Guild Wars 2

Same thing happened to us. We were able to get through the cooling rod room without the last one though, so it wasn’t a big deal. I assumed we didn’t do the dormitory room fast enough..

The first 100 ecto I salavaged gave 10,560 luck and 155 dust. The second 100 ecto I salvaged gave 10,340 luck and 145 dust. That first 10,560 luck got me to something like 54% magic find, the next 10,340 only got me to 65%, so it slows down quickly. Currently at 65%, every time you get 1% more magic find, the amount of luck required to increase by 1% goes up by 40 (if I recall properly, not at a computer where I can test it, it could be 50 though). E.g. If it cost me 1000 luck to go from 64 to 65, it will cost 1040 to go from 65 to 66.

So hopefully your thread can be a signpost for everyone to learn something, although there are many threads like this already. The consensus seems to be: the people who are willing to spend real money on gems fall into two categories.

There are those who are comfortable spending those gems on a random chance at an item, and those who simply require a promised result from those gems.

My (unsolicited) advice to anyone is: before you spend any gems, you think long and hard about into which category you belong. If you spend all of your gems and get “nothing” back, is the fact that you supported the company reward enough for you, or is it insufficient? That should guide you on how to best spend your gems.

As an aside, it may also be worth reflecting on this (obvious) property of randomness: if I toss a coin into the air twice, am I promised that it will land on heads at least once? Of course not. If I roll a 6 sided die 6 times, am I promised that it will show a 6 at least once? Of course not. Is there any reasonable number of Black Lion Chests that will promise me the item that I really want (obviously another crafting booster)? I suspect the number that virtually promises the desired payout will not reflect your definition of reasonable, given the direction of the thread.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

Wait.. the races give money now? Did some races the first day and I don’t recall getting any coin. Maybe it was patched?

There is a chest after the finish line, when you open it you get a bag of coins and some other stuff.

I didn’t see any options for “forum warrior”

JP = Jumping Puzzle

You were correct in your strategy, and correct in reporting him. Sorry that you lost your time like that. Usually when I end up in PuGs (so, all the time), someone takes a moment before each boss just to remind everyone what the plan will be. “Just a quick reminder: focus down the bubble then switch to adds. If someone dies, stop attacking the boss ASAP if the bubble is down.”

If you let people stay in the base, what’s to prevent them from harassing the winning team by drawing out the clock, turning your 5 minute victory into a 30 minute victory?

If it dodges, or moves sideways, it is not a clone. Call target (ctrl t or ctrl 1) on the real mesmer, and they’ll be marked until they stealth, after which you’ll have to find them and call target again.

I don’t like anything that discourages group play. I can see some WvW communities getting toxic because “This blasted militia noob is tagging onto our group and now we have a speed debuff, someone yell at him to leave.” I agree with you that I would like this problem to be solved, but I’d like it solved by encouraging players to split off, rather than discouraging them from grouping up.

Apolyon.6937:

Off Topic: How do you invite somebody from other servers????

Have the player selected, then click on the party button at the top where the portraits go. It’ll have an option to invite that player (it’ll auto-fill-in the name as [Server X – Rank Y]). I use it when I lose an even-or-in-my-favor-odds-fight just to pop in and say good job.

Partially I agree. I think that when you die in WvW, your screen should slowly start to fade to black, so that after 2 minutes (or whatevs) you can only see your allies (so that you can tell if you should wait for a res or hit the WP).

If you’re gearing up for a s/p + s/f build, and want to use the same sword for both, here’s a not-well-known-tip: if you leave your main hand empty in the alt-set, when you swap weapons it will only swap out the off-hand. So you don’t have to make/buy two of the same weapon to gear up

I proposed this solution in another thread, but I’ll repeat it here. What if we split each borderlands and EB into 2 separate time-gated maps. So you’d have Green Borderlands “day” and “night”, say, each one open for 12 hours /day. The state of each is maintained separately. With a system like this, if you take SMC and fortify it during the “day,” your effort isn’t lost if you can hold it until the end of the “day,” and your server is again active at the start of the next “day.”

Something like this prevents nightcapping, while allowing the server with a stronger world-wide presence to still enjoy the benefits that come with that (e.g. a strong presence on both “day” and “night” maps).

Of course the biggest problem with this solution, to my mind, is that it would be jarring when the day and night maps switch. What happens if the enemy holds SMC during the night, and you’re defending the lords room during the day? Where should you go?

