Guild Wars 2

@Zeki

You said you didn’t want to see thousands of noobs running around with a precursor. So I guess I assumed that meant you only wanted to see pro players having them seeing as pro is the opposite of noob. That isn’t too hard to understand is it?

Anyway, if you truly are of that opinion than you should be voting to change precursors into something that takes skill to obtain rather than rng. Rng is not worthwhile and it ENCOURAGES cheaters and gold buyers rather than discourages them as your post would suggest.

If you consider the hardest part to be at the beginning then you should be grateful for that. It means you can easily do many attempts on it untill you master it. And it’ll be nothing but smooth sailing after that right?

Anyway the puzzle is great! No change!

Ok, so the skins aren’t unique and the stats while unique aren’t in any way op. Sounds like there’s nothing to be upset about…

There are easier ways to get exotics. I can’t see anyone making that much money off of farming that boss for the few hours untill it was nerfed. I doubt it was Anet’s intention to give everyone a full set of exotics for minimal effort just because it’s halloween, so I’d say the nerf was justified.

Human Elementalist
No boosts

Took me four hours! Worth it though XD

@Zeki

You are sorely misguided if you think having a legendary is any kind of indication of a pro player. I guess you could say the first few people who got it are good because they found ways to get rich. But now there could also be gold buyers or exploiters or people who’s guilds pooled the gold to do it.

The only people who you could at least consider to be pros in the sense that they put in the time and effort by farming are currently shafted by the high TP prices and the Mystic Forge RNG. Those are the people I would consider most worthy of a legendary as it exists now, but they probably won’t have it for a while.

You make some good points, but I think you’re overreacting a bit when you say:
“but all the good content costs just as much as a sub fee”

You actually consider the Black Lion Chest skins to be ALL the good content? Even if we limit ourselves to this patch alone there have been new dynamic events, jumping puzzles and an open world dungeon added that isn’t even related to halloween and it’s free.

In context of Halloween you can do pretty much anything for free or cheap. I’m sorry the event (which still has 3 acts to go) is bugged for you, but I’m sure they’ll fix it by the time it’s over, after all, it hasn’t even been the first day yet. Although I don’t see how that translates into “nearly every halloween quest is broken”.

Well the person who reported the godskull exploit to Anet made a post on guru and said himself that he made 900 gold off of it and he apparently had zero trouble realising that it was an exploit (that’s why he reported it)

I think the precursors were only around 100 gold or less at the time which meant he must have made at least 9 of them to make that kind of profit. If he managed to get that many of them my guess would be that the chance of a precursor drop from godskull weapons was much higher than it currently is by using exotic weapons.

Well, that’s the extent on what I know about this issue anyway.

Depends on how many people want to craft legendaries. I know some people say they should be kept super rare but I don’t think that’s going to stick. The legendaries have been presented by Anet as a feature of endgame (not the only feature of course.) As far as I know Blizzard never released a video and a blog post about the Ashes of Al’ar. It was just this item in the game that dropped once in a blue moon, so no one really made it their goal to farm one out. The legendaries in this game are different. People have set their sights on them and I don’t think that was against Anet’s intentions.

A system like rng isn’t necessarily bad by default. It only becomes bad when it’s taken to an extreme (like most things in life). Obviously every single drop from every single mob is a rng, but no one is complaining about that because the rng in those cases is regular enough to reach an average for most players.

The precursor rng however is so abysmal that it creates astounding differences. The money spent in the MF for a precursor can range anywhere from 0.5 gold to potentially even 1000 gold. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of luck based systems. Luck can help players to speed up their progressions by getting mystic clovers faster or salvaging more globs of ectoplasm. But a possible 1000 gold difference is just far too much. The TP is an option yes, but it’s not the source and therefore is not reliable. Someone still has to get lucky and get those precursors in order to sell them.

The MF might be a good item sink system but it’s probably not a good idea to have it rely solely on precursors. There needs to be more desirable items (not just skins since there seems to be plenty of those already) that will make people want to throw items in it. That way the pressure isn’t just on the precursors.

