Guild Wars 2

I’m unable to log in to the game, when I click play the screen flickers black 5-6 times then I am dumbed back to the desktop with no error messages or warnings.

Running windows 8 64bit, ATI 6950 using Catalyst 13.2 beta, all drivers and windows updates are the most recent versions available.

I have tried deleting the local.dat file but that doesn’t fix anything.

What your saying would be true if that were the case, but all prices across the board suddenly dropped 50%+, the only logical explanation I can think of is due to a massive influx of items introduced by “bot” users, these users can supply 1000’s of items and happily sell them at the lowest price possible.

This is simply a case of high volume low price, the demand is still there, there’s just no profits in it for normal players due to the bot users undercutting everyone.

My only hope is that any players found using bots are not only banned but anything they have on the TP is removed as well. Reducing the quantity of items and hopefully upping the prices to a realistic level.

Over the weekend, I have seen a massive drop in many items, dyes, fine materials, scraps everything.

Items that have been stable for weeks at certain values suddenly dropped almost over night. Some haven’t been able to recover at all.

Claw’s for example have been stable at around 60-70c for ages then all of sudden this weekend they dropped to sub 20c. 3 days ago buy orders were 22c or more, now they are 11-12c.

I also think having such a strict time limit for diminishing returns for all dungeons is a bit daft, some dungeons can be cleared by a competent group in less than 30 minutes, you can’t honestly expect them to just stand around waiting for the clock to tick over.

They just won’t bother doing that content any more.

I love the dungeons in the game, but so far ever since the patch was introduced to curb the speed clears several weeks ago, I’ve been penalized every single time. I’m at a stage now where I just can’t be bothered to do them any more because I know I wont be rewarded properly.

AC path 1 and 2.

Path 1 finished in 37 minutes, got 30 tokens, 13 silver and 88k XP.
Path 2 finished in 24 minutes, got 15 tokens, 6 silver, and 44k XP.

It has been 3 days or more since I last ran AC dungeons and 2 days since my last dungeon run of anything. Suffice to say I won’t be doing any again until this bug is confirmed as fixed.

Just did a second path in AC in the desperate hope that i would get the correct rewards, but nope, I got 1/4 of what I should have. So dungeons are still a waste of time for me if im going to get penalized like this all the time.

Just ran AC for the first time in 3 days and got half of what I was expecting, so the broken penalties are still there.

Any item level 70 (weapon/armour/accessory) or above that is of rare (yellow quality) has a chance to have between 0 and 3 Globs of Ectoplasm when salvaged.

The best chance comes from a Mystic or Master Salvage Kit, the yellow quality salvage kits.

Considering all the other weapon lines are basically fine and only require minor tweaks, I’d go ahead and say that the only “balance” issue here is with 100b and I personally think it will be reduced in effectiveness in the not too distant future.

I’d personally rework Arching Slash, into an AoE DD attack, no longer giving fury, and make 100b an Adrenaline skill, with damage that scales based on adrenaline levels.

Full Adrenaline, damage is about what it is now.

I’d also rework the Hammer animations to remove the delays and/or pauses during animations so combat has more fluidity.

I played a dual swords condition build for a bit and a 25 stack of bleeds which was pretty easy to get would do ~2500 damage/second, and being a condition it ignored armour/toughness.

I now play mace/hammer, control is just far superior to straight damage. I can lock someone down for 6-8 seconds before they can do a thing to me.

Im not sure what all the fuss is about with crafting materials, I’d got 1 level 80 character, and 3 alts that are all <level 5. Yet have managed to level 3 crafts to 400 skill without spending a single copper on the trade post other than to for a bit of copper ore at the start.

All the fine crafting materials I had gathered over my 300 hour play time was more than enough to get my craft skills capped. Infact im already making a start on craft number 4

Do I farm daily, yes, but I never stick to the same mobs for more than 10 minutes and constantly move around. My usual route covers the entire left and top edges of Frostsound Gorge.

At the end of a 30 minute session I usually end up with 3-4 high value fine materials and occasionally a Corrupted Lodestone or two.

