Guild Wars 2

I created this topic to share my growing concern and annoyance about the crafting system. This problem was even more highlighted with the recent release of Ascended armor. With the increasing complexity of the system, consistency (in at least the same crafting tier) would be nice, but is more and more lost.

Example #1:
1 Lump of Mithrillium: 50 Mithril Ingots, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, 10 Thermocatalytic Reagents;
1 Glob of Elder Spirit Residue: 50 Elder Wood Logs, 1 Glob, 10 TR’s;
1 Spool of Thick Elonian Cord: 50 Cured Thick Leather Squares, 1 Glob, 10 TR’s;
1 Spool of Silk Weaving Thread: 100 Bolts of Silk, 1 Glob, 25 Spools of Gossamer Thread.

Every Ascended crafting material needs 50 Tier 5 crafting mats + 1 Ecto + 10 TR’s, but for some reason, the newly added Silk Weaving Thread needs 100 Bolts of Silk. The Ascended crafting system is obviously based on the current supply of items, and t5 Silk and t5 Leather supplies were overflowing. It is therefore logical that the new armor crafting system uses there materials to create a demand for them. It is however not logical to change the repice compared to the already existing ones, adding to the complexity. Recently, the refinement ratio of Silk Scraps —> Bolts was changed from 2 --> 1 to 3 —> 1, raising the demands even more.* Because all three armor types need Cloth (Damask) for their ascended armor, this puts too much pressure on the demands of all tiers of cloth. Side note: why would you also change the requirement of TR’s to spools of gossa thread? Again, this makes no sense and is confusing.

*The mithril and leather refinement ratio is still 2:1, while the Elder Wood ratio was already set to 3:1. Another inconsistency based on ever-changing supply/demand.

Example #2:
Every Ascended weapon requires a Vision Crystal (Augur’s Stone + 5 Dragonite Ingots + 5 Bloodstone Bricks + 5 Crystalline Ingots). Every Ascended armor piece requires a lesser verson of this crystal (needing 2 instead of 5 of everything). This was done because getting 30 of all three materials would take too long. Strangely, the Ascended Chestpiece needs a normal Vision Crystal (5 of everything). Another unnecessairy inconsistency, adding to the complexity of the crafting system.

Example #3
Another already existing inconsistency is the difference between refinement ratios. One Ori Ingot needs 2 Ori Ores, while 1 Iron Ingot needs 3 Iron Ores. 1 Ancient Plank needs 3 Ancient Logs, but 1 Soft Wood Plank requires 4 Soft Wood logs! The same crafting group (metal, wood, cloth or leather) has different refinement ratios for different tiers, based, again, on the supply and demand at the time of the update.

Concluding
The Ascended crafting system brought us with new high-end armor, but many new confusing problems:
- Different amounts of t5 mats needed for Ectoplasm Refinement, confusing and unfair;
- Inconsistent requirements for certain Ascended armor pieces, compared to other Ascended armor pieces;
- Different refinement rates for materials.

The Future
I would like to see some more standardizing. Every armor piece should require the same Lesser Vision Crystal. The chestplate is already more expensive to make because it needs 5 Deldrimor Ingots (for Heavy armor). Change the amount of Silk needed for Damask to 50, just like the other three. The increase in demand is too much if you consider the fact that all three armor crafting disciplines need cloth.

I could not find a good place to put this on, so I will relocate/delete this message if needed.

Gold Sellers are becoming more and more rude. First I was being e-mailed in-game, now I am being whispered. They all seem to promote the same website, of which the name I cannot type or else the forum thinks I am a gold seller.
To Anet: I hope there is some way you can get this website shut down or people banned.
To fellow players: If you get whispered, block the player and report him for gold selling.

First of all, it is great that you have opened threads like these. You have always been good at player response, and this fits in nicely.

The idea of the Living World is amazing and works well, to some extent. There is always something new to do, and if you don’t like it, you can wait for the next update. There are some problems with it, however.

1. As many people have stated, I think updating every two weeks is too often. Some people just cannot keep up. The downside is also that all these stories have very little permanent effect on the world, and do not seem to matter at all. All kinds of stories start (Marjory, Scarlet, etc.), while other stories can be used perfectly for the Living World, like White Mantle, Mursaat, the Elder Dragons, Palawa Joko, the Gods of Tyria having left, etc. These stories have the advantage of a background and have already captured the hearts of many GW1 players. As a player, it would seem easier to use those subjects as Living Stories instead of creating entirely new ones (with, sadly, less debt). I also believe that your bug-fixing team (which does a great job, by the way) cannot keep up with content being added every two weeks.

2. The second problem is the lack of end-game. The hardcore players do all dungeons/fractals daily and rack up as many achievement points as they can. If they don’t like the Living Story, they will just grind out the achievements and go on with getting gold. I am afraid that you will lose the hardcore players if this Living Story continues the way it does now: be easy for everyone. And while some people may not like ‘elitist’ or ‘pro’ players, they are just as important as more casual players. I think the lack of challenging endgame will cost you a lot of players.

So thank you for listening to your players, you are doing a great job at maintaining an awesome game, but I think it would be good to try to use stories with more background (which would seem easier to use, from a player perspective) and it would be wise to implement hard end-game content. Fractals of the Mists was a great example of that.

