Guild Wars 2

While there have been some vocal complaints about the expansion look at the positives for a moment:

1. T5 leather has been given a reasonable value.

2. Challenging and fair (but sometimes unfair but it’s still early) content.

3. Elite specs have brought previously overpowered specs in line…in the right way! Instead of nerfing the OP class they brought others up. In the forums you’ll see people complaining about druid, herald, scrapper, dragonhunter, chronomancer, and reaper being overpowered. If there are six classes out of nine that are “overpowered” then that’s good progress towards better balance. It’s better to have six overpowered specs than one. We know the “one” and I daresay that dagger/dagger elementalist can still hold its own and I even made top healer a couple of times in the past week as celestial. I say give thief/daredevil a slight buff but nerf some of its PvE only skills to compensate. Berserker/warrior is in desperate need of a buff however.

I can’t seem to find any recipes for crusader or marauder stat rings and accessories. I can find some marauder stuff on the laurel merchant (but that involves a time gated currency) but not crusader anywhere. I want some healing for my guardian on top of the exotic sprocket rings and his ascended armor (shared with a warrior) is 3 berserker pieces and 3 soldier’s pieces. I plan on replacing a berserker and soldier’s piece with crusader’s to most optimally help in HoT. Obviously not a dedicated healer (minstrel’s) but want decent healing.

I’m also considering a crusader stat helmet for my thief to compliment his two pieces of ascended zealot gear (shoulders and pants, rest apart from helmet is marauders, helmet ventaris to save on laurels).

For me personally:

1.Gather wood and ore. I only mine silver and gold for the sprockets so if the nodes are too inconvenient I just ignore them.

2.Do a bunch of Silverwaste, leaving for a bit after each round for dynamic events to avoid triggering diminishing returns.

3.Maybe stop by HoT zones.

4.Tequatl now that a 64-bit client is out.

I only stick around the zone for some adventures, flax gathering, and story achievements. Orr and Silverwaste feel far more rewarding.

Something like Nightfury but with tiny flying reindeer in place of bats ^_^

I wonder if all these bug themed things are foreshadowing the LS 3 theme? LS 1 and 2 built up to Mordremoth and very early Mordremoth was taken out now plotwise we have to move on from the jungle. I also mean the glittering weapons and backpieces and butterfly stuff too.

Rewards aren’t that bad. If you run Silverwaste 10 times you’ll acquire enough gold for a bolt of Damask. That’s just from vendoring non-cloth greens. The ectos from salvaging rares and sand would add a good deal more gold.

Bruce Lee once said I fear the man who has practiced a single kick 10,000 far more than the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once. The path to mastery is repetition, for this way we establish habit.

The game really isn’t free to play, pay to be a pro though. In that case paying real life money for ascended wouldn’t be optional. Then you would have to buy gamble upgrades where with each upgrade you have a bigger chance of failing. Consider grinders and needing to buy extra talent trees from Phantasy Star Online 2 (a fun game by the way but gets too grindy with RNG elements).

Thief usefulness typically goes down with bigger groups so for zerging you may want to consider guardian or elementalist. Though balance is bad enough where you might just wanna go with what people are saying is OP for big zergs. I regret sometimes in WvW bringing a dagger/dagger ele instead of a staff ele (I switch between the two) since I get in this big group fights where staff is far more useful. Even in big fights however a single target guy could be good, if you have quick observational powers you can easily determine who the supports are and take them out. Worked very well as a rogue in Alterac Valley, though in GW2 you don’t have smokebomb or countless abilities that allow stunlocking.

Tom Gore.4035:

Ascended mats or Laurels. Depending if you’re feeling lucky or not.

With the current price of the Ascended mats vs. T6 mats the favor seems to be shifting on the ascended mats choice.

What about WvW infusions and the cool dragon helmet and gas mask sets?

The reaper says, “Your soul is mine!” while not a gemstore item I’d like for thieves to say, “Your stuff is mine!” upon triggering steal.

Doesn’t sound like a bad idea in theory but in practice instead of getting extra drops we’d only have stuff taken away and need to pay for a regular drop rate instead of a good one.

