CM path 1
First encounter is a little sloppy. Ele tells us we should have stacked, which is fair enough, we should have. When I got back from the room for the first pull two people had followed me down stairs, and two had stayed up the top around the door. Oh well, it happens and we didn’t wipe. Next few encounters are smoother, but the ele isn’t moving. Eventually he turns for the room near Sure-Shot Seamus, but doesn’t offer a word of explanation as to what happened.
Getting past Sure-Shot Seamus is messy, as a ranger with about 1000 AP has hung back to fight him, and another dies rezzing the ranger.. Turns out the ranger hasn’t done this before. That’s cool, we’ll just explain each part as we get to it. But now the ele isn’t moving again. Also not a big problem, at. Least we know who’ll stay back and watch the video for the next bit.
Morgan dies, ranger is rezzed (we should really have explained the fight better), and the ele still isn’t moving. Two players decide to kick the ele and all of a sudden we’re outside the dungeon. Then the ele rejoins and explains that his computer froze. I would have tried again, partly because I like helping people on the first trip through a dungeon and didn’t want to leave the ranger with a bad experience, but two others left and so I gave up.
A couple of minutes later I was on the lfg tool and I saw the ranger, the ele and one other with the message “lfg, path 1, speed run”
Isn’t this the patch where berserker gets modified? My longshot guess is that a combination of zerker and Valkyrie will become the new dungeon meta, meaning that beryl orbs hit 3 silver.
Of my non-realisable assets I have the Moot, four ascended weapons and a whole lot of exotic suits and weapons. One of my toons also has black dye. Valuing the Moot at 1500, and ascended weapons at 45 each (average cost to make) plus another 30 or so for exotics and 13 for black dye this gives me a worth of over 1720 gold in non-realisable assets.
I also have most of the ingredients for Bolt, and have enough gold to buy what I still need (about half the t6 mats and about 25 charged lodestones). I would be able to sell this for 2150 gold. While I tend to hoard, I don’t have a lot of value left in my bank. I have 5 Azurite orbs left, and some t7 mats I intend to use for a set of armour. All up I would say about 130 because it makes the maths work out, so my total worth would be in the order of 4000 gold.
Depressingly, I would have played about 4,000 hours all up, meaning I’ve accumulated about 1 gold an hour.
It’s pretty common for event related items to surge in price before the end of an event, drop just after, and then slowly climb up after time. If I had to guess I would say that this is because at the end of an event people buy to get enough of the items to do one last thing and after the event everyone wants to clear out their inventory.
Well there are far too many power cores out there since basically everyone crafted 1 backpiece and saved cores for just in case if they decide to go after other
It depends on the server. By the time they fixed the bug with loot not dropping properly my server had tailed off to the point of struggling to kill one knight. I never got a core before the bug was fixed, and afterwards only got one of my three cores while on my home server.
I have a toon with a name that uses accents over the letters. It means that people have trouble typing it in if they want to invite me to a group but can only see me on chat, so I was looking at getting this when it was announced that it would come up. Put simply, not at this price.
I would certainly like it to be a kitteneaper.
Took me a while, but I figured out you don’t need to see it a lot cheaper, just a bit. Thank you forum profanity filter for pointing out rude words where I wouldn’t have seen them.
Actually, it’s not so bad. To make Elonian leather you only need to get to 450 in tailoring, leather working or huntsmaning (that last one may or may not be a real word). Getting to 425 just requires you refine t6 materials. At 425 it is a good time to make 20 slot bags, which are expensive, but if you think you are going to need them eventually, now is a good time. Also, if you do dungeons and WvW it might be good to make yourself a second suit of armour to swap into (Zerk or Assassin for dungeons, Soldiers for WvW unless you have a conditions based build). With that, and whatever rune gw2crafts.net thinks is cheapest (craft the runes before the armour) you should be just about up to 450, where you can enter the magical realm of time-gating.
Who is E?
Why did Scarlet want to raise a dragon?
What did that code in Scarlet’s lair say?
Did that Charr near the Mist gates ever get into the guild?
Surely 23 sets should be 70 major runes per superior, as you get 22 majors, which you just feed back in (92-22=70). As for the table itself, it’s just an experiment related to binomial distribution.
