Guild Wars 2

Just last Friday my guild pulled together, changed builds, tweaked food items, swapped classes, and finally put down the Vale Guardian with 1 minute left on the clock as probably the most casual guild you can imagine. For context, I was wearing exotic Magi gear on my Druid using cheap sharpening stones with a 2s food item I grabbed off the TP, and fewer than half of our group had ascended gear at all. We were elated.

How did you get those casuals to switch class? The consensus in my guild is that if the raid isn’t doable with no guide, no gear, 3 necro, and 2 thief, well, then raiding just isn’t for them. What classes did you have?

FrizzFreston.5290:

DeWolfe.2174:

FrizzFreston.5290:

Well, it’s more a 4k cap per week as there’s a double reset in the system at Friday and at Sunday.

wait wut? where does it say this?

Nowhere, it’s a bug, I think. But I haven’t been taking that a close eye at all of the resets to be really honest. But I do noticed that when we had an few missions done during the week that on sunday when we usually do our missions our cap had been reset mysteriously. It could be because we our favor from influence reset is on Friday (or was), or a bug in the system as a whole.

I mostly ignored it as we rarely reach our cap.

I think it happens when you put an upgrade through in between missions. I noticed once weeks ago that we seemed to have gotten more than the limit, wasn’t paying too much attention so i wasn’t sure. Last week we definitely broke the cap, went from 0 to 2150. (On Sunday, did everything on Sunday night, so anything happening on Friday wouldn’t have affected us.)

Easiest is minion necro (didn’t bother with reaper) and ranger (not druid) with pet and longbow. Worst is thief, daredevil or base. The only way I could get through a lot of areas with thief was with stealth. So I’d try to sprint through some dangerous mob-filled area to grab a wp like with other classes, unlike other classes fail and die, go back and stealth through it. I guess it’s balanced? Since thief has the option to stealth. I don’t enjoy it though. It makes it feel slower, having to wait for shadow refuge to cast so you can move.

malachi.7503:

I bought myself a guild charter thinking I’d get it just far enough to get storage out of it. Personally I don’t want a hall, at all I’m happy with my single solo guild being based in lions arch. How ever, in order to get my storage, I have to build a hall. to build the hall I have to do a mission once a week.
let me state again. I don’t want a hall. My complaint if I may add to this discussion is that I am required to build one in order to build a market, in order to get storage.

Making personal storage very expensive and difficult to get was certainly deliberate. A lot of people (including me) have guilds that only exist to hold all our stuff, which is not the intended purpose of guild storage. I got it mostly for free, just playing by myself when I was between real guilds. Now the deep cave upgrade requires 100g and 2000 favor on top of everything else needed to get that far. That would have been onerous for my current small guild, forget doing it solo. Better to farm for more character slots.

Why do you need to charge one every day? If you skip 3 days/month you don’t need to buy anything. Guild halls need a lot but guild halls are supposed to be a group effort and not reliant on one person’s daily quartz limit.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Lots of people are willing to help folks get their guild hall. After that, you can still do missions to progress the guild — easier if you get help, but some bounties (for example) can be soloed or duoed.

You MUST have participation from a minimum of three guild members for your guild to get credit for missions now. Still technically soloable, and members may get individual credit/rewards (not sure), but you can’t progress the guild with only two.

We only rolled it once in my current guild and failed pretty fast. Other guilds I’ve been in (2 different guilds) would just start it, let it fail, and reroll when it came up. This is the only mission we did that for.

We don’t know much about guild missions yet, but I wanted to ask how the difficulty rating was chosen and suggest it get another look. This week we rolled two challenges. The “Hard” challenge is Southsun Crab Toss, which is fair enough. But the “Medium” challenge is Deep Trouble (quaggan rescue), which is the most difficult guild mission other than maybe Tier 3 bounty. It’s much harder than Southsun Crab Toss. Why is it in the pool for Medium?

