Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the advice.

I main a squishy, viper/sinister elementalist (use to be zerker), so I’m use to dodging, and getting out of the way of things. That’s definitely a class that can’t take a hit, and with dagger main hand you’re always up close and personal.

I did make a thief the other day to try out the starting instance. It was definitely a different experience then I remember. I watched some complete beginners trying to face tank minotaurs (Norn start) and getting pasted, as I was running around not taking damage. Knowing the telegraphs, and cones of damage allowed me to just dodge out of the way and attack.

Even the final boss of the instance (the wurm), was a piece of cake with the thief. I felt like yelling out to the other players: Large spin…. get ready to reflect…. since the animations are the same for the Great Jungle Wurm and 3 Headed Wurm. It was down in at most 15 seconds, a very anti-climatic fight.

So what I’m saying is that I’m not afraid of the squishiness of a thief. I will also probably go through all of GW2 core story & LWS2 before picking up daredevil. I am a bit of a role player / author too and I’ve been feeling the story telling itch get at me. I might just write something down, fiction wise, about my character’s progression through the game. Maybe I’ll be done by PoF but I doubt it.

I’ve been playing the game for a while, and of all the nine classes I’ve never been comfortable playing a thief.

I used to feel the same way about Necro, but when HoT presales came out, and it came with the additional character slot I finally bit the bullet and decided to at least become competent with that. PoF is here and I’ve decided to finally get competent with Thief.

I’m having a hard time finding up to date guides. The ones here on the forum look to be at least 1 or 2 years out of date. Elsewhere I can find guides that are even older. But nothing really since the latest meta earthquake.

Are there any guides that are up to date? Has Thief really not changed that much in the past year to two?

I am almost exclusively a PvE player. I will occasionally do a karma run in EotM. I’ve never darkened the doorstep of the PvP lobby except when it used to be a convenient and cheap place to run through to get to Lion’s Arch (WvW queues were a thing back then).

I am also not planning to use my library of character boosts, I actually want to learn the class and not just insta-80 and run with full ascended/legendaries.

Where should I start to actually learn the class? Condition builds? Power builds? Stealth builds? I did read through the Guide to Thief Leveling (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Guide-to-Thief-Leveling/first#post2673266) but again that was written 4 years ago.

Thanks

With no-fly zone you can get lucky with it. If you get onto the map with only about 1/4 of Shatterer’s health left and you take part in the last part of the flight, then there’s a chance that Shatterer won’t attempt to take off again before the end of the fight. I think that will count as the achievement for you since Shatterer hasn’t made it into the air since you’ve been there.

Hi

I’m trying to find a guild I can join when my main guild isn’t doing other things. Specifically looking for a guild open to those that aren’t 100% meta and 100% sure on what needs to be done in the raid. In other words a guild open to help people learn the raids and forgives the occasional mistake.

I usually run a PS warrior or Herald against VG since that seems to be the slot I got stuck in.

For Gorse I usually run a tempest clearing orbs. Again that seems to be the slot I’m stuck in. Though when I did have a chance I preferred the PS warrior for Gorse.

I also have a Druid decked out in Magi gear that I want to learn how to heal with. I’ve watched videos and read guides but have never had a chance to take it into a raid.

I have a condi engineer that is geared out in Verata’s. I’m gathering the black diamonds together to switch over to Vipers.

The only thing I’m missing is a tank for that I’m looking at building up the mats for a chronotank.

I really want to go after Gorse some more and try out Sab as well as the new wing but my guild doesn’t seem to be able to make it past Gorse.

Edit: I should have put in that I’m on the North American Servers

Its even worse for people who have a jittery ping. I suffer from anywhere from 70 ms (on a good day) to 250ms or even 500 ms. If you have a constant ping you can adapt to it (mostly). But when your ping jitters up and down randomly you might find that suddenly your hitting the keys too fast, or on this run you’re a bit to slow and there’s no way to tell if the run you’re doing will be too fast or too slow.

With some of the adventures tuned down to the millisecond a high ping or a jittery ping makes them just an element in frustration. Then add the randomness to some of the adventures (shooting gallery, fallen masks), it just turns in more frustration: not only do you not know how your network is acting but you don’t know if the RNG gods are with you and providing you with a pattern you can actually get gold on.

When I realized they tuned them without taking the network lag into account I just did them enough to get silver for all the collections and gave up on them. I don’t even have bronze on A fungus among us.

You need it for Indigo Mushroom Milkshake which you need 10 for. I think its for the last stage of making the Energizer. But I can’t find out which part in the wiki, its only when you search specifically for it on Google does any information come up (usually reddit complaining you can’t find the mushrooms).

