Guild Wars 2

With respect to crafting: you have to assign some value to the materials used even if you already have them — you always have the option of selling the materials and buying a crafted item.

If you work out the costs, you’ll find you can almost always buy for less than it costs to craft the same thing, particularly if you are patient enough to put in a bid and wait.

Crafting is a mildly fun hobby, but it’s designed to be a black hole to prevent inflation in the game economy — nobody gets out of it what they put in.

Particularly if you level more than one char at a time (that use different types of armor) and share drops you’ll get more than enough to keep them all with their gear within 5 levels.

I read somewhere somebody’s analysis that said that to mitigate the most damage, health and armor should be balanced at 10:1 ratio. Following this mostly leads me to taking no toughness at all and as much vitality as I can get, because getting better armor as I level up scales up the armor faster than I can get vitality. The only class I have that needed to add toughness to make the ratio was warrior.

I wanted to check if this was still (or ever was) good advice. I’m not sure I understood the logic even when I read it the first time, but it seemed legit. The trouble is there are a lot of self-appointed experts that either aren’t right, aren’t right for me, or can’t be bothered to update their advice when the game changes.

I’m doing 100% PvE at the moment, but have 3 chars to level 80 (warrrior, ranger & ele) and need to start doing dungeons to get exotic equipment — the level 80 areas are tough for me to solo with the builds I have.

Thanks for all constructive opinions

There’s a stickied thread in this very sub-forum (3rd from the top) with a linked guide that is written specifically for AMD 5xxx graphics cards . Apparently there once was some kind of issue where things would get stuck in 2d/low-power mode even when playing 3d games. The guide is pretty clear with lots of screen shots, although it doesn’t explain the most basic things that you need to do along the way like how to open your control panel or catalyst control center or edit a file, so it does require you to know your way around windows a little, and to know some specs of your graphics card (like its max clock rate).

The 12/14 update fixed at least one of the things I mentioned above — The map progress bar changed color so the filled part of the bar is blue, that’s a very nice contrast with the white text.

Thanks!

There are some NPCs that have really annoying short-loop dialogs. I’m not talking about bad salad jokes, I’m more annoyed by event NPCs that repeat their challenge endlessly and over a really large area.

I’m not able to take a Champion event NPC solo, so there’s nothing I can do but put up with their verbal challenges, over and over and over and over and over very repeatedly repetiously without end.

For example, the ‘Capture the Infinity Coil’ NPC in Mount Maelstrom. He can be heard all throughout Infiite Coil Reactor, Gauntlet Gulch, Sunken Droknah, and Whitland flats. Completing the hearts, POIs and vistas in this area takes more than a few minutes, and you have to listen to ‘You know, your failure is only funny if you try’ over and over and over and over and over very repetitiously without end.

After the 100th time, I really really really don’t want to hear this dialog again ever again.

Of course I can set dialog volume to zero. That must be what the developers are trying to get me to do.

I have that very card — the DX, not the DX2 which is more common. I’m not having issues. Your issue sounds like a sound card driver crash to me.

I’m using windows 7 x64, and in the Device Manager windows tells me that the ASUS Xonar DX Audio Device is running driver version 7.12.8.1775 date 9/23/2009. (I knew I was running an old sound driver but that’s older than I thought! But never having any issues with sound on any game I’ve not been messing with it).

I have played CDs using windows media player at the same time as running the game, but not very much. You might want to experiment with a different player and see if that makes any difference.

I hope you find this info at least a little useful.

If you mix two minor and one major rune all of the same type, do you get the 3rd bonus? Or do you get the 1st & 2nd from the minors and the 1st again from the major? Or just the 1st & 2nd bonus?

Getting the 3rd bonus seems too good to be true, but I’d like to know for sure — it would certainly make getting that 6th bonus from exotic runes a lot cheaper.

Thanks for the suggestion! I had it set to Native. My main screen is 26" at 1920×1200.

I’d like to start a thread about things in the game’s UI that are hard to read. There are only a couple that I find difficult. Apologies if there’s already a thread for this and you have to merge this thread.

The places in the game where my eyes have trouble are all related to reading numbers. If text is a little unclear your mind usually automatically adjusts since people don’t read every character of every word anyway.

