It seems a lot of people here (me included) that have the problem while never having transferred have accounts that were in for the headstart/BWEs.
Perhaps a flag or field isn’t filled correctly for those accounts? (Maybe “on this server since…” is empty)
Are there any people that had this problem and started getting the bonuses after transferring and waiting out the intented cooldown period?
Mobs go invulnerable when their pathing AI says they can’t reach you (= their feet close to your toon’s feet). They can’t jump, so if you jump up on something it often happens. Unfortunately, there are some skills and effects (mainly teleports and knockbacks) that can put your character a bit over/under the surface and the mob thinks it can’t reach you. some terrain is also just glitched in rough spots.
If the mob didn’t go invulnerable, you could stand in an unreachable place (say on a roof) and safely kill unlimited mobs, so it won’t ever be changed like you suggest.
On the other hand, they are working on the glitched parts.
Equipment loot from mobs and some (boss) chests has like a 25 or 50% chance to be your level, but I don’t think mats and such are scaled up. Other chests only give out appropriate rewards for their zone.
If the item is supposed to be “Legendary”, your first thought when you find out what’s involved in getting it should be “No way, that kittening impossible!”
Then you either move on and forget about it or you decide you’re going to go for it, no matter what it takes. If it takes less than insane commitment and/or heroic achievements, it’s not worthy of the label Legendary.
So if you go for it, stop complaining. The harder and more painful the journey, the more legendary your prize!
In “that other” MMO, 99.9% of the players would see the new legendaries in an expansion and know that they’d never hold them. If you weren’t (buddies with) a GM in a hardcore raiding guild or saved up a zillion dkp, the matter was settled. Before you’d get a chance at gathering the pieces, new content would kill interest in the old one and you’d be stuck unless you committed to organizing your own pug raids for a suddenly outdated “Legendary”. (organizing pug raids = insane commitment too).
Either way, people would be impressed when they saw you with one.
In contrast, I find the gambling process to get a Legendary in GW2 distinctly unheroic and the fact that exploits and speculating on the market put the first legendaries in people’s hands so quickly after a launch very unlegendary. Now that it becomes harder to just buy your way to a legendary, the rarity and status will at least increase a bit, but we’ll have to wait for new legendaries unaffected by early exploits to really see who’s legendary and who’s not.
Regardless, they’re not worth it if they’re the only reason you play and I don’t think it will affect whether people want to play. It never stopped the 99.9% from playing in that other mmo.
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I’m confident that ArenaNet will makes loot drop adjustments if the market stabilizes at prices that make any crafting or acquiring rares/exotics prohibitive for casual players with their new level 80s. They are the norm, not those of you who drop 100 exotics in the Mystic Toilet every week because you decided you HAVE to have a Legendary.
The DR system may see a drastic relaxing when ANet has reducing the RMTs/botters far enough that they can’t flood the market anymore. It won’t go away, but you’d have to farm much longer before noticing any reduction.
If you have all expansions or at least Nightfall/Eye of the North, you can play the entire game solo with a group of customized hero NPCs filling out your team. Once you unlock some good skills for them, they’re strong (even OP) and aside from them standing in AoE too much (fixable if you flag them to spread out points) you will not be at a disadvantage because of their limited AI.
I revived my old account last spring and completed all campaigns and many hard mode areas without ever inviting another player into my party. When you take advantage of optimized hero team builds (http://www.gwpvx.com) you can
“play” the normal mode area by moving around and letting your heroes do all the killing by themselves while you pick up the loot or admire the view. Hard mode and the later content (War in Kryta and Winds of Change especially) require a lot more attention. I had a lot of fun playing GW1 as a single player game, but it’s a matter of taste.
Lorewise, you will learn a little more about the human/charr conflict in the early prophecies campaign, Nightfall features the Order of Whispers, and Eye of the North is really the preparation for GW2, introducing the Asura and Norn. Most of the campaigns feature events and people only mentioned in passing in GW2.
Factions especially has nothing to do with the current game. Perhaps in the future after Zhaitan and the Deep Sea Dragon are defeated we’ll get to go there again…
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Don’t underestimate how much time all of the above takes, especially if you’re on a fresh account with only a few skills unlocked. You’ll end up making many many detours to get decent skills for your heroes.
I had a lot of fun last spring reviving my GW account and running through on a newly created mesmer (probably the most OP class for PvE there), but even with most skills already unlocked I spent a few hours running to out-of-the-way places to capture elite skills (You get Elite skills from bosses in GW1)
If you WANT to play GW1, go for it, but if it’s only a chore to get a white raven in GW2, is it really worth the money and effort?
