Guild Wars 2

I’ve rolled both a warr and a thief to 80, although my warr is my first and longest played character.

Quick point. You don’t need thieves in the Underground fractal anymore as that has been nerfed to oblivion. This was added in the last major patch. You pick up bombs from a dispenser and run through a smoke cloud to get stealth then plant the bombs. There are stealth detectors that will reveal you and mobs spawn to attack. It’s face roll easy now.

If you look at pure zerk warr vs thief it’s all about the survivability. There’s about a 5-6k difference in HP which means a hit that would one shot a thief wouldn’t a warrior. Thieves rely heavily on good timing on the dodges and blinds to provide the same damage absorption.

In terms of party offensive support, it’s pretty hard to overlook a warrior. Empower Allies, Banners, shouts all of those are solid support so even without an ele you can maintain 25 might on your party.

The single biggest advantage that warrs have is Battle Standard. Way too many times has that saved a party from wiping in a boss fight. Instant res on anyone within the AOE, which can be extended from 600-900 with trait that also decreases the recharge time by 20%. Most boss fights won’t last that long but it is an amazing skill.

A Soldier kitted warrior can eat a lot of damage without going down while still dishing out respectable damage. About the only class that has higher survivability is the Necro.

Think of the warrior as a jack of all trades. It has very good dps output, solid survivability, excellent party buffs.

Thieves on the other hand are very much specialists. You really need to excel in dash-in-dash-out techniques to make the best use of their damage output. Positioning is everything to a thief as their flank and rear attack abilities are devastating. Particular when you factor in their stealth attacks on auto attacks. They’re probably the class with the best mobility skills with all the evades, stealths and leaps at their disposal. However, they’re incredibly squishy and a mistimed attack, especially in wvw, could mean you eat an Eviscerated or a hammer attack in the face and poof there goes your HP. Channel skills are the biggest enemy to thieves as they will continue to track you even in stealth if the first hit connects.

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

99% of my runs in that fight have been spread out and run with the occasional overlap of two or three people. Only once have I done the group up and run.

Like ppl have said, method two requires close coordination and experience, luckily the group I was in had both so we blitzed it. For the remaining times, I prefer the spread out and run. Playing a warr, I always pack war banner to insta-res ppl. Annoyingly I usually fail with pugs in the lower levels than on the higher ones.

Can you imagine the load on the servers having to calculate the damage to each player over time? In small numbers it would probably be manageable but upscale it to >100 player blob fights and the lag would be unimaginable. It’s pretty annoying already and is in my top 5 reasons why I hardly play wvw anymore.

There is one in a dungeon as well, Kudu’s monster in COE story. So if you really want that achievement, farming the champ in Nageling, Kol Skullsmasher and Kudu’s monster once a day would take about a year.

OP obviously have never gone to triple wurms. Skilled condition necromancers are VERY high in demand. If you don’t have 15 skilled condition users the zergs are going to be mobbed by Husks which will make short work of everyone for 2 reasons. 1) They have an unblockable knock up and back skill. 2) Their armour is so high that a full zerk build does less than 100 damage per hit. Full condition spec’d necros or engis are a must. Mesmers are generally more required for the dps teams.

WvW roamers are 90% if not 100% Dire spec’d condition users. Blob fights are dominated by Guardians Warriors Elementalists and Necromancers. The incredible toughness that a necromancer can bring means that in skilled hands, their AOE bombs can be sustained for long bouts of fighting. I’m totally not as skilled as some of the necros out there but in blob fights, my necro will almost always be one of the last ones to go down unless I over extend or our blob gets broken. Zerk spec’d necros have around 18k HP, but when including death shroud with no points in Soul Reaping, necros have effectively 32k HP. In terms of sustained fighting ability, Necros are hard to beat.

Your post makes the assumption that at end game people aren’t carrying extra gear and making use of the ability to retrait in the field. My necro carries 3 sets of gear. Full condition spec for wurms, knights/cav for wvw blob fighting and a zerk set for most other things. I’ll probably get her a 4th set for wvw roaming at some stage.

In terms of DPS, an interesting post was recently added about a youtube video that compared a full zerk warr vs a full zerk necro. Within the boundary conditions that were tested, the zerk warrior dps was 10% less than a zerk spec’d necro. This included food and bloodlust stacks. Lifeblast was doing 7k+ on crits and when traited, necros gain 100% crit chance. No class has an auto attack which lands 7k+ crits. When comparing channelled skills, most people look at hundred blades as the king of them with the massive damage that it has. However, this is offset by the fact that you cannot move and thus relies on good stacking. Assuming zerk specs, other channel skills like Whirling Axe, Rapid fire and Ghastly claws both channel up past 12k easily. Rapid fire and Ghastly claws have the solid advantage of allowing you to move while still channelling thus guaranteeing that all your shots will hit, excluding dodges, invulnerability and blocking.

