Guild Wars 2

@azurrei

Who said anything about 4+ hours a day. You farm what I describe in an hour-ish if you know where the spawns are.

No one said you HAD to do it…. why so hostile?

captaincrunch.6731:

I’ve found that having 2 or 3 level 80s in orr mining orichalcum every day can be rather lucrative – and painless (takes a half hour or so).

8 toons X minimum 11 ori spawns X minimum 3 ore per spawn X ~3.2s per ori (after15%) =

8.448 gold per day >minimum< just from orichalcum.

Ceronose.6019:

captaincrunch.6731

I find that leveling is super hard. I have 1 level 80. That 1 level 80 took me 4 weeks of constant playing to get there. I have started a new character, I think I’m going to just craft all the way but my main question is then, Which crafting professions give the most experience? How cheap is each one? And how fast can I do it?

You can go 1-80 in 8ish hours if you have all the mats ready. You will need to do several professions to get there. The ideal way to do it imo is to craft to 375ish in several getting your toon to around level 70 then joining the zerg in cursed shore to crush out the last xp from dynamic events in short order.

Pretty sure at the moment they are still bind on equip. At least my twilight was before I put it on.

Edenknight.9284:

What has happened is that the market has normalized where if a person crafts any item with buying all components from the TP – the price will be equal to the finished product or a lot of times, they’ll end up losing money. There are people here claiming that it isn’t true, but refuse to provide examples because it doesn’t exist anymore.

These examples do exist. The problem is that as soon as someone says, " I make x profit per <insert sigil/weapon/armor/etc> piece" if even 10 or 20 people read the post and start doing it, the profit margin dries up and they have to find something else to make. Setting up an excel sheet so that you can quickly input the cost of materials, and seeing the break even points of all the items you can make is a great way to start.

Edenknight.9284:

Those claiming to make crazy profit are either lying, or figured something out before the community has.

I didn’t see anyone in this post claiming to have made crazy profit. However any profit allows you to forge endlessly without going broke. At one point I was averaging almost 1 gold per forge of a certain exotic weapon type but more people seem to have caught onto that particular one and its now down to only a ~15 silver.

I agree that dungeon rewards need to be tweaked. There is just no incentive to run them outside of the token skins, dungeon master title, and low drop chance on lodestones.

However I disagree whole heartedly that the dungeons are not fun. My first CoE run took almost an hour and was probably the most fun dungeon I have run. None of us had done it before so we needed to learn the mechanics of the fights but once we caught on the encounters became quite simple.

If you are not having fun I suspect there may be something wrong with your group. I run a full clerics gear shout healing warrior build in my groups, weapon swapping and skill swapping based on the encounter. With the endurance regen buff from the warrior horn, the 6.5k on demand healing, and massive condition removal from soldier runes, there is rarely anything that the group cannot live through by dodging. Yes dodging and using line of sight are key for survival in a game that lacks true tanks and healers. Also, I can see how running a glass cannon DPS build in a dungeon would be frustrating especially if you don’t have support oriented team mates to back you up, or if you are not great at dodging. Anyone running such a build and having trouble should try a more tanky build and see the difference.

I do however have two gripes with dungeons. The first is the bugs such as the mounds that cannot be hit in AC. Stuff like this is not fun and out of players control. There are many other examples of such bugs, effort put into fixing these would be appreciated. The second gripe is with mob crowd control (CC). Many of the trash encounters have several mobs with seemingly low cooldown crowd controls like knockdowns. Groups of mobs with heavy CC can mean isnta-death for players without any way to react once you have used your endurance and defensive skills. My personal opinion is that many trash mob packs have too much CC. It is however manageable for people to rez and zerg through these groups, but that shouldn’t be the “normal” dungeon run play style.

Xym.9417:

face it, some people are so bad at math they think they can statistically beat a roulette table or slot machine. They truly think they are winning long term.

Sure some people hit the jackpot and some find method to cheat the system. But over all, Anet will need the mystic forge to eat 99% (no this is not an exact number, infact it is probably even closer to 100) of all gathered materials so they retain some sense of value.

