Showing Posts For Flax.4980:
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I agree that the average stuff you get from the chests are not worth spending real money on. Having new skins that are only obtainable through the chests is a step in the right direction, but like everything else currently desirable in these chests they are just too kitten rare.
Making some things be sometimes non-account bound would mean we could buy stuff off the tp that usually would cost gems, which is bad for Anet.
Personally I would just like to see at least something new and useful that is unique to black lion chests but not too rare. For example something like the 250 use salvage kits from Lionguard Lyns would be nice; It’s unique and useful but not special enough to have to be a rare drop.
Bloods and scales give the (arguably) most popular stats (Berserker’s and Knights respectively), which is likely why their price is so much higher than some other T6 mats. Either that or they’re just harder to find, or maybe a combination of both.
In any case many people are always wanting armored scales for their legendaries and those people tend to be richer and less picky with prices (if they weren’t then precursors wouldn’t stay so expensive). All it takes is one really rich person to exploit this.
Someone may have said this already, but a big reason why surveys can be inaccurate is because you only get data from the people that want to do the survey. In this case I imagine that there will be an unnatural proportion of people who were either very lucky opening a small number of chests or very unlucky opening a large amount and felt compelled to tell someone about it.
I imagine the best way to get a good average from this thread is to only take data from those people who opened hundreds of chests at once, as they will likely want to post their results whether they got a skin or not.
If SAB is a one time only event then yes of course the skins will rise in price and anyone with patience could make a lot of money buying skins during April.
However since SAB has received such positive feedback it would be very surprising if Anet didn’t release extra content for it at some point. Whether buying skins will be a good long term investment or not will really depend on if and when they decide to announce that new content will be released.
Game Over
I absolutely loved my time spent in the box. However a big part of the fun and reward of playing it for me comes from knowing that it won’t be there all the time.
That said I really really really hope they at least bring it back every so often with new worlds to play and more skins and/or other rewards associated to it.
If it was to be made permanent then in my opinion it would need some kind of “ultra hard mode” or some other mechanic to give it more replay value since at the moment the only reason to go back in is to grind for skins or get the achievements.
The reason you only get one stack of might is because empowering might as an internal cooldown of about one second. Even if you did 100 crits in one second you would always just get one stack of might.
In the best case scenario empowering might allows you to keep up 5 stacks of might on yourself and nearby allies. In practice this would more likely be 3 due to dodging, not always getting crits etc. Of course this can be improved by having boon duration bonuses.
More MF = more T6 materials + cores + lodestones + rares + exotics. When I pick up one of these things it makes me smile. When I pick up gold I feel nothing.
Choose happiness! Choose magic find!
I’m not sure on this but since t6 mats are only of “fine” rarity and heavy bags (and the like) are of common rarity, wouldn’t mf be counter productive?
An interesting thought. This is the way that I thought looting worked:
- Monster is killed.
- A dice is rolled to determine what category of item will be dropped (including nothing).
- A dice is rolled to determine the rarity of the item in that category, with higher magic find giving a direct % increase to the chance of getting a higher rarity tier. For example if we were in the sword category the different tiers would be {basic sword, fine sword, rare sword, exotic sword}. Another could be {globby gloop, potent venom sac, powerful venom sac} and similarly for other fine crafting materials.
If this is how it works then more MF would not affect the number of heavy bags dropped since there’s no rarer version of a heavy bag.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a dev say that loot drops work like this but I could be wrong. The point is that having more MF will give you better item drops but not more item drops since it doesn’t decrease the chance of a mob to drop nothing.
More MF = more T6 materials + cores + lodestones + rares + exotics. When I pick up one of these things it makes me smile. When I pick up gold I feel nothing.
Choose happiness! Choose magic find!
That fixed it!
Thanks for the quick reply! Now I just need to figure out how on earth I can get 450 more keg recoveries…
From the recent patch notes:
“Fixed a stalling bug that prevented some players from completing the Keg Brawl Kegmaster achievement.”
I was excited to see this, especially since titles are now more visible. However my Kegmaster progress bar still says I have just mastered 1 skill when I’ve actually mastered 3. I finished “Kegs Scored” and “Keg Fumbles Caused” ages ago but still don’t have credit for it.
I would have reported this in game but couldn’t seem to find any subcategory relating to achievements in the bug report menu.
I always have at least 5 points in virtues. The extra might + regen + protection for the whole team is sweet. Going 10 into virtues is definitely useful for fractals since you’ll be using wall of reflect a lot. My main issue is that reflects are situational and there isn’t really a good substitute major trait for consecrations (unless you use spirit weapons, which I rarely do).
