Guild Wars 2

In dungeons and fractals it depends heavily on what you’re fighting. If it’s mobs and one or two people go down, it’s actually better to let the others chop the mobs down before ressing. This is because that ressing in combat is slowed and having one person res hurts the dps of the remaining players. Unless of course the players can shadowstep, mist form or vengeance out from the combat zone so that a resser can run to them, get out of combat and res fast.

In fractals, it depends heavily on which boss you are fighting. Some of the boss fights are very close in so there is almost no hope of being able to res a defeated player. Molten Boss, Lava, Urban, Uncategorised, Underwater, Jade Maw all have situations that make ressing or reviving impossible. The best bet in fractals is to make sure your party has at least 1 warrior with battle standard. That is a life saver in tight situations. If a player dies during a non combat part, it’s quicker to let them respawn at a checkpoint.

In fights where you need all the players and mobs are all over the place, some party members should try to get the aggro and kite the boss or mobs away so that another player can res the defeated.

In regular dungeons, it is much the same.

I follow a couple of guide lines
1. Res the downed whenever possible. Stack res is best
2. If by ressing a defeated player I lower the party DPS, then I don’t res, especially if it’s a close fight.
3. If the player has managed to get to a safe point away from mobs/boss then res

Nope, the holo and teq wings were tied to achievement title tracks. If you completed them then you deserved to have those wings. If Anet made them available through crafting or some other such way, the player backlash would be quite serious. Allowing crafting of it would be basically the same as giving it away.

You might have a slim chance of seeing them again if Anet bring back Dragon Bash but otherwise you’ll just have to live with not ever getting them.

FYI I missed out on the Teq wings, which may have been nice for my necro. I had the shattered holo wings but they were applied over a fractal capacitor which I later put through the mystic forge to infuse thus losing the wing cover. I’m none too fussed as I got tired of the flappy nonsense.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

Azrael.4960:

One thing that a lot of people don’t do is bind a key to sheathe their weapons. When you’re carrying your weapons at the ready you will run slower. The character automatically sheathes their weapons after a brief period out of combat, but you can bind a key in your controls to force it. This is probably what is tripping you up. When you fall and take damage, your character pulls their weapons, so you’ll be in combat and with weapons drawn thus you are moving at the slowest speed in the game.

Just to correct this, having your weapons out in and of itself doesn’t make you move slower. Rather, it’s the ‘in combat’ state that slows you down. You can tell if you’re in combat if there’s a little fiery aura around your Endurance/dodge bar.

You’re placed in combat by taking damage (including fall damage), inflicting damage on a non-ambient creature, or inflicting/receiving a condition on something whether or not it does damage. If it was caused by falling damage and nothing else, waiting a couple of seconds will cause the combat state to end and your health to immediately regenerate, letting you move/jump at full speed again. If it was caused by another creature, you need to either kill that creature or move a certain distance away from it to exit combat, whether or not you sheathe your weapons. You will also need to cleanse any negative conditions you’ve suffered to exit combat.

Evading enemy attacks will not place you in combat. As such, dodging is quite important for quick travel!

Afraid you’re wrong there, you definitely move slower with weapons out than not. This is why binding a sheathe weapon key is so useful rather having to wait for the auto sheathe. If you have a Charr, pull out your weapons then start running. While you’re running sheathe your weapons and you will instantly notice the speed difference.

One thing that I have kinda wondered whether it is feasible or not is to grant certain off hand weapons a toggle-able mode, to improve their attraction to players. For example, shields are largely ignored by the two classes you would most expect to play them, Guardians and Warriors. Excepting very niche circumstances, like Fractals where SoA is a must.

Things to ponder

1. Could a shield have a swappable defensive and offensive mode? In all cases, I suggest a reduced cool down as mode swapping would be like attunement swapping, and also to incorporate the cool down for weapon swapping. So some of the 30 – 40s cool downs would come down to some thing like 15 – 20s for example.

Examples

For Warriors
Offensive mode

#Shield bash – same functionality as shield bash now

#Shield slash – If you’ve seen 300 where the Spartans chopped the Persians in the throat or chest, you’ll know what I mean. Might do something like apply weaken or vulnerability, for example

Defensive mode

#Shield stance – as it is now, and only affects melee attacks

#Incoming! – Similar to shield stance but only blocks projectile attacks. There was a similar skill in GW1 that massively raised armour against ranged attacks or it might have blocked the next ranged attack, I forget. It was a paragon skill.

For Guardians
Defensive mode

1. Same skills as now

Offensive mode

1. Shield swipe – interrupts your target and blinds them
2. Inspire allies – beat your weapon against your shield inspiring your allies and grant fury and might.

Or other such things…

Lord Kuru.3685:

Astral Projections.7320:

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

… and playing music is such an advantage?

