I mean yeah getting a legendary is available to everyone, but it still doesn’t change the OP’s point that the amount of farming is a bit absurd combined with the RNG. Anet could easily have the forge spit out 100% drop rate for a precursor (by putting in 4 exotics of the same weapon type) as well as mystic clovers, and that would barely make a legendary item that much easier to get (especially if the RNG around certain drops like lodestones isn’t altered).
Idk… probably just to look cool more than prestigious. I did plenty of grind stuff in WoW for cool looking mounts back in the old BC days… but I would say the real prestige comes from a sense of achievement that’s hard for folks to obtain because it isn’t something grindy/farmable. I only got the fancy flying hippogryph and gazelle-looking mounts because they looked cool on my female draenei priest decked out in T6 and the staff off Archimonde. Yeah a little chest pumping and ego-inflating I suppose… but it never made me so elitist that I wouldn’t give priests advice if they msg’ed me or help out groups who couldn’t find a healer for a dungeon they really wanted to do.
My character felt prestigious to me because of cool gear earned through skill (and some farming on the mounts I suppose), and I was helpful in whatever reasonable capacity… I made a presence on the server that I was this decked out priest willing to help as long as I wasn’t raiding (which folks knew my raid schedule). In this game, there might be cooler looking stuff than mine, yet some of those folks can’t play this game for diddly. I don’t feel like I, or some players I play with who I know are stellar at this game, standout in anyway…. which is really odd when there are so many mechanics and opportunities within GW2 to really create that experience.
Definitely agree that some profession balance is in order esp. in WvW and PvP areas… Though a little PvE tweaking wouldn’t be so bad either. Some classes have a lot of tools to evade and get out nasty situations over others yet still manage to hit like anvils… Whereas other classes severely lack in one or both areas. TBH, I find WoW (even with people who can have PvE items several tiers above what you can get) to have better profession/class balance in both PvE and PvP than GW2.
It’s 1 :
The fact you need 50 for an ascended back piece and 250 to infuse it on top of it isn’t a stranger to that.
That sounds reasonable, but there may be more supply as well from players grinding fractals.
In addition, this doesn’t explaing other incredible price increases like 500% on dyes or 400% on some superior sigils (fire was at 5gp last night — I bought a sup sigil of fire last month for 90sp).
That’s mostly due to #3, inflation and a little bit of #2, low supply…. People are making gold hand over fist doing fractals/dungeons and gold farming, demand is the same or higher, yet the supply of materials, runes, and dyes is the same or lower. Basically, the rate of gold coming into the system far exceeds the rate of materials coming in; so the economy goes into equilibrium by devaluing the gold, requiring more in order to buy stuff.
And if the Monthly requirement changed from WvW kills to 50 DEs in Wayfarer Foothills (or some other random non-Orr zone), people would likely QQ about it.
WvW kills are not super hard to get and have no pre-requisite do complete it other than join a BG and try to find a zerg/group that’s hitting points.
It’s a mechanic that’s a decade too old and completely not fun. They need to fix, asap
Yeah RNG for progression is lame. At least in D2, which was super gear dependent, you could feasibly naked run through the game if you had skills. WoW was RNG loot, but the nature of raiding was such that the raid group was progressing in gear and content even with the RNG. In GW2, regardless of having a consistent fractal group, all 5 players can go completely bust on a series of dailies and be stuck waiting to progress until RNG favors them.
I think the DEs were supposed to be the respective anchors for lower level maps more than the nodes and material drops, but there’s so many factors at play that they simply become undesirable to participate in at higher levels. I’ll just call out a few factors. By themselves, they might not seem that bad. In tandem however, they don’t generate the desire for players to want to play the content.
+ Scaled down rewards for DEs in lower zones (in terms of karma/gold/xp as well as general drop potentials)
+ Uniform rewards for DEs of similar level (doing a 15 minute event can gives you the same karma/gold/xp and drop potentials as a 5 minute event unless there’s a chest)
+ Lack of DE information (being able to tell what’s going on and where within the map and globally)
+ Lack of real consequence for success/failure (having a “dead zone” should carry severe consequences that potentially even spill over into other zones).
+ High WP costs (unlike WvW BGs where you can wp into any map for free (minus the que if there is one) and get a glimpse of what’s going on. Trying to do something similar in Tyria would cost you quite a bit.
I think they could ease up on the DR in the non-dungeon/fractal places…. or adjust the rate of material drops in these locations. The rate of gold income far exceeds the rate of non-node materials being able to be supplied which inflates their prices. Dungeon runs and fractals can drop T5/T6 mats, but not with any real consistency (except the harpies for blood).
