Guild Wars 2

Last I looked skill points were worth about 50 silver a pop, though I’d you were careful with how you traded items and were prepared to spend a little more time at the crafting table you could get a little over a gold.

Getting the balance on spirit shards right is going to be tricky. I doubt it will be an issue for older players unless they have been systematically converting skill points to gold and don’t have any in the bank. Get the drop rate too low and it is going to impact newer players trying to work towards a legendary, get it too high and it will be just another useless currency.

If I were designing it I would have made skill points a mastery path that starts unlocked. All level up scrolls would contribute to that path, whether you were working on it or not, and obviously you could complete it as many times as you liked. Mind you, if I was designing this game it would be a lot worse than it is now.

ANet did such a great job of churning out content in 2013 that our expectations have been set very high. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind content coming out a little slower than it did back then, but the current drought is killing me. I had a good experience the other night taking a group of novices through CM2, but other than that my routine has been log in, do 3 dailies, log out.

But yes, we do have it better than other MMOs. I started playing one with a pretty good reputation and got up to a quest where you had to kill a boss. There were about five people crowded around the boss, killing it as soon as it spawned. Because the boss didn’t scale up nobody was getting the drop they needed. Apparently the solution was to go onto a less populated “map” (essentially manually switch to an overflow map) and do the event there. When I went to the forums and said on one of the many complaint threads about that event that the event was poorly designed, offering a number of ways that the devs could have solved the problem I was called whiny and told that all MMOs have this sort of problem. No. Not all MMOs.

Best guess is that they are used to speed level crafting. People craft to gain levels quickly and allow themselves to do key farming. It has just taken this long for the key farmers to work through the Wintersday backlog.

I usually enjoy JPs once they are over, but I have found that they get more enjoyable as your skill level goes up. When I did the quest for the grawl at Wintersday I found that a lot of the JPs which had annoyed me first time around no end. I agree about the camera though, even first person view hasn’t solved all those problems.

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

No thanks. Mario is an indie game, wich i don’t like.

It seems people don’t understand what the term “indie game” means anymore.

Time to dust off the old Inigo Montoya quote

Remember when the dragon festival patch came out and everyone complained because there was too little content in it? I miss those days.

Long story time for those who like a little more serious naming.

When Revenant comes out I intend to play it on a female Sylvari, mainly because that is one of the few race/gender mixes I don’t have yet. So I thought, why not look up the scientific name for a plant associated with rebirth? It turns out that the lotus is associated with rebirth, but the scientific name for the species I was after didn’t work. However, it turns out that it had earlier been misclassified as Nymphaea Stelata, which I thought was an awesome name.

Having chosen the name I used my key farmer slot (being used at the time by Kia Hunter) to put in a holder for the name, only to find it had been taken. So, whoever owns the name Nymphaea Stelata I salute you for making me realise I was not as original as I thought I was. Also, keep an eye out for Nymphæa Stelata and know that because of you a lot of people are going to find it hard to add her to things.

There would be too much to re-engineer in this game if you made exploration account wide. For instance there would be a limit of 2 legendary weapons per account, skill points, which are getting redone soon, would have to be redone yet again. There are also advantages to revisiting areas in terms of encountering dynamic events, as most people will only see about half of them on their first run through of map exploration.

One possible solution is to either make one waypoint per map unlockable account wide, or to make all waypoints, but nothing else, account wide unlockable. That way you still get mobility, but getting the Gift of Exploration is non-trivial still. I would favour the first option and would suggest that it be the Waypoint closest to a World Boss event, and this waypoint is unlocked account wide by completing the World Boss event. Having said that, there are many, many things I would rather see the devs put time into first.

I think it is highly likely that the story behind the dragon hunter specialisation is going to be something to do with Braham taking up Eir’s longbow. The question is does he take up the bow and vow to continue her dragon hunting legacy, or does she teach him the art of the longbow and trap making herself?