I would think that it’s more ANet holding a hard line against macros than whether or not music playing gives advantages. They can’t reasonably say no macros but then allow some macros. A company gets into legal problems when they apply the rules inconsistently.

Anet applies rules inconsistently all over the place. One example that’s come to light of late is the treatment of people with two of the same legendaries (some got refunded one, others didn’t).

Your example is invalid. Macros, and their use, are covered in the legal terms of service. You, as a buyer, agreed to them when you installed the game, thus it is a legally binding contract between two parties. From a legal stand point, Anet would have been well within their rights to have said no to everyone who asked for some sort of refund (IMO these players do not deserve a refund). However, some people ended up receiving them and others didn’t. This is inconsistency with internal process, which isn’t legally binding.

An alternative to grinding ascended armour is a pretty good idea. However, you’ve overlooked a couple of points

1. You can craft up the +1’s to become higher grade infusions such that you can get enough AR using just your trinkets to play up to 49.

2. Adding in ascended weaponry and enough AR on trinkets you can actually go in to FOTM without ascended armour at all.

3. Ascended trinkets are account bound so you already have account wide AR. The base AR from ascended trinkets is 30. The back piece and rings can take more with the agony infusions. So conceivably you can make enough AR through that alone.

One thing that a lot of people don’t do is bind a key to sheathe their weapons. When you’re carrying your weapons at the ready you will run slower. The character automatically sheathes their weapons after a brief period out of combat, but you can bind a key in your controls to force it. This is probably what is tripping you up. When you fall and take damage, your character pulls their weapons, so you’ll be in combat and with weapons drawn thus you are moving at the slowest speed in the game.

When I make pug groups, I have 3 rules.
1. If you’re new, tell me when I ask
2. Pull your weight
3. Don’t be a kittenbag

I won’t necessarily vote for a kick for breaking rule 1 unless you’re dragging the whole party down, but breaking the other 2 and boom you’re out.

I really like mixing it up with different classes. I’ve done runs with all sorts of party make ups, it makes things interesting.

BUT, once I see kittenbaggery appear, that player is gone. I don’t care if we’re at a boss or just about to finish, you disrespect people in the party I will votekick you. If a number of people are being punks and I’m host I will bomb the instance.

I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a reappearance of the Tengu weapons that were available in the bonus mission pack. I had the Tengu sword and bow. They were puuuurty

Let’s take it back even further. Not all AOE’s are fields, your skill tool tip will say Field: Fire or may be Field: Water.

To make use of these fields, you use a skill that has Finisher: in it, for example Finisher: Blast.

The examples I’ve chosen are the most popular ones. The trick to watching for a field is the edge of the field will have a ring of what looks like rising white puzzle pieces. If you see someone like that it’s almost guaranteed to be a combo field. There will also be some particle effects inside that will give you an idea as to what sort of field it is.

Here’s an example
An Elementalist with a staff casts Lava Font, which is a fire field. A Warrior runs up and casts Banner of Strength. This banner has Finisher: Blast on it, so when it lands you will see AREA MIGHT appear telling you that all of the tarty members in range just gained might. The warrior then picks up the banner and hits skill 5 which does nothing except it is another Blast finisher and the party members gain more might. Each party member can then pick up the banner or use their own skills with blast finisher and blast the fire field while it is still active to gain more might and so on.

Similar with Combo: Water, although in this case using a blast finisher on a water field will pop AREA HEALING up so that everyone in range gets a heal.

Basically, it’s about observation. There are basically two types of combo finishing, party or self buff and enemy debuff. Blast is probably one of the most useful combo finishers as every blast will be have an area of effect buff or debuff. Blasting a dark field will give area blindness on foes, while blasting a smoke field gives area stealth. Blasting a light field gives area cleanse which is incredibly handy. As I fight with guardians a lot, usually being a warrior, my sustained combat ability in a condition heavy environment is helped a great deal by light fields. Warriors generally have Finisher: Physical, Blast, Leap, Whirl and all of those will cleanse conditions. Physical and Leap are self cleanses, Blast is a party wide cleans while Whirl is a party cleans but not self cleanse as it throws Cleansing bolts out to your party.

Hope that sums things up for you

Theftwind has it boiled down to a T. I don’t wvw much any more, it’s gone too stale, but when I did there were times I would follow the commanders and the server I’m on had a number of commanders who were worth following for the fights, others who took map wide strategy into consideration and others who only hunted other blobs for loot bags. I became somewhat tired of blob fighting as it just descended into who could out frame drop the other such that one side could gain an edge. So instead, I did much the same as Theftwind, capped camps, hunted yaks, picked off sentries as diversionary raids so the enemy commander would think our blob was heading to certain camps, popped white swords on keeps to pull enemy zergs out of position. At times I’d pull a militia together while the main mob was busy smacking the enemy’s blob and take a tower or two. I’d also run recon to see if our keeps were under attack, call troop movements, shadow enemy blobs.

