Guild Wars 2

I thought it’d be interesting to see what everyone thought about where each profession stands in regards to how “complete” it feels. I’m not looking for a tier list of best to worst, or anything along those lines, but rather a sense of which professions just don’t feel like they’re quite what they’re supposed to be yet.

I’m absolutely not an expert, but from my observations so far, it seems like Guardian, Warrior, Thief, and Elementalist are in the best shape, and Mesmer players seem to be the least happy all around. Beyond that, I’m not sure where the other professions lie.

PU builds are extremely survivable, but many Mesmers don’t find them to be very fun to play, because like you say: chances are, the opponent’s just going to run away rather than bothering to fight you. If they stay, sure, you can wear them down, but that’s about it. Other builds can be fairly fun to play, but pale in comparison to what other professions can do, both in damage and survivability.

In PvE, there’s just plain no reason to bring a Mesmer for a dungeon or fractal unless you want to use Portal. Aside from that, just about everything a Mesmer can do, a Guardian or Thief can do better, while bringing better damage and boons to the party as well. Until either the Mesmer is reworked or PvE starts rewarding condition damage and boon removal, the Mesmer’s just going to be a pale imitation of other professions.

I’m fine not being the most damaging profession, so long as we can bring other things to the table, but at the moment, most of what a Mesmer can do—no matter how cool those tricks are—just isn’t valuable.

Conncept.7638:

Well there’s been one thing suggested a billion times that could help and the developers still haven’t even done that. Conditions currently update their damage each time they tick, so if you throw some conditions on then get might or whatever other buff, the damage is increased on the existing condition. Removing that would get rid of something the of server has to constantly check and calculate for, giving them more resources, and buffing PvE condi builds since you could now burst boons on yourself then lay your conditions instead of constantly maintaining boons in a condition build.

I’m baffled as to why they’d update based on your current stats in the first place. That seems like such an odd thing to implement.

Belzebu.3912:

Nothing changed so far.
The cap in cond damage is because the server couldn’t handle the calculation of instanced stacks od conditions, so they made it global.

Really? That seems… really odd, given that other games seem to do similar things just fine. I wonder if the open world content, where dozens of players could be applying conditions to the same target, is the reason.

It’s disappointing to hear that there’s been no real progress. I like playing Zerker builds as much as the next guy, but I’d love to take a condition Necro for a spin in PvE one day.

I know, I know. We’ve been posting about this for really close to two years now. You’re all probably tired of it.

Is there any update on what’s going to be done about the cap on condition stacks in PvE? It’s a design decision that eliminates dozens of potentially fun and useful builds from group PvE content because it utterly cripples their ability to do damage. I can’t understand the logic behind it, either. There’s no cap on how many characters in Assassin’s/Berserker’s gear can tear into an enemy; what would be so unbalancing about letting condition-specced characters do the same thing?

Last I heard, something like a year ago, ArenaNet wanted to implement some sort of change. So I’m wondering if there’s been any news since then.

ASP.8093:

Agent Noun.7350:

Anyone remember the Mesmer’s trajectory in GW1? Especially in PvE, Mesmers weren’t particularly desirable, but by the end they were damage-dealing gods.

IIRC, that was almost entirely because of a single special PvE-only skill. (To be fair, a lot of builds were held together by a PvE-only skill.)

Honestly I like the GW2 mesmer more. GW1’s mesmer was a cool ideal, all hexes and interrupts, but when I played the game I much preferred necros and rangers for the same stuff. GW2’s mesmer does some unique things, some really cool things, even some borderline-broken things. It’s a fun class to play. Just… very bug-ridden and kinda inconsistent in its design. I miss both GW1’s hexes and its awesome interrupt gameplay, but not on account of the mesmer, really.

The Mesmer’s main problem in Guild Wars 2 PvE is the same as the Necromancer’s, when it comes down to it: the profession was designed for a different game than the one that got released.

For the Necromancer, it’s down to conditions. Because of a pretty baffling design decision that’s stuck around for almost two years and probably isn’t going to ever change, condition damage has no place in group PvE content, which means that the majority of what a Necromancer is built to do never really gets a chance to shine in a huge portion of the game. That’s a shame.

For the Mesmer, it’s harder to point to one specific issue. On the damage side of things, Mesmers suffer because a significant portion of our damage potential comes from our phantasms and shattering our clones, and as soon as the AoEs start flying (in all game modes), those poor illusions just plain die. That means that professions who do all of their damage themselves--especially, in PvE, Warriors, Thieves, and Elementalists—handily outdamage Mesmers. After all, it’s not like an Elementalist’s Lightning Hammer disappears if a boss attacks it.

And really, that’d be fine if the Mesmer brought valuable control and support abilities to a group. But in Guild Wars 2’s PvE, control’s not really a factor, despite the original design intentions. Reflects are valuable, but Guardians can do that just fine, and bring much more to the table as well. As for support, Guardians, Elementalists, and Thieves make Mesmers look downright silly. I mean, look at two of our three elite skills. Time Warp is a minor DPS boost that can actually be a hindrance if the party isn’t ready to adjust their rotations, and Mass Invisibility is outdone on a shorter cooldown (and without taking up the elite skill slot) by a Thief with a smoke field and a shortbow. Take away Portal and I don’t think I’d be able to point to a single reason to bring a Mesmer along.

The Mesmer is a fantastically cool profession. My Mesmer was the first character I made in the first minutes of headstart, and he’s still my most-played character. And even though I tend to feel like I’m playing a profession whose abilities are essentially fragile clones of other professions’ skills, I’ll probably keep maining Mesmer. But kitten if I don’t feel sad about all that missed potential.

In short, the Mesmer is an excellent profession for an entirely different game.

Anyone remember the Mesmer’s trajectory in GW1? Especially in PvE, Mesmers weren’t particularly desirable, but by the end they were damage-dealing gods.

