Guild Wars 2

Wesuteru.9132:

Hey there!

I find it a bit ridiculous that the collection for the ascended backpiece of the “Relic of Abaddon” takes 1.5 million karma (315k karma per backpiece, times five).

<snip>

Unless there is something about the appearance that’s desired, there are several other ascended backpacks with the same stats that are considerably cheaper. Specifically 3 vendors in the first 4 Living World 3 zones offer them for unbound magic and whatever the zone token is (petrified wood, blood ruby, etc). If you use magic tools bought in the zones you can speed up your unbound magic gathering, and if you use the “run the quick dailies” in those zones that I mentioned in a post above, you can earn enough karma to buy the magic tools even if you start with zero karma in the bank.

I’ve used this method to collect 12 characters worth of 5 ascended trinkets + 1 ascended backpack each, so getting a few backpacks should take you a week of about 2 hours a day, and that’s solo.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

There’s ways to make karma. I hear doing fractals is good for karma. Tequatl is good for about 15k karma the first time a day you do it, and That Shaman has a 7 minute Season 3 10k karma run

Also, the Living World Season 3 zones offer dailies worth 1500 karma each. The first 4 zones offer some very quick dailies. Magic gathering takes about 20 seconds + zone change time in all 4 of them (6000 total karma) and winterberry gathering is 5 total, and you get 1-3 per bush. Etc. If I’m farming karma, I run about 8 of those, selected for being very quick (less than 15 minutes total). That’s 12000 per day.

3 of any character type can do any of the dungeons. For a while it was the rage to solo them.

For the enterprising noob, there are plenty of online walk throughs available via Google.

Khisanth.2948:

Many? O_o

I think you hit the limit with just two.

My finding also.

I camped 2 per zone in the 1st 3 LW3 episode zones and had at it. (the other zones weren’t available at the time I did the above mentioned gathering, and I have enough tokens for another full set on some wannabe lowbie

If they are not farming the dailies and bonus bosses, particularly Bloodstone Fen, (Justicar, double Jade, Jade Champ) it will take a long time. watch what is going on to skip to the bosses when they are up. It’s about 5 days to 100 rubies doing that.

I averaged 1 full set (amulet, 2 rings, 2 earrings, and a backpack) per week in about 2 hours per evening. I got a total of 11 full sets and 3 partial sets (they already had the rest). At the time there were only the first 3 episodes of LS3. You can do the above on only 2 chars total, but since I had more, I camped them in strategic locations.

Ruthlessly cherry pick the zones. Some zone emphasize killing certain bosses and gathering a few nodes, others gather nodes and skip bosses. Adapt to what the zone gives.

Use karma to purchase gathering tools that offer UM bonus (average about 2) for any and all gathering clicks, not just zone token (rubies, petrified, berries, etc) harvesting.

Do the selected bosses that offer bonus tokens in the zone, avoiding all others. . i.e Ember banks = wurm gives 3 petrified wood for killing, Karka takes time, gives junk loot, and gives nada tokens so dosen’t further the collection cause. Learn boss token drops on all zones and act accordingly.

Run a node route that collects reliably available nodes in each zone, avoiding traveling long distances to seek to pick up a node here or there.

Run the quick dailies in each zone., avoid the ones that take time. Blood stone fen can get 20 or more rubies daily by doing 3 dailies, and the double jade (2) and the final champ (4) of the Jade construct series and gathering only nodes you run across on the way to those fights or while waiting near a fight area.

Run a 2nd character behind the first, cherry picking again. This will reach the zone limit faster than trying to scrounge every one in the zone with one toon. Watch the chat and go to the bonus bosses immediately. You can chase nodes anytime, bosses don’t wait. Learn the boss repeat times, note the IP, and log your 2nd toon in for the re occurance of the event rather than getting one more node with the first one.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

You don’t quite understand how the game works: there is not one bit of software involved in a map, there is one ANet server, and up to 150 different clients, all working on the same simulation at the same time, with latencies between them of up to 500ms on a good day.

Your client has the map data, yes, but the server is authoritative about everything, even if it happens to trust the client with some details such as what was being aimed at when the skill triggered. (Sometimes. This is, incidentally, true of every multi-player game out there.)

So … you don’t just have to have your client read the next bit of the map, you need the server to handle that. Right now that’s one process per map instance, with a bounded amount of space because of the zone boundaries, and with a bounded amount of actor involvement, because of the per-map player count limit.