There’s a wide variety of things to do that doesn’t solely revolve around fights, sure they can be fun but if you’re interested in helping the server then put yourself into a role, build your kit around it and go hunting.

People have missed out the one argument against mounts.

Introducing mounts will bring all the whiny WoW kiddies over to GW2….

definitely check LFG for players taxiing to teq runs. On nights that I command Teq runs, I’m on EU, I’ll post up LFGs in the Open World section to bring in enough people to either hard cap the map or at least give us enough people to ensure a solid attempt. Have yet to fail a run that I’ve commanded in.

Nope. There isn’t. Would be nice to get that feature from GW1 where you could have up to 4 sets prepared. One set in hand, the other 3 were in the pack. It would be a nice QoL change to have the primary and secondary set equipped with the option of having a 3rd or even a 4th set in the inventory.

To add on to that, having the option to insta switch, while out of combat of course, into a different set up. For instance, my necro has a condition set, a wvw set and a zerk set all using different traits. It would be a really nice QoL change to have a panel where you can create and store equipment + trait profiles which you can load while out of combat.

It’s called HERITAGE armour, the whole point of the word HERITAGE is that it shows your account descends from GW1, thus linking to that part of your history. If you don’t have a link to the past, you don’t have a heritage and thus you don’t deserve the armour.

Without referencing the wiki, only GW1 veterans would know where and the effort required to get the items like the Wayward Wand, the straw effigy, the claw dagger.

These skins are a reward for GW1 vets who played the game and fought those battles. It’d be like buying a Victoria’s Cross, you have the medal for battlefield bravery but you didn’t deserve it.

I hope it’s not something like LOTR:Return of the King where Rytlock releases the AC ghosts from their curse and surge out of the catacombs to help the war effort. That would be just too derivative.

Or he might raise Rurik from the dead who then rallies the ghosts from Plains of Ashford, Diessa Plateau and the WvW borderlands.

Or the return of the sword opens up a path to another ley line.

Rifles too. there are hardly any rifles that I would call rifles. More like fancy bits of stuff that make rifle sounds. I don’t want to see more odd bits and pieces hanging off the rifle.

Skins like Ascended, Aetherised, Aureate musket, Avenger’s, Black powder, Ceremonial, Ebon vanguard, Felix’s, inquest/mystic, Predator, etc. Rifles that don’t have extraneous pieces that would obviously throw the weight of the rifle off if they were real.

I don’t mind some flashy effects, such as the streak effect of a sword slash, or maybe a muted glow.

I definitely agree that many of the sword skins are poorly designed. The flashiest one I use is Bolt. The others that I use are the Fractal sword and Mistforged Hero’s sword. I’m working towards an Infinite Light, partly because I had a Runic blade in GW1 and that is one of my favourite skins of all time. The MFH sword is reminiscent of the big Middle Eastern scimitars or the ancient Chinese sabres, the designs of which I also love. In terms of non flashy skins, one of my favourites is the Ceremonial sword skin, which is much like a sabre and suits a Thief beautifully. The fractal sword is simply the most beautiful sword in the game. It has the perfect balance of flash versus elegance without being over board on either aspect.
Other swords that I do like are the Krytan, Light, Mystic/Inquest, Seraph and Whisperblade for the simple fact that they’re elegant designs with minimal fancery.

In terms of flashy greatsword skins I use Cobalt (the same as Ebonblade but with a blue fire effect) and that’s about it. Ebonblade and Cobalt skins are about as simple and elegant as a greatsword can be. I also use Naga Fang, although the hooked slashing edge is a little silly from a combat perspective as that would just catch on to armour and things. The Ebonhawke and Lionguard skins are also sensible looking. Others that fall into this category are Dawn/Khrysaor, Dhuumseal, and Ghastly

I’ve always hated using flashy effects to draw attention onto oneself. It’s a big “hey look how cool I am with this big flashy blade on my back!” sign. Hence, why I absolutely detest Eternity, Sunrise and Twilight. They serve absolutely no purpose except to be a nuisance in a big fight and block any of a boss’s tells. it’s hard enough to see with all the elementalist spells firing off I do not need my vision completely blocked by stupid swirls.

The contender for worst looking skin set is the Pearl set. To have that as the crafted exotic set is an insult to the eyes.

I’m on the EU and for the most part when I pug, things are generally pretty good. Join up, fight our way through, loot the boss and part ways. On extremely rare occasions I’ll get a noob or two. I really, really, really don’t mind dungeon newbies provided they tell me before hand that they are new. I really don’t appreciate finding out half way through when they’re dying over and over again. I won’t count myself as any sort of dungeon pro or speed runner. For example, I still haven’t finished Arah or TA because those two dungeons really don’t pique my interest. However, I am experienced enough that I can keep up with speed runners or just hack my way through for the hell of it.