LS is relevant because LS was intended to be the method of content delivery rather than traditional expansions. A lot of people didn’t like this model and complained, which is a shame because the lull in the lead up to the expansion is leading me to consider putting the game down for the first time since I started playing. Living story was enough for me, the current lack of content is making me look elsewhere.

Vindicator.

(I would go with Avenger, but Marvel)

Why? A guardian stands between you and danger, a vindicator goes and hunts down those trouble makers.

The bow skills look like they could work OK, but aren’t exciting at the moment. The trait path we will have to wait and see on. They could well have something up their sleeve.

Name wise, I would far prefer they use something like the old name that implies their new extended role. This is why I think “vindicator” would be a better name. Actually, I think “avenger” would be better but it has other associations.

I used to run a guardian build that had extended symbol duration, and about every 20th run in a pug somebody would complain about my light fields. I only see blasting of fire fields about every 10th run, meaning that half the people I used to annoy were too polite to say anything.

So, half the problem is guardians with symbols (I am better now, I swear), but the other half is not enough blasting of fire fields in general pugs.

Mind you, I’m happy with either field. If you lay down fire I will blast it for might, if you lay down light I will leap through it because light aura looks cool.

Try promoting this at the dungeon forums. You will get some traction if you change the last skill to:

On critical, 20% chance to kick lowest dps member from your party.

:)

My tolerance for farming is about 30 minutes, so I’ve never really done that sort of grind. The only exception is drytop. I was happy to do a cycle of events in an area that most people didn’t in order to help push up the Zephyrite favour and then run the Sandstorm events. I happily did that in one hour blocks until I had my ambrite weapon collection, although I had to supplement this with the Drytop PvP course in order to get enough fossils.

At one stage I decided that I would do 2 hours of dungeons runs every night. I liked watching my gold add up, but it felt like grind within a week, so I stopped.

I imagine it’s really tricky to get balance across classes and make encounters interesting. In these situations giving players a buff that says something like “Pets and phantasms take 50% (or whatever it would need to be) damage from aoe attacks” would seem a reasonable fix. Mesmers and rangers rely on these for a high percentage of their damage, and this sort of dps nerf tests a player’s patience rather than their skill.

For cursed shore you want to do the temple events (Grenth and Melandru) if you are after t6 materials, and bring a weapon that hits multiple targets. You should get a lot of heavy mouldy bags if you have a group about the right size. The Plinx and Gates of Arah events are also pretty good. SW is a better farm in general, but I think that the two CS temple events are still the best farms in the game if you luck in at the right time.

BattleCat.2098:

tl;rd: Focusing on the max level players is great, but please don’t forget the rest of us. We are, after all, the majority of the players.

If you are not able to spend the time to get your character to level 80 then there is already more than enough content for you. GW2 has levelling up to 80 as a relatively trivial achievement, mainly because high levels don’t have a very flat rate of level progression. You can’t do world completion without reaching level 80 for instance, so there is already more than enough to do for non-80 players.

For future reference OP, if you want to feel smart what you have to do is keep an eye out for new collections that come along and figure out what people are going to need for those collections. For instance had you paid attention at the time grawl weapon collector came out you could have seen that there would have been a sudden spike in demand for large skulls. Then you either buy them off the TP or look up how they drop on the wiki and farm grawl for them. You get to feel smart for making money, compulsive collectors get a temporary sense of relief on completion until the next set of cravings kick in and we are all happy.

There is plenty of opportunity for happiness in these things you just have to take the tiniest amount of responsibility for your own.

metaldude.4132:

Cazamar.7148:

Where is the best place to farm keys?

Some map completions provide keys as well..dont know by heart which ones but that could be googled

Maps provide random rewards, and there is only ever a chance that you will get a key.

I say this absolutely and categorically as if I am wrong then I will be so happy that I will cheerfully accept the damage to my ego.

I once transmuted my WVW armour to a low level skin and dyed it muted colours because I was embarrassed at how often I was getting killed in 1v1s while wearing full ascended armour.

