Guild Wars 2

I have one at 100% for the title, just because, and for legendary mats. My next highest is 85%, but she already has all of WvW completed. I’m in no hurry to get another 100%; but I’ve got that one ready and close if I need it for a third or fourth legendary. Still not even working on a second legendary yet, so no rush.

My Keybinds:

F – Forward

G – Skill 1

B – Skill 2

D – Skill 3

S – Skill 4

A – Skill 5

Right side of the bar is mapped Q – Y in the same order they are on the bar. R is mapped to reverse direction.

Interact is V, AOE loot is C. Dodge is shift, jump is space bar, weapon swap is Z.

Function keys are mapped H, N, U, and J. I main a thief so I mostly just use H for steal (F1)

On the mouse I use 4 and 7 for sidesteps, 6 for auto run, 5 for walk backward (lol), 12 for push to talk onTS, Mark and target marked are on my top two little buttons. Rest is all non- essential non-combat stuff.

This lets me keep my middle finger on forward and hit AOE loot when everything is dead. Pointer finger handles 1,2, utility 3, elite, interact, and function keys. Ring finger handles 3 skill, and utilities 1 and 2. Pinkie handles skills 4, 5, heal, dodging, and weapon swap.

This set up let’s me keep my thumb on the Naga’s 4 and 7. Weaknesses of this setup for me is my ring and pinkie fingers will occasionally not be where my brain thinks they are. Being a thief, pinkie generally rests on Shift (dodge) which I think contributes to that. Having the sidesteps on the mouse is very useful when doing some hard mouse turning, but I don’t feel quite as fast if I need to do some rapid Right/Left spam.

Harper.4173:

Basharic.1654:

Harper.4173:

PopeUrban.2578:

Champions will be placed on some sort of timer system, preventing players from farming them in a static loop as they respawn and in stead requiring players to venture to different zones and kill different champions.

Even if they do it – that won’t prevent the players from farming them as best as possible.
The whole problem with the game right now is not the zerg farming. It’s not a good thing but it is not the CAUSE. it is a SYMPTOM of the problem and the problem is that a good part of the player base are interested in JUST making money fast and getting the stuff they want.

I’m part of this sort of group. This is the mentality I go in this game with – having fun for me is getting the stuff that I want. In GW2 that stuff is very expensive ( in may Twilight cost me 1300 gold. One run of CoF gave around 75 silver. do the math.)

They’ve taken nearly EVERY effective way of making decent money in the game OUT of the game.
You can’t farm anything effectively. It’s all time gated, drop gated, or some other form of restriction is in place.
Not all people want or feel the need to venture into the TP.
If they want people to stop zerging champs, or going for the min/max approach to everything they have to realize that there’s a gap – a very wide – a TOO WIDE – gap between the shinies that people want and the means through which they can obtain them.

What are you going to do once you have all the things you want?

sPVP, WvW ( things i would enjoy but hardly touch since i need to get cash for my ascended armor grind, and ongoing ascended weapon grind).

In Guild Wars 1 – which i played the heck out of – I got all the stuff I wanted ( Wanted – not needed – because once HoM rewards were confirmed to give rewards in GW2 i farmed the hell out of those) in about 100-200 hours of gameplay.
I played that game for over 1500 hours – so the best answer to your question would be – just keep playing for the fun of it. For the experience, for the cool stuff – for all the stuff I don’t have time to do right now because I’m supposed to be chasing down gear by farming like mad.

I went from 0 to 463 hutsman in one day – cost me 44 gold plus a TON of mats i had already gathered. At around 4 gold/ hour that’s 11 hours of work without the mats – and for what? I’m not even close to crafting my weapon yet.

Anet fails to see that the game in itself should be our reason to play.
The EXPERIENCE, the LORE, the COMMUNITY. These are the things that keep people in a game and keep bringing them back. I remember a time in GW1 when I did dungeons for the experience, for the fun, a time when I could stop and stare at the decorations and interiors and such and not speed clear it all.
But that’s gone now because this game has a very different pace. And you can tell.

1500 hours of GW1 in 3 years. And almost 1300 of GW2 in one year. So – the devs got what they wanted – kept me in game longer – but I’d have to say I don’t really feel I’ve enjoyed more than 300-400 of those hours. The rest were spend grinding sadly…

So go do those things. It’s all there.

I have a legendary. I “worked” on it from January until late June. You could say I farmed for it, but what I did barely fits that description. The worst I did was the T6 circuit over and over again. I did this for the cash, the mats, and the fun because I like the high level zones, and doing the run gave me a rough framework that led me all over the zones (kinda like hearts in lowbie areas). I always mapped the T6 nodes for my server mates as I went, and on patch days the feeling of being responsible for that map was far more pressing than any urge I had for the legendary. I didn’t farm CoF, in fact I’ve probably been in there all of 7 or 8 times total. Any single ascended weapon isn’t going to take nearly that much effort. and I am simply NOT going to do anything I don’t want to to get it done.

By the way I have 2,300+ hours in more than 17k on Bash alone. Been playing since launch. My basic play philosophy is “OOOOH that looks big and scary! I’ma go kill it!”

I am a grade a lollygagger, and a screw up who will wipe his buddies for the lulz. If my lackadaisical kitten can get geared out it’s not hard.

I’m telling you, just do the things you like to do and the loot will come.

Sauzo.6821:

Basharic.1654:

Harper.4173:

PopeUrban.2578:

Champions will be placed on some sort of timer system, preventing players from farming them in a static loop as they respawn and in stead requiring players to venture to different zones and kill different champions.