At the times I feel like dungeons, I remind myself that pugging is a lottery. Some days I’ll the jackpot and every run is a blitz, other days not so good and yet others I’ll host a non stacking party and chop everything down in sight. Those last ones have been very fun. I see a mob and I aggro it, I’ve had players joining me who are like minded and we have an absolute ball doing it the old school way. This is what dungeons is about. Speed clears are one thing but going old school is infinitely more charming, not necessarily profitable with respect to time vs income, but a helluva lot more fun.

If you act like a kitten, then be prepared to be kicked. Regularly.

About the only time I’ve been kicked from a dungeon was when I was a bit sick and just doing so horribly in the dungeon that I deserved to be kicked. Never been kicked at a boss even from guild parties. I’m sure many will agree that as long as you pull your weight and don’t be a kitten you’ll get to the end.

OP, your double standard and hypocrisy is plain for all to see. The fact that you can’t see it yourself is astounding.

let’s lay it out.
1. Guild party kicks you and you raise hell and high water.

However,

2. It’s ok for people to go to a guild puzzle event and troll the guild, because, and I quote you,

“Well, i’d say people has the ability to do what ever them want in this game. It’s not breaking game agreement for doing such of a thing in open public area. If your guild event is more organized, I don’t think this kind of thing would happen. Consider about yourself before blame the others.”

Since by your logic, it’s “not breaking a game agreement to do such a thing in a public area” then it is no more breaking a game agreement to do so in a dungeon because an instance is no less a public area than open world. Simply because it is only 5 people in an area does not invalidate the “open worldness” of a dungeon. You are in a restricted public space, but a public space it nonetheless is.

To sum up, I give you your words back to you. Since you are often being kicked from dungeon or fractal groups, “consider about yourself before blame the others”

Every time a mount thread is created, another Quaggan goes into rage mode

Having played GW1 for many years as well as GW2 the single thing that shone out about is the lack of power creep. Dungeon crawlers, like Torchlight 1&2, Diablo 1-3, Path of Exile, etc etc, are all about power creep. Every new bit of gear pushed your survivability and damage output just that much more.
The appeal of GW2 has been the continuation of the GW1 philosophy of no power creep.

Introducing a gift of a damage boosting sigil will have only 1 consequence. Players will be forced to obtain it. You may use the trite argument that players have the choice of not getting it. But as with any gaming community that sees a damage booster, it becomes a must have.

A little sweetener for a big purchase that has no long term impact on the game is one thing but adding in a stat booster of any kind is an absolute no no.

If you can’t see that your suggestion is detrimental to the health of the game then you need help

I like…none of them. I checked them all out and I can honestly say that none of them appeal to me whatsoever. I appreciate that Anet is coming up with new weapon designs and what not, but whatever happened to sleek and elegant? There are a lot of clunky weapons already available and the newer ones are getting clunkier and clunkier.

About the flashiest weapon skins I use are the Fractal sword/axe/longbow, Bolt, Mistforged Hero sword and Cobalt. Otherwise I prefer simplicity over excessive showiness

You don’t have to do the entire story, you can just go to the check points where the particular chapter of the story kicks off. They should show in purple instead of green. When I did the first chapter and started again I thought I would have to do the whole thing from the beginning, but once you restart it, all of the check points will be available so you can do it at your leisure.

Pro-tip: bind your dodge to your Mouse 3 or 4 button and remove the double tap to dodge option. I still have V for dodge, but only for the occasional jump dodge.

I’ve bound dodge to my Mouse 3 and Skill slot 7 to Mouse 4. For Slot 7 I always have my stun breaker like “Shake it off!” or a cleanse. The number of times that I’ve saved myself by insta-popping off SIO! when I’ve been knocked back by harpies in the Uncategorised fractal platforms are too numerous to count.

Just want to say that every time I’ve commanded in a Tequatl run we always manage to hard cap the server the latest by 25min before he spawns. This isn’t even an orgnanised guild run. It’ll be 4 commanders from different guilds and servers with 120-ish random players most of whom I won’t see again. If we’re short of people, we’ll pop a message into LFG taxiing people into the server at which point I can guarantee it will cap. If you want to get into a Tequatl run, look in LFG Open World about 30-40min before he spawns and see if there are any taxis.

So far, of all the runs I’ve commanded, I’ve had 0 failures largely because of the bug fixes and also because so many people have done it now that very few people don’t know the mechanics.