Hey folks,

Does anyone, or can a dev shed some light on which colours/dye’s are used for the Twilight Arbor exotic weapon skins. Primarily because I’d like to dye my armour in the same colours

Thanks, appreciate the input and offering to look into things. I actually do enjoy most of the dungeons in the game, some do require going over with a fine tooth comb but otherwise they are good fun and I for one find them rewarding enough

That’s exactly how we did defeat him the first time though, brute force using a thief and mesmer. Without them we couldn’t even dent his health.

This to me goes against the design philosophy that ArenaNET told us all about, that dungeon’s while difficult and require good team work, will be possible with any class combination. This clearly, isn’t the case if it requires you to have a thief and mesmer in the group.

Two suggestion’s I can give to make this fight possible though are.

1. Reduce the frequency of crystal spawns, and the number of crystals spawned or
2. Reduce the health of crystal’s so that they are able to be taken down in 2-3 hits.

Also add an extra delay on when the circles appear and crystals fall, because as it stands its almost instant which makes dodging them very difficult.

Other than that, the dungeon path itself is very well done and fun. It’s just that last encounter that spoils.

I have heard of rumours that crystals spawns are luck based, if you get lucky on the number and frequency of spawns you can win. That in itself is a major issue. Encounters should never be luck based, specially in a game that’s advertised as being skill based!

So maybe our ranger could have been a little better prepaired for this encounter. Would it have made a difference, probably not.

Still would have lacked the DPS increase offered by Time Warp. As a defensive warrior I carry 4 weapons with me. mace, shield, hammer and rifle.

But none of this detracts from the fact the encounter is poorly designed. I would personally love to see an ArenaNET video of this one encounter being done in house without using a thief, mesmer and ranger.

Ran this dungeon path twice now, the first time was with a random group consisting of a thief, mesmer, guardian, warrior (me) and another warrior.

Second time was a guild group consisting of 3 warriors, an elementalist and a ranger.

The first time running this dungeon, we were completely blind, had no idea about anything but still managed to successfully finish the dungeon, the final boss was a tough fight but we managed to brute force it with mass DPS, totally ignoring the crystals.

This was most likely helped by the fact our thief kept poison up as much as possible (-33% healing effectiveness) and our mesmer kept Time Warp for the important burn phase from 30-0%.

On our second run with a guild group with access to team speak, co-ordination was spot on, we didnt die once and cleared through to the final encounter in record time, but could we kill him.

Not even remotely close, the crystals just spawned too fast and without having a thief/mesmer for the poison/burst DPS, we couldnt even dent it’s health.

So we attempted to do it the proper way, by destroying the crystals, we tried with 2 on the boss, 3 crystal killing. Couldn’t do enough damage to the boss. So we tried 3 on the boss, 2 doing crystals. Crystals spawned just as quick as we could dispatch them.

4 on boss, 1 on crystals. Pointless, couldnt do enough damage to offset the healing.

This is so far out of all the explorable modes I have tried the only one which demands a very specific group make up to even be possible. Without a Thief and Mesmer for the poison and 10 second double DPS increase, I just don’t see this encounter being possible.

Anyone care to prove otherwise, I’d be very impressed if you did it without one or both of the above mentioned classes.

tommy.1924:

The crying is to get the attention of the devs to address a problem most gamers are having with their product, that’s the point.

can I write this? or will this get trashed too? worst treatment I have ever experienced from an online game company.

You’ve not been playing MMO’s for long then have you because I can honestly say as far as customer support goes ArenaNET have been doing a stellar job so far and in most cases have gone above and beyond to explain them self’s to the player base.

Something a large majority of other MMO companies NEVER do.

The content is there, you just need to look for it. Dungeon’s are relatively fun, they are not a necessity to do unless you have specific goals, dungeon armour set, legendary weapon components.

You are not paying a monthly fee, if you feel you are getting bored or dislike the grind and don’t want to PvP in a PvP game, then quit. Your not losing anything by doing so and ArenaNET aren’t losing any revenue from you leaving.

Come back later on when new dungeons are added, new content is available or they have done a bug fix pass on current content.

Probably the best solution I’ve read about so far.

I always wondered why there is no daily/weekly/monthly incentive to do dungeons.