Once people are done crafting, to level the last few toons they are interested in, the forge is about the only material sink left.

I totally agree – that is how it is designed to work. Your choice then is to operate at a loss in an attempt at quick gains, or calculate the max you can spend per forge in order to break even and only forge at or below that threshold.

@Anatolian

OK… go on being a baddie. It really just makes the game more enjoyable and profitable for the rest of us.

Let’s all just have legendaries tomorrow then we can be bored and complaint about the lack of things to do.

I did cursed shore grind for 300+ hours netting on average 2 gold per hour. Plinx/cursed/penitent and all the other little events around there during down time. It is a very active play style requiring good map awareness and at the end of a 10 hour day you will be bagged. But, it gets the job done.

The winners are still making profits while the baddies are still crying hack/bot/sploit. Even when you try to help these fools they just lash back with incomprehensible insults and dribble. If the methods become unprofitable its likely because guess what, we told you about them and the margins may get worse. Thankfully at this point there are still many good ones.

The fact of the matter is that you can do MANY forge combines per day taking less than 20 minutes total play time and netting you profit. No one said you were going to do 5000 combines in a day and end up with precursors AND extra gold left over.

Do some research. Stop complaining. In the time it takes to come here and make a cry post you could have figured out one of several methods for profitable mystic forging.

I don’t think arah has anything to do with it. You need the temple of dwyna to be uncontested.

Running full magic find guildies and I are making decent profit farming these especially when you consider the value of all the other drops you obtain while farming them.

Parisalchuk.9230:

Shizzlenit.7648:

“I explicitly acknowledged that using the TP and forge is not the only way to make profit.

Also I am curious as to what you are combining. The cost to craft 1 Pearl Greatsword is 1.5 gold at the cheapest. How you are crafting items at 1/4th that price is beyond me."

i’m currently buying a lvl 78 daggers for ~40s each. That means an attempt costs me 1,6g. I will get a lvl 80 exotic back, even if i dont get the precursor, they are 95% of the time worth more than 1,6g. You can even get some weapons like Usokus Needle which goes for 10g+.

What you do is filter for exotics, lvl 75-80 and then sort by the cheapest. Now you will place BIDS on the cheapest one available on the AH.

Thank you, I understand this concept. If this is indeed what he was implying then I stand corrected. However I was confused in his use of the word ‘materials’ then.

Thanks for the method though!

Shizzlenit was nice enough to explain one of several methods of going for a precursor without being stupid and dumping your entire bank roll into the forge and ending up with nothing to show for it. Other methods exist as well but like I said, it takes a bit of time and research to figure them out.

Mira.4071:

Tallis.5607:

right now the only way to get a legendary is to buy gold, plain and simple.

The funny thing is that even if you bought the gold to buy them there’s not enough enough of them on the market to buy. Some recipes need 250 (or more) lodestones. Last time I checked there were about 80 on the TP – worldwide.

As someone who was actually interested in earning a legendary through weeks/months of persistence, I have to say I’m pretty discouraged. Right now the goal seems impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a legion of minions (or bots) to farm for them.

Even if I was Donald Trump and could just swipe my credit card and have every buyable legendary component dropped in my lap, the current worldwide Trading Post doesn’t even have one third of the lodestones required for one legendary!

If what you say is true, that should be an indicator that it would be worthwhile to start farming charged lodestones as their price is moving towards a new market equilibrium, making your time/reward for farming charged lodestones quite high.

The price of crafting products may in fact be below the cost of materials to craft them sometimes. You need to realize though that there are other ways for these items to enter the market such as the mystic forge. If I can pick up 4 level 70ish exotic coats for 80 silver total and forge them into a level 80 exotic coat worth 1.8g, then I can undercut the price of the item relative to its crafting cost and still walk away with a large profit. This example gets a out of hand for popularly transmuted items such as greatswords which are heavily transmuted in the mystic forge. However the cost of crafting materials does not drop in response to the reduced price for greatswords because they can be use universally for other items that are not regularly transmuted.

In general the market is highly volatile and taking a snap shot at any one time is useless for making generalizations. Similarly focusing on a single item, or single crafting profession, or bad use of buying/selling on the TP is also useless.