Of course we don’t need legendaries. As humans there is in fact only one thing that we absolutely need.

We need to die.

That’s why I personally don’t like to focus on what I need but what I want. Seeing as I really like playing this game I see nothing wrong with discussing on how to make it better. And that’s really all that we’re doing here. Discussing how to make legendaries and subsequently the game better.

If all I do is give up on things with the excuse that “I don’t need to…” then I would probably end up in a bad place.

I wouldn’t set myself up for a release date, since we don’t even have any kind of confirmation yet.

It’s a tricky question. Calling someone a selfish player because they don’t specc support is a dumb idea, especially since it’s not vital to finish a dungeon. Besides, just because you’re not directly buffing your allies does NOT mean that you’re useless to the team.

As an ele I make sure to have survivability so that I’m not a constant liability to the team. I also make it a point to take full advantage of my cc skills which tends to help everyone in my group.

To me the idea of a selfish player is someone who doesn’t rezz from downed state, who doesn’t make an effort to avoid danger, who uses 3 skills instead of 10, who doesn’t pay attention to his surroundings… If someone wants you to run the build that THEY think you should have, then I would say they are the selfish ones.

This is still an mmo. It’s different but that’s what Anet was going for.

And despite what many people refuse to believe the market exists for both types.

I’m actually pleasantly surprised by how well the no trinity system worked out. I was afraid that people would constantly be looking for specific classes for their pugs. There’s still some people that are convinced that a heavy armored melee is needed in every group.

One time I did an explorable with 2 thieves 2 rangers and myself an ele. One person said we would fail because we don’t have a “tank” but our playthrough had literally no difference in fact I think we were a little bit faster than usual.

So would I but Anet wants the MF to keep working as an item sink to balance out the economy. Looking at the big picture I can understand their situation but since this is a game I think we can probably have our cake and eat it too.

Problem right now is that the main source of MF usages is probably in attempts to win a precursor. But it’s not healthy that the entire economy balancing rests on precursors. They need to put in more different desirable things that can be obtained through the MF so that the pressure on the precursors isn’t so high. Then they will no longer have to rely on such insanely low drop rates in order to keep the MF working.

I doubt they will ever make world drops more viable then the MF since the MF costs money while grinding actually gains you money. That would cause the MF to be reduced to just another pretty LA ornament.

Shakki.3219:

Well that’s life in an MMO… have luck or not. And i like it and it never should be changed so all the crying people will stop.

If you don’t like change then why even play new mmos at all? You should have just stuck to your first one, or the earliest one that hasn’t shut down it’s servers.

The new mmos are all about “new ideas” this and “constant updates” that. And with all that listening to the community nonsense, the idea that nothing should be changed probably isn’t going to last very long in an environment like this.

No, I also have the option to petition Anet to make a change which I believe will make the game better.

It’s not really that much of a stretch. They do have these groups of devs called “live teams” whose sole purpose in the company is to continue changing this game for the better. In fact I seem to recall statements of them saying they are in fact listening to the community and if you payed attention you’ll notice that certain things have in fact already changed since launch (many of them due to community feedback no less).

This argument isn’t about how things are but how things should be. We all have different opinions on that matter but Anet will have the final word. They already hinted at possible adjustments and I expect they will eventually make a statement on whether those adjustments will actually take place. Untill they actually say that nothing about precursors will ever change I will continue to make my case on why they should.

@deathTouch

If becoming a TP mogul in order to obtain a legendary is really part of the game then I’ll believe when a dev says it directly.

I really wanna see that post: “We designed the Trading Post as a main part of our PvE endgame so that the top ranked market players can distinguish themselves in the art of GW2 economy gameplay and thus proving that they and only they are deserving of a legendary weapon.”

I’m sure they’ll be making that announcement and confirming your point any day now. Along with the announcement that they will reskin the legendary greatsword into a massive credit card that makes a ka-ching sound everytime you swing it.

I think Anet already mentioned making chests more valuable. That’s really all they need to do to make people want to kill the guy.

