Guild Wars 2

Being named by Time is pretty good. That’ll get a fair bit of main stream attention going in to the holidays.

G4 would have also been nice to add to the list of media accolades, but it looks like GW2 is getting hammered by Dishonored (http://goo.gl/wiEja).

I also don’t even think the game is being considered by Giant Bomb, Polygon or IGN, which is really sad. If you listen to their podcasts they pretty much say outright that they didn’t bother giving the game a fair shake because they are just over MMOs; however, the reasons they are over them are because of a lot of traditional mechanics that GW2 revamped or removed. A few of the guys even had variations of “It looks good but after SwTor…” comments prefacing their dismissal.

C’est la vie. Maybe more non-gaming specific media that aren’t yet jaded to the genre as a whole will give Anet some positive page space.

Edit: As of 12/7 GW2 is now beating Dishonored, but I am not sure if that even means anything since many people thought we were voting to choose G4’s game of the year and they announced that a few days ago as Borderlands 2. Have us vote for GoTy but then announce one anyways before voting is over? /smh.

Also IGN at least nominated GW2 as a contender. So that was nice to hear.

Ahlen.7591:

AcidicVision.5498:

You all forgot the Black Lion Trading post being fully stocked with Wintersday items!

- Unidentified holiday red dye
- Unidentified holiday green dye
- Unidentified holiday dye pack
- Two costumes that will take up twelve spaces in bank storage
- Toymakers chest with candy, snowballs, tonics, a chance for a holiday hat and gloves, rare weapons skins and minis (weapon skins < 5% chance, minis < 1% chance)

/smh

I hope I’m wrong about all of that.

God forbid a company try to make money off a product they aren’t charging you a monthly fee for and continue to release FREE CONTENT FOR.

Those sons of kittenes.

Ok, just to be clear, let’s run down the line…I own two GW accounts that have all three campaigns and EoTn (one account is all collector’s editions); I bought the BMP and nearly every costume available since they were introduced (couldn’t bring myself to buy the mantle outift); I bought mercenary slots for each of my eight characters, maxed out my storage and bought who knows how many make-over kits. For kitten’s sake, I have an Eve standee in my game room!

For GW2 I have the CE, artbook, Charr plushie, soundtrack, CE strategy guide, normal strategy guide, nine character slots, six bank tabs, max bags on three characters so far.

So I have absolutely no problem tossing money at ArenaNet, paying for their content and contributing to future development. I have been doing it for years.

But I will never give them a dime for keys, chests or any more costumes (until we get a costume NPC or locker). It has nothing to do with the company wanting to make money. I want them to make money. It has everything to do with nearly a decade of ArenaNet always giving players their moneys worth, when the players choose to give them more money. Giving them value for their continued patronage. RNG holiday/event gimmicks are uncharacteristic of the company.

And it makes me a little sad.

Which is why I ended my speculation with the hope that Wintersday comes with a change of heart and tactics from the folks running BLTC.

Weed ’em out, whack ’em, and lettuce be the hero of our story

^.^

You all forgot the Black Lion Trading post being fully stocked with Wintersday items!

- Unidentified holiday red dye
- Unidentified holiday green dye
- Unidentified holiday dye pack
- Two costumes that will take up twelve spaces in bank storage
- Toymakers chest with candy, snowballs, tonics, a chance for a holiday hat and gloves, rare weapons skins and minis (weapon skins < 5% chance, minis < 1% chance)

/smh

I hope I’m wrong about all of that.

They are a minority. Not only are they a minority of the player base as a whole, but they also only represent a small demographic of players. So even going as far as implying that the general tone of the forums speaks for the player’s attitudes as a whole would be a poor assumption.

The fan page on facebook would actually be a better place to gauge the general feelings of players, since it’s more likely to include the opinions of people spanning across multiple demographics. People that wouldn’t touch this or any other game forum with a 10ft pole will still voice their opinion on facebook and not think twice about it.

But even that’s a slippery slope to start going down.

