Guild Wars 2

I was going to say that the game should do this automatically, but I suppose I could see where someone might want their celebration booster to be active while they’re crafting or looting their home instance – so PVP lobby is probably the only place where it could truly automatically suspend the timers. I was also going to suggest a preference to auto suspend/re-enable, but people might want their item boosters to stay running inside or outside of town (depending if crafting or farming) – so keeping it simple/manual might be best, after all. Sometimes simple is best, ‘K.I.S.S.’ – as they say.

What are these suddenly needed/used for anyway, just the ‘new’ condi meta? I noticed their price about doubled a few weeks ago, but wasn’t sure why.

Vendors ‘sell’ tab has an option to sell junk – most of what you’re getting early on is just vendor trash that encourages immersion and has you horde and then sell, rather than just getting liquid currency (it makes more sense to get a claw from a skale and have to sell it, than to just get a pile of copper coins – though, I feel like you probably still get a few coppers for your trouble).

Later in the game you’ll get the following kinds of items:
1) same as above, vendor trash that occupies inventory
2) nearly same as above, stuff that looks like trash but actually has a purpose/value
3) trash stuff that’s exotic but has no vendor value and requires you type it’s name before deleting (these items are normally those that come from collections you’ve either bought to unlock or unlocked through achievement)

In general, unless somethings description says it’s a precursor, it’s probably safe to vendor / trading post without a second thought. For a newer account that is leveling, buying karma armor can be worthwhile, but don’t do that when you hit 80 – because it’s a fair bit of karma, and you can’t salvage runes back out of karma armor.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I move for legendary amulets/rings/accessories first. May not have any visuals associated with them, but they would still be useful.

ANet said they plan to look into making the trinkets from the maps other than Bloodstone Fen have a similar ‘reset’ capability, so other than having a stack of extractors handy, it sounds like this is already coming. I honestly feel like the ‘reset’ should return the infusions or re-apply them outright anyway, rather than destroying them. At that point, you would effectively have legendary trinkets, and without forcing an awkward grind (or, I suppose, 3 separate grinds for the 5 pieces, since we already have the back piece?).

Honestly with how easy it is to get the trinkets now, they should just remove the stats on them entirely and make the back pieces hold all the stats – except they don’t have enough stat sets, since people mix and match.

Just so I understand the request – are you asking for an alt to be able to consume a gift of exploration and:
1) get all WPs, hearts, POIs, and associated fog of war from POIs/etc. unlocked, with no map completion rewards from any of the maps
2) get all WPs unlocked, w/ related fog of war, but still be able to finish hearts/POIs
3) other?

I’d be in support of #2, I’m not sure how I’d feel about #1 – not sure there’s benefit in having those automatically completed without reward (unless, I suppose, OCD completionists who can’t stand to not see 100% on any given map).

Essentially, kickstarting – this shows promise, but also has the same potential pitfalls – people not getting what they expected, delays, frustration, and it not actually coming to fruition after collecting money. Think new legendaries, all over again, except this time the people who ‘paid’ for them can 100% say/show that they put money directly towards this.

I think it would need a few things to be successful:
1) some bonus reward/title to indicate you supported, since many features/requests will be QoL type things that everyone benefits from. If it’s a request for a gemstore item – either the item itself, or a discount on it.
2) a tracker w/ a high level status, or expected delivery date.
3) the gems get taken when the ‘project’ is funded/closed, and are earmarked but not otherwise taken before – perhaps with a warning if you go to spend them (or a setting that prevents spending committed gems).
4) a suggestion area to actually collect these suggestions – we could even allow people to put in suggestions directly to get gems to show support, but there would need to be an ‘acceptance’ period when Anet says it’s something they could do and set the project, where people could re-pledge or back out.
5) most importantly, and least popular – either 100% of the gems, or some X percentage of the gems, should need to be from direct purchase. I know all gems come from purchases (or so it is said), but I don’t think we should be encouraging gold farmers and grinders to set the direction of the game with purely converted gems. The purpose is to provide new revenue to support new/additional projects, and the gems purchased for gold have effectively already been bought. Also, if this gained traction and worked with converted gems, it would likely drive up the price of gems, which means that people buying gems to get gold would buy fewer gems. It’s in Anet’s best interest for gems to be worth gold, but not be worth -too much- gold, simple fact. If someone has deep pockets and want to buy a legendary, they shouldn’t be able to do that with the lowest gem purchase.