This wouldn’t necessarily restore Orr into the glory farm spot, but rather makes Frostgorge more viable again since it has the most sources of possible T5/T6 drops (totems, scales, claws, and bloods at the very least)
lol karka farming is aprox 1.6g per 45 minutes (not counting Rares if u get any) and sell mats you get
Just 1.6g in just coin drops and vendoring junk/blues/greens? Just wondering cause there seems to be tons of ways to earn coin, before going to the TP, yet getting mats has been crippled for some time. Prices are increasing because supplies are only coming in so fast, yet gold coming in far outpaces the supplies (hence your inflation).
I haven’t noticed a huge decrease with the diminishing returns. How long till you feel their effects?
Usually after the first few dozen or so kills and you’ll see the frequency of drops decline steadily… So whereas for the first couple of kills you might get a drop every other mob, after 5 minutes of killing the same mob type, you’ll get a drop every 12 kills or so. In Orr, since it’s all undead, you usually hit this DR real fast. In Frostgorge Sound, you can hit the DR for one mob type and then move across the map to trolls, sons of svanir, panthers, dredge, sea creatures, wurms, etc.
I’d be happier if they loosened up on the DR, or got rid of it entirely (but keep it in dungeons/fractals)… Increasing the supply of gold into the system only inflates the prices even further. If you make it possible to increase the supply of materials into the system, then things start to stabilize.
Just for clarification, is it 7 fractals start -> finish or 7 fractal paths? Cause I’ve only run maybe 4 fractals since the monthly reset and I have this part of the monthly completed (I had it done before my 4th fractal run).
It’s an interesting debacle….
It’s sort of a combination of bots no longer farming supplies and players mostly running dungeons/fractals which adds more gold into the system than supplies (and no real desire to use that gold prior to LS for anything other than maybe buying a precursor if they got the money). Post-LS, now there’s a resurgence in demand for supplies and prices have skyrocketed cause folks (on aggregate) are sitting on tons of gold, want supplies, but there aren’t many available.
I would say remove, or lessen, the DR from the non-dungeon/fractal areas. Now that there are less bots, players have to introduce the supplies…. and if players want to spend an hour blood farming over other activities, then they should be allowed to do it. I’m assuming the bot detection system is more robust now, so the DR isn’t as necessary to the degree it currently exists…
Might be worth it to folks, giving the cost of ectos, to run some dungeons. About half the armor pieces for any set are 180 tokens (3 paths). Depending on the stats you want, you can bang that out fairly quickly… While doing the dungeon, you’ll grab some coin and maybe a rare or two. If you want the full set of armor, it takes about 20 runs (without DR)… or about a week of dungeon runs (doing 3 paths a day before DR kicks in). This calculation might be a little off because bosses can drop little baggies now that gives some stuff including additional tokens, but fair to say it’s a bit of running in order to fully trick out your toon.
Since all the armor pieces require the same amount of ectos for crafting (and really just differ on how many wood/ore/goss/leather are needed), it’s better to craft the chest/pants (assuming they don’t cost 180 tokens) and try to get 3 pieces from a dungeon. While you might lack certain cosmetic appeal, I’m guessing most people want the stats first and then worry about making their character look cool.
Weapons are a toss up. 300 dungeon tokens for a mainhand/offhand weapon or 390 tokens for a two hander is a bit grindy, whereas these weapons are typically 4-5 gold on the TP (at least from what I’ve seen).
@Tab
Might be hard now given they’ve gone to fractals… AC isn’t too bad. While it might lack gear with “desirable stats”, you can definitely do that in close to an hour or less and most gold/boss mobs drop silver. The loot isn’t too bad as well, though not sure if there’s a potential for any core/lodestone drops.
Forgot weapon dmg…. this just takes stats into account.
this falls in line with anet’s anti grind policy. i admit that at times there are grey areas when it comes to interpretation or implementation of their manifesto, which as we have seen, has evolved, though the wording on the document stays the same.
That may be the theory but in practice all it does is make the grind worse, people still grind but they have to do it for longer. All the attractive loot in the game requires gold or a grind for mats so people still grind for both.
The say the grind isn’t mandatory and it isn’t…. as you put it, they just throw some cosmetic appeal and stats to make you want to pursue rares/exotics/ascended/legendary over your blues/greens.
Now Dungeon are kitten slow to build up enough tokens to buy anything. I wish there was a scaled diffecult system almost like the fractals with a higher drop rate as you get to higher levels cause it’s hard enough to get a group together to run 1 dungeon run rather then 3 (that’s like 3 – 4 hours for 120 – 150 tokens).
