Guild Wars 2

If you start your own group saying “all welcome” you will get experienced level 80’s three times out of four. Personally I will often join these groups on paths I know well because it offers a different experience. The only time I get annoyed is when people who haven’t done the dungeon before run ahead and agro mobs, or they just don’t listen.

So what about the one time in four when everyone is new to the dungeon? Welcome to the world of not being carried. Dungeons are hard when you are new to them and I can see that struggling through every dungeon as a rookie would get depressing, but every dungeon had someone complete it for the first time. Understand the principles of your class and don’t try for a bunker build and you should be OK provided you have a group of non rage quitters. CM path 2 took me 2 hours one night, so a lot of us have experience of hard dungeon runs where nothing went right. The game is old enough that you only have to go through that experience one time in four now. Just don’t be what I was back then, a staff guardian who didn’t use reflects.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Unidentified dye prices are also not 1g each as predicted and most likely will never be worth more than the 20-25 silver they are now.

Most of the people predicting a 1 gold value put the time frame of 6 months up. Others went so far as to predict 1 year. As far as I’m concerned the question is “are drops from black lion chests going to be high enough to satisfy demand?” My guess is not in the long run, but it’s really going to slow down the rate at which the current stockpile is consumed so I’m starting to think maybe a year to reach 50 silver.

The reason the marionette fight worked better is that failure wasn’t such a drawn out grind. If you did badly in marionette at least it was over quickly. If you do badly in this one it takes absolutely forever, which is pretty soul destroying. A bad run on Marionette was disappointing, a bad run in the pavilion is aggravating.

I have for a long time thought that the Mystic Forge should do something when somebody crafts a legendary, even if it just changed the colour of its light briefly and made a sound. That way everyone in the area could feel in on the experience. Crafting four in a row would definitely raise a few eyebrows if that was the case.

The previous aesthetic for Lion’s Arch was reclaimed ship. It will be interesting to see what they go with this time around. They could totally build the entire city just from the greatswords thrown into Zomoross’ forge. The could build a seat for the head of the Captains Council from them and….

In all seriousness, it would be very easy for the design team to end up making a pretty generic human style city, and I hope they don’t. I hope it ends up a mish mash of all 5 racial styles, and have the council chambers made from a decommissioned ship.

First off, I can see what has been attempted with the rewards in the Crown Pavilion event. Get smaller groups together to take down the bosses simultaneously to break down the zerg, and leave rewards until the end to keep players focused on the event rather than the farm. I can support that ideal.

I do however have a big problem with the punishments meted out to players who are in a map who don’t do the event properly. Now I don’t consider the loot to be the main objective of doing content, but getting 2 champ bags for almost an hour’s worth of fighting is just plain rude.

If even the champs you killed drop one loot bag I think it would go a way towards addressing this issue. Doing the event the way it was intended would still be the most efficient method, but it would do away with a lot of the really negative experiences people are having with this event.

A while ago I looked at what other areas might work for a champ train. Gendarran Fields turned out to be really good, including two sets of two champs very close to each other. Since I looked at that however three of those four champs have been downgraded (the spider near the rich iron ore node, and two pirates) so I don’t think that a champ train there would work any more.

Perhaps ANet could look at zone 2 areas (anything including levels 20-35) for adding champs. These areas don’t have world bosses after all, and while I am not a fan of champ trains in general, they are a social aspect of the game that people seem to enjoy, and given that they generate less gold than dungeon runs with a good group I say why not.

The black lion weapon trader (near the trading post in Gendarran fields) traded in them not long ago. Not sure if he still does.

Short answer: make Trail Mix until you reach 200.

Slightly longer answer: Discoveries always gain you experience, the closer to your level the better. You can also get experience crafting items within 50 of your crafting even if you’ve already discovered it. At 193 you’ll need to find the vendor for the trail mix recipe (if you haven’t already) and keep crafting that, or else do one of the other 150 or 175 recipes, which won’t be cost effective.