I think instead of a sub they make special farming zones that are gated behind weekly tickets. Droprates are drastically improved and it’s just a room like Mad King’s Labrynth (minus the annoying crowd control) with themed mobs like dust mites and sparks sharing a room. All exotic tier goods found in the room are account bound, but cores promoted to lodestones would still have tradeable lodestones. Reason for making stuff account bound is such a room could potentially flood the market with excess goods, reducing prices so you make less gold per sale. So precursors and lodestones would be account bound from the room.

“For one thing, in the scene, she just turns around and stares at the creature and does absolutely nothing to attempt to get away or fight. This is a very un-Norn-like response, especially from a master hunter and fighter like Eir. She would have fought or at least dodged and run. Period.”

I wouldn’t say she was doing nothing per se but rather watching the monster for tells and tactical opportunities to escape, but she was in no condition to physically act on the information and the monster was simply too fast.

I like inventing my own lore. For example ambient mobs because we’re able to attack them are corrupted by evil and we never really kill anything but instead if we say defeat a separatist, boar, raptor, or whatever they’re taking a nap and will wake up again after being rescued from evil mind control.

The inquest, separatists, nightmare court, centaurs, and other bad guy factions are in league with each other and are being influenced by an evil force that hasn’t been introduced yet.

Aedelric.1287:

Lady Elyssa.2469:

I make no justification for stating facts.

You may not be aware but forum titles cannot be changed except by the Mods, who I am sure should they agree with your opinion will be more than happy to.

Just think next time mate.

Eir’s death was not wasted, and her death may not have been heroic but it had more meaning. Being killed Mordy infront of Braham has given him drive to defeat the Dragon and perhaps all Dragons giving a bland character more depth and forwarding his story.

Faolin being the reason for Eir’s death also creates conflict within Caithe as she loves Faolin but was a good friend to Eir. Ultimately she makes a decision to side with us and fight to avenge Eir and give peace to her love.

It also gives your own character an enemy to focus on as during much of the story Mordremoth has no face. As I said, it my not be heroic but it does have meaning, it furthers two fairly mediocre characters stories.

Anyway her death is of no great loss to me, their are more interesting characters.

In Dante’s Inferno there are nine layers. Betrayers and traitors are placed in the ninth. Not only is betraying people who think of you as a friend and “ally” very wrong but betraying someone right after they save your life adds a whole other dimension. For perspective wrathful murderers and warmongers are placed in the seventh circle.

But we don’t need to go with Dante to know that Faolin crossed a moral event horizon and is therefore irredeemable. One cannot simply be neutral, those with Faolin are by default against us, as they are on the very side of someone who betrayed us.

1.A character being left-handed not in an act of betrayal or other evil. Seriously, in a game where nearly everyone is right handed (massively over-represented anyway, and at 90% of the population approximately in real life says a lot) the one character who happens to do something left-handed in a negative way really sticks out. If you’re going to make nearly everyone right handed you may as well go all the way to avoid the unfortunate implications of the token lefty being a betrayer or inherently bad.

2.A quaggan (preferably left-handed since there’s no good guy lefty representation) joining Destiny’s Edge 2.0

3.While playable quaggans would be asking too much a major hub quaggan city in LS 3 that we successfully defend. Quaggans join the pact.

Guhracie.3419:

Again, there are cosmetic mounts. They’re in the gemstore.

Oh, and the reason most players argue against the speed-boost mounts is because waypoints are, and will always be, better than mounts.

In some ways waypoints are better but in other ways they aren’t. For example if you’re traveling around one map then with a mount even ranged attacks and leaps won’t get you into combat to slow you down and you’ll outrun the enemies’ leashes faster, so the only things you’ll need to kill are those just hanging around nodes that’ll somehow attack you just when you’re mining or logging. Fuel also has potential to be cheaper than waypoints (especially with organic mounts like horses since vehicle mounts would need some kind of oil.) since you’d likely gather the mats for it yourself. You can’t feed a horse silver or fuel a vehicle with silver, but need to flush some to teleport. Mounts if fast enough can also make it worth it to not waypoint everywhere, thus saving coin in the long run.