So, who knows. Maybe we’ll keep getting nerfed into the ground and then a year or two from now suddenly find ourselves rising from the nerf ashes like a sparkly purple phoenix just like in GW1.

Playing a Mesmer is like… Imagine your character went to Guild Wars 2 college and majored in Thief, but kind of slacked off and failed all his classes. He picked up a minor in pretending to be a Guardian, but never really got above a C in any of those classes either. So eventually he just majored in art and drew a bunch of self portraits, which everyone thought were kind of neat, if a little confusing, but now they just kind of ignore them.

That’s a Mesmer: a failed Thief who occasionally attempts to imitate a Guardian but mostly just makes copies of himself that aren’t good for much more than looking at.

I’d be afraid that would lead to more Mesmer nerfs, since Mesmers remove boons all the time. (Ah, who am I kidding. Everything will lead to more Mesmer nerfs.)

Anyway, I originally envisioned Disheartened as a condition that the Necromancer would specialize in, so that’d be something, at least.

At the moment, the Unshakable/Defiant system for champion and boss enemies does little but discourage players to try to use crowd control. I don’t think that’s the intention, and it sharply limits players’ options for dealing with difficult enemies in a group situation. It doesn’t help that in many cases, players use skills with built-in control effects just for their damage, triggering Defiant without actually getting the benefit of a well-timed stun or interrupt.

So here’s my suggestion for a clearer Defiant system:

Make Defiant a boon that can’t be removed and has a set duration. Instead of champion and boss enemies gaining stacks of Defiant based on how many players are nearby every time they’re hit with crowd control, have them gain a single “instance” of Defiant that lasts for a certain number of seconds. During this time, the enemy can’t be affected by hard crowd control effects like Daze or Stun. The length of time this Defiant effect lasts should not scale depending on how many players are in the area, but can instead be raised or lowered individually for each enemy to reflect how difficult that specific enemy should be to control.

To put this another way: treat Defiant just like Stability, only it is triggered automatically and can’t be removed by standard boon removal skills.

This would also open the door to a potential new condition:

Disheartened. Skills that apply Disheartened are rare and have long cooldowns. Disheartened removes Defiant from an enemy and prevents the target from gaining any boons (including Defiant) for its duration. Once Disheartened wears off, champion and boss targets become Defiant even if they weren’t crowd controlled during Disheartened’s duration.

Whether or not a system like this were to be implemented, I do have one more request: make Defiant more visible on enemies. For example, instead of having it appear among all of the enemy’s boons and conditions, make Defiant a larger icon to the side of the enemy’s health bar and/or next to the enemy’s nameplate, with either its duration or its number of stacks clearly visible to everyone who has the enemy targeted. That way it’s easier for groups who aren’t using voice chat to coordinate when they should use their stuns and interrupts, because whether the target is vulnerable or not is clearly visible.

AesirValkyr.7418:

I could see the dungeon living on as a fractal in the future.

That would be a pretty good middle ground, I think. I could support something like that.

I’d rather ArenaNet let me decide when I’m tired of a dungeon rather than putting a time limit on it at all. Leave it around, and when players are done with it they’ll stop playing it.

Well I really hope they do. It’s annoying to be told, “You better do this dungeon now or you’ll never get to!”, especially when I’ve done the eight permanent dungeons so many times I never want to see them again. Having a new permanent dungeon in the game would be fantastic.

If ArenaNet wants to add temporary open-world, “dynamic event” stuff, that makes sense to me. But making entire dungeons—entire GOOD dungeons—and then throwing them away after an arbitrary period of time not only makes no sense to me, but is immensely frustrating.

bribrim.9710:

It seems many do not like the Living Story and the idea of change being permanent in a game. Not me! Nobody I know watches the same movie in a theater 50 times in a row. The analogy is probably poor but you get my drift. If you miss something in-game, well… do the next release of the Living Story. Just don’t force me to play in a NEVER changing world.

I’m fine with open-world stuff being temporary.

But complete, interesting dungeons should stick around. People like to have content to do, and many players have gone through all of the “permanent” dungeons so many times there’s no reason to ever return. Why should a new dungeon—a complete, and very fun dungeon—only be around for two weeks? Is it so wrong to want long-term variety in the game, instead of being told, “Okay, this two weeks everybody better do this if you don’t want to miss it. Next two weeks everybody has to do this other thing if you don’t want to miss it.”

I’m wondering if ArenaNet has addressed why content like the new dungeon—which is excellent on many levels—always has to be temporary. Could you imagine how expansive this game could become if the new content that gets added could actually stick around?

It’s very possible that the SAB might be permanent. There aren’t any holiday-themed Monthly categories like for the holiday events, and ArenaNet are going to be adding more Worlds in the future.

SAB has the potential to be like fractals for jumping puzzle enthusiasts. Seems like something great for the health of the game, and something that can always be added to.

I believe that free server transfers—even limited to a 24-hour timer—are causing more harm to the game than they’re worth. I realize there are good reasons why they’ve been implemented, and I do, on a certain level, appreciate being able to transfer servers without having to pay anything, but at this point I think most of their reason for existing is gone.

Here are the stated reasons for free server transfers and why they’re no longer needed:

Server transfers will be free until server populations stabilize. I think this is the easiest concern to answer: as long as server transfers are free, the population can never stabilize. Combined with public WvW rankings and players insisting on jumping to high-ranked servers (leading to WvW guilds leaving those high-ranked servers), free server transfers are ensuring that server populations remain in constant flux and that the WvW ladder will remain uneven at best. Closing free server transfers—with fair warning in advance, of course—would actually help to stabilize the populations.

Server transfers will be free until guesting is implemented. Can I be honest? I’m not convinced guesting is needed right now. You can already do dungeons and sPvP with your friends from other servers. While you can’t join them in the open world, I think it’s worth sacrificing that privilege—temporarily—to ensure more stable server populations and communities. Guesting is a great feature, theoretically, but I don’t think free transfers should remain until a feature that still doesn’t have an ETA is ready.