Even if they do it – that won’t prevent the players from farming them as best as possible.
The whole problem with the game right now is not the zerg farming. It’s not a good thing but it is not the CAUSE. it is a SYMPTOM of the problem and the problem is that a good part of the player base are interested in JUST making money fast and getting the stuff they want.

I’m part of this sort of group. This is the mentality I go in this game with – having fun for me is getting the stuff that I want. In GW2 that stuff is very expensive ( in may Twilight cost me 1300 gold. One run of CoF gave around 75 silver. do the math.)

They’ve taken nearly EVERY effective way of making decent money in the game OUT of the game.
You can’t farm anything effectively. It’s all time gated, drop gated, or some other form of restriction is in place.
Not all people want or feel the need to venture into the TP.
If they want people to stop zerging champs, or going for the min/max approach to everything they have to realize that there’s a gap – a very wide – a TOO WIDE – gap between the shinies that people want and the means through which they can obtain them.

What are you going to do once you have all the things you want?

And that’s where the dangling carrot of new skins and stuff come into play. As long as Anet continues to add new skins or gear, you will always have something to grind for. I too am like Harper, I find most of my fun in grinding for the stuff I want. I also like doing new content but after a few times, it’s no longer new so then I focus on grinding for the gear/items I want.

Ok, so say you and Harper had your dreams realized and ArenaNet decided to get rid of grinding completely. Log in, talk to NPC X, boom – any piece of digital kit this game offers is yours for the asking.

What would you do then?

Because if I understand you correctly, you’d stop playing. Since you explicitly say “I find most of my fun in grinding for the stuff I want.” Why on earth would ArenaNet extending the grind, you explicitly say you enjoy, in any way be a bad thing for you? If anything they are extending your enjoyment.

Harper.4173:

PopeUrban.2578:

Champions will be placed on some sort of timer system, preventing players from farming them in a static loop as they respawn and in stead requiring players to venture to different zones and kill different champions.

Even if they do it – that won’t prevent the players from farming them as best as possible.
The whole problem with the game right now is not the zerg farming. It’s not a good thing but it is not the CAUSE. it is a SYMPTOM of the problem and the problem is that a good part of the player base are interested in JUST making money fast and getting the stuff they want.

I’m part of this sort of group. This is the mentality I go in this game with – having fun for me is getting the stuff that I want. In GW2 that stuff is very expensive ( in may Twilight cost me 1300 gold. One run of CoF gave around 75 silver. do the math.)

They’ve taken nearly EVERY effective way of making decent money in the game OUT of the game.
You can’t farm anything effectively. It’s all time gated, drop gated, or some other form of restriction is in place.
Not all people want or feel the need to venture into the TP.
If they want people to stop zerging champs, or going for the min/max approach to everything they have to realize that there’s a gap – a very wide – a TOO WIDE – gap between the shinies that people want and the means through which they can obtain them.

What are you going to do once you have all the things you want?

I’m not playing board games with my family any more. The rewards for the amount of time I have to spend with my family just aren’t worth it. I can watch a Cheerios commercial for a minute or two and get the same warm feeling that I get spending an hour or more with my family.

I’m done ballroom dancing, I can get a better cardio workout doing dedicated aerobics. and all I ever do is spend money on dinner/drinks when the wife and I go out dancing.

I’m done with my rec league basketball team, all I ever get is a light workout and time spent with friends while NBA stars get million dollar salaries for playing the same game.

This. Is. A. Game. A. Past-time. A Hobby. The only real reward is entertainment.

Don’t do Teq for the shiny loot, do Teq for the challenge in individual play within the context of an unpredictable group dynamic. Do it for the challenge of coming together with your server, the challenge of getting lots of people to work towards the same goal. Because when you do that and beat him the reward and satisfaction will outweigh any pixel-based candy ArenaNet can dish out.

If you aren’t playing this game for fun you are quite simply and demonstrably doing it wrong. Free yourself from the skinner box mentality and you will enjoy this game, and most others in the genre far more.

Thief (main) 1757/2187 deaths
Warr 387/310

Rest of my alts are all 60 hours or less.

Mostly PvE with some Deer-level spvp, and a lil WvW. In my defense though I generally look for things that can and will kill me. And I like jumping from high places a lot. Like Really a lot.

The Crab and 2 champ Krill on the SW corner of Malchor’s, that whole event is soloable if you have the patience to whack on Krill for a loooooong time. I can confirm the krill drop chests. North of them far out in the water on the West edge of Malchor’s is a Risen Captain and her pet vet drake. I forget the names atm.

For that matter, I see the risen Hylek In Malchor’s up and unmolested often. He patrols with a pet drake in the water below Lyssa’s Union Waypoint. Bonus – if you kill him a Quaggan vendor pops. He sells spy kits.

Not sure if these count for your criteria since they aren’t really hidden. Just tied to little-done quests:

There are also the two event-bound champs in the waters of western Malchor’s. The inquest island facility you have to infiltrate will eventually spawn a soloable champ golem. You will probably need at least 2 good underwater fighters to get through the event chain to get to him though. The quaggan village quests in the water also lead to a champion krait I haven’t been able to solo him – he shoots too much.

Best I’ve got is for every successful Yak trip/defense your team completes it adds to a map-wide buff for your faction while taking some away from your opponents. Then for every event your faction loses you lose some of the buff.

To mitigate an overly dominant faction you could even have the buff gains tied to map control. Basically the more territory your faction controls the less benefit you see from successful event completions (in terms of the map-wide buff). Then you could weight offense/defense/yaks to tilt interest in the direction you want.

