Guild Wars 2

AliamRationem.5172:

MasterKaon.4027:

In hindsight, you are somewhat correct. With experience it’s easy to see the paths and options HoT presented to a fresh player, despite how limited they were. However this was all but drowned by a tidal wave of negative reinforcement for trying to do anything BUT those couple of options, either by constantly pointing to the mastery page in the most obnoxious fashion or outright killing the player with no warning and then pointing to the mastery page anyways.

HoT stopped being about things I could do and became about everything i couldn’t do and the mastery system wasn’t about unlocking cool abilities to open up the world, but about removing unnecessary barriers to actually playing the game. Luckilly once completed, those masteries stay on my account forever and I never have to bother with it ever again, which is one of the only reasons I sat through it.

Let’s just call it what it is. The HoT maps were too much for you. The exploration, the combat. It was too difficult and frustrating for your tastes. The complaints about masteries being a barrier are all in your head. You need only 3 masteries to explore the vast majority of locations in all of the HoT maps: gliding, bounce mushrooms, and updrafts.

Yes, you need expensive masteries like Itzel poison lore and leyline gliding to reach a handful of locations and achieve 100% map completion, among other things. But there is no reason you need to have 100% map completion the moment you enter HoT. There is no reason you need to complete every single objective from the moment you walk in. That was an expectation you had which was not met, but you were not in fact prevented from exploring these maps by the mastery system.

When I did HoT, I actually loved VB and the intro to the jungle that I just stuck around there until I had that map figured out. Then I went to AB, played around a bit, wasn’t really feeling it and went on to TD. 6 months later I have 102 mastery level, all of the more relevant masteries unlocked, 100% map completion on all maps, but I did it my way. I love VB and TD more than DS and AB, so those are the maps I spent most of my time on.

You have freedom in HoT. It sounds like you simply chose not to use it. Perhaps you listened a bit too much to the whining on the forums? A lot of the complaints here are very similar, but seem to originate from players who never liked HoT to begin with and don’t know what they’re talking about.

I wish the combat and exploration had presented even a minuscule challenge or it might have given at least some small sense of satisfaction. It did not. The combat was bog standard Gw2 fare, not bad at all since I like the way the game handles combat, but no real test of ability.

The exploration people seem to think was in early HoT consisted of two linear paths. That’s it. Then when I did get mastery points I still had no sense of exploration at all as I had already seen where the game wanted me to go next , how to get there and what reward i’d be getting when I did, but had told me to either buzz off till I had ground out the required master or outright killed me. Negative reinforcement at every turn.

“Oh but all you need is gliding updrafts and mushrooms to explore” thank you for validating my point. How long it may or may not have taken an individual player to unlock those masteries is wholly irrelevant when that exploration and the majority of the content was gated off behind masteries for everyone from the get go and instead of saying NO bad player and bonking them with a rolled up newspaper when they tried to see what was over the next hill, reward that curiosity instead.

So if a player tried to use a jumping shroom before mastery acquisition, have them play a directional minigame to keep their balance on the mushroom. It’s far too slow to use in a combat situation but gives the player a direct challenge to overcome in order to use the mushrooms till they unlock the trait rather that just telling the player to get lost till they clubbed enough pocket raptors to magically realise how to use mushrooms.

Masteries were a tour guide system that fed content to players in the most nonsensical way , unlocking a few scraps of additional content one mastery at a time in a manner that made no contextual sense. Instead of bashing monsters over the head for a couple of hours and suddenly being immune to poison, why not have an area of VB with a large cloud of non lethal but debilitating poison in it and players can actively survive in there by doing events, maybe gathering medicinal herbs and the like to build up a poison immunity? Then have a meta event there where they need poison mastery to access a special chest that can give them an armour skin? There you have logical, contextual , thematic acquisition of a Mastery skill with a very tangible reward at the end other than another couple of mastery points.