So mounts are better for single map gathering while waypoints are still better for long distance travel.

Kraggy.4169:

Eddie Mo.7169:

Why we should have mounts: Even if they don’t give a speed boost, mounts are a nice way to make your character look nice.

Actually, no game I play with mounts make you look “nice” IMO due to the horrible graphical glitches caused by clipping issues such as weapons slicing through horses’ flanks, capes dropping onto the horse’s hind quarters, etc. etc. etc.

Mounts, like cloaks, are things that video game graphics systems are still incapable of rendering sensibly.

I agree with someone above who said they’d much rather deve. resources be devoted to real, playable content rather than a mechanic the game’s core design made redundant.

It can and has been done but the extra tessellation needed would put extra strain on people’s systems. With dramatically improved performance coming with HBM2 cards (not just on, but especially on the VRAM front) that shouldn’t be an issue for the 2016 gamer however.

Me too! The set can be rewarded on a new track. If it’s re-released in the gem store that’d be cool too but preferably it’ll keep its PvP cache so whenever you run past someone wearing the set they’ll think, “That guy PvP’d quite a bit he’s so cool!” Yes make the new criteria a little harder than the original set, maybe two pieces can be awarded for champion genius (I’m making an engineer purely to obtain this title ^_^ but have other priorities like finishing the ascended light shoulders and gloves for the artisan craft achieve :( ), another two for champion shadow, and the other two for champion whatever for Ranger. Druid and scrapper (scrapper even counters dragon hunter, which in turn counters revenant and thief) are strong so thief would be the challenge for the achievement.

Or have the Stalwart set pieces be obtainable just via reward track and have a new set based off Stalwart but with effects for the champion medium classes achievement? Something like luminescent but with Stalwart in place of Carapace with improved dye functionality (reds look very pink on luminescent :( )

I actually had fun fighting them. I was on my way to the Tangled Depths.

" HoT Mobs are great, people need to learn to take out the ‘Prime’ targets first. None of the mobs are hard if you know how to deal with them or pay attention…"

Even in Silverwaste we have prime targets. From my experience the kill order is as follows assuming they’re all at full health:

1.Menders. They have strong healing and are very squishy. The obvious #1. When in a big group spam poison (shortbow 4 on thieves even interrupts) since that reduces their healing output, so if they do get off a heal they aren’t at full again. Try separating them. Sword/dagger thieves can try spamming daze with cloak and dagger then number 1 skill from behind. Scorpion wire is good here too, but may need to give up haste (reserved for teagarrif knockdowns or gaining quickness to ensure credit in the face of rangers who’d rapid fire at the worst possible moment I salvaged many bronzes in the nick of time that way) or signet of shadows for it.

2.Small tendrils. These nasty things do big damage, are mobile, and cause cripple. They go underground so conditions are good against them, but are low HP enough to burst down in a reasonable time. If you’re stunlocking a thrasher or teagariff their poison spit can disrupt you. Their mobility makes them much higher priority than the larger ones.

3.Trolls. These guys go down fast, but are typically accompanied by menders. They have a bee attack that does big damage if many red circles converge on you. You’re working against a monster then suddenly the bees put you on the defensive.

4.Thrashers. These guys have a vine attack that even ignores elevation, stealth, and LoS. Thus, the need to take them out fast is obvious. They have lifesteal but only if you stand in their field. Their vine attack also target everyone and in emergency situations become number 1.

5.Teagarrifs. Knocks down unexpectedly. In some tactical situations become number one. They give themselves might, which is good for boon stealing. They can be daze locked and rubble lying around can be tossed at them to stall their charge.

6.Big tendrils. Have a knockdown, but if blinded they’ll miss it. Take their closeup attack, cloak and dagger, then blind to ensure a smooth, easy win. They do spit, but their lack of mobility means you know where to avoid.

7.Hounds. These guys cause cripple and give themselves and their allies haste. With boonstealing they become far more manageable. They hit hard, but aren’t cheap unless paired with others.

8.Husks. These guys are tanky and their rocks hit hard, but their lack of cheap mechanics combined with tankiness makes them very low on the priority list. They’re weak to conditions however.