Terse answer: google a crafting site

There are currently less than 70,000 buy listings. Congratulations, you have the power to crash that market. Mind you, you are probably also the main reason that market is so strong.

Vayne.8563:

As for the song, yeah, I get what you’re saying completely. I love this particular style of satire and I think you did it exceptionally well.

I’d go easy on the praise, ‘cause you won’t like the version of “You’re so Vayne” he wrote.

After hearing dozens of bandits saying “Now I’ll never…” when they die, I had to laugh when I killed an Inquest operative who with his last gasp uttered “Now my golem will never…”

I am hoping that the megaservers were put in with a thought as to how they could add more maps without making other areas even more deserted.

If it is the case that there will be new maps added and tied in with LS, then I would be advising ANet to advertise it as an expansion. Copy along the lines of “GW2 is expanding! Over the next four months GW2 will see the addition of *four new maps *two new exciting world bosses *a new, permanent dungeon as well as the continuation of the ever-evolving Living World story line, leading to the home of Tyria’s newest dragon.”

Orangensaft.7139:

you should be able to set an option as a guild member to chose if you want to take part in such hostile guild events though

apart from that its a nice idea to make it a guild event^^

I think the best way to do it would be to have a message pop up saying “[guild name] has entered into a conflict with [rival guild name]. Do you wish to assist?” From that point on you are involved until the conflict ends. Invulnerable spies will exist but I don’t see that as a huge issue.

There are also all sorts of scenarios you could do. Highest kill count, kills by region, hold some obscure vista etc. The biggest bonus is that it wouldn’t descend into a champ train. The biggest difficulty is how it would play out on mega servers.

Personally I think a lot of guilds would go for this.

Csele.1647:

alwinp.2791:

These people exceeding 10 hours + a day

Have you considered getting a job? you probably spend A LOT less hours doing piece of kitten work (like farming a precursor in gw2), convert money to gold and buy one instead.

Have you considered that people might be afk? for alot of that time?

In that case the numbers they give are useless. “200 hours playing, 6000 hrs afk and still no drop. RNG is messed up.”

I dunno, if it’s run like a guild mission it could work. Leaders from two guilds choose the “guild conflict” mission and for the next half hour or hour all members from the other guild are treated as hostile. And if you are not in either guild you get to sit down and bring out the popcorn.

When I melee I dodge roll backwards and then forwards when he does his leap to avoid the second attack, which travels outward relatively slowly.

Faux.1937:

Thank you for sharing maybe they will learn from this.

You can tell him trait spotter,
But he’ll still range with longbow you’ll see.

Solidbeatz.8571:

Oh man, so i just lost a kitten load of gold because anet decided to recycle a massive farm event. Great, just great.

Thanks for the answer though.

You are quite possibly in the same position as the people who sold unidentified dyes at 35s, only to see them rise to 80s. A month later they don’t feel so bad about things. Speculations of this sort are wrong as often as not.

All reward tracks were defaulted to locked, so you have to complete story mode again. It seems like a pain at first, but in the end I found it nice to have an excuse to go back in.

For what it’s worth I think the TP is a mixed blessing. I would find it hard to do without it’s convenience. The fact that it is easily the best way to make money in the game by a large margin has some negative impacts though if you are after a desirable item and aren’t interested in playing this aspect of the game.

Doing away with the TP would cause far far more problems than it would solve without a doubt.

Wikie.2610:

Wanze.8410:

How does it make money making methods by playing the game obsolete?

everything is worth kitten, almost every drop in the game is kitten thats how
and every good way of making money by actually playing the game is always nerfed because arenanet wants to milk shekels from people exchanging gems to gold
so the only choice is either exploit suckers on tp yourself in the name of capitalism or never get anything nice…or whip out your credit card…gold wars 2
+at least in other games the government wasnt stealing 15% of my kitten

You realise that the 15% tax rate is one of the few things working against people trying to make themselves rich off the TP.