I just completed CM path 3 (butler) and got 1/4 of the reward I was meant to, over an hour and half has passed since I did TA, yet I got penalized rewards.

It certainly isn’t working as intended.

Everyones going on about Magg, have people even tried other routes.

Path one is actually good fun and fairly straight forward.

I have completed 2 explorable mode dungeons since the “patch” yesterday which reduced rewards for completing multiple dungeons more than twice and also reduced cash/experience rewards for speed runs.

I have just finished TA explorable mode (Up), took maybe 45 minutes and got a reduced reward despite it being my first TA run of the day, in fact first TA run in 3 days.

I got reward listed below. 15 Tokens, 13 silver, 88k XP, half of what it should have been.

I also got the same for my first run of CoF post fix (path 1), except that was 15 tokens, 6s 50c and 44,450 XP, a quarter of what it should have been.

Rewards are simply not working as intended because I should be getting 15 tokens, 26 silver and 176k XP for my time and effort.

The issue I have with dungeon’s is nothing to do with them being difficult or requiring a well co-ordinated group, it’s to do with several other things.

For a part of the game which requires good co-ordination and co-operation there are no options for doing this in game other than party chat.

While there are other things to do outside of dungeons, dynamic events, wvw, map completion, dungeons are the only way you can get better looking equipment.

Legendary weapons are a long term time investment and should not be considered as one of the things to do outside of dungeons, mainly because they also require components from dungeons.

My guild as ~100 members, most of us work full time, play evenings and/or weekends, some have wifes, husbands and kids. Very few of them are even interested in doing dungeons because they are playing to have fun, and dungeons just don’t offer that in there current state.

I enjoy them just as much if not more than other aspects of the game, but finding like minded people to do them, is a challenge in and of itself.

By creating content that is only there to please the minority of players, those with active well co-ordinated guilds with members who actively want to do dungeons because they have the time and/or patience to bang their heads against a brick wall.

For me to see Guildwars 2 last long term there needs to be greater option for me to progress my character.

Once I have 100% completion, there is little to keep me occupied short term, dynamic events are great and all, but they are boring after a few dozen times, there’s no reason other than to farm karma for the legendary components which will takes weeks, months of even years for a majority of players if they choose to commit to it.

If dungeons are to remain out of reach for the largest portion of players, then arena net need to implement other ways to gain better looking equipment. I’d rather not be stuck in knight’s draconic gear for the rest of my guild wars 2 career.

quote “^lol? You only swap to shield when you need it”

Having a shield equipped in a different slot still counts towards the aggro of a shield user.

With the way aggro works in the game, using a shield basically means mobs go for you. Unfortunately shields don’t offer enough defense to enable you to survive the onslaught. Is this intentional or a bug?

Even with 3400+ armour, 2.2k toughness, having 2-3 silvers lock onto you and refuse to de-aggro no matter what has a tendency to take a toll on my enjoyment in dungeons.

It’s almost like they are purposely picking on the midget warrior!

If i remove the shield, aggro bounces around everyone within the group.

Why are there none available for the armor crafting professions?

There also seems to be lack of aquatic helms available that are above mastercraft quality.

I run with 2500 toughness, 3500 armour and about 24k hp using exotic gear

Also have around 1800 power and about 55% critical chance so I get the best of both worlds really, damage and survivability.

I also trait for reflecting missiles when blocking, incredibly funny watching riflemen in CM explorable hit themselfs for 2k+

They were right back then and are still right now, you can do a dungeon and get a piece of gear you want with only 1 run.

1 run awards ~30 tokens, one piece of RARE armour costs ~30 tokens.

Exotic gear is exactly that, exotic it is meant to take time to get and requires dedication and farming. Nothing is stopping you from farming the required materials for an exotic set and getting them crafted, in most cases it is actually quicker to do so.

I can easily farm enough materials for 2-3 pieces of exotic gear a day and I work full time so anyone who says gear is too hard to obtain are just plain lazy.

Im a mace/shield + hammer build warrior, running, 10/0/30/30/0 using Knight gear, works really well so far. I may consider switching to power/toughness/healing power gear at some point to see how much of a difference it makes.

