Guild Wars 2

It was the dawn of the third age of gaming – 10 years after the first MMO.

The Guild Wars 2 Project was a dream, given form. Its goal: to prevent another market loss, by creating a place where casuals and hardcores can work for their different goals, peacefully. It’s a port of call – home away from home – for completionists, explorers, pvp’ers, and wanderers.

Humans and locusts, wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning lines of code . . . all alone in the intertubes.

It can be a dangerous place, but it’s our last best hope for peace.

This is the story of the last of the Trusted Developers. The year is 2012. The name of the place, is Guild Wars 2.

So then you should be able to craft the Gifts across different characters, right? It wouldn’t be necessary to level up Weaponsmithing on 1 character just to get Gift of Steel when another character with Weaponsmithing could craft it and give it to the first character?

P.S. Hi Erasculio!

Bloodstone shard, philosopher’s stones and crystals are soulbound rest are account bound

Bloodstone Shard, Crystal and Philo Stone are soulbound. The rest should be account bound.

Cynical.2097:

Reaching the end of this game, i’ve realized that Anet has done worse than Blizzard’s Diablo 3 in terms of loot.

I can spend all day doing dungeons and farming and find nothing worth any value. Even blizzard notice that having a end game with low drop chance on items is a bad game design.

Spending large amounts of time attempting to hunt items with no avail is turning me further and further away from the game…

Diablo 3 suffered a great deal because the fundamental expectation behind Diablo is that it’s a loot pinata. This is what Diablo is all about. This is what every single Diablo clone has ever been all about, from Titan Quest to Borderlands. You play Diablo so that you can hit things until they die and shiny things fountain out of their corpses.

The basic problem with Diablo 3 is that it stopped being a loot pinata once you started approaching the more difficult areas of the game. We can talk about the viability of its revamped stat/ability system, but the core of the matter is this: You got your loot from the Auction House. Not from random drops. The Auction House.

The implementation of the Auction House created a sense of staid, stolid predictability to a game played primarily for its slot-machine unpredictability. You play Torchlight, Diablo 2 and Titan Quest for the loot. Because you want to kill bosses and farm areas and see what kind of haul you drag in. Once we had an Auction House, all this disappeared, and all we did was farm loot so we could sell it for gold so we could save that gold to buy exactly the right item we wanted. There was no sense of chance. No addicting gamble. No loot pinata.

Therefore, fundamentally, your comparison between Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 is a false analogy, because Guild Wars 2 is not played primarily for loot, at all. It was never advertised as a game that depends on random loot mechanics. It is not a franchise known for its shiny loot. Nothing in the history of ANet or Guild Wars suggests that this is the sort of game you should play if you want to trick yourself out on phat lootz.

Is there a problem with loot not being all that rewarding? Arguably, yes. And the devs are working on that. We just got the addition to karma in dungeons, but expect to see better loot on world bosses, dungeons, mini dungeons and chests.

Your basic premise is flawed though. Comparing Diablo 3 to Guild Wars 2 on the basis of loot is a false analogy, for the reasons mentioned above.