TL:DR version:

I certainly understand the server’s role in computing results and handing them back.

You have missed the OP’s issue, which is "why can’t we have seamless zoning. "

If you make the zones smaller, the zoning will happen faster, until it appears seamless. No software changes needed, just map organization changes that need not be visible to the players. Arbitrarily choosing to make a huge area load at once gives us what we have now.

Seamless map flow was common art in games prior to GW 1, never mind GW2. I will not speculate on why they did not implement it.

ANET won’t do it now because they have no incentive. Spend money, make none in return. There are many things in the current game that might have been done differently at the beginning, but they can’t be redone now.

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

I still haven’t done any of the Dungeon Story modes (or explorable, for that matter), despite playing for 1.5 years and focusing on story. This is mostly because I have a pretty strong aversion to pug things I haven’t done before and my guild having seen a reduction in activity for some time.

I play most of my time with my spouse, and we have a pretty wide selection of lvl 80 characters, variously well geared, and with a couple each I’d say that we’re decently competent with.

Which Story Mode Dungeons (if any) would you say are feasible to duo?

A guardian/druid duo can pretty much do anything in the dungeons.

That’s not to say I’ve done it, but I’ve done about 75% and plan to eventually do them all. There will be mobs that you’ll have to do some experimention and come back a few times, but I believe that most people who play those classes well can do it.

I’m not sure any server upgrades are required. The entire world is already stored on our computer. All that’s needed is a portion of the next map be moved off of our own HDD or SDD and into our machine’s memory, so it can be rendered as needed. It’s arbitrary whether a small amount is moved, in the direction we are moving, or we take time to move a large amount (a whole zone) even though we are not going to use much of the new zone at any one time, and perhaps never during that session.

The player centric range calculations are already done, I.e. how far you can shoot, are you near enough to an NPC or an object to interact, how much of the map to send to the rendering software, etc. Range checks are simple, and done literally thousands of times per second. Adding a calculation to activate loading a map tile is trivial, and it’s from your own HDD or SDD that it happens.

The basic problem is that they did not choose to do it that way, even though it was common art at the time, and there is no incentive to do it now. I.e. cost money to break the map up into tiles, create software to load it as background, but generates no money.

If the GW2 world had been done as 4000 tiles, instead of the 40 something zones we have now, it would have worked fine.

mrauls.6519:

You know it’s not there lol, time to accept reality!

well, having looked for it a while I know it’s not there, but there is one for plenty other weapons (all of them?) so I guessed I’ve missed it. It’s common to find a speedup in some specialization for every main weapon I’ve equipped on other characters, and it’s a matter of deciding if I can stand the specialization or do without the speedup.

You’re saying for a new 2H item brought on by the dragonhunter elite specialization, you can’t speed up the recharge, even if I give up something I really need/want?

I’d was looking at LB for a potential ranged swap to, but it doesn’t look to be able to displace what I currently used before it arrived on the scene.

Is there a specialization trait that reduces the recharge of the longbow? I’ve stared at all the specializations, including dragonhunter, and see recharges for lots of weapons, but can’t find the longbow. I know it must be there and I’m looking at it but can’t see it.

Help please.

Pifil.5193:

Unfortunately I have no idea how they decide who the “next” ally should be. If it cycles through all allies in a certain radius well that seems kinda pointless in the open world. “Next party member” sounds more useful.

My point is neither “next ally” or “nearest ally” work as you describe. They cycle through nearby nodes, banners, vendors, mini-pets, but NOT any ally by your referenced ANET definition. Try it, it’s a (default) letter V or J.

Yes, the effect(s), druid heals, are INTENDED to heal allies. You just can’t target them using those commands.

Gold is easy to get. Karma, not so much. You can’t have too much karma. When you need it, you need big gobs of it.

I farm karma nightly, even though I have about 3.5 million of it at the moment. 1500 karma every 5 minutes or so, but only about 20,000 per night.

In the early part of the game, it was the only way to get obsidian shards, and I spent roughly a million of it. Later it was the only way to get very rare recipes (Superior sigil of malice, anyone?) and I estimate spending about half a million on those wandering merchants. More recently, I’ve turned a million karma into an ascended backpack and a full set of ascended jewelry (5 pieces), done with 100% karma, and spent about a 1.7 million to produce a full set of ascended leather armor (6 pieces), so dropped to about 2.5 million in the wallet. Using karma reduced the armor set gold cost to about 10g. Many people complain about the high cost of leather, but I’m not one of them.