By tying the benefit into an inverse relationship with map control it could lead to a dominant faction gradually losing interest in defending yaks or points giving the non-dominant factions breathing room and encouragement to expand. A non-dominant faction with no points controlled could focus on killing yaks to build up their buff. Then once sufficiently strong (while having weakened their opponents) they roll out and take some stuff.

Only potential problem I can see (besides having to program all that mess :-P) is that the players may figure out a happy spot in the map control and stagnate the map while trading a few key points to churn events and farm. But I don’t really see how that would be worse than having one faction crush the other two beneath it’s heel for a week. In a farm situation we are at least still all clobbering each other.

This might be a good application for the Bloodlust buff but I haven’t read up enough on it yet.

Wolfheart.1938:

What about champion loot increasing (or decreasing) the longer (shorter) it stays up? What I’m saying that like EXP people should be rewarded for doing champions that aren’t usually killed!

I told my wife the same thing the day the new rewards went in. It would completely gut the champ farm trains.

Only problem I can think of is they tied all the good loot to the champ boxes so it would either take some tweaking on the loot boxes or just upping champs chances to drop the good stuff in conjunction with the boxes.

I’d guess they are waiting to see where the champ farming settles for the long term.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Basharic.1654:

I can tell you why the Karka queen rarely gets done: Only two of the pre-events are soloable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve single handedly got the ball rolling on the Centaurs, Melandru, the Eye, Megadestroyer etc. simply by advancing the pre-events by myself. Usually by the time I get to where I need some help someone shows up. By the time we get to the relevant boss there is always enough to get the job done.

The event timer ensures people will show up if you can get the pre-events moving. this will not be a problem with Teq. And i have no doubt my server (Maguuma) will be rolling out for him every time he pops . . . . except for possibly on the late night shift. We Maguumans do love our sleep.

Yeah, I’ve pretty much try to initiate certain World Events all by myself and then announce on map chat that the boss is almost up sort of. The reason why some events are totally ignored while others are frequently farmed is because some of the pre events require player coordination like you’ve said while others are pretty much soloable. If they added some sort of Zone Wide or Region Wide World Event tracker, or heck even a Region wide chat just to improve player awareness of what significant events are currently rolling, it won’t be so hard to get people participating in the pre events that require coordination however some might think that this defeats the purpose of exploration and looking for events but as it stands now, the popular events are already being monitored in a timely manner through timer websites, so why not include the feature in the game itself just like what they did with the LFG tool. Region-wide announcements for the start of World Events like how we have worldwide announcements for Scarlet Invasions would be nice.

Good news is Colin has already said they are definitely looking at doing announcements like the invasions for the big events.

I’d love to see a world event interface that shows “The Swamp is Quiet” or “There’s Something in the Water!” with a “go to nearest Waypoint” button.

It really could be very similar the website/overlay we already use. Even better, would be to let us set it to track the event like achievements. Done worm for the day? It won’t pop off a notification unless you tell it to. Sick to death of fighting Claw? Set it to never alert you for that one.

Frostfang.5109:

Or just get Another back item to transmute them onto – then u’ll have two set of wings that u can switch between.

This.

Just get another back piece. If you have an ascended back just swap it our for an exotic or whatever. It’s all you need for open world. You can strut your stuff with Teq wings then strap on the ascended back for anything hard.

Once again . . .

The Karka queen “never” gets done because there are never enough players in South Sun to turn the camps UNLESS the zerg has arrived for the queen.

Unlike many of the world events, the karka pre-events are not soloable. For things like the centaurs, the eye, Melandru, Grenth and the lowbie events, a single player can advance things far enough to tigger movement on the event timer and bring the subsequent zerg.

But it’s bloody impossible to do in SS. I killed the queen yesterday and a proper zerg barely got the queen spawned before one of the camps went contested again. Camp Karka and the Northeast camp are not soloable. And even if they were, the current event spawn would happen too fast for a player or two to get it done. This is what nerfs queen kills not her difficulty.

Teq will be fine. If ArenaNet does what they are promising I’ll be there for every spawn I can.

There hasn’t been a single problem voiced in this thread that couldn’t be eliminated by not playing with jerks.

I can tell you why the Karka queen rarely gets done: Only two of the pre-events are soloable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve single handedly got the ball rolling on the Centaurs, Melandru, the Eye, Megadestroyer etc. simply by advancing the pre-events by myself. Usually by the time I get to where I need some help someone shows up. By the time we get to the relevant boss there is always enough to get the job done.

The event timer ensures people will show up if you can get the pre-events moving. this will not be a problem with Teq. And i have no doubt my server (Maguuma) will be rolling out for him every time he pops . . . . except for possibly on the late night shift. We Maguumans do love our sleep.

Mesket.5728:

I’m not talking about CoF, I’m talking about all the rest of the dungeons. Initially they were harder than they are now. AC is the only one that had a revamp (after it was previously nerfed); but almost everything else that got hit by the nerf bat wasn’t and you can’t tell me its a work in progress… come on. It’s been months. It is no longer a matter of we are working on it. They are now revamping Tequatl. Lets see how that goes and how long will it take to revamp all the other world bosses.

(still, not a single content was improved towards the roles given by ANet: Damage, Control and Support. As long as there is no need for roles, this can’t; by definition, be a role playing game. It is merely a nice hack n slash).

You are either lying or have been lied to.

Nothing in my memory or the patch notes on this site say anything about a broad scale Dungeon difficulty nerf.

The closest thing you will find is a nerf to mob health and armor in CoE (and ONLY CoE) and a nerf to the searing effigy’s difficulty in CoF in early October 2012.