Chrispy.5641:

Exeon.4358:

I think many don’t get the meaning of pay to win, basically a game is pay to win if game developers give any unfair advantage to players that are willing to spend money on the game, generally things that cannot be obtained otherwise or nearly impossible to obtain otherwise.

Bank slots and bag slots pay to win? if you really think so you have never ever experienced a real pay to win game, or worse, a game that wasn’t pay to win, but became one over time.

Your definition of Pay-To-Win is a little bit, narrow minded.

Time advantage. This has been discussed, and now we’re at the point where posters are repeating themselves instead of offering any reason why a time advantage isn’t pay-to-win (which I described in this game as pay-to-equality with veteran players, and pay-to-advantage over new players). I have yet to say that’s a bad thing, (slightly unfair maybe, bad…not really). Question is, why is everyone so wound up over me calling it a form of pay-to-win?

So, if things that give you a time advantage are pay-to-win, all convenience items constitute pay-to-win.

The problem with this definition of pay-to-win is that it is so broad as to be pointless.

dietzero.3514:

Cormac.3871:

If you are power farmer it should only take you a couple of weeks to get the gold for an extra bag slot. If you are not a power farmer then the extra bag slot merely allows you to a bit lazier.

It should also be noted that the Silverwastes is very easy on bag space thanks to most of the loot being in containers, so the idea that this is some sort of cynical pay to win scheme is even more absurd.

Convenience items like this being in the gem store where a lot of players are encouraged to occasionally put in less than they would for a sub. fee is a much better system that the “lucky dip” boxes where they encourage a small percentage of “whales” with poor impulse control to buy an absurd number of gems.

Not against the gem store leeching money from people with more money than sense, but space should never have been a gemstore item. Even though it was fine when the game launched (when I bought everything), it is ridiculously cost prohibitive now and needs to be changed.

‘Hey new player! Save for a month and you can get a bag slot!’

Yeah, so awesome…

I am against the gemstore leeching a large amount of money off a small number of players rather than relying on a small amount of money off a large number of players because of what it does to game developers’ behaviour. I would rather ANet concentrate on keeping a broad section of the community happy, rather than a small vocal minority.

If you are power farmer it should only take you a couple of weeks to get the gold for an extra bag slot. If you are not a power farmer then the extra bag slot merely allows you to a bit lazier.

It should also be noted that the Silverwastes is very easy on bag space thanks to most of the loot being in containers, so the idea that this is some sort of cynical pay to win scheme is even more absurd.

Convenience items like this being in the gem store where a lot of players are encouraged to occasionally put in less than they would for a sub. fee is a much better system that the “lucky dip” boxes where they encourage a small percentage of “whales” with poor impulse control to buy an absurd number of gems.

John Smith.4610:

Wanze.8410:

John, did it ever happen that a new feature or game mechanic that was proposed internally by the dev team was vetoed by you because it would have too big of an impact on the economy?

50 Times a week, I am the destroyer of the designers intention to make people happy.

Fun fact, the 20 maps that were completed for a Cantha expansion were knocked back because John Smith was worried about the iron ore market.

From champ bags you would expect to see one exotic from every 300 https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/823-champ-bags-results/first#post4457665

For everything else there are a huge number of variables (magic find, kills per hour) so that it would be impossible to say what you should expect, but for me 20 hours without an exotic drop is unremarkable (my MF is about 180)

DarkSyze.8627:

You do not know how many time i log out when i first start because of some other player calling me noob. They call me less now but sometime i am scared to play because if i make mistake or learn slow; they are ready to call me that word. Again, be careful for using that word especially if you want out attention.
Example; you do not ask people who do have little sufficient or with no sufficient to live; question and opinion by calling them poor and worthless people.
In return; they will look at you like other who look at them down and treat them bad.

I don’t think that I would find a thread with the title “Things you did for fun when you were a poor Uni student” offensive, having been a university student without much money.