Unlike Tequatl, THW really needs a lot of coordination. The well know guilds like TXS and TTS still regularly do it as far as I know. There is also an alliance of guilds that I used to do THW with regularly, although now the timing is a bit awkward so I rarely do it any more. I’ve been part of many successful runs of the wurms but the effort involved vs the paltry rewards really saps some of the enjoyment out of it.

Another guild that is on the action is DV based in Gandara, which is my home server. Also, keep an eye out in LA or the other cities near the time when THW will spawn. The other place to look out for is the LFG window. Some commanders will post in the Open World section that they are providing a taxi into an organised run. When I command Tequatl runs, I sometimes post in their to make sure the server caps.

Did a 38 run over the weekend and you guessed it, Mai Trin time. She was such a pain in the guts that we ended up doing the 4 man trick to beat her. The trouble we had was that we were all large bodied types. So it was a kitten ed hard time seeing where she was when we were mobbing her. We ended up doing the 1 char out/4 chars in trick to beat her.

On average days, I have pretty ordinary reflexes and it’s not helped by the fractional lag I get sometimes. But in all honesty, there are ways around her skills which a lot of people have detailed.

Since I normally play warrior, I can eat a couple of her attacks without going down and heal up or dodge most other attacks. As often as not, it’s her conditions that can be a right killer. Traited warhorn can be a real life saver. There were two warriors in the party, including myself and both of us switched in warhorns and we tanked all of her conditions. Also had a ranger in the party so whenever he dropped a healing spring we all ran into range and blasted the hell out of it for the heals. Surprisingly, 4 manning it didn’t take as long as I thought it would.

I used to be on Blacktide but took opportunity to move during the transfer window simply because of the sheer numbers of Polish players on the server. Not because I have anything against the Polish but because the WvW commanders that only communicate in Polish or have a poor grasp of English are not going to be able to organise people outside of their own countrymen.

WvW commands boiled down to
“On me!”
“Back!”
“Charge!”
“Regroup!”
“to <Insert structure name>!”

It became quite the in-joke that BT was a Polish server. Especially towards the end of my time there. Polish speakers far out numbered non polish speakers. Following the transfer window, when my guild became split between BT and Gandara, I heard that quite a few English speaking guilds transferred in and one of my guildies moved to one such guild but it subsequently disbanded.

Worse thing was, old LA became really toxic. Anytime players started to talk in Polish, they’d received torrents of abuse from non-polish players, usually along the lines of “This is an international server, speak English!” which is filled with all sorts of irony.

The other problem was that the player base skill level was really quite low. I don’t even know if they’ve since been able to do Tequatl or Triple Wurm. I remember that two guilds tried to organise but people just ignored the commanders and zerged straight into failure. After that attempt, Teq and THW were wastelands during those events.

On BT, dungeons with PUGS weren’t runs, they were slogs. I more or less only did dungeons with guildies because PUGs were just that bad. Same with Fractals, prior to the reduction in FOTM levels our guild leader regularly guested over to other servers to join skilled groups so that he could come back to BT and show us regular fractal runners how it was done. We managed to get to about 53 or 55 (out of the 80) before the update came along.

If I hadn’t been able to move servers, I probably would have quit the game.

luq.2786:

“Feel my rap!”
This thread is hilarious.

you mean “feel my wrap!” …“FOR THE PANINI!”

Good thing I’ve never had to buy a single bolt of silk off the TP. I’ve just salvaged it all from drops. Each run through fractals nets me at least a good 40-50 scraps. I regularly overfill my bank stack. If I don’t, I’m patient enough to wait for it to come with loot.

Now the lower level stuff, that’s a real kicker…

I can totally understand where the OP comes from. Personally when I enter a lowbie area with any of my 80s I generally avoid mobs as they just impede my progress. If I get mobbed, I’ll just cut them down and keep going, which I believe is the main thrust of the original post. If anything, there should be a mechanic that when you enter a lowbie area as an 80 where the mobs actively avoid you as they would sense that you are more powerful than they are. Much like how some predators know not to tangle with other predators (lions and cheetahs come to mind, a cheetah will give up its kill to a lion as it knows the lion is far stronger.)

The exception to this rule would have to be event chains, like Ulgoth, where strictly speaking the mob spawns are vastly below the numbers they need to be given the numbers of players there. As an example, during the hold the zone part of the Ulgoth chain, a couple of dozen centaurs appear but are cleaved/AOE’d down in mere seconds.

In the end, this isn’t something that can be solved by just tweaking numbers. Monster AI and skill sets are just so lacking in depth that regardless of whether the mob numbers are buffed or their attacks are buffed it doesn’t change that mobs are stupid.

Whenever I host fractals, I usually ask for non stackers, although I do have exceptions. Utilising safe spots, like Cliffside during the chest seal is sensible play as is LOS’ing the chanters during the arm seal. Doing it the non stacking way is stupid. The hamster wheel is interesting to do. I’ll stack if someone else’s hosting but if it’s mine, we’re running. One can never count on pugs to do it right and I’ve lost count of the times that we’ve wiped repeatedly because people are just too kitten ed squishy.