While it’s not a magic fix to problems with WvW balance and ranking, I do think that closing free server transfers as soon as humanly possible will go a long way towards stabilizing server populations and helping servers to build more cohesive, meaningful communities.

Killface.1896:

-1

Exploiter´s should not make ton of gold from them,and farming gold Korea style is a bad design to get legendary s.

Two questions:

1. How is my post in any way encouraging or defending exploiters? I’m saying there’s nothing we, as players, can do about them. If ArenaNet can help fix this whole Dawn/Dusk problem, great, but we can’t count on that, nor can we do it ourselves.
2. How is “play the game normally and just don’t spend your money like crazy” equal to “farming gold Korea style?”

I’ve been bothered for a while now by the fact that crafting, in GW2, just isn’t a viable way to make money. In the vast majority of cases, items aren’t worth the materials you’d use to make them.

I’m of the belief that crafting should be a way to make money, but to be honest I’m not sure what changes could be made in GW2 to ensure that that’s possible. Even if there were items that could only be crafted, the nature of the trading post would likely lead to the same situation we have now: materials being worth more than the item produced.

So what can be done to help make crafting profitable?

I thought the Bifrost looked more like a Mesmer weapon than an Elementalist one, myself.

Shinzan.2908:

Problem with your guide, all those materials are actually needed to make a legendary so if you just mine and sell everything now you’ll have to buy it all back later losing more than you made.

I’m just talking about getting enough money for a precursor or the Icy Runestones. You don’t have to do the whole process as one step—it’s not one big buy. If you’d rather stockpile all those resources up front and make money another way, that’s probably possible. My guide assumes this order when it comes to the “thing you need money for” part of the program:

1. Get enough money for Icy Runestones and to buy a precursor.
2. Begin to stockpile the stacks of materials you need to actually make it.

I’m trying to be realistic here, too: this is going to take months for most people. My “guide,” for what it is, assumes that you’ll be doing other things in the process, otherwise yeah, it’s going to be a massive grind.

Levelord.5746:

You can’t work with a system that relies on chance for getting a precursor. Telling people this is a guide to work within the system is ridiculous because it’s equivalent to telling people to work within the system of a casino slot machine that almost never pays out.

The OP’s post is complete ignorance and assumes people aren’t willing to work for the legendary materials. Nobody is complaining about gathering legendary mats. It’s until you reach the slot machine point where it just eats up your effort and gives nothing back that is the problem.

Unless you want Twilight or Sunrise, you can probably buy your legendary precursor if you’re capable of making and saving the necessary funds. Generating the precursors is random, yes, but buying them is a sure thing, a one-time deal.

I acknowledged the problems with Dawn and Dusk in my post: they’ve been exploited to kittentown and back and a few people have the market absolutely cornered on them. For those, yeah, you’re going to have to rely on RNG, and I’m sorry. The price is going up faster than we can likely make money. But Sunrise and Twilight aren’t the only legendaries, and many of them can reasonably be purchased by someone willing to save up enough money.

Hellkaiser.6025:

Like I said, even if you’re NOT in a rush, you could still hate PVP and thus you’re now immediately disqualified lol.

You can get Badges of Honor from doing the jumping puzzles in WvW—quite a few, actually. If you get with a group that’s doing them, you can get a decent amount of guaranteed badges every day.

But, as is the theme of this thread: “It’s not perfect, but here’s how to work with what we’ve got.”

Safari.3021:

I really don’t believe Legendarys are out of anyones reach.
I do, however, believe they are out of the reach of the picky inpatient players.

This, right here, is the truth.

Well, with the corollary that Dusk and Dawn’s prices are absurd right now, but that’s a complex economic situation having to do with a heady mixture of exploiting, market manipulation, monopolies, and just plain high demand for those two swords, but otherwise yes.

(Sorry, I just have to make sure nobody comes in here and uses those two as examples of why all legendaries are impossible to get.)

Anyway, I plan to just accumulate the things I need for my legendary while playing normally over the next few months. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s intended. I like playing the game, there’s nothing else I intend to spend money or karma on within the game, so I might as well save it (and all the orichalcum and wood I gather, and the rare mats that I find as drops) until I have enough for a legendary.

It’s only going to be a grind if you insist on having a legendary within the next two or three weeks. If you change your expectations to “months,” suddenly you don’t have to grind for hours and hours a day anymore.

Fancy that.

Yes. If you want to get your legendary right now holy kittens if it isn’t in my hand by the end of October I will literally die, you’ve got a heck of a grind in front of you.

If you’re comfortable with maybe seeing that snazzy hammer or staff in December or January, maybe, and just playing the game and not throwing money all over the place in the process, I hardly see that as a grind. Everything that you need to get a legendary can be slowly accumulated by playing the game normally (unless, of course, you just really don’t like WvW or dungeons or events or playing the game at all). Playing the game normally and accumulating the things you need to get a legendary as you do so is only a grind if you don’t actually like the game, in which case I question the sanity of wanting a legendary at all.

Well, hey, like I said: “if all goes well” then you should know that anyone with a legendary is great at all aspects of GW2.

I didn’t say all went well.

But again: I’d ask that people not use this thread to complain about the current process for getting a legendary weapon. I’d like to talk about how we can accomplish that while playing normally assuming nothing changes.

If I had to guess, I’d say that ArenaNet are balancing around PvP and letting PvE players simply adapt.

Warriors aren’t overpowered in PvP. Sure, if you’re caught off-guard by a glass cannon Hundred Blades Warrior it’ll probably hurt, but good players can counter that very, very easily. That means that ArenaNet sees no reason to nerf Warriors: that would just make them underpowered in competitive play.

I’m not saying that’s a strategy I support, but it seems to be what’s currently going on.