ArchonWing.9480:

It is nothing on the league of the watchwork one, because not only were sprockets pretty valuable at the time, it was very hard to acquire normally. That become muted with it becoming a map reward and now they’re not really that valuable.

Actually almost half of the ~650k supply of watchwork sprockets in the TP has disappeared in the past week, and the value of them has about doubled in the past two weeks – from 1s to 2s. I assume that it’s related to recent changes and the “new condi meta”, and sigil of bursting. Hardly leather-level valuable, but a significant change nonetheless – especially because the gathering options amount to watchwork picks and home nodes, so the supply is hardly flush.

Silly, but potential workaround: Does toggling /mentor prevent those kinds of invites? I know you can’t turn it on when you’re in a squad, so maybe enabling it prevents squad invites?

Otherwise, I think the only way to avoid this presently would be to tag up yourself (which will cost you 300g to be able to do, if you don’t already have the cmdr tag), or have a guildie in another map tag up and invite you to their squad.

Joining the squad and turning off squad chat and your party display would also effectively achieve the same result of "not being bothered’.

All of these workarounds are a bunch of needless effort for your original issue, just proposing them because I don’t know if any of them will suite you. I admit I’m biased though, I agree with the sentiment of the other posts – just trying to offer something more constructive.

revealed (and auto-reveal after bs) is stealths nerf. Prior to that it was backstab vanish backstab vanish spam, and it was disgusting.

So, question for the masses who are asking for the revert – what if rather than a 1s cooldown, the backstab skill switched to autoattack for 1s? Then you can still autoattack if you desire, but it won’t be a backstab. Encourages sound tactics, penalizes spammers, but still allows for cleave when the situation dictates? It’ll drive many people even more bonkers than the current implementation, because it will actively punish them for not knowing their timing, as opposed to penalizing them but giving them an opportunity to still utilize their stealth.

Morbid curiosity – do you still get 2 initiative back if all 8 projectiles are reflected and hit you? What if it’s half and half?

Adry.7512:

Hahahaha but why filthy?? I became a casual when I started my family….and work full time plus school…I am so busy I don’t even have friends except for maybe 2-3 who stuck around and I can’t even hangout with them. Casuals aren’t filthy lmaooo. There’s a reason why they’re casuals. Anyways you do have a very strong point. One of the main things that draw players in is how you can return at any time and pick up from where you left off. The point of the thread was to say that hey if you complain so much, then pay for a fee sort of thing, but not saying it’s a good idea to do so.

The dangers of the internet – ‘filthy casual’ is a tongue-in-cheek term I (and some friends) use to refer to ourselves (casuals) – I’d thought it was generally widespread and known w/in the GW2 community (didn’t think we originated it, certainly) – sorry for any confusion

Filthy casual here – with occasional ‘bouts of unhealthy amounts of play. Exotic gear is totally fine for enjoying the game and everything but high tier fractals (though you’ll need to “git gud” and avoid a toxic raid group if you want to join in things there).

Get your home instance nodes from the new maps first, then make a habit of looting your home instance daily. This will basically get you free ascended trinkets from a month of dailies, and they’re stat selectable on purchase. Keep that habit up, and you’ll never want for unbound magic, nor ascended trinkets. The nodes do cost about 50g if memory serves, though, so see ‘dailies’ below.

Most importantly, enjoy the game. A legendary is an obscene investment in gold/mats – I filthy casual’d my way through ad infinitum and it took about 6 months (between the 4 tiers of collections, saving up enough money to pay for things, and having time to run the fractals). I even cheated by getting clovers from my monthly reward and using laurels for a lot of the T6 mats for the end build. It’s totally do-able, but it’s a long term investment (that glider is sexy, though). I found I liked fractals, so it was a logical goal to shoot for. It was loftier than I realized going into it (particularly having to burn an ascended weapon/armor to get things started, oooh that one hurt!). Still, I quite enjoy fractals, and now I can T4 with the best of ‘em. Well, maybe second best. Since getting ad infinitum I don’t do my fractals as much, but they’re the easiest way to have a chance at some free ascended.

Dailies: If you can manage to run your dailies, do those too. I actually started PVPing in unranked daily just because it’s the fastest way to get that 2g reward from dailies, and you can get some nice skins/loot from the reward tracks to boot (80 potions per track, you can get 2-4 potions a day). If you don’t like PVP, or don’t want to grind dailies, then don’t – play what you like!