I’d either go 0/5/30/30/5, 0/0/30/30/10 or 0/15/30/20/5. Spamming justice is incredibly fun and can be very powerful sometimes (blind spam on worms in grawl fractal boss for example). That said there are also plenty of bosses where you can’t get kills to activate renewed justice and I love pure of voice too much to not put 30 into honor at the moment.
Very situational and not all that effective given the fact you have to complete auto chain with hammer for it to be effective thusly almost always having the light field taking precedence when you want to mighty blow. Of course you can just not complete or move and put the fire field in a different area, but it’s too much of a hassle for what you get out of it.
It’s not as hard as you may think. When you do a combo finisher it always uses the oldest field if there is more than one active, so if you put down Purging Flames or Hallowed ground before you start your hammer chain (or a few seconds after a finished chain) then every Mighty Blow will give might stacks for the duration of the consecration (unless other people’s fields were there before yours).
The main problem I find with doing this is that you’re pretty much using up two ulities to just give you extra might. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with some extra stability and condition removal but they’re very unreliable for many situations due to the long cooldowns (even when traited). I prefer to just use them in the situations when their primary effect is needed and take the extra might stacks as a bonus.
That said if you’re playing in an organised party who help each other with conditions + healing and the likes (I mostly do PUGs or casual guild runs so can’t always rely on others) then having a guardian built purely for stacking loads of might wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.
Since they modified boss chest loot the rate of precursor drops should have increased greatly. If anything because so many more people are doing these events all the time.
Personally I’m not even considering going for a legendary until the precursor scavenger hunt arrives (unless I somehow find the one I’m looking for). I would much rather spend 600g on permanent contracts, fancy armors and gems as I’m in no rush to get a legendary.
That said I am gradually saving up all the other things I need since the price of these things will skyrocket on the day precursors become easier to obtain.
Uncontested in Gandara! (EU)
Since the buff to the ascended gear that give all stats, I have planned to get these for my guardian. Ascended berserker jewellery does has a good trade-off of crit damage to regular stats however (less than 10 stat points lost per 1% crit damage), and would be my second choice. Here is why I prefer all stats to berserker in the case of rings:
Since I prefer not to go full dps, I like to have my gear giving me lots of power, lots of precision, lots of toughness and enough vitality. Call these ‘useful stats’. I also want some crit damage when I think it’s a good trade-off. I will try to get as much of these stats as I can from my jewellry and fill the gaps with my armor.
Berserker ring gives:
171 useful stats + 8% crit damage
All stats ring gives:
172 useful stats + 6% crit damage + 43 healing power + 43 condition damage + 4% magic find.
In my opinion, 43 healing power + 43 condition damage + 4% magic find is worth more than 2% crit damage, so I will use the all stats ring.
Of course if you don’t want any vitality and feel you have enough toughness from your armor and/or traits then you wouldn’t treat the four ‘useful stats’ as equal. But if you know you’re going to at least need some vitality and extra toughness then going for all stats is definitely not a bad choice.
The price of mystic coins started coming down from around 15s in January. My guess is that most people who bought the game from release and wanted a legendary had finished by the end of Christmas (or gave up due to precursor prices) and so the demand went down. We’ve heard that there’s been a lot of new players coming to the game this year, which means there’s likely more people selling coins.
However once a higher ratio of people reach the “end game” of acquiring fancy weapons, the demand will rise and the prices no doubt increase. I used to sell coins before I had a use for them, but now I always hoard them. Plus any announcement about new legendaries or the precursor scavenger hunt will likely cause prices to skyrocket.
In my opinion they’re definitely a safe investment. The question, as always, is how long term an investment it will be.
“Guild Wars 2 isn’t one of those games that masquerades as free-to-play but is really designed so that you can’t get far without having to buy lots of microtransactions. We recognize that customers paid $60 for the game and they have the right to play the full game. So the microtransactions we offer are non-essential additions to the game and convenience services for players who want to trade money for time.”
-Mike O’BrienHehe, its all optional ^^
Yea, I haven’t run into anything on the black lion store that wasn’t optional, so that’s one of the few quotes from O’Brien that seems to still hold true.
Yes it is very true that buying black lion keys is an expensive optional luxury. It’s just a shame that this is this case since the permanent contracts are very desirable items. I would actually rather have a permanent self-style hair kit over any legendary heh.
It seems that most people here who said they’ve bought keys decided afterwards they’d never do it again. It could be that keys are priced how they are to make money from newer players who are too curious to find out what’s inside those mysterious chests that keep dropping.
