Guild Wars 2

Nah, the current necro is the result of an arms race. Anet gave too many classes too many boons and then instead of nerfing that they buffed necro’s boon corrupt (which was already borderline broken). You can basically scepter auto-attack any class with boons to death now (maybe sprinkle in a corrupt boon and a few marks for good measure, but only if you’re feeling fancy). Ele is cancer but necro isn’t a cure; it’s more like trying to stab the cancer with a knife (or a scythe, har har).

It’s definitely a core utility along with shadowstep for me now. It’s a second get out of jail free card on an incredibly low cooldown. Other utils won’t save your kitten from getting stunlocked or immob-locked as often as this, and you really don’t need stealth utils with how much stealth access bounding dodge gives you. You can also just use it as a stop-gap to recover endurance and initiative. The kick is pretty good too.

There are more unblockable attacks now but let’s be real, they are not THAT common. Most require a second of setup like rev shiro util or now basilisk venom, which you can dodge when you notice it. It’s not about blocking the whole 1.5 seconds necessarily, it’s to give you a brief moment of safety so you can avoid huge bursts and then stealth up/ia out.

Thanks, I was actually hoping for someone to do this, so I know if I should keep or sell mine. It actually looks better than I expected, since the first swing of the auto is at least a proper scythe swing. I was expecting the third part of the auto to clip through the char model a ton, but it just looks a little silly whapping the enemy with the flat part of the scythe some. Can’t win ’em all (though it would be cool if they updated it, not even sure how it would work with that animation). The other skills (especially skill 2) look pretty awesome.

Uther Lightbringer.5718:

Jabberwock.9014:

Don’t make Juggernaut for Engie. It interacts very poorly with stealth so that all your armor shows up opaque and you have to look at your buff bar to tell if you are actually stealthed or not. It is a nightmare with stealth gyro.

Hmm odd! No issues here!

Try using a hammer attack on thin air after stealthing, or after exiting and re-entering stealth. It happens about 50% of the time (which is even worse since you can’t get used to it one way or the other).

While wielding Juggernaut, after stealthing, attacking the air with any hammer attack will usually turn your armor from translucent to opaque, making it almost impossible to tell if you are stealthed or not without looking at the buff bar. Very frustrating with engie stealth gyro and throw elixir S, so much so that I can’t use the weapon at all in PvP.

Don’t make Juggernaut for Engie. It interacts very poorly with stealth so that all your armor shows up opaque and you have to look at your buff bar to tell if you are actually stealthed or not. It is a nightmare with stealth gyro.

Yeah, it’s not there. Was super psyched when I read the article since I missed out buying it before, but no luck atm…

I don’t know, I kind of like the new version better. Way more useful for dealing with melee characters who won’t get off your kitten enough for you to get the range necessary to land the old version.

But I do play d/f more than d/d so I don’t care as much about fire grab combos.

Maybe they could update it to be halfway between the old and new versions as a compromise?

Most changes I felt were fair, execpt the drake’s breath nerf seems too hard. 33% nerf to burn duration is huge, given you can only apply it in one attunement and don’t have that many cover conditions compared to other classes. Ele can’t stack bleed high so burning is our main source of condition damage. 2.5s per tick would be much more fair.

Any news on the stock of these being replenished?

I don’t see how it’s any less possible than watching Fort Salma get destroyed more than once. Or anything else for that matter. Anything already played is non-canon the second time around, regardless of how long it’s been. Are you going to suddenly take away replaying Mordremoth’s story once a new elder dragon comes along?

^Been wanting juggernaut-like effect on my ele since launch.

There goes the pedantic police again; construct some more strawmen will you? Please don’t latch onto a single word I say and avoid the rest of the argument.

But to address you, yes they are not held to a fire and forced to give their money away, but if they want to get ToT bags in similar numbers to the farmers than they will have to. People who are locked out of the instance are in a very unfavorable position right now, forced to buy from a virtual oligopoly of farmers who can produce bags at an immensely higher rate than the rest of the population. Yes the farmers are not literally stealing from other players wallets like a mugger on the street, but money is being transferred (grudgingly) at a high rate from the have nots to the haves simply because the former played the instance as designed.

