Guild Wars 2

Thanks for the replies! Since I started I’ve been flipping only items with over 1k listings, > 20% margin, and a significantly higher number of buy orders than sell orders. I’m not speculating at all for now, just focusing on short-term flipping. However, I’m finding that some of the items I’m buying just aren’t selling despite having all of these requirements.

More than general tips, I’m really after some thoughts on the specific types of items to avoid, for example high level white weapons, top tier foods, salvageables, etc. Basically I want to be sure I don’t invest in items that look profitable to an untrained eye, but that don’t actually sell.

@Lucas of the Desert: Thanks for your comment on the t1 mats and logs, I’ve been flipping those but not making much profit off them. It takes forever for the buy orders to go through.

@LHound: thanks, I’ll stay away from ectos then.

I’ve only just started seriously flipping items on the TP, investing around a hundred gold across different markets. I won’t ask anyone to share the items they flip for profit, but are there certain types of items I should steer clear of? Does some stuff just not sell? I’ve noticed that despite a moderately large volume of transfer listings (3k+ buy offers), I have trouble unloading certain items even when no one undercuts me.

dinominator.9862:

I’d give it some time. Someone on the ANet staff has to farm enough gold to then go through the TP and buy out all the vendor trash, one by one. :P

LOL, COF will be stormed by Anet staff.

I learned my lesson in speculating during events after Wintersday. IMO, that’s all gold you could be spending for short term profits. Less risky and probably more profitable in the long run anyway.

DarkSider.1079:

It’s currently down for maintenance. Honestly, all those items that are priced at vendor price or lower should be automatically closed and items returned to the sellers. There’s a ton of junk on there that can’t be touched (as far as buying/selling) that probably takes up valuable space. I assume the TP is in someway integrated into a database, in that case, condensing the contents and optimizing it would help speed up pull times when we attempt to use it.

How can there be items priced at lower than vendor value?

Both the sickle and pick were definitely advertized as being able to harvest all ores/plants on one of their tooltips. I distinctly remember seeing both “equivalent to orichalcum” and “able to harvest all…”. So if they add a new tier of harvesting mats, those two statements will become contradictory.

The fact that Anet has never confirmed that these items will function for any new tiers leads me to think this might not be the case. Either that or whoever is responsible for communicating this stuff is really bad at his job, since I for one was extremely hesitant to purchase these items due to lack of clarity over this.

I have a gajillion items up on the TP and probably wouldn’t notice if any of my listings disappeared. To those of you that have experienced these problems before, do you normally get your items back or have you actually lost items for good?

To those rangers claiming the class is weak in sPvP, here’s a quote taken from the Ele forums.

“GOD they (rangers) make me nerd rage and QQ more than any other class. I will take a thief, warrior, guardian, mesmer any day over a ranger. I don’t know anything about their class other than they have a set it and forget it pet that does ridiculous dmg and cc, they can rip you to shreds from a distance, and when you do close the gap, they take sooooo little damage. Granted I’m not the best pro ele in the world, but I feel like if another class kills me, they at least had to work for it.”

His follow up comment his great.

“And if you go to their forums they talk about how broken they are……like, what more do you want? Like do you want the pet to actually eat the other player in one bite and then sh——- a picture of the player’s decomposed body on the player’s class forums?”

:D

Does anyone know of any websites or other sources where I can find extensive lists of NPC dialogues? They don’t need to be voice-over dialogue, the simple text dialogues from NPC encounters will do just fine. I’ve been looking online but I haven’t really found anything that suits my needs. Maybe some roleplaying resources?

awge.3852:

Ljiona.9142:

The icing on the cake is most of them pull to your pet so it takes massive amounts of snares and damage making it even easier to kite.

They should be drawn to pet and converted to boons.

Now that is a good suggestion. As far as I am aware necromancer and guardian have similar options of positively handling conditions, why does ranger have to negatively handle them if our pet is so vital according to ANet?

This is something we’ve been suggesting in the forums for months, I doubt it will ever happen. I’d even be content with conditions being cleansed from you and your pet, but I doubt that will ever happen either. Awful, awful mechanic, we’re the only class that actually suffers to wipe a condition.

uberkingkong.8041:

I’ve played over 1500 games with this leaderboards, what I noticed is that you win, you go up 3%, you lose you go down 3%. When your on the leaderboards you win you advance around 100 ranks, you lose you lose around 100 ranks.

