Guild Wars 2

I’m mostly curious about the runes. I have a set of Pirate/Traveler runes in my armor to give me a bit of Magic Find boosts. Are those going to be changing as well?

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Buttercup.5871:

Is this a joke?

You get 2 to 4 shards for capping a camp. Progression of obtaining shards through WvW is superslow. It’s way faster looting Queensdale chests on 4 characters. And then it’s still slow.

If you only take Camps (2 to 4 per), then yes it’s slow. But combine that with constant Tower (6 to 7 per) flipping, and you end up getting a lot of Empyreal Fragments. Add to that Jumping Puzzles with a Dungeon thrown into the mix, and you can get a stack a day for the hardcore farmer. The casual will probably get about 100 to 150 for a couple of hours playtime. That’s not really slow.

Constant tower flipping is not something I put on the “farm” scale because it’s just too dependent on other factors. You need to have towers available to actually take. You need to have a group that’s actively taking towers. You need to have enemies who can’t defend those towers. Those same enemies still need to be able to take those towers back later. And you need to make sure you’re able to tag for the Lord kill to get the mats. Even after all that, you still only get 8-10 fragments.

Yes. It’s slow. Especially for the more casual player.

That’s annoying. They ended the Runes blog with some more updates on profession changes….and for thieves they just repeated the same thing we learned from the Trait blog.

Kind of makes sense to me. The last month or so was pretty heavy content wise, so this month we have SAB (which is a lot of content but lighter in context) and an update to some world bosses. It’s a nice change in pace after all the Aetherblade / Scarlet stuff.

If Colin says to vote for Evon, I have to suspect some ulterior motive.

Keil knows what the common people need. Evon only knows what he can take.

Kind of interesting that the story takes in the fact that players have been constantly beating him back over and over again. I always wondered if story-wise we’re just beating these things once, and subsequent times are just non-canon.

Still. I’m wondering where this really fits in the timeline for beating Zhaitan.

Anyway, the story mostly involves the Pact/Vigil trying to research how to kill Tequatl, and Rox trying to earn her way into Rytlock’s warband.

BilboBaggins.5620:

My opinion is if it’s time-gated then the items we create should be trade-able, if the items are going to remain account bound then there should be no time-gate. As someone who can only play on the weekends (usually), time-gating means it will be years before I can outfit all of my characters. For a daily player, it will take two weeks per item.

People seem to be keep missing the fact that some of the items are in fact tradeable.

Basically, you have a raw material (account bound), which you can used to make a refined material (account bound), which you then use to make the component material (unbound).

Astralporing.1957:

Bawzdawg.2839:

omg guys chill.. its not hard to farm silk is it? Go farm events in cursed shore for one day and get like a full stack of silk scraps… next to lots of rares and tier 6 mats.

And you happen to need two full stacks for a daily crafting of damask. And you overestimate amount of silk gained, by the way.

Basically this.

Silk drops are plentiful, but not so when you consider the sheer amount needed to craft just one Bolt of Damask. It’s kind of absurd actually that you need more than one full stack of silk scraps just to make one bolt of damask. All the other materials I can farm enough to fill my collection and then have enough to make 2 ascended materials at least.

It would be nice if they at least started by reducing the amount of Silk Bolts required to 50 to match mithril and thick leather.

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Masterwork crafter.

I’m saving masterwork crafter for all the Ascended I’m going to make.

(Though I’m not really surprised someone finished off all the monthlies already. The Scarlet invasions alone make it incredible easy to get Champions + Group Events)

Just a small request, but for the effort involved in making the Ascended Spinal Blades, couldn’t they just stay account bound even after equipping. It was an account wide effort to make them after all.

People will get discouraged. Especially when they aren’t even getting past the first phase and not getting any rewards.

Players like to see progress. So far, I have yet to see any real progress for any of five tequatl fights. Sure, a few percentages lower here and there, but it’s still mostly just craziness and getting everyone organized is going to be very difficult.

I think until players start seeing him regularly go down to 75% health, you’re going to see more and more people simply giving up.

The dragonite isn’t too bad if you do the daily world bosses it seems. Still gathering enough of that for one ascended weapon is likely to take a couple weeks if that’s the only way you farm it.

