I successfully updated the ticket via email. Based on the text in the replies I received, a lot of my replies were missing. The end result was that Phanes was quite speedy and helpful now that we were communicating; I now have access to the account again.
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No real reason to read more unless you’re curious about the ticket update email issues. There were two problems: one, the referenced reply body was quoted. And, I was not replying with the envelope sender matching the ticket email destination; my login emails are just aliases, not real email accounts (they’re receive-only addresses). That was OK with the previous support system, but not for Zendesk.
Aliases aren’t as common today as they were in the past. When someone today needs a different email, they make a new gmail account instead of setting up an alias. OTH, considering Zendesk sends email in c. 1999 format, one might expect them to handle updates regardless of source (the required data is there in the body, but they still can’t do it). So, for those of you out there wondering why no one is answering your updates, it could be because you forwarded your mail to a different account and are replying there. Try replying from the original destination address and make sure you include the original, but don’t quote or indent it.
Problems with the verification email were dodged rather than solved. There’s no point in hashing that out in the forums at present — it can progress offline. I do wish, however, that the original thread wasn’t closed. Both of these postings properly belong there rather than here in a new posting.
Agent Phanes sent you a real response — that’s not an auto-response.
If you have questions or concerns of any king, please update your ticket. Those comments will be read, again, by an agent who will give them the attention they require.
I updated my ticket three times via email before I hit the forums. The first reply was to the auto-reply (to confirm the email address works) and twice to Phanes’ single response. The auto-reply stated that would update the ticket. Is that not true? If you looked into my ticket 429032 and don’t see ANY of my email updates, that’s a problem and it’s why I’m frustrated at your lack of response and resorted to the forums.
I’m not getting any auto-reply confirming receipt of my replies and subsequent update of the ticket, but then maybe you don’t send auto-replies for that. I don’t get any reject errors on the email, too (your side is accepting them).
I can’t respond via your ticket system. There’s no option to do that on your website or that option is only displayed when logged in, which is a chicken v. egg problem (the ticket is about being unable to login on that account).
If replies have particular formatting constraints before they’re treated as updates, I would have hoped those were stated in the email. If my ticket has truly has nothing but my first post via your web-support form, it could be that plain text (non-MIME) emails that include the full body of your emails in standard quoted reply format after my reply text aren’t what you’re expecting.
I’ll try some alternative reply formats to see if those work or you can explain here what your ticket system requires from an email in order to update a ticket. If none of the above work, the only recourse seems to be a new ticket for every reply, which I’d guess to be as onerous for your support staff as for me.
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BTW, on a different topic, you should ask Zendesk to put DKIM signatures in your outgoing email headers. It might help avoid having them punted to spam folders and will definitely make phishing via a zendesk masquerade non-trivial. IMHO, any professional service should have done that as a matter of course (your mailgun.org mails have them). Rather embarrassing to Zendesk that they’re missing.
Thanks for the vote of confidence on zendesk.com; I had tried it on the assumption that it was very unlikely that AN had it’s DNS or support page hijacked for the redirection, though considering the forum bugs, I had some minor doubts (AN’s Web-foo .. not so good).
News on this ticket: still no reply. And my email site is now getting hammered by dictionary attacks because I’ve got the usual blocks disabled to permit some kind of squirrelly verification email to come in.
If you (ArenaNet) think you’re sending verify emails, I want to see proof. Email the SMTP logs of that attempt. My bet is that you haven’t checked those to see if you’re actually sending anything, just assuming you are.
Or, perhaps you could just turn verification OFF at your end. Your tool is broken. The “turn off verification” button is greyed out (ie. your tool thinks I don’t have verification enabled). The “reset password” button also does NOT send email. It’s probably using the same broken mailgun mailer as the verification process — not that I need or even want to change the password, it was just the only chance at perhaps fixing things.
Oh, it may not have been apparent, but I’m absolutely disgusted with your total lack of any real response to fixing this issue — not even a “We’re overloaded and I only have 2m to respond, please try these automated tools while I bump this request up the chain. BTW, upgrade response is delayed and you won’t hear anything more for 14 days. (sorry!)” Something like that would at least let me know there’s no reason to let my email site get pounded by spammers because you’re not actually working on the problem.
I can’t login to one of my accounts and from what I can tell, your support staff is ignoring the problem. I received one automated reply and one non-reply from “Phanes” that responded to the title, but obviously ignored all the data I provided about the problem itself. Subsequent emails to the same ticket have not received a response, automated or human.
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I have two accounts. My dynamic IP changed. One account received the verification email after multiple attempts to send it (this account I’m posting on). One account does not receive verification emails, though it does receive the support emails.
I opened a ticket: 429032 and included information detailing these problems.