Maybe ANet is testing a change to crafting, taking out the components step and this recipe accidentally got sent to live servers…
I can’t login to the game atm to check, but as far as I remember smite condition doesn’t break stun, so you would be unable to use it while feared.
Wow, just realized I’m having the same problem. I was wondering why my crafting gains always fell short of expectations in the guide I was using, despite waiting for the WvWvW bonus to reach 15% or higher.
What a bummer.
Posted a support question too.
Btw, between you and your girlfriend, you could have 6 spirit weapons out, drop in a racial elite summons and you let them do the fighting while you explore and take pictures ;-)
I’ve noticed it on dodge rolls. I use the double tap and sometimes I have enough endurance, but nothing happens. Very annoying and deadly.
Sometimes it feels like ANet intentionally slowed down underwater combat by nerfing damage. My guardian takes ages to kill a group of mobs, but incoming damage also seems way lower than on land.
I don’t mind a little more time to get my bearings and make sure I’m not above/below my target, but it does get tiresome and most weapon skills become pointless if they do like 0.1% of a mob’s HP in damage.
If they make transmutation work across armor types, they might as well rename the game to Pirate Wars!
I like that my Guardian is encased in gleaming mithril and isn’t lost among the plated necros and elementalists. That’s my only (selfish) concern. Death Knights… shudder
My preferred option would be that ANet introduces some more armor models that mix styles a bit. So light armor with some metal parts here and there, heavy armor with flowing sleeves/robes and medium armor… well anything that’s not a trenchcoat.
It’d be a lot more work than allowing transmutes to work across the board though, so I’m afraid we won’t see it for a long time if ever.
Another option might be to allow light and medium to mix and medium and heavy.
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Parking an alt in Queensdale or another zone with regular event chains works very well. Centaurs everywhere seem hellbent on mounting hopeless attacks every 5 minutes.
I also have only a little over an hour a day to play and I usually just wander around on my main and participate in everything I find. When I think I only have ~20 minutes to play, I check what I’m missing and log to an alt and finish it.
Oh btw, all those critters with white names seem to count for different types too.
GW2 is more focused on mobility and preventing/avoiding damage than most other MMOs. No matter how much Toughness and Vitality you stack, you’re going to go down if you just stand in place and shoot, especially at lower levels.
Instead, you have to actively avoid/prevent damage. Dodge rolls simply prevent all damage during the roll animation, even if you’re rolling through fire. As an engineer you have blind (from pistol or grenade) to make enemies miss and nets to keep melee mobs away from you. Turrets can distract mobs for a bit too and bombs provide smoke cover.
With that in mind, the game turns into a race: Can you kill enemies before you run out of defenses? That’s why you should focus on Power over other stats, it greatly improves all your attacks. Especially for group situations (where you can usually stand at a distance and lob grenades in the waves of mobs) Power beats any other stat by a mile.
I found that running around a zone doing random stuff actually works fairly well.
Pay attention to the orange markers for Dynamic Events, they’re usually the most fun and give good experience/loot. Also buy the cheapest gathering tools and mine/chop/gather every node you find on your path.
I’m not very familiar with the Thief, only have a low-level alt, but I think the shortbow has good abilities for attacking multiple mobs, use that in dynamic events when lots of players are competing for the kills. Keep it as the 2nd weapon set always.
For single targets, just experiment with the various weapon combos you can make. Practice dodging, it’s vital to staying alive and winning fights.
In general, I can tell you that most classes feel a bit underwhelming at low levels, but that improves by level 30 when you get an elite skill and at 40, most classes really start to roll.
The starter zones are the best place to fool around testing everything. Once you hit the level 15-25 zones, things get serious.
EDIT: The daily achievement gives good experience and karma, look on your hero screen (H) under Achievements, the top one is the daily. It’s worth going a bit out of your way to complete this every day that you’re playing.
I’m no PvP’er, so can’t help you with that. I do hear that while you get leveled to 80, you still lack powerful traits of higher level characters, making you weaker than most.
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I’ll readily admit I’m a bit jealous of those rich traders, and frustrated that the potential profits from speculating on the TP dwarf any other way to gain gold in the game. That doesn’t make it manipulation however.
Only ArenaNet manipulates the market now and then, by introducing those temporary chest recipes for example, and they do it not for profit, but to combat excesses like the bazillion stacks of unwanted mats lying around at the time.