Your advice on soul bound runes is interesting however, now that I would have liked to see some data on.
Here’s another option. Create a new character, preferably a Mesmer and not a Charr or Norn. Use the levelling up scroll to get them up to level 20. This character has two jobs, getting to jumping puzzles and completing jumping puzzles. Every JP chest at this level has about a 1 in 4 chance of dropping a silver doubloon, which trades for a couple of gold.
You can buy quartz from the trading post and upgrade stacks of 25 to 1 charged quartz at places of power. They were also available as drops at Wintersday, which is obviously not much help, but it does indicate that you can expect it to return again later (I’d expect to see the Sephyr Sanctum return by June at the latest).
The underlying problem is that a badly played ranger in a dungeon is a liability. I have no reason to believe that the average ranger is any worse than the average warrior, it’s just that a bad ranger has more opportunities to annoy their party. There is also the fact that bad play from a ranger manifests itself more obviously. A ranger who can’t control their pet is also more obviously annoying than a shout-heal warrior who makes poor rotation choices.
Because a lot of people are deep down pretty dumb, they think that they can generalise for an entire class, so you’ll have to deal with the “rangers are bad players” attitude a bit sadly, and the above, coupled with confirmation bias, means you’ll never talk them out of it.
I have a ranger that I used to take everywhere except dungeons, partly because of the thing where you can’t dodge while holding a sword main hand. It’s a challenging class to play in dungeons, but you can offer a lot (don’t forget condition removal in your healing pools, as well as spotter and frost spirit) and you will always be welcome in Honour of the Waves paths 2 and 3 because of the underwater boss.
Any dps meter is only really value if you can make ready comparisons. “Cool, I did 600 dps that fight! Is that good?” However I don’t like the idea of someone who doesn’t contribute to might fields, fury or damage mitigation giving someone who does all that a hard time, because the only information they understand is the dps meter. So yes, private is the way to go.
Which means either a practice dummy with a useful summary, where different weapon styles and builds can be compared against each other. One I would like to see is a breakdown at the end of a dungeon of your personal contribution as a percentage of overall damage. “Hmm, only 16% of party damage against the final boss. Time to up my game.” This way there is no finger pointing from anyone else, but it does let people know if they are being carried.
Go for Gift of Mastery first. This is the gift that can’t be bought with gold. Then work on your mystic clovers. This will take a lot of karma and a lot of skill points.
I would also advise early on to start running Ascalonian Catacombs and Twilight Arbor (forward and up). You only need to do 8 explorable runs of AC, but if you enjoy it the money is good and you might find it more enjoyable than farming. Twilight Arbor you don’t need to do at all, but you get the occasional obsidian core and lodestone drop, which will be useful.
Keep an eye out for the golem mark 2 world boss event. Near that event is a rich platinum vein. You will need 1,000 platinum ore for your gift of metal, so don’t let an opportunity to mine it go by.
Mainly, keep accumulating gold and keep track of what you need. Aside from the precursor hold off on buying anything from the trading post until the end because you want to use as many drops as you can to craft your legendary. There is no point buying 100 hardened leather 2 months before you’ll be able to get your gift of fortune, because a whole lot of leather will drop for you in that time.
And good luck too.
Thats a valid opinion, however is anything stopping you from doing the same thing, if not it comes back to the same argument.
It’s a valid way of playing the game, Anet coded it in, just because you don’t enjoy it, I don’t enjoy farming but I don’t think I should deny anyone else the chance of doing it. Do they make profit farming, certainly. However unless the game denies me the same choices I don’t really see any problem with how anyone chooses to use their time to play.
When you say “however is anything stopping you from doing the same thing” you are effectively bringing the argument around to “play the way I want”, with perhaps the follow up of “or deal with the fact you get lesser rewards”.
The problem with disproportionate rewards for play style is that it effectively puts the most desirable objects in the game into the hands of the people who play in that style. Why are the people who are good at playing the TP more deserving than the people who are good at running dungeons?
Why is it that people think they have a right to dictate how someone else plays the game or what they get enjoyment from?
All I can hear through this argument is that people should play the game how they feel they should have fun, which is laughable…how big is your ego really. You know best?, for someone else…
Personally I am not against the idea of people who play the TP if that’s what they want to do. The problem is that it is disproportionately rewarded compared to other methods of playing.