Didn’t Anet do one called the Yakkington Post?

And I want to see Skritt running about town going “Shinies! NEW SHINIES!”

Thieves are all about mobility. Of the four melee classes, they’re the most squishy and rely entirely on their stealth and rather large number of evade abilities. Warriors and guardians have the armour and utility skills to sustain a long fight (relatively speaking) while absorbing, at times, obscene levels of punishment. Invulnerability skills like Endure Pain and Defiant stance give warriors, for the duration of those stances, the equivalent of double their actual health pool allowing them to face multiple opponents at once in melee. Guardians have lots of blocks skills effectively doing the same as warrior, but they have to be a lot more careful since their HP pool is so low. Rangers have pets and the mighty signet of stone, which when traited makes both the pet and ranger invulnerable.

These skills make those three classes, with the right kit, able to absorb a lot of damage and still keep fighting.

Thieves are all about burst (unless you want to go condition thief which is also pretty good). So you want to be get in preferably burst down 1 opponent then get out before resetting yourself for another target. This is where stealth skills shine and shadowstep. The skill rotations need practice. For PVE sword pistol or even sword dagger are perfectly viable especially when coupled with shortbow. At level 16, you’ll have access to a couple of utility skills. The signets that improve power, run speed are very useful, the venom skills like drake and skale venom are also very handy to have. Venom skills can be stacked on 1 target or spread to multiple targets. At your level, using sword skill 2 to jump in to engage with your venom skills up and spread the conditions around, with sword and pistol you get Pistol whip which will burn down targets in a hurry. If it doesn’t, pistol 5 then blast with pistol 4 to spread area blindness. That should buy you precious seconds to burn that one target down. Then punch out by hitting 2 again which will shadow return you and remove a condition. Now that you have some distance, switch to shortbow and shoot at your targets for a while. Short bow 4 with AOE poison and blasting with short bow 2 to get lots of AOE damage going. When the recharge for weapon swap is cleared, swap back shadow step in and finish them off. This is just one possible set of skill rotations and every engagement is a chance to practice different combinations.

Thieves are all about timing, your initiative bar allows you to fire off a lot of skills quickly, but depletes quickly as well so don’t give in to the temptation to spam skills. Make liberal use of the auto attack. Dagger auto has a high attack speed but doesn’t cleave, sword attack is slower but has cleave and so for you is the only option.

The other resource thieves have are the stealth attack skills which require good placement to make best use. Sword stealth skill dazes your target from the front but stuns from the back giving you an opening to hit your target hard. If you can time it right and chain another stealth, without being revealed, you can dodge behind and stun them again. Dagger stealth is back stab which is one of the highest damage single target attacks in the game, timing that one right can end the engagement right there.

Dredge can be a nightmare to fight especially multiple ones. They’re immune to blind which is the Thief’s best friend. Fights against them are all about dodging and evading.

Really?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Experience

says that you already have access to +483% (max) exp gain.

Factoring out the wvw xp gain, you can get +440%. Even under non optimal conditions, you can easily get +420% xp gain.

I’ve probably topped 7-800 runs of fractals, so far I’ve had sword, axe, focus, longbow, sceptre, harpoon, shield. At least no doubles yet…

Better yet, how about an option to “auto consume” right click on the food and select the option, at the end of the duration it ticks off another one. Much like auto attack

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

no idea , I stopped playing events when servers merged.

i remember there would be an option for guilds to activate events..
don’t know if that has been implemented though.

This has been implemented for 3 main events, Tequatl, Triple Headed Wurm and Karka Queen.

I’m still a bit ambivalent towards the megaservers. I’ve recently taken to commanding Tequatl runs and the mega server has made it so there are a lot more people around to give it ago. Also with the fixes to Tequatl, even with random players filling up the mega server it’s meant that gone are the days that it really needs voice driven coordination. Also, as more and more people get to doing it, the average knowledge level and skill level with respect to these sorts of events has gone up.

In my previous server, no one had the achievements for Tequatl unless they guested regularly. Without mega servers whole servers full of people who don’t guest were left without the opportunity to try these events and enjoy them. They just looked from afar sadly at what looked to be a fun event that they couldn’t do.

In terms of mega bosses especially with the changed times, it has become a lot more fun for me and I do hope that new or revamped bosses are in the pipeline.

This has the solid foundation of a good idea. At the moment, as many people have pointed out, some players have substantial balances of gold making them wealthy enough to buy whatever they need. Then there are players like myself who do a mix of both, some TP’ing a lot of PVE, so my wealth is modest and income is sufficient to meet my needs, however my karma balance is fairly high, and doesn’t have anywhere to sink it except in to Orrian boxes. Legendary has been made and ob shard reserves for ascended mats are sufficient so now it just pools.