Where I have trouble with numbers is where the number is on a background with insufficient contrast. Here are three examples:

- Icons that have counts, and where the number is over a part of the icon that is using a light color. The basic salvage kit is the main one, though I think I’ve had some food stacks that gave me trouble in the past as well.

- Numbers on top of progress bars: On the world map display you have world completion and map completion, with the percent completed written right in the progress bar. The number is white text, and once you’re past 50%, it’s on an orange background. Lots of ways to fix this: change the color of the progress bar, use an algorithm to flip the text color to black for percentages over 50%, or move the number outside the progress bar.

- The numbers for the gold/silver/copper your char is carrying at the bottom of the inventory display. These are partially transparent, and over lots of backgrounds they are not contrasty enough to see well.

Note: If you are going to post “change your screen resolution”, “I’m 25 and I don’t have any trouble”, “you should stick your nose further into the screen”, or “you don’t need to read the numbers anyway, just see how full the progress bar is”, please just don’t bother, that’s all off-topic as far as I’m concerned — this thread is about everybody being able to see the numbers that are there to be seen. Thanks.

I reported it the first time I came through that heart with a char, I wondered when I came through the second time if maybe I was missing something. Since you get no feedback on reports as to whether they’re confirmed bugs or not, I posted here.

@synk I think you’re pessimistic on that percentage, but I do agree that the number of bugs in hearts & events and really all kinds of ‘trigger’ related things is too high. FWIW I liked the most recent update (dec 3 was it?) — almost all bug fixes. Another 5 to 10 updates like that without any more intervening buggy content dumps and I’ll be enthusiastically recommending the game to my friends.

I can select the drunk, get a green ring on him, and hit 1. The animation shows the water being poured way off from the ring, but the drunk mumbles something, but doesn’t wake up. I’ve tried at least 10 buckets in a row, still comatose.

In Timberline Falls the “Partake in the moot” heart has several actions you can do, one of them is ‘rouse passed-out partiers’. It seems clear how this should be done, there are buckets of water and that works for the same objective in other hearts.

But pouring water on the passed-out drunks doesn’t wake them up. I’m thinking this is a bug, but was wondering if someone found some way that I missed (and the buckets are just a decoy). Even the wiki doesn’t say how to do it….

Bugged on Yak’s Bend.

This screen was just south of the Toran Hollow vista in Dredgehaunt Cliffs, looking south back toward the Bear’s Jaw shrine (at left of pic).

There is some kind of white thing flying around, doing laps basically. It looks like a vertical white bar with a contrail. In the cap it’s top center of the screen, moving up and about to go out of frame.

What the heck is that supposed to be?

There’s something similar in Wayfarer foothills south of the Heart of the Bear point of interest, except that one’s black rather than white.

I know the mechanic has always been that if you have aggro, your character doesn’t heal. Also, I know that you have to run a long way away from anything that has once aggroed you, long past the point at which it stops chasing you, to get its aggro released so you can heal.

But lately (like since the 11/15 patch), there have been several times where I’ve killed everything that ever aggroed me, and still my character hasn’t healed. Its as if some monsters aggro, but never chase you, they don’t know they’re aggro’ed on you, but the heal mechanic thinks you are aggroed.

Anyone else seen this?

Updating my post on page 4 of this thread — I went back and tried again and got through Armaments without going down. I’ve been watching update notes for anything about armaments or thief skill balance changes that I thought would make a difference and I hadn’t seen anything, but I strongly suspect that the boss in “Armaments” got nerfed — ahem, “tuned”.

I did a few things differently/smarter this time:

- I used steal because in the mean-time I’d learned what it did (I thought it stole coppers or something so wasn’t using it before). I was hoping to steal the bosses summon-dredge ability, but I didn’t steal that, I got a mace attack instead.

- I ate a boost-precision consumable ahead of time

- I had added the Mad Memories: Complete Edition backpack

- I think I’d gained 3 levels since my prior attempt due to exp gained while getting the backpack.

I think that either that mace ability I stole was really powerful, or the bosses hitpoints have been significantly reduced, because all I did was hit “thieve’s guild”, “call wurm”, “Steal”, use the stolen mace attack, and when I looked at the bosses hp he was down 75% already. I went into heartseeker spam and he went down after 3-4 of them.

