Guild Wars 2

Do they exist? Yes def. are you impacted by them? Possibly…

What you need to realise is that writing a bot who flips items are hard, both due to the ingame pickup requirement as well as available inventory space and no means to easy index the inventory (for the bot program).

Its FAR more likely that people are using them to invoke special trade strategies, i.e. stock up on item X in anticipation of Y. Or buy item X cheap to transform to item Y etc.

On example would be way back when the sigils where really expensive (high median and large spikes for certain sigils). One strategy was to buy cheap yellow lvl 40 weapons (or sigils), dis to get mats and the chance for the sigil,

Throwing these sigils in the forge was about 20% chance of get a higher level sigil, on rare occasion a really expensive one. Now at that time if the cost of the sigil used in the forge was around 3.6s you would turn a profit (at that time certain sigils were going for 16g+)

Buying all these items manually and tracking outbids makes it very hard to get a decent turnaround profit but if you have a bot doing the buying for you its different.

I am not saying I participated in something like this but a lot of people on the forums reacted on the weird behavior of the rare weapons which normally had a low turnaround.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

There are no apps that allow you access to buying and selling outside of the game. Yet another conspiracy thread.

Oh yes there is, shall I write one for you?

Behellagh.1468:

Two years aeneq? Wow you must be from the future because the published API on the API board isn’t that old.

So who wins the Super Bowl in 2014?

Ok true, I am off by a little bit considering that the game hasn’t been out two years yet.

However! The “published” api isnt published by an ANet official, its from datamining the protocol between the game client and the server and is posted by a user. That API was “discovered” way before he posted it on the forums, I remember looking at this stuff (and developing for it) in December 2012 and I wasnt by any means part of the first batch.

Again there is NO official TP API (and ANet has been working on oAuth support not for 2++++ years, pun intended).

Thats the motivation behind the APIs provided and supported however as DarkSpirit knows the TP api is not part of that API group officially.

The question becomes “Since the API has been there now for more than 2 years why hasnt it been officially supported like the other APIs are”. Well the reason must be that ANet either dont want to support it (which they have to for the game to work) or that they know that in its current form is unacceptable for official use.

Now changing it isnt as easy as you think since it would impact the current games backend as well so in other words…. “Welcome to limbo.”

You wont get a response to the question so no point in asking for it.

The 3rd party tools could be seen by ANet as another semi permanent tie to the game, i.e. you as a gamer will be reminded about the game and causing you to login therefore it can be seen as one of the “keep playing” reminders.

A game is frankly just as successful as its implementation of these “reminders”, ofcourse the biggest “reminder” is the social hooks/pressure from your m8s.

No matter what site it is you should never give enough information for them to be able to act fully on your behalf, even leaving your credit card has its risks these days. Its better to centralize these kind of payments under one umbrella that you put your trust in, PayPal/PaySafe is good choices in this regard.

Anyway looking over the page I could find no such demands, when asking for credit card information its only the name and four last digits so not sure where you got the bank reference from.

16s is quite quick imo, its not like the bot camps only one item and its not just one query per item either and ontop of that maybe the bot doesnt want to poll to frequently (becomes kinda obvious).

The bot would need todo the following;

• Query the listings for the user (since only 10 items per query this happens more than once)
• Query all items (again only 10 items per query)

Ontop of this HTTP request/responses there is additional data parsing and database updates. Further if you want ANY more advanced logic such as bidding history (to eliminate 10s 1 item bids) you would need to do additional queries for EACH item.

This could result in several hundreds HTTP requests for each iteration, so I would say that 19s refresh time is not unexpected in anyway (heck it could even be written in Java which would make it impressively fast

That said, peeps… green items!?!?! I have yet to see ANY strategy that produces enough turnaround gain that a bot would be of value. People running bots usually have quite a fund and the profit on low level items like blues/greens are minimal.