Rognik.2579:

MasterKaon.4027:

I’ve been playing Gw2 since open beta, I had all the masteries I cared to obtain within a month of HoT release. Note, not all the masteries, just the ones I cared to get. I don’t need to play catchup. Other people will and in my opinion, the mastery system and what it did to Gw2 was the single worst MMO experience I’ve ever had even though I was using boosters and playing intelligently. It was still a soul crushing, boring, near game and deal breaking chore compared to vanilla.

Forgive me if I’m missing the point, but are you just championing a cause which doesn’t affect you? I understand if you feel it’s unfair to new players, but I haven’t seen any new players posting around here that they had a lot of problems getting around Bloodstone Fen. I did see the odd comment of “I went in and didn’t have gliding. lol” and the like, but they didn’t seem upset, more amused that they weren’t prepared for the setting.

Should there have been a warning before starting up the season that masteries will be needed? Maybe, but perhaps that’s where needing to buy HoT comes in. What’s the big new thing that came with the expansion, besides just new maps and story? Masteries. And basic gliding is the very first one. As many people have said, short of updraft and bouncing mushrooms (which are all required unlocks in HoT story), you don’t really need the other masteries.

I get that you don’t enjoy the mastery system, but can you keep your complaints to those that are actually obstacles, rather than theoretic ones with little to no evidence? Because otherwise you’re just making a lot of noise and everyone is getting upset over something that is not going to change. Masteries are here, and we’re going to have to deal with them, like it or not.

I apologise for daring to voice my opinions in the hope of making the game more accessible and less frustrating for new players. If no one else really cares then no one cares, but probability states that there will be some new HoT players who will be turned off by the mastery system and leave the game. I merely thought making the basic mobility trees less of a hassle to obtain would ease that concern. /shrug

Vayne.8563:

Okay but, in each of those cases, you have to level each character seperately. HoT, on the other hand, you level your masteries one single time and you’re done. Once you unlock gliding on one character, all your characters have gliding.

Nor is HoT particularly linear. While you don’t have the options to have five starter zones, you don’t have to level each character differently.

I played HoT a lot like I played the core worlds. Even from the first waypoint in HoT, there are two directions you can go, leading to two different outposts, with two different event chains.

Some people just level their masteries via raids. Some people play open world stuff. If you have a lot of characters, you can even level by doing the story over and over again. Adventures give a ton of experience.

If you’re seeing HoT as linear, I assure you it’s not. It’s like anything else, you have to run through zones to get to the next zone, but even taht’s not 100%. For example if you have the AB guild hall, you can get into AB without ever setting foot into VB.

In hindsight, you are somewhat correct. With experience it’s easy to see the paths and options HoT presented to a fresh player, despite how limited they were. However this was all but drowned by a tidal wave of negative reinforcement for trying to do anything BUT those couple of options, either by constantly pointing to the mastery page in the most obnoxious fashion or outright killing the player with no warning and then pointing to the mastery page anyways.

HoT stopped being about things I could do and became about everything i couldn’t do and the mastery system wasn’t about unlocking cool abilities to open up the world, but about removing unnecessary barriers to actually playing the game. Luckilly once completed, those masteries stay on my account forever and I never have to bother with it ever again, which is one of the only reasons I sat through it.

Had a bit of a chat with some other players about the mastery system and how much I personally hated it. Now, i thought this was due to the slow exp grind required to get the mastery system going smoothly, but as the comments and replies flowed in I realised I have no problem with grinding as a whole, I’ll happily spend hours repeating events for map currency , my love of JRPG’s can attest to the fact I love powerleveling and I have no issues with the new mastery track or bloodstone fen compared to verdant brink at the start of HoT.

So what was it about the mastery system that had my finger literally hovering over the uninstall button like the sword of Damocles?

Look at vanilla Gw2 for the answer. Even though the maps are old hat for most of us now (open beta player here so yeah) You start off any new alt with a choice of five different levellling zones as well as Cities to explore. You always have a choice on what to do to level those characters. A new zone, a lower level zone, dungeons, wvw, exploring , crafting or whatever else you fancy doing, you can do when you want.