Rangers and Necros are the two most selfish classes in the game, this is undisputable. However, their background requires them to be so. Rangers are definitely not “garbage” and anyone who says that generally does not know how to play them beyond bear bow or pew pewing from range.

If you haven’t played a condi-necro, or a necro at all, you should refrain from judging

Convert them into stacks of vision crystals, there problem solved

When an asura punches off a combo, she says “Combine and compound!” For the longest time I thought she said “Ka-blime and KA POW!” :/

Could not possibly be more uninterested in dueling. Extra map content certainly. Looking at the world map, we’ve got barely half the world uncovered.

I’d rather go see what’s on the other side of the mountains and poke about in a cave than fighting which ever random that comes along and wants to get a feather in their cap. Dueling is about ego stroking which is not something we need

Another helpful feature would be to move the agony resistance and magic find essences into a new materials tab or into the same tab as the ascended mats.

The biggest problem with agony resists especially is that as you craft upwards you can end up in situations where you have a load of +1’s, +2’s, +3’s and so on. This can seriously clutter up the bank tabs.

A special storage tab for boosters wouldn’t go amiss.

“Raiding” in GW2 would have to fit a niche between open world mega boss type content and guild challenge level. It would have to be difficult enough that 1 party couldn’t do it, but not so difficult that it couldn’t be achieved by say 4-5 parties.

GW1 veterans may remember Vizunah Square where parties of Canthan characters would cooperate with Tyrian characters to defeat mobs of Afflicted. In a way, this was a limited form of “raid”.
The only way I could see it being workable in GW2 would be a form of “Super Fractal”.

Best thing to do is compare the wiki map vs your map for that region and look for areas that are under the fog but are shown to have a zone in the wiki map

dubak.3042:

I have no experience in programming, but would like to ask, would it be possible for you to include price information along with each food?

I’ve seen some sites which use API ( though I do not know what does api stands for ) of gw2 to get the current prices of all items on tp, so is it possible for you to do the same, that feature would be awesome!

One of my guildmates made up a very simple Excel spreadsheet that linked to the GW2 BLTC API. Every time you refresh it, it takes a data dump of all the items in the API and shows the current price. Being a spreadsheet you could then manipulate the data so that you could have it calculate the pros and cons of buying mats to craft them up to whatever item.

I’d imagine that linking it into a database wouldn’t be significantly more difficult than doing it in Excel, but then I’m no programmer so…

Edit: I see that it’s been done in wiki markup. Linking it to the BLTC API might be a little troublesome I suspect

For lore hunters, even a little bonus mission that all you got at the end was a token reward (as in a small thing not a token for exchange) but a tidbit into this story or that story. I mean, wouldn’t anyone want to know more about
- how the Sons of Svanir developed into a cult following Jora’s brother?
- what did Jora do after the events in EOTN?
- how did Scarlet convince the dredge and charr to form the molten alliance?

and the big one for me

- Just who is that colossus in Cliffside fractal?

The problem comes with resolving the quest directions. Even at the basic level.
Consider this:
I start an Asura and begin the quest of working out the problems that caused the golems to run amok but decide to switch norn. How is the game supposed to resolve that you are now a Norn who was supposed to have defeated Isormir, when you haven’t, but have developed golems, when you couldn’t have?
Or
You start off as a human and have fended off the bandits and killed the minister in trial by combat but decide to change to a charr who has to go through the motions of aiding Rytlock?

The personal storyline resolutions would result in a series of retcons but this becomes chaos once you start choosing certain quests.

Rouven.7409:

Azrael.4960:

The Charrzooka should totally get its own kneel-down-and-shoot animation

Gonna leave this here for inspiration for whoever is going to do the animations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRC1y1xhIkI

Take my money!

COE speedruns are probably the best balance between time spent/income. But pugging it is very hit and miss. Fastest speed run of all 3 paths was probably about 40min. Literally skipped and melted everything that was in the way. However, I love that dungeon and often host slugging matches through it just for the sake of it.

Consider how it would affect your character’s personal setup. If you’ve made progress on your personal story for a particular race, then what happens if you change your race suddenly? How is that retconned? This is especially relevant when you’ve made progress in race specific quests

Paypal and your GW2 account aren’t linked in any way so you could use your paypal account for whichever GW2 account you want.

On the flipside though, having a GW2 account with the same email account registered to a paypal account isn’t exactly safe.