DarkSpirit.7046:

How do you know that just checking every 12 hours would suffice? What happens if the bot is under attack by a human trader who outbids it by 1 copper every time at the first hour after launch? How can you be certain that your bot would have enough gold to withstand the outbidding war for the next 11 hours, if it doesn’t have the capability to take back its gold from the NPC?

First of all how many people actually have a disposable gold of 2k? Of those small number of people, how many would actually spend the time and effort to develop an automated TP bot? If they have that much gold, time, and expertise, don’t you think it would have been more profitable to develop a champ farming bot instead? Furthermore, if you have 2k gold, would you bother writing a TP bot just to outbid a rare item that is worth only about 50s? Is that even worth the risk on your 2k gold account since every time you run your bot, you take a risk?

Now you know why it is unlikely that everyone who has been outbid on the TP comes here to vent about bots, are really outbid by a TP bot. When I have been easily outbidding people just by camping on the refresh button.

It ofc. varies on the item being bought on, if one has a price war on a legendary then youll run out of gold asap. However if its 1c on a 20s item and its a manual war (ie. a player is bidding) then thats over 9k bids for a 2k budget.

This is extremely unlikely, its more likely if it ends up in a price war with another bot but even then its going to hit its price roof and thus become moot. Also the example I gave was for an extremely active market segment youll work with a lot less gold in another segment.

And even if it runs out of money, whats the big deal? It ran for a while and its just rinse and repeat after that.

A champ farming bot is a lot harder to develop than a TP bot, also if you have any know-how of TP strategies the return is a lot bigger.

To get any big profits on the TP you need a high throughput strategy, camping and waiting for legendaries/precursors for flipping is risky and often punishing (due to listing fees when selling). Your biggest return is in the segment below that produces the high cost items or in items that can provide a steady stream such as ectos.

This puts your best return of investment below 1g, anything above that will most likely just be flipping items (which is not a high revenue stream).

Depends on the items, salvageable rares for ectos has a cost per item @~25s, order of 4 of these is 1 gold in a cancelled order and theres a LOT of activity in that segment.

But that said with a big activity the orders can be kept very small (2-3 items) but it still can put a drain on things.

@DarkSpirit

Heck even to start a bot is a manual activity, I don’t think picking up your gold every 12h would make the classification of the program change. I think you are referring to some mythical bot that automatically plays the market for you, if thats what you mean then yes those would be very rare if they exist.

Being outbid and placing a new bid isnt a big drain on the gold available, even in the 70+ rare weapon market you would be ok with ~2k gold for a 12h period and it doesnt get more active than that.

@Aberrant

Yes cancelling orders are easy todo, the issue is that each cancelled order returns the money to the TP pickup window distributed in the item chain with all the items bought. This means that if noone interacts with the bot then it will run out of money (unless it has an insane amount of it)

All the bots I am aware of requires manual intervention to “harvest” the items/gold on a daily basis and to execute the trade strategy the bot is used for.

@DarkSpirit, if the account used by the bot has enough gold then it has no need to pickup the gold and that task can be relegated to a manual interaction. Ofc. that requires the account to hold a few thousand gold to operate at its best but thats not unlikely.

@Behellagh, yes as mentioned its possible. However the ingame TP ui is really bad and doesnt lend well to frequent rebidding on a large set of items. Even the “ordered” list breaks occasionally and doesnt show wether the item is outbid or not so you need to go into each specific order.

If you are running against external sites like GW2Spidy and others and use that to track against what you know you paid for each item then it becomes a rather big recordkeeping/matching excercise and it would be really feasible for a long term consistent behavior unless you actually retrieved the order list directly.

If you are at 30-40 items from a base of 200 then it seems like the items would most likely already be above the bots price limits as well.

It should however be clarified that bots are only useful when enacting a TP trading strategy, examples of this would be;

• Buying cheap rares for ectoplasm salvaging (cost <~10s of ectoplasm)
• Buying cheap rares for sigil/rune salvaging
• Buying cheap rare weapons for precursor hunting.
  etc.