Maybe 3-4 hours for Arah, but not other dungeons (depending on group’s ability, but most PUGs I’ve run with are fairly good at running now). A full non-Arah explore dungeon run can take around 1 – 2 hours of your time (or less), give you 78s and 180 tokens (which can buy 1 of the exotic pieces in a set priced at 180 tokens… and there are 3 pieces in an armor set that are priced at 180 tokens) just from finishing the paths. By the time you factor in vendoring and selling certain things to the TP that you found in drops, you’ve easily walked away with close to 2g.
::EDIT:: The flipside being, the more people doing this and not getting mats, the higher priced the mats go as supply is low yet we’ve only pumped more gold into the system.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
90% of items right now sell for 1 copper over what you can sell them to a vendor.
i love made up statistics.
oddly, anything i buy from the TP doesnt fall into this “90%”
Cause you’re buying, not selling…. people who opt for the auto-sell option to make a quick buck right away often fall prey to the market players who buy low and are willing to set the prices a little higher when they sell and wait until the item sells.
yeah no offense, I don’t see how forcing people to go farm mats rather than play the TP makes prices go down. They just play the TP less, you assume that they’ll throw up their assets for cheap.
Market players make money because people are willing to pay for things at outrageous prices. Ever wonder why a pair of Gucci sunglasses is $400-600 for basically plastic? Cause there are dolts out there willing to buy them at that price.
As for anti-grind…. they meant it as it’s not mandatory to grind. You don’t need rares/exotics/legendary to do anything, you simply want them and the market players know it; hence the prices are what they are.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
@skullmount
I do agree, at least up to 400, that jewelcrafting shouldn’t require ectos… but I think Anet did that in response to how remarkably easy it is to level that crafting profession relative to other professions. Did they change tailoring and other crafting professions as well to include ectos in the 375-400 craft? I know they increased the number of ectos required for a crafted exotic piece (except jewelcrafting).
I think the better question is, what rate of farming is acceptable to create a full exotic set via crafting materials? What’s the rate for those who want a set running a particular dungeon? Obviously, the riskier option (dungeons) will be faster… but what’s the acceptable time frame? Take in mind that it currently takes about 2 weeks, running 3 non-DR’ed paths each day, to get a full set of armor and weapons from a particular dungeon (1 week for the armor set, and about another week for the weapon set depending on the profession and what they use). Before DR, you could craft full exotic everything in a matter of a day or so; and aside from speed runs in CoF and Arah, it took a lot longer than 40 some odd runs to get full dungeon gear.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
ahh, jogging my memories.
I rather have a chunk of Takeshi’s castle though
I’d go for that…. only if my death/failure is shown in a comical fashion with Japanese commentators getting really into it.
I wanna chunk of Aggro Crag Mountain…
GUTS
Hopefully it’s leading the removal of the DR in the world map (yet keeping the DR in dungeons so that certain paths aren’t chain farmed all day). I understand trying to create a balance of risk/reward, but it shouldn’t try to strong arm folks into dungeons/fractals if they prefer farming/events.
RNG is RNG, why are you guys so impatient. I assume getting rings is to progress further in the dungeon? Otherwise, I don’t know why you need it so soon. They said they’ll make more ways to get it other than the dailies/drops. Just move on and come back when it’s more available.
Partially this since Ascended is gonna be around for sometime and we’re only 2 weeks into fractals. Just keep running, but maybe with less imperative to need to climb the ladder higher and higher… if rings dropped more consistently, then you’d be swimming in them right now. As for having/not having the right stats… which is more important to progressing, the right stats or the resistance? My necro somehow managed to get a ring… not the most desirable stats, but considering it saves me a bunch from the agony dmg on the bosses, I’m sure glad I have it over my “ideal” stated exotic ring.
T5 are still profitable as well. UNID’ed dyes (which drop more frequently in lower level zones apparently)…. Yes, low drop rates and DR doesn’t help, but low risk doesn’t mean income/reward should be equivalent to those taking riskier ventures.
All the examples the OP describes are surrounded by more complex issues… it’s not like Anet is proactively trying to slight it’s player base because kitten ‘em that’s why. They’re trying to create a balance between all aspects of how stuff is acquired…. the balancing act that occurs swings both ways.
DR was to combat botters, speed runners, and people exploiting things in order to get constant waves of mobs (like grubb’n). Prices are shooting back up partially due to the DR, but mostly because less botters/people are farming and a lot more people are clearing content… They’re walking away mostly with gold, but nothing to spend it on. Basically, supply is lower yet demand is the same if not greater and you’ve introduced more money; hence price inflation.