Since at the moment there is scant new content again, a few of my hoard of characters are rebuilding my hoard of karma. It’s the new equivalent to camping a chest at the end of a jumping puzzle.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Yeah, that was pretty funny

<snip>

And “next party member” would be a useful addition to the set of commands we could bind to a key.

Next ally, or it’s equivalent in meaning is in every PvE game in existence. ANET’s PvP bias in GW2 is shining brightly, it would seem.

Thanks for the straight up answer.

I am learning the Druid class, and was surprised that “next ally” did not choose anything that could be construed as an ally, not even my own pet (which is an active ally for purposes of activating ranger runes). I think it was the first time I’d ever used the command.

Now that I know mini pets, banners, nodes, and vendors are my true allies, I’ll behave accordingly. Party members, pay attention. ANET says you are not my allies. Just remember that I gave your mini pet an enormous heal just before you died, and beside you is the healthiest ore node in Ember Banks.

I too have 9 characters, one of each type, all now elite, and all with ascended weapons, coat, and jewelry. Some are full ascended, but frankly coat and pants cover 57% of the armor value, and making 4 other pieces is a PITA for fringe characters.

I sort of backed into that many characters. I started with ele because I’d played that approximate equivalent for years in a raid guild in both of the big subscription games. However, this is a PVP dedicated game, with only DPS archtypes, skipping the other two archtypes. Your survival is dependent on your ability to “twitch” out of trouble. I don’t twitch well. I too switched to necro, as it was a caster, and practically impossible to kill. She did “been there done that” back in the days when you had to get dings in the WvW area and transfer servers to find ones big enough to do the temples to get those dings.

I also raised all crafters to the max level, and learned I got game experience for both crafting and farming materials. Since I didn’t want to “waste” all the experience on level 80’s, and I didn’t want to raise 2 of the same class, I kept adding classes.

One doesn’t learn a class by crafting and gathering, so when they reached 80 I made them a full set of exotic armor, gave them ascended weapon(s) of choice and set off to solo a level 80 champion. That’s a big enough deal that you can’t just face tank on autofire, so one has to learn how to play them at least a little bit. Anticipating this, of course, I skirmished on the way up.

At the moment all have soloed HoT level champs, most before they were elite. Several of the 10HP hero point champions are soloable. Others, of course, will shred an average player rapidly.

I will say that there are 5 classes I can almost play, and the other 4 are at various degrees of suckage, and they get duty gathering flax or running a chest run somewhere, or maybe doing orphan children runs on Wintersday.

Like someone said, there is something for each class to do in this game. <g>

What is the intended use of the next ally or the nearest ally command? I think the defaults are the V and J keys. What it seems to do for me is target a vendor or a mini-pet, neither of which are potential targets for my Druid’s heals.

I’ve read that both here and on Reddit that ANET never intended it to be used, but that begs the question, why is it in game? Hence the post.

Since it’s in game, what is it’s purpose?

Haleydawn.3764:

When you learned the inscription recipe, you click that in your crafting list to show you your components in the main window, above that you have your inscription icon and it’s name next to it, you hover over that icon and it says ‘Account Bound’.

I see. Had I even a clue that exotics could not be transferred, I might have done that. I’ve crafted since the beginning, and ran up to 500 when ascended came out. Everything exotic could be transferred, and I made stuff for friends a lot. Never hit the issue.

This is probably the first time in years I’ve crafted exotics other than for myself, and I didn’t know. Now that I do know, I can’t fit any game theory to why some exotics can be transferred and some cannot. It’s like some mid level dev at ANET went off on a tangent about the time they started introducing new combos, and nobody was/is in charge of the overall game consistency.

Is there some good gaming rationale for some exotics being account bound and some not that I’m missing?

Haleydawn.3764:

You can hover over items before you craft them in the crafting panel, which will tell you if it’s account bound or not.

Thanks for the tip. I’m unsure how to use it, however.

Since I had to discover both the marauder recipes, how was I supposed to hover it?

Now that I have the recipe, when I hover over it, it does say account bound.