Outside of that there are a couple tweaks to Arah bosses. Almost every single other change to dungeons has been bug fixing, exploit closing, the AC update, fractals and my personal favorite; closing WP’s to players in combat. Which actually made dungeons a little harder.

It was 5 months from launch to the AC upgrade in February. We are about 6-7 months since that. During that time we’ve had 2 new dungeons added in. So IF you want to use AC as a template we are a bit overdue. That is a big if.

I suppose when my I took my warrior in to deal with Mai Trin it was just my imagination when I used my banner to pick up my downed guildies during the lightning wall fight or the barrage in the final fight. Or when we all stacked swiftness on each other to spread out during that bombardment. And I’m sure layering our group condition removals had nothing to do with taking Mai down, nor did we ever use a time warp, or prot, or ageis, vigor or aoe heals.

The fact you can’t see this drives home my point:

The ArenaNet trinity just isn’t nearly as obvious as the traditional trinity. This is because good players are constantly and seamlessly swapping roles on the fly as needed. In any single group fight we can and SHOULD be nuking, throwing buffs and fields, rezzing, CCing, and healing.

Now the infamous zerker teams are doing a lot less rezzing, but again it’s because the content they are doing they know so well that no one goes down. No one going down while exploiting class synergies is the point. This lets them focus on damage, using the GW2 trinity to boost that damage. There is nothing wrong with that, and exploiting class synergies to their fullest potential is absolutely making use of the new trinity.

Why anyone would prefer to be pigeonholed into only doing one aspect of the trinity well is quite honestly baffling to me.

Mesket.5728:

Basharic.1654:

Niim.9260:

I wish folks would stop saying ANET removed the trinity. The roles are still there and your group is often more effective for utilizing those roles.

The change ANET made was to reduce the reliance on specific classes by allowing all classes the ability to play all the roles to varying degrees, which in turn made for more hybrid roles, and they also made it so you could run in ‘everyone take care of themselves’ mode. These are great changes, imo.

Perhaps if the game had more challenging content folks would be forced into re-learning how to play as a group/team instead of just running around in ‘everyone for themselves’ mode while pretending that the game doesn’t have decent group synergy options.

The thing that always tickles me is ArenaNet really did choose the hard road here. What do you think is easier to design?

Building a boss who only ever has to directly deal with tanks from 2-4 class types. Because, unless you have a back-up tank in your party, tank death usually means a wipe.

OR

Building a boss who can present a challenge to a team of 5 players made up of any flavor of 8 professions. All of which are capable of at least briefly tanking it’s damage or avoiding it completely. AND picking up defeated pleayers.

I’m all for faulting ArenaNet for poor boss design. I think many of the bosses at launch were badly done. World dragons/bosses are the absolute worst of these. But I’m willing to give ArenaNet time to adjust to how well we players can work their combat system.
The reason I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt is that they DO have some interesting and tough bosses in game, and every revamp of mobs they have done has added skills and abilities to them.

For example did anyone of us give a second thought to fighting Veteran Risen Acolytes before their buff? Now how many players avoid them completely?

The 5 man content we’ve seen from living story has all been plenty interesting (re MF and AR), even if it wasn’t always the most challenging. I think we as players often forget how bloody difficult it is to bring something genuinely good consistently to market.

When a designer decides to increase difficulty by increasing the damage and number of mobs… you cannot defend them saying they are not taking the easy way out.

They had an idea,… people didn’t get it and started complaining on the forums and content was nerfed to the ground. What we have now? trivialized content that 5 monkeys on zerk gear stacking together can complete one handed. So… they are clearly taking the easy way out.

I disagree.

You can’t just point to CoF and use it for an example of everything in the game. It’s the easiest of the easy.

I’d like to see a zerker team burn down Ghost Eater. I do believe a good zerk team could do it in one and definitely two traps. But they ain’t doing it by ignoring the mechanics.

AC is the only dungeon that has been redone to date. Molten facility wasn’t designed to be that hard but I still have my doubts about zerkers one-handing it. Same for AR.

Out in the open world we have all manner of mobs getting more abilities, especially in Orr. To the point where certain events were broken because of them. One new ability from risen nobles single handedly shut down Warmaster Chan for months. Arenanet is still at it too, somewhere in the recent past Risen Ravagers were updated to throw down chaos storm. REGULAR Risen Ravagers I might add.

I think once they start to get a good handle on how well players are using the combat system and some time to work out proper challenges, we are going to see some very interesting things.

I love it, but I have no idea how hard that is to program. The only thing I think they’d have to watch out for is not letting certain abilities come together in overly powerful synergies that could mean GG for a group.

My current thinking for world bosses, specifically the dragons, mirrors yours: The Teq fight is going to be great. But for all the additions, Teq is still going to come in, and basically sit on one spot. For a large powerful dragon this is the equivalent of a starship moving at the speed of plot.

I think all three world dragons should be zone-wide events on the scale of Scarlet’s invasions. Multiple simultaneous events to defend each of the town/camps/keeps in the zone from spawned minions all while the dragon occasionally swoops in and stomps around. This gives us an added strain on defending a spot under heavy attack, and allows us to take some potshots at the boss.

Like taking the temples for Arah, each player held site gives us extra troops, artillery, buffs, etc. Eventually allowing us to force the dragon down for a final confrontation.

Combine this with your random ability selection, and we’d have a fight where there was so much to do and so many different ways of if playing out that it would never get old.

All of which sound terribly cool and easy to a non-programmer. :-P

Niim.9260:

I wish folks would stop saying ANET removed the trinity. The roles are still there and your group is often more effective for utilizing those roles.