Chris.3290:

Mathemagician.1836:

Instead of doing anything messy with PPT, which I agree is unfair, I’d like to propose an alternative solution.

WvW maps that are time-gated.

An innovative idea, but flawed since they’d have fewer people spreading across more maps, the BL’s and EB would still be up for grabs; and it would offer even more PPT for night heavy servers.

I agree. When I was proposing something like this, I forgot to mention that it might mean splitting each borderland and EB into the two (three? four?) timegated maps. We absolutely don’t want to spread the population out any more than it is.

Instead of doing anything messy with PPT, which I agree is unfair, I’d like to propose an alternative solution.

WvW maps that are time-gated.

So there is a NA prime-time map that is open from, I dunno, 5pm-5am EST and an Oceanic primetime map, with similar hours. That removes the “night capping” because the conflict takes place on a different set of objectives, and if you don’t have the coverage, you should lose them. Just an idea.

I agree. Kinda sick of minion-master asura builds thriving on how hard it is to click on them.

Hey, welcome to the game-

So as a guardian, you can only wear heavy armor, so you might look into Armorsmithing. You (and all characters) can also wear jewelry, so Jewelcrafting is another good one. Then, you can buy weapons from the BLTC, or make another character for Weaponsmithing/Artificing (one covers swords/shield/mace, the other staff/focus/scepter). Alternatively, you can pick up cooking.

I recommend Armorsmithing and Jewelcrafting because the only overlap is metal, and you can make equipment for 11 slots on your character. Plus jewelcrafting will be useful for all future characters.

You can only have 2 crafting professions active on any particular character at a time. You can switch professions at any time, but there’s a fee to switch into one you already have progress in (40 silver at skill level 400, if I recall properly). So I advocate having alternate characters for different crafting disciplines (e.g. my mesmer is my tailor/cook, my elementalist is my artificer, my ranger is leatherworking/jewelry, my thief is weaponsmithing/huntsman).

Crafting is not complicated once you “get it.” All disciplines but food/jewelry work on this principle: Component1+Component2+Insignia/Inscription = weapon.

E.g. Staff head + staff shaft + mighty inscription = mighty staff.

Inscriptions are wood/cloth+blood/fangs/totems/venom sacs/scales.
So a simple +power staff would require a mighty inscription, which is a green wood dowel (made from a plank made from logs) + vial of weak blood.

The most important thing to remember while leveling up your crafting is that discovering new recipes (e.g. the first time you combine staff head + staff shaft + mighty inscription) is worth A LOT more experience than making the 2nd/third/etc.

It’s also a good idea to do your crafting on Thursday nights, because WvW gives your server a crafting bonus, and it’s usually maxed by then. (Bonuses reset on Friday nights).

However, as Black Wolf said, crafting is a bit of an investment. You probably will not find, in the course of natural play, enough materials to fully level up your profession. So you will have to buy materials from the BLTC. Many of which are very cheap! However, the equipment you want is much more likely to be even cheaper, since the market is flooded with equipment made from people leveling up crafting. On the other hand, once you have a crafting discipline leveled up, it’s ``free’’ equipment for your alternate characters / friends. You’ll find the materials (mats) you need to make your armor as you level up the alt, so you can just craft the equipment you want. On the other hand, you could have just sold those materials and bought the armor off the BLTC.

I enjoyed leveling up my crafting, and I didn’t use a guide (you don’t really need one once you’ve got it figured out…except maybe cooking). I never went into it expecting to craft for profit, so I’m not as jaded as many people

Good luck!

I don’t agree with one-shot mechanics for everyone…I DO agree that it would be interesting if the situation did a one-shot on zerker sets. So unless you are great at dodging, zerker will not be the way to go. However, during the Weapons Test in Molten Facility, your damage output largely did not matter. So it would be good if damage did matter, so it didn’t reward “trivializing” the situation by stacking vitality and toughness. Use the “stressed” condition from the Weapons Test in Molten Facility to stop the players from switching armor between phases, if it is set up that way.

Other interesting mechanics to consider, that can be used to make a fight more challenging, already appear in other parts of the game. For instance, the burning oil in the dredge fractal. Spice that up a bit by adding something like the “Get out of the frog’s mouth” mechanic from Big Mayana, the Guild Bounty (if you’re unfamiliar with this, if the enemy hits you with a tongue attack, it “eats” you. Your skills are locked out. Then for a short window you are presented with skills 1-5, one escapes, the others lead to damage. So you have to be quick! ) What if you had to manage that puzzle to pour the oil, instead of just hitting a lever? This kind of puzzle would fit into other ways to make bosses vulnerable.