I’m sure the team gets a good bit of feedback from us, but the forums really aren’t even second fiddle. More like third or fourth: Facebook > Twitter > Reddit >= Forums.

Just look at the ways that news and information is distributed and how the company communicates to its customers. We are a small subset of a subset of players. Our opinions and input are valuable for specific reasons, but its a mistake to think that they reflect a majority of the player base.

Glint was Kralkatorrik’s original champion from the last time the dragons rose. She was supposed to usher in his awakening like the Great Destroyer was supposed to wake up Primordus. She betrayed him instead.

I think its like Quantum Leap. You don’t really know where or why. You just have to figure out the thing that needs to be done to make the next jump.

We may never know how important a role in history it was for us to kill a naked barbarian in a swamp.

The trading post. They are fairly cheap.

It was announced some time ago that rather than just release an all in one app they were instead (or also?) going to release an API that would allow people to create applications on different platforms.

Whenever that is ready you are bound to see a whole range of neat stuff coming along from them and the community.

The Cliffside is also one of my favorites. On the bit with the fire did any of you notice that he is the one that is blows them out? If you look up, you’ll see him looking down at you and blowing on the fire to protect you. That was an incredible touch that I think goes largely un-noticed.

I also like the connotations this one has on lore. All of the fractals are on Tyria in some place or time. So….wtf was he? When did that happen? Where is he now? Are there more of him hiding somewhere? Will we see him again? The game introduced that thing we never seen or heard of before and it exists in the world, or existed since the humans have been around. I hope we learn more about it.

This was a weird design decision. Typically you don’t want to load more than is necessary. It just adds time to the loading process and wastes memory that could be used for other things. Front loading all of the areas is more than likely the reason that loading into Fractals from LA is slow, but the time between Fractals is relatively quick.

System wide, they would have more resources available per fractal if the three you would be playing in were chosen in the hub and only those were loaded when you entered the first. Why store information, textures and entities for six fractals that you won’t see?

A potential problem I can see is the eventual growth of the dungeon. With this architecture, the up-front loading time is going to take longer each time they add a fractal, there could eventually be memory issues, and there are some performance costs associated with messaging (but I have no idea how their messaging actually works. It’s not very likely, but possible).

Techniques like front loading all assets, creating all objects , and then hiding them until they are needed are typically reserved for console games since resources are limited and consoles (xbox 360 in particular) hate on-the-fly object instantiation and cleanup. And by hate I mean they are like to start spewing goat blood before imploding in on themselves. PCs get away with the background loading stuff a lot better.

The same thing is done in dungeons, but I can see more of a reason for it. There was a glitch in HoTw that let you complete two paths at once because the entire dungeon and enemies are loaded when you enter. So it was possible to wall glitch and kill two bosses (long since fixed). It makes sense in dungeons since you are effectively playing it before you choose a path. Devs don’t know which path a player will choose so they need to load everything.

Just seems like there would be a more efficient way to handle fractals that would allow for practically infinite growth without a performance hit. But then i’m sure they have their reasons that i’ll never get to know (._.)

I have exotics on my Mesmer and I transmuted to look like the wing set because I liked the look better. My brother had exotics on his warrior and transmuted them to look like the Pit Fighter skin I think. Even my weapons are exotic transmuted to the Ebonhawk skins.

You really can’t judge a character’s gear by it’s looks. I’m sure there are a good few characters running around with pearl swords transmuted to look like anything else, and some CoF sets in disguise.

If I wanted I could probably transmute my quiver to look like the Mad King’s biography and have a pink with a green skin ^.^

Yeah I get that too. When I started my Guardian it was with a goal to not be another GS guard. I tried mace/torch, sword/shield, mace/shield for my main set and they just couldn’t hold their own, in the leveling process, to GS.

I tried to bias my brother against GS by talking up the coolness of some of the other weapon skills and combos, but the lure of 100 blades was just too strong.

It doesn’t help that they easily get the best looking weapon skins in the game. Probably just worked out that way since they give artists the most room to work with.

