Guild Wars 2

There was a lot of disappointment about the announcement that there would be a six week gap between the release of episodes 7 and 8. I put this down mostly to the fact that we have only had seven episodes of season 2 this year. Even being generous and counting from when season 2 started on July 1 (after a looong break), that’s seven episode in the last 26 weeks of 2014. Closer to an an episode every four weeks than every two.

So should Season two have been released every four weeks rather than every two? In the end having a two week schedule has led to expectations that can’t be met.

Personally I would diversify. But a lot of each t6 mat, maybe a black lion skin and an underwater precursor.

If you are constantly buying food, then yes, it’s worth it. You can also recoup the cost of levelling it in a little over a week if you have enough geodes to buy the recipe for the plate of piquant plant food.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I still harbor some measure of hope that we’ll get a proper dungeon (with tokens, weapon/armor skins, and slaying potions) related to Mordremoth at some point, but that could also just be a pipedream.

This would seem to be the logical way to go, but all the indications seem to say that they won’t.

The problem they face is that Aetherpath flopped, and rather than look at why Molten Facility was successful and Aetherpath wasn’t they gave up on dungeons altogether.

Honestly, I think that if they’d taken each of gimmicky sections of Aetherpath and split them over several paths, mixed in a few more standard fights to give an average run time comparable to other dungeons and used the standard token system then it would be at least as frequently run as, say, Caudecus Manor.

wasted.6817:

It’s same crap as in S1 only worse this time. They stretch tiny bits and pieces way too thin because they don’t have anything else to offer.

I couldn’t agree less. This is much faster paced than season 1 and we are finding out far more about people’s motives. Better exploration of characters, better exploration of history and better pacing.

I can understand people being frustrated with the lack of resolution for each episode, but this post I don’t agree with at all.

Just a quick note. Most of what Hexicz said was wrong in one sense or another.

WvW has now got WvW skills progression, and the maps have had a small change of mechanics (bloodlust mechanic gained by claiming ruins)

Two new level 80 PvE maps, with a different style of meta event, essentially giving two new options to those who just ran around Orr.

You may or may not have left before the Fractals dungeons came out. If you left shortly after they came out there are now twice as many Fractals.

Living World Season 2 has about 90 minutes play. Per episode. If you don’t play for achievements. We are on episode 7 so there is 10 hours of new content there, although you will have to pay gems to unlock the content you missed.

The game was always intended to be pay for looks rather than pay to win or pay to play, but there are still a bunch of new skins that that can be acquired via gameplay, such as ascended weapons and armour, carapace armour, fractal weapons, tequatl weapons and champion weapons as well as the skins related to achievement points.

Also, five new top tier traits per class have been added.

Kuldebar.1897:

Blizt.3086:

What do you all feel about this part?

It was tepid, because Caithe is inexplicably playing the fool more than playing the “bad guy”. The worse thing is that your character also gets roped into being an idiot when it comes to updating Jory on what transpired.

Really, hero, the Centaurs just became violent for no reason?

I mean, all Caithe and her psychotic girlfriend wanted to do was forcibly kidnap an honored guest from the Centaur village.

No idea why they would become so violent towards us. /rolleyes

I wouldn’t say it was inexplicable. She was only two years old at the time. Naivety is a bit of a racial trait for sylvari, even now let alone 20 years ago. She knows Faolin, trusts Faolin and has just discovered a group of outsiders torturing Sylvari and so is likely to believe Faolin over outsiders. She is also unable to recognise exactly the path that Faolin is about to head down with the nightmare court.

architect.3167:

pardon, i have one more question about salvageing. In case of cloth if silk come from 58-80 amor and linen come from level 44-63, how i know what i will get from armor between 58-63? do i get linen or silk?

58-63 can produce either at random. The higher the quality of your salvage kit the higher your chances of getting silk.

There are ascended items in the bank that appear to be anticipating ascended jewel crafting at least, but we have not had official word from ANet.

There is a post on the BLTC forum page about RNG in general. It was started by a dev who has not since contributed to it, nevertheless it is interesting to see where his thoughts are at in the first post.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/RNG-as-a-concept-Discuss/first#post4488821

In short, the devs know that players have an issue with this style of thing, but haven’t announced how or if they are going to fix it (presumably because they haven’t decided yet).