Another interesting mechanic would be the “bell hero” event from Wintersday, where the higher the team score applies conditions to the boss that makes the fight easier.

One more would be a jumping section like the harpies in the fractals, where you would have to jump from platform to platform to avoid attacks.

These would be reasonable ways, I think, to make more challenging bosses without it requiring the boss to be a damage sponge. I like dodging one shots, but there’s a lot more to the game than just dodging!

I go out of my way to harvest all plants, because they have a chance of dropping dye. I also harvest all mithril / trees that give elder logs, and of course ori and ancient/orrian trees. For the rest, I stopped seeking them out when I had a full stack + full stack refined in my bank. I still hit them up if I’m rushing my daily, but I don’t go out of my way any more.

I always care a mithril and an ori set, and if I remember, I try to grab from my bank / alt an appropriately leveled set of tools if I know I"m going to be spending an extended period of time in a zone.

Having just finished all renown hearts (for the second time), I realized one change that would have made my life much easier:

Similar to how dynamic events show an orange circle to indicate the effective area of the event, I’d love to see the area of a renown heart outlined (perhaps a dashed yellow line, to set it apart). I feel that this would be very useful for hearts that have multiple objectives, e.g. “Feed our chickens or murder centaur.” It was often the case that I’d wander off in search of centaur to murder (or at least outrun), only to go the wrong way and end up outside of the heart’s area. If I could see the area, I’d have a much better guess of which direction to head for those centaur, and it would make those hearts a bit less frustrating.

You definitely have to know how to dodge though (that is, play the game). I know CoFp1 has been talked to death, but I find it relevant here. I love it when (badly played) warriors sporting the full berserker set join my PuG group of random classes. They’re so used to killing things before they take any damage. However, when they’re in a PuG group, they don’t know how to play, so they just die and die and die.

I’m happy that monsters go after players with toughness. I like my build with condi/precision/toughness, so I can hold aggro for the glass cannons who don’t know how to dodge

As long as they are truncated, I wholeheartedly agree. E.g. with the molten facility, an amped up version of the weapons test (great place for Dessa to drop you into it), then a fight with some protectors and gunners, perhaps with the frost-boxes, and then finally fighting the duo. That’s a nice length Fractal right there

I’d love to take it one step further, and have an out of combat full equipment swap. I have a magic find set, and my PvE/WvW set, but I’d love to be able to swap them instead of change the 13 pieces that need to be shuffled about.

I think something like this is a good idea. It’d be neat if there was a (personal) control meter that filled up. Once it maxed out, you enter “scout mode,” and get your bonus rewards for defense. When you leave the area, the meter slowly depletes. When it empties, you lose your bonus, but if you return in time it fills back up.

If you want to promote academic discussion, you need a more clearly worded introduction, and you also need to remove things like
“Before realizing the results of lock boxes, I was happy to buy from the store based on my trust of GW2 and my eagerness to support such a great game. And now that I see what they are doing, I will never trust the charlatans of the Black Lion Trading Co to do anything other than con money out of honest people.”

You also need to reword your post to remove a lot of the hyperbole and emotion out of it. E.g. This statement has little place in a such a discussion: "The gem store is insidiously preying on people’s trust of the developers to give them equitable value for their money. "

My suggestion would be to try and convince an ANet employee (for reputability, perhaps another community leader) to launch something like kickstarter. Kickstarter itself cannot be used for contests, but maybe a similar site can be used.

I understand that you are upset. You are welcome to your opinion, and you are welcome to attempt to convince others that your opinion is correct. On the other hand…

As far as I can tell, they will continue to put highly desirable items on BLTC as long as it is significantly profitable. Some people, even knowing the terrible odds, find it worth their money to take the chance to get those items. You have no right to speak for them and their values.

A new thread like this shows up seemingly every day. I’ve never seen a thread like this make forward progress. Every time someone posts something like this, there is a counter post that says, in essence “Don’t gamble if you don’t know the odds.” It’s not clear to me adding more posts like this is going to make the information more readily accessible than it already is. Anyone who is concerned about the odds is going to quickly find this information, and anyone who is not isn’t going to seek it out.