In the end – find the part of the game you like, and enjoy it. It’s a game, that’s the point of it. If it begins feeling like a job or grindy, make sure you’re actually doing what you want, or are really looking forward to that reward. Feel free to take a pause from things and come back when you get the urge again. Filthy casuals unite!

Why are you salvaging rares with the copper fed though? Use a mystic salvage kit for those… in which case you would only want to be salvaging rares, not wasting charges on fine/masterwork/etc.

Even if making mastery points character-based would work, and was a good idea (neither of which do I agree with) – you’re completely forgetting that a large glut of points were awarded based on past achievements. There’s no way that Anet stored which of my characters -first- completed the lvl 10 story arc, nor is there a way (given how it’s currently implemented) for any other character to unlock that achievement – because achievements are account bound.

As for the experience bit, it doesn’t take too long in the whole scheme of things – and it’s absurdly fast if you save up your daily chests (hero chests: bloodstone fen, bitterfrost, etc.), and just let them stack up if you’re waiting on MPs to complete one tier and move to the next.

Those high tier masteries that cost 8 or 12 MP’s were pretty absurd, though. As someone who doesn’t enjoy many of the adventures, those numbers make me sob.

I’d love to see these many of these features.

If people are going to whine about the commander tag, then let people who own a commander tag get the commander-specific features when they create a party without having to tag up.

The idea that there isn’t a party leader has always kinda bothered me. I understand that a leader can leave, but it would be nice to have someone as the defined ‘leader’ – if we have issues about the voting, make a mechanism where when the party leader leaves, you need to vote a member in as leader to re-enable the features.

Disclaimer: almost all of the above is more coding that’s avoided by buying a commander tag and tagging up, so, it may get completely ignored as “has workaround”.

I find I only need to use YouTube when I’m grinding achievements/MPs/JPs, particularly in maps like Tangled Depths. I’ve never found the need to use it for playing the story/normal game (occasionally for map completion, I may need to confirm something – but usually I just bumble around and enjoy the journey).

Disclaimer: I’ve not started Draconis Mons just yet, but I’ve done all previous maps.

They may eventually make some kind of legendary armor acquisition outside of raids, but I wouldn’t hold your breath on it – it’ll certainly be a while, if they ever do, because it would (presumably) be a different legendary armor/design available through another game mode (my money would be on Fractals, because they seem to like them – or maybe WvW, since that was such a big draw originally and has had such a dry spell – and it would benefit so much from it).

It will never be sold on TP, they’ve been moving towards prestigious items requiring you work for them yourself, on your own account, and just get certain materials for them from either grinding/farming or TP.

Good discussion – I just want to point out that “+1’ing” is not a counter – that’s good tactics, but not a counter. Countering is specifically talking about beating out in a 1v1, or at least chasing them off point and decapping/capping the point.

I’ve certainly killed DH’s as thief in 1v1- though every time I do it I assume it’s because they were really bad DHs. The fights are just normally too prolonged to be worth it, or I’m squished quickly. If I see a DH camping a point without a teammate around, I get back over to the other two points, because I should be +1’ing the fights there.

Is he countered if I run up and immediately run away? The only winning move is not to play? Maybe… Maybe.

(edit: this response was to Doam.8305 – I hit the wrong reply button)

Ready check is part of sPVP only – so we’ve established you’re definitely talking about sPVP and not WvW.

Changing your legendary gear in sPVP doesn’t affect your stats in sPVP – because your stats are provided by your PVP amulet. You’re just changing the stats on your legendary for when you later return to WvW/PvE. Multiple times now people have tried to explain that your gear stats do NOT affect sPVP, and you keep posting showing you still think that it somehow does.

Anyone can change up their build in the ready screen, whether they’re in whites or full legendary, the same way – by changing the equipped amulet in the PVP build screen, which is what actually determines your stats for the sPVP match. The only reason to have multiple sets of armor for sPVP, would be for aesthetics. If, say, you liked wearing shiny armor for your power build, and a different green armor for your toxic condition build.

Personally, while I recognize that WvW is a PVP game mode, I would prefer that the terms are just PVP (for sPVP) and WvW (for WvW) – but it seems that’s not the generally accepted consensus, despite Anet further distancing those game-modes with different skill numbers, behaviors, and tooltips. It would sure simplify discussions like this if the terms were similarly isolated. At this point, precious little applies to both sPVP and WvW other than “you’re fighting other instances of the gw2client” (since botting/cheating is apparently sufficiently prevalent as to be a problem in some modes, I won’t say “other people”). Player vs Program, indeed.