Obviously ArenaNet know how many people are buying keys and will probably make adjustments to the current system if they think people aren’t buying enough. However I would love to see some kind of change. Opening chests with the possibility of permanent contracts is actually pretty fun, but might as well not exist at the current key price and drop rate.
Lowering the price of keys or improving the drop rates of useful items from chests could just make the gem prices rise to compensate. I think they should either increase the drop rate of keys or add some new way of getting an extra key every so often. That way we all get to enjoy opening chests more often, but the people who want to open lots at the same time can still send ArenaNet their money.
I’m curious.
As it stands it seems to me that the average stuff you get from a black lion chest is no where near worth the price of keys from the gem store.
The only real incentive is the chance of getting one of the permanent contracts or the endless tonic. However the chance of getting these seems so small that I’m not even tempted to dish out loads of gold for a gamble; I can’t help but feel I will be very disappointed.
At the moment the whole black lion key system is pretty unsatisfying. I know ArenaNet need to sell gems to keep the game running, but do many people actually spend them on keys? Would they not sell more gems if keys were at a reasonable price?
I love keg brawl. But like most things in this game I only really enjoy spending time doing something if I feel like I’m progressing towards something. In the case of keg brawl it is earning the title “Kegmaster” (assuming that the bug will be fixed some time).
However this currently seems almost impossible to get in any reasonable length of time without somehow “farming” certain actions with friends.
For example, I’m currently sitting on 200/500 wins but only have 16/500 keg recoveries. Even when actively trying to catch dropped kegs, it seems fairly random which nearby person gets the recovery.
Getting keg assists is also quite unnatural when playing with random teams (which is all the time). Currently the best way to get these is to pass the keg to a teammate last minute when you usually could have just scored yourself.
I’ve noticed some people say they have managed to finish all these achievements. Would love to hear how people did it!
At the moment I’ll just be getting amulets + utility infusions for all my active characters. Until they introduce other ways to get ascended amulets that’s all I’ll be spending my laurels on.
I really don’t see why rings cost 35 laurels when you can get them for 10 fractal daily tokens. Should rings not be easier to get than amulets? Seems a bit unfair on the people who don’t enjoy fractals.
I thought you gain influence for your guild, regardless of server?!?
You do but it is server specific. So you will not get the benefits of the guild that it has on 1 server if you are alone on another. You would still get to see gchat, dungeons, ect but the only influence and perks you get are the ones on the server you are located on.
So basically if you’re home is just for WvW and guest is for guild you’ll just miss out on the guild bonuses when you’re in WvW.
I’ve realised that by having “two home servers” you’re reducing your flexibility to guest on other servers since you can only have 2 guest servers at any one time. Can’t decide yet whether that’s worth sacrificing to have a better WvW experience.
In any case I’m hoping the new WvW updates will encourage a lot more people to play WvW on all servers.
Since we will soon have to pay to make a server transfer, It would be very much appreciated If someone could provide some more info about the differences between playing on your home server and guesting on another server.
More specifically, is there any reason why we shouldn’t pick one server (the home server) for WvW and another (guest server) for everything else?
I’m very happy with my guild and server in all ways except WvW, so it would be nice to be able to play in a more populated WvW server and guest on my guild’s server for PvE. I’d essentially be still playing on the same server but “guesting” to a different server for whenever I fancy some WvW.
So let me get this straight; Will your choice of home server ONLY affect WvW?
I pretty much never do WvW with my guild but would like to participate on a more competitive server, so are there any negatives to changing my home server for WvW purposes and guesting in my guild server for PvE?
Sorry if this has already been asked (this thread is huge).
Armored scales have gone up 2s in last 40 minutes.
Check out the buy orders graph for armored scales
At the time of posting it’s been longer than usual since someone (likely a bot) has filled tons of buy orders at the same time (causing the buy price crash). Could be that scale farming bots have been banned but manipulators have so far avoided scales since there’s a much bigger supply of them.
If you want to save gold getting berserker gear I’d recommend you run the Citadel of Flame dungeon path 1 and 2 once a day for a bit. You’ll make decent gold doing it (especially with omnomberry bars for the extra boss gold) and you can spend the tokens you earn to get “free” armor with berserker stats. It’s good to at least get gloves/boots/shoulders this way since the others cost more tokens but are virtually the same price to craft.
Also a tip on getting ectoplasm for crafting- Never buy them from the trading post.
