“In the next release we will adjust the way that world mega bosses award their loot. The current chests will stay lootable once per day per character, but each boss’s guaranteed rare item drop will be moved to a separate chest (visually similar to daily achievement reward chests) that can only be acquired once per day across an account.
Our intention with this change is to keep providing rewarding loot for world mega bosses while avoiding overwhelming participation in boss fights (and overwhelming the economy with rares) from players cycling through each character slot for each boss every day.”
Isaiah Cartwright
I wish this message had been made clearer. Specifically:
1. Are rare drops currently supposed to be guaranteed, and if so what it the in-game appeals procedure to follow when you do not get a rare (this has happened to me several times recently)?
2. Does this change only affect rare drops or does it affect rare or better drops?
3. Will the current chest still retain the possibility of containing exotics and specifically pre-cursors?
Tbh I think this is a terrible solution to a problem that ANet created through their own lack of foresight. If they had thought through the obvious consequences of the changes to guesting before they implemented those changes they could have completely avoided this situation.
The simple and fair fix is to limit access to “mega” event chests to players on their home server, and to spawn mega events concurrently in main and overflow servers.
That way they would eliminate the benefit of using guesting to participate in mega boss events and at the same time eliminate the downside to being put in an overflow server.
Players who have taken the time and effort to level up multiple characters to level 80 should be able to gain a benefit from those alts to offset the extra money / time they need to spend outfitting them, and there are already far too many “per account” limits in place.
Finally, to the people who say “but I want to play with my friends AND get rewards” my answer is this: Talk to your friends and PICK A SERVER. Then you can all move there and play together.
Eh, I’m with Vol. Not everybody is meant to have a legendary. You don’t need one, it’s nice to have.
I am sick and tired of people saying this. Everybody who wants a legendary can have one. There is no skill requirement involved, just money.
In fact the most efficient way to get a legendary is to never leave Lions Arch, to play the TP and to buy all of the components.
The devs who designed the “Legendary” aquisition process should be hanging their heads in shame because there is nothing legendary about it.
“Everybody who wants a legendary can have one”
Yes, that is absolutely true and I never said the opposite. In the real world, everybody can have a Ferrari too. However this requires either getting lucky or hard work. You can win the lottery, or you can put in a lot of hard work and hours to get this. Not everybody is meant to have a Ferrari.
The precursor is a super low drop rate because its… well… “legendary” and they don’t want everybody to be running around one. The issue is that there is very very very little supply but everybody and their mother wants a legendary.
@the guy who called me elitist. I don’t want a legendary. I don’t care about them. I just like to play with friends in WvW and dungeons. I only have around 100-200gold across all characters (big range because I have some mats stored up and I have 4 80s). My max level in FoTM is 12… so yeah, I’m super elite.
I don’t understand the way you are using the word “meant” here but oh well.
I wouldn’t have a problem if pre-cursor drop rates were the same for everyone but they aren’t. Thanks to ANet incompetence a huge number of pre-cursor ‘s were introduced to the game via a bugged MF recipie that gave a MASSIVELY inflated return rate. Use of the recipie was deemed an exploit and the recipie was fixed but the exploiters weren’t banned and got to keep all their ill gotten gains.
Those exploiters now get to control the pre-cursor market and push the prices sky high and ANet does nothing because high prices means more gem sales.
As a business decision its one of the more repulsive i’ve seen.
Eh, I’m with Vol. Not everybody is meant to have a legendary. You don’t need one, it’s nice to have.
I am sick and tired of people saying this. Everybody who wants a legendary can have one. There is no skill requirement involved, just money.
In fact the most efficient way to get a legendary is to never leave Lions Arch, to play the TP and to buy all of the components.
The devs who designed the “Legendary” aquisition process should be hanging their heads in shame because there is nothing legendary about it.
That was a month ago. In terms of a game that is on the market for about 5 months, that’s like a decade.
Right, a month ago, we knew it wasn’t on track for the Jan / Feb / March patches.
So…. why do we expect continual updates saying ’It’s still not happening in Jan / Feb / March…’
And in the lifespan of an MMO, a month is a short time compared to the total life cycle of the game’s live support and content updates.
The lifespan of an MMO is ultimately decided by the players not the developers.
If the developers ignore the issues that players are concerned about in favour of their own ideas then they might find out that 5 months isn’t actually all that early in the lifecycle after all.
GW2 is shedding players – in my guild 80% of its members have already moved on to other games and with Eldar Scrolls coming out soon that will only increase.
Talking to those who have moved on their reasons are a combination of boredom and frustration; boredom with the repetitive nature of the end game content, and frustration with ArenaNets blatant reversal of almost every one of the design principals they promised us before release.
