Guild Wars 2

For every type of content there will be one class that can do more dps than other classes, and when it comes to large hit boxes that class is Ele.

For aoe with multiple enemies, that is necro.

For single target dps, its a tie between ele, thief and ranger.

If they nerf ele, then the class won’t be used for single target dps and the ones of the remaining two classes will be used instead if they evade the nerfs. Large hit box will likely still be ele, even with a 20% nerf, through the two raid bosses which will be effected by this is going to be significant harder for those already struggling with them.

Cheesing achievements is very common and anet has never taken a strong stance against it, so long it don’t create a unwanted effect on the TP market. Case in point was the very used exploit during super adventure box, AND if I tried to list exploits used to cheese achievement/content through gw2 history this post would be quite long.

The only revert I ever remember was the gwamm title.

With this change the ab map is dead and the meta closed for new players. With multi map running for this long, anyone who wanted the achievements and rewards have long since got it. There is no reason to ever go there again.

Like with dungeons, I find that a bit sad. I do a dungeon run like once every second month, but I doubt I will even do that with AB.

Solid Ocean and Molten Furnace is the two fractals most in need of improvement, but not made harder since its good to have fractals with variance in challenge and difficulties. The time gates aspect just need change into actually mechanics.

But to comment the orginal poster and mossman, the trouble with the fractal is that there is little to mechanic introduction such as those in cliffside. you are expected to learn on your feet the first time, which isn’t that great.

As invulnerable creatures, Underground Facility had the right idea of a boss which for all practical purposes is invulnerable but made vulnerable by mechanic. Since the onslaught mechanic already depend on X amount of killed creatures, I would prefer if they went that route and just gave the animals insane health/armor for which the green aura gives a crazy debuff.

People have already touched a bit on the survivability aspect, but this is really the main reason why Viper necro is used so much in fractal and why many groups are t4 viper necro only (with the exception of an optional ranger).

Viper necro has parasitic trait and has better heal-over-time than warrior heal sig. With multiple enemies, the trait alone can make a necro heal so much that they are practically immune to damage. Add to that, 50% damage reduction from “Rise”, shroud when focused by a boss, and stability/escape with low CD.

All this while doing acceptable damage for a class on full dps gear, and exceptional dps when coordinating epidemic, and you got a very pug friendly class where the priority is to finish a fractal in decent time with minimum fuss. It also work well with the fractal tonics which provides endurance and speed buffs which necro commonly lacks. the defense tonic work well with the high health pool that necro got (and in shroud), and the offensive tonic combos with the parasitic trait.

I guess the slow download speed was caused by the large number of individual files? At least with my 1G line, it seems strongly correlated between number of files indicated by the file counter, and download speed.

If you want to match the same group size as wvw polls, simply enable the top 10% players with the highest AP.

What this thread do not address is what the purpose is for repeatable achievements. Questions:

1) Why aren’t all achievements repeatable.

2) Why are Agent of Entropy a repeatable achievement and realm avenger not.

Outside of the “interesting” glyph of elemental power bug/feature, 4 reaper is reliable and thus will remain the meta until the defensive aspect of necro get nerfed. The parasitic trait + healer + rise just make it almost impossible to fail, and if anything, failing a fractal is the least thing a pug group want. Most people rather want to spend 15m extra per day with a less optimal but more reliable comp, and that is what necro currently represent in fractals.

Welcome to the patch path of the Elementalist. They were exactly in this spot when tornado and fgs was nerfed, with the community asking anet the same question as this thread and begging that they could at least use a 4th utility skill.

Next up on the path should be epidemic, since it can (in some very specific circumstances, against very specific bosses) do more damage than any other skill in the game, similar to ice bow vs large targets.

Still, ice bow took a year or so after the elite were nuked. Necro is still a favored class in fractals, and still used on some raids. It a bad situation but history has a tendency to repeat itself.

Ecto is cheap, but even so its currently a relative bad investment, and that should say something. Its barely gone down past 85% its “base price”, if we can say that ecto has a base price.

It would be interesting to know how large portion of gw2 history that ecto has been worth above 34 silver, which is how high ectos need to rise in order for an investment to start giving returns. Really, it would need to go to 40 silver for a low 20% return of investment.