It’s the Empyreal Shards that’s driving me a bit nuts right now. I don’t really run dungeons, so I thought I might bee able to get a decent amount going around jumping puzzle. But so far it’s only a handful per chest. It’s going to take me a long while to get 500 of them…

Thaia.5146:

chemiclord.3978:

But now we get to the question… what WOULD be “worth it” in terms of rewards?

Guaranteed Exotic, at least 20s and 2-4 Champion Loot Bags… that’s my MINIMUM

I’m pretty much in the same road.

Minimum of 1 exotic + other stuff considering it’s current difficulty.

As it is, I can spend that 15+ minutes just doing champ farming and end up better off.

This would be nice. It could also lower the bar for the meta achievement while still giving the big WvW players something to strive for. I honestly don’t know why it’s not set up like that in the first place.

Altie.4571:

If some form of AOE range wasn’t a REQUIREMENT in WvW I would never have SB on. Simply is not that good, but when someone is standing on the wall, all you can do is aoe.

Too bad it’s hard to reach them with 900 range.

RvLeshrac.2673:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Pro-tip 2: there is absolutely nothing fun about having to randomly guess how far I can walk onto the water without 30 seconds of flopping around like a fish in order to maybe get a 1% chance of my whip/slingshot actually hitting a turtle.

Glad to see I’m not the only one for whom the slingshot almost never hits anything except at point-blank range. Whip doesn’t work for you either, I’m guessing.

That whip is the most unreliable item I have. The only time I hit anything with it is if I’m standing directly in front of them. And then the stun still doesn’t last very long compared to the knockdowns of the assassins.

I would really like to know what happened at the Reactor. Especially because a few conversations by the inquest sounds like they really don’t know either.

Well. If you want to keep winning, you do have to pay the consequences of people getting upset with you for winning. Not sure why you feel the need to keep making these topics.

I assume you’re heavily using the Bad Powerups when you race? That will annoy people a lot more than simply winning without them.

Well, since the elite spec is Staff, looks like Ricochet won’t be coming back even as the Elite.

I don’t mind if it took a bit of a grind to get one, as long as that grind came through doing various Halloween activities for the Candy Corn Cobs. But assuming you bought 15000 candy corn to turn into cobs, you would have to buy nearly 150 Gold worth of candy corn. A cob itself is right around 9 Gold right now.

Maybe we’ll see those prices drop, but I’m not so sure when Candy Corn nodes are less plentiful than before.

Because it needs to be done.

I’m surprised the Grove has an overflow. I don’t think it has the most convenient layout. Overall, I like Rata Sum better for doing crafting and using the Trading Post.

So I guess the Birthday Booster which gives you a 100% boost to everything for 24 hours wasn’t exciting?

Instead of all those Queen Jennas, you’d rather have a random selection of the current minis? Did you really only play those 14 characters with the hopes of getting 14 different minis? Did all the content over the last year become invalid because the birthday gift was not good enough?

I’m willing to bet part of the reason they gave players just 1 kind of mini is because people coming from GW1 anticipated getting birthday gifts. In GW1 it was a surprise, so players really couldn’t take advantage of it. That wouldn’t be true in GW2, so everyone gets the same gift. Maybe they could have done more, but I think what they gave out was still pretty nice.

The one shots are pretty annoying. Especially when they aren’t telegraphed well. The first boss is fine, because the wind up is really obvious. The Tier 1 boss though does not telegraph her one shot nearly as well.

By the time you start doing Tier 3, nearly every attack by the bosses deals a high amount of damage. Liadri is basically a fight of not being hit by anything, because even her normal attacks pack a huge punch.

What we could see happening is that dungeon tokens will be a way to purchase materials for ascended gear. So it won’t give ascended gear itself, but provide a path to it.

I’m not too worried. Ascended gear isn’t really required for anything.

Basically what the above poster said. SOR fought hard and worked as best as we could, but we had no chance of placing above 6th place. We really didn’t have any reason to even still be in Silver League with our current numbers.

I’m not even sure why anyone would bother buying a Hero Weapon when it’s just a rare. They’re incredibly common, and any player that played enough to finish the Meta likely has full exotics. Better to save the cost of the wine and dust, and wait till next season.

All this really does is further increase the incentive to ditch a badly performing world and pile onto the Gold Tier servers. You may not end up in 1st, but you’ll still get enough tickets to buy a skin.