This is from my personal experience with a thief and elementalist so other classes may vary.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

If they add mounts, they need to add realisism where you need to pay for a stable, vet care, food and water. Be a good gold sink or tradeable with other players. Don’t want to gather food for your mount? Pay for it or log in one day and it’s dead.

Instead of all that why not just have craftable fuel? For animal mounts cooking could cover it and movement will have an endurance bar. Once that runs out it gets fatigued, which wears on the mount’s endurance. If that second bar breaks then the mount is permanently broken or dead. So as long as it’s fed it won’t enter fatigue mode. Fatigue damage is permanent so the need to continuously fuel is obvious. Bar 1 depletes using fuel stores but the fatigue bar isn’t touched. You go a bit longer and bar 2 is halfway done then you refuel. You’ll still be halfwaay done fatigue but bar 2 won’t be touched so long as there’s fuel.

For mounts like a surfboard that wouldn’t logically need fuel they’d work like gliders with endurance until you have a mastery that enables unlimited travel.

There are no mounts because the game isn’t designed for it. We have waypoints and gliding is good enough at least for the new maps. Maybe in the next expansion we’ll go to the Woodland Cascades and have horses? Maybe even a centaur mount.

1.World Series like tournament (best 4 out of 7) with the traditional 5v5 setup where the winning team each decides on a weapon or armor of their individual choosing (not a consensus but they all choose their own individual prizes as long as it’s a weapon, armor, or skins so they can pick a legendary alongside an armor skin like Nightfury, or pick an armor piece alongside a weapon skin, or a weapon and armor, or weapon skin + armor skin) even legendaries and skins. Not that I think I’d win but the chance would be awesome and encourage more people to PvP.

2. School uniform outfits.

3. A Christmas analog to Nightfury…maybe being surrounded by tiny flying reindeer instead of bats?

4.Quaggans playing a major role in LS 3 (I’ve read truckloads of complaints about HoT but one very big one is missing: no quaggans!)

5.Quaggan outfits

6.Cat ears.

7.Bunny ears.

8.Taimi gets promoted to leader of Destiny’s Edge 2.0 (NOT Braham!) and plays a pivotal role in LS 3, even becoming the new Trahearne as far as importance goes ^_^

I play at 4k and love the medium interface dimensions. Felt too claustrophobic on 1080p. At 4k I can have my inventory or other windows open and still have a playable experience.

Now 8k, that’s when things really become too small. Yes, I’ve “played” at 8k with Dynamic Super Resolution for the screenshots. They aren’t that hard to search for in all those folders. I just go to Guild Wars 2 2015, go to the search bar, and type dimensions:7680 while dimensions honestly should be a default search option in picture folders and this saves time on right click, scroll to dimensions, and click its box.

Sometimes you need water for the AoE vulnerability stacking, healing, and chill field, Earth for reflects, bleed, and cripple, air for some CC and mobility, and fire of course for raw damage. I mean strictly staff but dagger/dagger has the same logic. You have your healing skill with it, chill, burns, gap closers, and interrupts from earth and air.

With artificial intelligence being potentially very high (even Garry Kasparov lost to a chess match to a machine…back in the 90s) we can objectively determine if a class is truly OP or not. In a LS 2 chapter 8 story quest you can fight a doppleganger, they can do the same thing but improve the AI drastically so they could test various builds and see win-loss records between the programs and various teams in addition to dueling. The teams would also have the other team’s details like traits and build hidden to best emulate real play. A great bonus to these programs would be AI used for raiding to simulate a PvP environment, though that might not be a good idea since you’d need to be at least as skilled as The Abjured to beat those programs so maybe tuning it down somewhat for raids but keep the maximum for PvP balance testing.