Plinx nerf was an attempt to make more of the map (Cursed Shore and the rest of the world) viable/desirable. A relatively quick and easy DE chain of 5 events that are near at least 2-3 other DEs (some you can do while doing the plinx chain) that respawns quickly is awesome for players, but unbalanced in the grand scheme of what they were trying to shoot for.
Ori and Ancient wood prices are market factors, and probably dipped due to botting, also dipped due to a lesser demand in needing those materials; for example, not as many jewelcrafting exotic accessories are necessary/desired. Not sure what the market is now, but dips/spikes are mostly market driven.
The new Arah gold run is just as bad as, if not worse than, the original token farming runs. All you’re doing is inflating the market… but hoping you can get your cash quick enough to buy stuff before the market responds. Anet fixed this exploit for the second time now, deal with it.
You can still make money…. try your hand at farming some stuff. With all the folks running fractals and dungeons, not focusing on T6 mats and such; you can make decent profit. You just can’t make absurd sums of money easy for low risk…
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They’re sold by the SE dungeon vendor, Morro, for 120 tokens.
TLDR: You can’t get initial rewards with multiple characters within the same daily period from dungeons.
Pretty sure this, which is a bummer… you already have to run like 20 or so dungeon paths (minimum) to get a full set of armor for one toon. If you went through the trouble of leveling another character (let’s say to 80), why should the other character be penalized?
I don’t think removing the DR is necessarily the way to go since you do want to encourage people to not farm specific paths all day… but you should give some leeway if folks are really motivated to get stuff from dungeons.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
They probably also did it because, relative to other legendary requirements, Bifrost is like one of the easiest/cheapest of the bunch.
Yes, fix the bugs and unintended issues created, but not the ones that affect my ability to get loots.
The sword of game fixing swings both ways people…. if you can’t understand how this fix was trying to repair something that wasn’t intentionally designed, then you’re an obtuse player or just being obstinate.
It’ll be interesting to see all the ways you can get Ascended gear once it’s been fully implemented. They’ve also stated that they intend to have this gear out for quite some time before the next tier. We’ll also have to see if future content is still scaled to blues/greens or if it’s scaled to rares/exotics/ascended… Vertical progression only really happens if the content requires you to gear up in order to progress (as far as I can tell, it’s optional and really only necessary in order to get the agony resist). I know I know, WvW “but er’body will have Ascended and me nothing, I’ll get crushed”… Yeah, perhaps on a 1v1 basis, but not if you play the map smartly by traveling with people and using this thing called “strategery” (<—- SNL reference, inb4 people mock it)
It sort of boils down to character goals and drive. If your goal is to get to lvl 80, farm mats, whatever, and you wanna get it done like yesterday and make your playtime as efficient as possible, then solo play caters to the majority of those activities unless there are clear reasons/advantages to partying up. Someone with goals, but no real care of getting them done quickly or effectively, is more likely to party up and just sort of shoot the breeze. Each method has a particular strength/weakness to it, but ultimately if players are having fun then it doesn’t matter.
I think adding certain story and explore mode dungeon sections into the even numbered fractals would be interesting… and completing them would still give you the daily chest (it’s just an alternative to the Jade Maw). Though with agony and no wps, there might need to be some serious retooling (certainly less hp).
Good paced encounter… even though the boss is a bit of an HP sponge at the end, it’s broken into phases so that you’re not just constantly whomping on him (assuming you don’t try to cheese it by just AoE’ing the final seal).
I have noticed this. At level 80 my necro has around 21k health, yet if I did TA explore (lvl 55 downscale), my health is just over 10k…. Because reducing my level by about 1/3 means cleaving my health pool by over 1/2?
Same idea… a dedicated group. Rather than constantly relying on 100% PUGs to do stuff, you can go with a group of players that are familiar with the respective playstyles. The only difference is that Rift and WoW usually incentivize being part of a guild because raid encounters are usually not PUG-able (at least when I played they weren’t) and require a consistent group of players working on progressing through the content. Content in GW2 is more PUG-able…. though it’s not always a guarantee that the masses want to do certain content that a guild might be more inclined to do.
Yeah spam guilds exist everywhere…. I remember the “family style” guilds of WoW that were just numbers and a whole lot of doing nothing.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
It would be nice if they allowed some measure of flexibility so that you could do a fractal level say 5 levels higher than what you’ve actually achieved… and once completed you basically still get a +1 lvl progression. This is a very basic solution to help loosen the hard gate.