I finally got my SLI and surround working today and gave gliding a try. Found the same problem. Since no-one else has attached a screen shot of it, I’m attaching one.

I don’t think I’ll use surround since it kind of stops me using my other monitors for displaying webpages, and the distortion to the sides kind of gives me a bit of a headache. You can really see the distortion on the left of the picture I’m attaching.

Almost all my toons have the Spinal Blade backpack. I was around during LS S1 and got all the colour options for them. My ele is dressed in green, so I use the green spinal blade. My mesmer is in red, so that one has the red one. And my guardian is in the bioluminescent armor so that one has the blue ones, works nicely with the glowing armor and glowing spinal blades. My ranger and engi have the standard default yellow coloured ones.

I love the look of the jet pack, and really wish they were glider skins as well. Especially if the jet nozzles had flames coming out of them when I’m using the lean techniques.

Aren’t all the current glider skins from some sort of gem purchase?

Base Skin – Expansion purchase
Feathers (black, white) – Gem purchase
Heart of Thorns Glider – Deluxe purchase
Crystal Arbiter – Gem Purchase
Bat wings – Gem Purchase

Did I miss any? I’d love the spinal blades to be a glider skin especially if they added affects to the jet nozzles, but I don’t think we’ll see it happen, since they aren’t gem or expansion purchases.

Now that I think about it, I don’t think I got my mastery points from the strong boxes either. I was at 20 available Hot mastery points yesterday, picked up 4 of the strong boxes and one in VB, and now I’m at 21. I just wasn’t paying much attention to it as I was hunting AP.

I would like to know too. I have tried four different doors in LA and all sent me to the NE side.

Personal story reward XP also gets awarded when you click on the accept. So you may be able to complete a personal story item, hop off to the verdant brink and accept the reward to get XP onto the masteries there.

My method for getting a precursor (which hasn’t worked), is to play the game salvaging and mining mithril and elder logs. At the same time I get T5 mats. When I fill up with 1500 ore / 1500 ingots I craft it all into daggers and dump in the forge. My favorite place right now is Cursed Shore when its active, the mob drops at 258% Account MF help with this addiction. Silver wastes is boring to me right now. I’m at something like 3000 hours.

The last time I dumped daggers was 328 daggers, got the teaser exotic twice, but not Spark. The time before that was another 280 daggers, and got the teaser exotic 3 times. I’m glad they changed the art for the forge, it now looks exactly like it feels. It especially feels like they dropped the MF upgrade rate recently. Before I was getting an exotic out about 20% of the time, now I’m getting one out at about 10-12% of the time (12 exotics out of dumping 328 daggers, which works out to about 100 attempts since I dumped the resulting rares as well).

And I dump all my level 80 rare weapons in that I get, as well as all the < 4g exotics in hopes of getting a random pre.

This way I’m not burning through my gold on buying rares and exotics from the TP. And hopefully save up some for the precursor. But I bought an additional character slot (before they announced you were getting one with HoT), and the white wings, which set me back. I really wish they allowed us to save gold on another character, so I wouldn’t spend it, like the pre wallet days.

I had a look at my value and numbers and probably missed a few things. The game was originally $60 at the start, so I added in $2 for classes, PVE Maps, WvW, PvP and community.

I also didn’t bring in the fact of the elite specializations for the core classes, and from what I can figure out they’re worth about 1/3 the original classes, since you use them as one of the 3 traits you’re allowed to customize your character with. So that will add $4 to the game.

So what this works out to right now is:

• classes – $5.50
• PvE Maps – $1.74
• WvW Maps – $4.00
• PvP Maps – $1.14
• Community and other features – $12

Which is worth $20.38 for what they’ve announced so far. For me it’ll hinge on how much PvE they add since that is what I’m looking for. Right now all that we know is that its worth $1.74 to me. Now if they come up with half as much content as what GW2 launched with it’ll be worth $9 of the total price. Which brings it up to $27.88. If they bring in as much PvE content was was launched it would bring it up to $36.88. Now we’re getting into the ballpark of whether the expansion is worth the $50.

To be honest I find that I am weighing too much on the community and features, and a bit too much on the classes. So maybe its in a good place. But looking at this tells me I’m waiting till its released and seeing how much content is in there before I purchase. If it has as much 1/2 as much PvE content as launch I might go for it, if it has as much as launch then I most likely will. So I’m hoping that Arenanet gives us some sort of information. Like there will be: as much, half as much, less than half, much less than half as much content. I don’t want to be spoiled on the story, just an idea of how much new content is coming it, but from all the news it looks like it will be one or maybe two maps with three levels, which works out to around 10-20% as much content.

