Guild Wars 2

I am digging the new dungeon and all, but in the end it only makes more apparent mechanics that have been kittening me off about dungeons lately… my CC as a guardian feels pretty much useless in Dungeons, and less than useless in this new flame and frost dungeon.

I want try to split up mobs with my wards, to make it easier for my group to take on larger groups? Not in the flame and frost dungeon, because even though most of the mobs don’t have the unshakable trait or immune to mobilize icon, they just walk right through my wards anyhow.

I want to use Wall of Reflection to protect my ranged squishes. No, sorry, pretty much every projectile in this dungeon ignores WOR.

And this isn’t an issue I am perceiving solely in dungeons, WvW is another area where I feel my CC is useless but, for me, dungeons are the worst. It’s feels like the only difficulty being added is just through making everything but damage useless. Anyone else feel this way? Anet, can this please be looked at?

Tranc.6780:

LordGustoff, I think your scenario could be plausible if Anet was releasing huge PvE content every month, but they’re not. Remember the first month of F&F where we were just fixing signs? Or the second month where there were just a couple new events? If they do the same thing with the next living story, a person logging on after the F&F dungeon goes away would still get the impression that nothing of significance has been added to the game. I know I would.

Even if the living story that follows F&F started with a huge content update, wouldn’t it be better to give a returning player this content PLUS the dungeon that they would have missed?

Considering all the negative feedback on how slow the beginning of the F&F content moved, I doubt that Anet would release the next living story as slow. But of course I am just speculating.

As for appearing that nothing of significance has been added to the game… well I don’t see how that is any different than any other MMO’s release cycle – meaning as far as I am aware, I can’t think of any other MMO that has any major permanent content updates in between expansion releases. At least with GW2, we get something more often than the 2-3 year expansion release cycle.

In GW2 we’ve gotten (an albeit useless) Southsun Cove, FOTM, and a complete overhaul of the Ascalon Catacombs Dungeon, not to mention they have successfully gotten people back into the open world by making meta-events worth doing (IMO, I’m on Crystal Desert and the open world feels pretty active to me). I feel like that’s a fair amount of permanent content for the game being out less than a year.

To answer your last question, no I don’t think it would be better to give a returning player new content plus access to something they may have missed. One of the major points that Anet sold the game on was a world that evolves and changes over time – and there have been many complaints on the forms that Anet hasn’t delivered on this selling point. If they are going to maintain the feel of a world that evolves and changes, there needs to be content that is temporary and can be missed. It’s the only way to deliver on this selling point. The only other way around it is changing the direction of the game.

Personally I like it the way it is.

While you make a good point OP, you seem to forget something: that there is new temporary content every month. EVERY single month since the Lost Shores/Halloween, Anet has made of point of putting SOMETHING in game. You argument would make sense if after Flame and Frost, there is no more development at all. However:

Person A quits before flame and frost. Anet turns F&F off. The next month, Anet releases a new living story. Person A decides to come back after Flame and Frost has been turned off, and plays the new living story content. Player A like the living story content and decides that perhaps Player A shouldn’t take as long of breaks so they don’t miss such content.

That seems much more likely than your scenario.

I agree, totally worth the price for an unlimited item. However, being soul bound makes it a no buy for me. If they changed it to account bound I would pick it up for sure.

I would say that Stability should prevent immobilize, but be ineffective once you are already immobilized. Stability shouldn’t act as a condition removal to begin with imo, it should be preemptive only

my current total is 0 gold. All of my rares an exotics came from trading items with friends. But then I also got lucky and got my precursor on my first Exotic try

Just use the buddy system when it comes to legendaries. Makes the whole process much less painful.

The no trinity was a design philosophy that was announced during development A LONG TIME AGO, and is one of the main selling points they use for the game. WHY do people like you then buy the game knowing full well the trinity design does not exist and then proceed to complain about it. If you wanted the trinity you shouldn’t have bought the game. Simple.

You already have an active thread on this topic…

Rising Dusk.2408:

The problem is that there are two schools of thought here and both have different views:

• The leaderboard should measure how much time you’ve invested into the game.
• The leaderboard should measure how good and what you have achieved in the time (regardless of how much) you have put into the game.