OneTyper.7045:

Promega, is your set of components giving stable, better or worse margin within a period, let’s say days or weeks if you have done that for long time?

I have had to make adjustments to remain profitable but I have sustained positive results for weeks.

Parisalchuk.9230:

@swiftpaw

Thats 350G at current prices. The key is staying with inflation. Odds are good that if they dont change the method or odds to get a precursor then prices will only continue to rise.

Prices have actually dropped and stabilized from not too long ago. The whole “the sky is falling cause precursors are going up in price uncontrollably” was so last weeks popular cry post.

I never equipped my Dusk either. Ran around for weeks with it in my bags before I crafted Twilight.

Parisalchuk.9230:

@Promega

Attempting to use the forge to make a precursor WILL lose you money since statistically you are not going to end up with a higher worth item then the combined worth of the first 4 items.

This quote is 100% wrong. My material cost going into the forge for example on one combine I do is 1.29g. The average selling price for the combines that dont result in a precursor is over 2 gold. Even after the TP 15% I still make money.

Sorry bro. I can’t help you if you refuse to acknowledge that what you are doing is not the only way to go about things.

I’m not talking about playing the TP Im talking about buying for example 10 gold worth of materials/items off the TP, putting it into the mystic forge, and selling the outcome for more than 10 gold.

Opposed to people buying 10 gold of materials/items off the TP, putting it all into the mystic forge, and ending up with nothing.

These latter people are doing it WRONG period if they don’t want to go broke.

The solution is to buy the correct items at the correct price, and sell the 80 exotics that you get from failed attempts at the correct price. I’m not going to hold your hand any more than that.

Shizzlenit.7648:

Someone here mentioned that he actually makes + by attempting to craft an precursor and i can fully support this. If you think about it for a minute you’re actually doing it wrong by buying lvl 80 exotics from the AH and then putting them into the MF to attempt a precursor.

Right now an attempt costs me around 1,5g and i will most likely make more out of the exotic i get from the MF back. I dont actually lose money by trying, i actually make a profit. You don’t have to put lvl 80 exotics in there, 75+ works fine and you have the chance to get one. Even if you don’t get an Precursor out of it you will 95% get a lvl 80 exotic which is worth much more than 1,5g.

If you buy lvl 80 exotics and put them into the Forge and get nothing in return (even after 1000 of trys) than there is noone to blame besides you. There are better ways without risking tons of gold.

And yes, i have gotten my precursor (after around 50 tries with lvl 75+ exotics).

I would just like to reiterate again… people losing money while attempting to craft a precursor in the forge are doing it WRONG. You are BAD at the game period. Anyone can be bad at the game it is not a reason to cry on the forums. Some of us are making PROFIT while failing at creating precursors.

Let me give you an analogy. Person 1, you failers dumping hundreds of gold into the forge and ending up with nothing, are basically gamblers putting it all on 37 in a game of roulette and losing big time. Person 2, those of us making profits while working the mystic forge for precursors, carefully analyze the markets for raw materials, exotics, rares, and precursors and do a cost analysis of input relative to average output. We put in only what will make a profit on AVERAGE coming out the other end.

Please stop crying that the game is broken just because you are bad at it. Clearly others here are using similar methods to mine and having similar results. In fact I’m surprised anyone else here even chimed in as the more people that know about this the tighter our margins will become. However, I don’t want to see legendaries become just another common skin because baddies are crying on the forums that the game is too hard.

melchiz.7182:

Promega.7628:

300 hours in game farming was a blast.

Wait, what? “My free time is valuable, so I spend it doing menial and repetitive things.”

Socializing with friends, attempting to find the most efficient ways to do things, actually playing the game… menial and repetitive may be one way to describe it, but your entire life can be described as the same thing… so again what is your argument here.

Mystfit.8309:

I handle the puzzles very simply. I call my daughter and she does them. I do not have the skills or the patience and she does. She LOVES them. In fact, last night, I sent her to a zone area I knew had a puzzle and turned her loose. She located the puzzle, did the puzzle and had a blast. It’s a win for everyone. I feel no regrets for having not done them myself.
Usually I try them first for awhile, fail and then when I get frustrated turn it over to her.