If your watching your win/loss streak while on leaderboards, if your up 5 wins and your at rank 440, it will take 5 consecutive losses to knock you off the leaderboards no matter who you play.

It doesn’t matter who you play, if your unlucky and lose to the top 5 ranked leaderboard people at 40%, you will be 37% next time it updates if you haven’t played a game.

That can’t be right, otherwise we’d all simply be ranked by win percentage.

Yeah it definitely needs tweaking, I can understand thakitten takes a while for your rating to stabilize but the actual of number of wins clearly needs to be weighted more heavily. There are players with less than 15 tournament matches on the boards.

I wish we had a pet that could throw down a light field, that would be really useful for condition removal. (Light field + Projectile finisher = remove condition). Maybe a Care Bear? :p

JoxerNL.3752:

it’s silly that if I wanted to play an Archery focused character i have to roll a Warrior over a Ranger.

Actually, if you think in terms of PvE, the ranger is the only class that’s capable of playing a true archer. A Warrior or Thief will draw aggro with their bow and have to switch to melee almost immediately, while the Ranger’s pet will hold aggro and allow him to happily fire away from a distance. It’s also the only class with access to both bows. If someone wanted to play an archer type character, to be honest I’d recommend the Ranger.

Is your ranking on the leaderboards influenced in any way by the caps, kills, overall points, etc. that you get in the course of each tournament? Or is it solely influenced by the outcome of the match and the ranks of the other players? Reading the FAQ sticky it would appear to be the latter, but I always feel like I gain more gain more ground when I consistently get the top score on my team.

Bailey.6892:

Electro.4173:

How the heck are you 1-skill-killing Young Karka with projectile reflect? I usually get them down to half health at the lowest.

Also, screw Reef Drakes. I hate them, condition removal or no. That cursed instant AoE “puddle” they have is horrible, especially when they put it down and then pull / stun you in the middle of it.

What I want to know is why my reef drake does not have the good attacks the other reef drakes have.

He’s a juvenile

zTales.4392:

Chopps.5047:

Consider a wolf. The wolf would both fear and immobilize. Usually an immobilized person can dodge, right? If said person is also feared, then the guy cannot dodge. That possibility is at least interesting to think about. I don’t often use this trait, though, maybe someone can show us a cool way to use it?

Wolf’s fear skill with cripple + Shortbow cripple into snow leopard’s Icy Pounce. Attack all the while. :P

Just something to think about. I have no idea what it’d be like, really. It’d definitely screw up a runner, that’s for sure.

What use is cripple on a feared opponent? In fact it’s counterproductive, he won’t run as far away from you. They could at least change the effect to “your next attack causes cripple”, instead of cripple directly on F2. Then you could wait for the fear / immobilize from your pet’s F2 to subside before hitting them with a new cripple.

I don’t understand why these traits need to be family specific anyway, why can’t we just choose between bleed on crit, cripple on F2, stability on disable, and AoE vigor on activation, for any pet? They’d become a lot more useful, in line with the utility of other master traits.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

i tried to do the same a while back xD
… reminds me of that post about ‘beaver’ being blocked; not because its an actual animal; just because someone can use it as an innuendo
edit
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Why-is-Beaver-in-apropriate/

That’s funny, ‘beaver’ is so inappropriate they locked the whole thread

Xsorus.2507:

Is it possible to run a Cleric Based Power Bunker build in the Zerg with a Ranger, Yes..

However i don’t think people quite understand what i’m saying when I say BM Bunker build isn’t amazing in Zerg Fights.

I can go into a Zerg fight on my BM Bunker Build, I can kill people in a Zerg fight with BM Bunker Build..

However if you’re zerging around, It honestly doesn’t matter what build you’re really running on your Ranger.

Only 2 Things Matter in a Zerg.