I’m, personally, in the second school of thought, though I see posters above me clearly favoring the first. I think capping the daily/monthly outputs would be stellar because it means I can focus on other challenges. The reality is, if I want to compete on the leaderboards, I must do the PvP/PvE dailies/monthlies every day/month forever, which is a drain of my time online and inhibits my ability to do other things I enjoy. This notion that I must invest time to compete is crazy for me, because I come from other competitive games where the only thing that matters is how well you do things and what you do, not how much of it you have done.

I really don’t think the second mode of thought would work unless some things really changed in the game.

1) Pick a thread on the forums, any thread. There’s a 99% chance that there will be a half dozen responses complaining that they aren’t being handed X, Y or Z on a silver platter. This community is spoiled. If Anet were to even consider that it’s consumers should have to work for what they want, the community would summon a large fiery ball of angst and doom on the poor company.

2) The games MAJOR weakness right now is that it is incredibly lacking in achievable content. As it is, the gaps between ranks are less than the achievement points achieved by doing one daily… if dailies and monthlies were gotten rid of, or capped, the top 25 at least would have the exact same number of achievement points. What would be the point of having a leader board with a plateau like that? The only mode of competition we have right now is time invested, there isn’t any other way to get ahead.

3) Dailies and monthlies give you way to much achievement point bang for your buck, compared to time and effort to invest into other achievements. (this has been fixed somewhat with the new dailies). But think about it, 30 mins of play gets you 5-9 points (depending on how many of the dailies you do). But killing 1000 giants, of which there exists like 3 enemies in the entire game that count toward this achievement only nets you 16 points.

If they were to make achievement points more tiered based on difficulty, say like for instance the harder and longer jumping puzzles are worth more points than the easier ones, I can imagine the second mode of thought working.

This… again…. sigh.

When it comes to these leader boards, you will have 4 types of people:
1) The person who logged in every single day and did dailies/monthlies for the last 7 months.
2) The person who just started a month ago.
3) Someone who has been playing since launch, but took a couple of months off.
4) Someone who has been playing for the last 7 months, but didn’t do dailies or monthlies.

Should players 2-4 have any chance at a high spot on the leader boards? Of course not.
In each case, player 1’s time/effort or both put into the game is higher than any of 2-4’s.

In the case of player 2, as long as player 1 continues to play, player 1 will always have put in more time. Why should that not reflect in player 1’s score?
In the case of player 3, player 1 will have put in both more time and effort into the game than player 3. Why should that not reflect in player 1’s score?
In the case of player 4, player 3 put in more effort by deciding to do the dailies and monthly on top of everything play 4 also did. Why should that extra effort not be reflected in player 1’s score?

If player 1 has put in more time AND effort than another player into the game, no matter the circumstances, than player 1 should ALWAYS have a higher score. If not, you are basically saying that what player 1 has achieved is moot.

Well since the point of down leveling is to make sure lower level content is still relevant and provides a challenge, it’s kind of doing it’s job considering your example. I personally enjoy the down leveling mechanic since when I play a lower level character I don’t have to worry as much about griefers running around one-shotting every mob I need to kill for my dailies etc. I’ve run into that problem in other MMO’s.

Second when I go back to a lower level area, if I have level appropriate gear, I still feel more powerful – the difficulty between fighting in an area at level 10 and level 80 is pretty noticeable to me, it’s just not “lolroflstompeverything”.

It’s more “logical” to me that powering up works this way, and therefore makes the game more immersive. It would be frustrating to me to be able to pumb stomp the Flame Legion in Deissa Plateau, but have trouble in Fireheart Rise, for example. Why should the same mobs in two different places have a different difficulty? This gets rid of that weird inconsistency.

I have, though, from the beginning always thought that the number of levels was kind of ridiculous. It’s necessary to a point to introduce mechanics slowly and give newbies time to adjust to how the game plays… and given my opinion above, 80 levels was overkill. If they had stuck with a lower level cap, down leveling wouldn’t be so obvious nor such a problem for people who think they should feel “powerful” because they are 70 levels higher than the mob they are beating on.

So as I usually do about once a year or so, I picked up and began to play Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time today. I got nearly to Dodongo’s Cavern before I realized I wasn’t using the Z-Targeting system or the shield as much as I “should” (considering how much of the game is built around the mechanic). I have been more prone to roll or back flip to dodge enemy attacks, rather than put up my shield and wait for an enemy to attack and then retaliate. Sure is a slightly different gaming experience than the z-targeting mechanic the game was built around.