I’m pretty sure you just admitted to a violation of the EULA…

Fire eles can spawn north of R&D waypoint around the contenders/gladiator event depending on the state of the fire temple.

melchiz.7182:

Promega.7628:

@Levellord
It took me a little over 300 hours to buy everything I needed for my Twilight running a ful magic find set in cursed shore.

300 hours @ $8/hour = $2400. Assuming that this is your only source of income, you would get most of your gross income back via rebate.

Why didn’t you get a job and buy the precursor? $200 or so for the precursor, and you’re still up over $2000. My point? A Legendary doesn’t mean much when the major component of it can be purchased with cash (precursor + all other TP materials), at a yield far greater than in-game time investments.

300 hours in game farming was a blast. 300 hours at a sub minimum wage job is pathetically boring. I work full time as is so Im not interested in working more for money when my free time is far more important to me. I don’t care if others want to spend real ching for their legendaries. I know the work that went into mine and I am very satisfied with myself having completed it.

I don’t really understand what your argument is here… If I totalled up the amount of hours I have put into MMOs over the past decade and considerd how much I could have made working at minimum wage jobs, sure I would have some extra dough… but what is your point?

@varl

Just got to the TP and count how many exotics you have bought and derive how many combines you have done from that. I’m still under 100 combines of exotic weapons in the forge, had several named but no precursor yet and I am up over 10g through the whole process.

I dropped a superior sigil of bloodlust in my Twilight and it remained the same legendary weapon status.

Many different lodestones can also be farmed in WvW.

Charged lodestones can also be farmed in Malchor’s Leap.

Corrupted Lodestones can also be farmed at the temple of grenth in cursed shore.

Molten Lodestones can be found on the fire eles in cursed shore.

Smart people put exotics in the forge “gambling” to make a precursor and actually make money or break even.

Silly people blow their wad on expensive exotics on the TP and go home with nothing.

I’m not sure ANet has a fix for people being “silly” or even that one is required.

@Levellord

If you don’t like RNG then save up to buy a precursor. It is really not a hard task. It took me a little over 300 hours to buy everything I needed for my Twilight running a ful magic find set in cursed shore. No RNG involved. Heck you might even get lucky and find something worth tons of gold along the way.

No one is forcing you to put items in the mystic forge, or to go for a legendary in particular. Stop acting like ANet is twisting your arm to dump all your gold and items into the MF.

Levelord.5746:

594655 kitteno.8103:

Aza.2105:

Its absolutely shameful that Anet has decided to use RNG to this magnitude, let alone a notorious grind. For what? A skin.

It’s like they’re forcing you to get this skin or something.

I sat down to consider this reasoning that everyone has been saying. In many ways, you are forced to get the skin.

You’re ignoring the fact that if you choose to NOT grind for skins, there really isn’t anything else to do in the game that has any ‘reasonable’ long term goals.

People are bored, so the only thing to look forwards to is to work for skins. If skins are set to be unattainable, then I guess there’s nothing left in the game to do and people would just leave. There isn’t a middle ground for skins to work towards. They are either stupidly easy to obtain, or autistically long and boring to get.

Why spend months or years boringly grinding for materials and gold, then putting them in a casino slot machine to get a skin, when people can just buy XCOM, Borderlands, Hitman Absolution, Natural Selection 2, etc etc, play for a few hours and have their fun?

I’m not saying GW2 has to compete with these other games, but what I am saying is that people will readily jump onto other games if all GW2 does is RNG you indefinitely.

Bad analogy incoming: It’s like a girl that blueballs a guy forever. Eventually that guy is going to give up and find another girl.

There is skin middle ground. And there is nothing RNG about Forfire’s Essence. If you want a legendary then deal with the system that is in place. Otherwise adjust your goals to something you feel like putting the effort in to get. Also its only been about two months and we have had a huge halloween content update, and rumor has it that on Nov 15 we are getting another content update. Who knows what new skins and recipes will be made available at that time.