I don’t want to start another thread complaining about the price or not getting another character slot, what I’m wondering is the expansion worth $50 bucks, content wise?

So from what I know off hand I thought I would do a bit of an analysis on what we got with the original game for $50 and what we’re getting with the expansion.

In the original game we got:

• 8 classes
• 31 PVE Maps
• 6 dungeons
• 2 WvW Maps
• 7 PvP Maps (I think, I never do PVP so I may be wrong)
• community events and other features like living story, guilds, social stuff

To me who does PvE I would probably rank these in the following manner:
$10 for the classes
$18 for the PvE Maps and story
$6 for WvW
$6 for PvP
$10 for the community

So that means:

• $1.25 for each class
• $0.58 for each PvE map
• $0.33 for each Dungeon
• $3.00 for each WvW Map
• $0.86 for each PvP Map
• $10 for the community

What we know about HoT is:

• One new class
• At least one 3 layer maps, count as 3 maps
• One new Borderland WvW map
• One new PvP Map
• The community and other features (guild halls, gliders, etc)

So for me the expansion is worth:

• $1.25 for class
• $1.55 for PvE
• $3.00 for WvW
• $0.86 for PvP
• $10 for the community and other features.

That works out to $16.66. Well lets say that PvE will be great and as large as half of what we currently have, this brings the price to $23.11, but there has been no indication besides just having one map with three levels. So please tell me why is the expansion worth $50? Is WvW going to be much larger? Is PvP going to be much larger? As I said I only really do PvE and I may have missed the great and awesome things for those that justify the other $25-$35. Maybe I’m rating PvE too high, maybe I’m rating each class too low.

I’ll buy the expansion if I feel its worth it, but really for me right now as a PvE person I only see $13 if we rate the community and other features that high. I’m trying to feel good about putting down $50 + gold for the character slot. I love the game, I love the community, heck I even got into gw1 recently because I wanted to learn the back story more, but I can’t see paying 4-5x what the content is worth to me out of that love. As I said, please tell me why I should buy the expansion?

I guess I’m also asking for people to give their opinions on the worth of what we’ve been told has been added if its really worth it.

Best item I’ve gotten from the game at the time as the Exotic Sam 6 months before the collection. Went for 12 g, and by far the highest thing I’ve ever seen drop and I thought I had hit gold when I got it. Now its worth over 300g. Oh I also go the exotic Ulgoth’s tail before the collection system.

From the Mystic forge I did get The Legend after dumping in exotic and rare staffs for 6 months, and then did a run of over 120 one day to get it out. Oh and now that superior runes of divinity are worth less than a gold I’m getting them.

I watch another guy in the guild who has smaller MF (220 vs 256) than I do, doesn’t run with the boosters like I do get at least one exotic a day, I’m lucky to see an exotic drop a month. And my exotic drop is usually in the sub 1 G range, or if I’m really lucky in the 4 g range.

Another guy in the guild with sub 200 MF has found 6 precursors, 4 from drops, 2 from the mystic forge. Of course he has a fully loaded home instance too. I would if I was swimming in gold from precursor drops.

Most of my gold recently has been from my 5th character doing map completion and now my 6th, harvesting everything I can and selling it. Its not from mob drops. Though I suppose you could count the cloth as mob drops.

It might be interesting to add more wps to the map that are at least at 30 second run from keeps or towers. They become active when a commander is within range of it. And it doesn’t get controlled by either side.

It could make some interesting fights if three opposing sides get their commanders close to it and suddenly all three sides come in. Mass chaos, whoever can get their side organized first would probably win. Maybe to lessen the chaos have the WP spit the players out 1000 units away from the WP in the direction of their starting zone.

I just saw the news on the Revenant

Looks like the Hammer Revenant is going to be the very anti-ranged.

Coalescence of Ruin:

• This specific skill’s damage increases with distance.

Field of the Mists

• This skill creates a directional wall in front of your character, blocking incoming projectiles. Even better, it follows your character!

I think this is going to hurt people who like to play at range and force them into closer range.

I used to main a staff elementalist, but if I do play my elementalist and I see a revenant I’d have to run away. All the primary skills on staff are ranged projectiles. The other skills on the staff are slow cast AOEs that are easy to avoid and get out of.

It was bad enough that I switched to a staff guardian because trying trying to tag fast dying mobs just doesn’t happen for a staff elementalist. It came down to a slower skill rate on things like chained lightning (3/4 sec vs 1/2 sec for guardian), and the untargeted nature of the guardian 1 skill. I don’t know how many times I would fire off chained lightning (or any of the other #1 skills) on a mob only to have it die before the projectile get there and it not doing anything to any of the mobs because that one was dead. When using #1 on guardian it doesn’t matter if your target is dead when the wave its, it still damages 5 targets, and it casts much faster.