I just thought it was interesting that I have become so accustomed to the twitch based dodge mechanic of GW2 that the instinct to use it, and find ways to use it in a game that wasn’t really built for it, has carried over from GW2.

Anyone else notice similar things have happened to them?

I have gotten one. I have been playing since launch.

I have to for the most part disagree.

Now is the time to do this kind of stuff and establish that the world is going to change permanently in one off events like this – if they start this now and establish that this is the game they are making, we don’t have to be disgruntled at a sudden change in direction in the future.

To make my point, I took a long break from WoW and decided to come back around the time Cataclysm was released. Having to relearn a world I had spent years becoming familiar with was the last nail in the coffin that kept me away permanently.

Ryuujin.8236:

I know quite a few players who arn’t actively playing GW2 anymore because they are waiting for “more content”; this short term content tends to fly under the radar and when they finally DO return, they see no new content, shrug and go back to playing something else while they wait.

On the other hand, I can imagine someone who has taken a break checking in, seeing another one time, game changing event and thinking I should log in for this so I don’t miss it, and actually coming back to play long before they intended too.

VOLKON.1290:

I think a more correct assumption would be that “people like you” aren’t their only focus. There are a myriad of types of gamers out there. Generations are being spanned these days. I’m extremely pleased with the “something for everyone” approach as opposed to the “all for one demographic” approach.

Now quit worrying about your particular demographic and go play and have fun! Danged kids…

I think that this is the best way to look at GW2. I agree with the OP that when it comes to lore and the rest of the game, they could stand to be a little more serious and dark but, stuff like this that is completely outside of the story is just fine. It’s a tradition that has been going on since GW1.

If you want seriousness, Flame and Frost is that way —>
Sure it’s not complete doom and gloom, but it’s definitely less corny than the personal story, which is a step in the right direction IMO.

I think that GW2 is not intended to be the sort of game/MMO you spend hours upon hours playing straight through. I think it fits more of a niche as a game that you go back to when you get burned out of your “hardcore” games. It took me a bit of time to come to that conclusion, and I enjoy the game more now because of it.

1) The hearts are unnecessary screen clutter. Try waiting around for a boss event to start, and have someone throw the potion into a group of people and tell me it’s not.
2) I can’t choose to get rid of it if I don’t want it on me.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, at least give me the ability to get rid of the buff by double clicking the icon or something. It has no bearing on game play whatsoever, so I feel I should at least have the option of not running around with those stupid hearts over my head if I don’t want to.

Better yet, make it costume brawl only – a one time use item you can use in costume brawl combat (while in costume a brawl form) to temporarily make your costume brawl combatant “charmed” and unable to attack. I could accept this. The way this item is now just seems useless, annoying and unnecessary.

(edited for the costume brawl idea)

I was going to make a post similar to this myself. Glad to see it’s already here.

I love these cut scenes WAY more than the flat dialogue screens we see in the personal story. I was literally giddy with enjoyment when I played my first living story quest last night. These are how I imagined the final dialogue scenes would be when I played all the way back in beta. For me, these scenes are MUCH more immersive than two character flapping their mouths are each other from opposite sides of the screen. When it comes to telling stories in the future I hope that you guys stick with these and trash the dialogue screens that we get in the personal story.

Renagade.2918:

Going to agree with sbr on this one, I think the whole point of the change was so that people stopped buying dungeon stuff and salvaging them for Ectos

If this is the case, I hope they reduce Ecto requirements for items. It’s seems dumb to nerf ecto acquisition rates by nerfing world boss chests and vendor salvage, but keep the requirements the same.

My only question: Are the new skins limited to the duration of the Flame and Frost story or are they a permanent addition? I couldn’t find if it specified in the patch notes.

You know, I was reading some of these posts and it got me thinking….

Anet already has the divide between sPvP and the rest of the game… why not introduce this mechanic into sPvP only, to see how it works on a larger scale and a live environment BEFORE adding it to the rest of the game?

Assuming sPvPers are more hardcore than the rest of the game, I feel like they would be able to give us a balanced perspective on how good/bad the mechanic turns out to be. And that way if it turns out to be a harmful mechanic, I assume it would be easier to roll back, rather than having it ingrained in the entire game and having to balance this on top of everything else.