Now I was a level 33 thief doing a level 22 story quest, so I think “easy” difficulty is what it should have been, so I don’t think they over-nerfed this boss, but if it is that easy for on-level players then it maybe got over-nerfed.

As far as kiting goes (several posts above suggested that), once the boss spawned I ran away to get all my skills ready, and he followed me a very long way, and I almost ran out of room before he stopped chasing me. Another difference this time was that when he stopped chasing he didn’t return back to the cave and he didn’t summon a whole new crop of dredge. One dredge followed me even further and I killed it before taking on the boss, who was by then alone. So one possibility is they changed the cooldown on his summon skill, because I don’t think he used it after I started running away.

The final build I got him with was 0/10/0/10/0 (+3 unspent trait points), dagger/pistol + shortbow (I only used the shortbow getting up to the boss), with Hide in Shadows, Call Wurm, Spider Venom (never used it), Signet of Agility (never used the active ability) and Thieve’s Guild.

I post this info because the thread’s OP was about the Armaments quest, even though it got very highjacked into a non-thief-specific direction (and away from the OP’s mentioned story missions too).

Thanks, I found that Agent Carter was wanting them, and giving them to him both gave me some credit toward “Help sply on the Crafty Corsairs” (which I hadn’t completed) and started the ’Free an Order of Whispers agent from pirates" dynamic event.

I have a couple Pirate Outfits that I got from somewhere in Bloodtide Coast, I think. They are unusual in that they have white text, not gray, are marked Trophy, are not salvageable, can be traded at the BLT Corp and do not seem to be event-bound or collectable by a renown-heart NPC (there’s no text that says so-and-so is interested in them, anyway). The tooltip for them just says “Pirate Outfit / Trophy / 6 copper”. They are not on the gw wiki page under Trophy. They certainly aren’t the gem-store skins, and they can’t be equipped. They’re apparently quite common, as there are nearly 40,000 of them available at the BLT Corp for 7 coppers each. Selling all junk at a vendor does not sell them.

Does anyone know in what these are good for?

I ran into this a month or two ago, and found something somewhere that indicated it was a known bug (maybe not on these forums). A couple weeks later I was back and tried again and was able to get in and harvest the cabbage. If it’s broken again they’ve regressed a fix.

Speculation: Maybe it’s intermittent and I got lucky the one time, access could be dependent on a bugged event or something.

Armor art UFO: I applied the Heavenly Medium Bracers PvE skin (from GW1 legacy) to a pair of gloves for my ranger. The blade part of the left glove has a major placement issue, the screenshot shows it against the sky between the left elbow and the building. I’ve colored the gloves Limette for the screenshot for visibility, and removed coat and weapons.

I must be misunderstanding your complaint — it looks to me like you haven’t dyed all parts of your armor black, as each piece except the shoulders has a part set to brown.

You have to drop dye into each of the 2-3 rectangles to the right of the armor piece icon… If you already knew that then I don’t understand what you want to be different.

Draethos is the waste of space. If you invoke the game with documented, supported options the trading company should work. There is no reason for anyone to assume that running the game with vertical field of view enabled should cause the trading company to report invalid auth.

FWIW I get one of two different errors, either the “invalid authorization” in big caps or a popup with ‘unable to access the login server, code 10:45:6:62:101. Logging out and back in will usually change which error I get, but not that I can’t access the BLTC.

For me, this all started with the 11/15 patch.

It seems to me to depend a lot on the monster type. Drakes in queensdale (whichever kind of drake that is) do it a lot, and there are other aquatics that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it happen for (barracuda for example).

I had it happen yesterday on land with a Jotun. He was one of the ones in Dredgehaunt that normally is sleeping in one of those half-huts.

I think it is really annoying, stupid, immersion breaking and just not fun.
+1.

But the summary on the left says 16/18 poi’s. The game must have reverted 2 of your visited poi’s. Are you saying every poi on your map is showing filled in if you scroll around and check them, in spite of the total showing only 16/18?

I have been wielding a shortbow with a sigil of battle, and on weapon switch an axe and warhorn, both with sigils of battle. I’m not getting the might buff all the times that I switch weapons.