A. Your Zerg being the Zerg that is pushing (If you’re the one pulling back, you’re going to lose the fight..The Zerg that Pushes is the one that wins the fight)

B. How many people you can tag with AOE, and i don’t mean actually kill, I mean just Tag… Cause if you’re in the situation in the A. group… And you’re pushing your damage honestly doesn’t matter….Those people are going to die…All you need to do is hit as many as possible so you can get as much World XP and Bags as possible.

And B. Group is why BM Bunker isn’t that great…We only have a few AOE’s, and they’re on long timers…Hell even Power build Rangers aren’t super great..We have Barrage basically with Long bow….Traps are short range and frankly are a pain to land on a fleeing group of people…

This is why I laugh everytime I see someone talking about how Bad Thieves are in a Zerg for example..

a Class that has a Monster AOE (Dagger Storm) and the ability to fire off Multiple Poison Fields (Shortbow) that can tag multiple people…Its one of the best classes in the game to Zerg on..but people act like “Well it has no group utility” completely missing the point of how Zerg Fights play out.. or what Mechanics actually yield the biggest gain.

To answer your original question, I could run apothecary gear… Pop on Longbow and probably pull the same amount of Bags/WXP you can despite doing vastly less damage…

If you want to Zerg, build for the max number of targets you can hit.

Xsorus is spot on, the only thing that makes any significant difference to the outcome of Zerg v Zerg is the size of the two teams. As far as you’re concerned, your only real goal is to tag as many opponents as possible for the badges and loot, and Longbow with piercing arrows and sigil of fire is your best bet for that. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but in the greater scheme of the battle it just doesn’t matter what class or build you’re running, the larger zerg almost always wins.

This is why I hate ZvZ, loads of lag (I play on a laptop) and my personal skill, gear, and build have a negligible influence on the outcome of the battle. It gets really boring, really fast. IMO putting an end to zerging in WvW is the single most important aspect of the game for Anet to work on.

I wouldn’t mind the range penalty on LB1 if it hit about 10% harder at max range. I like the mechanic, but at the moment the longbow’s damage is mediocre at max range and awful at short range. In order for that mechanic to function though you need at least some way to keep your opponent at a distance, hence why I proposed the immobilize on LB3. Without reworking any skills, you would be able to hold your opponent at range a little longer for LB1, and land barrage or rapid fire, which are way too easy to avoid right now.

Mcrocha.3891:

Well according to gw2 wiki:

“Conditions can be removed by condition removal. For generic condition removal, the most recently applied condition or conditions will be removed first. The condition is removed independent of the intensity, so 3 stacks and 25 stacks of bleeding are equivalent when considering condition removal.”

I assume this means that no condis have higher priority since intensity doesn’t matter either. Now that I read it though it says that most recently applied conditions plural, so I am curious if condi removal would cleanse both a wolf’s immobilize and cripple, but I doubt it.

Edit: Also condi removal worked this way in gw1 which is why I assumed it was the same and that the most recently applied conditions are removed first.

Oh ok, in that case I was mistaken That’s an interesting piece of info though, it implies you should stack your weaker conditions last. I guess the shortbow bleeds etc. are really useful in that respect, and it might cause me to re-evaluate the utility of the Sharpened Edges trait.

Sorry for straying off topic, but I guess I’m allowed because I’m the OP

Mcrocha.3891:

Well it could be argued that it is somewhat useful as a cover condition.

So if one immobilized and crippled with wolf and the enemy tried to cure the immobilize or it was removed passively through a trait or skill, then the enemy wouldn’t be able to cure immobilize and only the cripple first.

Of course this would only apply to single condi cleanses not mass cures like the active on SoR for ranger. But it could be useful in this sense to cover a more dangerous condition like fear, chill, or immobilize.

Furthermore, once immobilize runs out if the enemy chose not to cure it or was unable to, then they still are crippled allowing the ranger and pet to whack away a while longer. However, all of this is based on the premise that cripple is applied after the other conditions, which I don’t know because I personally never use this trait.

Overall I agree the trait is pretty worthless though.

I don’t think condition cleansing works that way, I believe certain conditions have a higher cleanse priority regardless of the order in which they were stacked, but I may be mistaken. I seem to remember burning being the first to wipe though. Can someone confirm? This is actually important to know for improving your game.

PsionicDingo.2065:

I’ve heard Moment of Clarity doesn’t affect Hilt Bash.