The balance needs to be quite fine. Karma income has to be high enough that isn’t prohibitive to buy order makers but not so much that it drives away all the flippers who don’t want to pve. On the flipside, the tax can’t be so low as to be negligible.

The tax needs to be very carefully defined. A couple of thoughts.

Hypothetically, what happens with a flat karma tax like 20c/karma

1 karma per 20c → 500 karma per 1g → 500k karma per 1000g

So for a player like myself, entering this arena would not be prohibitive in terms of karma use. However, volume traders would be very heavily affected, which is in part the whole point. But I feel that a system that slants so heavily against such traders is not fully justified. The idea is to encourage them to do other things not force them out of the market

How about a sliding scale? As an example (just a back of the envelope calculation).
1 karma per 20c for orders 5g and below → 2500 karma at 5g

1 karma per 22c for orders between 5g0s1c and 100g
→ so, ~2.3k karma at 5g0s1c up to ~45.5k karma for 100g

1 karma per 24c for trades between 100g0s1c and up
→ ~41.7k karma at 100g0s1c up to ~417k for 100g

The increments are just examples and not a solid idea. The tricky balance for a sliding scale becomes one of ensuring that buying near a bracket limit requires a bit of thought in terms of karma outlay. But you don’t want a bracket jump so large that it complicates trading near the threshold.

An MMO should strive for a balanced environment where players are encouraged to do things throughout the game to maximise their experience and not focus solely on one aspect. However, it should do so in such a way that is not draconian to anyone who has a bias towards one or the other. As it stands, Gw2 has players who are very wealthy gold-wise but karma poor and those who are wealthy karma-wise but gold poor, relatively speaking. By partly unifying the two currencies this would address the perception that time spent in the world is less rewarding (from an income standpoint) than time spent just trading all the time. It’s less about spreading the wealth and more about spreading the perception of wealth.

Zackie.8923:

yes please. maybe throw in racial mounts too.

for example

humans can griffon,
asura get a spaceship
charr get a mechanical rhino/hippo
sylvari get a treant
norn get all sorts of animals

+1 on the nonononononononononononononononononono. People really need to stop bring in mounts into these topics.

Mounts related to an area, like how we can ride golems or the giant wurms in GW1, possibly, but mounts for general use, no.

Racial minipets, maybe.

Definitely yes on racial back items

@HHR, the one thing you seem to have missed out is that flippers invest the one thing that no dungeon runner does in the same proportions and that is time. Dungeon running and path selling has been refined down so that it is optimally profitable for that player.

Flipping requires a great deal of patience and time, investment and competing with other flippers to bring in profit. Adventurers compete with nobody to obtain an income and this is the critical point. Adventurers can go step out and voila gold basically falls out of the sky. Even if you sold nothing on the trading post you can make an income. A pure flipper, someone who does nothing but flip (going to extremes here) cannot rely on a source of income that generates gold for them from nothing. Their revenue stream comes purely from the TP.

There is nothing wrong with flipping because a pure flipper gives up the ability to earn all the other forms of currency, laurels, karma, skill points from xp, dungeon tokens to be a pure merchant. If you converted all of their currency that they don’t earn into gold then perhaps you might see why you are so very wrong.

For example, my income is erratic as I generally adopt a more adventurist model. I go out into the world and do stuff that brings in an income much like what most players do. Periodically I sink some of those materials into the TP and make a very good profit. So I craft a load of items, might vendor a precursor I got as loot, etc etc. My gold balance is very healthy but I also have a solid balance of karma if I want to get stuff from those, a few thousand dungeon tokens that I could use to convert to gold if I wanted. So my “wealth” is diversified across a lot of different sources. If I converted all the time I spent gathering all those various forms of currency and spent it on flipping (presuming I make very few mistakes) I too could run a gold balance in excess of 10k gold.

This is why your argument fails. You are completely blinkered to against the things that flippers are not getting and cannot get because all you see is the gold balance

Got sword, axe and shield skins the last 2 weeks (while I was infracted away)

Sylvari make better thieves, at least they can hide amongst the shrubbery more effectively

Technically, a thief would only be able to use the shorter form of the blade.
So in order of size

Nodachi – Referred to as the Horse killer. If you want an idea of its real life size, look up images of the 1960s classic Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa. One of the characters lugs one around and it is LONG

Katana – or tachi, depending on the era. The one most people are familiar with.

Wakizashi – the shorter sword that samurai used to carry as a companion to the katana. Usually used for committing honorable suicide but in some rare styles as a companion weapon in 2 bladed fighting style. I would seriously love to see daisho style of equipment, kind of like how the warrior wields 2 swords but only for the thief to wield it blade forward instead of reversed.