So I’m back to the question of how I learn it’s going to be account bound before I make one?

How, exactly, does one find that out, short of making the mistake I did?

Upon reading more, I find a post that says Celestial stats are account bound. I’m surely not going to craft a set to determine if the post is true, but celestial came out eons before HoT.

Is there some place to find out what actually will transfer? The wiki pages on stats go into great depth about what each stat type does, but nowhere warns that you can’t get buy them (and being a max crafter in all crafting, doesn’t warn me I can’t make them for someone else).

What did I do wrong?

I crafted an exotic sword/dagger combo for a friend. I made 1 each berserker set and marauder set. (Total 4 items). I can mail the berserker set to him, but not the marauder set. They somehow came out account bound, even though they are both still unequipped (i.e. soulbound on use).

I’m sure I made them the same way, and they all appeared in my crafter’s bag, so why did Marauder come out account bound?

Sephas.8793:

That being said, the next “content update” is probably in April, specifically April 1st. And this will probably be Super Adventure Box.

I think I remember SAB twice in the past. Do you consider that new?

The question “how many times can you play the same content” covers SAB quite well, I think, and pretty much rules it out as being called “new”. I have plenty of leftover tokens in the bank and don’t think I need to start another stack.

OriOri.8724:

The “boss bad guy” would be the dragons, not Caudecus. We still have a few more episodes of LWS3 left.

Thanks. I’d overlooked that.

This thread is mostly a spinoff of my forum post about a friend who bought HoT as a starter for GW2 here! and I got carried away. Obviously I am looking at alternatives, since GW2 might be new to a new player, it’s not to me.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

If a new (potential) player would check the forums, then they would likely check the Wiki, which provides this information. The forums provide a link to the Wiki, and many, many posts suggest or direct forum-users to the Wiki.

Considering the purchase page warns that part of the purchase package takes 72 hours for delivery, those concerned with limitations might be motivated to check out what all is available when.

I read the forums regularly and have played the game since launch. However, that paragraph does not imply that after he gets the “purchase” it will not work for 72 hours. A quick visit to Gamestop, an account registration, and a 2 hour download later, and the 72 hour purchase delay would seem to have passed.

If the paragraph has said "after purchasing and downloading the product, some important portions will not work, it would not have been so (deliberately?) misleading.

I have a recent forum post about a friend who bought HoT as a starter for GW2 here!

My friend also encountered the “can’t sell on TP, can’t send anything by email” situation with his bags completely full of loot. We worked around this irritant by stashing valuable stuff in his bank or a bag, and vendoring all the rest. The problem with this is when you read the forums about it, as you suggest, we find people who have not gotten rid of the 4 day thing in 10 days, or even 14. Time will tell if he lasts that long.

DeanBB.4268:

If he doesn’t want to spend cash, he can convert gold to gems and buy that way.

I have done that the entire game. Gold is very easy to come by and I’ve bought bank slots to total 14, full shared memory, characters up to 13 from whatever the startup number was, a lifetime pass to Royal Terrace, and a number of 1-of items.

Still, that represents a lot of hours, and after a day of basically getting organized, he’s not there. When I offer to fund it for him, he opines that I could have just bought the account for him, ran him up to Super Hero Extraordinaire, bought all the good stuff, and told him how good whatever I’d named his character had done. I.e about the same answer as any true gamer who plays himself to the top would have given.

I mined everything I wanted from LS3 episode 4 a couple of weeks ago. (mastery and achievement points, and map completion). It would also appear LS3 has ended, since the Boss Bad Guy has been eliminated.

When might I expect to find any new content to be released? Is anything promised for sure in CY2017?

Of course, my friend could not log in during those times, as he only started yesterday, from scratch.

So not only do the expansions need to be purchases, as I expected, but even mini-content stuff needs to be purchased too for new starters?

I talked a friend into purchasing HoT for the first time, thinking it included everything so far. What he found is that it does not include LS3 episodes 1-3, which much be purchases for an additional 200g each (total 600). Episode 4 apparently comes with the purchase.

What’s up with this. Is this something I missed? I’ve owned the basic game and HoT since their respective launches?

That’s an unpleasant surprise, since the friend is not inclined to purchase anything from the gem store.