FWIW I think the dungeon tokens system is far preferable to the systems forthey later adopted in FotM and Aetherpath of TA.

The best solution as things stand I think would be to add a Mystic Forge recipe where you throw in 3 fractal weapons and a rare weapon of the variety of fractal weapon you want.

It might be worth asking on the Black Lion forum page on one of the stickied questions there. The thread is regularly visited by John Smith, who is in charge of the economy on GW2. I can’t promise he will answer your questions exactly, but he might give some insight behind the reasoning associated with adding both more recipes and more sources for this lodestone.

If I had to guess I would say that the more a material is both called for and provided, the easier it is to guess the price of any new item, as the material’s price will be less volatile. I agree with Zaxares’ point about the number of recipes requiring it (at least initially) being thematic.

Craft 20 rares at a time and throw them in
Or
Hold on to exotics, once I have two I will buy a dungeon weapon I need to unlock the skin of and throw them in with a forge stone.

The only time I got keys in bulk it was part of a package that included other stuff I wanted. 15 keys yielded me 1 scrap. That was pretty bad luck, but occasionally it’s going to play out that way. No trap, except in as much as all Skinner Boxes are traps.

kta.6502:

Vapour.7348:

To be perfectly honest, I think Caithe was craving an omelet.

Forget omlet. She was craving a Cadbury egg!

Even better: Caithe is looking for a Wintersday gift for her precious Faolain.

I never did believe what she said about dumping the Nightmare leader.

Caesar salad for sure. Lettuce, egg and to top it off a bit of backstabbing.

A Sylvari and a dragon egg to make the ultimate Caesar salad.

Rebound.3409:

Something that i see a lot of people haven’t noticed since the last LS.
Caithe’s Blossom (the ascended accessory u get from the previous LS) has this quote under it: “I’m done with your games, and I’m finished with you. I am not your dearheart.”

I don’t think it’s related to Faolin. I think it’s related to the Pale Tree. This is what made me expect something bad from her ever since the last LS..but i wasn’t expecting it this fast.

Anyway….kids…what did we learn from GW2 today? Preemptive deforestation is a good thing! <and the kids go yaaaaay>

Then there was the quote from Scarlet on the backpiece: “You’ll see Caithe, Tyria needs me.”

My money is on the more obvious plot line. It is the real Caithe, she has a plan for the egg, it’s for the good of Tyria but she didn’t want to tell us in case we tried to stop her. I also think that the dear heart would be Faolin, as it is her signature line. The Pale Tree would refer to Caithe as “child”.

Loki.8793:

and why her exit was very thief like instead of Mesmer like.

Caithe is a thief.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

ANet,

please look at this:

http://archomeda.github.io/gw2improvedwallet/

This is, imo, very close to the ideal wallet. I would pay for this. In cupcakes.

Pros: clears up inventory, logically ordered, can be expanded on with minimal fuss in future

Cons: see what you have at a glance functionality is gone, some scrolling required

For me the pros outweigh the cons easily.

No Walking.6349:

The updates for season 1 were SO much better than this season’s. There we had Lost Shores with the Karka event, Flame and Frost …

Bring back hammering in sign posts I say.

In all seriousness, the only thing I think was clearly better from season one is the Marionette event.

It would have been nice to see updates to Dragon Bash and SAB around the times of the feature packs, but the pacing of the story has been much better.

Stooperdale.3560:

And of course she has gone, completely gone, in two seconds. We’ve given up on finding her immediately. We’re not going to ask Eir where might have gone. We’re not going to use all the Pact soldiers to keep an eye out for her. We’re not going to question Canach who’s been with her recently. We all just assume she can go wherever she wants in the middle of two enemy armies, unlike the Master of Peace who’s dead on the floor. Time to speak to the Pale Tree, of course.

Caithe is supposed to be an uber wilderness survivalist, the Master of Peace is not.

When part 3 comes out I fully expect people to make reference to the fact that they have been looking out for Caithe but nobody has seen her (or that she has just been spotted and thus begins the next bit of the story). I am also sure we will talk to the rest of DE about her (although why you think Eir specifically might know where she has gone is beyond me).

Excell.1042:

Tbh, the carapace shoulders should be changed aswell, replaying the LS is more of a grind than actually playing silverwastes and having fun.