I received one automated response and one reply from “Phanes”. The reply from Phanes was basically a non-reply that ignored all the data I provided and simply responded to the title (unable to login). Note: both these email replies were to the account/email that the verification process was supposed to send emails, but does not.
Here’s the VERY important information that I hope y’all read this time: I own my mail server. I have nearly complete access to the filters and logs. So, when I say no email was sent, NO EMAIL WAS SENT. There wasn’t an email that got filtered or filed in a spam box. I’m checking the SMTP logs. There’s not even an attempt to send email. YOUR email verification process DOES NOT SEND EMAIL.
Now, there are a couple extremely unlikely situations that might mean you are sending it, but it’s getting dropped. I have one upstream site that uses Spamhaus’ Block List. If you’re on that, I won’t see it. However, if you’re on that, I wouldn’t see ANY email from you at all — not even the replies that I did receive (it’s an IP-based address block, not a content filter).
The other potential is that you are sending these notifications to the wrong address. Check the ticket data please. I do NOT want to change my login/email address. It’s been that way since creation and it works fine. I do want verify emails to go to that address. If you have a hidden email address for verification that is potentially different from the login/email, make it the same as the login/email.
There is yet another possibility: you are not sending verify emails from guildwars2.com. If you’re using a 3rd party in ANY way for your verification emails, especially if they’re engaging in questionable spam-like behavior like masquerading as guildwars2.com, I need to know so I can whitelist them. ALL my front-end blocks are temporarily suspended to make sure this isn’t the case, but I’m putting those back as soon as this problem is fixed.
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Side issues: I was referred to what looks like a phishing site by Phanes: guildwars2.ZENDESK.com. He also asked my to provide a LOT of information to this site, such as name, birthdate, account serial numbers, etc..
If you’ve offloaded your support to zendesk.com, you need to have HUGE BANNERS proclaiming that fact on the real guildwars2.com site so that people will know it’s not a site masquerade. It looks extremely suspicious when support requests data like that to be sent to a strange 3rd-party site.
BTW, I trusted the data from him and did try to use the recovery tool on zendesk.com, which is also broken (see ticket data). If that was foolish and your employee is actually engaged in phishing, please act quickly to restore my account before it gets stolen.
It only cost me 47g and some silver to get from lvl0 to lvl500 in Armorsmithing because I took the time to gather my mats rather than spend an unnecessary amount of gold.
It cost you FAR more than 47g — that was just the cash spent. You’re ignoring the cost of your gathering. Whether you drop cash on the TP or go and do it yourself, the cost is still the same. And, you’re forgetting that the OP is not a PVE’er — perhaps 80/20 PVP/e is how I read the description. That means ANY time spent doing “pve stuff” is horrible drudgery and a large barrier to getting to the goal of PVP’ing in WVW.
What the OP has is a misunderstanding of how nice ascended is compared to exotic in WVW — likely as a result of playing an MMO where top-tier gear literally meant “I win every time” (eg. Aion).
GW2 is not one of those gear-centered MMOs where your loot fights for you. Even in the hypothetical even duel with equal skill and identical builds, the ascended player does not have enough of an edge to win more than maybe 51~52 out of 100 matches.
Absolutely get your exotics — that’s essential and you will get stomped if you don’t have that, but it’s also absurdly fast and easy to acquire. Ascended for WVW? Do what’s fun and/or easy, like trinkets — or just leave it at exotics and spend your WVW time finding a fun WVW guild.
1. Completely remove fractal rank from your account. Anyone can open any rank fractal and the rank of the fractal you complete determines your reward. If you’re good enough to do higher ranks, why force the endless mind-numbing grind through the lower ranks or make good players with low rank get horrible rewards for grouping with and helping friends on high-rank runs?
2. Rewards are far too low. I’d double the gold rewards, change all ascended drops to be stat-selectable, and make ascended items salvageable (for more or better results than exotics).
3. Time balanced. Typical run time is still disrupted by overly long fractals.
These are the current reasons why fractals aren’t part of my regular play. Similar reasons apply to my regular dungeoning group, all of whom have high-rank & high-AR characters and yet do fractals very infrequently, too.
Your comment that it works for you led me to do a little more checking to see if I was in fact doing something that might not be part of their testing — and I likely was. I’d been using the -windowed client switch since release to force windowed-fullscreen on startup. Previously, the client would not automatically set that mode otherwise.
It looks like that switch changed behaviors. It no longer forces a start in windowed-fullscreen and instead will force the client to start regular windowed mode.
Now if they would just fix the client crashes in large events. Given they always have stack traces for those, it’s difficult to understand why they aren’t fixing them.
I think a lot of responders to the OP here are missing his major point and getting caught up arguing implementation details, which are rather pointless compared to the goal. The developers are creative enough to handle details themselves if we can convince them that the goal is worth supporting.