@LFk

You’re right. Obviously when it comes to PvP you can’t simply have all ties or have everyone be the winner. But it was Anet’s own philosophy to separate PvE and PvP where PvE would be focused on cooperation and PvP would be focused on competitiveness.

In my opinion the legendaries definitely fall under PvE so it’s a bit disheartening to see it being gated by the economic competitiveness. Obviously whoever is good at making money through trading should be rewarded and they are since they can forge a legendary a lot faster as well as afford anything else they want.

Problem is not everyone is interested in the TP. Some people just want to play and farm out the mats over time. The thing with precursors though is that they can’t really be farmed out. Considering how extremely rare they are, they seem to be almost impossible to obtain by anyone who doesn’t engage in and is extremely successful at TP play.

Most people probably wouldn’t mind if they needed high skill in combat or even jumping puzzles in order to obtain a legendary but aren’t too crazy about the idea of playing a stock broker.

I guess if competitiveness and being among the best should be a requirement for a legendary then I’d preffer it if they were given as rewards to top ranked sPvP players.

When you farm for lodestones you may not always get them, but at the very least you’re earning some coin while doing it (and you can buy lodestones with that money).

The precursors are just the opposite. For everytime you try to get it through the Mystic Forge you’re going to LOSE money. At least with lodestones it’s impossible to move backwards from your goal, the precursors on the other hand are just that. Constantly moving backwards.

I’m not saying the lodestone drop rates shouldn’t be changed at all. If Anet changes it you won’t hear an argument from me. I’m just saying that as grindy as they may be, they pale in comparison to the main problem.

LFk your post is a bit contradictive. You want people to find a way to roll for precursors while making average profit at the same time. But you refuse to give away your own method because it would drive up the prices and thus making your method invalid.

This means that no matter what, your method cannot work for the masses but only for a few individuals. While I’m glad you found yourself such an effective method but it doesn’t really solve the larger issue. Someone like myself would be more interested in a scenario where players in general could have a more stable (even if still expensive) way of crafting a precursor.

In the end, the only way to craft a precursor is still only through the tiny chances of the mystic forge or even much tinier chances of world drops. Someone has to do it. Someone has to throw in those blades into the Mystic Forge untill they drop. Someone will have to get extremely lucky while most others will have to go on empty handed. There’s no win win scenario here.

For all intents and purposes, gaining a precursor is no longer a matter of PVE but economy based PVP. For everyone who’s currently winning like yourself a lot of others need to be loosing. The problem is, this isn’t the type of game everyone wants to be playing. Not everyone wants to play the TP. Personally I wanted to get a legendary, not through farming but through regular play that would eventually allow me to afford getting one. The state of the precursors however is making it a huge problem for me to do so.

I still intend to get one of course, but I definitely definitely think Anet needs to look at it’s current method of obtaining.

I have done explorables with 4 eles and a warrior.
I have also done them with zero warriors or guardians.

There was literally no noticable difference. All you need is a team of people who know how to play their class and you’re set.

As an ele I have long since stopped being squishy. I have optimized my build and learned to take advantage of all of my skills, to survive as long (or longer) as any other team member. I constantly change up my utilites and weapons according to the situation.

I’d much rather see they change the precursor instead of lodestones. Lodestones are managable even if they take a while. You can get some from farming and buy more from the TP. For every lodestone you’ll be a little bit closer.

Precursors however have no progress, you just keep loosing money in the forge untill you maybe you get one eventually.

Shakki.3219:

Still funny to read all this… All you do is complain if you would invest the time you complain into actually playing you wouldn’t have to worry

It’s also funny when someone thinks they know how much time me or anyone else is spending in the game. Unless you actually make your point with some facts you can stop posting.

The forums aren’t really a good representation of people’s overall happiness with a game. Admitedly a lot of issues are brought up here which the devs have a chance to respond to.

Sadly there’s also a lot of drama involved. A lot of people seem to think they can get their point across better if they add in things like “THIS GAME IS DYING!” or “THIS ONE SPECIFIC PROBLEM IS THE REASON WHY TENS OF THOUSANDS WILL QUIT WITHIN TWO DAYS!”

And then there’s posts that really don’t contribute at all and their entire purpose is to hate on the game for who knows what reason.