The best measure we currently have however if a class is OP is tournament practice. Do the top teams consistently have certain classes? Yes! Because those teams did the research, crunched the numbers, and logically determined that those class setups were advantageous. Thief for example may be far from OP in actual combat but is OP as far as capping goes, which is why it’s brought. A good solution may be to nerf mobility slightly but up damage. The class has a high risk style and is obviously setup for single target combat, and combined with positional requirements for its damage should be the best high skill cap 1v1 class. Sometimes in Silverwsate I only get a silver because so much of my time was watching my interface for revealed so I can C&D again to daze a veteran thrasher, all while watching my environment for teagariffs and wolves to dodge or boon steal from.

slamfunction.7462:

Step1: Take out Credit Card
Step 2: Open Gem Store
Step 3: Buy gems, using Credit Card
Step 4: Go to the Gem-To-Gold Transfer
Step 5: Buy as much gold with the gems you have (OH! And don’t worry about that last 8-5 gems that you can’t convert to gold – Thats called “Salami Slicing”, and you’ll end up spending it someday, right? Riiiiiiiiight….)

Now, Fun Facts!:
*Average American Middle Class Pay: $20 an hour
*Thats 1600 Gems per hour
*Thats around 180 gold
*If you have a RL job, and you work 8 hours a day, you can make up to (180×8) 1440 GOLD!!!

Or, you could just play the game for 8 hours and possibly end up with 8-10 gold, but who wants to do that? Just buy gems. It makes ANet happy. And welcome to the F2P model.

Most of that goes towards bills, payments, food, and memberships like gym memberships though.

Look on the bright side, at least Zojja is still alive ^_^

Ranlares.2513:

I love how people don’t realize how much work it was redoing the entire legendary system and not only writing the quests for each new one, going back and writing ones for all of the existing ones. Get your head out of your doggy and think bud.

Now they just have to stop making shards of glory tradeable and make certain skins gated behind rank (like bringing back Stalwart’s and making it tradeable with shards of glory) in addition to a shard cost. Maybe the Stalwart helm and shoulders could be an ingredient in a legendary weapon or armor?

I like the idea and sounds like it would interface with PvP coaching very well (dragon rank, must have made it to the semi-finals in a ranked tournament, and to once have obtained the equivalent of 2200 Elo to use a WoW analogy so even if they dip below that threshold sometime will still be flagged as eligible for coaching) where you could charge gold based on your demand and reputation. There would be classes of 10 students and reservations, group play in something similar to a guild hall but located in The Mist for practice rounds (classes involving 1v1 and 1v2, including yes it’s okay to try escaping when the side with 2 obtains their logical advantage) where the footage is watched by a coach (e.g., “consider rebinding ‘2’ to ‘W’ as it’s far more convenient and easily accessed from home row” or, “The more essential an ability the closer to home row it should be” or, “What were you thinking engaging a reaper 1v1?” etc.)

The problem with making mobs too fast is it makes it harder for the player to avoid combat. Combat reduces running speed, and pull backs and CC don’t help. It’s like if I wanted to engage instead of gather or do some event I’d hit them.

Daddicus.6128:

Finally, waypointing when fully dead has always been an exploit. The game is designed to reward players for playing together, and waypointing out to prevent your colleages from having to revive you is just wrong. It encourages building glass cannons and coupling that with a shoot/die/waypoint strategy. Frankly, they would have been better to lock out waypointing out of combat altogether, like they did in dungeons.

I strongly disagree. If they’re reviving you then they’re putting themselves at risk with an overall DPS and safety loss. The obvious solution would be increasing rez speed. You’re locked out of the boss room if you waypoint away anyway.

TheLastNobody.8319:

Raziel.4216:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Raziel.4216:

We don’t know for how long she was starved before the fight, no matter how special she is if she’s starving she won’t get to do much.

That might be true if she was Human, but she isn’t, she’s a Norn. They have entirely different physiologies to Humans. Also, the assumption is from the time of the crash to then, so a handful of days at worse.

Handful of days? It’s not the first chapter, we’ve been out there looking for’em for a while so what part of the story implies that? It could be a week.
“She’s norn so she’s special” doesn’t cut it, Norn eat and drink too, Norn will get weaker if they don’t do it for a long period of time.

Plus the fact she’s been through a horrible crash, probably did not receive any medical treatment, and lord knows what else. Seems people are getting too hung up on and only focusing on the fact she said she hasn’t had food or water.