The goal — the highly desirable goal — is to just do whatever PVE you like and have the daily happen naturally as a result. That’s how it works for PVP. Playing is good. This is a game. Ultimately, we’re all here to play.
The only implementation detail I’d strongly promote is to CAP AP earned from dailies. One AP is a tiny bit of cheese, but MMO players have enough rodent-nature to be enticed into chasing that down. A list huge enough to cover all styles of “just PVE’ing” is a ton of potential AP-cheese and would feel like a crushing level of “work to do” to those folks.
Ascended armor offers almost nothing in the way of stats over exotic — certainly not enough to bother with for any game type outside of FOTM and there only for the AR.
I’d suggest simply getting ascended trinkets and weapons. The difference is still small, but it’s a maybe a little bit noticable. And, trinkets are relatively easy to get if you make sure you do ALL your guild missions every week. If your guild doesn’t get you 6 commendations per week, find a new guild that does.
Hardcore pve should be hours of practice by a group of dedicated people to practice mechanics, positioning, build coordination, to kill a boss.
That’s precisely what zerk play is. No one just zones into Arah their first time, teleports to each boss, and slays it with a few choice 100-blades. It just looks that way when you watch it being done by people that have done it MANY times and work together well.
BTW, harder content with far better rewards would be good, but making current content slower is definitely bad. Slowing current dungeons down with their paltry rewards just puts them into the “wasted space // one time for fun” category. Take a look at TA aether path. It’s totally and completely ignored by everyone. It’s not so much that it’s harder, but that is just plain too long and slow for the result.
But, to put this back on the LFG tool track, the harder and slower the content, the more important it is to make sure ALL member of the party meet your requirements before you start. Why? Because a single leech becomes completely intolerable rather than something you can shrug off. That goes for whatever you want in your group to tackle this harder content, not just zerk.
Zerk is just a handy example for the current situation because it is the defacto standard for PVE.
In order for it to feel natural, there need to be LESS variety, not more. The reason you can do PvP dailies just by playing is not only that they are natural to the play, but that they never change from day to day.
I’m all in favor of a more natural PVE daily set, but you’d have to cover all styles of play that people do every day:
1. Dungeon runners set — run 1~2 dungeon paths and totally complete your daily.
2. Champ zergers set — kill 4 champs to complete your daily.
3. Leveler set — gain 3-4 levels for your daily.
4. Mapper set — X skill points, Y waypoints, Z hearts for your daily.
5+ etc etc etc
The key to keeping this from becoming a truly insane grind is to CAP THE DAILY AP at 4. If you don’t cap it, those folks who try to complete every single possible AP gain every day will be driven insane.
Make sure whether it pops up or not is something that is selectable by the leader/officer AND blockable by players, too. I know that unless popups were both extremely rare and definitely one-time-only (ie. no repeat once viewed), I’d likely instantly leave any guild that had them.
I definitely would leave a guild that popped up trivial unimportant things like voice server changes, who won the lotto, etc.. Popups are just plain evil and need to be used very sparingly, if ever.
For example, nearly every single instance where the game currently has an “OK” popup that you have to clear to continue playing needs to have that popup removed; eg. overflow announcements and entering the home instance.
When you advertise party requirements and someone not meeting those requirements sneaks in, they’re deliberately creating more work and hassle for everyone in the party who cares about teamwork and meets the requirements. That’s the very definition of a leech.
How would you feel about someone silently joining your high-rank fractal run with only 10 AR? Or a newbie in your “COF speedrun” who doesn’t understand the cages? Creates more work, right? Same thing.
(BTW, it’s “zerk” not “zerg” — different beasts ^^)
It’s been months now since this setting was retained across login/logout. When is this finally going to be fixed? Having to set this on every log in is extremely annoying.
To reproduce: log in, F11, graphics settings, choose “windowed fullscreen”, log out. Log back and and notice that your screen is no longer in windowed fullscreen mode.
BTW, I’ve reported this on the forums before (no reply, no fix). And, I’ve reported it with the bug tool on every single patch since the bug was first added to the game.
This might seem to be a slightly odd set of topics to combine, but as a player who runs 100% zerk on all pve grouping characters and expects the same from other groupies, a bit of explanation might be in order for the non-zerk crowd.
The reason zerk-groups work is because the DPS is so high that the target/s die before they can harm the group. Currently, having the entire team in zerk is over-kill. It’s FUN over-kill, but not really required to make the team successful — non-zerk pugs are just a tad slower and less fun.
We can tell instantly when the pug/s are not in zerk, but depending on how many of them there are, it may not really mater: 1 isn’t such a big deal, 2 yields some grumbles on vent, 3 non-zerk and we seriously think about just leaving and starting recruit over again.
If the DPS of full zerk players is reduced, our desire and willingness to carry non-zerk will be reduced. If it’s a big reduction, we’re going to start insisting on 100% zerk for every single member — no more shrugging and just carrying a low-dps player or class (or two) along for the ride.