But you can’t kitten the weapon’s utility so people will use other things instead. I would just get used to seeing GS guardians, mesmers, warriors, and rangers for as far as the eye can see until we get some new weapon types.

(interesting observation: Asuran players seem more likely to try and stick to other weapon combinations. Because GS gets scaled down the ones I know just don’t care much for them)

I get noticeably more green drops when using MF than when I don’t. It doesn’t apply to the exotic loot tables only.

Green might not be rare or exotic, but it’s still better merch food than blue or nothing and if I get four of a kind in a run I just throw them in the forge to try and promote.

Over 100 does count.

There is no hard cap as far as I know. There is a soft-cap of what is realistically attainable. Explorer armor with doubloons or other MF upgrades + 3 day MF guild boost + 30 min MF guild banner + MF consumable. They all stack.

They have explained how it works. Chris explained it in the recent AMA, and the explanation verified that it works pretty much how the people on the forums theorized that it works.

Loot is broken in to tiers or rarity, each tier has a different percentage to be picked. Magic find gets applied to the rarer tiers chance to be chosen giving them a higher percentage. If a mobs exotic loot table has a 0.3% draw chance, then 100% mf adds another 0.3% for a 0.6% chance over-all.

The differences are small and it’s still random.

yurtshone.7325:

“we don’t make grindy games”

Which part of the game is unavailable to you or how is your progress blocked by not having an amulet with an unpopular set of stats?

Alt F4 is a windows event. It happens on your OS side, not on the game side. To “remove” it Anet would need to hook in to the windows events, intercept that message and mark it as handled before Windows gets it. And typically you don’t want to take functionality away from a user. This is why games virtually never intercept the windows key being pressed and causing the game to lose focus.

Different platforms have different rules. One I worked on a game for had a technical requirement to never interfere with windows events, and another had requirements to catch alt-F4, Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt+Tab, Minimize or anything else that could have been used to minimize the game or expose the OS.

With a “deserter penalty” you run the risk of penalizing players that had honest DCs. Either game, ISP, home network, electrical, hardware, or toddler issues could all punish someone for something that is beyond their control.

Capcom took some backlash for implementing something like because their “penalty” was to place all of the disconnectors into their own bracket. Players with incidental DCs were lumped into a pool of people that rage quit and ended up getting stuck there. It was hit or miss whether or not players could finish winning matches to get back out to gen pop.

There is also some consumer psychology there that would make people unhappy. If someone gets a power flicker then comes back to a penalty that has pretty much flagged them as a cheater, then they aren’t going to be happy. No one wants to be insulted by a company they are trying to give business to.

The best approach is to just keep the character in the world for 5-10 seconds after a hard DC. Then at least when it happens on accident and the player logs in dead (as would happen in GW1), it is more of a bad luck issue than a personal insult. Add a timer to the “Exit to windows” and close button options, and disallow logging out to character select while in combat. Better for the player, prevents WvW kill denial, no hacking around windows events.

You still earn skill points every time your bar fills past 80. Myanni in LA sells items in exchange for skill points that are used to craft legendary, ascended, or exotic weapons.

I just checked and the server is reporting high instead of full. So it would be possible to transfer now. Its 2:30 am EST.

MechanicalMind.9126:

Oh yes, the AMA is very… enlightening?

Go read all the pages on that thread.

No need to read all the pages, somewhere on here is a link to a google doc with all of the questions and answers copy pasted in. Very convenient.

Yesterday’s AMA mentioned a few times that they were still ironing out a solution and it was still a priority.

Give it a read. Lot’s of neat stuff in there.

DevonPaul.7495:

You brought up the petty spelling squabble, not me

You’re kitten right I did. And I don’t regret it. I think we learned something neat. And yes I did assume I was right.

Anyways, on your point of mats drying up, that wouldn’t realistically happen. People will always want different things. The guy that needs fangs might have a bunch of blood he has picked up, so he drops those into the market to flip for fangs. The guy that needs scales might dump in claws.

There will always be people getting the mats one way or another and there will always be people putting them in the TP to turn in to something else.