The change ANET made was to reduce the reliance on specific classes by allowing all classes the ability to play all the roles to varying degrees, which in turn made for more hybrid roles, and they also made it so you could run in ‘everyone take care of themselves’ mode. These are great changes, imo.

Perhaps if the game had more challenging content folks would be forced into re-learning how to play as a group/team instead of just running around in ‘everyone for themselves’ mode while pretending that the game doesn’t have decent group synergy options.

The thing that always tickles me is ArenaNet really did choose the hard road here. What do you think is easier to design?

Building a boss who only ever has to directly deal with tanks from 2-4 class types. Because, unless you have a back-up tank in your party, tank death usually means a wipe.

OR

Building a boss who can present a challenge to a team of 5 players made up of any flavor of 8 professions. All of which are capable of at least briefly tanking it’s damage or avoiding it completely. AND picking up defeated pleayers.

I’m all for faulting ArenaNet for poor boss design. I think many of the bosses at launch were badly done. World dragons/bosses are the absolute worst of these. But I’m willing to give ArenaNet time to adjust to how well we players can work their combat system.
The reason I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt is that they DO have some interesting and tough bosses in game, and every revamp of mobs they have done has added skills and abilities to them.

For example did anyone of us give a second thought to fighting Veteran Risen Acolytes before their buff? Now how many players avoid them completely?

The 5 man content we’ve seen from living story has all been plenty interesting (re MF and AR), even if it wasn’t always the most challenging. I think we as players often forget how bloody difficult it is to bring something genuinely good consistently to market.

The real question is why this question keeps coming up on the GW2 forums when there are multiple other games where people can get the trinity playstyle. If that is what you like what the heck are you doing here?

Complaining about it in this place is basically as silly as asking why Mario has to move through pipes.

The game is designed around a baseline self-sufficiency that can be augmented and improved upon by playing with others. Different players will have different levels of self-sufficiency.

PvE never stays truly difficult. DPS is always going to be king. The trinity crowd likes to put on airs about how critical the roles are in other games, but I can give you plenty of examples or tearing through WoW’s dungeons solo or in groups long after they were outleveled/outgeared/outlearned. And you know what happened at that point? DPS and not taking the big hits was king.

Finally, say all your dreams come true and we get real healers and tanks in this game. Do you really think that is going to be an improvement? That it will somehow make the content more challenging?

If your response is “No Bash, they’d have to build content tuned to the new paradigm,” then you’d realize we’d be in exactly the same boat we are now. But in the meantime we’d have returned PvP to the “No healers? You lose.” paradigm, and we’d have taken our current PvE from (mostly) easy mode to Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

coronaas.4362:

Basharic.1654:

There is little-to-nothing you can accomplish in PvE that can’t be done in level 80 greens. So what’s the rush?

This is my favorite part. Us min/maxers care because it will drop seconds off the fastest runs. to everyone else it means literally nothing. If you arn’t farming fotm 40+ and if you arn’t speedrunning why are you even bothering to get these?

And I don’t want any more power creep on our gear. I much prefer cosmetic progression.

power creep means nothing when difficulty of content doesn’t change.

Yep. I haven’t even logged in today and I already have a weapon with ascended stats. Stats, I might add, I can change on a whim. One down, two to go for my main set up. SAB gives me motion sickness so I have plenty of time to focus on new Teq, and farm if I feel like it.

Personally my guild is lazy even for 5 mans, so high level FOTM is not even in my world. I’ve been tossing WvW infusions on my laurel-bought stuff.

There is little-to-nothing you can accomplish in PvE that can’t be done in level 80 greens. So what’s the rush?

Legendaries, Fractals and ascended gear were put in place for grinders; for people who like longer term projects in their MMOs. If you aren’t one of those people, they aren’t for you.

Ascended gear is meant to be a mid range project between easy-as-pie exotics and supergrind legendaries. The mats I am familiar with on that list fit that bill exactly, and the time I’ve heard on the gated requirements fall into the two week range. That is nowhere near the time it takes for a legendary.

There is nothing inherently evil in time-gated content. It actually brings the time it takes for casuals and hardcore players to get any specific item closer together. It stretches the hardcore time, freeing them up do other things in game by limiting how long they can focus on a specific thing. Meanwhile gating barely affects casuals who play regularly, but for shorter sessions.

All that being said, I do really wish the Ascended items were statted the same as exotics, and were just sexy skins. And I don’t want any more power creep on our gear. I much prefer cosmetic progression.

Count me in. Around midnight The last night. Somewhere between 150 and 200 attempts. 4-5 of my last 10 attempts had her nearly dead. Including my favorite, dropping through the floor while downed and she had nothing on her bar.

Thief, condition build, S/D for phase 1, P/D for phase 2, 20/0/20/20/10, pizza, and BLC regen I had lying around.

Biggest thing for me was finally getting to phase 2 consistently enough to learn it.

Edit: oops I’m a jerk. Forgot to give much thanks to all the people who were hanging around throwing rezzes. I almost never had to run back. I bloody love Maguuma.

What I was expecting from the DE system was a functional skeleton at launch, which we got, followed by a gradual layering of more and more events until the entire game world is saturated with potential DE spawn points. Then instead of only having that one event that spawns in that one spot we’d have multiple random events that COULD spawn with a lockout on the other possible events until the one that is up is completed.