High value items will almost always go through very slow movements of stock even when under cut.

For instance, I took a punt and invested some G into making an exotic Azurite amulet and popped it up for 39g50 making it the next lowest asking price. Over the course of a few weeks undercutting has pulled that price to around 31g. So I have three options.
1. Pull my listing and relist at a lower price accepting my loss and that my punt hadn’t worked out for this one.
2. Sitting tight and wait for stock at the lowest price to move so that the price goes back up. This is coupled with the fact that azurite orbs cannot be upgraded from azurite crystals, and given how rarely orbs drop the supply is very limited.
3. Invest again, depending on the price of orbs, and make another amulet to sell at a middling price between the lowest price and my current price so that when they both sell, I’ll make an even healthier profit?

Regardless of which option I choose, do I bemoan that the people before have been unsocial and undercut me? Of course not, like every one else in the game, I’m a seller and all sellers know and understand that the buyer will aim for the lowest price they’re willing to pay. There’s nothing unsocial about undercutting. It may mean that one player gets their sale off earlier than the other, but in the end as long as the item sells what does it matter?

That would certainly be helpful. My guild leader wanted to boot one of our officers from our party but guild kicked him. He reinvited him back in and asked one of the other officers to kick him from party, but she guild kicked him by mistake as well. I’m an officer as well and I very nearly guild kicked him for a third time =_=

Xenon.4537:

Azrael.4960:

The BMP only gave you access to certain weapon skins as well as some back story. I remember paying something like AUD$6 for it, which is a hell of a lot less than what I’ve forked out for gems (which also isn’t that much).

I’d totally go for an extra mission pack but from Anet’s perspective the problem lies in that they couldn’t possibly release it as a real world cash only purchase. The inevitable backlash from the p2w(hiners) would be too great.

I think the real reason Anet doesn’t go ahead and produce a “Factions 2” as it were, is because they just don’t have the financial backing from NCSoft right now. That, and they genuinely want to give us content for free while sustaining the game on revenue from optional gem store items. They are in a unique position to try to change the way MMOs deliver content, and they want to try. Whether this is satisfactory to customers remains to be seen. So far a lot of us are not satisfied.

Good points. Sometimes working outside the box is a good thing but on the other hand being too left field can turn around and bite you hard. Anet’s ideas had merit, but were overly ambitious.

one of my guildies needs the gift of color as well and as she doesn’t craft or play so much (being a mother with a very young child and all) she didn’t exactly have a whole lot of resources to get that gift.

I ended up giving her the full 100 she needed since I got a lot back from the patch. For super casual players, this change was demoralising.

Brother Grimm.5176:

< considers Heads must Roll joke >

Go on, dough it!

The Charrzooka should totally get its own kneel-down-and-shoot animation

Zaxares.5419:

Personally I think Entropy looks a lot cooler than the Juggernaut, but that’s just my opinion. :P

^ This. I used to have Bolt on my thief but after a while it just ticked me off that it just didn’t look right, so I went back to the very simple and elegant Ceremonial Sword skin paired with a Ceremonial Dagger.

It only requires level 100 artificer….

The BMP only gave you access to certain weapon skins as well as some back story. I remember paying something like AUD$6 for it, which is a hell of a lot less than what I’ve forked out for gems (which also isn’t that much).

I’d totally go for an extra mission pack but from Anet’s perspective the problem lies in that they couldn’t possibly release it as a real world cash only purchase. The inevitable backlash from the p2w(hiners) would be too great.

Kartel.2561:

Morrigan.2809:

Kartel.2561:

Morrigan.2809:

what you want is great
- but the this is a Themepark MMO- what you are describing is a Sandbox or in the case of AA a Sandpark.

Those two things are very different- you cannot have persistent player driven content in a Themepark game- at least I have never seen it.

I have also not seen any sign that Anet has any interest in adding such content- or even sandbox lite content like fishing- housing or whatever

which is why I play AA- it feels very much more alive when the world around you is player driven

What would this have to do with GW2 being a theme park? It would be just as “off to the side” as WvW and spvp. Put it in the Mists for all I care (though I do favor something I can look at on the normal map). It doesn’t need to have any more story involvement than those other things.

then I misunderstood your OP- from what you were describing it sounded like a persistent environment in the world- you said large map or island- I was thinking a place like South Sun from that.

still it is sandbox content- wvwvw is as boring as it is because it is still a themepark.

if you attack another guild you want to burn their castle and burn their fields- if you could claim it permanently and charge the peasants taxes, so much the better.
that is Sandbox

I cannot see Anet doing content like that- it would be awesome, just don’t think they would do it.
In the mists or where ever.
All their content is designed to funnel you a long a path- which is fine for a themepark game because you want to keep the players together

Maybe they could sell add-ons for the buildings like furniture, paintings, etc on the gem store. Isn’t that where all roads lead? Come up with new cool content for us so they can sell us overpriced toys to go with it.