Materials for ascends is cheaper because of the multi farm? Elder wood logs are at an all high (and it went past rich iron ore as the more effective solo gold farm). Mithril ore is still on the higher end compared to earlier years, where it used to cost around 30 copper. That leaves Silk Scrap and Thick Leather Section, which both been going steady down ever since they spiked after a patch that drastically changed the demand. None of them correlate with the multi farm.

50.1 vs 49.9…

Anyway, as implemented, repair hammer seems like a wasted idea. People barely know about them, and much siege is cheaper to buy new than a hammer.

Mostly, there need to be a specific (but narrow) use case in which the hammer is useful and effective, without being frustrating to attackers/defenders. The current hammer don’t seem to be needed or wanted in active fights. There is some usefulness when defending static siege is left at very low hit points and the fight is long over, but for that the hammer is too expensive for what it does. It often easier and simpler to just build fresh siege.

I could see a redesign where hammers did not cost any supply, but rather than repair instantly it gave siege a extremely slow healing effect that ticked until full health.

So I always salvage exotic armor since I only use ascended, but this one has a surprise. The Draconic Headdress is worth 2.5g when selling to the regular merchant.

A bit more value than most salvages. I suspect its the most merch valued armor yet made?

Following the history of FGS, icebow, LF, and so on, I can suspect how the next nerfs will look like.

First, Epidemic is changed to only transfer max 5 stacks. This will kill any use of it, while some will pretend that its a viable skill. Others will call it an exploit that a single skill can cause that much damage and that it is a reasonable nerf (quote from the previous ele discussions).

Second, Parasitic Contagion is reduced to 6%. This will mostly not kill it, but it will make the trait feel less impact full.

When that doesn’t kill the necro meta (remember, it took a lot to force people away from elementalists), 6 months later the the scepter auto attack will be reduced by 33% thus triggering the next 4 characters of class X and 1 druid meta.

The public disclosure of this incident is very impressive. Within computer security research, its often acknowledged that social engineering is one of the least reported and most hushed area, where most companies would rather admit loosing a whole database of users personal data rather than admitting to be a victim of a scam artist. A common perception is that hackers has some magic pixie dust that allow them to steal nuclear codes with just the use of a phone (a recorded historical belief) so being hacked is something that just happens, while falling for a scam artist is commonly associated with feelings of being ashamed. Major points to a company that less than a year ago got major negative press for a lack of communication.

To Gaile, I’m sorry to hear that they destroyed so much in gw1. I remember the community events where so many people gave items to you in appreciation, and it feels bad to hear that those items are now gone. The frog events were one of the best method of communication that anet every did, and I recall them as being received unanimously positive. Even the trolls took a day off.

The new greens don’t explain why the price has been free falling the last few months. Would be see a reply from the devs if the reintroduction of the skins was intentional, a dup exploit, or just random bug. Estimated amount of skin are now around ten of thousands.

The rewards were badly designed. Finishing every zone once gives you AP but not much more. The rewards is geared towards those who do it 16×6 times, while discouraging group play and encourage solo play.

This is a mmorpg. Having people helping each other is a good thing. If you want players to grind, let them help each other. It would have been much better if the 16 skins were buy-able as it is now, but then have a separate reward like a mini, a back piece, or title be exclusively for those who finish all the tribulation achievements.

Running 2-2 and 2-3 16 times each is more a statement about time than skills. In the context of SAB, that is just SAD.

What was the group composition for each boss?

I know this is 3 years old content, but it is fun to experience it with all the bug from past years. The last jump has worked for me every time and even the animations in the beginning is smooth. Regardless if this is because better servers or better code, it was fun.

I pugged it and also did it without live steal. The tactic is to just run into the middle, kill everything and prioritizing staying near crystal rather than running around and dodging the attack. Remember to prioritize killing colossus (look for red circles), but make sure that all tentacles are dead before phase 2. During phase 2, first spike one of the side tentacles and then stand there and range the rest. I found that ranged characters had a slightly easier time in standing near a crystal and killing tentacles.

Because being rude is the best way to make friends! Go rudeness team!