Sigil/Rune hunting isnt possible anymore due to the crash in Exotic sigil market but it used to be quite profitable (and little competition).

All of these market segments are extremely active, if you put a bid on an item youll be almost immediately outbid. No person can actively try to stay on top, even bots come down to random luck, i.e. will someone sell an item before highest bidder is outbid.

It all depends on the item being bid on, I doubt anyone comes here complaining that they bid on rare weapon x of lvl 70+ was outbid in 5 secs (that’s to be expected, heck in that market segment only a bot can actually produce any likelihood of a buy going thru).

Where its easier to detect is in low volume areas, one example are rare weapons below 60, I used to peruse that area for sigil salvaging and usually you could get the weapons for vendor price.

If you in that segment suddenly saw an increase across the board of being outbid in 5min at any time of the day and they all stopped outbidding at a fixed limit. Its likely some automated system is in place, if the response time is uniform its then likely its not a text alert program.

But its true even in that scenario its possible that it is a human with just nothing else todo.

However noone is arguing that its not possible to automate the process and if there are people who knows how todo it then it is being done.

Now wether thats desireable or not is another matter, I know that Dark is pro TP automation and there are others that feel the same just as there are others who dislike the very notion.

The end is still the same, its up to ANet to define whats acceptable and so far they havent done anything either or and I doubt this will change.

So Dark, in the 6 months that has passed since you started the thread (and the time this was discussed prior to that) have you seen any action by ANet to make any changes (either support or not) in this API…

I just came up with an interesting thing ANet could do

If they move their ingame TP to use an ingame buy mechanism then it would mean that anyone using the public API is running a program in violation with the TOS.

Oh its def. possible, as Buttercup mentioned I have done some programming work in that area and I ofc. have tested it (just tested it mind you) and its quite easy todo as long as you have some programming experience.

The software package that gw2spidy uses for instance (which is open source) contains code todo this, atleast that code was working when it was written. The APIs have changed slightly so it requires some tweaking…

Some people on the forums might be hesitant to admit to trying these APIs out but I am confident there are additional people who has the same experience and its not a long leap from there to assuming that there are people out there who exploits this feature.

Due to the design of the APIs this isnt something ANet can resolve quickly, any update to fix this also impacts the normal TP behavior. The quickest one would most likely to remove the “buying/cancel” functionality and replace it with the same logic that governs selling which is an ingame mechanism that doesnt go over a HTTP API.

If they did that then they could even open up the API for datamining officially (wouldnt solve the issue with alert programs but I think those are acceptable).

As Aberrant said its easy to check if its a bot, since bots operate on large sets of items they dont look at volume/availability.

Therefore you can try to outbid someone on a low popularity item in a specific item set, if you get a quick response you can try to raise the prise until you get to the bots price limit. When you got this you can do the same on another low popularity item in the same item set, if the behavior is the same its highly likely its a bot.

edit: For frequently traded items where the bot needs to rebid a lot it causes the bot to drain the gold reserve if the bid quantity is high. Therefore bid quantities on these kind of items are fairly low which also is a hint, unless the bot has a huge stockpile of gold.
Have been afk a while, beta testing another MMO has taken all of my free time

There are bots and they usually operate on a large set of items, things like mass salvaging for Ectoplasm+mats sale or for TP strategies that require a lot of items (things like Precursor hunts or salvaging for Sigil toilet upgrades etc).

These are quite easy to identify if you look at the whole dataset and there is minimal gain to try to force them to their limits since they cover a large set of items and also that they have price limits thats correlate to their projected profit. So the only thing you gain is a reduction of their profit margins.

Blizzard is blowing smoke, the reason they removed it was the crazy super inflation that they never managed to get under control, in comparison GW2 is a poster boy of a healthy economic system.

Ok peeps are over thinking it, what they state are good and all but more directed to lvl 80.