I think one of the things that annoys people is that playing the Trading Post is the only aspect of the game that doesn’t get nerfed once people figure out a way to make money on it. Want to farm CoF all day? We’re nerfing that! Making a lot of money in Queen’s Jubilee? We’ll hit that too! Think there’s too much money going to those are good at the TP? Well, we can’t touch them, they provide a service!
I think that’s partly because these people are just thinking in personal terms rather than the economy as a whole. CoF isn’t nerfed because Joe Guardian can make x gold more per hour than CoE (or whatever), but because the cumulative effect of players running CoF non-stop to farm gold can unbalance the economy due to the amount of coin being introduced to the game.
Apart from not seeing how ArenaNet could “nerf the TP” with any degree of effectiveness, the argument for nerfing CoF doesn’t apply with the TP. If you increase the number of players “playing the TP”, the available profits don’t increase, but instead gets spread more thinly amongst the larger pool of traders.
Look, I agree with most of what you said, but I think my underlying point still stands, which is that there is one way to play the game which is most effective in terms of creating wealth. Even though I agree that other wealth creation methods create problems it is galling that the most effective method, which is not even part of the advertised core gameplay, hasn’t been touched. My first paragraph was more explaining the sentiment.
Me.
Sometimes awesome, sometimes worthless as a rock.
Pffft, amateur! I sometimes draw agro on mobs my team mates wanted to avoid, making me more of a liability than a rock.
I didn’t choose the PuG life, the Pug life kicked me, and then realised I was the one who opened the instance.
DISCLAIMER: Some or all of this post may be exaggerated.
I think one of the things that annoys people is that playing the Trading Post is the only aspect of the game that doesn’t get nerfed once people figure out a way to make money on it. Want to farm CoF all day? We’re nerfing that! Making a lot of money in Queen’s Jubilee? We’ll hit that too! Think there’s too much money going to those are good at the TP? Well, we can’t touch them, they provide a service!
The problem is that having the TP as most most efficient method of making money creates at least as many problems as it solves. If someone makes money flipping on the TP and buys a precursor what is the net effect on the game? On the positive side the buy and sell prices are closer together meaning that the casual player can make a quick sale knowing that they haven’t missed out on the best price by much (although their chances of making a bigger, more risky profit are reduced). Also they have acted as a gold sink, providing a slight deflationary effect. On the negative side they have reduced the number of available precursors in the game. I would argue that by having money concentrated like this the inflationary effect on desirable items such as precursors outweighs the deflationary effects of the gold sink.
Possible Heal-o-Tron/Hobo-tron heroics?
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Cormac.3871
Some golems are made great, others have greatness programmed into them. Other golems upgrade to greatness in order to deal with a difficulty they have with the authorities.
Frostgorge Sound’s champ train will get you Skill Points quicker than dungeons, but it will seem like longer.
I am an achievement hunter, but there are only about six paths I run regularly so my AP far exceeds by dungeon running skills outside those paths. At 5k AP my guardian was still running around with staff and Melandru armour, but I’ve seen players with 2k AP shred dungeons. There is a correlation between AP and the ability to run a dungeon, but past 2,000 that correlation is very slight.
Hide your wife, hide your kids… I’m buying and up-selling all the Iron Ore up in here.
If you are you’ve chosen a risky time to flip. Iron ore has been on a steady downward trend since its initial surge.
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19699
Dunno why I thought of this, but:
Mist Warrior (1): What is pugging, anyway? Isn’t it just a different view of the same thing?
Mist Warrior (2): Spend some time on the Dungeon forums and you’ll get it. Pugs are the enemy. They will destroy us, so we must destroy them first.
Mist Warrior (1): I see so many go in dungeons who never come out to the end.
Mist Warrior (2): That’s pugs’ work. You recognize them by how they kill—without purpose, need, or meta-builds.
PuG was originally coined to refer to a pick up group, but the meaning has mutated to mean an individual member of a pick up group.
OP, if you farm to craft you are effectively putting money you would have earned into that crafting skill. You are getting it cheaper, but you still have to factor it in as an expense.
WvW gives me very low returns, especially on nights I am feeling altruistic and buying upgrades.
Playing the TP works, but you have to know what you are doing, and it’s high risk for the really expensive stuff.