Hellkaiser.6025:

There’s nothing legendary about the “lottery weapons” nothing at all, you grind, you either spin the wheel or not.
To be fair it’s not something that would inspire awe in other players or even respect, all people will think is

A: Wow (s)he must have exploited
B: Wow (s)he must have farmed a heck of a lot mindlessly, maybe they’re mentally ill
C: Wow (s)he got REALLY lucky
D: Any number of the above in any order

They’re nice, but I question why anyone would want to farm non stop to blow it all on terrible rng like that :S

Then we’ve got the whole problem of those putting them up at 300+ gold, clearly they’ve worked out that’s how much it takes max, to get a new one and thus are selling off their (potentially exploited) precursors at a rate that will net them some profit, however with this kind of thing going on, and with this rng system, ultimately only a few will win, and if they stop playing the game, that’s money that disappears from the economy. Problem is, the prices may not reflect that when and if it does happen, given that if they are exploiting it will shorten the games longevity for them, this is a real concern.

I would argue that nobody was supposed to have legendaries at all yet.

My way of looking at it is that legendaries are an extremely long-term goal that you can achieve by playing the game normally over the course of several months. How? If you just do all of the things available in the game—WvW, dungeons, and Orr/Frostgorge events—and save all of the orichalcum, wood, and rare mats you come across, as well as saving your money, you could probably have your legendary within a few months.

The people who have them already either got extremely lucky or had help. Which is fine, by the way! Several guilds were made pretty much just to make a legendary as quickly as possible—it’s a prestige thing. But doing it alone will take a longer time. If you’re singleminded—if that’s all you want to do in the game—then yeah, it’s going to be a grind. But if you just play the game, play the new content that’ll be coming out within the next couple of months, and don’t unreasonably blow all of your money and materials constantly, you’ll get it eventually.

If we all had legendaries, or were well on our ways, a month and a half into the game I’d think there was a serious problem.

Gohlar.3671:

Or you could just buy the gold like Anet wants you to. The whole game is designed to encourage micro transactions. This design decision really bit them in the butt though as it created a market for bots to thrive.

Between this and D3 2012 is really bad year for gaming.

Oh, hey, I didn’t even notice this post tucked between my two.

Please stop with this ridiculous conspiracy theory stuff, okay? This game is not designed to reward the buying of gold. If it was, the gem-to-gold conversion rate would be a whole lot better than it is. If I can make $15-$20 worth of gold (by the current conversion rate) per day just by playing normally—doing dungeons with my guild and running around Orr and Frostgorge gathering and doing events—then it’s absolutely ludicrous to suggest that buying it would be any faster.

Logun.2349:

Op, I can agree with most of what you said except for giving ANet a Pass on the use of a Random Number Generator to preserve the rarity.

This game fixed a lot of systems to save MMO players from the things they came to hate about the MMO genre the most, from kill steeling to node jacking….. add RNG to the list.

I personally would have thought ANet would have been smart enough to realize MMO players who live and die by RPG rule sets are all about the percentages and the odds.

When you give MMO/RPG players a set of dice with the dots rubbed off effectively making the success or failure based completely on a random event (and not giving them a system to affect to odds) you effectively break the game for them.

Relying on a random chance event to being the precursor to obtaining the most sought after prizes in the game is just a total fail as far as I’m concerned. It’s a black hole money sink of kitten’ing you over that wipes all effort put into it by one RNG is no fun.

I’m not trying to give ArenaNet a “pass”—I’m just suggesting ways to work within the current system. If it changes, great! Otherwise, this post is meant to offer a way to work with what we’re given.

Plague.5329:

The “Master of Trade” one is the only component that’s actually difficult. Coincidentally it’s the least important, in terms of proving you actually deserve one.

So:

• Don’t enjoy money.
• Grind every day, the same three areas to make money you will not enjoy.
• Keep in mind prices are so high it doesn’t matter how much money you make by grinding.
• Keep grinding.

You’re right that trade is probably the hardest part, but the only thing it demands of you is time.

I’m of the belief that even if RNG is removed from the process of getting a legendary, it should still take a long time. It’s a long-term goal—it’s not meant to be done comfortably while you’re just casually playing the game. If you’re playing a couple of hours a day like I do, you can still make a reasonable amount of gold just by doing the things that are available in the game. I run dungeons with my guild. I run around Orr doing events and mining. And then I save that money.

What do you mean by “don’t enjoy money,” anyway? Do you enjoy just having a bunch of money sitting around in your inventory screen? Or do you want to be able to buy all of your cultural armor within a month and still have enough left to get your legendary? Once you have a full set of rares there’s nothing worth spending money on that isn’t exotic jewelry, cosmetic armor or weapons, or a legendary. If the legendary is what you want, what’s the problem with saving up for it?

Full disclosure: I could have about 10 more gold than I do now if I’d realized I could get exotics more easily through dungeons than through crafting them myself. I would’ve just made myself a set of rares and started doing dungeons immediately. I’ve got full exotics, though, so all of my dungeon tokens are just going towards looking cooler.

I’m not saying “grind a whole lot!” I’m saying “play the game and do the things that are available to do and the money will come in at its own pace.”

Listen. I’d agree that legendaries should be easier to get if either of these two things were true:

• If legendaries were more powerful than exotics. (They’re not—not by a single point. That was outdated information.)
• If ArenaNet was going to eventually make it impossible to get them—thus making legendaries a “limited time offer” or something.

But neither of those things are true. You have time. You won’t have your legendary this month, most likely, and unless you’re a very serious player you probably won’t have it next month. But I bet if you started saving your money instead of spending it, you could have it by late December, maybe January. There might even be new dungeons and new open world areas for you to play in by then, too.

Unfortunately, it’s a demand issue, FourthVariety. Twilight and Sunrise are the legendaries that the most people want—they look awesome and they’re greatswords. In comparison, Glacial Lodestones, which you need for Frostfang, only cost a few silver each. They cost less than Glacial Cores.

Ectos are dropping in price pretty quickly right now. No luck with those Icy Runestones, though.