There are examples of this and overlapping events in game. Yet the level 80 zones are thin. Really thin. A good example of this is the Northeast corner of Frostgorge. That area has a whopping five events (not counting claw) spaced miles away from each other that affect nothing but WP availability. But I can come up with at least four more events that could be based out of the Path of Starry Skies camp alone. This is at least partly why level 80s are bored with DEs. There is a horrific lack of DE variety for a year after launch, and that lack is worst in the high-level zones; where most people at max level are looking for stuff to do.

Sorry, I missed the part in the OP where ArenaNet held a gun to their dog’s head and threatened to splatter puppy brain matter all over the room if the OP didn’t do all the things in game.

Until such time as I have evidence this is going on, I’m going have to politely explain that the reason there are so many things to do each day is to let us choose what we want to do and when we want to do it. We aren’t meant to do it all every day.

Please take some responsibility for your own game experience. There is nothing in this game you HAVE to do. Even so much as logging in is a choice.

Dueling is so low on my list of priorities as to be non-existent. There are about a million things they could add or tweak in game before duels that would contribute far more to my enjoyment.

I’m not gonna complain if they do put it in, but I am in no hurry.

I really am loathe to say it but there is big need for learn to play in this thread. The “cheap” mechanics ya’ll are complaining about are what make the game interesting. Barring something being bugged, there is ALWAYS a way over or through the challenges we face in game.

And you flat out lose me when complaining about personal story difficulty. PS are PVE training wheels fights, and it ain’t like open world PVE is all that hard. I personally seek out the mobs and events that haves good chance of killing me. Some champs are simply not soloable due to their strength or mechanics. Aboms are definitely soloable if you are good enough. By the way I am NOT good enough to solo one yet, my personal best is getting the Plinx abom to about half.

But I’ve never seen a group of three or more people fail to kill an abom. The really nasty buggers are champ risen gorillas and champ rise nobles. But with the exception of the Baron at the skill point in CS, they don’t live in the regular world.

The Plinx abom is the one that really makes me laugh. Because with the new mechanics and location it became MARGINALLY harder for a full-on Plinx Zerg to kill it. Yet somehow after they changed it, it became “too hard”.

Now that I’ve vented, I’d also like to add that I think I’ve gone up against just about every champ there is in the open world, if you need some help or advice for how to beat something feel free to PM me in game. Depending on what I’m doing at the moment I might even come help.
Honestly though with the upgraded rewards you shouldn’t have any trouble bringing people in from map chat.

Here’s Bash – nuff said.

There is really only one trick to Adnul. And that is catching his heal two/three times in a row. The problem is when you know the heal is available you’ve got a 50 percent chance at best, and occasionally a 33 percent chance of actually catching it at the right time.

I’ve beat him only once on my main, and that was using mango pie before they “nerfed” him and locked those out. I’ve since tried again on alts and gotten screwed every time.

Even using Woo instead of Boast doesn’t help control his heal well enough. If you are good at Belcher’s and understand Adnul, it still comes down to blind luck as to whether you beat him.

VinylScratch.3461:

Yamori.9781:

Can’t see any reason not to help other people get their titles, at least not one that makes any sense. Thank you to all the people helping out others get their titles and points. If you don’t feel like helping out that’s your choice. Don’t really see how it makes you a better person by showing other people up in a mini-game but so be it.

My reasoning follows an ends justify the means form of justification.

An old saying states: “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

Let’s analyze this into the situation at hand now. I can give someone a free win and they can have their title, I’ve essentially just given them a fish. But the next event that has a title earned by a similar criteria, they’ll have no idea what to do and require another handout.

I can also beat them and hinder their progress in hopes that in order to get what they want, they’ll look towards accepting trial and error, and the principle of failure leading to success. The odds of this are very rare however, most people nowadays will just ragequit and find the handout somewhere else. But that’s not an issue I induce, that’s more of a personality flaw on their part if they’re not willing to put in the effort to kick it up a notch when it’s necessary and would rather find the easier road.

However, some times, and it does happen, you get that one guy who you spark the fire inside of them and they take each failure as a lesson and eventually beat you and earn their title. Actually happened to me about four hours before I went to work today. I had raced a guy eight times in a row, he eventually beat me and sent me a whisper saying pretty much he just wanted to beat me so bad he looked for every shortcut and made sure to win sooner or later. It happened and I was actually happy for him.

The above paragraph is a factual account and an example of teaching a man to fish. He earned his title, and now with the next title he seeks, I’m more than certain he’s going to apply himself to finding every trick he can to secure his goal.

In the event it works, the end result definitely justifies my means. In the event they get upset and quit and view me as one of the world’s biggest pricks, ohh well. Like I care what a bunch of internet people think about me or my strange way of teaching people to push themselves on a game.

Do you teach a person to fish by showing them how easily you do it? Or would you perhaps set the hook, and then hand them the reel the first time?

I prefer to think of it as holding the door for someone. Once you have the achieve, much like holding a door, all it costs you is a little time. There is no benefit to finishing first, once you’ve gotten your achieve, for anything other than ego.

I find this entire thing an interesting look into the human mind.

Someone let me win. I then legitimately made it to the line first about three/four more times while I finished the other achieves. I always waited to cross the line until at least three people had passed me.

They also stuck around and “won” legitimately on their own. I think it’s very nice for folks to let other people knock out the achieve. But it’s not the end of the world if they don’t. Practice,along with learning the track and power ups, will get most people there.

Theat champ is soloable, at least for some professions/levels. I took it down on my knights/zerker statted warrior. As with most things when it comes to warr, it was depressingly easy.

Some of the other champs mentioned are way more dangerous. The rinsen knight in Malchor’s, and the risen king in cursed shore are the two roughest that come to mind. They both can instagib if you do it wrong. Outside of using stealth, the knight is manageable with a buddy to distract them. The king is much rougher but, I have pulled off the skill point there the same way.