Farming also requires a bit of research, and possibly a friend to make it more efficient. Keep an eye out for rich iron nodes ATM.
Dungeons should be netting you about 1 1/2 gold per run. There are two end rewards, one for a gold and the other for 26 silver. There should be at least 24 silver worth of other stuff, though you may choose to salvage blues and greens for luck. I personally throw the cheap green in the Mystic forge to try and get yellows, sell the expensive ones (except greatswords, which I keep until I have 4, then throw them in the forge as they sell for over 40 silver as rares). Blues and light armour I salvage for luck and silk. Then if you know what to do you should salvage armour bought with dungeon tokens, but you can only do that every four runs or so.
If all else fails there is the Frostgorge train, but I personally can’t stomach that for more than 2 cycles.
And one final tip, before you unload always check the TP. You will occasionally be surprised at what is highly valued.
If players in general wanted dungeons to be challenging content that required communication they wouldn’t be so fussy about who they accepted into a group. At least that’s what I assume looking at most lfg’s.
If you do not see that a company caters to the need of people that spend money, at the expense of people that do not spend money, then there is really nothing I can say to help you understand.
Call it an attitude if you want. That doesn’t make it wrong.
OK, so let’s say you get put in charge of running GW2 for ANet. There are currently over 350 people employed working on the game. Your sources of income are games sales (which have slowed right down) and the gem store. At the moment the only real concession to the Pay to Win model is the fact that you can convert gems to gold at a pretty poor rate, other than that the store is mostly vanity and convenience items.
How do you change your business model and ensure that you can still employ 350 people?
I personally find that having the mystic forge close to the crafting stations is useful. It would have been particularly useful for the new back pieces.
This made me wonder if we are being patsies.
I mean we know from Scarlet’s Lair that she has a big screen with huge x’s on it.Right by LA- atm she is nuking the daylights out of LA
Right were the Orders are.
So we set up camps there?
Am I the only one wondering what is up with that?
You aren’t the only one who has noticed that. I think the most likely explanation is that there is someone on the inside communicating with Scarlet.
Crafting a metabolic primer is a possibility.
Crafting recipes that give bonuses like the sixth item on a superior rune set is a possibility (eg mist form on 10% health, as on rune of vampirism)
As for how crafting level 500 food might work I see two options as most likely:
You craft an ascended version of a recipe using vision crystals
-or-
Level 500 meals require ascended base materials to craft, but no obsidian (it’ll be good to start drawing some empyreal stars out of my bank)
It’s not necessary at all. The game lacks gold sinks as it is, we don’t need even more money being pumped into the game, especially into the hands of the champ farmers.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the average gold being dropped from a champ chest being lowered by the average value of bloodstone found in a champ chest. This would mean a slight drop in the amount of gold going into the economy.
An interesting consequence of putting a value on ascended material is that you can then put a value on vision crystals. At 1c each making a vision crystal means you missed out on 15s worth of selling, or 6 silver for a lesser vision crystal. At 32c each that value becomes 4.8g, or 1.92g for a lesser.
I wonder what is the Dev statement on serious TP manipulations like these…
Why they not permaban and block those users who doing this?Because they are not doing anything wrong and in fact the more money that is spent on the trader the better the economy is overall? the TP is the main gold sink in this game, hell the only gold sink.
The economy should be there to support the regular players, not the other way around.
A well ruining economy is one where a player can go to the trading post and buy or sell an item for more or less what it’s worth. Flippers perform a useful role here because they bring buy and sell prices closer together encouraging quicker and less risky trade for the player who does not see “playing the trading post” as an aspect of the game they wish to spend a lot of time on.
However creating false demand by hoarding and putting in fake bids has an entirely negative effect on players with an exception of providing a gold sink for the economy. A false price is created for the item because supply has been artificially choked and the number of that items available to those who want to use them have been reduced. If you wish for an economy that genuinely works on supply and demand action should be taken to ensure that neither are artificially manipulated.
Adding “all welcome” is as likely to get an experienced group as any other tag I’ve seen. The only difference is that you are less likely to get some guy who has run the path twice rage quitting because of “n00bs” at a wipe.
Four X’s, one on each of the 3 orders and one on LA.