Hope this helps.

First of all I’d like to state that the LFG tool works tremendously well. It’s fast, easy to use and very efficient. I also like that you can see the composition of the party.

Something does bother me. When I assemble a Guild Party, some people stay on their low level character to level it, until the party is full. I tried to fill the last two spots with the LFG tool, while my other two party members were still exploring with level 10 characters. I could not create a LFG or see any existing ones, because they did not have the required level for CoF. I’d like to see/create LFG’s whenever I want, just to save time.

When I’m exploring and feel like doing a dungeon, I want to be able to pop up the tool, pick something and switch afterwards, so 1. I won’t waste time waiting for a party and 2. I won’t miss the party because I switched first.

I do believe other options for your personal LFG can be added. The website lets you pick additions like ‘Speedrun’ ‘Experienced Only’ or ’I’m new’. I believe this is very helpful to choose the group that suits you best. Some people like to kill everything they find and some like to skip as much as possible. A level 80 only requirement would seem useful too. Dungeons are just a lot easier if all party members have the max level and decent gear. Another option like ‘all levels welcome’ can then be added too, so lower level characters will not be ignored.

So overall a very nice and useful tool: it’s fast and easy. I’d like to be able to choose more options for my own message to filter different players to create the most suitable groups according to the situation.

My bad, I changed it.
And someone else created the same topic already.

Today at around 17:30, we killed Tequatl the Sunless with 7:42 left on the clock. Thanks to all the people who joined, especially the guilds dedicated to killing Tequatl: TSS, THS and TKS.

The OP is right, the invulnerability is extremely annoying. I believe it was desinged to counter elementalists from nuking them with Meteor Shower. While I think this was a very cheap ‘fix’ and not the way to handle these kinds of problems (getting knocked off will sometimes give me the invul too, while staying melee), we have to live with this anyway. Some tips for this fractal:
*Killing the first two Harpies and then stealthing your party with a thief (smoke screen + blasts and then Shadow Refuge) will let you skip all the other harpies.
*The other option is to kill them all. This can be easily done by using reflecting/absorbing skills like Feedback, Wall of Reflection, Shield of the Avenger, etc. When synced correctly, you won’t get hit at all.

Game client crashed for me too, also with error 42:6:3:2158.
Seems that everyone has it?

First of all: the events/enemies/bosses/etc overall were amazing.
The Karkas were really cool, interesting and formidable foes. The new area looks awesome and the events were great. I’ve had some issues too, and hope you can use my positive and negative feedback to make this great game even greater.

Lag.
Pro: I have a pretty good computer and internet connection and for the mega-event on sunday I set my graphics to ‘Best Performance.’ That worked really well for me. I can however imagine that people had problems with the lag.

Event on Sunday was scaled up too much.
Pro: The idea of the Ancient Karka and the hive was amazing. Taking him down could have been a lot of fun. I don’t mind dying a few times if I don’t watch out for Karkas rolling over me (again, a cool feature).

Con: In my Server (Underworld) I managed to get into the actual area (not the overflow). I thought that most of the people would be there and we would have more luck getting the Ancient Karka down. But because everyone in the area participated in the event, it was scaled up enormously. Especially the ‘kill the reinforcements called by the Ancient Karka’ event took ages, and there were two of them! The idea of events scaling up with the amount of people playing is great, but this was just insane. Champion Karkas took about 10 minutes to take down, and could kill low armored players in one hit. Two Champions in one wave was just too tedious. Event the Veteran Young Karkas took ages to kill. Scaling is great, but don’t scale the event indefinitely. Especially not when low lvl players are also treated as lvl 80 characters.

Con: My Warrior (lvl 80, some points in the toughness trait and rare lvl 80 armor) should be quite durable. Unfortunately even I could be killed in a few seconds by a Veteran Young Karka in the event. Getting killed by a Champion or other boss is no problem for me, but this was too much and really tested my patience.

A lvl 50 player scaled up to lvl 80 is nowhere near a lvl 80 player.
Pro: My little brother had a lvl 60 necromancer and participated in the sunday event too. He was very happy he could play along with me and it was tons of fun.

Con: The Event started at 9 PM in Holland. He had school the next day and couldn’t finish the event, because ‘killing the reinforcements’ took more than half an hour, twice. He had to go to bed and couldn’t finish the event. Eventually we were done at 12 PM. The Event took 3 hours to complete. When he quit, I felt like quitting too, it just wasn’t fun anymore, but I worked so hard already and didn’t want to give up yet.

Conclusion
Good: The idea of the event was amazing, we had a great team, many people showed up (and died, giving me the Combat Healer title). The Karka are great, walk funny and are a challenge. The idea of taking down it’s armor first is also very creative. The rewards were amazing (too bad I didn’t get a precursor).

Bad: The event was scaled up too much and took far too long. I don’t like the idea of low lvl players being scaled up to 80, because they are still much weaker than a lvl 80 player, and their use in these huge events is limited. Please be careful with the scaling system, with scaling events as well as scaling players. This was a deadly combination, which resulted in a tedious and boring event at the end.

I hope this helps. Keep up the good work!