What amazes me is that the moderators don’t see that it will do more harm being rude to people who leaves than deleting the comments. Do you think this player will ever, EVER, recommend this game to anyone after treated like that? I would not be surprised if they now start actively discouraged people to buy the game, warning them of the hateful community.

Lvl 52.
Finished the first fight without a loss (got the chest).
The second fight went fine without the boss eating a capture. He never regain any stage and we had 3 bubbles.

But no achievement.

Of course the nerf was heavy handed. It was designed to deincentivize players from playing the unsupported dungeons and directing them to the supported content that is fractals.

I worried half a year ago that dungeons could become ghost towns after the expansion, and decided to try get as many dungeons path done as possible before unlocking dungeon skins became a PVP-only concept. Everyone said that this would not happen.

Well, here we are now and I will just bring up party search and see who was right… Every single dungeon room is empty except for arah, since there is people who want to do story.

The Elemental Source is a RNG based fight. Who thought that this would make the fight more fun?

If they intend to make that fight harder, at least take out the RNG. Make each player spawn on a predictable position so that player skills is the determining factor for when the party fails and has to restart. Fights now will win or loose based on the question: will a player be spawning next to the elemental, pulling 2-3 groups of double spawning mobs.

Cameron Rich.3905:

Once Heart of Thorns is available, the new version of the fractals instance will become available to all players.

Please say that this mean new fractals as well, not just updates to the rewards.

I just wish that the filter would be a bit better. I can’t write “assessable” without “able” or it think I am cursing, so now I am forced to “estimate” things.

if we are not going to involve luxury items, then we must ask what subset of items constitute luxury.

In guild wars 1, you had one character slow per profession. In guild wars 2, you have about half of that. Is character slots then a luxury item? Same goes for bag space, bank space, and account upgrades.

A simple answer is that everything in the game is luxury items, since you don’t actually need to play a game to survive. I am excluding this line of thought from the beginning since it doesn’t help us to define a subset of items which to base the inflation on, as in that scenario every number is just get reduced to zero. A more complex answer is that luxury items are those which has a market penetration of less than 5%. This would likely work if we had data to show what is being bought and sold. It is also strongly questionable if precursors are bought by less than 5% of the player base, as its hard to even find a player who hasn’t built a legendary at this point (anecdotal data).

One way to find this subset of items is to collect the total number of items players has collected after 1 year, and based on those make assumption about what is being bought by players during the first year. With the new account API, websites are collecting data and someone could use this to estimate what constitute necessity for the player base. One problem of this would however be the lack of data over time, but it would be a start.

Are anet now promoting two guilds by name? Having guilds mentioned like this will inadvertently give them a large pool of new players wanting to join, which seems to be a thing that Anet has previously avoided. I don’t even remember if they ever named a guild before in a official message.

Finding party for dungeons are all about scale. If there aren’t a minimum amount of players that fills up the search, then the few who are left aren’t going to stand around and wait for a party to fill up. A negative reinforcement kicks and from that point dungeons will be dead content. I will personally follow this path.

The Jetpack skin.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Imho disincentivize means less appealing while still being appealing, the other means to be not appealing at all. And I am pretty sure John Smith means the former one.

Part of the purpose is to incentivize people to participate more in the content we support, which at the moment is fractals. – JohnSmith (https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ogusa/the_guild_wars_2_heart_of_thorns_economy/cvxdpi6)

Back in the day it took ages to find 4 other people who needed victory of death, so most people did not do it. It was such a problem that anet fixed the whole path just to open up the possibility for a significant part of the player base to finish the game solo.

10 runs might sound little, but it is a major pain and close to impossible if the player base to pick a party from is exclusively those who are also going for the same legendary.

BoogerSammich.7189:

Creating, developing and supporting content requires resources.

They are currently spending resources in order to deincentivize that content which secondary effects are negative PR and lower customer satisfaction. Doing nothing would have been better from a resources conservation perspective.

Fernling.1729:

Their confidence in the new HoT content is worrisome. Kind of sad that they have to do this in order to ensure people will choose the new content over the old.

It does make this look like a cash grab, which I suspect is a unintentional consequence.