Aside from the limits set (and changes made) by ArenaNet, the GW2 market is about as free as you can get. All parties have equal access to information and it’s impossible to directly interfere with competitors. It’s also impossible to mislead buyers with fake or low-quality products and practically impossible to create artificial demand through advertising.
Compare that to real-world markets where Apple and Samsung are in dozens of lawsuits trying to deny each other access to markets, where various (mostly) Asian companies are pumping out fake brand products from shoes to military-grade electronics and 80% of products are advertised as making you cool or feel good, when they do no such thing.
Yes, ArenaNet has a log of all mails and chats, they’ve referred to those quite often in the Accounts section of the forum.
It’s most likely something like this: ANet identifies the accounts that have been used by gold sellers (botting/spamming/etc) and traces all gold that has been mailed by those accounts to other players.
If you don’t accept gold from one of those accounts, you have nothing to fear when sending a few gold to a friend.
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The Black Lion Chests and Keys are meant to feed some people’s gambling addiction, not as a reward for playing or hard work. The rare key that drops is much like the free credit you get on any number of gambling sites: a lure to get you started.
The Mystic Toilet is the other manifestation of ArenaNet’s increased focus on gambling profits. Because it pays out sometimes, people will keep putting items and money in, because humans are terrible at decisions involving small odds.
I force myself to call it the Mystic Toilet just to remind myself not to throw anything in until I have nothing else to spend my gold on.
I would save the karma for level 80 items.
What you could do is put out buy orders that are more than 1c above the vendor price. I often do a quick check of green items on TP before vendoring the lot. If there’s a buy order at least 15% above vendor price, I’ll go for it, but usually there’s only the crap orders that would lose money if I filled them.
Would you buy a car you know was stolen?
If not, why would you buy gold that you know was stolen? It’s not that different.
RMTs are criminals preying on every dumb MMO player they can find. As said above, click on their ads, visit their sites and they’ll leave some trojans on your PC so they can later rob you blind.
If you do buy gold and get your account cleaned out later, you should not be upset and instead be happy for that other person that bought your gold, because they got a great deal from the RMT!
I love my Guardian, they’re tough, versatile and fun to play. But if you don’t like melee much, don’t go for one. I’d advise you to try the warrior you already have a bit longer. If you can get into the melee style but think the warrior is too straightforward/boring, Guardian might be worth trying.
Like most classes, Guardian can feel a bit squishy and weak from level 15-40, but then they really take off.
I decided to try something stupid and get the book on my lvl 31 alt just because I thought the looks fit his style.
At every point where it got harder, high level players helped me out, clearing the way and rezzing me. I want to thank all of you that helped the lowbies get through. It was great experience to meet so many kind strangers.
Thank you for the replies!
With your experiences in mind, I’m confident now that crafting a rare Explorer’s set is the way to go.
It should help me collect gold a bit faster so I can eventually go for a Knight’s Draconic set, and get me close to 400 Armorsmithing while doing it.
Btw, thanks for the tips jukkou on figuring out crafting, I already used a guide to get to 300 expediently and it made a huge difference compared to “just trying”, so I know the value of that advice. I even learned I should wait a day or so for the WvWvW crafting bonus to stack up.
I finally dinged 80 on my first toon, a Guardian, and now I’m looking at my options to gear up and I could use some advice.
My goals:
- Get a good weapon and set of armor for open-world exploration, that’s my main activity because that I don’t have a lot of playing time.
- Eventually work up to the Exotic Draconic Armor, I like the looks on that one.
My resources:
- currently geared with lvl 65-75 armor and a lvl 80 green greatsword.
- 5g, 65k karma and some crafting mats
- Armorsmithing at 300
My main dilemma is whether to spend my gold buying gear or investing in leveling Armorsmithing to 375 and making Explorer’s or Knight’s gear for myself.
Should I continue in my current gear and buy Exotics one by one, or go for a rare set first?
Is a rare cultural sword/hammer a better buy for my karma than one exotic armor piece from Orr?
I’ve had that at times after switching between alts a lot. Completely logging out of the game (not just to char selection) and back in resolved it for me most of the time.
I think you lose the connection to the TP server or however the TP interface reads your inventory info.
To get a new kidney in a western country in a hospital = wait for a long time for a compatible donor and then... pay $200,000* or more.