You also have people that farm up common materials to promote to T6 and sell in the TP for profit. So there are materials that are pretty much coming from thin air.

We had it easy because of the bots. They created an influx in supply. Now the majority of them are gone, prices for mats and drops are stabilizing to how they were designed. New players will be playing closer to how Anet intended us to be.

Hey, we are learning something.

“Some American writers do make distinctions—for instance, that theater is a venue while theatre is an art form, or that theater is a movie theater while theatre is a drama venue—but these are preferences, not rules, and they are not consistently borne out in real-world usage.”

The website isn’t completely correct. Its not just writers that make the distinction. Its the Military, and the government, which means it’s how we are taught in history class in school, which is how we end up writing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theater_(warfare)#Theater_of_operations

As far as etymology goes though, I can’t argue with you.

I know what it is. And you still meant “theater”.

“By you logic on dungeon running and gold gathering, if all players turn to doing this, where will the materials come from for me to buy on the TP, Dredge Loot bags?”

What are you even talking about anymore? Besides loot bags, there is plenty to do in the PvE area. Dynamic events, story missions, 100% world completion, harvesting for materials. Typically in the process of all of those you get mats. Then on an alt you get them again. Then when helping friends you get them again.

“I was sold this game on the manifesto of “Play the game your way”, now I am being told to play it the NEW™ way, even getting 30 tier 6 materials (usually required for an exotic set of armour) has now become a grind.”

Where is the grind? You can dungeons and use the TP to flip one reward to another. Eight dungeons, at least three paths each. Now fractals. If you just did all paths of one dungeon a day then you aren’t having to repeat any content for over a week. Sprinkle in a little time doing dynamic events in Orr, screwing around on an alt, or mapping an area you haven’t finished yet and you are repeating even less.

If you choose to ignore everything else in the game that could result in you just being able to purchase what you need from the TP in favor of sitting in one area killing the same mob over and over to get the drops instead, then you are imposing grind on yourself.

“I am asking a simple question, is the drop rate of ANYTHING in the game likely to remain stationary”

I’d wager the drop rates are what they will be. You may not see an increase in those, but a decrease in the number required for high end crafting. They actually said as much in the reddit AMA today. Also your 75-80 population issues might be server specific. Mine are still a bustling, but either way it was also mentioned there are changes coming to draw players to each of the different game areas again.

I play explorable dungeons, fractals, and mess around in Orr from time to time. I always have MF food, and my guild pretty much always have the MF buff up.

By just playing the game I managed to have plenty of mats laying around to flip and golds to salvage for ecto. The quiver I bought for my character cost me skill points, and that’s about it.

I really don’t get why anyone would want to run around a zone killing trash hoping for the thing that has the lowest chance in their loot tables, instead of doing a dungeon that takes 40 minutes and will give you at least 35-40 silver (to buy mats), karma, three chests of loot, 60 tokens, a skill point, and a good chance for lodestones, cores and shards that can be flipped 1:1 or 1:2 for T6 mats. Hrm…any of the dungeons still contribute to your goal directly or indirectly, grinding out mobs in a zone and getting crap while hitting the DR contributes nothing. What would the logical thing to do be?

Also, you are using “theatre” wrong. Unless that was a type-o.

Whip – Mesmer, Thief, Necro.

They reset health if there is no one engaging them or in aggro range. Their life will reset and they will run to the center of the room. You may have had someone in the room with them but for one reason or another that person dropped combat to the encounter started over.

So the non-sensationalist, sensible reason is that new content released. It has nothing to do with tiers or progression. There is new stuff and people want it.

Orr was also largely abandoned during the holiday events because people wanted the book, mad kings slippers, and Halloween skins from his mini dungeon. None of those had anything to do with a stat bonus. They were just something different.

Give it a little time for people to get satisfied with their Fractal level and they will go back to doing the stuff they used to do. When the overhauls to areas and dungeons comes around people will be abandoning Fractals (if there isnt a new fragment or two) and doing those.