On top of even that due to the square-cube law she would take a fall harder than a human would due to all her extra mass. She is seven feet tall, which is extremely tall even by a human male’s standards, and since weight outpaces strength with bigger sizes (you aren’t just getting more muscle as you grow but need to hold more water, skin, bones, etc.) bigger people would be more vulnerable to gravity than smaller people. When ants fall off a table they walk like it isn’t a thing whereas if a human fell from a similar height (if a table is 100 ants tall vs. a building that is 100 humans tall) they would die.

I’m working on full celestial for my ele. I have two and a half complete sets (full medium and heavy, light pants, chest, and head), 10 charged quartz, 1 Ventari exotic insignia, 1 Celestial exotic insignia, and am well on my way to completing my boots then shoulders and gloves in that order. I use staff in PvE but dagger/dagger in PvP. In WvW sometimes I regret taking dagger/dagger over staff whenever I find myself in a situation optimal for staff. Big fights seem better with staff and its combo fields and crowd control whereas dagger/dagger is better for smaller scale fights. Staff tends to be very telegraphy so it has that risk associated with it.

My PvE build and traits is the same as my PvP build and traits except in PvE I replace mistform (except in certain instances like the last boss of living story chapter 8) with signet of air for the passive speed boost. Sometimes I’ll replace earth armor with icebow like in the picture.

Then the legendary would stay in wardrobe and all you’d need are precursors to unlock them all.

Element.4319:

This.

It’s been all over reddit with spreadsheets and everything and just ONE serious comment from Anet would suffice that they are aware of this.

They nerf dungeons to focus on fractals and “claim” it to be their focus for end game when fractals ended up being nerfed to heck as well – it’s seriously a grind system now that isn’t rewarding at all. I have so many guildies and friends who quit doing fractals above 50 and solely do em for dailies now that it’s literally just a chore. I hope Anet doesn’t shoot themselves in the foot as it’s lookin’ like a pay 2 play just to get ascended gear with these insanely inflated prices.

At LEAST un-nerf the frikkin’ dungeons or something.

Keep in mind that even with inflation while your gold and vendoring trash may not go as far your liquid assets can be sold at the inflated prices.

More hair styles, outfits that change your character into a vampire or werewolf but doesn’t apply remove helmet in cutscenes. School uniform outfits, access to a secret island for farming different mats with great droprates. You’d find dust mites as one of the mobs but with charged lodestone drops drastically increased. It’ll be level scaled like Mad King’s Labyrinth so players can level reasonably fast there too and save exploration EXP for masteries.

An item lottery with scratch where you have a chance to win very rare skins, a set of 30 of a single lodestone type, a couple of ascended mats like bolt of damask, or other goods.

While not a gemstore item I’d love a Zojja or Taimi plush ^_^ The quaggan one is very nice.

Samnang.1879:

If you have real money, anything (not account bound) can be obtained.

You’d need $300 or so real life US dollars for some legendaries so it isn’t realistic, at least in one fell swoop ($20 every other week over long periods of time though is viable). Why would I spend that just for a virtual sword when I can put that towards hardware upgrades?

I agree that it’s okay for rare items to be rare (except for the rare tier since ectos are a vital part of high end crafting) but rarity should mostly stem from skill not random drops. Like the Glorious Hero armor set, if you see someone with it you know they’re a great player because you need to get a good PvP tournament rank to acquire it. I want that armor set but know I don’t quite deserve it (yet?) so I’m going to practice sparring with some guild members in the Guild Hall with 1v1 and 1v2ing with my ele (we’ll take turns being the 1 so we all get that 1v2 experience) and guardian, especially if they’re popular meta classes. Even if we don’t make it far enough others would simply be better and therefore more deserving of earning the armor set.

Wanze.8410:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Wanze.8410:

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Anyway, I know whining about it won’t change anything, hence instead of whining, I decided to ask other players what currently the best ways to make gold are (aside from TP flipping).

By far the best alternatives to TP flipping are investing, forging precursors and crafting.

In that order.

Forging precursors is what I used to do, but took a break from that and crafted myself some ascended armor sets in preparation for HoT’s raids. Now I’m kinda low on gold and low on mats, so that means I’m either gonna have to gather the mats to forge a pre (don’t feel like doing that, but if I really have to) or gather the gold to buy the mats.