And you were right as far as the island like southsun, except I was thinking much bigger and private to your guild. You go there and it takes you to your guild’s version of the zone. Maybe there could be a browser option to be able to check out other guild kingdoms that they’ve made public. Maybe a voting /rating feature too. Remember this doesn’t have to just be for GvG matches.

Have 5-10 areas on the map where your guild can make a claim, and build from there. Castle, houses, etc, however and wherever you like within the claimed area. But no other kingdom claims would be on the map until you queue for GvG and it takes you to an instance where the enemy guild has one of the different claim locations and a matching number of players.

Maybe with an alliance system, the zone can automatically merge yours and your ally’s map so you can be together when not in GvG.

Which is basically what Archeage online is all about.

Hmm lets see.

Fractal runs with some guildies and/or pugs
Dungeon runs with pugs
Hosting yolo runs in dungeon. Pick a dungeon, LFG NO STACKING MUST BE WILLING TO YOLO, PRAY TO YOLO AMEN.
Map exploration with my thief and just getting to grips with a glass class.
Harvesting mats for ascended weapon crafting, and given how many I want, this is going to take a LONG time.
Crafting stuff on occasion to make some gold
Wandering around maps and helping lowbies if I come across them
Avoiding QC and the gauntlet

Taku.6352:

Next do SE p2 full clear/no stacking/phiw builds.

wait what? that’s not hard. I do that, whenever I do dungeons. PRAY TO YOLO, Amen

I made my legendary last year and even though I’ve since had another precursor drop, I don’t think I could go through that again, at least not just yet and certainly not until they add in some more designs that are worth getting.

Instead, I’m going to give all 5 of my characters a full set of ascended weaponry to replace everything that they use, which is quite a lot. My warrior still needs another axe, a mace, a sword, a rifle. Made him a longbow, an axe and greatsword already.
My ranger carries Bolt so that’s her sword done, but I’ll probably make her a greatsword, longbow, axe, warhorn and shortbow just to round out the collection. Thief needs sword, 2 daggers, 2 pistols and a shortbow.
Necro needs sceptre, focus, warhorn, staff, daggers.
etc etc
I know weapons are account bound and I could just swap but the sigil load out would be different. So I’ve got a lot of gathering to do, and I won’t deliberately farm because I don’t want to solely focus on my end goal. I’m making it so that everything I do in game is part of the process towards making those weapons so I won’t burn out from the effort.

That is what I think a lot of people burn out from. Singular focus on one thing to the point that it becomes all consuming and then they burn out

Got a shield tonight doing a 38 run

I had a burst of activity in terms of drops right after the patch then it became really quiet.

Right after the patch, I got 3 ascended armour chests, 2 ascended weapon chests, a fractal sceptre, then it was real quiet for a while with only a few rings to show for my efforts with another armour chest, a precursor, and another armour chest last night.

you’re not-you’re not-you’re not real-you can’t-can’t be-can’t be here!

can I be insulted by both?
If the fractal is no going to drop a ring, could it at least drop:
1. some extra gold?
2. T6 mats?
3. A named exotic?

IndigoSundown.5419:

Azrael.4960:

The thing that often bugs me (here comes another gw1 vs gw2 comparison) is that in Gw1 mobs that get aggroed will run towards you but will maintain separation to minimise AOE.

Don’t go there. GW ranged mobs would happily plink away at characters while their arrows, etc. bounced harmlessly off the intervening objects. Yes, they maintained range, but at least in 2 the mobs move to where they have a chance to hit.

Ah, but at least they didn’t just stand in melee with everyone else lining up to be cleaved down!

Fresh skeletons can bleed marrow, that’s a morbid thought

mtpelion.4562:

notebene.3190:

Really? Just logging trees too? I’ll keep an eye out for that, and be sure not to skip logging any trees as I’m looking for herbs.

You can’t get “herbs” from trees, but you can get some other cooking ingredients such as cinnamon and walnuts. I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten peppercorns from a tree.

I’ve definitely gotten pepper from trees (seeing as pepper grows in trees) and bay leaves too. I’ve been on a logging bender as I need lots of wood for ascended crafting

I’d get a Skritt if only to hear him/her say “SKRIT! I’M HIT!” whenever s/he takes damage.

Other things that a Skritt warrior should say

- “I’m going to kick the skritt out of you!”