I don’t think they will fix it. 8 hours I remember, as it’s on some open world chests, which I camp when in the boonies because that’s all I can do. I’ve never run across 23 I don’t think, but then Orr Truffles was something longer than 8.

My OP really just wanted to know what it was.

I still consider 23 hours a poor design, as it protects nobody, including ANET and hurts plenty.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Regardless, those with a window of time for game play must wait until reset. If they did the Daily (or gathered items on a 24-hour schedule), they would have to wait (the full 24 hours at some point). I don’t really see the difference.

Sure you do.

Assume I play from 8 to 10 every night, and that server reset at 7:00 gates everything.
I can gather anything anytime in my play time and do anything else I want.

Now assume that, besides reset, I have to wait 24 hours since my last gathering. So if I gather at 9:30 one night, I can’t gather at 8:30 the next night even though I’m in game playing. I have to wait to at least 9:30 and since I’ll may be doing Habion, taking 10 mins, I can’t start until 9:45. I didn’t have the chance to gather before the boss fight, because the 24 hour lockout forced me to wait even though I’ve passed into a new server reset time.

Fast forward to the next night and I’ll blow out of my play window. No, I’ll stay and do it. Next night, same until I can’t gather until 2 in the morning.

It doesn’t matter where my play window is with regard to the server reset. It could even be the next day. However, adding a 24 hour reset on top of that slowly pushes me and everyone else out of that. In practical terms, so does 23 hours. As long as things are gated to server reset, which is fine, adding an additional time delay on top of that has to be careful not to drive everyone but those who play 24/7 out of the opportunity.

Edited. I tried to type “e t c e t e r a” but it showed up as exkitten for reasons unknown

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Then, the cap is probably just from ‘gathering’ the ‘bubbles’.

Yes, thanks. I guessed that after I thought about what you said. We had to both be right, so that’s what fell out of it.

Most of my UM came from gathering nodes of some sort. The tools contribute 1-3 to anything gathered, including in Tyria and the home zone. Gathering token nodes seems to be 7-10, and events give bonuses up to 20 (or more). I only chase bubbles because they are what’s needed for the magic gathering dailies in each zone.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Um, Daily reset happens at the same time every day. Why does gathering pose a problem if Dailies do not?

Each LS3 zone has a daily that collects unbound magic bubbles (total of 4 dailys) and pays with a chest. The bubbles do not reset when the “server reset” happens, but instead reset as a function of when you last harvested them. At least ad hoc evidence suggest 23-24 hours. Ergo, they cannot be done until the bubbles reset and if you come back too soon they will not be. My example was an hour or two earlier than the previous night the winterberries had reset when the server did but the bubbles had not. This caused me to inquire if anyone knew the reset time for the bubbles, hence the OP and the thread.

The daily we’ve all done in Tyria resets with the server, and can be done in a few minutes after server reset.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

<snip>

To reiterate:

• All nodes have some sort of minimum refresh rate. For upper tier mats, rich nodes, node farms, and the like, it’s somewhere between 8-23 hrs; for others it’s less. You can accelerate that refresh by swapping instances.
• Nothing allows you to farm more often than any daily cap.
  • Certain nodes are capped per map.
  • A few nodes are capped per part of a map.

Summary: Delays using reset timers are understood. Absurdly stupid reset times (23-24 hours) hurt all the player base without gaining anything for the game itself. Players have a finite game play period in a 24 hour day, and a delay of that magnitude just pushes events out of their play window.

Thanks for taking the time for all the detail.

In the 3 winter months, I’m pretty much in the game a few hours most days/nights. Otherwise, I spend every other month in a remote outdoor project that’s an internet challenged area. I don’t do GW2 other than an occasional daily. So I’ve spent since Dec 20 doing LS3, all episodes. LS3 gave me the opportunity to equip my characters with ascended backpacks and full sets of jewelry. At the start, I had exactly 1 ascended backpack and 5 characters with 3 ascended jewelry pieces each, spread over 10 characters, one of each type and a 2nd ranger. All had ascended weapons and coats, all were elite, and I could halfway play some of them. Now I have 10 characters with full ascended backpacks and full sets of ascended jewelry and a full spare set without the stats selected. Adding zone passes, home nodes, etc and rounding, that’s about 150,000 unbound magic, roughly 1500 each petrified wood and blood rubies and double that of winterberries. There is probably an entire report that could be written on how to break all that down into practical tasks to make it doable as a whole, and with the ability to break off at any time and come back an hour or a day later. I’ll leave that to later.