For leveling I would suggest mainhand axe (offhand is up you, Id suggest warhorn for the speed buff) and weapon swap for GS (for dps and mobility). Its kind of a boring setup since the main damage is simply the autoattack but it works…

So dps would basically be GS charge, 100b, (alt ww), swap and axe it.

Then you would trait for this setup which basically is strength and arms trait lines. What should be considered from the other lines are Tactics (10pts for any of the following; Empower Allies, Desperate Power) and Discipline (10pts for Warriors Sprint or Signet Mastery).

When you reach 80 its different tho since you can better spec for synergy effects.

Thats pure axe/mace with vulnerability rotation? Was curious whether rotating offhand for additional skills would have an impact. Sword #4 for instance seems to do a lot of dmg for the cast time involved (big cd tho).

@Nike

Wonder if you have played around with alternatives for GS. I was looking at a Axe/Mace setup with a weapon swap to Axe/Sword, the Axe auto attack chain times in very well with sword #4 and Sword #4 crits for around 7k and leaves 2 stacks of torment on the target.

This would be very similar to a pure axe setup but still gives you some extra dps for minimal cost. If Pure axe already is very similar to axe/mace+gs then this would be an alternative.

Although the mobility and the immunity offered by GS would be missed ofc.

green plum.7514:

About OpenGL – the main reason why it is not used for games is because high-performance OpenGL applications used to be a PITA to debug. There is still no SDK, limited developer tools (on Windows at least). In contrast, DirectX is fast, reliable, simple and very well documented.

And as far as features go… OpenGL has supported that multithreading you people are talking about for over 20 years now

And ofcourse the standardization process was so infuriatingly slow that Microsoft just ran past them. However that has changed the recent years and OpenGL 4.x has caught up and in some cases passed DirectX.

To some extent that has to be credited to the success of OpenGL ES in mobile devices, and ofc the OpenGL (ES) version running in PS3.

Behellagh.1468:

azizul.8469:

yeah… even the old LOTRO has option to use either dx9 or dx 11….

come on ANET, this is 2013 already……..

Yes but over three years after it first came out, just before it went hybrid/F2P. It also officially supported Dx10 6 months after it’s release. But this was back when the game was subscription only (as well as $200 lifetime subscriptions) with paid expansions.

Then there’s the question about how much exclusive Dx10 and 11 they are using over Dx9. Did they just use more complex shaders and graphics memory management or did they use more? They could use just one exclusive feature from Dx11 and say they have Dx11 support.

Quite right, there is even DX11 something labeled as feature levels that allow for a wide range of graphics devices. What one needs to remember is also that although DirectX is a platform independent API its not quite true, the API is (or atleast has been) evolving in close discussion with HW vendors so that the accelerated features in the API is actually provided by hardware.

If this is not the case then some features isnt available without a big loss in rendering performance (this is one of the reasons that porting DirectX to old HW is not a viable option).

You can look at the following link to get a better understanding of the various levels offered under “DirectX 11” http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476876%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

loseridoit.2756:

…
If you believe that being able to access the nuisances of graphic cards is marketing nonsense then I dont know what to say.

Oh well, I type until the other side rants

Case and point /discussion.

loseridoit.2756:

aeneq.1760:

Wrong, what do you think DirectX is? Its designed as a low level platform independent API but still low level. The only thing that’s new in this scenario is that Mantle is platform specific and optimizes things farther than DirectX can.

wait, you think that direct X 11 is a low level api?

ok, I think I might have a problem explaining things to you.

Direct X 11 is an graphic api that abstracts hardware and provide a easy to use api. It turns out that this api have a gigantic overhead that prevents developers from extracting the full potential of graphic cards. In that sense, the api is actually pretty high level.

Mantle is a real low api that allow developers to touch hardware.

btw, platform independent and low level are kinda oxymoron terms

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understanding-amds-mantle-a-lowlevel-graphics-api-for-gcn

I think you should read it

Dude you are cracking me up! Have to say thanks for that but seriously do you have ANY exposure to actually programming these APIs or are you just spouting marketing garbage?