Did this with about 20 other people, maybe more. It took 4-5 tries, and someone had a mentor tag up so people kept coming. On the last try, when we finally got it, we had so many players around that we spawned 7 brood along with the boss, all veterans or elites except for the one that was a champ. We killed them all and there was much rejoicing.

Astralporing.1957:

Tantrika.2840:

Some maps have areas with no points of interest or anything else in them. Those areas are required to really complete a map too but not calculated in the percentage. I had it happen to me in one of the core Tyria areas, don’t remember which one though.

That’s only for the exploration achievements, not for map completion.

By the way, there are supposed to be now map completion rewards for silverwastes, dry top and southsun. They are not rewarded retroactively however (and they definitely should).

They are bugged as well. I did Southsun on one alt (was only missing one poi) and got a very nice reward. So of course I immediately checked my other characters to see if any of them also hasn’t completed it. Found one, completed the map (two poi) and… nothing. Then took the same character to Dry Top where I was missing one poi and a vista. Again nothing. This was the first time completing Dry Top on my account since HoT. Not doing any more until I hear that it is fixed.

The pvp mission is the easy mission. Then you have the race in medium and another race in hard.

I know I will like it once I get used to it and finish leveling masteries. And whatever is making maps empty gets fixed. The jungle is beautiful, story is interesting and fun, gliding, exploring, that’s all good. I miss the episode method of delivering content, so everyone could focus on a small area for awhile. Now people either don’t know what they want to do first, or they do know and find it’s impossible unless they do a whole lot of other things first.

I’d give it at least an 8, but I couldn’t care less about elite specs. Loses 2 points because I find HoT mastery xp to be really scarce. It’s hard to find events and once you find one there is no one around to help. I can solo, but it takes so long. There has to be something wrong with the maps. We can see guild members now, so I know they are around, but we have to group up and taxi if we want to be on the same map.

I usually play without sound but I turned it on to play the expansion. I’d like to apologize to everyone I’ve played with while on my thief in the last month. Currently using the new Lover skin instead, which makes up for lack of sparkle by being silent.

I have 4/19 in wardrobe and 1/19 in the collection, for a total of 5 different skins.

I just bought Sam. Bad timing.

They also have it so all of the best drops always appear on the same day. Large bag of obsidian never pops up without his friend bag of rare gear. Then some days (like today) there’s nothing worth getting and i just close the window.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

If they ever require another use for karma, such a several million to craft the new Legendary weapons, I’m sunk. Lol.

I’ve been working on karma skins too, but always hold about one million in reserve. Still remember blowing all my karma on rng boxes expecting to get it all back after the patch by opening champ bags I had saved only to have them heavily nerf karma from champ bags in the same patch without any warning.

That said people complained bitterly about that and it turned out that it was still quite easy to amass huge amounts of karma. Removing it from the boosts is a tiny change in comparison. I still feel for people who paid for the powder to convert though. I never did because 10s each is way too much, I have enough boosts saved to make a full stack, that’s 25g! No.

TJgalon.5012:

I am thinking about getting it, but I do not have the cash to gold atm, on avg, how long do these sale last, you think?

This is what I wanted to know. Sometimes it will say on the item how long it lasts, sometimes it doesn’t. I’m hoping it will be like the black lion intro pack which has been in the shop for months on end and shows no sign of going anywhere, but who knows.

scorekeeper.6524:

As an engie in SW I knock back teragriffs and leechers to interrupt their abilities, as well as husk slingers to get their attacks out of range of the fort walls.

Other than that, yeah I don’t use knockbacks when a friendly melee is whacking enemy mobs. It’s just not good form imo.

Stop knocking back the leechers please. That’s one of the knockbacks that bugs the most. When you knock them out of my aoe that would have otherwise killed them in a couple seconds, they immediately use their skill again which has no cooldown… unlike my skills, which ARE on cooldown. The only time you should use knockback on them is when they are in the leeching puddle, to get them out so people can melee.