Oh well, I liked my Elementalist, but really its not as viable in PvE as it used to be, especially if a new class is getting thrown in that forces a squishy elementalist to come into melee. There’s probably going to be more PvE mobs that use these skills and more. I don’t do PvP but I assume its going to do something similar there.

My first set of ascended armor was a Celestial set with dolyak for my elementalist. It worked well in WvW and in Fractals. But then the various nerfs that were suppose to affect the Zerker meta nerved celestial more pushed me out of that armor and into Zerker armor with scholar. I still keep the Celestial armor around for when I need to switch to healing and conditions or survive-ability, and WvW. I’m almost exclusively PvE these days so the Celestial armor is getting dusty.

As Archon says its very hard to mix modes with the armor. Celestial used to be good for that, but not any more. Celestial might still be the meta for D/D elementalists in WvW, but its definitely not for PvE or fractals.

And I agree if I was forced to pick I would go with Zerker armor. And then stick with the zerg in WvW and hope someone drops some healing and make sure you have a fair amount of condi removals.

I remember when the changes were made that we were told that we would love the changes. Unfortunately the only reference I can find to it now (about a year later) is on reddit.

I don’t really love it. I do wish the mystic forge would stop trolling me though. I drop in 4 rare daggers (recently about 360 of them I forged), and got out 2 Usoku’s Needle, which shares the skin with Spark.

Out of the 90 combines I did pull out 20 exotics though.

I think there’s something seriously wrong with how the teams are balanced. I find the entire thing frustrating as I just played 5 losing matches in a row. It didn’t look like anyone from my team left but it was always 5 vs 3, or 4 vs 3. I was always on the team with only three players. One game when we were down 400:100 two players joined, and then just left. It might have been auto balancing that forced them onto the team. But this does not make a very fun experience when you are constantly outnumbered.

In PvE Celestial gear has more stats (if I remember correctly), but is subpar for any specific build. If you want full damage, you go with Berserker’s for instance.

On my elementalist I carry celestial gear, but its my secondary armor. My first set is zerker gear. I switch to my celestial when I have to fill another role in the party. For instance if the party is short on healing I’ll fall back put on the celestial and switch to water. If we’re short on condition, I’ll do the same and switch to earth. I don’t fill those roles that well, but better than if I was always running with zerker’s. So basically in PvE, celestial is good if you have to fill in for something that your primary armor set isn’t good for, basically it provides flexibility without having to lug around four different armor sets. Its a case of its not how big the stats are but how you use them.

I’ll probably go with an Asura for my revenant. Only because it sounds like the jungle is going to be full of jumping puzzles. And Asura definitely have the advantage there.

Playing as an Ele main I think they’ll give us a spear. Since the elementalist only has one under water weapon the trident they might be thinking we need some flexibility underwater. I’m being slightly cynical because of how they’ve treated elementalists in the past with the balance updates.

This can be both good and bad. We know there will be an aerial component to the expansion. What they haven’t said is if we’ll have aerial combat. If we do and its like water combat it might make the elementalist the master of the air if the specialization promotes it.

If its just for water combat then it would be a bit of a waste of time, since I don’t think water will be a bit portion of the expansion.

I had the same problem. Your husband probably has a full trading post. I had a couple of hundred greens on order in the trading post to boost my magic find. When I finally got those recycled (three grabs from the TP to get them all and 100 bad slots free), the green star came up.

It looks like the living world is delivered through the trading post. When you log in it gets added to the end of your TP queue, and it has to percolate up.

Most people seem to be arguing about hardware and technical matters on why GW2 won’t make it to the console. I’d like to add some more fuel to the fire by adding on some legal/compliance matters.

This will all be based off of my experience working for one of the largest publishers in the gaming industry for six and a half years. So take it with a grain of salt.