To get a new kidney somewhere in a back alley in Uzbekistan* where they do a custom search for a suitable donor for you and extract a kidney = $50,000*
Clearly hospitals need to change their prices!
No. There just is no comparing the "right" and legal way with the criminal alternative. Of course they’re more attractive financially! They *have* to be, to make you discount the risks and ignore the harm they inflicted on their victims, be it in stolen kidneys or accounts.
To say the original has to compete with the illegal alternative on price is saying that any legal or moral grounds are irrelevant to you.
* completely made up figures and random faraway country used
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…
The casual player ,as mentioned in a post, is already complaining about the TP as are the market players. I don’t consider myself a “market” player, but I do recognize that the cost of the basic mats should not exceed the value of the finished product in an economically “brilliant” choice of how to roll out a TP. So I disagree with another poster to this thread. Ford doesn’t hypothetically spend 12,000 dollars building a Mustang to sell it for 8500 dollars and label it a success.
The finished products you mention are actually just byproducts of leveling a craft to 400, players are trying to recoup at least some of the gold they spent, but they never made the products with the expectation of profit.
If Ford had to make bicycles first in order to be able to make cars, they’d be dumping the bicycles too at any price over the scrap metal one.
I suspect that this effect will lessen some as the initial wave of people leveling their crafts along with their characters passes. People are also becoming more aware of the fact that crafts aren’t worth leveling except for legendary reqs or completionist satisfaction.
Finally, unlike that other MMO, people will not be dropping and re-leveling crafts whenever the meta says this new craft is now 0.03% better for raiding than the previous top craft. They’ll just pay 40 silver and not dump dozens of items on the market to claw back their costs.
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While leveling, it may seem useful, but you can earn more than enough skill points to buy all available skills, so I don’t think it’s that necessary.
I did regret some choices I made early on after learning another skill in the same tier was much better, but it only takes a few skill challenges to fix that.
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It’s sad that a giant in a level 15-25 area is more deadly than those humongous loot piñatas that pass for dragons…
That particular giant is nasty, but I’ve found a huge difference between champions. Some are not that hard to take on with 2-3 people, just slow, others like this giant have abilities that make it very hard to kite them and keep them from resetting while you revive people that got caught by his stomp. Pointless to try then without a whole gang.
I agree that some of them need a second look from the devs. Not only in how long it takes to get them down, but also how to make it worth fighting them. Right now the decision is “spend 10 minutes on this and get no loot or run the other way and find a quicker event with lots of loot and the same karma/exp?”
Getting anywhere is a pain in some zones, you’d take forever if you stopped to fight every mob. That said, I do try to detour around other players if I’m dragging mobs behind me and never run through them.
Setup was smooth and it’s working great! Thank you for implementing this so quickly!
The one small thing I’d like to see is that the code field in the launcher gets focus automatically. If not getting focus blocks any automated attempt, that already happened at the password field. I don’t mind having to click the password field, but when I have my phone out to get a code, I can’t use the mouse and keyboard at the same time, so it’s just awkward.
Btw, to those people asking for a “remember me” setting in the game login, you’re asking to greatly weaken the security of this whole system. The hackers working for the RMTs will just update their trojans to include remote control and empty your account from your own computer while your PC is downloading torrents at night.
It’s 10 seconds to open the authenticator and enter the code, surely that’s not too much to do once or twice a day?
They’ll surely add more and better stuff. But having “cooler” armor skins in the gem store than available in-game right from the start would’ve soured the game for a lot of people that just spent $60.
The real question to decide this is “will gem purchases made by people playing the expansion make up for lost sales if we sell it for gems?”
I suspect a big expansion (in a year or so?) will have to be bought in stores for real money, unless ANet “manages” the gold-to-gems exchange rate to prevent the average player from just cashing in their pile of gold to buy it.
In a year, I expect lots of people will have a decent amount of gold saved up, after getting their bank tabs, character slots, and flavor items from the BLTC. The smart ones will even stockpile gems whenever the rate is good, because ANet can’t devalue the gems nearly as easily as gold.
If ANet sees that for example 40% of GW2 players has enough gems sitting unused in their account to buy the expansion and 20% has enough to also buy the new goodies without spending real money, they’ll think twice before releasing it as a gem purchase.
On the other hand, if gem purchases keep going well throughout the year and people are spending them, not stockpiling them, they will probably do it, and perhaps even release it for free to draw players back in.
“Move!” would have been better, but I use Retreat! all the time regardless, it’s just so useful.