I have to agree with Electro – while it certainly would be wonderful to either unlock the runes per-armor/character/account (those last ones probably fairly effectively gutting the rune economy), they’ve managed to give people what they’re asking for without requiring huge amounts of code change, and still providing utility/value to legendary gear to support build swapping.

This is the same basic reason that transmuting things through the mystic forge destroys upgrades. If it didn’t, they’d have to have recipes for every modified base input item – an infused bloodstone ruby ring with a 14 AR infusion? You want to attune it? Sure – here’s an attuned infused bloodstone ruby ring with a 14 AR infusion and a new shiny empty infusion slot. Items are singular, and upgrades attach to items upgrade slots directly – it’s not in a separate lookup table or anything fancy, it’s just a fixed field – they would need to do a lot more coding to support your request, which would push things out further. What was previously 2 item IDs is now 60+. Again, that’s just a relevant example – it’s actually way more complicated than that, because we’re talking about unlocking X rune slots on the legendary in an arbitrary order, so it’s either a modulus operation and mapping all the items, or a parent/child relationship and now storing goo gobs of data.

Changing it to be normalized (e.g. ever used a basic store checkout where you just have “an address” vs. Amazon where you have a list of addresses and choose which address to use) would require rewriting tons of underlying pieces – same idea why they don’t have dye channels on back pieces – it wasn’t considered early enough in the design process, the assets weren’t built with it in mind, and the object storage simply isn’t developed around it.

Now, that said – I certainly wouldn’t balk at them providing characters w/ access to a few ‘bonus’ slots that are non-shared and dedicated to only hold runes for swapping these into, akin to the shared inventory slots (e.g. not an actual bag, specific purpose, only sits at start or end of inventory). Since runes stack, you would only need 1 per unique build. If we also get sigil swapping with legendary weapons, then having 2 slots for armor and 3 for weapons seems about right. I do have to admit, though, my anal retentive nature is probably going to have me walking around with an extra rune of any given type to ensure that the runes go into the inventory slots I want them in. If they don’t give us some kind of “rune inventory” slots.

There were lots of ways to skin this cat – they’ve chosen a way that, at least, serves the actual need.

Since the last post and question about discount is only a few days old, may as well chime in for anyone still watching:

Guild Wars 2‘s first expansion is now available at a new, lower price—starting at $29.99 (USD) for the Standard Edition.

Seems like letting me gift gems to someone would make Anet more money than making me go buy a gem card at Best Buy and provide them the code – Best Buy has to be taking more than just tax on that sale, even if it’s a small percentage. No sense in inconveniencing me and reducing Anets profit just to stand on principle, IMO. Maybe you can gift a gem purchase directly to another player, I suppose I never tried that exact action.

I assume the ‘no in-game gifting of gems’ is there to ensure the TP gets its conversion claws into things, or to disincentivize the act of people from pooling their remnant/leftover in-game currency (there’s a term for the ‘problem’ you run into with in-game currency when you have, for e.g., 100 or even 15 gems lying around – it’s a good problem for the store to have, because you’ve got potential value there, but you need to give them more money to realize that potential – which keeps you coming back.) – crumbs? something clever and humorous like that…

+1000 – I’ve tried to gift gems a number of times, and the thought of converting gems to gold then gifting the gold then having the recipient have to convert the gold to gems – you end up having to gift like double or more the gems!

One time I wanted to buy a digital upgrade for someone – but you can’t gift that either, so I was trying to gift the gems for it. Another time someone bought me an item I was about to buy, and they have a lot of ‘stuff’ so I didn’t know what they could use – so I wanted to take those gems and ‘gift it on’ to someone else.

Khisanth.2948:

On the other hand scams of that nature still occurred in GW1 with that trading system. How do you propose a foolproof way of avoiding that?

Scams of that nature literally could not occur in GW1 with the trading system, because the confirmation prompts acted as an escrow system – exactly what was being traded was visible before the trade was finalized, so if I approved a trade without them offering the money – that’s really my own fault.