I’ve seen quite a few suggestions to limit the population caps on the WvW maps. While I agree that this could solve some of the population imbalances between servers, I don’t like that it’s not scalable.

My suggestion is that every map’s population cap will instead be based on the average number of players playing on that map per server. At the end of every tick, a new average is computed and set as the new cap. This way each map’s cap scales up and down based on the number of people playing at the time. It also keeps larger servers from completely outnumbering every other server, while still giving them a slight advantage.

Example:

Red Borderlands starts the matchup with a 50 player cap for each server. Red server brings a full 50 people into the map to play. Blue server brings in 40 people, and Green server brings in 30 people. After the next tick, the new cap is computed at 40. People already in the map of course don’t get booted, but this puts a queue on both Red and Blue servers, while Green still has room for 10 more people. If every server is always bringing in enough people to queue, then nothing changes.

Of course, there would still have to be some minimum and maximum numbers set so that maps don’t become completely unpopulated. There would also have to be some way to increase the caps during peak hours. In these cases, I suggest the cap increases by +5 per tick as long as at least two servers are queued and the average remains the same or higher than the last tick.

I know quite a few people are opposed to introducing any kind of stricter population caps, but I believe this might strike a nice balance. Let me know what you guy think.

MastaNeenja.1537:

Just a thought how have we not managed to kill off the entire Aether Blade and Molten Alliance population? Are they breeding in a dark room?

Some days I wonder about that, but I think we just have to accept that as MMO mechanics. There simply has to be lots of enemies to fight, and players just have to try to suspend disbelief when it comes to the story.

That said. You could just imagine that the Aetherblades are never truly killed. Like players, they just waypoint back somewhere safe.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Coldin.2840:

Or are you trying to tell me that you can gather up all the materials for a Legendary Weapon (including 100% map completion) in just 2 weeks?

Nope, but what makes you think anyone will be making Ascended weapons in just 2 weeks. We still don’t know what drops rates are going to be, and it’s Anet we’re talking about here. I’m not all that hopeful about it.

I bet we see someone posting up an Ascended weapon within the first week actually, since the end result items do not appear to any related timers, and the materials before that are unbound.

Tamaki Revolution.3548:

Essence Snow.3194:

Coldin.2840:

And really, you don’t need an Ascended Weapon. Yes, they’re better than exotics, but the whole idea is you don’t need Ascended stuff to play GW2. We kind of all knew there was going to be a bit of time related grind to Ascended items, kind of like there was for getting the Laurel ascended equipment as well.

You don’t need anything beyond whites. Same premise, but does it fly….nope.

I have one ascended trinket, on all of my characters. I just wanted the +gold infusion amulet on my guardian, for no good reason. I still have 200ish laurels. I really don’t think it affects my roaming WvW characters in the least bit. I’m not going to notice this at all. Bringing up whites is just trying way too hard.

Not agreeing/disagreeing with time gating, but don’t pull that and to try dispute something :P Exotics are still fine for everything sub high level fractals.

Pretty much the same reason I went for an Ascended Amulet. I eventually bought an Ascended Ring as well, but that was mostly from the windfall of Laurels and Badges I got from achievement chests.

LameFox.6349:

Were you actually pulling people into one on purpose? Or did it just randomly succeed?

So far the overflows I’ve been in, I think the majority of players were dead on the floor. Not kidding about it being the majority, either. Arriving in overflow is like a perfect storm of fail – a combination of people who were all trying to get somewhere else, never heard of each other, and need levels of co-operation that require 3rd party software to work. If any of them win it without organized groups showing up there intentionally I’d be very surprised.

Agreed.

The only way I think an overflow would win is if people are just hijacking the overflow to get an already organized group together.

Most overflows I’ve been in (only got on my home server twice) tend to only get him down to 90%. A couple times it’s been almost 75%, but apparently not quite. That’s usually followed or proceeded by a bunch of people complaining about people being dead, afkers, bad players, bad turrets, and all manner of other things for why we failed. Usually followed that up with another set of players saying how they love the event, glad it can’t be facerolled by people pressing 1, and how we should all just L2P.

As for the OP. Screenshot or it didn’t happen.

