Guild Wars 2

I’ve not done EotM since its debut. What are those things?

I wouldn’t mind those ambients moving, for a completely different reason: That used to be a nice RP spot, safely far away from inflicting spam on others or getting tangled up in theirs while offering a nice view and a lot of Asura ambiance. Last time I and my guildies went there to break in our new Asura alts, we got mocked, harassed, and griefed. One person even boggled at the idea that RP existed in an MMO and called us names for doing it. Thanks, Megaserver.

Note that we were not in any way attacking the ambients or talking to the farmers or demanding they leave. We just did our own conversation and they went ballistic.

I got one in the first round, and found it handy while working up to Tailor 500 and then making some ascended cloth items. I’ve barely used it since, as I don’t use that alt much and all the services the pass offers are available readily enough without having to shuffle the pass via the bank (for added fun, even with it in your bags you’re kicked out on log in, so you’re not by a bank to pick it up from an alt anyway).

To me it’s a huge plus that I don’t have to redo my keybinds for every alt. I only have but so much muscle memory! TESO and AA both feature the joy of manually assigning preferred keys every time I make an alt; I put up with that in TESO because I like the game and because I’m still pretty much on just one character. AA is out of my life for many more reasons than that, but it was a serious QoL issue to have to spend 5 to 10 minutes just setting up an alt before I could play it.

I could see the benefit of there being an option to create custom binds per alt for those with leeter keyboard skills nor me, but please leave the default at one-size-fits-all.

There is, you can file a support ticket using the link at the bottom of this page.

However, think for a bit before you do. Are you likely to keep accruing mats over time? All that mithril you get from Silverwastes, etc? The storage expanders do in fact expand your stored mats. Anything you can deposit from your bag cogwheel option list can stack much higher. I’ve bought mine up to 1500, and I must say I’m still at 1500 mithril ore and 1500 mithril bars. I may have maxed out a few other things as well (coughbloodstonedustcoughcough), but there’s just so much breathing room now. When they introduced the expanders I freed up a ton of bank slots.

Thank you! That is a magnificent explanation. Now I understand what the heck is going on in there.

I still sorta have’ta do aoe given my preference for ranged fighting in there, so short bow 2 and 4. But I keep it on the boss, and now I know the bubbles are bad news (not good like in Gold and Silver) and can be more situationally aware of them. Plus on the ledge I drop Shadow Refuge when the offshoots start swarming and they swirl away from the folks up there.

I’ve seen Copper succeed every time I’ve done it, I thought it was the easiest one for that reason.

As I understand the distinction, Healix, what you report is someone using LFG to try to sell merchandise, as that has nothing to do with grouping up to work on an instance or world activity. Using it to sell instance runs has been okayed.

As to selling achieves you’ve already done, I know that mixed groups can get the achieves. My second LS Labyrinth run (on an alt) was aided by a guildie who’d done it on the alt she was using. She got two achieves. Then we did an achieve hunting run and the rest of us got those two achieves and she got her remaining ones.

Thus it’s not a scam, if the seller delivers the achieve, as they certainly can help others through it whether by leading them on the right path, acting to distract the centaurs so the buyer can stay clear of trampling, etc. Personally I prefer to do these things with friends or to help those who ask and have never bought or sold any runs beyond minor unsolicited tips for mesmer jp portals.

I’m generally in SW on my thief, using sword/pistol. If any mordrem’s giving me too much grief (and isn’t using point blank aoe) I shadowstep into its face, pinning it there, and wave my sword around wildly which both damages and interrupts it. Things get sticky, I dodge or Roll for Initiative away and stealth-heal, then jump back in its face.

Also I’m not zerker, so a hit or two or three doesn’t wreck me.

I’d say the closest to what you’re looking for is the dungeon armor. It’s not direct loot, but you get tokens from running a dungeon and when you build up enough of those tokens you can get the exotic armor that dungeon vendor sells (they are in a row at the Postern Ward WP in LA, you can go preview all the looks there). Each vendor sells 3 different stat sets of the same skins, in 3 armor weights, so be sure to scroll down if you don’t like the stats in the first batch.

The armor is distinctive enough that those in the know can tell at a glance which dungeon you ran to get it, and even how many times you had to do it.

Also, I don’t know if they’ll do meta-rewards for LS events again (beyond the carapace skins currently getting ground out in SilverWastes) but there were a few things that could only be gotten once for a while, until they got added to the laurel vendors. Like the gas mask. I worked my butt off achieving that thing.

There is a GW2 hat with reindeer antlers, though I can’t remember the name of it right now. I think it came out last Wintersday. Looks great on my norn ranger!

You don’t need a black lion key to get a makeover kit (though you might get a kit in a chest). You can just buy the kit directly on the gem store, assuming you’re willing to buy the gems with cash or with gold.

Even if you don’t want to spend gems, it could be fun to window shop all the gem store tabs just to see what’s out there so you know where people got the cool things you see them running around with.

Not only that, but your friend will also be stealthed and able to knock out the asura.

I think mesmer fits the bill for you. It has get-out-of-fights skill thanks to invisibility and distracting clones, but can do ranged or melee quite well and quite interchangeably with the right weapon swaps. I’m no min-maxer and tend to stick with a build and maybe swap out one utility to fit situations, but I find my mesmers do great all ’round (I have 3 at 80).

WvW is the only thing that remains server bound. You play for your home team only.