Heck i’m sure people have taken level 1 alts down to orr for giggles since the game would let you if you can make it.

Then HoT came along and Gw2 went from being an awesome list of fun things I could do as and when I please to an awesome list of fun things I can’t possibly do at all unless I follow the mastery system tour guide.

HoT was a linear, on rails path that demanded I do masteries, areas , heck even certain events at certain times because everything else was gated off. Completing a mastery and opening the next gate just led to another gate that would take longer to open. The freedom that vanilla Gw2 had always had was gone and I hated it.

What was worse, that feeling of exploration and wonder was not only gone, trying to free oneself from the HoT straightjacked was discouraged by the game simply stating there are no rewards or fun here because you haven’t ground out mastery x , or in many cases, outright killing you for daring to step away from the established, on rails path.

Even worse than that, by the time I had opened up sufficient masteries to go wherever I chose, I’d been spoon fed so many small , inconsequential morsels of ‘fun’ that I’d eaten practically the whole cake without knowing it. There wasn’t anywhere left that was interesting, nowhere I could go that the game hadn’t already shoved in my face as the next stop on the HoT tour. I completely lost interest in everything the expansion had to offer.

Enter bloodstone fen in season three and I’m having more fun with that one small map than the entirety of season 2 HoT. The reason is simple, I have my freedom back and am currently happily farming bloodstone rubies for the ascended backpiece there.

Well there you go. That explains it as best I can and I sincerely hope Gw2 never has to go that route again.

TheNecrosanct.4028:

MasterKaon.4027:

TheNecrosanct.4028:

MasterKaon.4027:

Guess it all depends on how you see the mastery system then. To me, masteries are not fun, they are not progression, they have zero sense of accomplishment upon completing them and no incentive to get them beyond the basics of either grind mastery points or uninstall cuz this is what Gw2 is now.

Endless Gliding is fun. The mastery grind to get there was worthy of a full page article in the watching paint dry handbook.

So endless gliding is fun, but masteries have zero sense of accomplishment upon completing them. Sounds rather contradictory. Which one is it? Because if you’re having fun with a certain mastery that does imply some sense of accomplishment. No incentive to get them? How about making navigation easier, or other things you can do once you’ve gained certain masteries? Your words betray you. It’s not that you don’t like masteries, you just don’t like doing the work to get them.

It’s going to be like this for all newer players. Two years down the line there will be more masteries and new players will have to do the same amount of work us veteran players had to put into it. This is always the case when starting an MMO a few years into its existence. You will have to catch up. There’s no other way around it.

Use every kind of XP booster you have (they do stack). Use food for extra XP gain. It will all help you get there faster. No one got their masteries handed to them. Some like to grind and had them all within a week after HoT release. I took a little over 2 months to get them all, because I’m not a grinder and also not an impatient person. I don’t mind spending time on them. If I did, it would’ve taken me even longer or I wouldn’t have bothered with all of them at all. Being late to the party does not make you eligible for easier mastery levelling. You have to put in the time and work, like every single one of us had to.

Now the problem here is one little word you chose to use and the entire reason why I like the mastery effects and utterly loath needing to grind them out.

That word is ‘work’. Why does it need to be ‘work’? Why is it a chore? Why do i need to repeat the same event chain for the umpteenth time for another centimetre of exp? Beyond the first experience, none of the events were interesting. None of them were challenging skill wise, beyond hoping that forty odd random people had enough common sense not to stand in fire.

There were minimal consequences for failure and until the improved loot tables were introduced, minimal rewards for success. Four maps get very old when a person’s been through them so many times.

The whole mastery system tested nothing but my patience for repetitive, menial tasks and I found it so detestable that I very nearly quit altogether during HoT’s early days, hence why I can’t take any sort of accomplishment from it. It was like chewing my way through a mountain of compost to get to the cupcake at the center. The only reason I kept playing was my love of everything else Gw2 and the knowledge that when it was done it was done and I could finally enjoy playing the game again.