It’s a shame you don’t like the look of Storm, because that’s cheaper at the moment.

I am ok with the idea of grinding for fashion, but I understand your frustration given that the item you happen to be after is also ridiculously expensive. With 250 giant eyes you can’t even farm a decent percentage of them. At least with something like charged lodestones you can get them occasionally and upgrade charged cores.

Mind you, once it’s on your character and you are running around with it you might decided that you are less impressed with it than you thought you would be. I just had that experience with Abyssal Sceptre.

In the up path there are four groups of them after you kill Malrona. Be aware of where each set is and watch them closely. You can only dodge roll past three, so if they are moving to the left and you can run to the right that’s ideal. If you are first in the group avoid running over the top of them and if you have swiftness you should be able to run past them without needing to dodge roll.

If you are not going to do Fractals then exotic equipment is sufficient. In monetary terms it is hard to justify precursors given their slight improvement. Having said that, I craft ascended gear because it gives me something to work towards that isn’t the utter grind of a legendary.

EDIT: for WvW the infusions are only really useful if you enjoy soloing camps.

It may be worth switching the left hand side in general, but please stop playing. Or if you must play, just become a trading post baron

Stuff you might do when you reach level 80:

Finish personal story
Do living story as it comes
Work your way up through Fractals
Do the world boss circuit (only 2 of which are genuinely challenging)
Work (grind) your way to a legendary, and complain about precursors on the forum
Craft ascended weapons and armour
World v World
Become a trading post baron
Speed run dungeons

Some of this might work for you, some won’t. Some despise Living Story, but I like the concept, and think the execution has been OK. Your server must be quiet if you can’t find a Zerg in WvW. I play off peak in a Bronze League server and there is usually a commander tag up. Try your home borderland and Eternal Battlegrounds first. The world bosses are all worth doing at least once, although with the new mega server system they are usually past their ideal size.

Oh, and the final battle in the Personal Story is a bit of a disappointment.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Someone (or a group of someones) is trying to increase the price of them. Notice the 6 digit listing at 20c?

Despite the fact that even if this is what is happening I can’t see this working, I am still tempted to sell what I own at 19 copper.

If you are going to craft greatswords then it’s simply a matter of finding which t5 material is cheapest. Apothecary’s still works out to be too expensive to consider, so you don’t need to worry about that.

As for axes, every time I’ve checked it has been more cost effective to buy from the TP rather than craft. I would be surprised if that’s changed.

Natsu Dragneel.1625:

Give them a vender price, maybe… 1s each? keep them un-tradeable though.

I think even 25 c is a stretch (62.5 silver per stack is a fair bit of money to pump into the economy, never mind 2.5 gold). They need to bring in ascended cooking and use these in consumables.

I’ve spent a small amount of real money on gems, and have converted gold to gems. I wouldn’t convert gems to gold personally, so for me gems are on the cheap side paying with gold. I do however find most of the items overpriced no matter how I get my gems. Other people’s mileage obviously vary.

Aidan Savage.2078:

This is also why there’s already a prompt when salvaging rare and higher items. Kinda hard to accidentally salvage something unless you’re mindlessly clicking ok without reading.

Except he was salvaging exos and rares, so was getting those messages for everything. Maybe a second message saying “Are you for real? It’s a precursor man, a PRECURSOR!”

I have this recurring nightmare that some time in the first couple of months I put a precursor in the forge, before I knew any better.

It should be up in the patch that gives us precursor crafting and prevents dungeon instance owners from being kicked.

Callendor.1840:

I got mine from the MF, I was a little lucky though…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsOmoTdLNJU

I remember the first time I saw this think that you were going to accidentally throw Dawn into the forge

The stats I have seen indicate about 350 attempts with rares per success. The problem is that as a rule of thumb is that if you roll an x sided dice x times, the chances of of x coming up at least once are only around 65%. So if you try 350 times with rares there is still a greater than one in three chance that you will get nothing.