Assuming you’re referring to the “inexpensive item that uses the same icon” trades, I personally chock that up to someone not being careful – but seeing as anything you trade -could- be similarly placed on the TP – I guess I would load the TP price up and have a prompt that says “you saved X gold over selling this on the TP” / “you saved X gold over buying this on the TP” – simple enough.

That way, for e.g., if you went to buy The Anomaly from someone but they offered up a Crystal Core – when you entered your 225g purchase (or whatever), and they offered up an item that’s worth less than a silver, the trade window could get real nasty and ugly looking and warn the user that they’re severely overpaying – or prevent the trade entirely, I suppose.

I think it’s simply because that content is gated behind HOT, so it’s the logical place to expand on it – especially since the masteries in HOT are directly relevant here, whereas the core tyria masteries are more QOL focused around existing content.

You’re right, geographically it doesn’t make sense, but if you look at it from the standpoint that Lake Doric is HOT content (which it is, you can’t play it without HOT) then it makes sense. For the next expansion, they’ll do the same thing with the next set of masteries (and they’ll give away base + HOT, with it, but episodes will remain unlocked unless people had logged in at the time).

Terrible idea, the TP is a godsend for the usual churn and getting a hold of whatever isn’t bound.

I do agree with others though, I wouldn’t mind the -additional- option to do direct trades like in GW1. I have guild mates I’ve run with a long time, but if a precursor dropped and they wanted to buy, I don’t -know- they wouldn’t stiff me on a mail based trade (nor do they know I wouldn’t), so we’re forced to go TP and burn a chunk of coin on the middleman for what should have simply been a direct barter.

Yep, 28 for each tier, 4 tiers = 112 pages. Theoretically possible in 28 days – you can get 4 pages a day by doing nightmare challenge mode, in addition to recommended, but requires 150 AR and a good group to clear 100 CM. Without that, it’s 38 days of recommended (37 1/3).

The achievements are fairly easy, assuming you have a good group or a dedicated couple friends in a pug. The real time delay is going to be in building your AR up to be able to do the final tier (since you need to do the highest Mai Trin, which is fractal 98), and just saving up the gold/mats to craft everything. You only need to sacrifice one ascended piece of gear to get going – after that I think it’s smooth sailing (there might be a need for one more in the final step?) – but don’t be overly concerned by the recipies requiring X balls of dark matter, because what you’re crafting as you go needs to be salvaged for each next step, and it salvages into a bunch of balls of dark energy.

I did it casually over about 6 months, and used my login rewards for clovers. I also cut down the cost of purchasing the mats for the gift of fortune significantly by using laurel on heavy crafting bags (1 laurel for 1 bag gives you 3 of the required mats, and the drop table for it is -only- the 8 types of mats required for the 2 gifts). https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Heavy_Crafting_Bag

It’s a really nice glider, and the immersion from having a backpiece that’s the same as the glider is cooler than I’d realized it would be (keeping in mind you can of course get that from certain gemstore combos for significantly less effort).

gw2efficiency.com with an API key for your user can give you an idea of the gold costs that will be involved, it’s a nice way to track how you’re coming along.

… but reveal does overpower stealth and on top of that prevent future stealth applications until it expires.

I have this same issue, and it’s not a huge one to be honest, but it is a bit confusing, especially if I’m logging into characters parked in LA to confirm their crafting level. I agree that having an icon change that indicates either max level professions, or your highest level in a given profession, seems like a reasonably simple way to resolve this. If the API calls are messy across so many characters, they could even cheat and cache the information in the local client on character logout, since 99% of use cases would have people either already at max level, or always using the same client, and when it’s changing because you’re leveling the profession, you probably know that anyway if you use 2 clients.

You can move around the Sylvari home instance really effectively with infiltrators arrow, FWIW. Lots of corners and thin floors to hop between, and it’s quite pretty.

If you’re about pure aesthetics though, you’ll probably prefer the human looks.

Oh I definitely agree – the stat system as it currently works is rather horribly broken, and you’ve called out the exact problem – all stat combinations give the same numbers, but those numbers rarely (if ever) have an equal effect. I’d love for ANet to do a massive change and just fix it all, and make everything have sane equivalent formulas, and re-stat celestial to truly give a ‘balanced’ amount of ALL stats (Celestial is such a nice idea, but it’s too timegated for all the stats it lacks) – but the amount of balancing required from ANet to change all the skills and everything, I can’t imagine it ever -can- happen. Add on top of that the rage that it would cause people is nigh unthinkable, with leather prices where they are now, and no way to extract runes/sigils outside of gemstore – I don’t even know what it currently costs to change a full set of scholar (or another expensive rune) ascended with another stat set + repurchase runes, but multiply that by – well – probably just about everyone doing it all of a sudden? The TP would melt in a shiny fiery goldsink that would consume so much of the economy, and a single piece of leather would be worth like 100 gems by the time the smoke cleared.