Don’t take my use of the word “work” so literal. Levelling a character is work too. Getting ascended gear is work too. Levelling crafting disciplines is work too. Substitute my use of the word “work” for playing the game, because that’s all that’s needed.

I maxed out my masteries a long time ago, just by playing the game. That is not work to me, that is pastime. I was in no hurry and took over 2 months to max them out. Yes, it does require you to play HoT maps, but I like playing those maps. Not enough challenge? Sure, it’s open world. Challenge will be limited, as always. It’s still more challenging than core Tyria maps, which you can play with your eyes closed. If you want challenge, you’re doing it wrong by looking for it in open world PvE. The real challenge in this game lies in high tier Fractals and Raids. Those will test your skills. In fact, Raids will help you level up HoT masteries as well. I use the LFG for HoT metas, and the failures I’ve experienced can literally be counted on one hand, since the release of HoT.

The only problem here is being late to the party and feeling like you have to catch up. You don’t, really. You can take your sweet time. There’s nothing that forces you into Bloodstone Fen at this very moment. Besides, that map has extra XP gain possiblities. I don’t know if the usual XP boosts stack on top of it since I didn’t have to level masteries anymore. Also, if completing an event chain only gives you a centimeter of XP, I’m sorry to say but you’re doing it wrong. This makes me think you haven’t been using XP boosters, celebration boosters, etc., which do stack.

In the end it’s a matter of preference. I didn’t grind for my mastery XP, I just played the game. I play this game every day and I don’t get bored or frustrated. But catching up is always an issue when leaving a MMO for an extended period of time, or starting it when it’s already been online for years. It might seem insurmountable, but that’s only if you want it right away. That’s your own choice, not one that is forced upon you. Just like for the rest of us, it takes time. People like me, who play every day, just have the added benefit of already having spent that time in the game. If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine. That’s a choice too, and all choices have consequences.

I’ve been playing Gw2 since open beta, I had all the masteries I cared to obtain within a month of HoT release. Note, not all the masteries, just the ones I cared to get. I don’t need to play catchup. Other people will and in my opinion, the mastery system and what it did to Gw2 was the single worst MMO experience I’ve ever had even though I was using boosters and playing intelligently. It was still a soul crushing, boring, near game and deal breaking chore compared to vanilla.

That’s probably a bigger issue than grinding, how the mastery system completely changed and destroyed the fun of the basic Gw2 experience in my opinion.

Redenaz.8631:

You can unlock a 10% XP boost in Bloodstone Fen, up to three times for a permanent 30% boost. Since Bloodstone Fen counts as a HoT map, I can’t help but wonder if this option is meant to help people grind mastery XP. I don’t know how efficient that would be compared to doing HoT maps, but without a big map meta, Bloodstone Fen is easier to jump in and out of.

+30% towards spirit shards could be useful, but it seems much more useful for masteries.

Now this is interesting. If it works like that, adding in exp boosters, Masteries could be a little less tedious , especially the earlier and more essential ones.

TheNecrosanct.4028:

MasterKaon.4027:

Guess it all depends on how you see the mastery system then. To me, masteries are not fun, they are not progression, they have zero sense of accomplishment upon completing them and no incentive to get them beyond the basics of either grind mastery points or uninstall cuz this is what Gw2 is now.

Endless Gliding is fun. The mastery grind to get there was worthy of a full page article in the watching paint dry handbook.

So endless gliding is fun, but masteries have zero sense of accomplishment upon completing them. Sounds rather contradictory. Which one is it? Because if you’re having fun with a certain mastery that does imply some sense of accomplishment. No incentive to get them? How about making navigation easier, or other things you can do once you’ve gained certain masteries? Your words betray you. It’s not that you don’t like masteries, you just don’t like doing the work to get them.

It’s going to be like this for all newer players. Two years down the line there will be more masteries and new players will have to do the same amount of work us veteran players had to put into it. This is always the case when starting an MMO a few years into its existence. You will have to catch up. There’s no other way around it.