Along the way I learned about zone caps, reset timers, level caps, etc except as noted, I ignored the unbound magic timer, using the expedient of running another character instead of the one being blocked. ANET was clearly slowing down the game in a different manner than thy had tried in HoT, but still, it was there.

I am now down to trickle mode, harvesting karma in the 4 zones by doing the quicker of the dailies, and gathering UM and zone tokens as I do them. Better to gather them than just run by. I’m not interested in running multiple characters across multiple zones to avoid whatever the reset time was on bubbles of UM, and I had to face it, and so inquired here.

What I see above confirms my own observations. However, I took no exact times, so can’t tell if its 23 hours, or 24 hours, or something between. Either is an absurdly stupid design point. It hurts the entire gamer population, something that should be strictly avoid by competent designers.

Everyone has some play time dictated by sleep time, and work or school requirements. They have a window or two per day and play inside it. Activities having anything near a 24 hour reset means that whatever task they do last in their play window CANNOT be done even one minute earlier the next evening. The result is the event starts later and later, until it rolls out of the time to play window and into sleep or work and gets missed.

Real games solve this problem by making it 18 hours, and there is never a problem. The game gets the delay it wants, and the players can still things daily in their time available windows.

I wonder frequently: Is anyone still in charge there? Does anyone stand back and look at what they are really doing?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

It’s 500 per account per day. It’s unclear, to me, whether that is just from ‘gathering’ or from acquiring Unbound Magic in any way (i.e. salvaging Map Currency, tools, etc.)

I’ve gathered a lot more then 500 per day so there must be some loophole somewhere. When I was grinding hard (now I’m in maintenance mode) I’d use UM tools and gather everything in sight, whether I needed it or not. With the tool bonus, a token node can give 10 each whack, and elder trees 1 to 3 per whack, etc. I’d get around 3000 per night over the then 3 extant LS3 zones.

Not yet, and I’d suspected 24 hours a few times in the past. However, that is such a stupid design point I gave ANET credit for not doing it and felt I was must be wrong.

If it were 24 hours that means all your collecting would be pushed later and later into the night until you had to skip a night to get back to your normal play time. Then you’d have to do the gathering early so you didn’t get pushed back and have to skip every other day.

No, I had just started. The first 4 trees were empty, and I guessed I was inside some reset time. Server reset was past by about 2 hours.

I mentioned the UM bubbles because they are what count for the daily. The UM bonus you get when harvesting nodes does not count, whether or not you are using UM tools.

I actually didn’t know there was a daily cap on unbound magic. What is it, and is it per zone, or gamewide?

Tonight I planned to gather winterberries in Bitterfrost, and unbound magic in the trees overhead. While I could gather winterberries, I could not see any unbound magic bubbles in the trees. I specifically wanted the daily magic gathering, and the winterberry stuff was because I was in the area.

The time was 2 hours past reset, and about 2 hours prior to when I had done the same route the night before. I noted the IP was the same as the previous evening. (not unusual).

I have gathered enough unbound magic and zone tokens (petrified, winterberries, blood rubies, etc) to earn 5 full sets of jewelry, and from time to time have had issues with unbound magic not showing up that I should have gotten the timer for myself.

However, I didn’t. Can someone enlighten me in terms of time since last gathering (given an intervening reset) and in terms of new map vs old map?

TIA

Yes, I did know to go underwater to get the daily, but I’d really like to know the reset so I get the tokens and magic at the same time.

The ground chest is once per boss per day PER CHARACTER. Run another character, get another chest. Run the same character, get naught. Since those are low level World bosses, it’s easy to run up a 2nd character and do them twice.

The bouncy chest on the right side is once per boss per day per ACCOUNT. That starts at level 39 (I think) and is guaranteed rare with a chance for exotic. It’s a good way to gear your character up with rare gear, as you don’t have to buy it, and you can sell the stuff you can’t equip and bank it, or use it to buy something you can equip. I never bought any gear since 4 drops a day will give you 1 piece to equip and in a couple of weeks you are full. Loot drops around your level, so as you level up you can replace the older stuff with newer.

The Pack Supply Network Agent might solve your problem. I’ve not done it in a long while, as I quit when I got what I needed, several recipes costing 10’s of gold each.