So, nothing official on streaming specifically from policy, but…

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-arenanet-streaming-schedule-for-the-week-of-april-3/
https://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2

They specifically call out popular community streamers and invite people to watch them through their official channel – I’ve never heard of any negativity or takedown notices just for streaming actual unmodified gameplay. Do keep their TOU & ROC in mind though:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-content-terms-of-use/
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-rules-of-conduct/

Specifically, things like brand/naming, not appearing official/sanctioned, not profiting from their assets (e.g. selling stuff), etc. If you’re a beta tester – don’t stream that… If you discover a glitch or something that can be exploited, don’t go streaming it or making videos – but otherwise, go to town.

Disclaimer: I’m not ArenaNet, a lawyer, and definitely not ANets lawyer.

Yeah there were some collection achievements (a-la the coins in silverwastes/etc.) that required using the aspect movement skills to reach – either those achievements would need to be retired, they would need to be moved to reduce their ease of achieving w/ gliding, gliding would need to be disabled, or just leave ‘em in as-is because at this point it’s behind us (sure I suffered through, but I’m tired of ANet removing achievements).

pow pow power creep – pow power creep – power creeeeep! king of the creep!

No. there are stat infusions that provide a trivial bonus if you have ascended gear and don’t fractals but do wvw and want to be a true munchkin. PVP doesn’t actually use your gear other than weapon type and skins for looks, and that certainly doesn’t need to suddenly change.

If condi is a problem in zergs, it either needs rebalancing or (more likely) people need to bring more condi removal – you don’t just add arbitrary resistance to only one of the two types of damage, especially the one whose damage potential can already be largely avoided after it’s been delivered and before it takes effect.

signed,
a thief that regularly doesn’t bring enough condi removal, and plays power builds.

So, I remember the cliffs – what, really, was that map other than a bit of a festival event farm (for the festival currency), crystal farm, and champion train (because if you got enough people, the only real mobs were ~4-5 champs on the way up), with some unique movement skills thrown in?

I’m not against bringing it back, there are certainly legitimate arguments why it shouldn’t just be blocked off forever, but I’m confused on why everyone is claiming it was some amazing map that should be permanently accessible. There were some mobs that spawned for the events, but I think if you brought it back permanently (rather than as a festival) that it would become fairly barren after a month or three, save for the few people trying to farm/craft Celestial (which, is there even a build/class that -truly- shines with Celestial at this point?).

Personally, I really like the idea of making it available as a summer festival.

I can agree with the ascended runes if the idea is that you’re unlocking a rune to be able to be selected/equipped out of combat, a-la legendary stat swapping. I don’t think they should provide power creep/statistical benefit beyond that. However, I think Anet is already working on an idea for this.

I don’t see Anet allowing the creation of bigger bags – between bank slots, bag slots, and character slots – they profit heavily from Inventory Wars™, and between angering the playerbase that actually bought/crafted their 20 slot bags and the potential financial impact, I just don’t see it happening. I wouldn’t mind more storage as well, don’t get me wrong, but regardless of the material cost – people will spend it in gold earned in-game, and Anet will be the overall financial loser.

I don’t know if legendaries should be factored into this discussion, because my understanding is they’re going to do something about this with legendary armor. It would still be nice to have a permanent one for ascended, since stat changing is a thing – at its current price + the cost of the leather to stat change, you’re almost better off just crafting a new piece of ascended.

Hopefully legendaries (and maybe ascended) will get a way to swap between ‘owned’ or ‘stored’ runes and stats, and you need to bind one such rune to either the account or piece of equipment to unlock it for selection. I’m probably hoping for too much out of ascended, but even if we just get rune/sigil swapping on legendary/ascended, that will be very nice.

Here’s your recommended daily non-helpful solution: Anet should Just make it so the skins aren’t for sale – problem solved. You want the skin? Craft the tokens to purchase the ascended piece w/ the skin.