Talk about pedantic reasoning Tman. Yes, there is transfer of wealth from players who are locked out of instance to players who aren’t. Who cares if they are not literally creating gold, they are still making money for themselves by effectively stealing it from people who played the instance as intended (the latter are forced to either buy bags from the farmers or farm at a much slower rate if they want them). And I am 100% sure this was unintended; if Anet actually intended for the playerbase to be split into have and have nots for an arbitrary and unknowable reason like completing content that is meant to be completed, then that bodes very poorly indeed for the game.

I wonder if when people say they are “making money” in real life you correct them because they aren’t creating bills with a paper press…

Paradox.1380:

This is just silly because there are other places with almost as many ambient creatures in the world.

Hm, not really. There are almost zero spots where you can continuously get 3+ ambients per throw, with fast respawn rate. And the places where you can get close are exploding with other farmers and griefers, bringing the profit per hour down by at least half.

Chris Cleary.8017:

In a player driven economy, the demand of an item surpassing the supply generated by the playerbase will increase the value of it. While there are some items in these bags that are not based around cosmetics (the low drop rate of T6 mats), the price of these bags is directly relative to the cosmetic value that is being placed on them. While currently profitable, that profit is derrived directly from other players and their willingness to play a higher price. In essence, this is a transfer of wealth not wealth generation.

As far as this specific spawn of ambients is concerned, it’s definatly one of the faster ones to farm. As long as the playerbase is willing to pay for that item, and the demand remains higher than the supply, it will be profitable. This is not an exploit, it’s the playerbase saying “thank you for farming this, because we didn’t want to”.

Quite frankly, this is completely unfair. Those of us who played the content normally and finished the instance are locked out of the best farm spot in game for 2 weeks. If you think this is so kosher, than why don’t elementals in personal story instances drop bags? I could farm Lion’s Arch sewer in vigil personal story if you hadn’t arbitrarily removed ToT bags from it.

And no, there is no other comparable ambient farm in game. Everywhere else is in the open world you can be endlessly trolled or competed with for bags. Hell in Rata Sum there were a group of 10 players continuously spamming necro marks on a particularly good ambient spawn just so people couldn’t farm it. And there are absolutely no comparable clusters of ambients to the reliquary in the entire game.

But I guess I’m the fool for playing the content as Anet intended. From now on I’ll make sure to wait several days for kosher exploits before accidentally ruining things for myself.

And I don’t know who thought 700 chattering skulls was equivalent to 6000 candy corn… 700 skulls is like 3g while the candy corn is like 25g.

I love ’em. Hope that Anet get even more creative and add ones that make you turn metallic or golden.

Based on the fact that you use the word “ghostly”, “merchant”, and then clarified that copper is not involved (possibly implying karma), my way-too-obvious-to-be-right guess is that the first item is ghostly doubloon from the karma merchant in bloodtide.

Still goes the full duration if you’re worried about that.

I was freaked out at first but I tested it, and it’s still a 6k heal (which you can now get off 3 times if the summon survives). The only (small) problem is that, like the rest of the elementals, it is a super slow animation so you still can’t rely on it in a pinch, or interrupt on demand.

Staff: get persisting flames, pyromancer’s alacrity, and blasting staff. Spam lava font + fire auto on mob groups 90% of the time. Occasionally meteor storm, air auto when mobs aren’t close together.

D/D: Go 30 arcana for fast attunement swap, use sigils of geomancy and/or hydromancy. Burning speed into mob groups, use all aoe skills off cooldown while constantly swapping attunement. Air auto when other skills on cooldown.

Utilities: arcane wave for instant ranged (or melee) aoe damage. Arcane blast for really long range fast damage on melting targets. Signet of air for speed and stunbreak. Elite doesn’t really matter… fgs probably best for mobility.

Heal: Arcane brilliance for more aoe damage while healing.

Signet of air is a more viable stunbreak option now… however, I still will find it hard to ditch any of cleansing fire (needed for immob breaks), armor of earth (needed for stomps), or lightning flash (needed for everything, from mobility and escapes to warping up terrain to pressure and surprise updrafts). Armor of earth is probably what I would consider dropping, just because it has a long cooldown and stability can get stolen/corrupted easily.

Signet of earth is a bit intriguing for a condi build, although it is still hard to cover conditions as ele. Would be nice if it gave poison too.

Signet of water… I just don’t know why it exists. The active is worthless outside of a “written in stone” build. Make it a 10s cooldown and we’ll talk.

