork dyes, you may get a common dye back…. but you won’t have a chance of a rare at all.

Aurust.8961:

Wow…. looks like alot of people are still clueless about how to dump karma for gold… keep buying your boxes suckers.

And no im not referring to crafting a legendary and selling it.

Assuming your talking about picking up greens and mystic forging them? I always found that to be slow / cumbersome from a storage perspective. Of course, if you have portable forge access…..

I’ve been trying to figure out if FotM counts as a dungeon for purposes of influence gain. I know it’s not a dungeon from the perspective of daily / monthly achievements (where it has its own category.) But if I do FotM with a 5 man guild group, does that count as 5 people doing a dungeon for influence?

Precursors are a low velocity market. Despite that, the supply cycles more than you would think…. John Smith posted at one point that 7 & 9 dawns and dusks traded in a single day. (those numbers may be off, I’m feeling too lazy to go link the post.)

Now those are some of the most sought after precursors, so I can’t comment to The Legend, but I think you should expect to list the item for a few days before things cycle enough to sell it.

Likewise, remember that buy orders hurt the purchaser in no way. It costs them nothing to take down a buy order and put it back up to be ‘back on top of the stack’ as they save money. I would hazard that more buy orders are filled than sell orders because of this….. People who list an item for sale are gambling with a listing fee and are more likely to let an item ride at a given price rather than eat the listing fee to relist….. people placing buy orders have no such barrier to adjusting the price they are willing to pay.

I’m a box spammer…. If you have 2M karma on one character, light off karma boosts, flatten your karma for jewelry boxes (you’ll get about 400 boxes), and spam them open. Then, burn down all the liquid karma you got back (’s why you use the boosts) and you should have about 1.5 – 1.7M Karma…. do it again….. With 2M karma, you should be able to open at least 1,000 boxes. Should net you a significant number of lodestones, + most of the obsidian shards you need for a legendary + vendor trash that will probably be worth 10g+

Fair warning, your mouse click finger will hate you!

(Oh, and expect more risen priest minis than you would ever want…. I have 9 now)

A few things I wanted to offer up:

1) Stacking and Reflection use are both natural responses to current design. It’s commonly referred to as ‘meta’ because it is an effective tactic that has the highest ease of use for the broadest player base and gains general acceptance. Meta tactics have existed in most games and represent neither exploits nor an activity that ’goes against the design of the game._ It is simply a commonly accepted, efficient method of dealing with the puzzle that devs present in encounters.

2) Any change in encounter design will prompt a change in Meta. That is the nature of the game. If devs add encounter mechanics that discourage close grouping (attacks that bounce and become more punishing with more bounces as an example) you’ll see shifts towards builds that reward use of swiftness and a focus on range so that parties can spread out more.

I don’t want to argue that the status quo is the best thing in the world, but, remember, it’s taken six+ months for the state of the game to reach this point. That’s not a bad life cycle for a strong meta to emerge and take hold. It actually argues well for the level of complexity in encounters and the diversity of encounters.

another reason to stack: Ease of overlapping support / combo fields.

If the party stacks, then everyone is in range of shouts, everyone is at close range to hit combo fields, etc, etc…..

As an example, if you stack a SB Thief and a Ranger in a spot, along with the rest of your party, the SB Thief spamming Cluster Bomb inside the ranger’s healing spring is both a damage source, and is triggering a party wide heal.

CB has a high arc and takes forever to hit a target at long range, but if you pull the party in close, you can hit the combo field several times in rapid succession.

If an Ele lays down a fire combo field, that SB thief can also spam out party wide might via the same blast finisher.

When stacked on Alpha, the members of my static group work hard to give a quick warning before setting up a combo field so we can capatilize on it. Works wonders