Absolutely, other than the occasional soulbound on acquire item – things you pick up will be either unbound or account bound. Do note, however, that some items become soulbound on equipping (exotic items at least, possibly rare) – so you can’t actually share higher-tier armor/weapons unless they’re ascended/legendary (which is gear that remains account bound, but will take a while to afford). Exotic armor/weapons is good enough for anything but high-end fractals (which require ascended just to have the infusion slots for agony resistance). Some people will want you in full asc for raids, and certainly it provides advantage, but exotic+asc trinkets will get you 90% of the way there, and an ascended weapon will get you to 95%. A good player who knows their class in the above will easily outplay a character in full ascended who is just blindly following a meta build.

Forgot to mention – both metabattle.com and qtfy.eu have builds for various game content, that will give you an idea (with some feedback) on how to best use a class/character. qtfy is more up to date, but it’s primarily raid focused – so metabattle may give you some other ideas for other game modes.

For raids, I would say that in my limited experience ele is generally more ‘appreciated’ than necro because it can fill both support and dps roles, whereas necro can mainly do dps/condi (but isn’t necessarily top tier in either) – but it’s easy for an inattentive ele to die often, whereas even a bad necro will tend to stay standing a long time, so just being an ele doesn’t guarantee you’d keep your spot in something top tier like a raid. Necros are seen pretty heavily in fractals because of that survivability and them being a bit ‘faceroll’, quick daily fractals are something many people appreciate.

Again, though – both fractals and raids are sort of ‘end game’ / ‘hardest’ content – for your specializations / hero points, you’ll want to work your way over to heart of thorns, and try to either party with people or just run around with them, because the hero challenges there give you 10 per challenge (as opposed to 1 for central tyria) but are not always solo-able (nor necessarily easy to find).

Lastly, you may wish to run around central tyria first learning your classes and the mechanics, because the mobs in HoT tend to be a lot less forgiving, and can easily overwhelm you if you’re not experienced.

It really depends on what you want. I have 9 characters, one of each class – because if I find one has a really useful purpose/role, I want to have that available to me. I play 95% of my time on just my main, because I prefer that class (thief) – and the majority of the games content is accessible to any class. Honestly, for PvE – unless you’re raiding – any class in the game can be plenty effective. Even within a raid group, there is flexibility – but you can’t just grab 10 people and toss ’em into a raid and expect to clear it.

I mainly pull out my mesmer for puzzles (portal!) though I actually quite enjoy playing her, I just haven’t taken the time to really immerse myself in the playstyle. My second main play is my guardian, simply because it was a nice change of pace from my main (thief), and it’s useful for certain guild events (like southsun crab toss).

Fractals, dungeons, personal story, current events, open world – any class you like can do all of these things (though you’ll want groups for fractals/dungeons, at least). WvW/PvP are a bit of a different beast – there are hard counters to certain roles/builds, so being able to be flexible there is important if you want to succeed – that’s where having other characters is going to really matter.

Many of the classes play quite differently, so I would encourage you to try different ones out – but there’s no requirement that you play anything but what you want – it just may make it harder to get into a PUG (pick-up group) for certain content because sometimes people are picky about who can run with ’em.

At the end of the day – it’s a game, play what you enjoy and if others don’t want to play with you – that’s their problem. Work towards whichever goals you wish, socialize with people worth socializing with, and stay awesome.

I actually left out mystic forge and laurel vendor – forge, because you can still get a portable one for ~63g (though mystic forge conduits are getting rarer and rarer, only about 100 left of the cheaper on TP, and 30 of the more expensive one), which I did many years ago), and laurel because I just don’t think it’s used frequently, since you can only gain laurels from login rewards (and perhaps some AP tiers?). TBH the laurel vendor I use most these days is the one in fractals, which I can’t get to from these passes.

I have to agree that making it instanced so that you can enter/exit it from anywhere would greatly increase the convenience, that’s part of the reason I prefer using my guild hall for most of these services – because I can do just that.

Come to think, I didn’t look around for one – I assume there’s a repair anvil somewhere?

I’d buy a royal terrace pass in a heartbeat if I was able to pop it and then load over into Fractals to join a team I just LFG’d. Add in access to the Raids and you’d get even more interest in it as a convenience item. Heck, give me an item that lets me join these game modes directly and I’d probably buy that (I pulled the trigger on the home portal stone ages ago and have been happy with that, it ensures daily looting of my home instance).