If we’re going with jokes, I liked “Advance in a different direction!” from another thread.
35 and really like the game, even though I miss things like puzzling out great hero team builds from GW1.
Since my two kids were born I just don’t have the time anymore to dedicate to “keeping up with the Joneses” in WoW just so I can raid, and the single-player content is not worth the subscription.
I love being able to jump into any random area in GW2 and in minutes find DEs, places to explore and challenges to overcome. My limited time also means I have yet to reach 80 and see the most bugged and crowded places. I’m confident that by the time I get there, ANet will have improved them.
My Guardian doesn’t stink.
She’s a Sylvari, so I imagine she smells like pine or sandalwood or something.
Guardian and Engineer.
The other 3 are Mesmer, Thief and Necromancer, but I just keep going back to Guardian and Engineer, both are just so much fun and complement each other well.
I support this, please move the buttons back. Remove retaliation from the skills entirely if you have to, but don’t force me to relearn the UI everytime you “balance” some skills.
I think it’s a terrible design decision to maintain the ordering of skills by cooldown, forcing a change of the UI every time you balance something by changing the cooldown. The initial ordering made sense, but please keep them as they are now.
We’re gamers, we can adapt, but that doesn’t make it any less hostile to people just wanting to have fun.
There is no such thing as “fair” in war, only two or more sides claiming their own claims are “fair”. That’s the point I was trying to illustrate by turning your words around.
Who do you think are the rightful people of Ascalon.
The Humans who took over Ascalon fair and square whilst the charr were busy fighting amongst themselves trying to figure out who should be Khan Ur?
Obviously the Charr who took it back “fair and square” while the humans were busy fighting amongst themselves, trying to figure out whose gods, seen or unseen, should be the real ones.
Now if only some Ghostbusters could be summoned to evict those annoying ghosts squatting on prime Charr real estate.
Yes, but some of the higher end items are just ridiculous to sell on the TP. Take destroyer weapons as an example. Put it up for 30g it costs around 1.5g. The 15% tax on actually selling it ends up being 4.5g. That’s a total of 6 gold lost.
The 15% actually includes the listing fee (the sales tax is 10%), so you’d lose 4.5g in total. That’s still a lot, but it’s a lot less than 100% which you’d lose to a scammer.
ANet has repeatedly stated that they don’t have the technical ability in the game to restore single items, and account-wide rollbacks won’t be used for this purpose.
Removing the gold would actually work, I like that.
I’ve wondered about this too, why not take action against the gold buyers? Someone else had a good answer to that though:
It’s almost impossible to do this without harming innocent players as collateral damage.
If Anet bans players that receive gold in the mail, RMTs could simply start mailing random players gold. Sure, you can post on the forum that people should return the mail, but people are gonna be banned undeservedly.
Another example: suppose I finally convince my RL friend to buy GW2. To get him started I mail him a few gold. Bam! Banned!
The bad PR and whinestorm this will create by far outweighs the benefits.
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I salute your willpower, being able to delete your characters after so much playing!
In GW1 I liked to play for survivor titles, even getting Legendary before the nerf where you could start over. But in that game you had lots of tactics and tools, and not nearly as many crappy ways to die.
In GW2 I’ve fallen to my death several times trying to reach a vista, died to veterans respawning on me before out-of-combat healing even kicked in, and of course lots of times in Personal Stories when 10 mobs spawn right on top of you. Also, Fire Elemental says hi.
Death comes too randomly and unpredictably in this game to make hardcore have any appeal. When 0.2 seconds makes the difference between dodging in time and getting one-shot, I’m not even gonna try.
From another thread:
Update update read all about it!
We’ve finally tracked down the root cause of these missing skill point NPCs and fixed it. This magical fix will be in the next patch after it goes through further testing. This fix will also address issues with missing Event NPCs, too.
We apologize for the hassle these have been, but thank you all for hanging in there while we got this issue sorted out.
-Bill
As you can see, it wasn’t just an issue with the skill challenge itself, but an underlying issue that was affecting almost all skill challenges and even some events.
That sounds very hopeful, I’m sure it was a sneaky little bug that caused so much grief, but I guess we have to wait a week to see the fix…
That’s the engineer for you: a kit for every situation. Switching kits effectively in the middle of combat is the difference between struggling and being comfortably in control.
It’s just not a guardian where you can grab a hammer and treat everything like a nail. I play both classes and Engi takes more work and planning ahead of fights, but it’s heaps of fun.