Just a thought.

(edited for grammer)

You question is answered here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/2x-Pink-Quaggan-Backpacks

What you say is true, but I don’t think there is really much that Anet can do about it. It’s peoples natural tendency to take the path of least resistance, so as soon as one of the other professions becomes more effective at speed runs or high challenge content than the current set, people will be asking for that class instead.

Anet can try and do what they can to shift the emerging meta game so that each class has their turn, but I don’t think there is much they can do to get rid of it altogether.

Leader boards and such ladders are supposed to be competitive. Given that, I think it’s irrational to throw away the achievement points gotten from doing the daily/monthly; it shows dedication to playing the game. If someone plays the game every day for a year, and I decide to take a couple of moths off, of course they should be ahead of me on the leader board. They put more time and more dedication into the game than I did, and demanding I should be on equal footing with someone who played the game months longer than I is just absurd.

Also, asking to be able to catch up to someone who has been playing the game for a year longer than you is just absurd.

Also, look up the definition of ACHIEVEMENT. Your argument is invalid.

As someone who mains guardian, in the pursuit of balance, I want to suggest this counter trait to Boon Hate:

Trait: True Sight
Effect: Can at the very least see (if not also target) enemies who are in stealth.

If someone is going to ROFLstomp me just because I rolled a guardian, I want to at least be able to see it coming.

Ballads.2509:

With the upcoming update not only do we get our ability to get rewarded for events on multiple characters nerfed (mega boss chest nerf,)

Didn’t they nerf the Halloween labyrinth chests to once per an account per a day? Or was that once per a toon? I tried looking back through the patch notes, but I couldn’t find any reference to it… if they did nerf it like that, we already have precedence here for this.

Preamble: I don’t have a firm enough grasp of economics to have an argument one way or another, I just have a vague opinion based on my experience in the game over the last 6 months.
Definition: When I talk about loot I mean solely physical item drops. Not gold.

With the recent looming changes to the mega boss events I found myself hesitantly despairing as I have watched the prices of Ectos and rares rise; that coupled with the recent rise in the cost of T6 mats I wondered without all the loot, how was I going to pay for it all? Then it occurred to me that my issue isn’t less loot, it is an anticipation of less gold income I would be getting overall. It wouldn’t matter if Ectos, for instance, were 25 silver or 1 gold as long as I was feeling that my inflow of cash was adequate enough to at least pay for what I wanted.

I consider myself a semi-casual player (650-700 hrs. Adjust to player type based on whether or not you think that number of hours is semi-casual). Before it started raining rares, I felt that my gold income was not adequate – at least if I spent any amount if time in the open world. Then after it started raining rares, with the steady stream of Ectos I was getting I finally felt like I had the extra cash to pay for things I wanted. Like getting that Valkyire gear for my ranger alt. Buying a mini pet here and there to work toward that achievement. Now I wonder if after the changes I will go back to feeling like I don’t have enough income per time spent in game.

I feel like my gold income has gone up and down like a yo-yo, as Anet has buffed/nerfed ways to get good loot since launch. A nerf to loot has always seemed like an over-nerf to my cash flow, and it makes me wonder if perhaps getting gold is tied too heavily to getting physical items, which are then sold for gold

So my question to you economy junkies, do you think this is true in the larger scope of the game? Would the game economy be better off if Anet stopped playing a yo-yo game with loot drops and focused more on adjusting cash drops?

Discuss, and educate me

I’m willing to wait an see how this change plays out before I complain, but for a semi-casual like me I have a feeling I am going to feel like once again, the gold/material acquisition for my time played is once again going to be inadequate – especially considering the rising cost of T6 materials.

We’ve been playing the loot yo-yo game for 6+months. Can you guys PLEASE take a look at physical Gold drops in the open world and maybe buff that a bit, instead of tying loot so heavily into a persons gold income?

Cliff.8679:

Something a lot of people don’t really consider is that a lot of players want multiple sets of gear for different roles/playstyles/builds. That’s a big aspect of Guild Wars. But by attaching such a high cost and time investment on ascended gear compared to exotic, it really kills this philosophy for players that don’t have the time and/or resources to spend every moment of their playtime grinding out dailies and monthlies for laurels or slogging through fractal after fractal. Especially if this means being forced to do content they’re not interested in, which ArenaNet themselves say is a big no-no to them.