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So, to support what I suspect will be much stricter grouping requirements that will come with a zerk DPS nerf, the LFG tool needs to be able to set barriers to joining, including default barriers you want for all LFGs you post:
1. Level barrier; eg. no character below L80 can join.
2. Gear barriers; eg. no character wearing less than exotics.
3. Experience barriers; eg. all-paths completed for the given dungeon.
4. Stat barriers; eg. no less than 50 AR, 10k AP, or XXX for power/precision/crit-dam/etc.
Barriers prevent playing and applying on a low level necro while intending to group on your L80 zerk warrior, but that can be handled by permitting people to apply as one of their other characters while actually playing something else.
Also, it would be nice if people applying for the group were placed in a pre-joining state/panel on the tool instead of simply popped into the group. This would permit crafting a nice balanced team; ie. you might be OK bringing one necro, but three is a bit much for you. Kicking post-join is a horrible option to rely on for attempting to craft a good team (you can’t see 6th+ apps and some take it personally rather than as a group-pruning method).
Edited by Moderator.
(edited by Moderator)
There are a several quality-of-life fixes that have been required for a long time for Dungeon running in GW2 and they have not been made. I’m going to list several here in no particular order:
1. All dungeons need to be open for entry 100% of the time. The current practice of checking a website to find where it’s open and guesting over to enter is absurd. There are many creative ways to slightly alter the current “blocking” events in minor ways to maintain story immersion and leave dungeons available without guesting.
2. Dungeons should not collapse when the opener leaves the party. If the remainder are willing to continue, they should not have their efforts destroyed either deliberately or accidentally by the opener leaving — or if the opener was the problem child, by kicking the opener.
3. The party leader should have sole control over kicking. This is critical to promoting and supporting good leaders; ie. those people that want something from the game bad enough to gather people together into a team to achieve it.
This is something that I think seriously hurts this game. In all previous MMOs, I had no problem forming groups of total pugs and teaching anyone new how to fit into a constructive and successful team. That absolutely does not work here unless you bring at least one trusted friend along to second your kicks. This is a needless barrier to leading and creating groups.
4. Kicks should not be invisible. This is a corollary to the one-leader fix, but it works even without that fix. The name of the player kicked needs to be added to the party action log as do the names of who initiated the kick and who seconded. This should be done BEFORE the kick takes effect to ensure kickers and kicked have that information; eg. “Stackmez voted to kick Bowknocker, seconded by Zerkwar”. All three names in the log should be clickable for party actions, tells, etc — maybe it was a bugfix kick needing a quick reinvite, maybe Bowknocker doesn’t understand and wants to ask how to fix his play, or maybe Stackmez wants to look him up after the run to explain.
None of those positive actions are possible with the current invisible-kick and they’re all far more valuable and desirable than leaving the kickee wondering.
I have a lot of fun in skyhammer and while some classes do have more KB’s & pulls than others, the problem isn’t that the map is unfair to certain classes. Rather, it’s that most people don’t consider the need for those abilities in their build and can’t or won’t tweak their build for that map when it shows up; ie. I don’t think it’s map-frustration, but rather induced by an unwillingness to adapt.
If there were hot-swap one-button templates that could swap entire sets of gear and skills during the 10s “map prep”, I don’t think there would be nearly as much rage over skyhammer. It would still be there because it does offer big advantages to those that include it in their build and I think many people resent being forced to adapt.
BTW, I see rage in sPvP in two situations: people that go airborne a lot in skyhammer and people that die to a many-on-one situation (eg. to a thief doing his job of tipping over a 1v1).
Since the Tuesday patch, not all graphic settings are saved. In particular, the “Windowed Full Screen” setting is lost and must be reselected every single time you start the game. This is a step backwards for me and an exceedingly tedious annoyance. Any ETA on when ALL graphic settings will be saved again?
Flying mounts would be nice for jumping puzzles. I’m particular found of flying monkeys. Consider the potential mount-spawning animations.
It would be nice if guesting was unlimited. I don’t really see why it’s limited right now. The only time your home server actually matters is for WvW. It already doesn’t matter at all for dungeons, which has created an environment where people have friends across far more than just two different servers.
Will people “dog-pile” onto the one and only fun server in the game? I doubt it. I suspect all servers are pretty much equal in the “fun” department, at least in the eyes of their respective denizens.
The upside would be reduced complexity in the guesting code (fewer bugs is a big gain) and no need to micro-manage the time you spend playing with which friends on which servers.
If you try to join a dungeon instance that was not opened from your own server and you have already used up both your guesting tickets (to different servers), you will be punted to the desktop.
You will then crash again every time you try to log that character into the game for as long as the dungeon remains open.