Devs don’t post every few comments just to make their intentions clear. The fact that they aren’t responding all the time doesn’t mean they’re just ignoring the issue.

There’s a lot of reasons why devs don’t just post all the time. Sometimes a conversation can go a more natural course without the powers that be constantly interrupting. What Anet decides to do or not to do can’t be measured by the number of their posts.

ravinhood.3981:

Why do you think you must/should have this Legendary weapon in a month or two? I’ve played MMO’s where it took YEARS to get these kinds of weapons. I’ve never seen so many whiners and complainers who think the very best items should drop like rain or be easily gotten in a very short amount of time. It’s an MMO…..things are MEANT to take a longgggggggggggggggg time to get.

He literally never said he wanted a legendary weapon in a month or two. Why do we keep have to make counterpoints to LIES. There’s no other way to call it anymore. If you quote someone and then ask him why he wants a legendary in a month or two when he DOESN’T actually say he wants it in a month or two then you are in fact LYING. Stop making arguments based on LIES because it makes them meaningless.

deathTouch.9706:

Archer.6485:

You can expect to spend even more than that. Who knows? You might have to spend double that amount. It’s RNG.

Imagine you had a 50% chance to gain a precursor. On average you should get one after only 2 attempts. But with just a little bit of bad luck it could easily take you six tries to get your first one. That means your investment was 3x bigger than average.

Same thing can happen with really low RNG. You might spend the average which is estimated at 300g OR you could get a bit unlucky and have to spend 3x that amount which is already 900 gold. So good luck.

Or you could get it on your first try and net a profit of close to 300g.

Your post is pointless.

Actually my point is even stronger with your statement. The difference in cost between two players trying to obtain a legendary can LITERALLY be between 1 gold or 1000 gold. That is not a well working system.

GG for all the money you made, It’s perfectly fine, I don’t consider you an exploiter in any way. But if you’re telling me that being a really good TP player is a requirement to obtain a precursor than you can just GTFO.

There needs to be a more stable option of obtaining a precursor for slower paced players period.

Maybe he had enough money to buy a precursor, just don’t say he could have made even more money by throwing them into the forge.

Btw, a rare greatsword is closer to 14.5 silver.

24x mithril for 30c each
12x elder wood for 30c each
15x t5 fine mat for 25c each

That’s 1455 copper or 14.55 silver. Of course TP prices change all the time so it gets cheaper or more expensive all the time.

I’m 25 and I’m crazy about this game.

Not sure if age is the main factor but what I do know is that I probably wouldn’t appreciate this game as much as I do if I didn’t play other mmos in the past. Anet really did fix a lot of things that were bugging the living hell out of me and were prime reasons for me quitting them.

WoW: I quit because of the gear race in which I could never succeed even though I had pretty much put my life on hold to try and keep up with.

Aion: I quit because the grind was unbeliavably long and incredibly boring. People say GW2 has too much grind? That game took me and entire month of constant playing just to reach 25. Needless to say I cancelled after that.

Rift: I actually found a great raiding guild and the content was really fun, but at the end of the day I realized I was only logging in for the raids 3-4 nights a week for 3 hours for the slow paced gathering of shinies. It just didn’t feel like it was worth the 15 bucks/month anymore.

SWTOR: Waiting for hours upon hours to get one over-entitled healer who would quit the group because of one wipe. I was a jedi consular which means no other consular would want to group with me because of the kitten loot system. And since consulars were the most popular class on republic side that meant getting groups was all that much harder.

It’s actually incredible to think that not a single one of those problems can happen to me here

It still doesn’t say that it HAS to be rare or that more of them would make them not be legendary anymore, as is the argument with some people.

You can expect to spend even more than that. Who knows? You might have to spend double that amount. It’s RNG.

Imagine you had a 50% chance to gain a precursor. On average you should get one after only 2 attempts. But with just a little bit of bad luck it could easily take you six tries to get your first one. That means your investment was 3x bigger than average.

Same thing can happen with really low RNG. You might spend the average which is estimated at 300g OR you could get a bit unlucky and have to spend 3x that amount which is already 900 gold. So good luck.