I did consider this in one of my earlier responses, but I think made my point in reference to alts. In no way does getting Ascended gear cost crafting materials. You can obtain an entire set through Laurels, or do fractals and guild missions to expedite the process (I suppose back pieces are the exception here). Since it doesn’t cost crafting mats, that actually frees up those material resources to craft more sets of exotic gear. Instead of spending materials on two exotic sets of gear, you can have an ascended set, an exotic set and the mats you saved by getting an ascended set allows you to have a third set of gear.

Of course, this takes us back to the argument of whether or not it’s fair to be forced to run around in second class gear, which is going to vary from person to person. Personally it doesn’t bother me as long as Exotic = on par with all game PvE content and Ascended = OP compared to all game PvE content, which is where both levels of gear currently stand.

As for WvW… my only other experience with open world PvP comes from being on a PvP server in WoW, so I guess I am used to being ROFLstomped just because someone has better gear than I do. I feel like when it comes to open world PvP, skill can only take you so far before you plateau and the only progression left after that point is higher levels and better gear. So ascended vs. exotic in WvW doesn’t really bother me either and is just the nature of the beast that is open world PvP.

Shadow Blade.1324:

ascended are a cheap crutch to keep some people playing, as opposed to developing interesting new content that isnt just + resist vs +boss dmg. there’s a reason companies like blizzard stopped using resistance gear 5 years ago, it splits the player base.

Yeah I agree… but I assume it takes A LOT longer to produce actual playable content, rather than adding new items a person has to grind for. As kenshinakh pointed out, they started with non-physical appearance gear, which hints that visible gear takes longer to produce…. which means that playable content would take even longer

It has been mentioned by Colin in multiple interviews that a large portion of the player base was getting through all of the playable content faster than they had expected. Which means that they probably figured they had more time to develop playable content than turned out to be the case and consequently had no backup content with substance to throw at us to keep us occupied. And that also shows short shortsightedness on Anets part… but that’s another issue altogether. In their case I probably would have done the same thing…. throw shallow gear grind content at us to keep us occupied, while they develop content with actual substance (which it seems they have done, as we now have the living story). Of course, this is just speculation on my part, and Anet would do better to be more communicative on the true purpose, rather than being the locked box of secrets that they currently are.

At least we have content, even if it is rather shallow, than going for months without content altogether.

Sil.4560:

This is the same post that implies that Warriors are good with a “sturdy body” and should have to “ask for help” to remove enemy conditions, while going through boons with “raw force”, all being things which severely hinder this class in its current competitive state.

To counterpoint this… I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that each class needs to rely on another class for something. In my experience with Guardian, every little point spent in damage comes at a great cost to survive-ability. So, in a competitive setting I have to spec for survive-ability, or I’m basically a dead body on the ground. Which means, for instance in WvW I can survive most encounters but if I want that kill I have to rely on running with a DPSer for the burst damage to get it…. which I find perfectly acceptable. This is supposed to be a cooperative game after all. Whether or not people actually play with that mindset (which I would be willing to bet for the most part is not the case) is another issue altogether.

So in regards to the weaknesses you point out for the warrior as making them weak in competitive setting – sure it makes them weak if they try to run it alone, just like I am weak as a guardian running alone. If the warrior were for instance to run with a Guardian whose great at condition removal, or a Mesmer who great at ripping boons off an enemy, those weaknesses become much less of an issue. Which makes sense to me, given a cooperative setting.

That makes sense. Was just curious, thanks!

I started a Human Necro toon today, and went into Divinity’s Reach and entered the personal story quest “On the Mend”. After being in the instance for a few minutes after gathering the POIs I decided I wanted to do the quest later, and wanted to use a way point to get out of the instance to somewhere else in Divinity’s Reach…. but WPing would have costed me 5 copper to WP outside of the instance, despite the fact that I wasn’t technically leaving Divinity’s Reach.

Working as intended? It’s not a huge deal if I have to run back to the instance entrance to leave, I just found it odd since going from WP to WP within a city usually doesn’t cost anything.

Sil.4560:

This is the same post that implies that Warriors are good with a “sturdy body” and should have to “ask for help” to remove enemy conditions, while going through boons with “raw force”, all being things which severely hinder this class in its current competitive state. Anet’s balance philosophies are questionable at best. I’d rather see them contradict their vague statements about how classes are supposed to operate and make a more balanced game than leave things broken.