Platform Independent and Low level are NOT opposite, I can grant you that varying complexities in the underlying layers adds costs in overhead but if you think Mantle is without overhead then you are sorely mistaken.

I can write a totally platform independent and extremely low level memory management library for instance. The complexities in these elements almost ALWAYS comes down to platform cross dependencies.

However low level HW access has minimal cross dependencies (and yes includes DirectX as well).

The 9x factors for draw calls are NOT solely because Mantle is a low level API but almost exclusively comes from better utilization of multithreading to keep the GPU busy, something that Microsoft has been really lazy updating the Direct platform to.

Before you start spouting nonsense again, know that I have over 20 years in low level embedded and graphics development and if you cant do anything except spout marketing material I see no sense in continuing the discussion.

Soz tone might be aggressive which was not my intent.

Yeah 2 stacks is a bit little, its most likely closer to 4 but it depends on how fixed one can remain which usually isnt the case unless you are running trash/soloing. The biggest let down if the FGS is however the buff overwriting, it geta really annoying after a while.

Also for some reason there seems to be scenarios where the buff doesnt trigger but dont know the specifics yet. I have been fooling around with 30/25 in anticipation of the Empower Allies change but I am as you understand annoyed with FGS atm.

Oh and also this little tidbit… if you hit 25 stacks your FGS buffs will cancel out previous ones on a fifo manner, this means that youll start too loose the good ones from Signet/Sigil/Party and youll end up with short time expiration friendly FGS buffs and thus loose out on might stacks in any group that is halfway decent (and frankly I wouldnt want to run in groups like that).

Well 2 might be pessimistic, but assuming auto attack and 100% crit you can as a maximum get 10 stacks (5 sec buff), you will ofc occasionally get a little more but 10 stacks is generous (assuming non trash since trash doesnt really count).

Now this means of you are stuck in GS with all the negative aspects there of (lower dps for auto and rooted for 100b). Unless you do weapon swap and on a 5 sec cd. that means your stack is halved so generously we say 5+ stacks…

Now to that we add spinup time which is occuring on weapon swap and on movement (dodge, occasional range etc). Now we are suddenly below 4 most likely and maybe even lower…

So what would be better??? Well if you like big might stacks and occasional OMG Look at that dmg instead of a more stable DPS+group then well its up to you…

loseridoit.2756:

aeneq.1760:

loseridoit.2756:

aeneq.1760:

loseridoit.2756:

…

mantle is a console like api for the pc…….

Not likely, as is confirmed by posts on AMD twitter feed. The Mantle is present in one form or another on both X1 and PS4 as well as being available on PCs at some point.

Actually, it an api for their gcn card architecture.

I guess Amd will probably will be selling gcn cards for a very long time

What does “Actually…” refer too? Dont see anything in the quote that seems to be applicable.

The mantle api is a api exposing the low level features of the gcn architecture of their graphic cards.

Its a shame that John Carmack doesnt have time to tweet and test the details of this new development.

Your posts are extremely confusing, you seem to debate things in quoted texts that arent there…

• Yes Mantle is a low level AMD API (we all know that), wether itll be GCN exclusive is unknown, most likely itll be supported in GCN++ but thats just speculation.
• Mantle platform support is unknown atm, they officially stated Windows yes but they also strongly hinted at support for both X1 and PS4. Given that its a low level API with minimal platform dependencies I wouldn’t be surprised if a Linux version would be possible as well.

loseridoit.2756:

The only difference is that they announce for windows pc which might become political since this announcement also benefits steam OS

This sentence make no sense. Difference to what? Also how do you see a statement of Mantle support to benefit Steam OS since that is running linux.

loseridoit.2756:

If Amd is not supporting the api for the pc then there will be no reason for AMD to announce this api as they can send copies of the documentation and allow either SONY or Microsoft handle the specs.