Seriously? These are the classiest particle effect weapons we’ve had to dare. The fact that they aren’t tacky unwieldy shapes is what makes them so great. I for one don’t care if they are reskins over level 1 starter weapons, because frankly the starter weapons are more tasteful than most of the rest of the weapons in game. And wow, the dagger actually looks sharp, unlike most of the thick rambo knives in game.

Narkodx.1472:

Pavel.8531:

Isn’t flanking strike actually extremely easy to dodge if you want to dodge it? People just don’t waste dodges on Flanking because there is no point… but now there will be. And with the inability to “preload” the larcenous strike and flanking being 4 ini, larcenous should have been reverted to stealing 2 boons to at least balance things a bit.

NO… FS is the one that spins you and homes in on your target.. Larcenous Strike was the slow one that is easy to avoid…

One thing that you can see as a “buff” is you can use FS twice/three times in a row to evade a bunch of attacks… Also maybe S/D thief will now take the new GM in acro?

FS homes but has a REALLY obvious animation. I think just about anyone can dodge FS on reflex, while LS is kind of difficult to spot.

Human ponytail is in my top 3 styles now, especially thanks to the awesome bangs, but I do wish the ponytail was less stiff as you note. I have to just convince myself there is a crap ton of hair gel holding that thing in place to keep immersion.

Eh, I rather like it. It’s way better than the characters completely ignoring you and your accomplishments like they used to in the past. Boss seems to fit well since the characters are never overtly friendly towards our pc’s, so at least having a working relationship helps explain that away. It’s not like it’s possible for them to call you by name without sounding like Microsoft Sam, so boss is about as good as you can get.

As soon as Kasmeer said “ooh, let’s go talk to Belinda” I knew Belinda was going to die. Hell, I knew as soon as the last living story when she got the typical “safe” mission to go back to fort salma. Honestly it kittenes me off a bit, since she was one of the few characters in the entire game that I actually was starting to like since she seemed like a real person (at least moreso than other npcs). Unfortunately they killed her off before she could get any real development or actually do anything. The only reason for her introduction after Scarlet’s death it seems was to become future cannon fodder and give Marjory some cheap “development” (and I honestly don’t care much for Marjory or Kasmeer… Rox is pretty much the only one of the gang that I like much). At least let Belinda do something for the plot, or have some heroic sacrifice before killing her.

Honestly would have been way more exciting and fresh to have Marjory die saving Belinda from a vine. Not everyone and their mother would have predicted it for one. And furthermore Belinda replacing Marjory in the gang could have ended up being awesome for group dynamics.

Completely agree. It seems that the trend is to never release armors now, since it is so much easier to make one outfit and pump it out to all classes compared to making three separate skins. Triple the monetization. I wouldn’t care, but the massive problem is no mix and match, which renders most outfits much worse in my eyes since there is almost always a part I don’t like.

I don’t understand why they don’t release outfits as armor skins and just have the same skin for all three weight classes. Yes it was a trend to release different skins for each class, but that trend is completely arbitrary and meaningless now that any class can look like a thief with this outfit anyways. Seems like they are trying too hard to preserve consistency when really they should just own up tell us “guys, making 3 separate skins is too time consuming and we don’t care about weight class identity anymore. From now on we will be releasing the same skin for all armor classes when creating armor.” Seems they are just using outfits as an out to avoid saying this right now.

Has there been a recent development regarding Jewelcrafting 500? I can’t find any news about it.

I think monocle drop rate got buffed too looking at gw2tp. Are they dropping from something other than gauntlet chances now?

It seems to have started ever since the nerf to fiery rush blink behavior. Never really saw the rubberbanding before then (and it seems to happen randomly despite timing sometimes, although bad timing might make it more likely).

Only min-size asura warriors need a nerf. I swear the animation for eviscerate on asura is just pitiful for such a devastating and spammable move. Who needs setup when your attack looks like every other attack? The main giveaway is the white lines but those get hard to see with particles flying, and bull’s charge and rush get the same treatment anyways.

I like your style… still, I feel like you sacrifice against every other matchup besides thief by going 30 air.

I don’t want any more playable races because it will just take resources away from making stuff for the rest of the races. Just look at Charr and Asura: Anet already has enough problems porting armor to these races. Adding another race is just going to throttle model development even further.

Oh my god, this is amazing Anet! And a full hour transformation available?! I’m in heaven. The only thing that could make it better is if you also had an option to to bobblefy only yourself, although that might not be technically feasible.

It’s true gold is almost worthless right now. Almost everything worth owning is in the gem store. The only thing that gold is good for are legendaries and skins on the tp.