Saelune.5316:

Lion Chests give out good stuff. Waypoints are not expensive, even at level 80. Youd be far more likely to save money with the keys than the waypoints.

Lion Chests CAN give out stuff. RARELY. (Like never).

However waypoint cost reduction is something you will use every time you travel around. That can really add up in some savings.

Mkalafut.1273:

Just jump over them. After you do the race twice you can pretty much tell which are real and which are fake. Just jump over them with your #1 skill (or as others have mentioned, if you have ‘Grounded’ use that).

Still really annoying. Jumping over them can be tricky, as can dodging them. Or they can be in a blind spot or just after a jump.

It’s just interesting how the bomb powerup is much more effective for keeping first place than the gusts, lightning, and blinds are for taking first place.

Funset.7893:

Orr is bad and Arenanet should feel bad about it.

Indeed.

I like some parts of Orr, and the temple events can be interesting mechanics. But overall, it’s sooo boring compared to all the other zones. No hearts either, which I find kind of strange. And all risen, and everything is just undead all the time. Making three zones worth of it was just too much.

(I also really wish Arah story mode hadn’t been a dungeon)

I personally wish Thieves had the ability to dodge while immobilized, at least in some limited fashion. I bet that’s partly why thieves rely a bit more on stealth, because it doesn’t matter if you’re crippled or rooted or even stunned, as long as you stealthed first.

Conditions are also pretty rough. There’s good talents that remove conditions while in stealth, but nothing similar for dodge. Maybe some internal cooldown of 10 seconds, where every dodge removes one condition?

But I may be asking for too much there. I love dodging personally, I just wish I could do more of it and be more effective while doing it.

Ugh. I Wanna be the Guy level of cheap gameplay mechanics and artificial frustrating difficulty?

Yeah, I don’t consider that kind of gameplay fun when things kill you instantly and unexpectedly, and the only way to win is to know the entire thing before hand perfectly.

I get that some people like that kind of thing. I don’t really get it. I don’t really consider it good game design, but I guess I can agree there’s an art to figuring out ways to actively trick players into falling into traps. I guess it’s the same type of people who like playing with DMs who have unwinnable encounters.

Randulf.7614:

Josh, Ive noticed on the gong run, you can release the gong..die the run back and meet the gong at the bottom ramp. Possible exploit!

I was SOOO tempted to do that. Especially because I realized it could be done relatively easily compared to following the hard to follow gong. But then I got stubborn and wanted to do it the “right way”.

Kiro.3164:

Sometimes people take /wave as a threat lol. Any emote is the equivalent of a threat actually. PvP is PvP.

Any emote is a threat. Running around is a threat. Walking around is a threat. Standing still is a threat. Dancing is a threat. At least that’s how it appears sometimes in 1v1.

Kiel is an intense person, but she had to be if she wanted to be taken seriously as an inspector. Doesn’t mean she’s evil. Just tough. I imagine being on a pirate council requires a bit of toughness.

(Not like that Evon. I bet he’ll cave at the slightest threat to his life.)

Doggie.3184:

Astralporing.1957:

Lpfan.3578:

She’s a great detective, she’s a good necromancer, and she knows a lot about poison… does that really sound so crazy?

Well, the previous event when she showed up made me think she was rather poor necromancer, with no abilities whatsoever. This is the first time someone mentioned she’s competent at anything.
Her being smarter than Logan did not say much – after all, pretty much anyone is smarter than Logan.

(just to be clear – i agree with you that she’s no Mary Sue. I just don’t consider her one for a different reason).

She is a bad Necromancer. She got owned during the first instance fights.

So did Trehearne.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Coldin.2840:

Scarlet has not yet proven to be a Mary Sue yet. Just because you don’t like her doesn’t mean she fits that profile. Most of what she has shown is very standard, super smart, egotistical villain.

You must not have read her short story.

She excells at everything, got the most legendary norn blacksmith to want to teach her but refused, got taught by one of the best Iron Legion snipers then ran with the secrets, got into all three asura colleges being the first non-asura to ever do such (and even if the interview with TowerTalk pegged the feat of graduating all three colleges down by explaining she took specialized courses, that’s still a feat that shamed the asura intelligence), and (though countered in the interview mentioned) saw the Eternal Alchemy (now it’s “may have seen but most likely didn’t”).