Lions Arch just takes too long to load, even on a recent machine with kitten – it’s slow and enough of an interruption to provide that ‘on second thought’ moment of “meh, I’m having fun – maybe I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing”.

Add to that the fact that all it (particularly) offers over my guild hall is the crafting stations, and zoning straight to a city other than LA, and it becomes hard to convince myself to buy, even at 30% discount.

I had been sitting on a 2 week pass for the airship (which I understand people say has a worse layout) and the crafting stations are simply way too close together. The only vendor that is worth having on the lower level is the laurel merchant, so why not spread things out a bit and bring the laurel merchant up top.

If it’s meant to be a convenience item – then I don’t think it’s quite doing the job it set out to do. If it exists solely because LA loads slowly, and that was a conscious decision, then – well – there you have it.

The TP by definition doesn’t create wealth – it just transfers it between players, and reduces it in the process. Every bit of wealth you have from playing the TP has come from other players – by you purchasing something at one price, and selling it for a higher price – if you hadn’t meddled, the 15% would be taken once and one or the other player would be that much richer.

So no, I’m not going to sit here and let you tell me that doing dailies harms everyone else in a minor way, but you flipping ectos or leather because of the upcoming changes is somehow helping everyone. You flipping mats on the TP pricegouges the people actually playing the game – requiring that they earn more gold from the game to account for the gold that is destroyed in the TP transaction.

Speaking of – the BLTP could have a tax weekend, where none of those percentages are taken. That’d be an interesting event, I should think. Please don’t do it though, ANet. Someone will manage to obliterate a couple important markets in the process, and I’ll get blamed for it. A plague is interesting, intellectually, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Don’t invite the plague.

I think the existence of transmutation charges primarily drives bank tab sales – because when people get a free skin item, they store it in their bank. I was just talking with a bunch of guild-mates last night who said that not insignificant portions of their banks are filled with the initial ‘free to apply’ skin they get when a skin is unlocked in some way (fractal, achieve, etc.). We all also agreed that we were just going to start deleting them if we need space.

I personally agree though – getting rid of transmutation charges altogether would be good. As for the skin issue – giving a transmutation charge, or letting you trade skins in for charges, would be a nice QOL improvement.

There’s little drive for ANet to do it, though.

More a workaround, but you can open your inventory, line the items you want up on either the left or right side of it, and drag it 90% offscreen – this’ll give you what you’re looking for, at the inconvenience of your inventory always being open and off the side of your screen (probably the left side, since you wont be able to see inventory, you’ll want to see things as they come in).

Disclaimer: I’ve never intentionally run around like this, but I’ve definitely tossed my inventory mostly offscreen when doing ‘stuff’ at vendors and things.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Repetitive clicking? It’s only one click to ‘Consume All’. I, personally, do a lot less clicking with Essences of Luck, than I do with other items.

I honestly wouldn’t mind a “Consume All but One” option (or make consume all do this by default or an option for it to behave that way or something – because then it’s just one extra double-click to finish a stack) – I do the same thing as another poster with my inventory, let it stack, but I have to break the piles up before consuming all so that I can retain that inventory placeholder. OCD FTW.

What’s your build (specifically, traits)? The thief is dropping 5 stacks of confusion on you from the steal trait, and I notice the only skill you actively activate is the auto-attack, but from https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Confusion :

“Confusion damage is applied on every skill activation, whether activated manually or automatically. For example, necromancers will take confusion damage when they create a Mark of Blood after dodging while equipped with the Mark of Evasion trait. "

I definitely see you getting some boons as your health is dropping (regen+vigor+fury) – I think you have a few automatic traits that activate as skills and are causing confusion damage to tick on you again. At the very least you’re running soothing ice as I see the frost aura that would count as a skill activation kick off shortly before you go down, and there’s some final boon that kicks off right before you’re downed, I can’t even make out the icon – possibly aegis or protection, but if it too has a ‘silent skill’…

I actually had no idea that traits that have skill-type activations actually count against confusion, so that’s actually going to inform my builds moving forward – thanks for the video and asking, so I could learn that!

Just wanted to put in there that if you have kitten, you basically don’t want to be defragging your system. People with an SSD shouldn’t have this issue anyway, but defragmenting kitten will only burn through some of its write cycles, and won’t improve performance, because the drives have built-in algorithms to spread writes out across the SSD to ensure the maximum longevity of the drive. Defragmenting assumes the system knows the physical layout of the drive and can reliably write to a physical location.