Use every kind of XP booster you have (they do stack). Use food for extra XP gain. It will all help you get there faster. No one got their masteries handed to them. Some like to grind and had them all within a week after HoT release. I took a little over 2 months to get them all, because I’m not a grinder and also not an impatient person. I don’t mind spending time on them. If I did, it would’ve taken me even longer or I wouldn’t have bothered with all of them at all. Being late to the party does not make you eligible for easier mastery levelling. You have to put in the time and work, like every single one of us had to.

Now the problem here is one little word you chose to use and the entire reason why I like the mastery effects and utterly loath needing to grind them out.

That word is ‘work’. Why does it need to be ‘work’? Why is it a chore? Why do i need to repeat the same event chain for the umpteenth time for another centimetre of exp? Beyond the first experience, none of the events were interesting. None of them were challenging skill wise, beyond hoping that forty odd random people had enough common sense not to stand in fire.

There were minimal consequences for failure and until the improved loot tables were introduced, minimal rewards for success. Four maps get very old when a person’s been through them so many times.

The whole mastery system tested nothing but my patience for repetitive, menial tasks and I found it so detestable that I very nearly quit altogether during HoT’s early days, hence why I can’t take any sort of accomplishment from it. It was like chewing my way through a mountain of compost to get to the cupcake at the center. The only reason I kept playing was my love of everything else Gw2 and the knowledge that when it was done it was done and I could finally enjoy playing the game again.

Guess it all depends on how you see the mastery system then. To me, masteries are not fun, they are not progression, they have zero sense of accomplishment upon completing them and no incentive to get them beyond the basics of either grind mastery points or uninstall cuz this is what Gw2 is now.

Endless Gliding is fun. The mastery grind to get there was worthy of a full page article in the watching paint dry handbook.

Sir Alric.5078:

And not having time to play somehow entitles you to have everything effortlessy handed over to you because….. ?
You are not supposed to go to Bloodstone Fen without completing HoT first, because you need the masteries to navigate the map. If you don’t have those, go back to the Jungle until you get them. You don’t need to unlock all of them. As long as you have unlocked gliding up to updrafts and Bouncing Mushrooms, you are good to go. And they are not hard to get. (Of course, having full gliding mastery makes it easier, but it’s not mandatory).

Then have the game tell new and time limited players that. Don’t even let them start season 3 till they have the mandatory bare minimum to navigate bloodstone fen without issue and complete all events there without issue. They did that with HoT story, why not fully gate off season 3 to prevent people who haven’t ground out the necessary masteries from wasting their time trying to have fun?

I’m just lucky I have all the masteries I need. I feel sorry for new players who need to go through that slog just to play catchup.

If you’re a new player poking your nose into HoT or have limited play time and dare to think you can pop into Bloodstone fen and enjoy the story and content there without going back and slowly grinding out a large portion of essential and nonessential masteries in the base HoT areas , you’re going to be crushingly disappointed.

Season 2 grind should not prevent anyone from easily jumping into season 3 content if they want to and getting the full experience. If you won’t make all the Masteries easier to get, then the gliding ones at least should have their exp costs massively reduced as you outright need up to and including ley line gliding for a smooth experience in my opinion.

Add things like mushroom bounce, nuloch invisible seeing and other quality of life masteries and that’s a significant and daunting time investment the game demands of a player before they can even think about season 3, not to mention how much the mastery catch up game will have to be played later on the later someone joins the party and more and more tracks become neccessary.

The biggest problem I have with this expac is the repeated, crushing disappointment I get from trying to explore and find new, fun things. From the get go in Verdant Brink, before leveling the gliding Mastery, mushroom bouncing and gliding thermals the zone was a tedious, boring chore to slog through.

Yet even when all those were unlocked, the zone was no better. Sure I could go places and explore, but why even bother when all the places I could find were gated off by needing even more masteries? It honestly felt like scrabbling over a tall, oil covered, barbwire wrapped wall, expecting green fields and candy only to be greeted by a big excrement covered boot to the mouth and an even taller wall of pain and misery to climb.