Run events in Orr and Frostgorge Sound. And for the love of kittens, don’t run the same events over and over again. Don’t just stand at Penitent Path in Cursed Shore thinking that’s what all the cool farmers do. That’s for idiots. Run around and do all of the events. You’ll be killing a variety of enemies, which really delays the onset of diminishing returns, and you’ll be running a variety of events, which also delays the onset of diminishing returns. Wear Magic Find jewelry and put some Runes of the Pirate in your armor and go to town.

Run dungeons. Any dungeons. Completing a path of an explorable dungeon will award you with 26 silver and 60 tokens once per day. There are eight dungeons with at least three paths each. Do all the dungeons you want to—most of them really aren’t that hard once you learn what they’re all about and how to avoid each boss’s signature attack. Ascalonian Catacombs is especially fruitful, since your level 80 gear will make you kill enemies and bosses very quickittenhere even while downscaled.

If a rare drops for you, sell it on the Trading Post. Conventional wisdom has said that you should salvage rare equipment for Globs of Ectoplasm, but the price of ectos is dropping quickly, and the cost of salvage kits will cut into your profits too much. So just sell the rares themselves. Chances are you’ll make more money doing that in the long run.

If you’re playing actively, mining and woodcutting, and running dungeons or events instead of sitting in town spending your money on the Mystic Forge, you can make 3 to 5 gold per day. And remember: save your kittenloving money.

One last thing: you can do this. Especially if you read this far: you can get a legendary weapon. It will take some time. It’s a long-term goal—a very long-term goal—and it’s entirely possible that you still won’t have it in December. But if you keep working towards it while doing other things that you have fun with in the game, it’ll come eventually.

A Request. This thread isn’t for people to bellyache about how hard it is to get a legendary, how they’re not “legendary,” or how precursors shouldn’t rely on RNG. If you’re not interested in figuring out how to work within the system that’s in place, this ain’t your thread, bucko.

So you don’t have a legendary yet. You know what?

Good.

Yeah, I wrote that. Good. The game has been out a month and a half, roughly—it’s a good thing that you and I don’t have legendary weapons yet. How boring would it be if it only took a month and a half to get to 80 and get a legendary? Sure, some people have them already, but they’re either exceptionally dedicated players or… well, more about them below.

What makes these weapons so legendary, anyway? Well, I don’t work for ArenaNet, but if I had to guess, I’d say that their creation is designed to test your mastery of every aspect of the game.

• Mastery of Combat. You need a whole lot of Badges of Honor from World vs. World.
• Mastery of Trade. You need a whole lot of money. A whole lot.
• Mastery of Exploration. Gifts of Exploration. Enough said.
• Mastery of Crafting. You need two crafting skills at 400. Probably the easiest part, all told.
• Mastery of Dungeons. Each legendary requires a gift from a certain dungeon. Get used to that dungeon. You and it will be friends.

That’s what makes these weapons legendary: if all goes well, you know that anyone wielding a legendary weapon is really good at every aspect of Guild Wars 2. Pretty cool, huh?

The real situation. Okay, let me level with you. Those players who already have legendaries? Most of them had help. There are entire guilds that formed in the early days of Guild Wars 2 with the goal of making the first legendary weapon. That said, it is possible to get a legendary on your own—it’s just going to take longer.

How do I make money? That was a fairly long preamble, but let’s be honest: the thing you’re probably worried about, right now, is your ability to make money. My advice? Before you do any of the below things, you need to know this: stop spending your kittening money. Just stop. If you have a full set of rare armor, weapons, and jewelry, you have everything you need to start working on your legendary. Stop buying different exotic sets. You can get your exotics from dungeons easy enough, and make money doing it. Stop trying to “play the Trading Post.” Save your kittenloving money.

Ahem. There.

Another disclaimer: I’m sorry, but you probably can’t get Sunrise or Twilight right now. The costs of those precursors has gone through the roof. Some people exploited the everloving kitten out of those things, and now a small group of players essentially controls the market. None of the below advice is going to apply to those. The Mystic Forge really is your best bet there, because it’s unlikely that you can make money faster than Dusk or Dawn’s price rises. Quite frankly, that sucks. Unless ArenaNet can find some way to remove those Dusks and Dawns and that money from the game, that market’s kittened.

(I want you to know I’m actually typing “kitten.”)

Malchor’s Leap, Cursed Shore, and Frostgorge Sound are goldmines. Or, rather, orichalcum mines. Not counting the nodes in Eternal Battlegrounds, there are 12 orichalcum nodes and 12 ancient/Orrian saplings in the world, and they reset every 24 hours. Chances are, someone on your server has an up-to-date map of their locations, but keep in mind that the locations change whenever there’s a server reset. If you mine all of the orichalcum available to you and chop down all that ancient wood, and then sell it all, that’s about 1.5 gold per day at current prices—and that’s if that’s all you do. That’s not taking into account that you can hit all these nodes again on another character, if you have another 80.

So step one is: gather all the orichalcum and ancient wood available to you every day.

After that it’s up to you. Here are some other options:

Not everything in every MMO is meant for every player.

I’m sorry, but if everyone could reasonably accomplish everything in GW2 within a couple of months, it would have no long-term appeal for anyone but the most casual of players. That’s not okay, not for ArenaNet’s bottom line, and not for the games long-term health. In a game where everything is about cosmetics, players need to be allowed to feel special. If everyone has something, then nobody gets to feel special, and all that motivation is gone.

If legendaries had better stats than exotics, then I think you’d have a point. It wouldn’t be fair if people who sunk exponentially more hours into the game than you did could more easily defeat you in WvW (or do better in PvE) by virtue of simply having a more powerful weapon than you could ever hope to get your hands on. But they’re not. In fact, the stats on legendary weapons are kind of underwhelming—not everyone’s going to want power, vitality, and toughness on their weapon, and if they do, there are much easier ways to get those.

The motivation to get a legendary is only because they’re “special.”