Extremely confusing… I believe you are trying to say is that AMD will support Mantle for Windows otherwise they wouldn’t have made an announcement? That seems very obvious… like saying 1+1=2.

loseridoit.2756:

Low level access to graphic cards is new development since the glide fx cards. However, low level apis are not portable and can only be limited to the architecture they are written against

Wrong, what do you think DirectX is? Its designed as a low level platform independent API but still low level. The only thing that’s new in this scenario is that Mantle is platform specific and optimizes things farther than DirectX can.

Well that’s a bad group, just imagine doing Arah without skipping mobs shiver

Seems the way to go is WvWvW and attach to a zerg.

loseridoit.2756:

aeneq.1760:

loseridoit.2756:

…

mantle is a console like api for the pc…….

Not likely, as is confirmed by posts on AMD twitter feed. The Mantle is present in one form or another on both X1 and PS4 as well as being available on PCs at some point.

Actually, it an api for their gcn card architecture.

I guess Amd will probably will be selling gcn cards for a very long time

What does “Actually…” refer too? Dont see anything in the quote that seems to be applicable.

loseridoit.2756:

…

mantle is a console like api for the pc…….

Not likely, as is confirmed by posts on AMD twitter feed. The Mantle is present in one form or another on both X1 and PS4 as well as being available on PCs at some point.

On the discussion of DX11 upgrade its not that easy…

Normal game engines has a higher level frontend API and isolate the rendering to abstract components. This means the internals don’t really change when you switch platform/render target.

If you only look at it from that angle then yes it would be fairly trivial to write a new render backend supporting DX11. However what would be the upside? In order to make use of the new features in DX11 you would still have to mod the engines internals which is a costly and sometimes risky business (old optimizations gets broken etc).

The only benefit from a simple port would be a more efficient draw call handling (due to DX11 threading support) but I doubt ANet sees rendering performance as extremely critical at present.

Behellagh.1468:

There are some rumors out there since AMD announced Mantle because both next gen consoles have AMD GPUs based on the GCN architecture that just maybe Mantle is available to both of them. Anandtech suggested outright that Mantle IS the preferred API for the XBox One.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understanding-amds-mantle-a-lowlevel-graphics-api-for-gcn

The API will ofcourse be available since its HW specific, however I doubt its the preferred API on either.

Even for X1 BF4 support will be out first after several months so that indicates that DX11 (or a spin of it) will be the preferred API. PS4 will ofc. not use that however they cant only use Mantle for several reasons so their base is most likely a spin of OpenGL just as PS3 was.

You should not put too low value on existing art/asset pipelines and engines that are already optimized for DX and OGL.

Now whether Mantle will be used a lot depends on companies bottom line, they want as minimal cost for maximum revenue. If they are targeting X1/PS4 then already there they have two render targets, now adding Mantle just adds cost and nothing in the revenue stream. The only scenario I see Mantle being a preferred choice is if you target only PS4/X1…

PS: Don’t mention BF4+Mantle, that’s basically AMD subsidized.

Sorry but if you got them all to 1% health and nothing happened then they clearly were hacking… There is no trait/skill that could explain that behavior over an extended time.

If they had -cond duration build they could potentially be unkillable for 4 seconds using Endure Pain (potentially 8 if they had it automatically triggering at 25% health). If they had saved their escape abilities (60sec cd) they could potentially have some fun with you but as I said if it was for extended times then something fishy is going on…

Hmm, well since this has been the meta build since a few months Im not sure what to say…

Oh btw, you ofc need a secondary dw weapon set with Bloodlust on both for quick 25 stack gain…

In my experience Sigil of Fire is about 5% dmg and more in AOE situations, however as you build power it starts to trail of. I also seem to notice that it doesnt scale down much in lower level Zones so in those scenarios it might be even better.