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This is speculation. It looks like they made a change to dungeon guesting to use a guesting ticket, which I don’t recall it ever doing in the past. It now uses a “soft” ticket on dungeon entry, which is what you get when you try to guest somewhere and end up in an overflow. The ticket becomes “hard” and used up when you actually touch soil on the guested destination.
My bet is the bug is a result of the soft ticket staying active when you exit the dungeon, thus becoming used up. So, do two dungeons or two guests and you’ve used up all your soft tickets. Then you try your third. It gives you a soft ticket and then at some point an assertion checks and screams “uh, 3 tickets bad, get lost!”
If you have used two guesting tickets and then try to join a dungeon that is not on your server, you will be punted all the way to desktop. This is for patch 26,0077 (most recent patch as of this posting). Friends are saying this has been happening all day. So, the bug was likely introduced in the initial patch today.
Our group typically has at least one player with two tickets used up. So, this bug essentially makes dungeon play impossible, which is about 90% of the game for us. Our static essentially logged for the night as a result.
He’s not asking for a race change, but for a gear-transfer method — specifically for gear within his account only, but potentially to other accounts. The later might be a bit much and would certainly impact the TP at least a little bit.
Considering how fast one can level a new character to 80, this is actually an exceptionally simple method by which AN could provide an effective race change method without actually implementing a true race change.
IMHO, why not simply get rid of soul-bound entirely and change all soul-bound items to account-bound? It’s the same player, what does it matter which character’s hands first touched the object?
It currently costs ~600g to level all your crafts enough to make ascended weapons. That’s as much as a precursor. But that’s not the worst part about it. It’s that if you take that path and make an ascended weapon, it does not progress you in the game — it doesn’t move you closer to a final state. Yes, it gives you better stats, but those stats don’t help you on your way to the next (supposedly final) item in the game, a legendary weapon.
In fact, the cost is so huge that going with ascended instead of directly to legendary will set you back by at least several months.
There is a trivial change that could rectify this: permit any ascended weapon of the appropriate type to be used as the precursor for that legendary or perhaps as the main ingredient in crafting a precursor. Voila! There’s now a true progression path from ascended to legendary instead of a giant detour.
The lore-friendly fix for playing skrit would be to have your skrit “character” be a small group of skrit, not just a single skrit. This would open up a lot of potential for fun and unique behavior in the animations, art, and especially the dialogue.
IMHO, open world in GW2 is essentially designed for solo play and sometimes for “mass solo” play (aka zerg play). You’re looking in the wrong place for group play. Currently, the best way to find groups is to use one of the web-based LFG tools like gw2lfg.com. That (hopefully) will change tomorrow with a patch that will include an LFG tool inside GW2.
BTW, unless the champion has a “[group]” event tag, it can be solo’d by an experienced player with any class. Some classes do have it a LOT easier in that respect, though. I’ve watched my ranger’s pet solo a champion once — didn’t help it at all, just watched. I’m saying this not to make you feel unskilled, but rather to let you know what’s possible, so that you can perhaps do it yourself. ^^
There’s no way for me to say this without seeming belittling, however. The average path takes 15 minutes, each Arah path (excluding 4) is roughly 20. 30 is far too long, unless you are measuring by PUG standards
LOL, don’t worry about it. You sound like you’re trying to communicate things that you’ve experienced, which is what I’m doing, too. A lot of others here aren’t. Honesty is pretty easy to recognize and I’m sure I’m not the only one that appreciates it.
I think you might have misinterpreted my 30/m path number as an “inside the dungeon” number, though. Not sure about y’all, but I’m always surprised at how little we end up doing despite being able to burn through dungeons relatively quickly. There’s always a LOT of time missing when looking back at the end of the day and considering how fast the actual dungeon runs were.
We have similar interior timings — maybe closer to 20m on a typical path (not counting aberrations like cof/p1). I just think if you’re actually doing 16 different dungeon paths in one 4H stretch, that you have a very dedicated and focused group. I feel that 8 paths is a more reasonable expectation over that time frame — counting total time online, not just inside the dungeon.
He’s referring to spot selling. Duo P4 will take ~40 minutes. All spots sold is 30-40g each. If you did that 3 times, it would take you 2 hours. That’s 90-120g /2 = 45-60g/hour.
Ah, P4 is so easy. I didn’t realize anyone sold completions. Appreciate the data; so much of this thread has devolved into trolling. Big mistake to mention legendary and indicators for potential pug skill at all here. This forum has gone downhill in a big way since I last posted.
Regardless though, I’m not sure where you get your numbers from for dungeons. You can get about 35-40g from just doing a casual tour which takes 2-3 hours.
1g/path, roughly 30m/path, 4H play non-continuous (time lost for recruit/etc), no Arah. 5g+ is common for me. More dedicated would do 8g~10g easily. Arah you’ll do another 6~8g on top of that just for the extra cash. So, I could see 20g’ish from a 4H tour; 35~40g sounds a bit high.