I want to reiterate: if ArenaNet can come up with another way to get the legendary precursors that doesn’t rely on the Mystic Forge but keeps them just as rare and hard to get as they are now, I’m all for it. I can’t think of anything myself—the only ideas I have to keep them rare rely on RNG—but I’m not a game developer. But, as someone who doesn’t have a legendary precursor and might never have one, I am vehemently opposed to making them more common.

Here’s the thing:

If the idea of grinding gold to buy a precursor makes your stomach turn, legendaries were never meant for you. I say this knowing full well that I’m in that category: as a semi-casual player, I was never meant to have a legendary.

So I haven’t made that my goal.

The problem with having a different method of obtaining the precursor weapons is that anything guaranteed—a long quest line, for example—is inevitably going to make the weapons more common. Once everyone knows there’s a 100% guaranteed way of getting it, even if it takes weeks to do, then I guarantee you’ll see legendaries become common much sooner than you will with the current system. And then what’s the point? When everyone and their cat is running around with Sunrise, it’s just going to be annoying to look at.

If that means I don’t get to have one, then that’s okay.

I’m not completely opposed to making a different method for acquiring precursors, but it has to be just as difficult and just as “rare” as it is right now or legendaries will be a joke.

While I can understand not implementing a universal token system at all—I agree with Robert Hrouda that it’s a bad idea for the health of the game for all tokens to be universal—there might be a compromise.

What if dungeon armors and weapons only required that two thirds of the tokens you use to buy them be dungeon-specific tokens? For example: let’s say I want to get a helmet from Twilight Arbor. Right now that requires 180 Deadly Blooms. What if, instead, it required 120 Deadly Blooms and 60 of any token (including Deadly Blooms)? You could buy it with 120 Deadly Blooms and 60 Ascalonian Tears. Or 120 Deadly Blooms, 20 Symbols of Koda, and 40 Shards of Zhaitan. Or you could buy it with 170 Deadly Blooms and 10 Ascalonian Tears.

The advantage to this, of course, would be for small guilds and groups of friends—they can run dungeons with each other without ever having to slow down their “progress” towards the armor set they want. At the same time, the majority of the tokens for each armor set do have to come from that set’s dungeon, so you know that the person probably spent most of their time there.

nagnag.4058:

So my suggestion would be :

• maybe implement a difficulty indicator for each path – this way new players don’t get frustrated by taking the most difficult path on their first try.
• Give some bosses a few new mechanics so they get more interesting. Like giving them more offensive capabilities (not just more dmg – different attacks/more cc) and/or a nice boss room u need to utilize to be effective (for example: every tree-boss in TA should have “Pulls”).
• add barriers in front of and after each section of every dungeon to make skipping lots of content less rewarding
• this might lead to lower hp pools in the end

(wow just realized that this is a lot of text)

I’m not concerned about difficulty or even about skipping bosses. Your second point would be a nice thing—if bosses had varied enough mechanics to warrant their high health pools I wouldn’t be so bored with them. As it is now, though, bosses are too “one-note” to sustain many players’ interest for the full duration of their fight.

For the most part, every boss in Guild Wars 2 is a Marathon Boss. That is to say, Guild Wars 2 champions and bosses have an extremely high amount of health relative to the amount of damage a party can deal. The problem here is that most bosses do not have varied or interesting enough mechanics to warrant their fights being as long as they are. This leads to a general feeling of tedium—boss fights just turn into an endurance test.

To put it another way: instead of asking, “Can you figure out how to defeat this boss before it kills you?”, the game asks, “How long can you keep this up?”

My suggestion: lower the amount of health that veterans, champions, and bosses in dungeons have by at least 25%. This would in no way make them “easier,” just less tedious. I also think this would go a long way towards making dungeons simply more fun.

Honestly? Playing the trading post takes a certain degree of dedication. You can’t just try it two or three times, lose some money, and declare it impossible. It clearly isn’t, because there are people making huge amounts of money doing it.

I see you’re a Mesmer, which I am, too. We have a horrible time farming events. What works for me is taking Illusionary Persona (30-point Illusions trait) and farming using only shatters. You have to run into the middle of the swarm of enemies and use Mind Wrack and Cry of Frustration in quick succession—ideally while doing Blurred Frenzy so you don’t get hit. You’ll tag most of them pretty well. None of our ranged AoEs are fast enough or do enough damage to tag things.

And anyway: if nothing that’s bought with gold is “worth effort,” why are you bothering to do it in the first place? Just play the game, don’t spend money like crazy, and let it slowly accumulate. Once you have a full set of exotic armor—or even rares, exotics aren’t that much better—you don’t really need money for anything other than vanity items, repairs, and waypoints. And if you’re actively playing the game, you’ll be making more than enough money to cover your repairs and waypoints, so just let the rest pool up.

Buying gems to turn into gold, by the way, is an awful idea. You get a very small amount of gold for your dollars, and if ArenaNet really wanted that to be a viable way of making money, the exchange rate wouldn’t be as awful as it is right now.

I’m going to assume it’s related to the Halloween event that’s going to be coming in a few weeks.

World PvP is an awful idea in GW2. Listen, I like PvP servers and all, but because of the ad hoc grouping and dynamic event systems in GW2, open PvP would be an absolute disaster. Could you imagine trying to do the Claw of Jormag event with half of the players trying to kill other players just because it’s funny? It’d be far too easy to disrupt events and force players to fail at them by killing them over and over.

Not a good idea.

You need to have money to make money—that’s pretty much how it is in real life and in the game, unfortunately.