Its like when new maps come out in an FPS or a new champion comes out in LoL. That’s all you see for weeks then it just becomes part of the game like everything else.

Yes. That’s what I use anyways.

Keep an eye out for sales on Amazon this weekend. The next few days are the big days for holiday shopping and things will be going on sale left and right.

I am assuming you and him are young. You could always hit up your parents to see if they could help you buy a Christmas present for a less fortunate friend.

Or maybe get a hold of a member of his family and tell them it would be a good gift for him.

This is all of course assuming you actually celebrate some gift exchanging holiday within the next month or so.

Nice to see someone trying to help out a friend though. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.

Magic find food and a Magic find armor set if you can afford to sacrifice some points in a trait. Magic find guild banners and three day buffs help also. All those things stack.

Then Fractals of the Mist. Monsters there seem to have a higher drop rate for rares than usual and chests at the end of each also has a good chance of dropping rares. On more than a few occasions I have gotten 3 yellow items our of five from the final boss fight at the end of even numbered runs.

Finally black lion or mystic salvage kits have a better chance of scoring between 1-3 ectos from salvaging rares that are lvl 70 or higher.

Lothair.8942:

Ecto’s aren’t the problem here people – the problem is the T6 fine crafting materials. Ever ask yourself why, when salvaging gear, there is absolutely no chance to retrieve fine crafting materials? Look beyond what is spoon fed to you.

Maybe because they are used to craft some of the rarest stuff in the game and for that to maintain any value et all all of the materials cant just be handed out like candy?

Also there is a guaranteed way to get T6 from salvaging. By promoting up the stuff that you do get.

Stop looking when you reach paranoia.

Leonard.2867:

So are you saying that people are funneled into two locations in efforts to feasibly obtain Ascended gear?

Partially. You need essence to craft the back-slots. Those are in FotM. To get the ring you get past level 10, and while doing that you are getting a steady stream of golds and tokens. You need the tokens to buy the infusion from the dungeon merchant.

So right now most of the stuff you need for Ascended gear is in that content.

As far as the fine mats go, that depends. You can get them from anywhere. If you are looking for the blood in-particular, that just happens to be the mat that Karka drop. I think they might drop fangs also but could be mistaken.

Im not sure why you think that is worth pointing out though. They were pretty clear when saying that those areas were where this stuff is initially going to be but soon they will add in other methods, including systems to get all of it in WvW.

Still no conspiracy or cash-shop shenanigans.

This is nuts. Have you played in Fractals at all yet? There is a high probability of getting golds from the chests at the end of each fractal. And a higher chance for mobs to drop golds than usual. Use a magic find set and your inventory will be half full of gold items after just a few runs.

Those salvage into ectos. I have quadrupled the number of ectos in my bank by just casually leveling up in the dungeon, while still saving a few like type weapons to try to forge for a precursor (by the by, med armor, accessories, tridents and staffs seem to be the frequent rare drops. I haven’t seen a gold bow or sword yet). The other craft materials you need have an increased drop rate in Lost Shores and in the higher levels of FotM.

There is no cash-shop conspiracy here (and I like a good one, like the Crystin Cox/Nexon frenzy we had yesterday). Just play the game, especially the new stuff, and what you need will start flowing in to your bags. Remember, it’s an MMO. The stuff isn’t supposed to take a day. But getting the mats for Ascended is much more reasonable and goes much faster than say…cultural armor, legendaries, or some of the other freaky mystic forge weapons out there.

mcarswell.3768:

“Our goal is to ensure we have a proper progression for players from exotic up to legendary without a massive jump in reward between the two. "

this bothers me a lot, because there was NO jump in stats between exotic and legendary before they added Ascended and bumped up the Legendary stats.

I addressed this in my first post here. Not all gaps have to do with weapon power. There was a LARGE gap of time, with zero character progression, between getting your exotic set and acquiring a legendary. That was the gap that was filled by adding an intermediate tier of gear.

Leonard.2867:

“They’re designed to stand out and show everyone that you are a true master of Guild Wars 2.”