I don’t even know if it works, but it brought back recipes that were no longer available in game, so grew to high cost as the few owners let go of them for big money.

It’s a daily grind until you get what you want, and you’ll get several more you didn’t want but now have along the way.

OriOri.8724:

If its the golem one its pretty kitten easy to solo on a few professions. I did it solo on core necro and never dropped below 50% health

I agree. A necro can almost sleepwalk it. With nearly double the health pool of other classes, they are tough to kill. Mine did it for map completion. I also soloed it on 3 other classes, on their way to elite HP totals.

OTOH, I have the other the 5 remaining classes who skipped it for various reasons, like got repeatedly stomped into the ground, staggered screaming and shouting out of range before getting stomped into the ground, etc.

(Mumbling….I just don’t play those all that well, but they can camp flax fields with the best of them,…)

Khisanth.2948:

Flax dropped in price because additional things started dropping flax seeds. That is a pretty simple increase in supply. For example I have seen them drop from the mobs that you kill during the Itzel hunting event. The drop rate isn’t high but the number of mobs spawned can be very high and those events occur extremely frequently.

Ah, yes. You are right. I was going on my one camped collector who was still in the range night to night. (the others went back to useful work). But you are right. I’ve found single flax items in my nightly bags dump, and since I’d would collect a node if I ran past it, I’d not recognize it as out of norm.

I don’t keep logs but do pick up when I go to sell flax and it’s suddenly 4-5 silver and it was 11-12 silver the night before. Perhaps a glitch, since it came with the Winterday’s patch, but a month later it persisted. Referring myself to Spidy, I found the drop almost overnight in the plot, something I have a hard time putting a model on. I guess thin market, massive immediate oversupply, followed by folks dropping out of collecting it as a waste of time, so stablized out where it is now. The same thing happened to quartz crystals, btw.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

50-60 chests isn’t really enough to establish whether there’s been a drop rate change. For starters, you’re not altogether sure if your usual, weekly drop rate is 1:63 or 2:63 (and my memory is that not all the 9 chests in the queensdale run include the chance of doubloons/marks). “Close to one per day” is also hard to compare.

But let’s say it’s 1.5 per 60 chests typically and recently up to 5 per week. The chance of getting 5+ doubloons if the ‘true’ drop rate is 0.025:1 is about 1.7%. In other words, if you’ve been doing your runs for 2 years (104 weeks), it would be quite reasonable to get 5/week a few times.

I understand statistics to a fare the well, and would not have even written on such thin data except I also noticed prices dropping (anecdotally). I then went to the website that plots them over time, and sure enough, there it was, on an unarguable decline. I’d not base anything on my own slope, but that (spidy website) data integrates (via the TP) a lot of collectors, including both of us. So I thought to check with others on here.

Similarly, I see your data as thin also, as you do, but if you think not much has changed, you might check the plotted prices. I don’t do that often, and had not since flax dropped to half overnight back a couple of months back. The argument for doubloons now would be it’s only been a week, but might bear watching.

We are also in a tough time to tease out what’s happening. ANET is attempting to lower prices across the board, against unknown targets, and with seemingly random methodolody. Then the population is wildly swinging due to holidays, new content, new content getting finished, etc. So is it an ANET change somewhere in the supply line, or just less gathers or less users showing up week to week? Quien sabe?

I keep a low level character (21-35) running a quick 9 chest run in Queensdale and Wayfarer Foothills ISO low level cloth/leather mats and the occasional silver doubloon. For a week now I’ve seen a noticible increase in silver doubloon drop rate and a corresponding slow drop in the price. From about 1-2 per week to close to 1 per day. Not the abrupt overnight halving that occurred in flax back in December, but if the drop rate holds I’d guess when this character reaches 35 it will be the end of that farming, if it even lasts that long.

I really never understood the price drop in flax, as the drop rate of it remained steady. It must have been something on the “used in” recipes or items.

I’m sure I saw one run by me yesterday in Bitterfrost. I don’t use a shield, so don’t know if it can be equipped on the back or not, but I don’t think I was dreaming….

I expected to see an announcement of what those Continuum Rifts are a teaser for, or at least speculation on it.

Does anyone know?