Some people would prefer to play in Silverwastes, others would prefer to redo the story. I don’t see the harm in having both options available.

With regards to forging greens, I use a system that skews me towards weapons as an output. Rares have a base value related to the cost of ecto’s, but rare weapons with a desirable precursor equivalent are worth more. Also, don’t mix greatswords with other things, and the same for any other weapon type which has a high value as a rare.

Personally I don’t think the fact that there are some extremely expensive items with only cosmetics to set it apart. In fact I think it’s a good thing.

The worry for me is that with only 550 on the TP the price can be artificially inflated by someone with only a few thousand gold.

Quirky tip: only one node in a spore patch will give you a spore sample. You can find out which one by holding ctl.

September patch notes indicated toxic events were moved out of Queensdale and Celadon Fields, although I haven’t checked. But in general around the lake in Kessex Hills is the best place. Gendarran Fields and Brisban have the toxic events but nobody ever does them. I didn’t think Harathi Hinterlands had them, but I may be wrong.

THuGaNoMiX.5036:

Still don’t get it. I would like to hear from a Moderator or Admin on the explanation of why they would do something so stupid.

They probably won’t comment. Encouraging people to log in every day and giving crafters an avenue for making money still seem like fair enough reasons though.

zaced.7948:

Cormac.3871:

…

yes, t5 prices would have spiked but those of the ascended mats wouldn’t have. now just check spidy and compare the bids/buys (div/mult by numbers needed, ofc; you can check the numbers bought/sold in this time on spidy) in the average pricerange (prices at the time of the update+reasonable max prices in tp /2) on those asc mats and t5. you will come to the conclusion that the gold drain with asc mats is higher.

another point is that you can farm t5 mats, acs mats you can not.

I am pretty sure you don’t know what’s price spike is or a gold sink (unless a gold drain works differently to a gold sink).

The price of a bolt of damask hit 20 gold, then dropped down to ten before steadily climbing to about 15 today. I don’t know that you can say a price spikes for something when it is just introduced, but paying double for something just to have it on the first day isn’t so bad, and is hardly relevant now.

You can pay a premium and buy now, or you can log in regularly and get it eventually. When that premium is over 15% then crafting is profitable, although it is impossible for just a small number of players to quickly exploit that market, so the profit stays around for more people. As a regular player who likes long term goals this is great. It encourages more regular logging in rather than just getting out your credit card in my view.

You also said ascended mats can’t be farmed. I’m not sure what exactly you mean here. Obviously you can’t farm manufactured goods, but are you talking about silk scraps (a t5 material incidentally) or do you think we should be able to farm bolts of damask. I’m confused by what you mean and why it might be a relevant point.

cranked.3812:

No, Cormac, the main reason is to get you to log in every day.

I agree that the idea of getting people to log in every day is a factor, but I wasn’t replying to OP, just to the person who claimed it was a nefarious scheme to get people use their credit cards.

Cooking and jewelcrafting do not require fine materials, which means that they are less likely to compete for resources with your armour profession. Cooking is cheap, but can require a lot of storage, so I would advise against doing it in one big hit.

zaced.7948:

because if not timegated the prices for those mats on the tp would have been way lower thus shrinking the overall “value” of the armor. another point is that you have to log in every day. another and probably the most important point is that by locking those mats behind a timegate there is way more incentive to buy those mats from the tp, generating a need for gold (which correlates with the price of those mats: higher price -> more playtime/gems needed) which by itself again gives the incentive to buy gems and trade them for gold.
why timegate? because profit.

Absolutely, 100%, unequivocally wrong.

Had crafting not been time gated the price shock on silk would have been enormous as people had bought up all the stock needed for their set of armour in one hit. Damask hit 10 gold early on, which is around the price it ended up stabilising at, the only difference being that early on crafters who weren’t interested in making their armour early on we’re able to make a good profit as silk took a month or so to reach its new base level.

You could possibly argue that the number of materials required are an attempt at getting people to convert gems to gold, but the main impact of time gating has been to make crafting profitable for those not in a hurry.

Most rares should be salvaged for ectos.

Swords, greatswords, staves and daggers should be sold on the tp.

If you really want to play the MF throw longbows into the forge (masterwork as well as rare and exotic), but only if you enjoy the feeling of buying a lottery ticket.