There isnt really much to choose from, you cant really take a crit sigil and an on-swap sigil together so in the end you have 2 permanent stat sigils and one either crit or on-swap.

Permanent is ofc. Force and Accuracy (there isnt really any options unless you go Night for instance or Slayer of….).

On crit is probably best if you have high crit or minimal boon duration boosts, if you have boon duration then Battle would probably be a better choice. Anyway the only options you really have here are Fire or Battle.

Atleast for DPS…

Wethospu.6437:

I’m not sure if I’m ready to lose Fast Hands so I will probably use 30/0/0/20/20 with Desperate Power.

Yeah cant live without fast hands for sure, I assume 20 in Discipline is for Warrior’s Sprint?

Flissy.4093:

How would a 30/0/0/10/30 build fare when compared to a 30/10/0/0/30 build? I guess Empowered would be lower DPS than Rending Strikes, but as a Warrior who often uses 2 shouts (FGJ and OMM), would taking Lung Capacity be more worthwhile than Rending Strikes, swapping to Empowered when using 2 Banners or Signet?

Well you gain around 1.2% dmg with OMM+Lung Capacity, the increase in dmg from FGJ+Lung Capacity is also minor. At best youll get Lung Capacity dmg boost to match the dmg from Rending Strikes and in that scenario you dont take the 10% crit chance boost into consideration.

And ofcourse Empowered doesnt give you anything unless its an actual Boon you have on you. i.e. Banners/Signet does not come into play…

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

aeneq.1760:

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

If you gave me the traits I could do that for you. The issue you will run into with that build, just from your description, is that you will hit the 25 stack Might cap in a 5 man party and all the effort you put into boon duration will go to waste.

This is usually how I run;

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-s;4VK-C-b4cK-60;9;4T;09T48A;41;058B5JF6;2UydbTqLQn-kK7835;3kVq0u1zY4_A5230C-2i;5F-03c00P;9;9;9;9;17u0;20-6x

A few things;

• The calculator isnt updated with the new Rune of the Traveler info (so its some more dmg and 15% boon duration instead of 10)
• I used to run Ruby orbs instead of Traveler since with 10 in Tactics I got 100% uptime anyway. Went to traveler for the coming change and thus those 10 points would most likely go to Arms (unless I go 30/25)
• Been playing with the idea of running a lot of either +9% or +10% slaying potions instead.
• Usually rotate the skills a bit dep. on group. FGJ to replace a signet etc (with 100% Fury uptime FGJ looses some value so I leave it out for solo)

edit: Quite true for Might consideration only hitting the roof is detrimental, however I mostly do PUG runs so it happens very rarely (current guild doesnt do much serious team runs) and ofcourse yous till get the other boon benefits

With Bloodlust: 11098
With perception: 10893

The extra Might you accrue is not worth the Power and Crit dmg you lose from Scholar Runes or Ruby Orbs, not to mention the Scholar Rune #6 buff. Your dps is about 11% lower when solo, and a whopping 24% lower when you are in an organized group that hits 25 Might stacks.

Ok, good too know. Was a bit more than I expected, just a few followups so I can but the numbers in context…

• Are those numbers assuming Scholar #6 boost?
• Is the numbers max values or are they an average over a DPS cycle?
• Does the calculation consider boon downtime over a cycle as well?

edit: Oh btw, is the 11%/24% actual DPS or percentage of the maximum output? If its the maximum then ofc. dps impact is less

Nike Porphyrogenita.8137:

If you gave me the traits I could do that for you. The issue you will run into with that build, just from your description, is that you will hit the 25 stack Might cap in a 5 man party and all the effort you put into boon duration will go to waste.