High AP = more time sinked in = more experienced = more skilled. USUALLY.
Unfortunately, all we can actually check is the character name. Some of our group will add a pug to friends temporarily to check AP, but we’re usually not that concerned. If a character has a name that shouts out “ranger, engineer, or necro”, we’ll probably skip it for another that sounds like “warrior, thief, guardian”, but if we guess wrong, we just suffer through it for that path.
We tend to watch low AP players for bad behavior more closely, though. If we post with “experiened req’d”, we will sometimes kick for annoying bad play. If someone sends a tell first saying they’re new and we take them, we teach them and/or carry them for the full path unless they don’t listen, which has never happened with those that give a tell in advance — only with newbies “sneaking” into an experienced run.
Dungeons can give up to 40g/hour.
We’re talking typical, not “I got a lucky drop” runs. A die-hard 4H tour will be 8g cash plus token/ecto conversion (maybe 2~4g). That’s not a normal dungeon effort, though. Normal includes time for breaks between runs, recruiting, etc.. Including Arah in the tour ups that number, but then also greatly increases recruiting effort (I wouldn’t bring more than one pug on an Arah run).
40g/h as a typical repeatable number for dungeons seems absurd to me after the dungeon-spamming nerf. If you’re not simply trolling, you’ll have to back that up with at least a general methodology.
In one respect this is good to not know. Because you can’t just kick someone because of their choice of weapon, like you alluded to wanting to be able to do.
This is a different topic, but I would like a way to judge whether a player is suitable for grouping or not. The ideal would be a way to tell what their stats currently are; ie. are they zerk or pvt, what’s their actual AR, etc..
The legendary as a “gold grubber” item is simply unfortunate. If it had been done with grouping required, it could have been a useful indicator. Now, it’s not. Would you have preferred it to be a sign of skill or as it’s become, a sign of grind?
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I should have titled this post “Inverted Risk/Reward” and left the legendary comparison as a side-note or not mentioned it. I think I’ve arranged for the truly important point to be conveniently ignored. ><
Legendary and ascended currently require a great deal of gold to complete. Combine this with an inverted risk versus reward structure and you have Legendary weapons becoming a “Gold Grubber Badge”, not a sign of skilled dedicated player; eg. here are how I’d rate gold-earning in GW2:
TP (60g+) > Zerg Farm (Champs) (10g+) > Dungeons (5g+) > FotM (2-3g)
The gold numbers are what have done myself on a typical day doing mostly that activity — perhaps 4H of play.
Here’s the effort scale, including recruiting effort if a group is required.
FotM (no pugs allowed) > Dungeons (pug ok) > Farm (solo) > TP (solo)
IMHO, I see this as the biggest PVE problem for GW2. It’s not just a current problem, too. This inverted reward scale has been in place since the creation of the game and continues to be supported and refined by each subsequent patch in GW2.
This feeds an impression I’ve come to embrace more and more: a legendary weapon on a pug is scary. It indicates a player that is unlikely to have any skill playing in a group. It’s not a definite mark of badness, though. I’d say it’s about 70/30. Most of them are horrible, but the ones that aren’t horrible are usually pretty good. That’s why it’s scary. You can’t just kick on seeing a legendary; it might be one of the good ones you’ll want to add to your list, but it’s probably not. ><
I think the anger mostly comes from denial – people want so badly to believe this game has good build variety in pve, they want to believe that the other armor sets have a purpose.
PVE balance is barely supported by AN. Even after the 3-way skill split between PVE/WVW/PVP, 99% of their efforts for balance are made with sPVP in mind. While it’s true that balance is far more critical to PVP, it’s sad that there are classes that are essentially completely unwanted in PVE groups (ranger, engineer, necro).
BTW, by unwanted, I don’t mean kicked or locked out of groups. When we take a pug, we may groan a bit at being “forced” to group with a sub-par class, but we take them anyway. What I mean is that with 5 players having all 8 classes geared and ready to go, those above 3 classes are never picked for dungeons or fractals.
Why do you even want assassin rings? Berserker has been tested to be better in almost every way.
It’s still very useful. If you’re comparing full assassin to full berserk, I’d guess zerk would win — primarily because crit-chance from precision has DR while DPS from power is linear. However, a sin/zerk mix can out-perform pure sets of either one depending on your build.
How far you can push precision before break-even with power depends on how much critical damage you have. One thing to remember about crit-dmg is that it’s only applicable very near L80. If you’re doing level-capped dungeons, your crit-dmg is gutted; eg. in AC, you won’t have any crit-damage and thus you’ll want power, not precision.