The baron in Cursed Shore can be avoided, you just have to slip in and hug the left wall. You can safely sit at the top left of the stairs and not draw aggro. Pull the other mobs guarding the point to you while the baron is down the stairs, then snag the SP when it’s safe. The timing on it is VERY close though.

Just over 2k hours played since launch. I think my random exotic count is somewhere around 5-6, I know I’ve gotten at least 2, possibly 3, just off of random chests in Orr. Not the big event ones; the lil ones that are usually guarded by a vet.

My most recent was off Claw just yesterday. The guaranteed rare was a named exotic staff.

Update on Bash – Same clothes as before, changed mah colors to go with the new weapons. Bolt and Corrupted Shard. Working on finishing out a dungeon set of clothes, but it may be a while. My guild is lazy about dungeons. :-D

First I ever saw of it was in a very popular add on in WoW. I’d prefer they did the indicators as an integrated part of the spell/skill effect but the rings are good for knowing right where the edges are. Even if only having a toe in them counts as a hit. :-p

DrixTrix.7168:

Thief’s use whatever they can get there hands on, if you ask me the whole arsenal should be available, except maybe scepter and focus as there centered around magic, a staff can be used as an offensive melee weapon.

on the more realistic not i would love to see a whip / shield added to a thief, a shield would add a completely different dimension to the gameplay, center it around blocks and interrupts or something.

This.
I’d. Totally rock a stave or maces.
I’d also love to dual wield swords. I just got Bolt done and would love to partner it with Infinite Light.

Thanks for the info Colin. I have one suggestion if it is doable from a programming perspective.

Tie reward amounts/quality in Orr to how many temples we have unlocked.

The simplest current mechanic to use would be an automatic zone-wide buff that stacks magic find a percentage for each temple held, pad it with an additional percentage if a player actually participates in successfully taking or defending the temple.

I’d also recommend a guaranteed exotic from completing the assault on Arah, but ONLY if all temples are player controlled. My thoughts lie along the lines of a guaranteed rare with a sliding percentage chance at the exotic, based on number of temples held, that totals 100% with all of them. This reward should be in place for the defense event also.

On the difficulty front, on top of scaling based on number of players present it would be nice to see the defense events scale based on how many times the players have defended them. If you have that capability it would be quite cool. An added incentive here could be another bonus reward for holding the temples/Arah through multiple defenses.

As a player I’d like to see a precursor/or a precursor ticket drop from the Arah defense event IF and only IF players can hold it for an impressive number of defenses against ever increasing odds. It should be bloody difficult to do but not impossible. This could lead to an opportunity to show server pride in PVE through high numbers of Arah defenses.

Charr can be gorgeous. Many people are too dim to see beyond human standard. But then again I’m apparently a weirdo. I prefer the non human races, the less human-like the better.

In fact I actually managed to avoid the SWOTOR disaster because I found all the races to be too close to human. Had they thrown in Hutts, Trandoshians, Ughnauts, Noghri, or even Wookies I might have reconsidered. Even Gungans would have been preferable

I like my main, and Rytlock is a sexy mother.

I like to think at least a few of my toons cross that line on typical beauty, yet remain attractive.

I don’t have any properly ugly toons though. Right now.

Guildie had dusk drop for him. Sold it and had another exotic GS drop (not a precursor) for him within a week.

Wife got three reef riders and ill naked Lord Fahren.

All I got was the lil naked blonde.

Stuff like that happens. I’ve seen others, but the only one I could definitively point out is the disappearing boat in Cursed Shore.

Leave the shore off the piers to the northwest of Meddlers. You’ll see a ship off shore, but as you start to swim towards it, it will pop out of existence. I believe that spot is used in the personal story.

Shadowstep, shadowstep shadowstep.

As I understand it, the step isn’t a proper teleport, but more like a very rapid movement over the surface of the terrain. The problem with this is it seems to be far more to sensitive to the terrain.

A minor dip or rise in the terrain can stop the step in its tracks, resulting in the Thief poofing in place. This happens even if the player character can traverse the terrain without needing to jump. It is especially noticeable in Orr’s broken landscape.

If there is a way to lower our various shadowsteps sensitivity to the terrain without making them true ports it would be appreciated. If this isn’t possible changing the mechanical aspects of shadow steps to match the “under the hood” mechanics of portals with appropriate balance adjustments is the next logical step.

It seems to be more prevalent in Infiltrator’s strike, and Infiltrator’s Arrow, but it’s probably a perception bias caused by their common usage. The pre-range fix Shadow Return did not suffer from this problem. Which isn’t surprising as it seemed to behave like a true port instead of a step.

Travlane.5948:

no cooldown? hows that basharic?

The actual shadowstep skill and the signet have a CD, but Infiltrator’s Strike, and Infiltrators Arrow are initiative. Granted they don’t have all the same mechanics of Mesmer ports what with being limited to ourselves, But I bet some clever thieves could really work that to our advantage.

That doesn’t really sound terribly op to me (with some consideration to not making Shadow Trap ridiculously awesome) but I might be biased. :-P

ArenaNet obviously doesn’t want us doing that. But it sure would be nice to have our steps work reliably.

Zacchary.6183:

This is me when 2 inches of dirt halts my shadowstep….

No lie I was doing the Megil event in CS and hit IS to port to a mob only to poof in place. A few seconds later I returned back to the spot then ISd again from the exact same place and it worked . . . . . . . . . yes I had a mob targeted both times. Many kittens were uttered.