The only reason people have trouble with dungeons in GW2 is because they try play them like they have done PvE and PvP. Glass cannon style, this just does not work in a dungeon at all.

You need support and utility to be successful in a dungeon and more importantly survivability.

If you lack either of the above you will die… many many times.

My only annoyances are.

Hammer skill 3 and 4 can both be interrupted by moving

AC explorable mode isn’t hard, it just requires a totally different mindset than general PvE, once you know the encounters and how to deal with the trash its easy.

TA is also fairly easy although some of the trash has incredibly high burst.

The issue with dungeons, is the difficulty curve, they are very unforgiving and people lack the patience to learn the encounters and how to deal with the mobs, this learning process is hampered by bugs and in some cases a total lack of tell tale signs for when an npc is using a powerful ability.

These signs are often hidden or made difficult to spot due to the spell effect soup often around when in group scenarios.

masterwork/rare with a very small chance of exotic (dungeon set) from chest would make it more rewarding to do dungeons.

This pretty much sums up the reason people have trouble with dungeons.

Dungeons need to basically follow this basic design philosphy.

Short < 1 hour
Interesting
Rewarding
Minimal trash

Bosses need: Interesting mechanics, avoidable spike damage and good rewards.

Casual players who are the largest portion of players do not and will not do explorable modes, in some cases they will just not bother going back after trying story modes.

As much as I like a challenge and enjoy trying hard content I am in the minority, the 1% of players who will do explorable modes even if they take ages and result in multiple deaths and expensive repair bills, that doesn’t mean I enjoy it though. I do it because I want to stand out and have my character look unique.

If dungeons are remain as they are currently, then alternative methods for collecting the “dungeon” specific loot need to be added. Tokens for doing dynamic events in the zone at certain levels or allow purchase with karma, rather than just the one method which alienates a vast majority of the playerbase.

I’m level 80 have been since launch, I have full exotic armour and weapons, several pieces of dungeon exotic loot, 400 skill in 2 trades and over 225 hours of play time.

I love and hate dungeons, some are great fun, CoF for one, its fun, short and rewarding. the time/reward ratio is spot on.

The rest though are not even remotely close to the above. Arah is just plain horrible, once you get to Giganticus you hit a brick wall with 99% of pick up groups. For mid way boss, I understand the mechanics, I know how to defeat him but when someone gets targetted by his single target ability and then gets clipped by his AoE its game over, and even if I can survive longer than anyone else, once people start to drop, it’s a wipe, no matter what you do.

AC Explorable is next on the list, some of the paths are fun, some are not. The 2nd route is good fun but the rewards are a bit lacking. The time/reward ratio is a bit off here.

TA is just ridiculous full stop, the encounters are far too easy in comparison to the trash mobs which more often than not result in countless corpse runs because they just do far far too much damage in a short time period. Again time/reward is totally out of wack for this dungeon.

CM as above, bosses are straight forward, once you know the tactics they are more than possible, the trash though is just insane, you often get situations where you would enter a room and within seconds your dead, because 3 riflemen target you at the same time or some other gimmick in the dungeon results in a group wipe.

I haven’t even bothered with CoE and the dredge one because they were just horrible in story mode so won’t even bother with explorable.

Again though that goes against the design philosphy arenanet put in place for the game, basically if you require root, cripple, knockback in order to defeat that means you need specific professions/specs which is the opposite of what they said.

If any profession/spec combination is meant to be able to do the dungeons just fine then something is wrong.

So basically what your all saying, is in order to do this part of the dungeon, you need to cheese the content by “abusing” an anti kite mechanic built into the game.

If ArenaNET intended you to fight the Knights, one at a time, there would be only 1 Knight and not 3 of them.

Quiet simply the damage and CC dished out by the combination of 3 Knight’s is far greater than any group can deal with without using the above mentioned cheese tactics, that is very very poor design.

Link doesn’t work.

We gave up after 4 wipes and having to run the entire length of the dungeon to get back to the count.

I can’t get people in my guild to do explorable dungeons at all, there just not interested after getting killed over and over again in story modes for little to no reward.

If I say anyone up for a dungeon, guild chat/team speak goes silent.