I could argue that the game is called Guild Wars. And if you managed to organize a guild that performed cohesively towards a single purpose to help you gain some level of prestige, on top of all other things required…then yes, you are a true master of Guild Wars.

:D

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

Hope you had a good turkey day, brother! I always get jealous of the US thanks giving because they get turkey and now I don’t

Don’t be jealous man. The turkey tradition was started by the government as a means to get the country lethargic and pacified on tryptophan.

The retail industry helps perpetuate the process because people passing out after directly after an early dinner means they will be up earlier and more energetic…thus more inclined to venture out on black Friday.

Leonard.2867:

I agree with you 100% Heck I agree with you much that I will edit your statement into my original post to help support my claim.

Fair enough, and then you might want to edit out anywhere you had made assumptions of obtaining them through Orr grinding and Trading post manipulation. Because that’s not how those were earned. Those early Legendaries were collaborative efforts.

Also…

Leonard.2867:

And if anybody can justify to me that they obtained their Legendary without unnecessary grind on a failed model, then ill shut my mouth.

I did that. Team-work and people taking on different parts of the process eliminated unnecessary and excessive grinding of one thing by one person. It’s all well documented on Guru. One guy even has a day to day diary of everything accomplished. So I guess /thread. Good talk.

tigirius.9014:

Xaxir.3562:

As far as i understand – noone forces you to do the achievements. I play for 1-2 hours a day if i have time, so you can call me pretty casual – and i am not stressing as much about not being able to complete everything.

Not everything should be designed for casuals ONLY.

Watch the manifesto, this game was originally for casuals, not for dungeoneers.

Secondly, making the monthly require this dungeon for the monthly is the same slap in the face they gave crafters by making the important expensive mats only drop in the dungeons.

Completely opposite of their manifesto and completely against their main player base.

Tigirius, would you mind scrolling up and reading my post and giving me your response. Because I really don’t see how anyone was slapped in the face. Fractals was designed for casual players. Everything about it is casual. The people that want a more hardcore or challenging experience have to put time in to bring it up to that level.

Leonard.2867:

Are you saying that a Legendary is not easy to obtain, despite an Anet posting barely a month after launch, discussing that people might already have them?

Yes. I definitely am. I was around pre-launch. I know people that hunted for Legendaries and I watched the people that kept threads about their progress up Guru.

Those people that got their Legendary within a month picked that as a goal. They wanted to be “world first” to have an item. But something you are not considering is that those people didn’t do it alone. They had groups of friends or guild-mates playing with them non-stop to meet that goal. There was one guild created specifically for that purpose and everything each member did was revolved around making progress towards a legendary.

One group would rush the player around for world completion, two others would focus on the crafts needed for the gifts, a few others would farm items to promote up to gold to try to forge pre-cursors or to salvage for ecto. Do you see how that can exponentially speed up the process? If there are 12 people dedicated to helping create a legendary in a month, then 12 months of play time went in to crafting it.

In GW we had a special treats weekend to coincide with Thanksgiving. Mobs dropped pie and cider but that was pretty much it. Same thing with Easter; the mobs dropped eggs and chocolate rabbits.

They were little things to give a nod to the Holidays, but not obtrusive or shoved down the throats of the people that might not celebrate them.

It would be nice to see something like that in GW2. I’d imagine if they were going to do something along those lines then we would have had an announcement of some sort by now.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Special_Treats_Weekend

Was it mentioned anywhere that the gap between exotic and legendary was a statistical one? I thought it was a gap in time. You could very easily get a full set of exotics, but then had months to well over a year of playing before you would see a legendary; referring to normal playing habits specifically. Not grinding for the purpose of the legendary. Just doing dailies, monthlies, dungeon runs when you have the time, some WvW here and there, leveling alts and salvaging/harvesting as you go would get you a majority of the things you need or the resources to get them.

Assuming they make legendary components easier to acquire then you characters path changed from:

Masterwork->Rare->Exotic->…months and months and possible expansions later->Legendary.

to:

Masterwork->Rare->Exotic->Ascended->ascended content leading to legendary mats->Legendary.