Rather than reinventing the wheel, a co-op survival mode instance would be more interesting. For those that remember GW1, there was Glint’s challenge (or something similar) where you had to defend her eggs against waves of destroyers with the waves progressively getting close to max levels.

Have something similar but with waves of Krait, Dredge (omg waves of dredge), Grawl, Destroyers progressively getting closer to champion and legendary class. Now that would be fun. I’ve always like the whole last stand thing.

I don’t think there is any way to tell. Certain ingredients are level limited such as Snow Truffles and Orrian Truffles being limited to recipes for lvl 80 characters and are thus going to be in level 80 areas. Herbs are very likely to drop from herb sprouts of course, but all from unlikely places like trees. I’m sure we’ve all see pepper corns, cinnamon, and the like from trees. I think part of it reflects that in nature a variety of herbs are from trees.

In fact, that reminds me that I’ve had random drops of bay leaves from various trees.

Hmm I think the duplicate thread on the discussion was deleted.

I suggest

Crittina Von Trap or
Crittina Y Vade

I wonder if anyone remembers
Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!Citizens!

Danikat.8537:

Veteran Novice is part of a grand tradition of video game naming conventions which are completely logical to a computer or in a database and complete nonsense in practice.

GW1 was great for this, with drops like ‘Fire staff of water magic’ being very common.

And on the other side you could get a ‘fiery fire staff of fire magic’. (It does fire.)

Or a Vampiric Sword of Enchanting, or other such similar nonsense.

cesmode.4257:

Hi,
So if I read Colin’s writeup about the story journal correctly…

We have to log in during the 2 week time frame that the LS episode takes place in order to have access to it perma. If we don’t we have to spend 200 gems to gain access to this content.

So…I mean I hate to bring it up again, but is Arenanet moving even further away from their notion of “you can take a break from the game a come back” ? If I take a break, I miss out on all of this stuff unless I spend real money on it.

Contrasting to a sub-based game for comparison only, I have access to all content patches, zones, dallies, quest hubs, raids, dungeons, etc…

Is it a technical reason that they went this route? Or greed? I currently am not playing the game because im having a blast in Wildstar, but if I ever wanted to come back and catch up on the living story, I am SoL unless I dish out real $$. Seems pretty lame to me

Quite upset about this.

Hmm, you get two weeks to log in to download a patch. 14 days to do something that takes only 5min (obviously longer if you have a poor connection).

As for a sub based comparison, regardless of whether you want access to that content or not, you still fork out the cash. The company has chosen for you that you will have this content like it or not and you will have to pay for it.

With the journal, if you’re not fussed about not having certain parts of the story then you don’t have to pay for it. 200 gems is what..20g at the moment? And you don’t even have to pay $$ for it. That’s at most 2 days of dungeon running.

Anet has given players the option of exchanging in game money or real world money to purchase older content as opposed to limiting you to only real world money as in a sub. I’d say that’s a pretty good deal

Majic.4801:

Astralporing.1957:

Be glad you did not run into exploding Champion Risen Chickens.

Only the pluckiest players can defeat them!

It’s eggsplosive fun! what a blast!

Oh, I should mention Veteran Novices, which is like saying Experienced Noob

The thing that often bugs me (here comes another gw1 vs gw2 comparison) is that in Gw1 mobs that get aggroed will run towards you but will maintain separation to minimise AOE. They’d also run out of an AOE after a certain number of ticks.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every moose/moa and minotaur be granted the AI to run away from AOE’s but certainly “sentient” mobs like bandits, centaurs, sons of svanir, jotun, grawl, ogres should at least have a mind to get out of aoe or cleave range after copping a few hits.

It’s-it’s-it’s-landed-landed-I—I-I’m sorry—I’m sorry—-I-I-have-have-to-go.

The salient points on why this is a really bad idea, minus the parts that earned me an infraction

- Cash → gems → gold fluctuates depending on the market but prevents runaway inflation due to the relatively low conversion ratio
- A $15 a month subscription allows a direct injection of gold into the economy for a flat cost.
- Those who take up this offer (and many will) will cause an even bigger divide between those who have large reserves of gold
- Farmers will make the most of this with optimised farming techniques
- Potential for near unlimited amounts of gold to flood the economy leads to runaway inflation, driving away players who do not subscribe.
- Rather than help Anet, this will hurt their business as they will be creating gem store content that players will not need to buy gems with real cash. The gold they bring in from farming will more than easily pay for anything they want.

Basically, the “option” of a $15 subscription will not be an option at all if one wants to be able to buy anything. If you want to see what run away inflation does to a game, look at D3 and that was free to play but wanting any high end equipment cost upwards of 100million gold.