- I never get might when switching to the bow
- I get 2 stacks of might when switching to the axe+warhorn (not 4 stacks). There’s an orange buff icon that has a 2 on it and says might when I mouse over it.
- If I equip some other offhand instead of the horn, I don’t get any might when switching to the axe.
- If I equip the warhorn but some other main hand weapon instead of the axe I don’t get any might when switching to the warhorn.
- If I equip the axe & warhorn with some other non-sigil bow, I still get just 2 stacks when switching to the axe/warhorn.

Based on my testing, this is not just an undocumented cooldown. It seems like the sigil is sort of working like half a sigil — I need two of them to get the two-stacks effect, one by itself on either a two-handed weapon or on just one of a pair of one-hand weapons doesn’t do anything.

FWIW I have the Ranger ‘Tail Wind’ trait and I get the swiftness buff from that on every weapon switch.

Has A-net ever said that there will never be any use for the junk items (gray text drops)? In GW1 there was no use for monster parts initially, but when events came around there were collectors for them, and after a couple years they added Nicholas the Traveler.

I have been holding on to all my junk stuff waiting to see if there would be any halloween event collectors, so now I’m thinking of ditching it all, but I’d be unhappy if I did and they added collectors at the Wintersday event.

Aleaf.8174:

Eastwind.7209:

GregT.4702:

Total length of Halloween event = 10 days.
Time needed to level character from 1 to 80 from a fresh start = 7 days.
Time needed to level character from 1 to 80 if you already have crafting mats for cheap XP = 1 day.

I’m not sure I see the problem?

Then don’t see the problem if you don’t want to. Do I tell you how you should enjoy the game? If you enjoy skipping all the content and rushing to the end so you can get out of PvE as soon as possible that’s your choice.

I like to play and enjoy the game the way I think it was intended: fighting the mobs you’re supposed to fight (like the champion spider at book 6), figuring out the puzzles (like the pressure plate one which I didn’t get to enjoy on my first char because it was already solved) and exploring the maps. I’m not interested in spoiling a $60 A title in 7 days, having friends baby me through challenges, looking up all the solutions and directions on the web and then moving on to whatever title comes out next month.

I spent literally thousands of hours playing GW1 over the years, and I expect to spend a lot of time in GW2, so I’m in no rush to get to level 80 — my chars are levels 45, 35, 39, 30, and 43 on my main account and 8, 6, 12, 7 and 9 on my mule account, and I’ve played 372 hours on the main account over 58 days. I haven’t explored Harathi with any chars yet.

What I was originally complaining about was that we weren’t told that this quest was not designed for levels 1-15. That’s not to claim you can’t get through it as a level 9, even solo/naked, but you can’t tell me that was the dev’s intent. I think they intended that the quest be too hard for levels 1-15, yet they advertised the quest to everyone in LA and make it seem like it’s going to be 100% no combat at first.

I don’t expect or want all the parts of the special event to be appropriate for all levels, or all the awards to be stuff we all get, I just think they should make it clear what’s what before you spend time on something you aren’t intended to be able to complete.

Is it really to much to ask that they put a level number on the event like they do for every other event in the game?

You got the first book no? Then there’s your reward. You went as far as your level could carry you. The higher level book is for players of higher levels(Hence the stats on it).

And lastly, the game has been out for two freaking months. How are you not at least lvl 40 yet?

And I don’t think ANet should have to explicitly say with huge font that X Event is for X Level. Go figure it out yourself. You have a brain and a heartbeat no?

Read my post. Say “oh”. Move on.

GregT.4702:

Total length of Halloween event = 10 days.
Time needed to level character from 1 to 80 from a fresh start = 7 days.
Time needed to level character from 1 to 80 if you already have crafting mats for cheap XP = 1 day.

I’m not sure I see the problem?

Then don’t see the problem if you don’t want to. Do I tell you how you should enjoy the game? If you enjoy skipping all the content and rushing to the end so you can get out of PvE as soon as possible that’s your choice.

I like to play and enjoy the game the way I think it was intended: fighting the mobs you’re supposed to fight (like the champion spider at book 6), figuring out the puzzles (like the pressure plate one which I didn’t get to enjoy on my first char because it was already solved) and exploring the maps. I’m not interested in spoiling a $60 A title in 7 days, having friends baby me through challenges, looking up all the solutions and directions on the web and then moving on to whatever title comes out next month.