• Patching: Patching on a console is a royal pain in the butt. You can’t sign the patches for the game, you have to submit the patch to MS/Sony and get them to test it, sign it, and then post it. This normally takes 6-8 weeks. With the bi-weekly content and patch updates that GW2 have this won’t happen. MS/Sony can send out a patch faster than 6-8 weeks, I had one patch go to Sony get propped in 36 hours. And 1 week with MS. The first was mostly because Sony didn’t know what they wanted and changed it at the last minute forcing us to rebuild the patch. The second with Microsoft because we had a severe commerce bug that was losing MS and my company lots of money. Both of them were put up, but with the words ‘never again’. Unless Arenanet can bypass this process the current development/Living world model won’t work. Patching is also expensive. I don’t know the exact (I wasn’t in finance), but its something like $50k for the first or second patch (I think MS gives the first patch free), $100k for the second, and it keeps growing and growing and growing. This fee can be waived if the patch is to enable more micro-transactions (downloading a new DLC for instance)
• Patch Size: There use to be a 4 meg max patch size limit on the XBox360, this use to be a hard limit but they were able to work around it, by storing patches in different ways. Sony use to have a 1.9 gig limit on DLC and Microsoft a 2 gig limit. That was package size and couldn’t be worked around. There wasn’t a limit to how many packages you could have, but see my next point on total hard drive space. I don’t know the technical size limits on the PS4 and XBone, I left the industry 4-5 months before they launched, and didn’t really get into their commerce technical docs.
• Hard Drive Space: Both Sony and Microsoft limit the amount of hard drive space your title has access to. For the PS3 I think it was set at 5 gigs, and x360 it was gigs. I’m pretty rough on the numbers since I haven’t had to deal with it since 2011 when we initially looked at DLC sizes. We found we were well under and never approached the number and then forgot about it there after. For the XBone and the PS4 those numbers might increase. Though I believe this is a compliance limit, not a technical limit and can get negotiated away.
• Hard Drive Access: If you think your load times are slow now, wait till you see it on a console. MS and Sony are paranoid about data on the hard drive and want to make sure that cheaters can’t change anything. Even stuff cached to the hard drive needs to be encrypted, and every access checked for validity. This is SLOW. Again this might be better on the XBone and the PS4.
• Commerce: Microsoft and Sony are very fussy about how commerce is done on their systems. They would probably allow Money->Gem transfers, but much rather prefer virtual items. Also like everyone else in the industry they take 30% off the top. Refunds are a pain to deal with, think its hard getting a refund now? Wait till you have to talk to Microsoft and Sony, and then they have to talk to Arenanet to do a refund.
• Inter Console Play Microsoft hates Sony, Sony hates Microsoft. The fastest way for a game to fail compliance is to make a game play across the artificial barrier. They have no problem with the console talking to a PC, but if another 1st party console gets in there the kitten hits the rotating air blower. The negotiation to allow cross-platform would be complex. And would probably involve more lawyers than Arenanet has staff. If they only brought it out for only one console this wouldn’t be an issue.
• Game Play with Controller Both Microsoft and Sony want you to use their controller. They might allow you to use a keyboard, as long as you had an in game keyboard that people can use, and I think it only allowed for text input not game control. For compliance for the PS3, XBox360 I remember some checklist items that specifically banned using a mouse. Custom game controllers were frowned at, but allowed if negotiated for.

I’m sure there’s more I’m forgetting. I think the legal/compliance issues will be more limiting for GW2 to come out on the console than raw hardware power.

Leamas.5803:

Once you practice using the staff a bit, it’s not too bad, at least for a guardian, though I think guard might be a little faster. I’d suggest doing Plinx a bunch of times to work on timing.

I’ve actually been using my staff on my ele for close to 8 months. The problem is that 1 second casting time. Take FE Pre, with the inquest porting in. You hear the sound that they’re porting in. I hit my ‘del’ key which is bound to the closest enemy, and then 1. The fire ball goes off aimed at the inquest 1 second later. Hit 1 again to trigger the second fire ball. But even before the first fireball lands the inquest is at 1/4 points, and often I don’t even see damage coming up depending on how far away the inquest is. I definitely don’t have time to get the second fireball off before the inquest is dead.

That’s why I was looking at switching to dagger or scepter, shorter cast time, shorter travel time, better chance of getting enough damage to tag an enemy in.

I would probably switch to working on a different legendary. Ironically I am working on bifrost, and with mega server a staff weapon is too slow to tag anything. 1 second casting time on an ele means that by the time the projectile reaches the target its already dead.

I’m saying ironic because I had decided to switch to building dagger, focus and scepter and would you know it I pulled The Legend from the toilet last night. Oh well I guess I’ll build bifrost after all, just 6 runs of Arah away from getting it.

Mesmer, Necro, and Thief are 3 I haven’t really been able to get click yet. My mesmer is 80 though crafting mostly. My Necro is 22, and my Thief 33 or so. The only reason my thief is that high is because its the only Sylvari toon I have and I wanted the achievement for the personal story. Once I finish bifrost (6 more arah runs) I may blow the dust off my necro and give it another try.

Again its your play style and what you like. Warriors seem to be a good starting class, but some people leave it behind for other classes with more complex mechanics. Still I think I might go back and play with it later. I have plans on making three sets of ascended armour, light, medium and heavy zerks, and now that you can share them between toons I don’t see a reason why not to give it a try.