Basically what I am understanding from your post, is that Warriors are broken, so instead of fixing warriors to embody the vision Anet has for them, nerf other classes down to the warriors broken state. This sounds worse to me than just fixing warriors.

For all of you complaining that is stupid that Guardians can “lol permabuff” and be appear to be invincible, I would like to link for you this post on how Anet feels the Guardian class should work: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012#post999247

Specifically:

The Guardian is a heavy armor class who relies on boons to make up for their low levels of innate health. They focus on area control and punishing enemies for the position on the battlefield. We want them to feel very powerful when their boons are active, but if those boons are removed, they will start to feel pressure. They can remove conditions more easily than the Warrior, but share the Warrior’s need to be in melee range to dole out maximum damage.

Boon Hate goes against this philosophy 100%. Boon hate basically punishes us for what we are designed to do. THIS is why I am against the mechanic.

I just want to say no… for reasons that a lot of people already pointed out.

To directly answer your questions: No the COF armor is no different from crafted berserker armor. As for loosing surviveability it would be hard to tell without a) crunching the numbers and b) knowing what your skill level is. Someone who is more skilled can sacrifice toughness/vitality for more damage; someone who is less skilled may need the toughness/vitality to make up for their lack of skill.

If you want to crunch the numbers, go to this PvE gear calulator and compare the numbers of your current build with what you want to change it to: http://gw2buildcraft.com/

I agree that Staff/Scepter+Focus is a bad combination. I like scepter+focus personally myself, especially for WvW – I have personally found that scepter+focus is great for escaping when need be. Scepter 3 bind, plus Focuses blind and 3 attack block provide great utility.

Honestly in PvE I’ve found that there are times staff shines over Scepter+Focus and visa-versa… I would keep both and switch between the two depending on the situation, and find a damage oriented weapon set to replace your main hand. Guardian has the great ability to fairly easily switch between support oriented or damage oriented, even in the midst of battle. I feel like if I am not taking advantage of that ability, I’m not playing the class to it’s full potential.

I think another useful tactic is just don’t stop attacking when they stealth… even if you just mash your auto attack. Stealth doesn’t make them invulnerable, you can still do damage if you aim at the right spot.

For instance if a thief stealths because they are trying to come in for their burst, an AOE like hammer 2 or greatsword 2&3 will still hit them if they are in range… or really any skill that has AOE capabilities. Thieves and mesmers are squishy and I’ve killed a few while still in stealth this way… I think a few of the less intelligent ones expect people to stop attacking when they go into stealth. If you don’t stop attacking, you can give many of them a nasty surprise.

Aye.8392:

The problem with what you’re saying isn’t that you have to put in the hours, it’s the way that you have to play each and every day to get those hours in. You can’t ignore the game for three weeks of hard study time, then get to spring break and dump 100 hours in a single week and be at the same spot you would be if you put in an hour a day for three months. The only people that would have those 265 laurels are the ones that spend, at the very least, an hour each and every day, without fail, in a video game.

You are right. But I don’t feel like it’s a requirement to log in every day, even at the loss of a laurel, because in PvE there is not a larger, constantly evolving, meta game I feel I need to catch up to; at least not one that requires Ascended gear.

Ascended gear, to me, feels like playing a new Mario game. I pick it up, play it for a while then put it down for a few weeks before coming back to it. Sure I could have finished the game in those three weeks, but I am not worse off than if I had played straight through. Right now at least, in my opinion, GW2 PvE plays the same way.

My first question: Have you gotten everything else you need for your legendary?

If not it makes sense to wait until you have everything else you need, and hope you get lucky by throwing collected rares/exotic from drops into the MF in the meantime.

My second question: If you have everything else you need… what else would you possibly wish to buy with that 600 gold?

If there is nothing else you would buy or need right now, it doesn’t make any sense to me to just sit on the gold if you have the means to get your legendary now. At 600 gold, the precursor is probably the most expensive purchase you will ever make in game. Which means if something comes along in the future you absolutely have to have, it certainly wont take as long to amass the funds to get it.

Something else I have been thinking about since posting this thread: The game has gone through some major changes since launch, that people feel like the company has betrayed them. I wonder how many of these changes have been made because it turns out that in practice some of the design philosophies they really wanted to include just doesn’t work in the MMO game format?