So at the end, let me say that I’m sorry that you were burned. This happens to many people, but I, and many people (as determined by my informal survey of the forums), don’t see it as immoral.

In terms of what you should buy from the store, many people who want to support the game buy things in which they find value. If you only find value in things in which you know you will get what you want, then that’s what you should buy. I wouldn’t say “I’ll never buy from the BLTC again!” over being burned like this, especially if there was something I really want.

Jex.6482:

Mathemagician.1836:

If you join a higher level group, you will advance your personal level and will not affect their rewards, so you can look for people doing the level 2, 4, 6, 8 dailies. You can probably get on lvl 10 daily groups, just be up-front about it if you haven’t done a particular fractal before. At 10+ the bosses will hit you with agony on their attacks, so if you get an infusion (75 regular relics, the new backpieces from Secrets of Southsun living story have an infusion slot for it), you’ll be better off. Especially if you link this infused item when you say you are newer to Fractals on a 10 group, they’ll be more forgiving.

Please don’t join a lvl 20+ until you have enough AR and experience I don’t mind helping out new players, but new players in 20+ is a bit much..

Ok so only run fractals 1-9 until I have agony resistance. I know for CoF almost everyone usses a class cannon build or at least most warriors. Is there a build like that for fractals?

I would say 1-9 until you’re comfortable with every fractal, then feel free to jump on 10+ runs, even without AR. A friend of mine that I play with finally got his first bit of AR once we finished 16, and he went down far less than the people with AR

I’ve never had an issue with not seeing the circle. You may not be able to see the circle on your platform, but if you make sure you are paying attention to nearby platforms too, you should be able to see the circle regularly.

Also pay attention to the geometry of the platforms. You can often dodge roll forward or backward in a pinch or just make a jump. Personally I go for stability since I have an unhealthy tendency to hurl myself into the void

If you join a higher level group, you will advance your personal level and will not affect their rewards, so you can look for people doing the level 2, 4, 6, 8 dailies. You can probably get on lvl 10 daily groups, just be up-front about it if you haven’t done a particular fractal before. At 10+ the bosses will hit you with agony on their attacks, so if you get an infusion (75 regular relics, the new backpieces from Secrets of Southsun living story have an infusion slot for it), you’ll be better off. Especially if you link this infused item when you say you are newer to Fractals on a 10 group, they’ll be more forgiving.

Please don’t join a lvl 20+ until you have enough AR and experience I don’t mind helping out new players, but new players in 20+ is a bit much..

It may or may not be worth it. If you look at your total precision, and divide it by 21, and then round DOWN, that should be the same as your crit chance (before any boosts like Fury).

Now, go back, and add 5 to your precision, divide by 21, then round DOWN. This is your crit chance if you added one +5 infusion. If your crit chance improved, then you need only one infusion to up your crit chance by 1%.

Otherwise, repeat by adding 10 instead, or 15, or 20, or 25, or 30, and you can see how much 2,3,4,5 or 6 infusions adds to your crit chance.

It’s possible that just one infusion gives you 1% more, because of where your other gear puts you. Note that if one infusion ups your chance by 1%, then you will need 4 (possibly 5!) more infusions to get an extra 1% more. (You can check via the formula above)

Look carefully at the boss attacks, and learn to dodge them. For instance, like was mentioned with the lava boss, when he turns to face you, if he does a slight lift-up, dodge, because an arrow is coming your way : ) It will really help, I think, to play ranged attacks so you have more room to dodge.

Also, you can now use laurels / guild commendations to buy ascended gear and put simple infusions (75 regular relics at one of the merchants in the Fractals) to get some AR. Alternatively, every time you do the daily lvl 10-18 fractal, you get a pristine relic, and 10 of those will get you an ascended item too.

As long as some people have AR, it should not be an issue (I have 25 AR, but my 2 guildies I often run with still have 0, and they’re fine at level 16 so far).

Good luck!

So yesterday in WvW I fought a guy that was very obviously using some sort of speed hack, and maybe a teleport hack (he liked to fall out of the sky onto the same position, but that could have been him speed-jumping from further away). I did right click on his portrait and report him (for botting). Is there any other followup I could have done? I didn’t think a screenshot would be particularly helpful, since it doesn’t have his name on it, so I didn’t take one. What should one do in the future?

Thanks!

I hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy it by now. If not, a simple solution is to make your own post on gw2lfg, and advertise that A) you are new / new players are welcome and you don’t want to rush through any of it.