I spent literally thousands of hours playing GW1 over the years, and I expect to spend a lot of time in GW2, so I’m in no rush to get to level 80 — my chars are levels 45, 35, 39, 30, and 43 on my main account and 8, 6, 12, 7 and 9 on my mule account, and I’ve played 372 hours on the main account over 58 days. I haven’t explored Harathi with any chars yet.

What I was originally complaining about was that we weren’t told that this quest was not designed for levels 1-15. That’s not to claim you can’t get through it as a level 9, even solo/naked, but you can’t tell me that was the dev’s intent. I think they intended that the quest be too hard for levels 1-15, yet they advertised the quest to everyone in LA and make it seem like it’s going to be 100% no combat at first.

I don’t expect or want all the parts of the special event to be appropriate for all levels, or all the awards to be stuff we all get, I just think they should make it clear what’s what before you spend time on something you aren’t intended to be able to complete.

Is it really to much to ask that they put a level number on the event like they do for every other event in the game?

Who said anything about being entitled? I’m offended by that remark. I simply want to be told ahead of time I’m not ready for something.

What about Act III? Is it over after Act II or is there more? Maybe the end of it requires a level 80 solo fight? What’s the use in running it if I get something I can’t use because I’m too low level?

I haven’t explored Harathi Hinterlands on any character, so you’re advising me to basically spoil the whole map by using an online map to figure out where to run — or else you’re advising me to try and explore an entire level 45-55 map naked.

And for what? What do I get at the end? A level 80 back brace I won’t be able to equip for weeks or months?

Was it ever mentioned anywhere that you had to be a high level character to complete this quest? I now find out I wasted all my time spent on this over the last week. Boo on Anet, and thanks for nothing.

Every time I play a jumping puzzle where the thing zooms in so close I can’t see where I am I wish I was playing a smaller character. So it goes both ways. Not that they shouldn’t fix both issues.

I found a cauldron in Queensdale, and turned into a pink flamingo. But there was an event in progress so I used skill 6 to go back, and my damage was way down from before. I’m an ele using a staff, so I tried atuning differently, no change. I equipped a different weapon and then back and it was ok again, back to taking off at least 1/2 the health of the low-level mobs I’m farming with one shot, instead of them needing more than 10.

@Veldan, I think its just a few of the storyline quests that are too tough. I have been getting through almost all on the first try with all my characters — except this thief on the two quests I mentioned. One thing in particular making Accusation hard for thieves is that the mobs are immune to blindness. Since I wrote my post above I got all level 30 gear, maxed out runes and jewelry for Toughness, swapped my Dagger/Pistol for Dagger/Dagger (since the Dagger/Pistol has two useless blind skills), swapped for more quest-specific utility skills and I still got pwned. As in after the golem had taken down all my summons he two-shotted me, with the first hit doing 3/4 of my health. What’s really sick is Accusation is a chosen quest, I could have taken the alternative, but I’d already done that with my ranger (and breezed through it). Too bad I can’t go back and re-choose. In most MMOs you can abandon a quest, but not in the storyline.

I also noticed, I think, that the golem got some healing somehow, I think had him down to 1/4 and then he was full again, but maybe that was not the golem. Whatever, Accusation is just abusively difficult, for thieves. Btw, in this face-off you’re in a small cave with no room to kite. You can kite out of the tunnel, but you run out of real estate quickly that way too as all you have is a thin strip of land to kite in.

I have two accounts and am playing all 8 classes through as many of the storyline quests as I can, and in general I can get through the storyline quests when my char is at the intended level with level appropriate gear (maybe a little better than typical, because of hand-me-downs and drops from the other chars which are sometimes a few levels higher).

But there have been two missions which have just been impossible for me, and the OP is talking about Armaments (level 22), which is one of them. The other was The Championship Fight (level 19). And the character I was having trouble with was also a Thief. I haven’t tried these missions with other chars.

A lot of the advice being given here is good general advice that doesn’t work in these two quests.

Take kiting. In armaments the boss is a golem that spawns dredges, 3 at a time. You can kite, and eventually you can separate the dredges from the golem, but you can’t separate the dredges, they’re linked so if one aggros they all do. If you perhaps can kill 3 dredges that are higher level than you, when you return to the golem you’ll find he’s summoned 3 more. Kiting flat out fails.