Here’s what I suggest:

• Use a Master’s Salvage Kit, Mystic Salvage Kit, or Black Lion Salvage Kit to salvage rare (yellow) items that are level 71 or higher—they can give Globs of Ectoplasm that sell for around 18 silver each, and are one of the most important crafting materials in the game.
• Vendor fine (blue) and masterwork (green) items. They’re not worth salvaging. Level 71+ blues sell for a little under a silver, while greens sell for a silver and a half. While you might get lucky and get orichalcum or gossamer from them if you salvage them, just vendoring them will give you enough money to just buy the gossamer or orichalcum you might have gotten by salvaging them all.
• Salvage white items with a Basic Salvage Kit. The silk or mithril you’ll probably get is worth more than their vendor price, and you can still get lucky and get orichalcum or gossamer.
• Once you have a few gold, buy low and sell high. It sounds ridiculous and it sounds risky, but if you’re holding onto your gold it’s not doing you any good. Even if you continue to farm or run dungeons, take the time to buy and sell and turn your gold into more gold.

EDIT: As zerospin says above, you can make a ton of money using the Trading Post and the Mystic Forge… if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, like I am, you’ll just end up with a bunch of magic find maces, tridents, and warhorns that nobody wants. You should only try playing around with the Mystic Forge if you’re not saving up for anything in particular, because it’s easy to lose all of your money in that thing.

illgot.1056:

wait will clones persist if I switch targets before my first target dies?

Yes. Your clones and phantasms “stick” to targets.

I like to put clones on several different targets and shatter them—it lets you spread out your shatter effects further, or daze multiple targets with Diversion, etc. Or put one phantasm on one target and one phantasm on another to keep one target busy.

Whether you take the Domination traits or not depends on whether you’re planning on using a shatter-based build or something that relies more on phantasms. I like both of the Domination traits because I shatter constantly, so doing 20% more damage with Mind Wrack is amazing. Plus, clones crippling the target when they die can really help with kiting if combined with Deceptive Evasion. That’s also why I take Master of Misdirection. Since I have fairly high condition damage, and since all of my shatters cause confusion, I generally have at least four stacks of confusion on every enemy at all times, and that spikes to eight or more if I use Cry of Frustration. It’s basically free damage.

I considered taking the Chaos trait that reduces damage for each illusion you have out, but since I shatter frequently that won’t really come into play very often. If you plan on relying more on phantasms, though, then you’ll probably find it useful.

If you’re not going to shatter often, then I’d skip Master of Misdirection and Illusionary Persona, as well as Mental Torment. I’d probably go 10/20/15/15/10. Take Crippling Dissipation in Domination—your enemies will be constantly crippled in dungeons. The Chaos and Inspiration minor traits will keep you almost constantly under the effects of both Regeneration and Protection if you stand near your phantasms (maybe a Warden?) and seriously lower the damage you take in melee.

I prefer to use a shatter-based build that hops in and out of melee and abuses invulnerability, but something more phantasm-based could be a bit tankier. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’d guess it might lack mobility, since a lot of its survivability depends on phantasms staying alive and the Mesmer staying near phantasms.

I actually posted my own melee shatter build in dungeons in another thread. I’ll quote it here. I agree with Xyrm on the trait distribution, too—20/20/0/0/30 is how I roll, though I wear tankier gear (Carrion, Valkyrie, some Toughness gear, and a couple Berserker’s pieces).

You definitely need to weave in and out of melee, but I think that’s true for any profession’s melee capabilities. I don’t even think a Guardian could afford to sit in melee all the time.

Agent Noun.7350:

Here’s what I use, with a mixture of Carrion gear, Valkyrie gear/jewelry, and Honor of the Waves Precision/Toughness/Condition Damage pieces:

Weapons

• Sword + pistol
• Greatsword

Utility Skills
Take three of these depending on your needs:

• Decoy
• Mirror Images (less vital since you have Deceptive Evasion, but you really should have either this or Decoy, sometimes both)
• Feedback (not always useful, but when it is, it’s a lifesaver)
• Null Field
• Arcane Thievery (ever stolen 25 stacks of might, retaliation, and fury from a boss?)
• Signet of Illusions (helps your clones reach your target to shatter, and also helps you recharge your Distortion in an emergency)

Domination 20

• Mental Torment (+20% Mind Wrack damage)
• Crippling Dissipation (clones cripple on death)

Dueling 20

• Blade Training (20% sword cooldown reduction)
• Deceptive Evasion (clone on dodge)

Illusions 30

• Master of Misdirection (+33% confusion duration)
• Illusionary Elasticity (extra bounce for Magic Bullet and Mirror Blade)
• Illusionary Persona (of course!)

That’s right. Melee. The thing is, Illusionary Persona only affects targets that are within 400 range units of you, so you have to be pretty close to them to hit them with your own persona’s Mind Wracks and Cries of Frustration. So, why not use a sword? While this build could definitely be tankier—I have a few pieces of ruby (Berserker’s) jewelry I should replace with beryl (Valkyrie) for more vitality—it currently relies pretty heavily on invulnerability and escape mechanisms.

For defense, you have:

• 5-point Dueling minor trait that gives you Vigor every time you critically hit.
• Blurred Frenzy (2 seconds of invulnerability every 8 seconds while in melee).
• Distortion on a 45-second cooldown.
• Illusionary Persona lets you do a 1-second Distortion even if you have no clones out.

Once you exhaust all of that, pull out a greatsword, dodge or Decoy out of melee range, and prepare for your next Blurred Frenzy + shatter bomb. Meanwhile, you can use Diversion to daze enemies and keep them from bothering your allies.

Just shatter them.

I used to think this myself—that clones should persist for an entire fight—but now that I’ve been 80 for a few weeks I don’t think it would make that much of a difference. You can generate clones with incredible ease once you have access to a good amount of traits, and if you’re not shattering them constantly in DEs you’re missing out on a ton of AoE DPS.

Even single-clone shatters are worth doing.

If only ArenaNet had implemented initiative for all professions and removed cooldowns completely, I think they would have then been on to something truly original.

I actually kind of agree with this. I had the same thought while playing a Thief myself.