Hilt bash triggers an attack of opportunity for you and your pet with moment of clarity, it’s just that it won’t stack on your pet with the damage boost hilt bash provides on its own.

No issues so far, not even with Zhaitan Junior (drake) and Juvenile Delinquent (jaguar).

Faux Sheaux.6179:

Screw the professions, I want the names of the developers who okayed stuff like this.

~prepares many flaming poo bags~

LOL

Indoles.1467:

Ranger has worse traits.

Possibly, but this one irritates me the most out of all my characters’ traits because it’s just really poorly thought out. I don’t understand how a trait like this can make it into the game, who approved this? It’s a glaring example of superficial work on ranger traits.

Seth.1308:

From a strictly PvE point of view, this skill does not require fixing. 33% damage reduction on nearly 100% uptime, and acts as a de-taunt?

I don’t know, seems like there are far better options for your utility slot in almost any situation. 10 seconds of stealth and protection is nice I guess, but far from great, and I just don’t see the advantage of stationing your pet somewhere. Now if you could ‘warp’ to your pet from far away, you would suddenly open up a world of possibilities in both PvE and PvP.

Intimidation Training (BM IX): Activated (F2) abilities for canines and spiders cause cripple.

Am I missing something, or is this just a really poorly thought out trait? Below is a list of all canine and spider pets and their F2 abilities, cripple is partially or entirely wasted for 5 of the 9 pets this trait affects.

Alpine Wolf: Chilling Howl
F2 chills for 4 seconds. Cripple is wasted.

Fern Hound: Regenerate
F2 grants regeneration. Cripple is useful.

Krytan Drakehound: Intimidating Howl
F2 immobilizes foes for 2 seconds. 2 out of 4 seconds of cripple are wasted.

Wolf: Terrifying howl
F2 causes fear for 2 seconds. 2 out of 4 seconds of cripple are wasted.

Hyena: Howl of the Pack
F2 summons an additional hyena. Cripple is useful.

Black Widow: Paralyzing Venom
F2 immobilizes foes for 3 or 4 seconds (according to wiki). Cripple is wasted.

Cave Spider: Weakening Venom
F2 inflicts weakness and vulnerability. Cripple is useful.

Forest Spider: Deadly Venom
F2 inflicts poison. Cripple is useful.

Jungle Spider: Paralyzing Venom
F2 immobilizes foes for 3 or 4 seconds (according to wiki). Cripple is wasted.

EDIT: Weird language filtering

Daemon.4295:

Too much development effort. I would just incorporate a blink that teleports you to your pet. Now that would be cool, you could really catch your opponent off guard that way. Imagine how much havoc you could cause!

You could do the John Peters. “Poof! Here I am!”

Too much development effort. I would just incorporate a blink that teleports you to your pet. Now that would be cool, you could really catch your opponent off guard that way. Imagine how much havoc you could cause!

Put sigil of fire on your longbow and turn barrage into a meteor storm

Piercing arrows is absolutely essential in both WvW and PvE, that’s where your AoE comes from. It just comes in strips instead of circles

Methal.9045:

Undean.9704:

I think the only stat of your that will affect your pet is your healing power determining how much it is healed for. I’m not sure of this because when I tried to test it in pve, the changes to pet aggro made it so everything would come after me and then my pet would kill it without taking damage.

Yeah i really don’t like this at all.

I wish they would have made an in game feature that allows us to decide if and when we want our pets to tank for us.

But you have that, it’s your pet selection. Choose a cat and you’ll have DPS, choose a dog and you’ll have control, choose a bear and you’ll have a tank, choose a spider and you’ll have range, etc. etc. The real problem is that their stats don’t scale alongside yours, meaning that offensive stats are less effective on a ranger than all the other classes.

+1 to that, there’s still a lot of work to be done (what happened to the longbow fix?) but in my opinion the devs did a good job at addressing some of the key issues with the class. There’s certainly less ranger rage these days

We should probably thank Robert Hrouda for creating an open dialogue with the player base, to collect our feedback and report it to the rest of the dev team. The April 30th patch finally addressed some of the most recurring complaints in the ranger forums, whereas in the past we seemed to get buffs (and nerfs!) where we didn’t really need them.