The tendrils only touch you if you are at range. Get in close, and it turns into a harmless bag of hp.

A permanent trading post contact, which I listed too high and has been sitting on the trading post for almost a year.

metaldude.4132:

How many people are they looking for I wonder…also, when you find the portal stone, do not forget to register for the newsletter

It drops for people who aren’t already signed up? This is the first I’ve heard about a newsletter and I read the patch notes and map chat.

The footfalls don’t look good but the flowers all over the bow itself match the outfit just fine?

I’d love this but I know they won’t put it in. They’d rework the entire class before putting this in.

ProtoGunner.4953:

I never noticed that and I usually do this event 2-3 a day. The event only failed once. Maybe EU servers are super leet or I am just super lucky :-)

Same, haven’t noticed any mortar abuse and very few afkers. We only run into problems when too many new or unskilled players end up on the same lane. They look like they are trying but somehow the health bars on monsters just don’t move. The event is super forgiving though so it almost always still succeeds.

Edit: I mean vinewrath succeeds, breach still fails half the time.

The new unique precursor skins will only be part of the collection pres? Or will random drops have them too? I hope if it’s a universal change people who already have account-bound legendaries will get the new skins automatically unlocked.

Then after they leave and the rebalance pops, you can use your skills to turn the whole game around!

I’m average so I won’t hurt a good team (much), but I can’t save a bad team. When I get lucky and that volunteer button comes up, it’s not a good feeling.

I was a bit annoyed until I noticed that you get envelopes from the regular dailies, and blew 16g on rng bags only to come out ahead. It’s alright.

Dragonball. I played about 8 matches. Two overwhelming wins, two close matches (won one, lost one) followed by loss after loss after loss. With no reward for losses (and minimal reward for wins) I’m probably just going to do the two rounds for the daily for the rest of the event and leave the farmers to grind down prices on me and the other daily running sacrificial rams. It’s no worse than the snowball throwing daily imo. Actually it’s kind of like combining that one with the bell choir daily.

Whichever ones I find I need to progress while playing, same as any other game where there is a leveling choice. Unless there is an amazing must have new legendary skin, then some points will have to go into that.

SenorMoody.5908:

That is a very interesting point… The fact that you will no long get Skill Points for leveling after 80 will probably make some people not want to buy the expansion for a while.

What? Why? I was really really excited when I read that they were going to replace the xp bar with a mastery bar. I’m still really excited. So gaining xp is no longer going to be a pointless incidental thing that happens while playing the game… I can’t wait.

Just for this thread I logged in on each of my characters so I could add up my unused skillpoints. As of right now, I have 2310 skillpoints across all characters, and an additional 1236 in scrolls. 3546 skillpoints on my account right now. What the ffff am I going to do with 3546 skillpoints? I looked into converting them to gold of course but it’s very tedious. The only recipes worth anything are slow moving (risky) high end items, or upgrading low end crafting materials at 1/10 of a skillpoint per forge. Yuck. No. I’d rather do pretty much anything else. I made four legendaries and 3 sets of ascended armor and many ascended weapons and unlocked every skill on 8 characters and I still have 3546 skill points left over. It’s a little excessive. Just a little!

One thing I wonder is if the mastery points will be retroactive, so if you already did map completion before the expansion will you have to do it again to unlock that point? What about personal story? Jumping puzzles? With what was said in the presentation about having old and new players on equal footing it doesn’t seem like they will want to dump a huge load of mastery points on everyone who has completed large chunks of the game… plus it would mean less to do for experienced players.

The rock dodger one took many tries for me solo. I played through the story 3 times for the head armor boxes. Once with ele, once with guard, and once with ranger. After that I chose to do the achievements on ranger. Best damage thanks to the attack speed of longbow. Guard scepter 2 uses ground targeting which isn’t ideal. It still took many tries. Finally I just started playing very very conservatively, that is, I would stand on a fire spot until I saw a rock line because the rock lines never go into the fire spots. Then quickly run out and get the buff.