I think that they see the problem with having town clothes as outfits under the current system is that your wielded weapon will be displayed. Personally I wouldn’t mind and would start using town clothes again even if this were the case. I wonder how many people think that moving from tonics to outfits would be a backwards step for this reason.

DarkSyze.8627:

zombyturtle, you do not make yourself different by calling new player Noob. I am a little new but i will not answer your thread until you remove that word. Suggestion; no new player like to be call noob; think next before using that word.

Example; you do not ask people who do not have little question and for oppinion by calling them poor

The term isn’t offensive as in this context is implicit the understanding that we were all noobs once.

Astral Projections.7320:

Servanin.5021:

The different salvage kits. Okay, I get that the rarer ones have a higher success chance of recovering your upgrades, but I don’t get what chance of rare materials does. Maybe getting ancient wood and orichalcum? Sure doesn’t feel like a 15% chance though, salvaging my whole inventory gets me 1-3 of them.

Like should I be using my mystic forge kit for blues and greens? Or saving it’s charges.

I have yet to figure out the salvage kits and what they mean by rarer materials because I’ve used masters and basic and I get what I would consider rarer mats from both. If there are more with masters I’m not sure it’s enough to cover the cost difference.

The salvage kit stuff is a bit weird. There are items that have a chance of producing t3 or t4 materials. Say on a basic kit the chance of getting t4 is 30%. If you use a kit that says it has a 20% higher chance of salvaging a higher tier material, then the chances go to 36%. I can’t say for sure that this is exactly how the numbers are calculated, but it’s close enough to give an idea of the sort of difference these kits make (not a lot). The one advantage of the higher level kits is that in certain circumstances they produce more of that material.

I really should do some research by salvaging lots of the same item so I can be more specific.

The bank and collections system (as it was called when I started playing). It’s not a design flaw, but a mental block on my part. What, you can put up to 250 of every item listed into there? That seemed like cheating to me as I had never been in a game that allowed that much storage. I think I was about 1000 hours in before I discovered I could put materials in there without having to go there physically. It never occurred to me that this might be an option.

Behellagh.1468:

Celtic Lady.3729:

Wasn’t Wildstar geared toward hard-cores? Considering how few of them there are overall, why did anyone think that an MMO made mainly for them would be a good idea?

The vanilla WoW founders of Carbine felt their voice about hard core raiding was being ignored by Blizzard and left. They thought it was an underrepresented part of the MMO playerbase and would flock to an MMO that had it as a core feature.

Unfortunately they didn’t realise that what 80% of people who claimed to be hard core gamers liked was not hard core gaming, but telling everyone how the games they play are too easy. I do feel sorry for the genuine 20% though because it looks like Wildstar had a lot of great elements.

Getting a nice dye can help make an outfit pop, especially the right metallics for heavy armour.

It’s a pastiche on the Tyrian Overture, made to sound a bit like the old National Geographic theme.

4475 hrs – 1 drop from mob (zap)

2 from MF (both The Legend), from what I can guess based on the number of rares and exotics I have thrown in I have had about what I’d expect.

I have four completed legendaries and 3 precursors waiting to be upgraded. I have never paid more than 200g for a precursor off the tp.

Ashen.2907:

Cormac.3871:

Ashen.2907:

Cormac.3871:

You need ascended gear to complete hearts?

It has been said 100 times, but I will say it the 101st, aside from fractals, the difference between ascended and exotic is negligible. Get two evenly matched players put one in ascended and one in exotic and have them meet up in WvW, the results may skew out to 55-45.

What part of your journey has been delayed by your need to get ascended?

And before you try the “Why wear armour at all?” line, the difference between rare and exotic is noticeable. The difference between exotic and ascended is not.

Never claimed that I needed ascended to complete hearts. Really not sure where you got that from what was actually said.

I notice a performance difference when I equip a trait that increases damage by 5%. Unless full ascended weapons/armor/accessories provides significantly less than that (and the math has shown that it is actually more) it is noticeable (for me).