T6 mats are going to be another sticking point. Temple events on cursed shore are good for heavy mouldy bags. Hopefully you’ll end up with enough t5 mats that you can occasional craft a batch of rare longbows and increase your chances of a MF drop from nothing to almost nothing.

Learn the Twilight Arbour run early if you haven’t already. You will need to run it at least 8 times, but do it more as dungeons are a great source of raw gold.

Zaxares.5419:

Personally speaking? I dislike the Juggernaut because it looks like a giant thermometer,

If a nurse approached me in hospital with something that looked like the Juggernaut I think I would be too scared to roll over.

Frostfang has more utility in terms of sharing between your alts, but other than that it’s a matter of taste. Of which I have none given the joke I told.

Jerus.4350:

Thaddeus.4891:

I can only talk about the people I play with in my guild, but like Tom Ysf said, a lot of people were doing Labyrinth for money or for candy to get the last Halloween reward they wanted (Kuzu the mini cat).

… zuzu

I was personally hoping for a drop of Leaf of Zuzu, the great feline weapon. It batters their enemies until they are half dead, then does nothing until they are almost out of range, then pins them down and starts hurting them again. Just be careful not to pass through a beam of sunlight with it or you’ll be stuck there for hours.

I don’t think overall leader boards are a good idea (for the reason of exploited runs as stated above), but if the game kept track of your personal data and let you know when you had done your own fastest run for that path, that would be neat.

Why is the price for salvageable leather so high? At 1.75silver it can’t be for the leather, because there is no way to recoup that cost. It can’t be for the Agent of Entropy achievement because there are cheaper salvage items out there (hard leather straps are about half as much).

I don’t understand it and prices I don’t understand on the TP worry me.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge#Recipe_sheets gives the mystic forge ingredients to make the recipe sheet for boxes and satchels of armor.

I play the Mystic Forge a bit for precursors. One night after making twenty rare staves and throwing them in I got the Legend, which in itself is not a huge surprise, as I had been doing that a fair bit and was probably due for a pay-off, but hey, first precursor from the Mystic Forge for me.

One month later I decide to unlock some skins from the dungeon vendor. I throw in three random exotics and a forge stone and I get the Legend again. The money helped a lot in finishing the Bifrost.

About the longest odds I will grind something for are 1 in 20, maybe 1 in 50 if the bags are dropping as often as ToT bags. Things like Gwynerfyrdd and Chaos of Lyssa are far too long odds to go in with any sort of expectation. Ironically it is the sort of person who will collect 50,000 bags hoping to get that rare drop that ensures that this type of content will keep getting put in.

Swagginator.3246:

can’t imagine the torment for ppl with alzheimer disease..

help!

I can’t stand running dungeons with people who have Alzheimer’s. They are always saying things like “So, who’s the healer?” and “maybe the trash mobs will drop something good.” Even on their more lucid days they talk about writing a suggestion to Robert Hrouda.

I envision the gods being between the dragons, but I can’t quite get it to work, and I suspect that the reason is the one Konig suggested, namely that the domains are shifting. Here is my best attempt

Dwayna: life / wind
Kralkatorik: wind / chaos
Lyssa: chaos / shadow
Zhaitan: shadow / death
Grenth: death / ice
Jormag: ice / war
Balthazar: war / fire
Primordus: Fire / growth
Melandru: growth / plants
Mordremoth: plants / mind
Abaddon: mind / water
Splashy (bubbles): water / life

Which leads back to dwayna. Obviously some of these are pretty solid while others aren’t.

A weird thing I noticed according the wiki is that Lyssa is supposed to cover the realm of water.

Mystic.5934:

there were 2 of a few of them. 9, to be specific. You are right, though, in a random situation, you would see some with 1, some with 2, some with 5, etc. What this tells me is that there are far more salvageable materials available in the pool than I observed.
For example, if you picked 20 random numbers from 1 to 100, you would expect 1, maybe 2 of 18ish different numbers. you wouldn’t expect 5 of one number. But if you picked 100 numbers, then you would expect to see 3, maybe 4 of some numbers, and only 80 or so different numbers. As your sample size approaches the pool size, then you start to see more multiples.

I should have looked here first. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Salvage_Item

Of the 42 basic salvage items that existed before Mawdrey II came along you have 25. Of the 6 that came since you have only 2, but you have four of one of them (the regurgitated mass, which I missed the first time, because it was unfamiliar and on the top line). So, not as suspicious as I first thought.