She has been set up, betrayed, exiled, desired, and she thought nothing of it. She has been pampered by the whole world since day 1 all because she has high IQ. And to top it off she’s disconnected from the Dream of Dreams without the rigorous meditation Soundless need to do.

That sounds very Mary Sue-like to me. And that is why I don’t like her, personally speaking. I don’t think she’s a Villain Sue because I don’t like her; I don’t like her because I think she’s a Villain Sue. The interview helped lower the Villain Sue-ness of her character, but its still there, and worse, it (her background, both story and interview info) isn’t there in game.

No. I read it. She excelled, but always quit early before she truly learned everything. She never mastered blacksmithing. Never mastered potions. Never even mastered all the various asura colleges. The only one she did “master” was weapons. The only kind of Mary Sue esque part of her character appears to be convincing people to teach her. The high intelligence is pretty much just villainy 101, so really should just be disregarded.

As it is, no one really admires her. Her plans have failed at least a couple times. She fell for the Queen Jenna illusion trick. Scarlet really hasn’t ever won unless you count the brief victory at the Queen’s Speech.

A villain sue would be showing us someone who’s a lot more infallible. Someone who always comes out on top of the heroes. So far, she’s mostly just caused a bit of chaos and manages to get away at the end. Still sounds like your basic villain to me. Now, you may not like her because she’s the generic intelligent and insane villain archtype, but that does not make her a Villain/Mary Sue.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Aeros.2046:

This is what we asked for.

I never asked for this.

Sadiki.7942:

We took him from phase 2 directly back into phase 2 before the stun wore off. This is precisely why people need to put in effort to learn the fight instead of just saying it’s too hard.

I’m pretty sure most people posting here on the forums know the fight right now.

We simply all aren’t blackgate guesting to low pop servers to guarantee that we have the instance all to ourselves. Some people are trying to beat him on overflows with random party members the way most group events are intended.

tigirius.9014:

Of course all of the people who WvW or play PVP don’t see a problem with getting these things.

One of the problems with this system is it’s disproportionate according to what you do to get it.

Once again open world seems to get the short end of the stick. I supposed we’ll be hearing next about how the bots are to blame for this as well?

Open World doesn’t have problems with Dragonite.

Dungeon Runners don’t have problems with Empyrial Fragments.

WvW seems to be happy that they got anything, despite that it’s a grind out there too.

No one has problems with Bloodstone Dust.

It’s probably a good thing that a couple of the catchers are a bit more subdued. I’ve been running the Wind Catcher for the last day, and while it was neat at first, I’m starting to feel a bit visually fatigued.

Lunar Sunset.8742:

Nothing good, 1 green and 2.5k karma. We finished at about 55% hp, the lasers helped a lot.

Ouch. That’s it? Hopefully beating him has something better.

Hmm. Doesn’t seem like unidentified dyes are changing that much. 65 silver right now.

CaboSoul.1204:

Woohooo just 18 more seasons (19 for me if I don’t get my chest) untill I have all 19 weapons. >_>

That’s assuming your server always gets 300 or more tickets. Some servers aren’t even getting 1 mistforged this season.

Vertixico.4805:

What I am wondering is, why no one has brought up the issue of scaling as of now. i mean, it is entirely possible, that with a smaller, well organized group of say 20 players, Tequatl would be scaled down and be more easily done? Instead of a large and heavily unorganised group.
If that would be the case, that would be great. I always disliked the current world bosses, where you just spammed attacks uncoordinated and the mass was enough to win the fight. Now there will be actually need of tactics, a player who wants in on the success needs to understand the event and participate in it – AND THAT IS GREAT. I am all for challenging, near-to-impossible content depending entirly on your frigging skill and teamwork.

Actually, I’m not sure if it scales like that. From what I remember, the fight was designed to be played by 80+ people. Having less than that just might mean you never have enough DPS to do anything to him.

It’s a little annoying, I agree. I wouldn’t mind so much if I had to switch between bombs and slingshot before I could use them. But that I lose all my other skills including my torch and shovel and can’t swap to those quickly is a little annoying.

I still think the Whip is pretty much useless. Takes too long to use, still have to be at the same distance as the stick, and only stuns them long enough for maybe one hit. It’s just not very useful.