EDIT: I don’t know about being a “truly strong class”, but ranger is improving

Did I say it was superior? I said it was a decent offensive weapon. Sword/horn might still do slightly more damage, but GS is definitely an offensive option now with the recent buffs to maul and reduced cooldown on the attack of opportunity. You do need moment of clarity though, otherwise I’d go with sword/horn.

Longbow needs an immobilize on hunter’s shot, so you can follow with barrage and actually hit your target. I’d also buff its base damage, it isn’t strong enough even at max range.

Faux Sheaux.6179:

You’re posting in the ranger forums. Everyone here will tell you to roll a ranger.

Lol, yeah right…

Guys the greatsword has become a decent offensive weapon in PvE, I run it all the time on my zerker build. Maul hits like a truck, and with Moment of Clarity you get a 150% damage maul every 25 seconds. Add traited Signet of the Wild to that, and you’re critting for around 8-9k. Sword is clearly superior for condition damage as you can pair it with a torch, but you could certainly be forgiven for playing GS on a power build in PvE.

You really need to try both before you can decide which class suits you best, why don’t you roll an ele and a ranger and try them both out in the mists (PVP)? You don’t have to level your characters in PVP, all players start out at level 80 with access to the same gear, stats, and skills, so you can easily play a few hours on each to see how they feel to you.

Control Core.1079:

I never use them. The reason being that I have no clue what they actually do. For instance a ranger has the signet of stone, which states: Your pet takes no damage from attacks. When I read that I go like: yes, for how long, 1 second, 2 seconds, what?

Or how about this one. Signet of the Wild: Your pets grows larger, dealing more damage and gaining stability. Again for how long, and how much more damage, what does the extra increase in size matter, is that cool? Stability is pretty cool I guess, but for how long.

I just use the passives, I can see how much of a stat gain I get from those, for the rest I don’t bother with them.

You have to check the wiki for the stats, like a lot of skills. Remember that with the trait Signet of the Beastmaster, all those effects apply to you as well as your pet.

Zelulose.8695:

Make it mobile.

Give us a Whirling Defense app. :p

Boomslang.4352:

Diak Atoli.2085:

Signet of the Wild + Quickening Zephyr, anyone?

This.

For PvE, I’m not sure if there’s a ranger burst that can compare to a trait-ed SoW+QZ on a shortbow ranger with zerk stuff on. I actually run this most of the time along with the piercing arrows trait and a fire sigil.

Snip.

SoW+QZ will burst for more with either GS or Sword than with shortbow. Probably even longbow. Remember quickness only gives you 133% attack speed on shortbow (is that number right, or is it 125%? Can’t remember).

IMO, SoW+SoH+QZ+Moment of Clarity with a Greatsword is the best burst a ranger can get in PvE right now. I reckon the strongest single attack chain is SOW, GS5 for interrupt / attack of opportunity, Maul, SoH before maul lands, LB3, LB4 for another interrupt, LB5, QZ as soon as you start channeling LB5, LB2. Can anyone come up with something better?

jubskie.3152:

check out the compilation thread, there are quite a number of wvw builds that go GS/LB in there

Yeah but none of those people are roaming. I run GS/LB myself, but it’s for zerging. The OP said he wanted to know what was better between SB and LB for 1v1

KensaiZen.3740:

Closing distance got you worried?

Barrage on self. Pet swap to wolf for knock down when enemy is in range. Rapid fire. Thats a lot of damage. Alternatively you can use enrangle instead of a knock down.

Time LB 4 to interupt their heal.

Then you swap to GS to finish them with 3+5+2

Trick with LB. Dont rely on the 1 skill.

You’ll just get knocked out of your barrage, or range hit from just outside the red circle. The best case scenario is that they close the gap on you and eat two or three seconds of short range LB while they wait for your barrage to end. Doesn’t seem like that great of a tactic to me, I’d rather wait to land a snare or a wolf knockdown and then barrage on my opponent’s head with quickness.

Any half decent player will block, retaliate, or dodge your rapid fire by the way. Longbow is just terrible on anyone that is actually paying attention to you.