This is usually how I run;

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-s;4VK-C-b4cK-60;9;4T;09T48A;41;058B5JF6;2UydbTqLQn-kK7835;3kVq0u1zY4_A5230C-2i;5F-03c00P;9;9;9;9;17u0;20-6x

A few things;

• The calculator isnt updated with the new Rune of the Traveler info (so its some more dmg and 15% boon duration instead of 10)
• I used to run Ruby orbs instead of Traveler since with 10 in Tactics I got 100% uptime anyway. Went to traveler for the coming change and thus those 10 points would most likely go to Arms (unless I go 30/25)
• Been playing with the idea of running a lot of either +9% or +10% slaying potions instead.
• Usually rotate the skills a bit dep. on group. FGJ to replace a signet etc (with 100% Fury uptime FGJ looses some value so I leave it out for solo)

edit: Quite true for Might consideration only hitting the roof is detrimental, however I mostly do PUG runs so it happens very rarely (current guild doesnt do much serious team runs) and ofcourse yous till get the other boon benefits

Interesting… this is kinda off topic but in those calculations did you do any evaluation of boon duration?

The reason I am asking is that I run a boon duration build (Monk, Water, Traveler+Food+Signet Mastery) to get 100% uptime on the Elite. I do this mostly for swiftness (kinda hate playing a Norn Warrior without any speed boost).

This ofcourse has the extra benefit of higher Might uptime/stack (Sigil of battle can now give up to 9-10 stacks permanently) and ofcourse other party wide buffs lasts longer.

Its tricky to evaluate a build like that, however as I said I run it mostly because it makes playing more fun but it would be nice to see how it stacks.

I think its evident from the lack of progress in the alloted timeframe that the event is done “wrong”, there is most likely a right way that will have better progress and to assume that this “right” way is discovered in the first attempt is optimistic at best…

Still waiting for a source for the “Rune of the Sunless” mentioned…

edit: Ok found it, yeah that rune set was weird.

• Crafted precursors was first mentioned end of last year, dont expect it to happen…
• Precursor scavenger hunt was first floated end of last year, dont expect it to happen…
• New legendaries… yeah hmmm not likely…

Im not saying it wont happen, just that the track record tells us that there is no point planning for things like this.

My take on the matter is that Legendary weapons are very hot atm, with stat diff to exotics until all upgrade to ascended and people who just dont want to grind for the ascended mats etc.

Now my guess is that this will cool off as we move forward and thus prices on legendary weapons/precursors will stabilize around the current levels or slightly lower.

If you are not going for Sunrise yourself then I would probably either craft/sell or sell the precursor directly.

edit: kitten cat….

AtlasSi.9130:

Orange.9701:

if you have a life, it is not so epic waste time when the event fails.

Dude. I can’t +1 this post enough. ily<3

Dude. I can’t -1 these posts enough.

I guess “fun” is just face rolling stuff by pressing 1 repeatedly to collect loot…

True but in a good group you already have a full stack of vulnerability and especially in any open world event which makes those points circumstantial in most scenarios (although even more so with Rending Strikes).

I kinda stear away from boosts that are minimal and in some cases not even applicable

That said, the Inspiring Banner trait is about 34 power for a BoS or 1.5% Crit Chance/3% Crit Dmg so yes seems in most cases 10 in arms is superior.

Too bad, I really liked the 10 in tactics it offered a lot of flexibility for group composition. Ah well guess its back to being the selfish Zerk warrior for the most of us…

edit: Is 10 points in arms (for bleed I assume) really better than going 10 in Tactics for Inspiring Banners, granted you only gain some mobility due to the range increase and about 20% of the actual value of the banner but 10 points in Arms is meh….

Ok, Since PvE basically has two builds atm 30/25/0/10/0 (5 to spare) and 30/0/0/10/30 I am wondering what would happen if/when Empower Allies are moved out of range for the 30/0/0/10/30 build.

Getting the 10 extra points needed nerfs dps way too much for anyone taking Empower Allies (170 power vs. 15% dmg or 15% crit chance).

I don’t see an option other than PvE dps to go to the 30/25 build, anyone else who see any alternatives (assuming DPS is the focus, and please don’t turn this into an argument thread of 30/25 vs. 30/0).