By the time I had made it to Auric basin i no longer cared enough to appreciate the zone aesthetics , music , story , unique feel or specialized content. I knew for fact that most of it was going to yet again be gated behind Masteries that were going to take me weeks to farm up, so why bother getting invested in any of it?

The feeling of huge, open world freedom that vanilla Gw2 had was dead and gone , replaced by an extremely claustrophobic sensation of being caged in a tiny little portion of the world until I had beaten my head against the bars long enough to break them whereupon there was nothing more exciting or interesting awaiting me than a slightly larger cage to start pummeling on. Repeat ad infinitum et nauseum.

Just my opinion on how this expansion feels and the problem I have with it. I’m still going to play as there’s few people in the world as masochistic about grinding the same boring events for the thousandth time for that next millimeter on my exp bar as I am, but compared to how I felt and what I loved about vanilla Gw2 , HoT is an extremely poor successor.

It’s not so much that raiding/dungeon running in any one MMO experience is wholly better than another, it’s the general feel I’m getting at. Almost every MMO I have played has a feel of a party of adventurers banding together to complete a specific goal for a specific reason, GW2 dungeons and world boss raids feel like a random group of yahoo’s on a drunken bender.

Also, I’ve not had a problem with Killing worm, the couple of times I have managed to get into a dedicated group, we took it down. It’s trying to find a proper dedicate group that’s the problem. Getting that many players together and coordinated is a pretty rare occurrence, at least during the hours I play.

Going to come right out and say it, I miss raiding. It was and still is my favorite MMO activity. Getting with a group of friends, needing to plan every pull, learning mechanics, discussing strategy and when everything goes as smooth as clockwork and that pesky boss finally coughs up the shiny , it’s oh so satisfying.

Now, I know GW2 has plenty of group content, but… in my opinion, all of it falls short of a proper dungeon or raid experience. Note that it’s not difficulty I’m solely concerned about, but the experience as a whole.

General world Bosses, Maw, Shatterer, SB, Golem, Megadestroyer, Jormag , pretty much all of these are glorified loot pinata’s and more often than not, the loot is atrocious. Sure they have some mechanics to them, but most of them can still be done whilst you alt-tab to watch cat videos. I don’t bother with these unless they are dailies or I’m in the zone and one happens to pop nearby.

Worm/Teq. Teq and Triple Worm are a little better, needing a modicum of organisation and communication to down effectively, plus they have a better chance of dropping something that isn’t salvage fodder. Whilst Teq can be reliably done provided you’re in the map 40 minutes (so exciting and entertaining) prior to start so you aren’t shunted into an overflow map, the dedicated grouping needed to do worm is almost impossible , I’m in a pretty large guild with close connections to half a dozen other large guilds and I’ve seen one scheduled attempt at worm in three months.

Silverwastes meta event. Something worth doing! Not long enough to be tedious, rich rewards even if nothing super fantastic drops. Still no real need for dedicated co-ordination though, not anymore.

Dungeons and Fractals. A really poor substitute for the dungeon runner and raider in me. These runs boil down to Shadow refuge past everything to a boss and avoid the many instagib attacks the boss has. In cases where shadow refuge won’t work, hide round a corner and pray things get dps’d down before everyone dies. Almost every encounter is the same mess of players running around like headless chickens trying not to stand in the instakill fire that bosses throw everywhere. It’s eminently unsatisfying.

Couple this with the fact that, right now, speccing yourself for healing or survivability is wholly worthless, there’s no variety to how the game is played. DPS hard or go home. Having a specific, needed role actually makes some players feel valued rather than feeling as though any one of another hundred cookie cutter, clown costumed DPS junkies could take our spot in the party and no one would notice.

Hopefully heart of thorns fixes a lot of these issues as dungeon running and raiding are something a lot of MMO players do enjoy and GW2 is a severely sub par experience on that front right now.

Yep, me too. Servers all crashed just as I logged on and started Maw.