As was said above, the guides to 400 will still work fine, but weaponsmithing and armoursmithing are an awkward combination unless you hit the ore nodes really hard, and even then fine materials will be a problem. I would advise swapping one craft with cooking.

My advice is to just refine materials until you are about level 18. At that point get your crafting up to 75 and you should be able to set yourself up with masterwork (green) equipment for level 20. This should also clue you in on how crafting works, so next time you’ll be able to do it more efficiently.

The points you want to look out for are levels 20, 35, 50 and 65 because at each of these points you can craft masterwork (or even rare for higher levels if you’re keen) equipment. It’s how I did it when I leveled my alt’s and I rarely had to buy materials.

There’ say weird group of things that can’t be salvaged or can’t be forged. Not sellable on the TP is fine because you get the “soulbound on acquire warning”. I was surprised when I bought armour from the Vigil for instance that it couldn’t be put into the Mystic Forge, especially given that this was extremely unlikely to get me a profit (I’d have to luck and get an exotic with a desirable sigil or insignia).

As it turns out though, buying 4 mid-level light gloves and putting them in the forge probably offers the best karma to gold generation in game at the moment.

You can’t salvage items bought from the orders, or put it into the mystic forge. That’s kind of annoying. I play PvE and WvW and I get a far better deal playing dungeons in general, even considering the fact that I have uses for karma.

Flissy.4093:

The forum necro is strong in this one.

Gah, missed that. Thanks.

Making a legendary requires full map completion. And that’s the easy bit. The hard bit for ascended is getting crafting up to 500. At this point you can buy all the required parts for less than a precursor and get it straight away, or you cold wait it out a week while you craft the time gated stuff and save yourself some money. Ascended is an order of magnitude easier.

I think that Settler’s is the only other one. There are also a few curious insignias that can’t be crafted, mostly those found as medallions or crests (soldier, rabid, shaman and magi, but not assassin), but can be salvaged from exotics. Then there is sentinel’s which, AFAIK, could only be attained as a drop during Flame and Frost, but might also be available in the Molten Facility fractal.

Hopefully the main function of ascended cooking will be to act as a steady drain of the supply of ascended mats in my account, but not a drain on karma or skill points. As it stands using a vision crystal to give a boost to Lemon Poultry soup (say double duration, 20% bonus to stats) would be cost effective in terms of gold, but unsustainable for karma and skill points. Bring on vision flakes I say.

DonQuack.9025:

90% its the necro and guardian who dont make it.

Yeah guardians fail on it way too much. Last time though it was an ele, who also should have no excuse.

VideoGamermike.5813:

again with the really hurtful titles. You know calling someone’s entire fightingstyle “useless” kind of clashes with your attempts to be a gentlemen.
and curtoky…no one cares about what the staff is by direct comparison, focus on the staff alone. there are plenty of reasons to go staff, would you write a 20 minute freewrite in alphabetic order? You don’t get to call an entire weapon ‘useless’ no weapon is useless from what I have seen, its just more specialized. As much as we bash Anet, they got a lot of stuff right, balancing is one of them. It’s not perfect but then what is?)

Ok, up until this point I didn’t think you were a troll. “No one cares what the staff is by direct comparison” was the give away. Well played up to that point though, you got me spending a lot of time on this thread thinking that you were genuine.

And then there is that final run to Vallog or Frost. If we don’t have a thief I always suggest we draw out the guys at the bottom and kill them. 90% of the time the group decides to run through it. At least half the time somebody just can’t do it and it ends up taking longer than it would have to fight. Plus we don’t get bags.

Just a quick note about probability. As a general rule of thumb if something happens on average every x times and you make x attempts, there is still a greater than one in three chance that you will not have had a success. The upshot of this is that placing items in the forge for your own precursor it is a huge gamble. The more you craft though the more the odds even out so if you are putting in huge numbers for profit then you can start to feel more comfortable about your outcomes.