There is no way in hell that throwing rares into the Mystic forge gets you enough exotics to cover your losses and make a profit. Otherwise everyone would be doing it. Like it or not, your math is completely off. Don’t believe me? Go spend a few hundred gold on it and tell me what you earned.

“http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/legendary
Definition of legendary:
Of or pertaining to a legend or to legends.
Appearing (solely) in legends.
Having the splendor of a legend; fabled.
Having unimaginable greatness; excellent”

Huh, says nothing about having to be unique or extremely rare or available only to a select few…

Who would have thought.

I really don’t get why crafting should be profitable. Anyone could do it then. Just stand around and making money in Lion’s Arch by clicking on materials to turn into gear. The only way it could make money if it had unique recipes or crafting was really hard to max out. I mean like impossible for the majority of players and that won’t happen.
And whether you have crafting with unique stats or skins there’s always hgoing to be people making tons of money and the rest will get screwed over.

flyinpoons.6481:

In game or in real life I actually want to succeed based on my abilities, and if working harder is what it takes, then I work harder, but it’s ok, you always have GW2 and in real life the welfare state, they don’t care that you have no desire to work at anything, and wont judge you.

You’re seriously going to say that people who like GW2 want to be on welfare? How distorted is your perception of life? You can tell the difference between games and reality right? You think because you would rather play some other game, you’re more succesful in real life than other posters?

You’re here arguing on the forums of a game that you don’t even like. I guess that allows me to make assumptions about you, like apparently you’re completely incapable of letting things go. That’s not a healthy attitude.

Honestly I don’t want to get rid of conjured weapons cause I really like the idea of them, but yea they need to be a lot more useful if they’re going to use up a utility slot in my build.

Personally I don’t think the warrior is underpowered at all. I play an elementalist and I have spent a lot of time working on my gameplay to survive different encounters. I bound my keys so that I can reach any of them at all times and I’m actively watching my opponents making sure I time my dodges for maximum effect. It’s pretty difficult but I think I’m at a point where I can safely say that I have become a decent player.

My friend on the other hands uses his warrior by standing perfectly still and just whacking anything in front of him. And sometimes he uses his utility skills by mouse clicking on them. MOUSE CLICKING! My ele would be dead three times over if I took the time to mouse click on a skill! I have to do everything in split second!

Warriors lol

Maybe people are anticipating that Anet will change precursors’ drop rate or method of obtaining them so they’re selling them up while they can still overprice them.

@Shakki

Yes technically I would still preffer that everyone got the weapons over the current system, It’s freakin’ PvE content. Who cares about exclusivity. It doesn’t actually make you special in ANY way. The legendaries don’t actually make you a legend you know? They’re just items you can work towards for personal achievement.

That’s not what we’re arguing however. No one said they wanted a legendary within days or weeks. What we’re actually arguing (as I explain it for the millionth time) is that the method of obtaining a precursor is not really fair and it’s not in any way fun. It’s not legendary either since that’s your big concern.

Anet can make obtaining the legendary as hard and time consuming to obtain as they want. If that means 2 years then it means 2 years. But what I don’t want to see is that my obtaining a legendary is completely up to chance or up for grabs in an extremely small and competitive market on the TP.

I read pretty much all the interviews, diaries and marketing on the game I could find for four years. The game is pretty much what I expected it to be and I wouldn’t trade it for any other mmo currently out there. Not even close.

Maybe I’m the one who understood the interviews wrong? But then what are the odds that it turned out into exactly what my vision of it was?

Zutroy.9105:

*No grind: grind in lvl1-80 is well hidden, it’s cool. lvl80 is all about grind: grind 100,000+ money for the easiest end-gear, grind thousands of tokens for the “pseudo-hard” gear, grind loads of mats+millions karmas points+hundreds of millions experience points+grind WvW+… for the ultimate stuff. Challenging? No. Grindy? Yes.

Could you please point me in the direction of an mmo that has NO grind? Or at the very least an mmo that has less grind than GW2 in obtaining best stats gear? If you could give me just one example that would be great.