Bash

I’m a few weeks away from Bolt I’ll repost when I am legendary.

Been like that since launch, all the shadow steps are treated as though the thief is actually traveling on the ground from point A to point B. Not a leap, not a port, but as though you were running really fast.

Because of this you can’t shadowstep to anywhere you couldn’t run to without jumping within the range of the step.

The problems comes when you run into ArenaNets screwy terrain design, invisible walls abound, as well as many imperceptible little bumps. It seems shadowsteps sensitivity to the terrain is often greater than just running.

They could fix this by making it mechanically a proper port but it would open up a whole ’nother can of worms. Because then thieves would have mesmer hacks on no cooldown.

No, just no.

I came to this game to get away from vertical progression. Ascended stats stink and should never have been put in. They could have added the agony resist slot to exotics and called it good with the new skins. If you want that kind of ball-gargling stat juggling go play any of the other bajillion MMOs that have it.

GW2 is not that kind of game, stop touching it there.

Ok folks let’s talk. Yay new armor sets! But . . .

STOP MAKING HUMAN-FORM FEMALES their own special sets. Once again the human/sylvari/norn female versions are completely different from everyone elses’. I understand there are boobs to deal with, but modify the chest piece for them (LIKE YOU SHOULD BE DOING FOR CHARR TAILS) and move on. This set is a prime example.

The heavy shoulders on females is far better than the male version. The Leather boots (which is a piece I was interested in) are way better on the females, on the light the male chest is better just by dint of not being another short poofy skirt. The light head is a toss up. They both work for that look. It is terribly frustrating to get that female preview then realize “Oh wait, that won’t look anything like that on my male or female charr/asura.”

If your resources for creating new armor are as limited as it seems to be, it makes no bloody sense to waste time making a completely different set (queue sleazy voice) “for the ladies”.

Everything item but the chests should always be standardized across the genders, With reasonable modifications for Charr and Asura. Reasonable meaning they still look like the same item modified to fit their bodies, not a completely new item.

Chests do need modifications for boobs and tails. But that’s it.

Yep, my buddy and I liked to throw ourselves off of that point into the volcano, competing to see who could get the furthest into the lava. And now we have to launch from the lower vista point, becausekittenthat’s why. It’s really annoying.

So we’ve upped the difficulty on our game. Now we jump off of the LA diving board, or Malchor’s leap. To be declared the winner you have to hit a rock and die, but do it in such a way that you skip off the rock and end up dead in the water. Whoever ends up deepest in the water upon meeting these conditions wins.

Added bonus to the Malchor’s site, if you jump off the north side instead of the point with the goggles, you can fall with a wall whizzing past you. The wall has a curve as it nears the water and you can position yourself in such a way that you actually hit the wall and slide the last few feet on the wall at terrific speed into the water. If you do it right you can even pull it off without dying.

I use a near-daily node run through the high level zones as a framework for just being out in the world. I’m currently hocking everything I get from these runs to finish my last bit on the legendary. I’m pulling 10-18 gold in the TP depending on luck with drops, and how many events I do.

The full run can take as little as a couple of hours to forever, depending on what I get into.

After refining I get at least 22 ori ingots, around 150-200 mithril ingots, 12 ancient wood planks, and around 70 elder for sure. Then I also get random assortments of T5/T6 trophies, ectos if I pop off to the world events, and a number of gems. I burn whatever T5 dust I get upgrading ruby crystals to orbs. Then vendor anything not beating vendor price on the TP.

I also usually get about 1g just from event’s and running around. I take breaks from the run to do dungeons when our small guild has enough folks around, and occasionally duck out and work on alts.

I only have 2 80s and alternate them on the run so I don’t have to worry about node timers. My warrior always makes less gold than my thief, mostly because I bloody love my thief and tend to get into more when playing him.

If I am really looking to do something more challenging I go solo cap the Eastern Collonade or do the chicken chain in Malchors, kill the golem near Waste Hollows, or solo the contender chain in CS.

If you are in it for the farming you should also never skip these events:

CS: Megil, the early parts of the Mel/Grenth chains, and (yes still) the penitent, shelters, and jofast events. Plinx is also still good. But people are scared of the abom.

In Malchors your best events for lots of mob kills are actually the escorts and Lyssa’s pre-events, Dorics/Wren are ok, even solo.

The TLDR point is the ore run is a good way to get out into the world and have stuff happen that leads to full bags. Don’t just focus on the nodes.

I go by how much I have to pick them up during events. :-)

And as stated up thread, any one aggressively telling anyone how to play is usually terrible and should be avoided even if they aren’t.

I’m near the end of my legendary process. All I have one set of very expensive mats and a handful of dungeon runs to knock out. This is how I’ve been making 10-15 gold every time I do it.

I go on an “ore run” which is simply a gathering node stomp through the high level zones. I use the T5/T6 nodes like I used the hearts when leveling: As a framework for running around in the world. Along the way I stop for any DE that strikes my fancy. Specifically the mob heavy ones. I keep an eye on event timers and hit up any of those I feel like doing.

This can literally take from a little less than two hours to as long as I want for full completion. Just depends on what I feel like. I am currently hocking every single thing I get from these runs excepted for Charged lodestones, and my average is coming in at about 13 gold a night. I got hot with drops last night and pulled more than 18g. It was also a very long play session.

The point is I am never standing still or grinding mobs. I’m just out and about playing the game with purpose. Even better, this system is completely adaptable to my schedule. I have two 80s so one is always off CD for the nodes, and with SS and FG it’s very easy to only do it for 15-20 minutes.

The game flat out rewards you for getting off your digital butt and running around.