My ultimate suggestion would be some kind of xp tracking bar in the hero tab. Max difficulty level setting is something you achieve in order to initiate a fractal dungeon (almost like how you only need one person to have done story mode to initiate the explore mode dungeon). You get “xp” for completing a fractal level; the amount scales as the difficulty increases. If you’re a player doing the max level fractal possible for your toon, completion is an automatic “level up”. Those who are a few levels behind get a level up and probably some spillover xp. Those who are a few levels past the level setting still get some credit towards progression.
The idea is that alts and fresh 80s can still participate without having the hard gate of 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc…. They can feasibly go from like 1 to 5, 5 to 8, 8 to 10…. etc. (let’s say they started out running fractal level 10 or something). Higher level players have some incentive to help lower level players.
Yeah like a gigantic monolith with the names of everyone that has fallen. Like million names listed ^^, and then a smaller monolith for the ones who lost their… connection! ._.
Buy anyway, the loot must be equal, with the same change of looting the same exact number of items of course. We took part of the whole event, why should we get reduced loot?
Yeah I do think folks who DC’ed should get a box that gives you the event specific rewards and basically the same roll potential as the event chest (so like random 2 exotics, 2 random rares I believe).
I’d like to see in Fractals are dungeons/paths that don’t have a boss, where you go from start to finish to find something and that’s it.
I mean I guess the cliffside fractal has a boss… but his presence is minor and it’s really more what you’re describing. It’s pretty fun exchanging the hammer and working together to climb your way up to the top. Honestly, this is one encounter I think Anet did a fantastic job with.
Well idk if you noticed this or not, and maybe it’s not a uniform adjustment, but ever since certain fields only affect up to 5 targets, I’ve noticed my healing has shot up dramatically. My elixir gun healing field is ticking in the 380s rather than 110s. Well of blood on my necro seems to have improved at lot as well (though not quite as drastically as the engineer’s healing field)
Well I’ll concede that the precursor RNG is a load of doylak poo (I’ve been saying that well before the LS event and that event only inflamed the issue)… Prices are going up because demand is super high and supply is relatively low (and the DR isn’t helping).
The distribution of farmers to “content clearers” matters because if most folks are doing clearing content, then they just have a ton of gold and nowhere to spend it. The few farmers there are do a substitution effect where hey you spent X time getting Y gold…. which is the same as me spending the same amount of time farming Z mats, so we trade your Y for my Z since we spent equal time doing it. Crafting professions hardly add any additional cost for refinement, merely a sum of materials consumed to make the product.
(edited by Bruno Sardine.2907)
I think fractals do a slightly better job given they’re a set of random encounters with some that have other random aspects thrown in (the dredge fractal, for example, will give you either a dredge suit boss or an ice elemental boss… killing them is the same strategy, but the two bosses do different things). It’d be nice if explore mode dungeons had a little more of this randomness thrown in even if you still choose a particular path to go down.
26s in 5-8 minutes with loot drops…. considering that’s not a uniform pace in any other dungeon or other facet of the game, it probably wasn’t intentional by design. Can’t believe there’s QQ’ing over basically the equivalent of token speed runs prior to them making token drop at the end of runs. If the 26s was on a Giganticus and all of a sudden stopped, yeah that would suck; it’s a tough boss on top of the fact that it takes awhile to actually get to him.
Yeah, cores and lodestones and things that we need a lot of doesn’t help… but neither does flooding the economy with easy farmed gold (you just make prices higher).
I really hope that new statue they’re building in LA is actually a giant Ancient Karka holding a placard that says NEVER FORGET 11/16/2012
Well it’s a legendary weapon, not armor…. and considering the precursor is exotic, they have at least one exotic.
Maybe if the road to getting a legendary was less about RNG/farm and more about skill, then it might have been prudent for a player to deck themselves out in exotic equipment… but it would still be a choice the player has to make.
Request carriage rides in Divinity’s Reach… it goes in a nice circle.
double post…
I also play a necro…. I feel like it has a little less support on the group, but manages conditions like a champ.
Engineers….
- Health kit to place down some heals (6s cooldown), condition removal, and a fury/switness buff (f1-4 skill is a self heal on a short cooldown)
- Elixir U (i think) is a stun break that restores all your endurance and can be tossed (f1-4 skill) to help revive players (other useful elixirs as well)
- Elixir Gun auto-attack applies bleeds and weakness, has a cripple (which also gives nearby players swiftness), can lay down a healing field (on 20s cooldown) and has an f1-4 ability to give you and nearby players regeneration.
- Grenade kit can apply blind, bleeds, slow (via chilling effect), poison
- You also have the rifle, pistol, and shield (in some combination) that all have various CC and other mechanics to them.
Basically, an engineer is a super flexible platform to do all sorts of support. You can even go a bomb kit route where you essentially can tank n’ heal while laying bombs.