Thankfully Anet (or John Smith) may have realized this which could explain why custom arenas will sell for gold soon. This will lower the astronomical exchange rate a bit since there will be more demand for gold.

If you right click an item from inventory and say “sell on trading post” and then switch to another item (in the tp screen) and sell that item instead, you will instead sell the item you initially clicked for whatever you sold the second item for.

In my case, I right-clicked a lovestruck focus, but ended up trying to sell a keeper’s recipe for 20g. Due to the bug I ended up selling the lovestruck focus for 20g. The fact that you can sell under the highest buy order without compensation (highest buy order for lovestruck focus was 60g) amplifies the negative effects of the bug.

Also having the nasty left hip clipping with ancestral outfit. My human female has the second from the left on character creation “curvy” body type.

The outfit looks so good, but this clipping looks so bad.

There is actually a major bug that personally caused me to lose 50g but could potentially have cost me thousands. If you right click an item to say “sell on trading post” and then switch to another item and sell that item instead, you will instead sell the item you initially clicked for whatever you sold the second item for.

In my case, I right-clicked a lovestruck focus, but ended up trying to sell a keeper’s recipe for 20g. I ended up selling the lovestruck focus for 20g, when the highest buy order was like 60g.

This could have happened to chaos gun dude if he right-clicked chaos gun but then tried to sell some iron ore.

This is hilarious. How anet can deem this an appropriate drop rate is beyond mortal comprehension. For god’s sake, there were tens of thousands of shadows of grenth, but there may not even be 10(!) total chaos of lyssa in existence. But I wouldn’t be surprised if all of a sudden one day they start dropping like candy with anet claiming it was always that way (like final rest).

Most likely because everyone is running new runes of strength.

Terrible design on Anet’s part. Seems like they used a random number generator to come up with the “challenges” for unlocking traits. Nothing unique should EVER come from a failed event; they made the same mistake with red hylek potions, which are probably impossible to obtain with megaserver now, since they require many, many events to be failed in a row to be able to buy.

Despite the extreme title, I have to agree. The gem store is getting out of hand, to the point where almost literally all new items are being placed in the gem store. There are very, VERY few instances of desirable items being sold in game for gold of late (which would decrease the conversion rate)… the only ones I can think of are the selfless potions. Because of this jacking up the exchange rate, converting gems to gold becomes by far the easiest method to earn gold, trivializing almost anything else you can earn in game that isn’t account bound.

I disagree that increased gold in the economy is causing the exchange rate to skyrocket. If anything gold generating activities are being dampened (see champ bags). The reason the exchange rate is so high is because demand for gems is obscenely high since something new is releasing in the gem store every week, and nothing is releasing in the game to increase the demand for gold. If legendaries didn’t exist, gold would be almost worthless and I wouldn’t be surprised if the exchange rate would be 1 gold for 1 gem

You underestimate the power of convenience, and how many people PUG. Yes scholar is BARELY better in completely organized speed run groups where you are always at 25 stacks and at 100% health… but for your average PUG you are going to be much better off conserving all the might you can get. DPS will be much better with Strength in this scenario, especially if you ever drop below 90% health (hint: you will).

For solo play (PvP and PvE) as an ele, I can tell you it’s no contest to use strength over scholar. Ele can single handedly conserve 25 stacks of might now, WHILE getting a 7% damage boost. And you don’t have to stay above 90% health for the damage boost. You just can’t beat that.

Dyes are as obvious as they get lol… nonetheless, I think they are one of the best investment opportunities we’ve had in a while, since there is a massive burst of supply, and then suddenly there will be none. If that’s not a recipe for easy money I don’t know what is. Very little risk since even Anet is predicting them becoming more expensive than before (see: gift of color requires only 100 dyes now).

On the one hand, I’m happy I bought 70 of these at 1g. On the other… could have bought so many more :o

Sigil of air could still rise since it is now quite useful in PvE and there will be a lot more sigils consumed period due to 2h weapons gettting a second slot. A lot of speculators panicked when it didn’t immediately rise and sold off all their stock, but I suspect it will be one of the ones that rises slowly from here on out.

I’m really afraid they’re going to nerf them. This runeset is pretty much singlehandedly holding up ele at this point. Also I got 70 of them so would lose me money too.

Dueling is about ALL that it is good for… and even then is it really worth it to go 30 fire? Debatable.