Unless you’re very unlucky you’ll get them for at least 15% cheaper by crafting and salvaging rares. Last time I did this (a week or so ago) it cost about 20s of buy orders for the mats to make some level 80 rare boots, and since you get on average about 0.9 ectos per salvage with a master kit I was paying on average about 23s per ecto when the current TP price was 28s.
(edited by Flax.4980)
Actually, looks like market manipulation. Other t6’s don’t have the same sudden rise in price.
Powerful venom sacs, powerful bloods, vicious claws and vicious fangs have all had thousands of their supply bought out at the same time it seems. Armored scales and ancient bones seem to have been untouched so far.
Good to know. It’s sad that this tedious method is currently the best way to get keys if you don’t wanna spend real money or lots of gold. I did this six times myself before Halloween when I heard about the skins and it wasn’t very fun. What you get in an average chest is definitely not worth 30 minutes of boring. Now if there was something fun that took 30 minutes to get a key it would be a different story!
Please please make black lion keys obtainable by some other method!
Personally, I don’t think they have been banned yet. The reason for the slow increase of the prices is mostly due to more people going for their Legendary weapon. Just in my guild (around 50 players) 5 are working on legendary while last month, only 1 was. This causes prices of Globs/T6 mats to go up. If the botters were banned, the prices would increase even more, as happened last time.
In a way, I hope they get banned cause they destroy the game, however, the economy is now fairly balanced, so a massive ban-run will destroy the balance.
Yeah you’re probably right about more people now working on their legendary. Or at least people are planning ahead and getting the T6 mats now while they’re cheap. Lots of people might have waited til now to craft an ascended back piece too.
Powerful Venom Sacs and Elaborate Totems are over 18s each now.
These two never really got cheaper after the price spike. I’m guessing they must be harder for bots to farm.
I’m sure most of us remember a time when most T6 fine crafting materials were dirt cheap due to bots over farming. Then one day in October/November ANet banned a massive amount of them and prices started to rise. When they actually announced they had done this prices exploded (with help from market manipulators no doubt). For example vicious fangs went from costing 30c to 17s in the space of a month.
The bots then returned at some point in December and by the end of the month prices on most of the materials had settled down again (but were much higher than before, probably due to more people crafting their legendary and maybe fewer bots).
ANet have said that they prefer to collect lots of information about bot patterns/behavior before they decide to send out mass bans. So when do you guys think the next ban wave will happen?
Personally I have my suspicions it could already have happened, as in the last several days the demand for certain T6 mats has exceeded the supply which happened just before the last massive price spike. I’m no economy expert though so would be interesting to hear other people’s opinions!
I just hope they create a new way of obtaining black lion keys. They are far too expensive on the gem store for what you get from an average black lion chest.
Two unidentified dyes will cost 1 token, which could also get you an obsidian shard, which is worth 2100 karma or 15 fractal relics.
If we assume that the time spent to get 1 token will be something similar to how long it takes on average to get 2100 karma (less than half your daily reward) or 15 fractal relics (a complete level 1 fractal run), then we’ll all be able to get unidentified dyes MUCH easier than we can currently.
That said, we don’t know whether these tokens will be things that are worth farming or whether they’ll just be small bonuses that encourage us to do different things. If it’s the latter then these tokens may not have as much of an impact on prices as you might think.
I would very much like to know more about how these achievement tokens will work.
If they gave us tokens for achievements we’d already done then lots of people will instantly be able to get the best rewards, which would take away the feeling of progression.
On the other hand if they don’t do it retroactively then people who have played more will be at a disadvantage.
This leads me to think that we will only be able to get tokens from dailies/monthlies and new achievements added in the update. The only problem I see with this is that all the old achievements will seem more pointless. Hopefully we’ll get some credit for past achievements but the meat of tokens will be best acquired by doing the new ones they add.
(edited by Flax.4980)
I definitely remember reading that the wintersday boxes (the ones that cost gems) had a small chance of dropping the hair contract. But according to the wiki it can also be found in black lion chests.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Permanent_Hair_Stylist_Contract.
Well in general holiday items are one of the safest investments you can make. It’s more of a question of how long you are willing to wait for them to increase in value. I reckon that as people buy up the unbreakable bells more people will start to realize that you can pretty much buy a lifetime supply of normal bells for half the price and so the two will rise in price together. Personally I’m investing in unbreakable bells as I prefer selling a few items to selling stacks of lower value ones.
After seeing all the stories of people’s bad luck I decided to keep all my stuffing and glue to sell after Wintersday and just buy the endless toymaker tonic off the tp for about 22g. That way I get all the transforms including Dolyak and I can even sell the tonic later if I get bored or want money for something else.