Well, you started off by saying that doing hearts was playing the game for you and you concluded by saying that getting BiS armour was the start of the game for you. I thought that was a little inconsistent and was hoping to draw your attention to it. You still didn’t answer my question as to which part of the game you needed ascended for.

As for making a noticeable difference, if you can tell the difference between 20 hits to knock out a veteran and 19 hits by the end of a fight, you are doing better than me.

The poster to whom I had replied compared killing mobs/doing hearts to crafting in terms of leveling. I was pointing out that crafting is not play for me while the others are.

A 5% damage increase is noticeable to me both in play and because I check my combat log frequently. Then again monitoring my own damage output is something I do in every game I play.

BiS gear is not about a need to be able to overcome specific opposition for me. It is about developing my mastery of my character at his best. For me the journey doesnt hit its full stride until the character is at max level and has BiS gear.

So, the only thing not having BiS is stopping you from doing is knowing that you have BiS, and the only way you could tell the difference is by checking the combat logs afterwards. OK, I am sure those things hold some relevance to you, but I am not overly sympathetic.

I am around 160 too. Aside from Halloween (or was it Wintersday) it has been pretty slow going recently. I whistfully remember the days when I could do the two low level paths of Twilight Arbour, salvage my drops and go up 1 point in magic find.

I always wanted to make an all Sylvari guild called “Destiny’s Hedge”

I had a ranger pet called Boaromir.

My Asuran warrior is called Empirical Data.

I am going to level up properly. The three bits of the NPE that bug me are the new weapon skill gating, the silly thing where you can’t activate skill points early on and the fact that trait unlocks are not account wide (I like the unlock system, but think it should be account wide for everything except the top tier). The first two annoyances should pass quickly enough as early level gain is apparently much faster, beside which I have a pretty decent levelling bonus thanks to achievements.

I’ll also be doing the personal story again, but my decision to join an order will be a bit of a downer, because I’m essentially choosing which mentor I want to see die.

Ashen.2907:

Cormac.3871:

You need ascended gear to complete hearts?

It has been said 100 times, but I will say it the 101st, aside from fractals, the difference between ascended and exotic is negligible. Get two evenly matched players put one in ascended and one in exotic and have them meet up in WvW, the results may skew out to 55-45.

What part of your journey has been delayed by your need to get ascended?

And before you try the “Why wear armour at all?” line, the difference between rare and exotic is noticeable. The difference between exotic and ascended is not.

Never claimed that I needed ascended to complete hearts. Really not sure where you got that from what was actually said.

I notice a performance difference when I equip a trait that increases damage by 5%. Unless full ascended weapons/armor/accessories provides significantly less than that (and the math has shown that it is actually more) it is noticeable (for me).

Well, you started off by saying that doing hearts was playing the game for you and you concluded by saying that getting BiS armour was the start of the game for you. I thought that was a little inconsistent and was hoping to draw your attention to it. You still didn’t answer my question as to which part of the game you needed ascended for.

As for making a noticeable difference, if you can tell the difference between 20 hits to knock out a veteran and 19 hits by the end of a fight, you are doing better than me.

Ashen.2907:

Killing mobs and doing hearts is play for me. Crafting is a detestable chore. Spending my day off pulling an extra twelve hour shift at work is more enjoyable than a game session spent crafting.

I am not sure that developing multiple crafting professions to 500 and crafting a couple dozen pieces of ascended gear would qualify as, “a little bit,” of crafting but I spent the time and money to get multiple sets of BiS already. If other people want some long involved process so that it feels like an achievement to them, fine. I dont have a problem with that. Just add an option to skip that process for those who want BiS by level 80 and for whom getting BiS gear is not the journey itself but rather the first step in starting the journey.

You need ascended gear to complete hearts?

It has been said 100 times, but I will say it the 101st, aside from fractals, the difference between ascended and exotic is negligible. Get two evenly matched players put one in ascended and one in exotic and have them meet up in WvW, the results may skew out to 55-45.

What part of your journey has been delayed by your need to get ascended?