What I’d like is for Thieves to keep their uniqueness—no weapon skill cooldowns at all and using Initiative as a resource—while other professions get lower weapon skill cooldowns and an Energy resource that recharges at a different rate than Initiative does. This lets Thieves keep one of their main draws—that they have no weapon cooldowns at all—while giving other professions just a little of that Thief magic and allowing ArenaNet to continue balancing at least somewhat around cooldowns.

Of course, then we just have Guild Wars 1’s system again, but I’m comfortable with that.

And, of course, this would never happen. But it’s nice to dream.

Poplik.8697:

Also when you steal the fat stack of boons with arcane thievery, you could use signet of inspiration to share them with your party.

Oh yes! How could I forget? It’s a pretty fun trick to do. It works well with the Superior Rune of Lyssa, too. When you have six of those runes, you get all boons (and I do mean all boons) when you use an elite skill (like, y’know, Time Warp). Then you can copy them all to your party and enjoy god mode for a few seconds. Fun for everyone!

I also forgot to mention Signet of Illusions, which can make it easier for your clones to reach their target when shattering (thanks to increased health) and will also provide you an emergency shatter recharge (if you need another invulnerability).

ManCaptain.3154:

In dungeons you should go either full zerker phantasm build or a projectile reflect build.

I disagree. For one thing, these really should be the same thing. There’s no reason you can’t have both in the same build, especially because you have time to lay down utilities and support skills while your phantasms do passive damage for you.

But shatter builds are criminally underrated in dungeons. Shatters with Illusionary Persona provide our best source of AoE damage, consistent interrupts and defense, pretty much constant confusion stacks for sustained damage, and (if you trait right) amazing kiting ability using Crippling Dissipation and Deceptive Evasion together.

A shatter/clone factory Mesmer can effectively “kite tank” better than almost any other profession, especially since bosses can be crippled endlessly and they’ll just keep trying to kill those clones.

Here’s what I use, with a mixture of Carrion gear, Valkyrie gear/jewelry, and Honor of the Waves Precision/Toughness/Condition Damage pieces:

Weapons

• Sword + pistol
• Greatsword

Utility Skills
Take three of these depending on your needs:

• Decoy
• Mirror Images (less vital since you have Deceptive Evasion, but you really should have either this or Decoy, sometimes both)
• Feedback (not always useful, but when it is, it’s a lifesaver)
• Null Field
• Arcane Thievery (ever stolen 25 stacks of might, retaliation, and fury from a boss?)

Domination 20

• Mental Torment (+20% Mind Wrack damage)
• Crippling Dissipation (clones cripple on death)

Dueling 20

• Blade Training (20% sword cooldown reduction)
• Deceptive Evasion (clone on dodge)

Illusions 30

• Master of Misdirection (+33% confusion duration)
• Illusionary Elasticity (extra bounce for Magic Bullet and Mirror Blade)
• Illusionary Persona (of course!)

That’s right. Melee. The thing is, Illusionary Persona only affects targets that are within 400 range units of you, so you have to be pretty close to them to hit them with your own persona’s Mind Wracks and Cries of Frustration. So, why not use a sword? While this build could definitely be tankier—I have a few pieces of ruby (Berserker’s) jewelry I should replace with beryl (Valkyrie) for more vitality—it currently relies pretty heavily on invulnerability and escape mechanisms.

For defense, you have:

• 5-point Dueling minor trait that gives you Vigor every time you critically hit.
• Blurred Frenzy (2 seconds of invulnerability every 8 seconds while in melee).
• Distortion on a 45-second cooldown.
• Illusionary Persona lets you do a 1-second Distortion even if you have no clones out.

Once you exhaust all of that, pull out a greatsword, dodge or Decoy out of melee range, and prepare for your next Blurred Frenzy + shatter bomb. Meanwhile, you can use Diversion to daze enemies and keep them from bothering your allies.

Works very well for me.

We know Mesmers are going to get nerfed. That’s why I’m suggesting changes that will bring us more in line with other professions in PvP without crippling us in PvE (which, to be honest, is what’s probably going to happen).

So:

• Move some damage off of phantasms and onto weapon skills so that Mesmers have to be more active.
• Increase the duration of Confusion in PvE only so that shatter-based builds are more practical as a method of dealing damage.

As for Portal, I’ve read so far that changes under consideration include making the repair kit unable to go through a Portal and making Portals unable to go through walls. Of course that second change pretty much removes the rest of the skill’s usefulness, but that’s how MMORPGs work I guess.

But Portal isn’t the topic of this thread. So. Anyway.

Sleaze.3748:

I don’t understand why you’re so concerned with stealth on mesmers right now. Sure we have a few different stealth skills, but anyone that would use all of them in a single build is seriously g.imping their own potential by doing so.

Almost every other skill slot has options that are way more effective. In fact the only stealth that I think is worthwhile is decoy while the rest are pretty useless. I guess I could understand you’re issue with it when the the Prestige was bugged giving mesmers almost endless stealth, but that issue was fixed weeks ago.

For someone to be saying that mesmers are ‘dancing around in stealth’ almost makes me wonder if and how much time you have actually spent playing them because someone that sits the entire fight in stealth will likely lose his phantasms and not be winning any 1v1’s.

edit: g. imp is a filtered word???

Apparently it is.

Anyway, I’m just trying to address two complaints: one that I have, and one that others have. Obviously the Mesmer isn’t going to spend their entire time in stealth—that’s ridiculous. But the fact that we can do so much damage without breaking our stealth has a lot of PvPers frothing at the mouth for us to be nerfed into the ground. I’m just trying to offer a suggestion or what I think is an inevitable nerf that won’t actually hurt our damage or hurt is in PvE.

In fact, I think it would help us in PvE. If we were less reliant on phantasms for our damage output, many people would be less reluctant to shatter their phantasms. Phantasm-based builds could still be popular—it’s great that we can do passive damage while focusing our attention on supporting, especially in dungeons—but it would help encourage people to experiment with shatter-based builds as well. Combined with a buff to Confusion’s PvE duration, I think we’d see a lot better build variety.