Yup, same. Massive server crash it seems.

serenke.4806:

By playing 6 hours per day (not being afk in LA) and not spending, you should be sitting on thousands of gold in a year’s worth of playing even if you never get exotics worth over 1g.

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But when every bit of materials you find go straight to 80’s gear crafting (cuz even mats are rare as hens teeth for you) and you rarely get anything at all worth the time it took to get it, it sucks a good portion of the fun out of the game, knowing you’ll never be able to afford a legendary, when even the ‘skin of the month’ on Black lion is forever out of your grasp, when ascended pieces take months and months to craft…and It’s not lazy play, or wasting gold. It’s your RNG rolling zero on every single thing you do.

Halvorn.9831:

MasterKaon.4027:

Not all of them are RNG kings, but there are a couple who think a ‘bad week’ of looting in gw2 is getting less than two precursors, either from drops or from throwing half a dozen random yellows in the Mystic flusher.

There is a thread around where people report their /age and how many precursors they have gotten in that time. Maybe you feel less alone if you read through that. FYI: I have around 2k6 hours and 1 precursor drop and I felt extraordinarily lucky.

Expecting two precursors a week from drops or “half a dozen” rares is plain BS. Don’t fall for it.

It’s not just precursors i’m interested in, It’s anything that’s not utter trash. I’ve never found an item from drops worth more than 10g. Most exotics I find are worth less than 1g as they are almost always level 78. I find one half decent (worth more than 1g) exotic usually every 3-4 months of intensive play if i’m lucky.

Yargesh.4965:

You don’t need to get any exotics is the point I was making. You may be focusing on areas that may give bags but they are not the best without those rng gears lining up.

Maybe, but teq and dungeons get brain numbingly boring running them more than once or twice a week. I can stomach teq every day simply in the vain hope of a teq hoard drop, but dungeons are just a soul crushing grind for what are pretty mediocre rewards when the gold at the end usually totals more than the sum of all the loot drops you received.

Yargesh.4965:

I am having trouble understanding this. Without lucky drops and playing six hours a day you should make a hundred gold per week. Dungeons guaranteed gold, teq guaranteed gold, guaranteed rares that are broken down to ectos from all world bosses. T6 mats are min 30 silver.
What are you spending your gold on?

You don’t seem to understand. I don’t spend any gold and never make any either. I can farm world bosses and frostgorge champ train for five hours and never get an exotic, find maybe only 2 or three more rares that weren’t from the guaranteed chest at the end, break them all down with black lion chests and maybe get one ecto for my troubles. That’s the sort of ‘luck’ I’ve had since day 1. Nor is it a once in a blue moon kind of thing, this happens with every single event I’ve ever done. Opened over a thousand bags from Vinewrath farm, only found 3 level 80 exotics, two non 80 exotics, and maybe about 20 rares.

The divide between the ‘haves and have-nots’ in the game is atrocious. I posted a topic a while ago that it took me a full year to somehow scrape up 400g , playing six hours a day when a lot of my guildmates were making that in a casual week’s play off of drops alone. That’s not me being a ‘statistical outlier’ that’s a broken account.

The loot system needs a drastic overhaul to restore at least some semblance of equality and fairness to it. For the record, I’d take the track rewards for pve events any day. Ever if it took 20 attempts to gain a Teq’s hoard reward, It’d be better than the only 2 exotics I’ve seen from Teq since he was buffed even though I farm him practically every day.

Halvorn.9831:

I would run the world boss train for hours and never see an exo. Haven’t done vinewrath often (maybe 10 times), had one exotic from it so far, but my mouse is wearing of from salvaging blues and greens and using the luck essences.

I don’t think you are right with your “bad luck” or “rng is broken on me” feeling. The point is that the loot distribution in general is unsatisfying. Way too few “OMG look at this” experiences.

Give out less garbage and blue/green, or at least add the luck directly to my account rather than me having to click on the essences. And generally increase the rates for rares and exos, so that even those with an unlucky strain on the rng at least sometimes feel rewarded for their efforts plx.