Earth Staff also has bleed on 2 and 5. And reflect on 3. Nothing I like more than to go up to some boss reflect and turn my reflect on as well. ‘How do you like reflect you kitten’. Not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, now is it.

Though with the number of enemies showing up with reflect it does make wielding a staff a pain. The main attack on all four elements gets reflected, everything that doesn’t get reflected has a long cool down, longer than the reflect usually lasts, so with a staff you can nova on a reflect mob and have to detarget so you don’t kill yourself waiting for the cool downs.

I started with a Warrior. Got to 80, moved to playing an Elementalist, gave up on it, went back to warrior. Played a ranger for a bit, gave up on it went back to warrior. Played an Engineer, gave up on it went back to Warrior. Left the game for 4 months. Started a guardian, got to 80, gave up the Warrior addiction. Played through the scarlet invasions. Put a commander tag on the guardian.

Putting the commander tag on the guardian was a mistake, cause then I went back to Elementalist to give it a try after the initial scarlet invasions (the ones that ran every hour). I now have a hard time leaving the elementalist. Really the only time I play the guardian now is when I need to use my commander’s tag for Guild Missions. Well I picked up the legend last night from the mystic forge, had 450 gold left over, and now my ele has a tag. I doubt I’ll ever use the guardian and warrior again in a big way.

I only use my engi now because he’s at 72% world completion, all that’s remaining is PvE, already done WvW, my guardian, warrior, and ranger all have world completion. And I only use them for crafting ascended items now.

It all depends on your play style and what you like to do. I loved playing the warrior tank who was his own AOE. Now I prefer playing the mobile ranged fighter, that can easily switch between roles. As people’s play styles change they’ll pick a new favourite class.

The other nice thing with ascended armor is that you can now share them between characters. That alone is probably worth 3x the cost. Still the cost is probably still too high, but being able to build one set of armor and share it between characters helps justify some of the cost.

well I came close to beating it again on a server with PUGs so it is doable. Came close because we had 3 minutes left, 1% health and my client crashed. No loot for me. So yes waiting on a server for 40 minutes really helps out your party as they run around doing SB, JW, and Golem II. But it doesn’t seem to help you since the game crashes just before you beat it. And I was going to get 2 more of those achievements too. Flawless Defense and fast foot.

Can you tell I’m bitter that the game locks up just at that point? Why yes I am.

I thought it was impossible too. Always getting there after SB, but Monday I beat it with a random group just after SB.

Of course this time I said to hell with protecting the people on the turrets, I’ll run one of the turrets and make sure its done right. Did that, had the camera set up right so I could see the other two turrets in case I needed to cleanse them, and we took down Teq with about a minute to spare. One of the happiest days I’ve had in GW2 recently. Got 3 achievements out of it too. Of course that was on the Northern turrets which are a lot easier to run than the southern turrets. And I had forgotten to pop my powerful potion of undead slaying.

But Teq is beatable with random people that show up right after SB. Its probably better as other said with showing up much much earlier and getting people who are prepared.

If you learn how to run the turrets, how to position the camera and how to shut off auto targetting, and make sure that everyone knows how to do it then Teq is beatable. It just sucks that the turret operators are so important and if you have crappy ones then you aren’t going to win, when you have a 100 man event that relies on just 6% of the people there to get it right, its so easy to get it wrong.

Luck, especially on the poison bursts can be real bad, and that can really screw up the event. If you aren’t coordinated on TS you can have a situation I had the other day. Three turret operators all see one turret hit by poison, cleanse it, and then a second one comes in and knocks out one of the turrets while cleanse is on cool down.

I’ve been running a modified Celestial/Staff build for a while now, and since the patch I haven’t really been having as much fun with it anymore. I’m from a low pop server (Kaineng), and the modified build was perfect for low pop PvE, able to do some damage, able to keep people alive, and fill in for condition damage when needed. But with Megaserver it really isn’t working out too well, staff is too slow to tag a mob hard enough and fast enough to get credit for it half the time. So I’m thinking of changing the build, I’m fairly mobile and pretty good at dodging so I’ve been considering a Zerk build. But the Zerk crowd kind of kittenes me off, the ‘zerk or go home crowd’ that harasses players till they leave. But if I can’t get the DPS higher to do enough damage to a mob I may have to go that way.

My current build

I do have some ascended berserker accessories on another character. 1 amulet, and 1 accessory. I haven’t picked up any zerker rings on fotm, but I do have one infused celestial ring in the bank.

So what do people think? Should I move more towards a full celestial build, changing the traits and such, or go with a full zerker build? And which builds would people suggest? I haven’t really found any outlined celestial builds since the patch so I’m not sure what I should go with. I’ve been thinking D/F or S/F, and hoping the casting time helps get enough hits on a mob in PvE to get credit for it.