I’d just like to ask a question to everyone who is telling the OP that he shouldn’t have gambled. If everybody takes your advice and stops gambling in the Mystic Forge, then where will all the precursors on the TP come from? Random drops in Orr? Yea, those only happen every other blue moon.

The fact is that the TP is not a magical source of guaranteed precursors, somebody always had to gamble for it. It always comes back to the Mystic Forge.

If you can tell OP that gambling was a bad idea and that the better solution is buying off the TP because it’s more reliable then I can safely assume that you don’t like the Mystic Forge gamble system either and would rather see it replaced with a more sensible way of obtaining precursors?

Or are you just here to be kitten?

Will people please stop defending the RNG on the basis that RNG exists in real life? What the hell does GW2 have to do with real life? Just because there are Casinos in real life it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to put them into an mmo. At least not as the only means to obtain an item that is necessary for a large part of endgame content.

The same goes for defending the idea that you can’t have stuff unless you’re super rich and can make money really fast in the game and everything is okay with that. How does that actually help the GAME???

For those of you who somehow missed the OBVIOUS, we’re here to discuss how to make the GAME better and more enjoyable in terms of obtaining the legendary. The way I see it, Arena Net can cater to the hardcore 1% who already got their legendary or are well on their way (already have the precursor) and leave the rest of us in the ditch (a much deeper ditch than what it was before the godskull fix). I’m sure it’ll make those guys feel really great about themselves but it will only alienate the rest of the playerbase to the point where many of them will start abandoning this game.

OR they can start implementing ways for the rest of the community to gain precursors in a more reasonable way. Not necessarily easier, just less friggin’ random! Who cares if more and more people start getting it eventually. Within 1 or 2 years we’ll get an expansions with new shinies and legendaries and it won’t matter anymore.

You wanna talk real life? Real life is that Anet will want to make this game enjoyable for as many people as they possibly can, because it’s in their best interest to have as big of a community as they can get. If that means upsetting a few no lifers who are so desperate for attention they feel the need to be the only ones with a certain ingame item then so be it.

I forgot to mention there’s probably a “grass is greener” effect going on here. People don’t notice all the annoyances that they have been complaining about in other mmos don’t exist here, but I for one remember them.

I remember when I was playing Swtor and couldn’t find a healer for dungeons to save my life. And when we did get one ( after an hour of doing nothing) he was an arrogant prick who quit after one wipe in a dungeon none of us had done before. I remember in WoW I could never find a raiding guild because all of them demanded that I already have several pieces of raiding gear as well as raiding experience from vanilla (I started playing in BC). Later things got worse with gearscore and achievement linking. I also remember the forums being flooded with complaints about how PvP wasn’t even remotely fair because of the pvp gear grind that only people with the most free time could max out.

I wonder if those people who left GW2 went back to those games, waited 3 hours for a tank and thought to themselves “God I missed this.”

Morrigan.2809:

I agree with you completely, just from the responses on this thread I can see that a lot of people simply don’t get it.
There is genius at work in this game’s design and I think dynamic events are a big part of that. The truth is that this game is easy to pick up but it does reward players who have the patience to take the time to immerse themselves in the world.

It is not designed to run through in a zerg and blowing through the content like a locust horde. There is such depth that it is mindblowing- you are just not going to see it if you come with the attitude of time is money where is my loot.

I guess You could say GW2 is an elegant game for a more civilized age. :P

For a lot of people it’s not what they want and for a lot of us it’s exactly what we want. I get what you mean OP but it doesn’t matter how hard you try to make people understand. They either like it or they don’t.

Oh, well if it’s not unusal then everything is fine…

Oh wait! No it’s not! That makes it worse! We’re here because we’re saying that the drop rate is way too low and that this should not in any way shape or form be normal.

Also, there’s this thing that’s called market manipulation. We don’t know what the actual average cost to produce dusk/dawn is. The TP proves nothing. And the average cost is pointless anyway because you can’t rely on average with such low RNG numbers.

I didn’t use caps but hopefully this’ll help you clear up a few things.