Chopps.5047:

Axe 4 is 100% combo finisher and its a long duration reflect with a whirl finisher. Am I the only one who uses offhand axe? I use every weapon and offhand axe definately gets pulled out from time to time.

Yeah but there are plenty of other combo finishers to play with, axe4 would have to have better utility or hit like a truck to make me really want to use it. I do realize I should use offhand axe more often just because there are some scenarios where reflecting projectiles is great, to be honest I often don’t even think of pulling it out. I haven’t started on the new southsun content yet, I’ll probably whip out axe offhand there for reflecting the karka spit or whatever it is that they fling at you.

Pukknub.7368:

Well, imo. If they “force” us to group up like last story dungeon, we should at least have some kind of automatic lfg system. Kind of like spvp I guess.

They said they were working on this ages ago, didn’t they? We might see it at some point. It doesn’t bother me though, gw2lfg works just fine for me.

Varonica.8307:

Daemon.4295:

Elbegast.6970:

Will Southsun be ending in a Group Dungeon?

I would like to know so that I don’t waste my time with the content. I have no desire to complete a single player chain; only to beg 4 other players to run me through a dungeon.

Forcing people to party to complete a dungeon is just wrong, especially after a long chain of soloable content.

I sure hope so, in my personal opinion temporary themed dungeon events are the most entertaining type of event in GW2. Keep them coming ArenaNet!!!

To paraphrase other people here, you are just selfish wanting them to add content for just one type of player, but I am not serious, they can have as many new dungeons as you want, themed to if you like, just don’t add them to story arcs like this, and still waiting for that answer, this oh so friendly and helpfull company that listens to its player base can’t be bothered answering.

Look basically I don’t care whether or not you want more dungeons, and whether or not you get them, that’s not the question under discussion here, at least it’s not supposed to be the question, the question is will southsun cove storyline end in a 5 man dungeon, it just needs a yes or a no from anet and we can all move on doing our own thing.

Hey I just commented on what I personally enjoy most in GW2, I never said they should ignore other types of content. Honestly I think Anet does a good job at improving all aspects of gameplay, whether it’s new maps in spvp, new tactics for wvw, or new dungeons in pve.

Regarding single player content, I don’t have a problem with people playing GW2 solo but at the end of the day it is an MMO, so I think a stronger focus from the devs on group play is to be expected. Also, Living Story isn’t an extension of your Personal Story, it isn’t all about your character. You’re supposed to be working together with your fellow Tyrians to make the world a better place. What I do have a gripe with is the final dungeon in personal story, which robs you of all your glory and was a big mistake on Anet’s part in my opinion. I wasn’t even in the cutscenes!

PS: Arenanet will never tell you how the living story content will unravel, that would be a horrific spoiler for the rest of us. But it’s probably safe to say that you will see more solo content, and more group content. Something for everyone!

faeral.7120:

i’m ok with it staying reflect, we already have block stance on GS. but we have to be able to move. even the situations where the skill is effective leave you like a sitting duck, very high risk, low reward.

i like the retal idea too though.

Yeah this, although honestly I have more issues with path of scars than whirling defense. The only reason I don’t run offhand axe is that I get zero utility out of axe 4, I actually really wish I could run it more often for the projectile reflection.

PS: According to the wiki Whirling Defense is actually supposed to block projectiles, rather than reflect them.

Really? I don’t find engineers very hard, up until the recent engi superpatch they were the easiest class for me, next to warriors. Now I’d say they’re about on par with most other classes. The classes I have the toughest time with are mesmers and eles. Condimancers are the worst for my trapper build, but I don’t seem to come across many of those (condition damage necros with condition transfer and epidemic, they basically use your traps against you).

Rox’s quiver looks way cooler than my ascended quiver, but frankly I put too much time and effort into getting mine to drop it over a fancy skin. Besides, I prefer gear that demonstrates the time and effort you had to put in to obtain it anyway, no matter how cool something looks it just isn’t worth as much if it’s an easy buy. That’s what makes legendaries so awesome.

IMO 600 gems is too much for a skin anyway, I’d rather spend those gems on useful stuff like bank and inventory expansions or extra character slots.

Kain Francois.4328:

So is the firing speed of axes better too, or just projectiles?

Sounds like it’s just projectile speed, increased by 33%.