The one on Lion’s Arch is either in the place where the probe went off or where Mai Trin was released.
Near the Priory is the location of Scarlet’s lair.
Interestingly we know that the Vigil is where we will move when Lion’s Arch is under attack.
As for the whispers, there is a probe nearby, but nothing has happened there that I’ve noticed.
One possibility is that the X’s mark the positions of her four top allies, but it’s hard to see a pattern other than it being the bases of the three orders and the lionguard.
I’ve always found the writing to be pretty mixed bag in Guild Wars 2. Even the novels while good in general had things that made me wince. While the writing for the living stories has been similarly patchy (Taimi and Braham are great, but the film noir section was heavy handed, if you are being serious noir is too stylised a genre to fit smoothly in, and if you are going for laughs make the detective a quaggan!) I think the overall arc has become quite engaging. I am also glad I held off on judgement about Scarlet, because I now find her an interesting character. The activities have generally got better as well, aside from Molten facility most of the best stuff has come during the second half.
As for the underlying concept, Living Story is by necessity a compromise. One off events as attempted with the Karka don’t work for many reasons, but the aim of having a dynamic world with events progressing over time is a worthwhile one. Fractals are also a nice way of retaining content, and I would fully expect to see more stuff from LS appear there.
I would personally call Living Story a partial success, mainly because it still falls short of the ideal that they are trying to realise.
The final touching scene comes with hero-tron badly damaged, his circuits exposed and fire gradually eating away at his processors. His demise is imminent and inevitable. Using all that remains of his processing power he makes one final speech:
“They say that a golem can not exceed his programming, that he was always bound within the parameters of his maker’s intent. But I have gone beyond, I was programmed to be petty and servile, and disregard the needs of others. But I have broken these boundaries, I have acted for the sake of others, I have served the greater good. In so doing I have saved the lives of thousands, but doomed myself. I now regret going beyond my programming.”
Marcelo: I shall compose a song of your bravery.
Hero-Tron: It pleases me greatly to know that I shall not have to listen to it.
The final touching scene comes with hero-tron badly damaged, his circuits exposed and fire gradually eating away at his processors. His demise is imminent and inevitable. Using all that remains of his processing power he makes one final speech:
“They say that a golem can not exceed his programming, that he was always bound within the parameters of his maker’s intent. But I have gone beyond, I was programmed to be petty and servile, and disregard the needs of others. But I have broken these boundaries, I have acted for the sake of others, I have served the greater good. In so doing I have saved the lives of thousands, but doomed myself. I now regret going beyond my programming.”
Where are the outhouses?
In a sad reflection of the cultural ruin of our city, outhouses have been constructed by the pier.
Well, the results of your guild tryouts are in?
And?
Given that you turned tail and ran at the first sign of Scarlet’s army I think we’ll be doing without your services.
Where have you been?
Down in the sewers. It was wonderful. Respectable folks don’t go there and neither do Scarlet’s minions.
Hmm, from now on I might go there with you where it’s safe.
What does a sylvari think about?
Usually, they have salad dressing on their mind.
I was going to tell a bad joke about whatever the voices in their head say, but now I don’t feel like it.
What is evil anyway? Isn’t it just another view of the same thing?
Spend some time in Lion’s Arch and you’ll see. You recognise it by how it kill, without justice, need or pity, all the while giggling with a girly voice.
I’m not sure if it’s exaggeration, so let’s do the maths:
Torn garments average 2 linen per salvage
Medium ritual bags average 0.8 per opening (assuming the drop rate of 40% given on the wiki was and still is accurate, and that the average number dropped is 2)
Let us also assume that bags drop every 2 flame legion, and garments every 5.For every ten flame legion we can expect two garments and five bags, for an average of eight linen (2×2 + 5×0.8). Therefore to get 250 linen we would need to kill over 300 flame legion. Assuming that a good farming spot for them exists you would need to kill 3 every minute to do this in 100 minutes. This sounds plausible to me.
That is the problem .. Bags DON’T drop on every second .. they drop maybe from 1 of 10 or whatever.
I tried to farm them a while ago, and i got maybe 30-40 linnen per hour and that was not worth the time.
If you can get 250 per hour that would be 15g if you sell for 6s .. and then i think there would be much more people farm them and in the end the prices were going down.