If you are blowing your entire bank roll on trying to make a precursor in the forge and afterwards you feel like crap and want to quit then I guess no one can stop you. All I’m trying to say is that there are ways to put exotics into the forge without losing money. I’m throwing you a bone here so there is no need to be hostile. I’m not even “gambling on the forge” to make another legendary it is just a fun “mini-game” at this point that I do on the side since it isn’t costing me anything per attempt.

Ulquiorra.6903:

Promega.7628:

Being stupid with your money and making bad gambling decisions on the mystic forge is no reason to complain. Doing it the right way you can actually MAKE money gambling on precursors in the mystic forge even when you don’t get a precursor. Then when you hit on a precursor its big bucks.

being vague in an attempt to insult the op, while trying to sound cool, is actually played out x.x

I’m not going to spoon feed my methods to the community so that my profit margins can dry up. Spend an hour or two figuring it out for yourself and share in the profits if you wish. I currently make in the range of -5silver to +90silver per combine while attempting to get precursors. Just buying up level 80 exotics off the TP and throwing them into the forge is stupid and no reason to complain when you fail.

Being stupid with your money and making bad gambling decisions on the mystic forge is no reason to complain. Doing it the right way you can actually MAKE money gambling on precursors in the mystic forge even when you don’t get a precursor. Then when you hit on a precursor its big bucks.

Try the order of whispers hide out for starters.

People need to stop quoting demand as everyone who “wants” a legendary precursor. Demand is set by the people who want the precursor AND have the ability to buy it. 400g is not unattainable but requires some serious commitment if you want to do it yourself. I farmed up everything for my Twilight in about 300ish hours making roughly 2g+ per hour.

All this argument really comes down to is people not wanting to invest the time or having the discipline to save enough gold to craft their legendary. I got a full magic find set then literally did not spend money on anything but travel, repairs, and magic find food/boosters for 300+ hours of play. If I can do it then you can too.

You can craft the perm skins when ever you want. Get the halloween related components that you need NOW, and work towards the lodestones or what ever else your are crying about later, and do the combine for the perm skin later. There is no 1% issue here just more crying about not getting everything in the game handed to players instantly for no work what so ever…

Cezton.2415:

The game is centered around events heavily, yet karma is only useful for one set of armor in Orr, and various skins on par with lower level items.

We simply need more things to spend karma on.

There are few rewards in both PvP and PvE. Chests from puzzles, dragons and dungeons drop various vendor trash, blues and greens and the occasional yellow worth 10-15s. There’s no burn, no urge to really grind.

Heads up folks, MMOs are about grinding. How it’s implemented is what determines if it’s a good or bad form of grinding. Gambling for legendary precursors or saving up 300-700g over the course of months is probably one of the worst forms yet.

The cosmetic approach, the approach for all to have fun and be equal feels like it will be the downfall of this game after a few months of everyone doing the same things.

I’m amazed that I’m actually desiring a worthwhile grind, and am amazed that there are no real loot tables in such a successful MMO title.

I think you just need to reword your argument from “grind” to “character progression”. Once you reach 80 with a full set or two of gear you are basically done. There is no further character progression but there are tons of things you can "grind’ like legendaries, skins, gold for various things such as pet collections, valor, WvW, etc…

Just finished crafting Twilight last night so down to 6 gold. Typically earning 2-4 gold per hour while farming.

ANet does not stand to gain much $ from your lack of karma so why not make players feel rewarded by giving them more. However they do stand to gain $ by selling you gems which convert to gold, so in game gold acquisition seems to be more tightly restricted.

Id just like to add that I complete the worlds first, my character doing exactly the in-game events that I do every day in the order that I do them, every day. Let’s all share in my meaningless accomplishment.

You can also farm these from high level earth elementals in eternal battlegrounds or places like Pagga’s waypoint in malchor’s leap, or around cursed shore when the temple of melandru is not bugged/contested.

Snow.5269:

“The current precursor method fills an important role in the economy: it drains the supply of crafted and looted, rare and exotic weapons on the market. No proposal that I’ve read for an alternate method of precursor obtainment would replace that role in the economy. Those are needed to provide an outlet for the supply of mithril and orichalcum ore, elder and ancient wood, ectoplasm and T5/T6 fine materials.”