Gudy.3607:

Heibi.4251:

But remember, the drop rate tends to increase after you get the final one. I remember constantly seeing posts in map chat of folks who have it done but keep getting them.

That’s called Confirmation Bias. Look it up. And while you’re at it, read up on the Gambler’s Fallacy as well.

I got two in a row after about 12 attempts, have been doing it regularly since for the rest of the parts I need, and haven’t received a single coat box.

Krestfallen.8025:

TL/DR (I hate these, but in all fairness those were long posts): I strongly believe that Arena Net is using their Story Instances (low pressure environments) to teach players the skills they need to fight challenging bosses before they then go out into the open world and fight upscaled/more challenging bosses with the zerg (high pressure environments).

Someone from anet said ages ago (around when Tequatl got his update) that they design content by looking at the average skill level and then making it just a little bit tougher. I don’t think it’s a deliberate attempt to create an army of skilled buttwhippers, they are just trying to keep it fun and interesting for the majority of players, but it works out that way.

Yeah, I’ll admit it. The first time I did this boss (ch 8 endboss) I found it absurdly difficult and broke all my armor trying to figure out what I was supposed to do and how the mechanics worked. Ha. I had the most trouble with lighting the fires. First, was the delay with the torch, then I didn’t notice the sparkle on the ground and just ran around in circles in confusion. I finally happened to notice the dialogue while seeing the arc of the torch. Oooooooh! Then I’d go to light one, I’d get an orange circle and dodge away… This happened every time. I tried relying on Braham’s protective bubble, but I must have done it during the attack where it does absolutely nothing (which I now know is telegraphed by a smaller orange circle) so I concluded it never does anything. It seemed impossible. Eventually I did figure out that you can complete the channel even when being brutally smashed into the ground, but it took awhile. I’m not even that bad in general, I soloed wicked rodeo, and all the achievements for this encounter. But this was tough the first time.

I feel you on it being way too hard though. I quit TSW after Tokyo. I played through the first couple (super frustrating) updates, but haven’t touched the last one which I think came out in summer. The big difference there is the massive grind for top level gear that would make the encounters easier. Not going to do it. (For reference for those who know the game, I was like a 10.2 and played story updates with a friend in blues.) The gw2 philosophy is so much better. I’d say keep trying, you’ll get it eventually, but I understand completely just not wanting to.

Zaxares.5419:

I expect that the “silly Legendaries” like Moot and Quip will get “serious” alternatives in HoT, while the “serious Legendaries” like Bolt or Frostfang will get “silly” alternatives.

I hope so! Can’t believe the people in this thread who think we need more weapons with flames coming out of them, and hold up the flame-themed legendaries as the very best. As if we didn’t already have entire multiple sets dedicated to stuff that looks like it is on fire. Like the legendaries we have that are on fire look any better than cheap fire skins. There is only so much you can do with fire.

I want more crazy looking stuff, especially for the weapons where the current legendary option is plain boring. Bifrost, Incinerator, Bolt, the Predator… especially Bifrost! (Because I use staff a lot.) With my luck the new legendary staff will be flame-themed.

I was sort of “temp disabled” last year and gw1 and gw2 were a huge help in passing the time without going too crazy while waiting for my body to recover. (And avoiding thinking about what the heck I would do if it didn’t!) I have to laugh at the suggestion to go learn something. Oh man, I would have if I could have. When I started playing gw1, using the “downtime” to fill my HoM, it was actually too hard because I could barely remember what quest I was doing. I played the game like it was my job, but if it really had been my job I probably would have been fired. Trying to do anything harder than playing the game was horrible because due to fatigue I just couldn’t do it, and I’d be reminded of the current, unacceptable situation. And that was only the mechanics, interacting with other people (even in game) was worse. I was so slow and dull. Sometimes I had to read sentences several times to understand them, which in a real time interaction is just so awkward. Though it was still better than trying to concentrate on listening to someone talk.