Ah .. and i used that guide/spot btw.:
http://www.guildwars2-crafting.com/farming-guides/linen-scraps-farming-guide/
OK, for science I killed 100 flame legion in Southern Fireheart Rise. I ended up with 20 bags and 3 garments, which probably makes the drop rate for bags between 1 in 4 and 1 in 6, and garment less than 1 in 20.
What I didn’t do is pay attention to which flame legion members are more likely to drop bags.
250 scraps in 1 1/2 hours is the conservative version of what was claimed, which is 3 scraps per minute. Going at the rate of 0.8 per bag as before, and assuming that supplementing these with garments will take the average linen retrieved to 1 per bag (it won’t quite, but it makes the maths easier), then that requires fifteen kills per minutes.
Having reconsidered I no longer think that the claim of farming a stack of scraps in 90 minutes is plausible. While I could probably see myself getting ten kills in a minute, I can’t see myself sustaining that rate. Having gathered this data, I personally doubt I’d be able to push past fifty scraps and hour, even if I properly researched where I needed to go.
What about your favorite Non main NPCs!
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: Cormac.3871
Then down near the gates to the mists the following conversation is heard:
Sylvari: We’ve found a suitable opponent for your guild try out.
Norn: Are you sure one opponent will be enough, I wouldn’t want it to be too easy.
Sylvari: Oh, one will be enough, given it’s the dragon Scarlet just raised!
Just a quick note, at $15US you can convert for 6.40 gold per 100 gems, 1200 gems, about 77 gold. (76.8 to be exact) ($)15 (cost) into 77 gold is approximately 5.12 gold per dollar spent. About 19 cents of real currency per gold in game. This is incredibly cheap when you consider the time necessary to earn a gold by farming or doing champ/dungeons. If folks have gems, it seems like the ratio is at peak, I converted 3700 gems last night when the rate was just a touch higher but personally I don’t think it can sustain this level of exchange since gem prices haven’t increased. This is, of course, theoretical but I think it has maxxed out….
i bolded a part of this to show the flaw, try and think about regular play without any of that.
no dungeons, no champs and no farming, let’s see how far you get.
Actually, you highlighted the strength of his argument. Aside from TP flipping these are the most efficient ways of getting gold in game. If these don’t appeal to you then you will be accumulating gold even more slowly, making gems bought with casheven better value for money.
I dunno how long it takes to collect up a stack of 250 plat ore. 1-1.5 hrs can get you a stack of Linen (sometimes faster due to RNG, as you mentioned).
Why must people always exaggerate like this ? 250 in 1-1,5 Hours .. that is just a joke.
I’m not sure if it’s exaggeration, so let’s do the maths:
Torn garments average 2 linen per salvage
Medium ritual bags average 0.8 per opening (assuming the drop rate of 40% given on the wiki was and still is accurate, and that the average number dropped is 2)
Let us also assume that bags drop every 2 flame legion, and garments every 5.
For every ten flame legion we can expect two garments and five bags, for an average of eight linen (2×2 + 5×0.8). Therefore to get 250 linen we would need to kill over 300 flame legion. Assuming that a good farming spot for them exists you would need to kill 3 every minute to do this in 100 minutes. This sounds plausible to me.
There are a few ways to cut down costs, but most of them only save you money in the long run.
If you use maintenance oils craft a bunch of them when you are around 425.
At 450 work out what materials you are going to need in order to make your ascended weapons and craft these. This bit is time gated so it will probably take you a week even if you have the materials on hand.
There are some inscriptions that can be obtained by salvaging weapons (magi, shaman, soldiers). If you have been running dungeons look for weapons with these stats at the dungeons vendors and salvage away.
Also, you are going to want to hit the world boss events for dragonite. You are going to need 500 dragonite per weapon. High level world bosses such as temple events give you 20-30, while low level event such as Shadow Behemoth give you about 4. You also get a guaranteed rare item, which should be salvaged for ectoplasm. Doing these events is necessary for dragonite and the rare drops will go a fair way to defraying your costs. By the time you have enough dragonite you should have around 50 ecto from salvaging.
That’ some pretty good research there Wanze, thank you for that. I am almost inspired to do some similar research on level 20 clothes.