In the end I am disappointed to see this wasteful behavior. Dungeons are rich on art models and story, both which constitute free raw material to mold into new fractals. There they can bring historical events into a playable instance, and fractals gives a story reason to do what no other mmorpg are allowed to: retire unsupported content without community backlash.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Economy-Questions-Repost/first#post5602939 / https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ogusa/the_guild_wars_2_heart_of_thorns_economy/cvxdpi6

I understand why they do this, but they are intentionally creating a ghost town out of old content. Would it not make more sense to dismantle unsupported content and reuse them in either fractals or living story?

Im not sure people realize how much of an impact just this is going to have.

About 50% of the costs when people roll for precursors are Elder Wood and Mithril. Same goes for superior rams and other commonly used siege weapons in WvW. Expect to see prices go up by 15-25% in the next days unless something will calm the market.

As one of those “vets” who like that the old skins are kind of exclusive, I am also very egalitarian about it. If a skin (or item with a skin on it) cost more than 500 gold on the TP, lets have the forge toss them out in with same speed as precursors. There, fixed it, and in a equal and fair way for everyone.

(Type in the word “skin” in the TP and sort by price to see which skins do not drop any more. Some sadly do not have the word skin in them so its not a 100% catch all search).

Remove the cannon phase and voila, they can fix what ever bug there is and everyone will be happy.

The cannon phase is boring, has zero interaction with the players, and is the definition of a time waster. It discourage player-to-player interaction. If during 1st April, they suddenly spawned angry killer rabbits instead of cannon phase, then the player base would plead to Anet that it would be made permanent! A joke is better than the current fight, and anything that allow groups to endure it is a bonus at this point.

There is two main branches where Elementalist will end up in after expansion release.

1#, people will not use Ele’s in fractals, raids, dungeons and PvP, and loudly complain/kick if a ele joins the party. After numerous complaints and statistical proof that the class is being outshined by other classes, in 9 months they will start consider some “exciting” changes that in 12 months time will result in a single build that everyone complains is OP, resulting in a devastating nerf several months later.

2#, alternative people will figure out a single tempest build that works and everyone will complain that it is OP, resulting in a devastating nerf several months after release.

This has been the major problem for ele’s since release and the expansion has not show any attempts to bring build diversity in a class that desperate needs it. The new utilities and new mechanics could have been designed to enhance current weapon sets, improve the weak condi damage, provide party support that effects defense or offense in a unique way, or enable ele to tank and survive what otherwise would be one-hit-kills.

As things looks now, Eles will be in the same situation as Necro is when dealing with fractals and dungeons. Its not that Necro are bad at DPS, but average is not enough reason to pick it without significant utility or party buffs. But there is also a much worse problem that Necro face.

Experience players that focus on fractal and dungeon tend to have multiple characters, and most people will pick the class that is best for the job rather than a average one. This leave a very low average skill level for the people who do stick with the class, thus create a negative experience for those who players with them and after a while the class falls into dislike by the rest of the community. Not short after you get parties that says “no ranger, no necro”, and parties that will active kick people who enter with such class.

Average is not good enough to be played, and bad enough to be turned away when it really matters.

Chrono mesmers do look to be the clear winner in the expansion and a must for every dungeon/fractal/raid party. Very solo nice video for what is essentially a support build.

Anet has been very inconsistent when it comes to rare skins. There is now a bunch of 2k+ gold skins on the TP, and only the halloween has been re-released.

Why should the jetpack be the most expensive skin in the game? Why is the fused weapons more expensive than a legendary or a permanent contract?

They need to figure out a consistent way to slowly reintroduce rare skins to the market.

The faulty information was people who said that we were in a ice bow meta, that ice bow was 90% of the groups damage, and that it was ice bows fault that content became trivial.

Now ice bow is gone and yet the meta has not changed, 90% of groups damage has not gone away. and content has not become non-trivial. People can call it a step in the right direction if they want, but the initial claims about the ice bow has demonstrated be shown to be lies and hype.

Dahkeus.8243:

only made a negligible difference in the speed of clearing current content

A good description of so called OP ice bow. Funny how a skill could be negligible and OP at the same time.