Khisanth.2948:

Skill 1 hits 3 times by default the damage popup is a sum of all hits. As long as there isn’t a break longer than a certain time period the damage will continue to be added to the popup. Some of the other channelled skills used to have the same bug. Some of those skills used to have the bug, got fixed then have the bug return.

Another thing with the same bug is the flamethrower at Claw of Jormag.

Do you mean skill 1 of airborne damage? I’m aware of the bug in Mesmer greatsword skill 1.

Back to the experiment. I’m trying to discern, with at least some measured evidence, that fighting the Unbound Guardian in Bloodfen Maw completely airborne is at least as viable as ungrouped on the ground with the same character, and it’s a great deal easier. The numbers I see on the display for skill 1 are great enough to affirm that but they do not correlate to what I read in combat chat.

I sometimes see multiple hits per skill use, and though perhaps it was 3 hits per use, but at other times I see only 1, or 2. Still possible a 3 hit skill, but each one has a hit/miss dice roll, and since it’s a Legendary, you miss a lot. However, that doesn’t solve the problem of the single hit correlating to chat. I test a little each run, but not so much as to be obsessive.

I do the UG once a night, and rotate 3 characters though, to accommodate whatever the node gathering reset nonsense is in LS3. All are nearly full ascended elites, so probably of hit is about maxed.

I plan on testing more, but not obsessively, and I plan to continue to remain completely airborne. The skill 1 numbers I see seem sufficient to equal or exceed my ground numbers. Skill 2 is an explosion of damage numbers on the screen, sufficiently impressive, but not likely to be analyzed from that display. Skill 3 is healing, and each time it procs 540 healing 20 times, spread over 5 characters on the ground. 2160 healing on 5 players every 10 seconds is probably enough to get several flyers up just for that. It’s an easy fight to get downed in on the ground.

altermaven.7385:

In terms of condition damage, condition damage is aggregated over the course of ~1s and given to you as a display, but if you need a more accurate display of conditions damaging, turn on “Simple Condition Floaters”. As for actual display, it’s an aggregation of total damage. Tuning your chatlog to have DPS on a tab, then using the tab, will see what does what in real time.

Yes I understand the 1s time increments for conditions, and some DD DoTs. I do have simple conditions turned on. However, Skill 1 of flying reads as DD. I occasionally see conditions proc, but that varies with the charcter I’m playing and audits to traits.

More in my next response, below.

Thanks for the input.

I was actually trying to test airborne firing on a ground target, in particular the Legendary Unbound Guardian. It seems to be a fight designed to be done from the air, but prevailing wisdom is that the airborne few are freeloaders on the work of those suffering down below. Comparison of damage is the basic need to resolve this.

The issue is definitely not autofire amping up, as skill 1 does not autofire unless you set it to, and resets each time you drop out of the air. I have noticed the greatsword effect on the mesmer that you mentioned, in the past, and that made me overall suspicious of the display screen. That and overload induced dropout of that form of data in low FPS fights.

I’ll have to take a “normal” character out to the PVP test range and do some tests for display consistency. Meantime I’ll contemplate my navel in trying to decide what to do about airborne testing.

There is a combat section in chat which will report damage you are doing as it occurs. There is also a set of white numbers on the screen, indicating damage you are doing. I find them widely differing.

Why?

I initially guessed my chat log display was the raw output of the weapon/skill and the on screen display was after combat modifiers, (buffage, opponent defenses, etc) were applied.

If I try to correlate them, to find a potential ratio factor, I’m not too successful, and some of the screen numbers are so large I find it difficult to find any modifiers that could work. So, are the on screen displays wrong?

I presume, since this is written text, that your polysemous word was probably homographic.

I’m guessing you lost some non trivial percent of the readership with that word, and I might have just sent them down a dark tunnel of their own making.

I would attribute that to an attribute of their guesswork.<g>

I just made that character a gathering ranger. Speeds up gathering things like winterberries where 2 Vet trolls and 6 wolves defend every bush. Send pet, gather, move on, call pet back.

Of course, I didn’t want the character in particular, I just wanted the token out of the shared inventory slot and the only way to move it out was to use it. Took another hour to run it up to elite just for the drill.

As for soldier gear, it was my first experience with it. All my others have either zerker or viper gear. OTOH, when gathering, you can’t be too careful. Good thing it’s a ranger with a pet, as it would take an hour to kill anything with that gear. Exactly half the DPS of my zerker ranger.