As for ANet’s policy on macro’s, any reasonable policy is likely to have room for interpretation, which is why debs hadge their bets when talking about banability. I don’t think they’ll be after Wanze for finding a way to do an activity that loses money more quickly.
There is a lot of stuff that’s true for all legendaries. Start with an eye on gift of mastery. This means world exploration, which, scary as it may seem now, is the easy part. I would also concur that running dungeons sooner rather than later is a good idea. Ascalonian Catacombs will need to be done at least 8 times, but by that stage you should be pretty good at it, and at 1.5 gold per run up to 3 times a day this would be a worthwhile part of a daily routine. Also consider Twilight Arbour, as once you get used to the runs it is quite easy, and it will also occasionally get you Onyx cores and lodestones.
The two really tricky bits will be saving up for the precursor and the gift of fortune. For the latter you will want to craft the Mystic Clovers first, but that can wait if you are running low on skill points.
Above all, concentrate on the bits you enjoy and you should make progress. Personally I find the Frostgorge champ train bores me to tears but I love running the same dungeons. Other people feel the opposite way. And good luck.
Someone posted a list of relative damage for guardian based on armour types. Celestial outperforms soldiers (power/vitality/toughness) in terms of damage. Survivability wise there is the drop in vitality and toughness but a bigger gain in healing, meaning your character is probably as resilient against all except burst damage. Given that most people advocate soldiers stats for WvW I would say that Celestial would be a better option for guardians in most situations.
I also think that Scarlet is trying to get to a dragon, not to raise him, but to bury him (if I may mangle my Shakespeare). She formed the molten alliance to create and she formed the Aetherblades, watch work knights and toxic alliance to destroy with ground air and chemical weapons. All her attacks have been field tests, which is why she hasn’t been too concerned if she’s lost. It could be argued that she’s been testing out the defences of the pact, but this makes less sense as the pact will also have been learning about her. This is why I think her real target is a dragon.
The questions are who is she doing it for, and which dragon does she want to destroy?
Theory 1: She wants to destroy Mordremoth at the behest of Primordus. In this theory she has been haunted by Mordremoth because he is linked to the pale tree. When she stepped outside the alchemy a voice said to her “I know how to help you get rid of that annoying presence in you life”. I have an inkling that the dragon under LA is Primordus though, and if that’s true next update she raises Mr.P and the next update they attack Mr.M, which seems a little rushed. Maybe it is Mordremoth under LA, but I don’t think so.
Theory 2: She is attacking Primordius at the behest of ?? Similar deal to theory one, except for some reason unexplained Scarlet has been haunted by “dat eye”, belonging to Primordus. So that was her Wild Hunt, to destroy Primordus, and she was gifted with the genius and drive to carry it out. Unfortunately, that genius was unstable and she saw her hunt not as a quest but a burden. She went looking where she ought not have looked, and made a pact which was the one deal where Scarlet was the one being used. She has now located Primordus and will attempt to destroy him.
Personally I think theory 1 plays better to the idea of her rejecting the path of the dream of descending into nightmare, and the story could play out like theory 2 if the dragon beneath LA is Mordremoth. If this is the case she could be acting at the behest of either Primordus or else some other malevolent supernatural figure (possibly with a link to Abaddon that we would have found out in the Abaddon Fractal).
From my point of view there are too many unknowns to be sure. A lot of my speculation is tied to the idea that the pale tree is a pre-emptively subverted champion of Mordremoth, and there are plenty of good arguments for that not being the case.
Gather straight away and don’t sell until you know what you do and don’t want. Personally I would only do refining until you are level 18 or 19 unless you choose cooking as one of your crafting skills.
So say you choose weapon smithing as one of your crafts. Mine ore, chop wood and every time that it is convenient refine these into logs and ingots. Once you are at level 19 look at a crafting guide with an eye to crafting up to 75. Do all that crafting in one hit, making sure that you end up with as many level 20 masterwork items as you can make. You will also have gained enough experience to take you up at least one level.
Pavilion and Scarlet Invasion fed everyone gold.
The market never recovered.
There were a few other things around that time which had a more permanent effect. Champion boxes and gold rewards for dungeon completion are the two that come to mind, but even WvW players are getting rewards for levelling up, effectively doubling their (admittedly poor) gold income.