See…the problem is, there are plenty of players in my guild alone that have trouble even believing I have such atrocious luck. Not all of them are RNG kings, but there are a couple who think a ‘bad week’ of looting in gw2 is getting less than two precursors, either from drops or from throwing half a dozen random yellows in the Mystic flusher. Most of them would cry if they didn’t make 400-500 gold per week from drops playing only a couple of hours a day, when I had to bust my back to make that in a year! It’s ridiculous.

I’m fed up to the back teeth with getting garbage for loot. Been playing since day 1 and am utterly cursed with such awful luck that most of my guildies have trouble believing how broken my account is.

Yes, I say broken. Nothing else could account for such atrocious luck.

Saying RNG is RNG means diddly squat to a player whose RNG needle is stuck on empty and has been since day 1.

Examples of said broken luck.

Farm Teqatl nearly every day since his buff for months. I see two exotics total from his chest and all bags and boxes that aren’t spoon, or sigil, no ascended boxes.

Farm Breach and Vinewrath 6-10 times a day for two weeks after release. His chest, his bags, bandit chests/bags , vine maze chest and all the bags from that (a LOT of bags) yield maybe one decent item worth about 6g a couple of junk exotic axes and one or two 78 oranges that aren’t even worth the pixels that comprise them.

Spend time in orr farming trees for foxfire clusters. After ten 80’s have chopped down every tree in Malachor’s leap I’m left with a grand total of about twelve clusters.

After running half a dozen pvp tracks I managed to find one of only three ascended drops I’ve had since ascended was introduced and gain nothing else apart from the guaranteed rewards.

Hours of farming EOTM has never yielded anything of note.

After an entire year of playing six hours a day, saving my pennies, financing armor upgrades for 80’s through farming alone and making the best deals I could on what little loot I received I amassed grand total of 400 lousy gold. AFTER A WHOLE YEAR OF PLAY! This isn’t ‘RNG’ , this is a broken account. That was when I took a three month break.

I really hope something is done about this nonsense. I have little incentive to do anything on Gw2 anymore as there’s simply no worthwhile rewards for doing any of it.

I can’t emphasize enough how terrible I found this ‘content patch’. I’ve been playing since beta and this is by far the worst load of tripe produced by this game so far.

Where to begin? The story was dull and uninspired, pointless filler if I’ve ever seen it. Nothing to do with my characters or their story, it felt like a placeholder intended to drag out season 2 for longer than needed.

The worst series of offences however, come in the form of the ridiculous amount of mind numbingly boring grinding needed to gain the boots and leggings.

Grind a vast amount of badges to buy the boots , grind more badges to buy the extractors, then grind bosses time and time again to get multiple parts per boss in some cases. It doesn’t matter if you had things left over from last patch or not, there’s still nothing to do in the new content but grind, grind, grind the same boring, snooze worthy events over and over for this patch and in preparation for the next.

The game feels less like a game and more like a full time job with hard work returning minimal fun. I feel like the game is demanding to be played 24/7 or get out as you’ll never keep up with the ever increasing insane demands placed on the player for what is in truth an increasingly inadequate reward.

No. Stop it! Bad Gw2! Bad!! This is not what the game was based around. In the beginning Gw2 was supposed to cut the worst elements of the grind out of the MMO experience as it’s simply not fun, now this new patch makes it feel like the most mind numbing grindy MMO I’ve ever played (and I’ve played all the mainstream MMO’s you can think of).

Please don’t head down this road any further. I’d hate to see the once revolutionary Gw2 devolve into ‘just another MMO.’

I bought two 2000 gem cards yesterday and have been trying unsuccessfully to redeem them.

It didn’t help that after I removed the protective sticker from the code, both codes were all but unreadable, the ink having been lifted off the cards by the sticker’s removal.

I persevered nonetheless , but after inputting every variation of each code I could think of, based on the letter and number fragments I could make out,the codes still could not be redeemed.

Any advice on how to proceed?