I’m fine now and back to doing stuff and happy to be doing it, but I know that if you can’t… you can’t. It’s nothing to do with laziness or low self esteem or whatever else people might assume. Sometimes you just can’t.

It’s more convenient if you just park an alt in the home instance and give him a stack of keys. It’s not like you can only hold one key at a time. The loss of magic find is a bigger problem. I’ll be opening the chest regardless (champ bag alone is worth it), but I understand why other people wouldn’t bother.

Part of what makes this thread so interesting is that there is no such thing as a sylvari player. Only human players who choose to play sylvari. If you kick everyone with a sylvari character from your guild, you are going to be pretty lonely.

I started the reward track thinking I’d get one of these then I got to the end and thought, nah. Picked a finisher instead. Didn’t get any from gifts, though I did open enough to get 3 pets, 2 bells, and a light of Dwayna recipe.

When they first started the boss thing, it took an awkwardly long time to figure out they meant me. Thankfully they aren’t real people so standing around and waiting for “the boss” to do something wasn’t too embarrassing.

This patch also introduced enemy aoe that looks exactly the same as friendly aoe. In the first instance I was constantly standing in it because it looks like allied guardian symbols – blue, shiny, and not at all red. In pvp enemy guard symbols are easy to pick out (for not color blind people) because they have a red border, these ones don’t.

That did bring me out of it a bit. Then I remembered that I routinely call down meteor showers on myself and my friends and we are all just fine.

I wished I’d brought guardian, mostly for the stability, took awhile to figure out what I was supposed to do and how to not die. After that it was pretty easy. My biggest mistake at the beginning was assuming the spammy orange circles would interrupt the channel. They don’t.

The only class I still don’t like playing at this point is engineer. If I ever bother to level to 80 so I can slot in some traveler/speed runes, it’ll probably change. Speedy kits or going 4 deep into a lame skill tree? No.

I didn’t/don’t have huge problems with that trading style, but I do prefer the trading post. The advantage of getting super good deals is outweighed by how long it took to find them.

You actually do need a character of each race to buy the skins. Luckily, they can be level 2 and you can delete them right after. It does make sense that they would want to keep people from buying expensive skins they will never ever use… xD

mtpelion.4562:

I think the Quartz nodes in Dry Top also have a chance to output the charged crystals, but that chance is really, really, really low.

Never seen that and I’ve spent a lot of time in dry top.

Charged quartz dropped from Wintersday gifts last year, it was nerfed early in the update and this year they were removed entirely.

I’ve gotten so many unid dyes from the rng loot bags that were added to the rewards for personal story if you want to “farm” those.

The best way is just to buy specific colors from the tp with buy orders. Blue and green dyes are cheap.

Mental Paradox.3845:

I wasted 4000 hours of my life getting GWAMM and 50/50.

Don’t do it. I regret it every day.

1200 hours for me. I don’t regret it and use the titles and skins a lot. Recently started playing again just for fun. Careful OP, “just one more point” might turn into 50.

1. Kamohoali’i Kotaki

I made this one on a whim and love it. The shark effect still makes me smile every time.

2. Kudzu

Most recent. Love the 3D footfall effect.

3. Sunrise

This used to be my favorite but I’ve had it for awhile and it’s kind of gotten old. Only using it on 2/4 gs classes now.

Disappointing

1. Kraitkin

I made this one after the spear, and it is hard to put into words just how underwhelming it is. No cool skill effects as far as I can tell, nice skin, but it’s so dark/plain you don’t really notice it in typically dark underwater environments.

I think grubby packages will stop dropping same as continue coins stopped dropping when they shut down the box.

Please. I would like to spend more time doing bell choir because I find it fun, but every time I try it I can’t even make it through a whole round because you spend more time waiting around than you do actually doing the activity. The loooong wait between every single song capped off with waiting for “free play” to be over is unbearable.