Thanks for doing this.

Does anybody else get the feeling that there is a non-random element to this? To have not got more than two of any salvageable item strikes me as suspicious.

If you are careful about how you use it and go with a friend you should be able to get most of your ingredients back from a use of maize balm. It also gives you something to do while waiting for the Shadow Behemoth to spawn.

It is possible to improve on gw2crafts if you do your research and do a bit of planning based on what you are likely to need in the future. Unless you know the market really well though using your own system based on researching is likely to take you five times as long.

You could hit sites like gw2spidy and gw2craftgold to find value for money recipes and probably get pretty close to breaking even, and in the cases where you lose money you will gain a lesson about how the trading post works. If you just want to get things done quickly however go with gw2crafts. It’s as good as any page out there and getting things done quickly at a reasonable price.

the most likely reason they would have kicked you is because of class or low achievement points. I think it’s bad form not to mention these in the LFG if you are going to kick someone, but it’s not lfg abuse.

And you probably don’t want to run with a group who think they will crash and burn because they have one guy with low ap anyway.

I am torn. On the one hand some people need the wake up call that they are doing less than 15% of the party’s damage. On the other hand you’ll get players thinking that they are doing fine, but who haven’t been doing their job with buffs and damage mitigation.

Roybe.5896:

A series of links about random factors, perception, and business decisions based on these perceptions

https://www.princeton.edu/~osherson/papers/Ranperc.pdf

https://www.problemgambling.ca/EN/Documents/HPG%20Probabilty%20Final.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jun/08/slot-machine-lose-lose-situation

There are a lot of pages here and you didn’t give a summary, so I went to a random paragraph and read it. I didn’t find that paragraph useful, just bad RNG I guess.

Three reasons for me

Some items can only be accessed via crafting, specifically ascended armour and weapons

Long term you can make money off crafting, particularly if you know what the market is doing and why.

It adds a bit of variety to the game.

There is still plenty of exclusive stuff out there. ANet made a mistake last year in making too many of the Halloween related items too hard to get and corrected this year. Even though it means that the candy corn node I have in my home instance is far less valuable I don’t mind, because I am enjoying this holiday’s more attainable goals more than last year, where I just didn’t bother.

I do however sympathise with the idea that older stuff should climb in value. I would perhaps like to see something like the Black Lion collections model where Zuzu returns for 16 cobs instead of 12 next year. But that’s a different argument. All that has happened here is that ANet recognise that they made a miscalculation last year and fixed it making for a better experience for the majority of players.

Personally I would go around Caledon forest and Metrica Province hoping to find vanilla or around Ashford looking for chilli peppers. You will stumble on a few onions anyway and chilli and vanilla sell for a good enough price that you can buy onions with the profit. Unfortunately onions are a little too spread out to farm specifically, but can be farmed incidentally in a lot of places while you are doing other stuff. Which I understand is frustrating if all you really want are the onions.

Lishtenbird.2814:

I don’t really think there’re any other options aside from tokens or “progressive RNG”.

I think that combining both depending on the situation would be best:

• For major world boss (Tequatl, Wurm) rewards, tokens make most sense. Like, you can get lucky and receive Tequatl’s hoard on the 1s-5th-Nth run straight away, but if you grind, say, 50 Tequatl kills, you get enough tokens for a weapon anyway.
  • Tokens are received in a fixed (or very low-RNG) manner, like 10 (or 7-13 tokens) per completion, and deposited to account wallet (as it is not a temporary LS currency).
  • Direct drop rates are adjusted accordingly to maintain the average current distribution.
  • This achieves balance between the thrill of winning the jackpot and the frustration of being on the bad side of statistically even distribution.

Personally, I would prefer an achievement system here? Kill teq 50 times and get your choice of weapon. Pretty much for the reasons you state though. I guess I’m just biased against creating another currency.

• The same goes for things like Fractal weapons and tonics. If there’s a serious reason not to use current fractal relics as the currency, an alternative weapon token system can be used.

I agree on Fractals, even though it means that after a certain amount of time you will have everything. Actually I very much agree with the rest of your points. As a rule of thumb, the more rare an item is the less it should rely on RNG.