So yeah, making a legendary contingent on a single very rare drop is a terrible system. On the other hand chances are good that you will do more than the amount expected to get a precursor and still not get it without the RNG being broken.

VideoGamermike.5813:

I think it be a wiser idea to push this thread to a better question. Lets not ask how to push people to stop being staff guardians based on DPS, lets instead discuss ways to -use- said guardians to their fullest. What can staff guards do, and what can you do with those powers. Try to discuss something besides DPs….sadly I know nothing about the staff guardian nor have time to research…so i cant help there. Sorry.

That’s kind of already been covered, but here is a run down:

Skill 1: wide arc, hits up to five targets, does very little damage wise. Reasonable when there are large numbers of mobs, but there are probably better options. Terrible for three or less targets. Dungeon uses: clearing volatile blooms.

Skill 2: sends out an orb of light which damages enemies and heals allies. Can be exploded. Too little damage or healing on pass through to be worthwhile. I’ve always had trouble detonating it, I’m not sure if that’s because of latency from Australia, but again the numbers are small. Dungeon uses: I honestly can’t think of any where this is worthwhile, it’s really a tool for WvW.

Skill 3: Places a symbol which grants swiftness to allies and does an OK amount of damage to enemies. This is genuinely useful when running through trash. Against a single boss it may be occasionally a nice damage supplement unless you are relying on blasting fire fields for might, in which case it will interfere.

Skill 4: pump it for 12 stacks of might. Genuinely useful.

Skill 5: Line of warding. You shall not pass! Unless you’re a boss in which case you walk right over it. Not quite as useful as you might think running past trash, useless in a boss battle except maybe the TA f/u path.

So, against a boss what do we get to compensate us for low damage? We get speed , some hard to control heals, might and 5 targets. And the ability to fight at range.

Let’s compare to other weapons.

Scepter focus: also range. Superior damage, but on a single target, a blind, three blocks and a blast finisher.

Greatsword: superior damage, but against three targets, a blind and surprisingly better utility against trash that might pop up.

Mace torch: nobody likes this combo, but it offers superior damage, most of its skills to more targets than staff, superior healing, more easily controlled and powerful condition cleansing, a block and a little bit of range which can be used effectively against bosses like the Butcher. This maligned combo is far better than staff against a boss.

Sword focus: superior damage, two blinds, three blocks and a blast finish.

You are right that it is also about utility, but the utility of the staff is geared towards running through mobs and facing large numbers of enemies. All it brings of substance against a boss to make up for its lack of power is might. Any other sensible weapon style is superior in terms of utility as well as damage. I was going to say except for mace/shield, but I think that even this might be better.

Tl;dr staff has great utility for WvW, but not really for a boss.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

But why would you want to punish a Seller who decides to offer the same item for cheaper? You can’t reward a person just because they posted first. The reward (the sale) should go to whomever has the cheapest priced item, be it 1 Copper or 1 Gold undercuts.

For an item over a certain value one copper is essentially meaningless and at that level the TP becomes LIFO instead of FIFO. One copper only matters if you are trading in bulk.

Personally I think that the mystic forge should do something when a legendary is crafted. We get a big noise every time somebody reads an experience scroll, so why is crafting a legendary so anticlimactic? I am not asking for the floor around the forge to become a disco and Le Freak to break out when somebody crafts The Moot (well OK, maybe I am), but a change in colour of the Mystic Forge’s light and some sort of sound effect like a low rumble or an angelic chorus of “Aaah” or whatever would be great. Something that would make the people nearby think “cool, someone just crafted a legendary!”

0.5% means you would have to undercut by 20 copper for a t6 mat. That market would be interesting. It would be interesting to see how people gamed it too. If I had 100 t6 blood to sell and the price was 40s would I put up 1 at 39.8 and the rest at 39.99?