It just doesn’t seem like Anet style to make these items have no purpose. If they remove the vendors without warning I would at least expect them to introduce some other use for them. Having hundreds of thousands of junk items on the tp hardly does anyone any good.
As the title asks, will the vendors that exchange socks/hats/sweaters for stuff disappear with everything else or will we have more time to spend any leftover ugly clothes? As far as I know there is currently no other use for the uglys so if these merchants were going to vanish it would be nice to have a heads up!
Especially enjoyed the bell ringing! Would love to see more musical things in future events/content.
Would be interesting to know just how many of them there are left in people’s banks!
I’m sure everyone including Anet agree that they should at least be account bound. Let’s just hope they remember to change it some time!
I don’t think they should be tradeable as I really like it when the game encourages you to do different things. I don’t especially enjoy running the same dungeon lots of times unless I have a real incentive to do it. One day when I decided I wanted the rifle skin from AC I found it very rewarding and refreshing to be made to do this new activity that I would have no reason to do otherwise. If this item had been on the trading post I probably would have just bought it and missed out on several hours of fun. The same goes for runes.
That said, it would be nice to have something we could use unwanted dungeon runes for. I have 5 soulbound superior runes sitting in my bank that I would likely have no use for even if they were account bound. Maybe allow us to put 4 superior runes in the mystic forge to get 1 random one? Or introduce a recipe that turns dungeon items into their respective tokens?
If people can get something done for free in a non-fun way in many cases they will do it. I don’t think adding a fee to travel to WvW is a good idea at all as we need more reasons to do WvW not the opposite.
Possible solutions:
-Make travel to LA free (as suggested).
-Introduce permanent personal mystic forge and crafting stations and move fractals to a different instance (so that eventually we don’t need to go to LA nearly as much)
-Introduce the ability to travel to LA for free as an item or unlock for doing something (map completion maybe?).
This is an excellent thread idea and I hope lots of people post here with more ideas!
Personally I don’t agree with the OPs suggestion of having more transmutation stones as
a) It would take away the feeling of diversity between all the different race and armor tier combinations.
b) It would be a little silly and confusing seeing warriors running around in frilly dresses.
If there were more benefits or fun things to do when wearing town clothes (costume brawl was a good start) then I would consider buying these if there was enough diversity to choose from.
My stance on paying real money for gems is that I will only consider buying something if it is a unique one off purchase. For example when I saw people flying around on a broom during Halloween I thought ‘wow that’s a really cool thing to have’ and bought it with real money. But If I want a total makeover kit I would buy the gems with gold because I see this is a standard item that I may want more of in the future.
Thanks for the response!
I’m guessing they’re probably going to wait until they’ve made sufficient money from people buying keys to try out the updated black lion chests. It also makes sense that we can’t spend commendations on keys in and shortly after Wintersday as we can currently get commendations for very cheap. Now I just need to decide whether it’s worth the risk and investment to stock up on commendations now with the hope of getting cheap black lion keys later! If they removed black lion keys from Lyns I would be a very sad panda.
I for one would not be happy if they introduced ectos as a map completion reward since I just finished the high level areas.
Technically the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough supply, but more that there is too much demand since the Ancient Karka precursor boom (more people now working on legendaries) and since they introduced the ascended back pieces (300 ectos for an infused one). You could argue that not enough supply is the same as too much demand, but it makes more sense for Anet to change the latter since I imagine changing drop rates is more likely to have unpredictable repercussions.
I have had all of these issues. Because of the pick up crystal delay issue the only way I’m guaranteed to survive the jade maw death ray is if I’m already stood over a crystal when I see the skull.
The problem with magic find is that it’s something you feel you’re missing out on if you don’t have it, but having it doesn’t make the game feel more fun.
I remember in Diablo 2 you’d feel awesome equipping full magic find then taking out a boss to see three unique items drop. But in that game you’d never consider wearing full magic find gear for general play because you’d die too easily.
However in GW2 you CAN get away with wearing full magic find gear if your team as a whole is strong enough. The fun of dungeons for me comes from feeling like you’re really contributing to the team, so I have to choose between getting better drops but having less fun, or having more fun but getting worse drops.
A way to solve this could be to have a small personal magic find cap and then have all magic find higher than the cap get divided amongst the party. That way you can still benefit from having a little magic find for yourself but also give something back to your party if you have lots of it.
You also get pretty good general loot like level 80 rares/exotics and T6 crafting materials as well as being able to acquire 20 slot bags for no gold.
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