Tanto – Some samurai carried a 3rd blade which was shorter than the wakizashi and is more along the lines of a dagger. Depending on the era, samurai carried tachi and tanto but later converted to katana/wakizashi

These were samurai class only weapons.

Ninja wielded a variety of weapons and an actual bladed weapon like a katana or wakizashi has never actually been historically proven.

So and so. there are a few sources of blade shards around. The sprocket node in your home instance (if you unlocked it), the Aetherblades in Fractals, the Twilight Arbor Aetherblade path and the Aetherblade JP are pretty much it

phys.7689:

Azrael.4960:

The fundamental mistake is comparing the Trading post to a stock market. The TP is more a commodities market. If you look at it that way it makes more sense. Flippers are more in line with speculators.

Regardless of how you look at it every game has an in game economy, formal or otherwise. Using it to bring in an income to fund your in game activities has been the mainstay of all of these games.

The OP’s suggestion is ridiculous as that would drive up prices not bring them down. Under their idea, in order for the prices to even be held static, the same quantity of items removed from the TC would have to equal the volume being put in. This is just not going to happen.

What you see as illegitimate is actually a very legitimate way of playing the game. You go off into the world and hoover up vast quantities of materials, weapons and gold then sink it into the TC or merchants. Adventurer’s gold is created more or less out of the air and as such, there is effectively a limitless supply of it. What does a limitless supply of currency cause? Inflation, then hyperinflation.

Flippers are a necessary part of the in game economy. They’ll will do dungeons, sell Arah paths, gather mats, and all the stuff that anyone does but the gold they earn from that is sunk into the TC, which acts to keep the economy balanced. They earn a great deal of gold, this is true but 5% fee also acts to remove a great deal of gold from the market which in turn helps control inflation. Even pulling a number out of the air, one could consider that 100s of thousands, if not millions of gold are sucked out of the economy by flipper trading.

Remove flipping from the game and you’ll destroy the economy

an economy is like an ecosystem, yes you would destroy it, but something else would undoubtedly spring up in its stead, the question is, would what comes be better? maybe not, but honestly the economy we have is not really that good. Many goods services, tasks have no value, or low value, the ones with high value end up being degenerative.

And although flippers do keep inflation down somewhat, they also increase the wealth disparity, after all what a flipper essentially does, is either skim money off the item creator, or the item user, or both. they basically make everyone else poorer to make themselves richer.

so they arent really a slam dunk in terms of benefits to the economy.

Allow me to try to keep the discussion within the scope set by the OP’s suggestion.
The in game economy is a microcosm in a sealed environment. The real world economy fluctuates here and there, market corrections and crashes, but it reacts, evolves and moves on. The GW2 economy doesn’t really have the luxury as it exists within a framework of largely inflexible rules.

So within the bounds of the OP’s suggestion, removing that form of income must be replaced by Anet with another form. Grey market trading isn’t really an option and there’s just too much room for abuse.

Wealth disparity will always occur in any MMO, this is simply unavoidable, particularly when one is able to convert real cash to in game cash. Fortunately, in gw2 the check on huge personal wealth having a massive effect on the economy is relatively minimal. A stark example of wealth disparity, in my experience, was caused by the ill fate auction house system in D3. Hardcore farmers amassed fortunes in the billions of gold while casual players puttered around with maybe a million or so if they weren’t bankrupted by repair costs. This led to a system where the items one needed to keep going was completely out of reach of the casuals. This was made worse by the way the game difficulty scaled. At least in GW2, the expense of precursors, at least to newbies, is offset by the fact that they’re not necessary to progress in the game.

Gandara is reasonably active, but largely on EBG where the queues are. The borderlands have some action but obviously nowhere near the activity of the tournament season. The last few weeks, the only activity has been from the serious hard core of WvWers who pretty much only doing the same thing as before. Capping and baiting zergs to fight.

Otherwise, it’s pretty much a graveyard.

If you look at the stats, rare items will generally tide you over for about 10 levels compared to masterwork which need to be replaced every 5 or so to keep up with the mobs. However, you can get rare item drops for levels that are not craftable. Also, if you really want rare items for levels you can’t craft at, check out dungeon merchants.

Having recently started commanding Tequatl, the message suppression really has a detrimental effect when you’re trying to keep your team in one piece. Luckily so far, the growing experience of people has meant that they know what to look out for; popping shields when Tequatl shoots spines, feedback fields when fingers appear, bannering without being told, keeping banners outside teams, etc. But when some of the poison fields slip through and I’m suppressed from calling a cleanse, it makes holding the group together that much harder.

Something more veteran commanders may be able to answer is, does suppression happen in squad chat?