I mainly do PvE Boss hunting (don’t like following a schedule but oh well), some dungeoning, and some fotming. I rarely do WvW, but sometimes I do.

I’m wondering if they also changed it so you only get loot from your home server main. I got loot last night after the reset because I was on my home server. This morning because my home server is dead I guested over to a more popular server and got nothing.

I’ll have to do an experiment tonight. See if I get loot multiple times in a row on my home server. And then in the morning when Kaineng is deader than a rabbit on ambient killer day I’ll guest over to another server and see if I get loot or not.

But it might not be that. going by http://www.gw2tp.com/item/50058-synergetic-assault-knight-power-core (zoom down to 1day supply and demand) you can see something happened last night at 8:51 pm when demand suddenly shot above supply. So it looks like the core drops have been removed.

The two in the spot light were lesbian romances. The one heterosexual romance that was pushed to the front was Logan and the Queen. I don’t use her name because its more like Fido and his master. The other heterosexual romances in the game weren’t really brought forward and there hasn’t been any development or character growth.

The Caithe and Faolin barely had any growth in it, and you only got to see that through some of the back story by the time you get to see it its all been hashed out and developed. Logan and Jennah has no growth. The only romance that has any sort of growth was Marjory and Kasmeer.

Of course the main characters don’t really have that much time to develop a romance. Interracial romance is still a hotly contested subject and I don’t think Anet is really ready to make that step, not like Star Trek was with the famous white/black kiss.

But look at the main characters:

Personal Story:
1. Caithe – Female Sylvari
2. Zojja – Female Asura
3. Eir – Female Norn
4. Logan – Male Human
5. Rytlock – Male Charr
6. Trahearne – Clinically depressed Male Sylvari

So we have 3 females and 3 males, and only Caithe and Trahearne are the same species, and really who’d ever see anyone hooking up with Trahearne, it’d be ‘This won’t end well.’ all the time. I don’t count Snaff because I don’t remember him actually being in the game anywhere and I never read the books. The other characters really didn’t have any sort of relationship besides Logan and Rytlock. The rest was just cliche hatred that wasn’t really explained in the game.

So we have the new Living Story:
1. Kasmeer – Female Human
2. Marjory – Female Human
3. Braham – Male Norn
4. Rox – Female Charr

I don’t count Taimi because she doesn’t really do anything for the story, and she’s a kid and doesn’t have anything to do with romance I hope. So we have two humans, a norn and a charr. If interspecies romance is out that leave the two humans. Since the party is loaded 3 (4 if you count Taimi) females to 1 male that leaves the only option being a lesbian romance.

So if you want a heterosexual romance with some growth and progression there needs to be more males in the main group of heroes. While there definitely are lots of heterosexual couples in the game they’re mostly static, and not given any growth. The only group I could see really hooking up for this is if Evon and Rox got together, but there’s been no hint of that. Or Anet takes the plunge and pushes an interspecies romance to the front for some sort of story arc.

I can see them moving it to once per day, but if that’s the case, then its a stupid, stupid decision. I was hoping to earn the cores for colouring my backpieces, I didn’t want to drop down gold for it in the TP. Before the latest patch I did 4 knights and got 4 sets of loot and only 1 core. After the patch I’ve done 4 knights and no loot.

I stayed with the game for over a year, I have over 8000 achievement points. I realize that the loot drops are terrible, I haven’t gotten my precursor yet for example. But if they’ve scaled back on the rewards AGAIN, requiring 10 cores per colour, and getting only maybe 3/4 of a core a day that means 40 days of this event that will only last 2 weeks. Forget it.

The frustration level is too high. I’ll probably check back after work to see if they’ve fixed the loot issue. But if not then I’ll probably tell my guild that I’ll be moving to another game when I find one. It depresses me that I have to do this. But it has just gotten too be too much.

If its geared to how much damage you do, then I guess the game doesn’t want you playing different builds. I run an elementalist in ascended celestial armor, traited to power and precision, with some left over for vitality. I can dish out the damage but not as much as others, and I can support and heal when needed better than those who can deal out lots of damage. But if this isn’t enough damage to get loot and I have to change to assassins or zerkers, than what’s the point? I don’t have the ~500 gold for another suit of ascended light armour, and I only have 4 of the thread in the bank, it’ll take me 32 days to make enough for another suit the event will be long gone by then.

Now I wouldn’t have minded dropping down some gold on the TP if I was short 1 or 2 cores to get the coloured backpieces. But with the loot drop rate the way it is now that 1 or 2 is now 21 if my luck holds out to 1 for every 4.