There were never any ice bow meta. People lied and overhyped the damage, and now we see the result. The ice bow damage was previous balanced to the cool down, so the nerf only really get noticed if the boss die before the CD impacts DPS (ie, when the boss die around the 10-30s mark).

In the last months we have all read people declaring that ice bow made content trivial, that we were in a ice bow meta, that ice bow was 90% of the groups damage. So since the patch has arrived I wanted to share my experience with this brave new world of challenging content.

I started with a fractal 50 using the exact same group running the exact same composition of warrior, guardian, 2 ele’s and 1 thief. The run itself took about 40m, and is average for us when we got twins as end boss. The only time I notice any difference was during old tom (no fan, just dps) and berserker, and that because those fights are pure dps that normally end in 10s. Yesterday it took 15s, 0 deaths.

So maybe the change can’t be found in fractals. Today I went to check the place of origin for ice bow #4, AC path 3 and SE path 1. Both are places where groups original requested elementalists to equip icebow, so I here I hope to find a nerfed icebow causing problems. However I can sadly report that burrows died in a couple of seconds as it did pre-patch.

As a last effort I went to world bosses Tequatl and Tripple Trouble in hope that here I would finally notice something. Everyone wrote pre-patch that ice bow was trivially over powerful against large targets, but alas the dragon died faster this day than the hours before patch.

So now I ask the community, have anyone else found this challenging content that was promised?

I am using the bloody prince staff skin but I have no collection unlocked for it.

Lord Trejgon.2809:

nearly impossible to nerf this single use of it without either rendering skill totally useless or removing it at all….

A nice wish but I would not put my money on it. Past experience for elementalists has shown that fixes are made permanently and without any regarding to keep the skill in use.

The outrage will be relative minor as elementalist players has had plenty of patches to endure that its not really worth the bother.

Once anet do figure out that the reason hybrid/condi never had a chance is because of the buffs warriors provide (about 20% of a party damage comes from banners alone), then the outrage will be beyond what anyone has yet seen. Guardians are also playing a very dangerous game with Lupi atm, and doing several hundred thousands of damage in the matter of a second has been called by a few players as OP. Neither player base has experienced the this kind of nerfs so I do not look forward to that day.

Its fine that ele’s can’t stay as top dps class forever, but it would be nice if eles had other roles we could fall back on in pve. Defiance negates a focus on CC, Aura’s are personal and has minor effects, and healing is not a thing. Maybe if PS warriors didn’t exist then might stacking could be their thing, but as it is we don’t have a trait that give party might without a ICD.

Perfect scores!

In order to be constructive I will list the issues I had with the event and what previous event succeeded where this one failed.

1. Comparing this event with the toxic event in Kessex Hills, gaining rewards after 30 minutes delays the feeling between accomplishment and reward and makes the experience feeling hallow and unrewarding. The toxic event also made you feel like you were progressing with each finished event while this one only increased the reward per 5 completed events, which also contributing to a unnecessary negative feeling at the end when you end with 4,9,14, and 19 wins.
2. Comparing this event with the save the citizen during the LA invasion, the map in LA worked together to achieve the best rewards. Commanders showed new player how cooperative the community was and many guilds capitalized on this to welcome new players. In contrast, this event had even commanders do “tag and run” tactic, and map chat was full of negative and hostile comments.
3. The immersion of the event was lacking heavily. The map had no new art work and no context to put the invasion. As a player I felt a complete lack of passion from the developers in making this event and it felt hastily put together. In contrast, my interest was drawn in during the toxic event thanks to the cool tower and how the new map felt.
4. The initial bug had a major impact on presentation. Like with food, the most healthy or great tasting food would be rejected if it was a gray slimy goo. An event that never started would have been better than one which felt like a waste of time.
5. The rewards was presented in a way that told the player to grind or to not bother at all. A better way would be to give a one-time reward to unlock a single skin after a specific challenge, and on top of that allow grinders to get more if they want to put in the work. Multi-layered reward system can do a lot to hide grind and the reward for finishing a achievement category is a excellent system to do that.

I bought the minis and it doesn’t haunt me that others can get them now by farming events. I only wish that the jetpack was available as a reward choice.