DanteZero.9736:

Also, when you said 7/8 dungeons, is it safe to assume you’re talking about Arah Path 4 being the only path/dungeon left?

I believe that is one of them… I’ve done Arah story and the Forgotten Path. My understanding of Arah is that the paths are extremely long. It’s been a while since I’ve run the Forgotten path, but the 45 mins or so I believe it took us (this was with running/skipping a lot of unnecessary stuff), started to wear on me. So I haven’t done them because I don’t think I could stand being stuck in the same area for 1+ hours :P

INB4 someone asks, how do you get through fractals? I run it with a regular group of people and we have become extremely efficient at running them. That and the fact that you change areas every 15-20 mins helps to stave off my dungeon “cabin fever”.

I have been pretty busy, but have been slow reading all of the responses and wanted to give a couple of comments.

WvW aside, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to only have one toon in top end gear after 6 months. I didn’t go after ascended gear until after I got my ascended amulet. Which means most of that time I was running around in Exotic gear and the game wasn’t any harder than before. Considering Ascended gear can be gotten without the regular materials, it serves to reason that it means it would be easier to to deck out alts in the more than adequate Exotic gear, since you aren’t spending those mats on getting the top tier gear for your main.

Yes, using only laurels is much slower than other methods of acquisition, because Anet wants to encourage us to do these things… but I have changed my mind on this subject. I had no intention of doing Fractals, and then I tried it, and lo and behold I found it fun. Other methods of acquisition wouldn’t be a bad thing though because you can argue that the current system gives the impression “if you aren’t doing fractals or guild missions you are doing it wrong”. So I can understand the frustration there.

Even though I have been doing the chest events like mad, I haven’t put many rares into the market myself. Most of the rares I salvage for ectos, unless the rare is worth more than the cost of an Ecto, which isn’t often. Those ectos I get from salvaging go to my legendary fund (mystic clovers et al.) and ascended accessories. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of people like me hoarding their rares/ectos (since every top tier item and it’s mother seem to need them) rather than circulating them into the economy.

JaironKalach.4938:

Just to note it quickly and explicitly… My understanding from this post is that you were able to do this by enjoying the game all of this time without that top level gear, correct?

Just to say it quickly and explicitly… yes.

So… if you are not into high level fractals (I’m on 21, and the group I regularly run fractals with has no interest in going above 30), nor if you are into min/maxing…. it still makes offensive/defensive slots nearly useless for the majority of the user base IMO.

I think it would be brilliant if Anet introduced a way to introducing Utility slots into ALL infused/ascended items. Might reduce the number of people/complaints of random pugs running all MF gear if we had a separate slot for MF/GF (note, I said, REDUCE… there is always going to be someone running MF gear on top of MF infusions slots). However, how game breaking this would be only Anet can tell…

Funny enough I ran a level 10 fractal last night and one of my guildies was having the same problem. He could see the skulls over the rest of us, but could not see it over his own head. We got through it by targeting him whenever we noticed he was being targeted by the Maw. His character is the tallest possible norn warrior he could make.

Most guilds that require 100% rep are explicit about their requirements when you sign up. I have to agree, if you don’t like it, don’t join. Simple as that.

I am in a small guild myself (avg 10 people on a night), and I have to agree that the gated content sucks. But, I’ve decided that the friendships I’ve made are more important than guild hopping and the small bit of content I can’t do (which seems to often be bugged and cause animosity among guilds anyhow).

Good post OP. Agree 100%

What about some sort of indicator over your characters head when you are being targeted with this attack, a la what is done with the Jade Maw’s attack? Also, this coupled with reducing the AOE range to the range of one platform should give you enough time to either jump to another platform or use a block ability of some sort to negate it.

Do the captives the shaman heals off of respawn? If not, would it be a viable route to ignore the shaman and take care of the adds first? I realize this would make the battle longer, but also easier since you would just worry about the adds, then the shield, once he’s finally run out of captives to heal off of. That is instead of trying to do it all at once.

(I am only fractals level 20) Also I have found that for the group I run with, most wipes happen when we try to revive someone who has gone down. DAT AOE. Seems to be easier to just let them get defeated and kite the shaman while reviving bit by bit from the defeated state.