And before you try the “Why wear armour at all?” line, the difference between rare and exotic is noticeable. The difference between exotic and ascended is not.

SenorMoody.5908:

The dumbest things That I have ever done in this game was:
1) Purchased Gems

Purchasing gems is only dumb if you do it to get ahead in the game. The Watchwork pick is the only thing they have put up that could have done that, and even then you would probably have got a better return on you investment if you had put your gold into t6 mats.

Purchasing gems is not dumb if you think paying a little bit for fripperies is OK in order to support a game with a no-sub model that you want to keep going because you enjoy it.

Making ascended weapons I accidentally crafted twenty hardwood dowels instead of twenty hardwood planks.

Oh, and for a while meta used to be 4 warriors and a Mesmer running Citadel of Fire over and over, so at one stage it was worse.

For dungeons, the meta is glass canon, direct damage melee, yes. For pvp and WvW there is much more variety. For open world pve the newer content varies a little, and the older content is so easy it doesn’t matter what you use.

So, is this bland for dungeons? I would argue that it is not as bland as it first seems.

The guild wars trinity was supposed to be damage / support / control. As dungeons stand all players are expected to do damage. Which means that the real trinity is damage + support / damage + control / damage + support + control.

Support I would include as any boon sharing, particularly might and fury and vulnerability on enemies. Unfortunately this game doesn’t really make healing a useful option, however damage mitigation tactics involving reflects and blinds are useful, and sometimes condition cleansing.

The control aspect is less appealing than it might be owing to poor AI (although the sort of mobs we see in the Silverwastes would be interesting in a dungeon). The idea is usually to gather up enemies and hit them all at the same time. To this end guardian greatsword 5 is fantastic, just about everything on a necro is bad.

Some classes have variety better than others. For guardian I will swap between greatsword, sword/focus, scepter/focus and occasionally sword/torch, all the while avoiding the weapons of choice, hammer, because I just don’t like it. I also do a lot of switching around of skills, even in the middle of a dungeon. There are also at least three trait builds I can use and still call myself meta. On the other hand with ranger I have to play spotter and frost spirit, and my only real choice is whether I want to play sword/axe or sword/war horn.

Tl;dr build and weapon variet exist for most classes, just not stat variety.

Fractals, the Arah dungeons and some of the story achievements are the only bits of endgame where you can expect to fail on a given attempt (although you might want to rage quit on one or two jumping puzzles). So if your endgame enjoyment is determined by having stuff that not everyone will succeed on the there’s really only fractals that will keep you going.

Population is OK. Most dungeon parties fill reasonably quickly (except for the harder ones that people prefer not to do with pugs) and lower tier WvW can be pretty patchy off peak peek pique high usage times.

Internode is good, but they got progressively more expensive when I was on them. I left a bit over a year ago after a price hike, but wouldn’t recommend my current service provider as they seem to be pretty sketchy around peak hour.

Zaxares.5419:

since the sand pools only spawn where the Earth Elementals are killed, there is no risk of getting hit by them as long as the Elementals keep following Caithe around.

Just a quick side note, the centaur can summon sand pools if you in melee range of him. I found this challenge really hard for that reason. The Elementals had to be killed at range and any melee of the centaur had to be done very carefully. I spent hours doing this, and in the end I still couldn’t read his tell for summoning the sand pool (although there were a few times when I knew he wasn’t.)

I know the conversation has moved on, but FWIW when the Krytan logging daily comes up I go to Bloodtide Coast. There are always a few trees near the LA entrance and the chance for some coriander too.

“Same goes for the Krytan Heir”

Expect to see that expanded on in a later season. I like the fact that they don’t need to have everything tidy up in a neat ball, but are prepared to foreshadow things a long way in advance.

I also wonder if some of the problem is caused by people doing the event without the perseverance buff. I usually have poor luck with this sort of stuff, but having got my third coat in about the sixth attempt, it makes me think that the fact that I usually play on the map from a fairly early stage has something to do with it.