In The Championship Fight the guy you have to kill has a warp-to-enemy-and-smack-him skill that recharges in a couple seconds. I wasn’t able to kite successfully there either, even with speed boosts.

As for whittling down, that’s out for these two quests also. The golem summons 3 more dredges faster than I can whittle.

To get past The Championship Fight, I went out and surfed for Thief PvE builds, and the best thief advice is the dagger/pistol + shortbow build that OP is using. I switched to that and still had trouble with The Championship Fight, so I posted in the Thief forum and asked for advice and was basically told “everyone has trouble with that, other professions too”. So I just went off and leveled my thief up to level 30 before coming back. That got me the elite Thieves Guild skill, and with that I got past The Championship Fight because the boss whittled the minions while I took him out. I also partly got lucky, because I was able to backstab him. Usually he turns around so fast you can’t get behind him, but combined with Hide in Shadows I managed it.

I haven’t gotten past Armaments yet but I can improve my armor a bit so I will and try again before I say its totally impossible.

Also I don’t have a rebuttal for the point about dodging. I admit I’m not good at dodging, I’m over 50 and my reflexes aren’t the same as when I was 20. With a pile consisting of my character, two shadow thieves, the golem, 3 dredge and my Wurm all throwing stuff around, I can barely see the golem let alone catch when he’s winding up and get my dodge off in time. And the guy is taking all the minions down really fast and then taking me down in about two shots. He seems way overpowered for level 22 characters.

So I think the thief is just very (maybe totally) reliant on dodging, and if you aren’t great at it, hang it up and reroll, or wait for them to buff some skills or something. I think anet is faced with the problem of trying to make the thief not too uberpowered in PvP while not making him too underpowered in PvE where it’s many to one against you. Unless they go the way they did with GW1 and have separate skills, its going to stay a non-competitive PvE class for many players.

That’s it! All I needed was to add -nopatchui after the password:

-email joebiden@whitehouse.gov -password 55555 -nopatchui

Thanks very much for that secret piece of information (I looked all over the web and didn’t see that anywhere). I’ll update the gw2w wiki.

PS: Who’s Pat Chui anyway??? (j/k)

I can’t get the -email and -password command line parameters to work for me, have they been disabled?

I’ve tried many ways of quoting the parameters, nothing works for me, those fields are blank when the launcher comes up.

I’m running Win 7 x64. I’ve installed GW2 to a non-default hard drive but in the default location on that drive: “I:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe”. That shouldn’t be a problem as the launcher is found no problem and the game runs fine.

For example, I’ve tried this format:

“I:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars 2\Gw2.exe” -email joebiden@whitehouse.gov -password 55555

Thanks for all the responses and good suggestions, I decided to just level a bit more and get lvl 25 equip and try again (a few more times) later.

I’ve got a Norn theif up to level 23, and I’m stuck on his personal story quest “The Championship”, where I have to go 1v1 with Mikkel Toivosson (level 19 quest). I’ve got decent equipment for my level, since this is an alt with plenty of hand-me-down drops. I’ve tried a couple of builds, and can never take off more than about half of Mikkel’s health bar before being downed.

I am not fast enough to keep him off me and he turns so fast I have not been able to land backstabs. I’m going down in about 30 seconds, so I only get to use each 6-0 skill once, though I’m not that dextrous at hitting those keys with my left hand anyway.

I’m feeling like I’m simply not good enough to play a thief, and that’s not a fun place to be.

Latest build I tried is this: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fYAQNAoaVlUmCPHcS6E95Ex2jeqTe6zgsjV/ANB;TsAg0CnoixEjIGbMuYkxssYYxECA

with 0/10/0/3/0 and Power/Precision and some vitality bonuses on equipment.

Helpful advice appreciated.

I’m a lvl 30 ranger and am catching up on the storyline quests, I need to choose my order. Since this is one of the few (the only?) irrevocable decision you make on the way to lvl 80, I’d like to know factors that influence the decsion.

I should add that I’ll be spending 90%+ of my time as a solo PvE player, ‘cause that’s what I like, the other 10% would be dungeons when I get to them.

Based on the quests so far, I’m guessing it doesn’t make a big difference on the quests.

It seems to me that the difference is mainly what Order armor you can get (how it looks and what stats it has).

What did you choose and has it mattered or been ‘wrong’ for you in some way?

TIA