That in itself is a bad thing for the longevity of the game, people should want to do dungeons, they should feel like they gain something from doing them. IF there’s no incentive to do dungeons, people won’t bother.

I reckon one of things that should be done to incentivise dungeons is maybe have Glob of Ectoplasm drop from the final boss of a dungeon for level 70’s and upwards.

As many will know Glob of Ectoplasm are used by all 400 skill recipes in the game and currently only come from salvaging level 70+ yellow items.

Just tried route 3 for TA explorable mode with a group of 80’s, 3 warriors and 2 thiefs.

Other than the entire dungeon being a teleport zerg fest, we got to the part Kill the Count of Blood.

Leurant was his name afaik, he was accompanied by 3 nightmare court knights who do a knockdown combo.

If all 3 leap at you at the same time your dead regardless of class. As a warrior I was pretty much killed instantly the second they go for me.

How on earth do you counter that, even with area blind from the thiefs the damage dished out is just far far too much to deal with and kiting doesn’t work that well either because they can leap what seems like a million miles!

Having done all the story modes and most of the “do able” explorable modes I can only agree with the OP.

While I love the difficulty in some of the dungeons, the mechanics of most of them could do with a few tweaks. Mob burst damage is one major issue, not for special attacks with clear visual cues, but for general damage.

Ranged mobs are also very powerful often doing incredible damage in a very short period of time or doing high aoe damage. Some can be dodged, but as endurance is limited you more often than not get caught out.

Boss fights are either one of two things, far to easy tank and spanks, or mindless teleport zergs. In these cases the bosses that are too easy need improving and the ones which are just zerg fests need fixing.

I also find the aggro of mobs totally random and in some situations can be incredibly frustrating, like when a mob or two just decides to latch onto one person and never let go until your dead and running back from the teleport.

Better or at least some aggro management would be very much welcome. Specially when you’ve been downed, mobs should leave you and go for someone else.

Rewards are lacking though, getting 25-30 tokens for 1 run and 15-20 for each run after when items are 180+ is pretty poor, specially when you consider that getting a set of Exotic level 80 gear is already very easy.

My only gripe with dw swords are the animations. They are all the same as using 1h sword. So some variety there would be great.

Damage wise with the right stats dw swords can dish out insane damage. 25 stacks of bleed do 2500 dmg/sec for my warrior,. Mobility is fine. Coupled with longbow, swords are great.

The in game mail system needs a conformation box for high value and or rare/exotic items.

I just accidently ended up sending 20 globs of ectoplasm to a random person. I now have no way of knowing who that was or any hope of getting them back. Having spent days farming for them.

As you can imagine i’m very ticked off about it.

Upon a little investigation it would appear that the mail recipient name is filled in automatically when ever you highlight or target someone, highlight is done by simply facing someone.

This along with no confirmation message has resulted in my loss of 4 golds worth of materials.

Actually the OP is right, the risk out weighs the reward and some of the mobs and bosses are not hard they are just ridiculous, making some content become very much not fun and its only through determination that you finally get past it, several hours later.

The stat difference between blue, green and yellow are fairly significant, your easily looking at double if not more going from blue to exotic.

To create a level 80 exotic greatsword requires

5 glob of ecto @ 19.5s each
5 vial of powerful blood @18s each
44 orichalcum ore @ 3.5s each
20 ancient wood log @ 1s each

That’s 3g 61s 5c. Factor in the 5% listing fee and 10% final sale fee, if you want to make a profit, lets say 25% you would need to sell that item for a minimum of 5g 6s 1c.

But people are listing them for as little as 3g 40s which when you take into account the fee’s are basically a huge loss. If you farmed those materials yourself, you’d still be making a loss creating items because you could get more selling them separately.

Exotic gear is worth it in the long run though as its a net 13% stat boost which can make all the difference, specially in explorable mode dungeons and wvw.

Hey folks,

I have a 400 skill armoursmith and weaponsmith and lately have been farming materials or buying from the trade post in order to create items to sell.

What I have noticed though with greater frequency is people selling exotic level 80 items for far less than they actually cost to create. In most cases at a significant loss.

That to me just seems silly. I hope it won’t be the norm and just a consequence of people not understand the economics of the game.