It’ll take a little longer to find a group, but you’ll find one of like-minded individuals (after all, wouldn’t you instantly join a group if you saw that post? : ) )

You might attempt it on days where the daily achievement includes group events and/or daily revives. Usually if you advertise that you’re putting a group together for it and mention that it’s a great way to progress on those two achievements, you can reasonably quickly get a group to take her down.

Just poor luck. I’ve had days where every dragon chest gave me all green items, and days where I’ve gotten 2 rares out of one chest. The important thing is that you get the promised rare via the daily bonus chest.

Probably because the items you make with them are rare quality?

My first 80 was an ele, then a ranger, then I did a mesmer, then thief, and then a guardian. Guardian definitely felt like easy mode. Still fun to play though! Mesmer is my main now, far and away my favorite character.

You’ll be effective almost no matter what you do really, so there’s something to be said for that. I never looked at builds on the forums, but that’s a personal preference. One thing I would do is take your characters to the heart of the mists, so that you can play around with traits and have all of the skills unlocked. That way you can test out some builds and see if it fits what you’re looking for. There’s training dummies and a bot for each class to spam your skills against too.

Personally, I do think mesmer is a good choice. I mainly run a condition build based on staff, which I like because I provide a lot of buffs to my party (our warriors like permanent fury!), and it lets me back out and see where I can support the party with utility skills. My other weapon set is two swords, which lets me get into melee range with some nice defensive options.

Also people will be your best friend forever when you portal them to the top of jumping puzzles :P

I’m surprised this compromise hasn’t yet been mentioned (or did I miss it? Sorry!): a training instance in the mists that you can test your skill rotation on, and after 2(?) minutes it resets and gives you a damage breakdown like it would give you if you died in sPvP. This would let me test certain aspects of my build that I’m curious about: e.g. is it better to have my other traits here? Or should I drop this signet and take this active skill instead?

A responsible player will use this knowing that they’re just fine-tuning a build. It’s in the Mists, so it’s not going to be a reflection of your gear necessarily, so hopefully that will be far enough removed that nobody is going to say insist on you divulging your DPS #.

AntiGw, I’m guessing the plan was try to join guilds until you find one that lets lowest level people into their bank, then clean it and split it.

Also, willpearson, it’s interesting. It’s not clear to me I’d be comfortable living with the guilt of doing nothing.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to associate myself with those people anymore, unless they apologized and returned their goods. Then again, my friends would never do this, so it may be more complicated than that. Sorry that you have to endure this awkward situation OP!

(Also why is this in Crafting? )

I think it’s ANet’s policy to not get involved in guild disputes like this, but there’s no harm in trying.

Hi, thanks for taking the time to read this.

I’m (slowly) building up toward a legendary (Bifrost), and I now have a lot of excess karma, since I bought my obsidian shards with Bauble Bubbles. So I wanted to see what the community thinks is a good way to spend the karma.

I see 2 main options.

Lost Orrian Jewelry Boxes, to gamble for lodestones to sell. The downside here is that it can give me more obsidian shards which I don’t need. I suppose I could use excess shards with excess ectos here to potentially generate more T6 ingredients?

Use the karma to buy sunbeads to make beaded warstaff to mix with 3 lvl 80 rares to throw away into the mystic forge. (Or sell)

It’s possible I’ve overlooked something, so I’m interested in your opinions.

Thanks!

I keep mine in an invisible bag. Anything in such a bag will not be sent to your bank when you hit deposit collectibles.

I really like this idea!

Same thing happened to me. I had just finished my Kryta events for the daily achievement, went to switch zones to Metrica for the fire elemental, game crashed, when I logged back in I was a 1/4 events completed. Not as big of a deal as losing a pristine relic, but something happened for sure.

Pixelpumpkin, the offer is for Tony to teach you the explorable mode, which does have some tricky bits to it. A very generous offer I’d say!

What I would love to see is a new NPC in the Mists with whom I could talk and see a list of skills that are different, with the information of how they are different in PvP vs. PvE. As a new PvP player, it would be really disorienting if my PvE skills don’t seem to be working as expected all because of some change that is never made obvious to me.

Try releasing a bubble then shooting it.

Also ran this for the first time in a while last night, I forgot how fun it is! Also, now the end boss gives a daily reward chest like the fire elemental / other world bosses, so that’s pretty awesome.

Probably belongs in the suggestions forum instead, but I really like this idea!