Oddly, and perhaps embarassingly, I have a harder time Zerkering in CoF than I do in just about every other dungeon and it’s solely because of the flamethrower guys. I can do other dungeons no problem, but everytime I run into those flamethrower guys, I feel like an idiot.
I’m glad I’m not the only one, I’ve been afraid to say it
It’s not you, it’s your party. Here’s how to do those with 3 players in about 5s: start on top of the gate. Do NOT wait for them to charge through the gate. Have your puller (mesmer, guardian) pull them against the wall the instant the gate opens. Your warrior should be doing GS/5 while the mesmer does this. Then GS/2&3. Mesmer GS/5 when they start flaming. They’re now dead.
This way you have your stack, your KDs to keep them from flaming, and your DPS all in one spot. If you have your full party of 5 on top of the gate for this, it’s often over before I can hit GS/5 on my mesmer to KD the flaming.
Also, while guardian and mesmer are the best pullers, the small space inside the area past the gate does make it easier if you bring bad-for-dungeons classes. We did it with 4 rangers and an elementalist the other day just for variety.
Use similar tactics for all the flamers. Put them against a wall. KD them when they flame. Let the melee stack rip them up. Ultra easy when the rest of the party works to setup things to let the stack DPS; ie. getting in there and DPS’ing them while they flame is your job. It’s your party’s job to wall and KD them so you can do yours.
Ranger has the highest learning curve of all of the classes in GW2.
LOL. In an odd way, I think that’s got a grain of truth. That’s why so many players of the class are “bearly a ranger”. When all you have to do to solo champions in open world is watch your pet, it really doesn’t provide much incentive to learn anything at all.
Here’s a neat troll for those of you running with a zerg. Next time you see a ranger KB’ing things away from the melee, do “/say please don’t KB things” and then count the number of “why?”‘s you get (I got 4 different why’s? one time, all rangers).
That’s because dungeons are essentially 80-only. There are two factors contributing to this. First, leveling a character to 80 takes days, not weeks, months or even the years of some other MMOs. Second, it’s actually counter-productive to level your character in any gear nicer than “green”, which is dirt cheap via the TP.
MMOs are all long-term games. Everyone is expected to play for quite some time. Years is typical if you like the game. Considering the likely total duration a player will spend in an MMO, if you can’t put at most perhaps two weeks of casual effort to learn, level, and gear one character (at least all yellow/rare for a new GW2 80) before grouping, MMOs are not for you.
The assassin stats are not available for ascended trinkets.
Zerk play depends on the entire party using zerk gear, too. The general principle is “if it’s dead it can’t hurt you”. So, the more in your party with suboptimal DPS due to gear, builds, or player skill, the greater risk there is for the zerks. They have to be “elitist” and group with only or at least mostly other zerks. If they don’t, they die; ie. your low-dps can actually kill the party.
A PVT leach doesn’t care what others wear. He’s going to live and eventually (someday in the distant future) kill the target. He doesn’t care about time. He’s playing a game. The whole point of a game is to kill time, killing critters is incidental. After all, the only thing you can walk away with is a memory of having fun. Who cares how fast you get nowhere?
It will depend hugely on what builds you run and which class. For example, assassin makes no sense for a signet warrior, which has precision dribbling out of it’s ears (messy).
I like assassin for my mesmer, necro, ele, guardian, and ranger — but not full sets. Typically one or two of the three types (weapon, armor, trinkets). BTW, assassin stats are unavailable for ascended trinkets. I don’t want to get accustomed to having assassin stats on trinkets for characters I’m going to put ascended trinkets on.
2 weeks of casual play=ascended.
2 weeks of hardcore farming=legendary.
The above numbers are VERY misleading. More reasonable time frames would depend greatly on what you do. If you do things I consider fun (like sPvP & dungeons), you earn maybe 5g a day. If you like extremely tedious things that take almost no skill, just the ability to withstand boredom, you earn roughly 10~15g a day (boss zerging). If you work the TP, you can earn a great deal depending on your current bankroll (60g a day with fairly minimal initial bank).
Basically, the rate you earn gold in GW2 is inversely proportional to the level of game challenge you seek out, with zero game-challenge (TP) actually yielding phenomenally better results than challenging efforts (high level FOTM).
Here are what I consider more realistic numbers for likely time if you’re playing 4H a day and working on earning gold maybe 25~50% of that time.
Ascended Weapon: 2~4 months
Legendary Weapon: 9~12 months
If you’re having fun all the time, you are unlikely to ever earn enough to for either weapon type … unless you are extremely diligent at saving gold: no nice skins or dyes, all gear from tokens, etc..
I don’t care about the art or the size of the map. I do care about the map being locked on North/UP. That’s a game breaker for me. If it’s not changed very quickly to support the standard Facing/UP, I’ll just punt sPvP and likely won’t bother with it ever again even if it’s fixed a few weeks from now.