I’ve hear this argument before but it doesn’t hold much weight. Right now the way legendaries are currently designed a person would be silly to throw anything into the Mystic Forge. 1-3g attempts with a 1% chance of success? No thanks. I like many other refuse to, so what exactly is getting removed from the economy? Most of the precursors still in existence are the result of early exploits & were hoarded. Very few new precursors have been reportedly made/found. If our entire economy is that dependent on precursors to survive then something is terribly, terribly wrong.

You supply no evidence to prove that most of the precursors on the market at the moment are the result of early exploits. These things drop every day in Orr and just because YOU dont like to gamble in the mystic forge doesn’t mean people with a large bank roll don’t craft massive amounts of rares/exotics to create precursors via the mystic forge thereby putting a massive demand on the economy for all sorts of materials.

The argument that the precursor market essentially balances the supply and demand for end game materials such as wood ore and other fine mats is extremely important. Just because YOU don’t do it doesn’t mean other people aren’t doing it and making a killing by selling the precursors they make from the MF. The thing is to do it reliably takes a large time and gold investment and most people are just not interested in doing it. So if you don’t want to invest in making your own then buy one off the TP or move on to something else.

In the same boat. Thought it might just be me. Seems to be a more wide spread bug.

also looking for a working server, northern shiverpeaks currently has a large zerg trying to clear

Even with the new halloween patch I still think a rotating zone wide karma buff to DE’s is a great idea.

Obviously downscaling needs to be tweeked and there are plenty of level appropriate zones to play in anyway if poeple want a less populated alternative. This is an MMO note the massive part of that description. If you want a single player game then consoles have tons to offer you.

The game is what it is and this change would be a very simple tweek that drastically expands the endgame content of the game without coming up with new content or introducing new systems.

There is also a lot more for lower level players to do in zones besides zerging DEs such as hearts, vistas, jumping puzzles, pois, etc. The pve karma grind is what it is but fortunatetly arena net has built a system that rewards max level players for replaying content in all zones of the game. The only problem is that the system is not rewarding enough to encourage max level players to take advantage of it compared to the alternative.

Adding more activities that award karma is a great idea but it is asking a lot more than adjusting existing rewards.

temple of balthasar – the initial seige into orr

NinjaKnight.1340:

@ StevieMJH Agreed, OP is not being rational.

In any game there will be a small percentage of players who will cheat try and get cheaper gold etc.

You don’t put in place mass restrictions that affect the majority of the player base just to catch the few bad eggs. You go around with a detective/police force and catch them.

It would be like telling the US Gov to shut down the Postal service because possibly a small amount of illegal stuff is being mailed.

In a real world scenario you can’t remove the ability of people to break the law because their ability to break the law is ultimately governed by the laws of physics and their will.

But we are not in the real world, we are in the matrix, where Anet CAN remove the ability of people to circumvent their ability to make profit.

I don’t see these people as a few bad eggs. I see them as a particularly attractive portion of the gaming community (in a business sense), those that are willing to spend money for in game reward. These are the people that Anet really wants in the game. They just need to adjust the system so that they have a monopoly on gold sales.

Can you honestly say you would stop playing the game if you could not mail massive amounts of gold and items to other characters or receive it in the mail? Is it really that much of a coveted feature?

TheDaiBish.9735:

Promega.7628:

The purpose is to see more content than cursed shore. The buff is intended to rotate to a new zone each week, only applying to a single zone at a time. How will it not accomplish it’s purpose may I ask?

Because all it would be doing is rotating the horde of zergers and bots to that particular area each week.

I don’t think thats ALL it would be doing but yes that is the point? I don’t understand what you are saying.

Some further improvements could sure be made such as tweaks to downscaling and such.

The quest for karma is currently very long and unfortunately very boring if you want to do it optimally. The idea is to see more content and have more fun while doing it while requesting the very minor tweaks from ANet to change the system. I’m working on the assumption that other players feel staying in the same zone running the same events for 100-300+ hours is boring as well and would also enjoy seeing more of the game.

Bots while being detrimental to the game are an entirely different issue.