Investing is something I’m aware exists, but never really understood how people go about this. Care to explain? Some tips to get a newbie investor started? Feel free to send me a PM with additional info if you’d like. I would really appreciate that.

I probably don’t have the budget to really invest into anything, but it’s something I might wanna try in the future wen I saved up some gold again.

When you say crafting, do you mean crafting ascended mats (like deldrimore and damask)? Or something else?

I forged 20 pres since HoT and made between 300-500g profit per pre, as prices for mats went way down. I expect another flush of mats with wintersday (t5 snowflakes), so you might want to start preparing for that (start crafting mithril plated dowels and weapon components now).

With crafting i dont neccessarily mean ascended mats (but atm give a couple of gold profit, i think, even if you buy the mats for it).

There are plenty of items in demand right now, mostly for guild hall upgrades, basic collections and gear for new alts and players who just hit 80.

I have an ongoing thread about the economy, trading and how i go about investing and making gold in the HoT subforum, where i also answer specific questions from other players. It should be on the first page.

It might be a good place to start.

When I crafted my precursor I’d mass produce shortbows by gathering in Orr. I’d hit every node and it took a couple of weeks to finally land one. After finishing ascended armor I’ll work on either the sword or dagger since those tend to be in demand. I personally don’t like the idea of precursor crafting for profit due to the high risk involved (I’ve heard stories of people losing 1000g in the forge) but if it works for some it should at least be worth checking out. Though I’d rather salvage the crafted rares and get some ectos.

Misguided.5139:

Yeah, I think being able to switch stats on the fly will be great.

Me too. I’m glad I made a legendary when I did (it had exotic stats in those days) and now my Dreamer has zealot stats.

• They need the to appeal to audiences that have vastly different ideas of what even makes a good MMO. *

Balanced PvP with challenging yet fair PvE content with intuitive mechanics that don’t require prior research on a Wiki. Deep and responsive controls, flexible and diverse playing styles, and a sense of progression (e.g., lower level zones feeling easier because you far surpassed them. Bears were once dangerous and fearsome but you are no longer a level 5 average Joe but a level 80 superhero) are important too. Fair crafting and a reasonable economy helps a lot too. Exclusivity of some items but most stuff being tradeable on the TP is good. If a skin can only be obtained via certain achievements or PvP then they should not be tradeable, but everything else should be fair game.

AXEL.8362:

BrooksP.4318:

To play devil’s advocate, the MMO market has been pretty terrible the past 4 years, so it’s not that much of an honor. For years to come is also iffy at best, unless Anet actually figures out a long term plan they are doomed to only appease diehard GW fans. Pre-HoT and HoT has shown that Anet doesn’t seem to know where they want to take GW2.

Not only that but the word MMO itself this days has a bad connotation. Almost always used negatively or aggressively in debates. This has “MMO tier quest”, “MMO tier skills”, “MMO tier action”. Never used in a positive way.

Even some games go the extra mile to avoid being considered MMOs. Destiny is for all intents and purposes a MMO, yet you will never see anyone from their company calling it one. Because MMOs in popular culture are associated with “high quantity, low quality content”. And frankly I cannot blame the people who make that association.

MMOs are on their way out unless something really ground breaking comes in.

Phantasy Star Online 2 is a great game, good characters, excellent character customization, and while the weapon upgrading system certainly isn’t the best (need to buy grinders with real life money, needing a yen conversion to buy the codes for the cash and extra skill trees) and while dodges have no endurance bars (thank goodness!) the game is designed in such a way where even with it challenge can still be there. Missions are fun and you can buy or find rare skills. You can also buy (or win via scratch) house decorations, some of which actually play music and there are crossovers with Border Break and even a Sonic Anniversary event. It’s just unfortunate that the game never made it to the west. Sega is focusing a lot on mobile stuff but who really wants to play Sonic on a train on a tiny screen anyway when you could watch Youtube videos instead mentally complaining to yourself how it isn’t the same as watching on a real computer?