All that has changed is that in the huge chunk of time between Exotic and Legendary, you will now spend getting Ascended so you get a feeling of progress and growth for your character. And having the Ascended may speed up getting the Legendary.

In the end, around the same amount of time has been spent. They just added something, to give some direction to those that want it, in that void in between.

What is it that you don’t like about dungeons?

It might sound strange, but other than the Dredge fractal, I don’t get a “dungeon” vibe from them at all. Maybe it’s because they are so short and linear. Dungeon has a connotation of being this long involved thing where one person can dramatically affect the run. Fractals feel more like isolated dynamic events or story mode missions and are significantly easier than any of the dungeons.

Does a one off challenge-mode type scenario automatically qualify something as a casual-unfriendly dungeon? I thought these were much more accessible. Casuals can stick to lower difficulty levels and the people that want that extra difficulty can level themselves up to make it harder. Aren’t casuals the entire reason you can pick a difficulty below the lowest level achieved by the party before you start?

oh, you and I had this argument of being forced to do something before. We aren’t going down that rabbit hole again. But I will offer up some advice…skill levels in GW can make more of a difference than raw stats.

If you feel you can’t match up to other people just because they have a ring and a back-piece that you don’t, then you may want to practice more. Because I can promise you, even once you get those things, people with last seasons exotics or rares will still kill you and it will have nothing to do with gear.

Columba.9730:

Goodie for you. Some of us hate dungeons and will never do them. Why didn’t they make these available in wvwvw right away? It can’t be that hard. Yes, they added mandatory dungeon grinds to be competitive. thanks.

I know they said the items could be obtained in WvW but I haven’t looked for them. Nothing has been added yet for the rings or essences? That’s really all there is to get so far and they are the only things that cant be had via trading post or charity.

I don’t have ascended gear yet. I have been lvl9 for days but end up running lower levels to catch my guildies up. By virtue of that though, I have a ton of tokens. So when I do get the ring after 10, buying the infusion will be nbd.

Still have been playing WvW without an issue. Still doing dungeons, story missions with friends, and fractals without a problem. Not having ascended stuff hasn’t changed a single thing. I can’t imagine having it will change a single thing.

If it weren’t for the fact that I just really really want a quiver, I would be fine with exotics and ascended jewelry for agony at the higher levels. The other pieces, ill get them when I get them.

I was completing content just fine and having a good time while using rares from story mode and drops before I could finally craft/buy all my exotics, and before that it was rares and masterwork on the way up to 80. Going from exotic to ascended will be the same thing.

This still isn’t most other MMOs where the gear defines the player. You can still be outplayed, outclassed, and taught new things by someone with inferior gear who is just better. At least that much is similar to the original GW. Not everyone could afford those runes of superior vigor on all their characters :p

He put a note on your MMO permanent record. It will follow you for the rest of your life. Just like those middle school detentions.

Osprey.6587:

50 seconds in: “Guild Wars 2 takes everything you loved about Guild Wars 1 and puts it into a persistent world.” I’ll keep watching for more examples but for now I will say “check”.

Lol, the only point I can make against that is I asked how they broke from it as of the Lost Shores update. I could have placed those checks waaayy before lost shores came out. There is a ton of stuff I loved about GW that has been no where to be seen since the first beta.

Yosoy Tupapi.2913:

Yeah. He doesn’t get it. The mats drop rate might be reasonable. But will you find enough people to start level 1 fotm with you next month..

This is iffy. If you find yourself a good guild, people should have no problem running you through it. Also, FotM levels are character bound (whether thats a good or bad is a whole separate topic) . So if people want to get through and get essence, or the ring, or the higher end drops on their alts, then they start from level 1. And I would say after about a month would be when people really start doing that on their alts.

people still do story mode on their alts. They still do dungeons on their alts. And they still do the world events in zones. I cant see why FotM would be any different? Bu I guess we will know in a few months.