BTW, while this feature is critical for me, loosing me from the sPvP stage probably won’t be noticed by more than a couple of people. After all, I just started doing it regularly a few weeks ago and we don’t have a full regular group yet.
It’s only wnen you enter from a PVE map. If you enter from the PVP lobby, you can get into WVW. Also, the matchup displayed in the PVP is completely broken (shows you as the wrong color, wrong points, and versus servers you aren’t fighting). It will put you in the right color zone versus the correct enemies once you get in, though.
IMHO, the benefits of high dps groups are rather far from game destroying. The vast majority of PVE players in the game either can’t or don’t play with characters in berserk armor and maximum dps builds. I agree that it would be a lot more fun if other mechanics were introduced, but you have to be OK with people whining “it’s too hard”; somewhat similar to the other thread where people are complaining about skill points in Orr being too hard when the reality is that they all can be solo’d in 30s by any class using very simple tactics (yes, under 80 & in green gear).
GW2 PVE is definitely far too easy and getting easier (eg. nerfs to personal story battles), but it’s mostly because of human nature. MMO battles are always a matter of killing the target before the target can kill you. Some start taking damage and react by thinking “I’ve got to kill this faster!” Others get hurt and think “OMG, make it stop hurting me!” A lot more seem to have the second reaction. So, you have some in “zerk” gear and some in “pvt” gear and if you mix them, you get both sides hating the other.
What the game truly lacks is teamwork, especially in boss fights. The environmental danger component is better than giant HP pools, but it leaves the “group” feeling like 5 people solo’ing together rather than a team that interacts to build on each other’s skills to achieve a synergy that is 10x better than can be achieved by 5x solo’ers.
Boss fights should be so hard that without group synergy, the group is guaranteed to fail. The game needs skills that interact with other player’s skills. Combos are pathetic compared to what’s really needed and we need bosses that can’t be killed without those very strong group abilities (or perhaps take 10-20x the time & effort without them).
I spend an insane amount of time controlling my pet. Somehow the devs decided letting an npc account for nearly half of my ranger’s damage was a good idea. It’s a freaking handicap. No other class has that problem, and it wasn’t in gw1.
IMHO, Ranger pets are outrageously over-powered. I’ve just stood there and watched my cat solo a champion. I didn’t help or control the pet in anyway. Granted, this was one of the stupidest champions in open world, but really!? Pet > Champion? That’s just wrong. This was before the pet buff, too. They’re even worse now.
I suspect the pet-control comment in an earlier post was more directed at necro pets rather than ranger or mesmer. Necro pets often just sit there until the fight is half done before they wake up and start attacking. Ranger’s and mesmer’s start right in. I suspect this is because most necro pets are on a 4s attack cycle that seems to run independently of combat. So, if you start attacking when the cycle just started, it can take another 4s before they start fighting.
I have a mesmer with rabid, rampager, knights, and two zerk sets. It was my first character and I went through a ton of builds on it. These days, it’s extremely rare for me to use anything but 100% berserk.
BTW, one thing to think about when picking stats for your mesmer is that your illusions share your stats: except for vitality. Vitality does nothing for your illusions.
In knight’s gear, it’s pretty much a wash. You’ll net roughly 20% higher DPS either way; either via more and stronger crits via fury or via harder base damage and 15% empowered with the 10 in domination. Power has the v.slight advantage of being nicer versus objects as well as live targets (you can’t crit versus objects).
IMHO, the bigger issue is knights versus berserk. I’m assuming this is a PvE build, in which case you’ll almost certainly want to be 100% berzerk all the time. With the higher critical damage from full berzerk, fury will give ~30% net dps improvement and thus be the clear winner. Empower will still give 15%, but you’ll net less from the greater power (the more you have the less more of the same will do).
Well, before the Orr team gets too depressed reading this, I’ll say that I love Orr and everyone I play with love it, too. Whenever we level a new character, we all find Orr both the quickest to map and the mokittenn (why does "most"+"fun" get kittened?) to map, too. Frankly, I’d be overjoyed if all the zones were reworked to play like Orr (no hearts).
Instead of outright banning people, we could instead feed them to the lions in the colosseum. We could even charge admission and then up/down vote.
Why would we want to discourage zergs? That’s what WvW was built to support. It has walled combat, after all — the epitome of “zerg” combat in a historical sense. There are all kinds of problems to running your entire map’s population in one big zerg, too. The biggest being that a zerg that big can only be in one place at a time.
If you don’t want to run with the zerg, there’s plenty to do in WvW with small groups or even solo. Or, you can do sPvP.
Yeah, my social pressure system is very weak. I’d cheerfully endorse something better. I would like a way to contribute smaller amounts, though. For some of the higher valued upgrades, it’s like finding a hard luck case with a cup that says “$20 bills only”.