Another thing with the loot drop rate at once per day (as it feels, it might not be), we’re going to get a lot of people in after reset, maybe for 2 or 3 hours and then the event will be abandoned till the next day leaving those who work different times (night shift) SoL.

Khisanth.2948:

Durrik.4679:

One other way to really stop the zerging is to pool all the bags (not champ boxes) that are dropped. Every 10 citizens saved drops 1 bag per player on the map into the pool. At the end of the 45 minutes total up the time spent by all players on the map, and then divide up the loot based on that.

Oh and set the idle timer in LA to 5 minutes, so if you haven’t moved or done anything for 5 minutes you get booted back to the log in screen. Or put in a 1% rule. If the top player kills 500 mobs and you’ve killed less than 5 then you don’t get loot. Though the 1% still means that people only go out till they kill enough and then go hide back at the way point.

This will pool all the bag drops, so that those zerging help those saving citizens, and those saving citizens are helping those who are zerging.

So anyone who dc part way through is totally screwed.
Zerging is also the best option for getting the maximum number of kills. That is why it is so good for loot. What exactly are you trying to accomplish with your suggestion? Oh and if you think kill credit should be on last hit then anyone relying on condition damage is going to get heavily penalized.

The 1% thing would just encourage people to be more selfish. Why bother helping other people anymore? More dead players means fewer competition.

Maybe I should have explained the ‘add up all the time’ part a bit better.

Say you have 5 players, and 450 citizens saved, and 400 bags dropped from kills.

Player 1 & 2: full event 45 minutes
Player 3: Jumped in at 10 minutes and went to the end (35 minutes)
Player 4: Disconnected at 30 minute mark ( 15 minutes)
Player 5: Jumped in at 10 minutes and disconnected at 30 minute mark (20 minutes)

If you go with a even distribution of citizens saved, 10 per minute (for this example), there would be 160 bags added to the pot.

The chest at the end for the players would be:

Player 1 & 2: 157 bags
Player 3: 122 bags
Player 4: 52 bags
Player 5: 70 bags
because of rounding 2 bags out of the 560 didn’t go out, call it the house percentage.

The example was simplified, and you can do better data tracking and logging through out the entire event then just a couple of simple numbers.

But for this to really work you have to make sure that the people AFKing don’t get it, either set the AFK timer to 5 minutes like the Sanctum Sprint, or some other way of determining that the person hasn’t done anything during the event. Maybe something like counting how many hits a person got in on the enemy plus the number of citizens they rezed/encouraged and there’s a threshold. I don’t like the 1% idea I just don’t know of a better way to say things for it

One other way to really stop the zerging is to pool all the bags (not champ boxes) that are dropped. Every 10 citizens saved drops 1 bag per player on the map into the pool. At the end of the 45 minutes total up the time spent by all players on the map, and then divide up the loot based on that.

Oh and set the idle timer in LA to 5 minutes, so if you haven’t moved or done anything for 5 minutes you get booted back to the log in screen. Or put in a 1% rule. If the top player kills 500 mobs and you’ve killed less than 5 then you don’t get loot. Though the 1% still means that people only go out till they kill enough and then go hide back at the way point.

This will pool all the bag drops, so that those zerging help those saving citizens, and those saving citizens are helping those who are zerging.

There’s an easy way for us to handle the Tengu for this outrage.

They’re obviously not trading with us, and there’s a lot of missing opportunity there.

Here’s what we do, we build air ships. We find a Commodore named Perry to lead the air ships to open the gates for us. We’ll call it the Perry Expedition. It could be a whole new campaign for us, with cannons and gun boat diplomacy thrown in. After all we aren’t using that hug air ship with the mega laser we killed Zaitan with. At least I haven’t seen it around.

I personally think the tiers are done wrong. This has probably been suggested before but they should probably be set up like football. (soccer) leagues. Have 9 servers in a league 9, 6, 9) in NA, and have rotating matchups in the leagues every week. There’s a posibility of 504 different matchups, I believe (9 * 8 * 7). If you cap the ‘season’ at 9 matches each server will get to play each of the other 8 servers at least twice.

At the end of the season, the top two and bottom two servers in each league get promotions and demotions. This way if there are any big upsets like mass server transfers, it won’t affect things for too long as the servers will move around a bit.

This will ensure that there will be a different match every week (or two) and there will be a fight for e promotion to the next league and a fight to keep away from being demoted down a league.

Also if you keep a record of the matches and make sure one doesn’t happen twice (till the numbers run out) you’ll always have a different game. And if you come up with the schedule at the top of a season you might promote more strategy and scouting, perhaps allowing people to observer matches without affecting them? People may start training their guilds for specific anticipated matches in the future too. The goal is to promote different ways to play and more dynamic matchups.