It isn’t a perfect system but it’s a step in the right direction. Guild Wars 2 took some steps there (active dodge) but also some back (In WoW you could bind all your abilities to your keyboard like A for hemmorage, W for backstab, F for ambush, Z for shadowstep, B for smokebomb, etc.) Their PvP system with everyone having equal stats is great, but then again only being limited to teams of 5 isn’t. Alterac Valley was one of the best experiences in MMO history due to the rich strategic and tactical potential. There’s a chokepoint where the Horde could stop the Alliance (if you were lucky other participants would know and not just zerg the bosses) while Strand of the Ancients and Isle of Conquest were really fun too. I didn’t care much for Eye of the Storm although shamans with their knockback made that great fun (not sarcasm).

People at Anet knew these were fun, but stronghold is missing a certain something those other battlegounds (Alterac Valley and Isle of Conquest) from another game had. Anet gets credit for the effort and I’m sure there will be better stronghold battlegrounds in the future. Maybe bumping it up to teams of 20 vs. 20 and making the battlegrounds much bigger and more spacious in areas? Guild Wars 2 with its soft trinity means anyone can have okay healing if they spec for it so everyone loving you for queuing as a healer is gone.

As far as soft trinity goes I think Guild Wars 2 made a great decision. I remember raiding in SWTOR as a DPS spec on a scrapper but finding myself needing to heal. It was the one where the floor gives way and before that everyone had to be on a certain mob. It was a hard trinity game so such improvisations aren’t optimal, and your epics being from PvP rewards means there’s some stat hit, but being epics you still have plenty of extra stats (but not the right ones for healing if you go DPS obviously) but GW2 is set up much better for such a play style.

Will 3D work with 4k? I noticed no difference between 8k and 4k except that 8k has better screenshots, a smaller interface, and a slideshow (though it is asking a bit much to fit all that data down the pipe.)

Keep in mind that the 64-bit client is still in beta. In one event I heard my graphic card buzzing, usually that’s when crashes happen but it toughed it out and stayed in the game with it.

Gathering and ascended crafting. It’ll take lots of logging for a weaponsmith but worth it if you have a feel for tree nodes. You can also look up a map for permanent iron and platinum nodes and just mine everything you see then put that towards Deldrimor steel. Also karma converting mid level armors to linen and coarse leather for their ascended counterparts.

CandyHearts.6025:

Druid Amulet? :o
Healing Power [Major]
Toughness [Major]
Power [minor]
Vitality [minor]

That stat set should be PvE only. In PvP it would be too powerful then they might nerf druid to the point where the above mentioned stat set would actually be needed for raid viability instead of optimal.

“This is an subject I talk a lot about (as it’s related to grinding gold vs going directly for the item) because I also find it important item represent something. That type of value is important imho. Maybe not for you, but for many It is. Even Anet sees that and basically said that it was a mistake to make the Legendary weapons tradable because of this reason.”

Yes certain things should be obtainable only through achievements or (especially) PvP, but much of the Halloween stuff is either really hard to make (Nightfury) or currently unobtainable (the chainsaw swords).

" Even Anet sees that and basically said that it was a mistake to make the Legendary weapons tradable because of this reason."

The mistake this time was making Shards of Glory tradeable. WvW and PvP just shouldn’t be optional for a legendary especially since they’re the most important parts of the game.

“It filters unneeded gold into the market. If you keep them tradeable, then re-release these skins for everyone to earn again. "

I strongly disagree. The gold is obviously needed if you want the good but it’s otherwise unobtainable.

I have today in Silverwaste. It typically either happens around certain players only or a server issue.

I think someone’s working on new hair but it needs refining and taking into account clipping issues. My Asura female ranger has hair that clips through the imperial collar for example.

Farzo.8410:

People who tries to play an MMO as a single player RPG are the ones who got him killed.

They just don’t understand how crappy the lore will become when writers have to cater to player characters.

Then they get sad when their characters “somehow” isn’t mentioned in the written lore.

The Pact Commander (i.e., player character) I like to think of as a male charr warrior canonically because warrior makes the most sense for a leader (with guardian as a close second) and charrs are cool.