In short, ArenaNet might find out soon enough that 5 months was not “early days” but in fact about half way through the lifespan of GW2.
Eliminate precursors from the recipe. Replace them with an exotic weapon of the right type (sword, greatsword etc) with the stats you want on your legendary and leave all other elements of the recipe as they are.
At the moment the only “skill” needed to acquire a legendary is wealth, and my proposal won’t change that but it will bring the amount of wealth needed down to a more reasonable level.
I’ve been giving this some more thought and it occurred to me that they could simply drop the requirement for a specific weapon (the current precursors) and replace it with any exotic weapon.
If they did this it would be simple to have the resulting Legendary retain the stats from the exotic weapon, solving the problems with transmuting the current legendary weapons.
The current recipes already have specific gifts and runes for specific legendary weapons so they wouldn’t need to change any other elements.
I imagine people who already own legendary weapons might be a bit annoyed to have missed out on the opportunity to choose the stats on their weapon but that could be solved by adding a transmutation recipe – throw your legendary plus an exotic with the stats you want plus a “Gift of Transmutation” into the forge and get back your legendary with the stats from the exotic. The “Gift of Transmutation” could be sent to each player who has a legendary via in game mail or put up on the gem store for a limited time for free.
The only down side to this idea is it means one less hoop to jump through to get a legendary but I don’t think removing a requirement that can be achieved by using real money to be much of a problem.
At the moment there are only a few requirements in the legendary recipe that you even have to leave Lions Arch to obtain, and if you are willing to spend enough real money there are none, so this change would not make the process significantly easier and would make it more straightforward and resolve two issues.
If they had wanted to make legendries truly challenging they would have made all the unique ingredients at least account bound and would not have allowed them to be traded at all – then a player who wanted a legendary would have had to work for it and not just buy it.
Laurels would not be my preferred currency either, but I proposed that the new item should be available through multiple vendors for any and all of the in-game currencies – hell they could even add it to the gem store as well.
I believe that the mechanisms available to obtain a precursor weapon are broken. The Legendary process has one element that requires Luck – the gift of Luck – and does not need a second.
The problem with precursor weapons is compounded by the fact that the TP market for them is being heavily controlled and manipulated to keep the price ridiculously high.
This situation has been allowed to develop by ANet due to their blunders in allowing bugged crafting recipes into the game and their decision to not take any action against those who exploited those bugs.
Most people who are playing GW2 now have reached level 80 and have full exotic gear and therefore they are looking at creating a Legendary as the only remaining goal in the game, until the first major content expansion is released.
The process of creating a Legendary should be hard and time consuming, but it should not be one that can be exploited by a small group of individuals to the detriment of the rest of the community.
ANet needs to do something about this and I think the simplest solution is to implement a Mystic Forge recipe that guarantees a precursor weapon. The recipe should use a new item (call it “Legendary Essence”) which is available for purchase for gold, karma, fractal / dungeon / WvW tokens, or laurels. The other ingredients should be standard stuff – 250 Globs plus two others that are specific to the type of precursor required.
Most importantly the resulting precursor should be soulbound to the character that creates it. I would go so far as to say that ALL precursors that come out of the Mystic Forge should be soulbound. World drop precursors should remain soulbound on use to allow those lucky enough to get one to profit from it.
What to do about existing precursors? Nothing. As much as it would please me to see them all become soulbound overnight (and imagine the MF exploiters looking at their stacks of dusk and dawn and crying) it isn’t necessary. If there is a guaranteed recipe then it fixes the price – nobody will pay 650 gold if they can craft it for 200 – and the market will have to adjust to match.
Market traders will whine but tbh they’ve had a good long run exploiting this so screw ‘em.
The solution is simple, and ANet have already implemented it.
To continue your analogy, when the donkey starts to walk directly towards the carrot they beat it with a big stick until it turns away. Simple.
You say you want to eliminate grind?
Lets have a look at a few things you’ve done since launch:
1. reduced the drop rates for L80 mobs killed “out of event” to almost nothing.
2. increased the (Karma) cost of vendor bought weapons and armour by a huge factor
3. massively increased the number of dungeon tokens required to buy gear
4. and now reduced rewards for trying to efficiently farm said tokens
Do you guys even know what the word “eliminate” means because I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Not affiliated with ArenaNet or NCSOFT. No support is provided.
All assets, page layout, visual style belong to ArenaNet and are used solely to replicate the original design and preserve the original look and feel.
Contact /u/e-scrape-artist on reddit if you encounter a bug.