I’ll disagree with changing SW for the sake of making it more WvW like; if people aren’t playing WvW because it doesn’t interest them, that won’t push them to do SW instead. I enjoy the WvW-like feel of it without the prime detractor for me which is that I can’t relax when other people might want to hunt me down and kill me. While I like the idea of organized Mordrem to some extent, I find that SW requires constant enough attention already. I don’t even notice guild chat while I’m doing a round in that zone.

You can buy any item off the TP you want, even one of too high a level for you (assuming you have the coin). Salvage it to unlock the skin, then apply the skin from your wardrobe using a transmutation charge. You can put your lowbie in what looks like level 80 exotics that way.

Over time you’ll come to see that dropped items really do have a limited variety and eventually you’ll just salvage or sell your greens and blues without even checking the skins. Player mix/matching/dyeing is what gets the wide range of looks in this game. I wish there were more variety in dropped looks, but you’re not restricted to at-level drops for your clothes-horse needs.

You could start a new thread with a link to the archived discussion for reference, or find a similar topic already going in the current forums and link the archives there before continuing your thoughts.

Sorry but no

The CE disk isn’t any good anyway, it’s like 6 30 second selections (I exaggerate, but not by much). I did regret all the effort I went to for the physical CE as I don’t care for game figure statues and the other stuff in the box just wasn’t that valuable. The sound track promise was what made me go for it and getting a little teaser sampler was a big disappointment.

So when they announced the 4 disk set I jumped on that — and quickly ran into the cesspool that was Jeremy Soule’s company. I was one of the lucky ones, it only took twice as long as promised to get my set (which meant I got it after game launch when I no longer had time to leisurely listen to it since I was playing). Other people paid for it and never received it; customer “service” from the company was at a level where punitive legal action would have been entirely appropriate. And there I speak as someone that thinks lawsuits and charges should be a last resort.

Then Soule severed ties with ANet, meaning the disks will never be produced again, nor would proceeds go to the devs anyway. The Amazon price reflects all this.

Now, I loathe piracy. But it’s not like Soule and his company are ever going to make money off this again, and he completely screwed all the fans who wanted to buy it. So if you can find someone who has it and is willing to get you copies, I can’t see any morals or ethics against that in this specific case.

In the meanwhile, each and every track has been published on YouTube; look for the ones with the ANet logo displayed as the image while the music plays. One piece is called “Snaff’s Laboratory” so you can google/youtube search for that as a starting point.

I would suggest you black out the links in your image. No free advertising for phishers!

The WvW parts are doable over time, though frustrating if a gank squad goes out of its way to chase you down so you have to run all the way back to the vista multiple times (I speak from semi-bitter experience). The main thing on them from a PvEr’s pov is not to make them the last thing you need for completion. Any day you feel enough like it, check your world’s colors, see if you have access to the forts you still need, and go get those while you can. If you can clear WvW out of the way, then you can get back in control of your completion progress and choose which spot will be where you get your gold star.

I can think of a lovely time to use the knockback: At Amber in SW, when the Husk Slingers persist in standing out of cannon range. Get behind the slinger, and fling it into a withering fusillade from the ramparts. (I’ve done that on my thief using the Steal knockback we get from husks, it’s glorious).

But there -are- guild weapons of all the types you mention. Check the commendations vendor.

I’m not sure they have guild emblems on them, though, between klutzy design (I like my swords to have something resembling a point — though I really do like the high rez detail and polished sheen of the guild weapons) and my guild not doing guild commendation activities, they aren’t something I’ve looked at closely.

My ranger’s a norn, so I went to an Old Norse dictionary to pick names, with some tweaking to make them sound good to me. Then thanks to the constant name loss on swap, I had to make a Word list to remember them … so I have things like my jungle stalker Kelda (means spot), my jungle spider Eitretta (poison eight), my alpine wolf Issulfr (ice wolf).

The only name I did without that dictionary trick was my Blue Moa Fjordpiner. Hopefully someone will get the reference

As unfortunate as the timing of this break may be, it’s not like they have everything in the can and are just picking release dates. Imagine your response if you were working on a large project — say, a term paper, or a mural on the side of a building — and someone said “I know your due date is in six weeks, but I’d really like you to finish next week instead.” You wouldn’t be able to do it, not with any reasonable quality.

I’d also posit that while not everyone gets vacation at once other than on XMas day itself, enough people want their week of vacation that there will be a real down turn in available personnel.

I live in the DC area, so there’s a heavy federal employment presence. Rush hour gets far more manageable during December thanks to so many workers with use-or-lose leave to eat up. Plenty still work; the aggregate effect, though, is to remarkably lighten traffic. I was a State employee; our office could get rather ghostly at this time of year even as we kept enough people working to cover courtrooms and client intake.

I know MMO companies don’t actually give that much time off to employees. It’s ingrained in them to push long work with minimal breaks. Yet they have to give some time off, and this is the season when that gets used the most.

As to that, no, all exotics have the same stat spread, and the dropped and crafted ones are generally available on the TP for much less gold than the value of the component mats. However, dropped exotics are far too rare to rely on that for gearing up. You either make them or buy them. Ascended miiiight drop (heck, I just got my first ascended weapon box) though you can’t choose the stats (I got Settler’s), but otherwise you must make that tier.

Jewelcrafting might be an exception, jewelers can do things to gems to enhance them greatly and I don’t recall seeing drops of such upgrades.

If you want to spend the gold and skill points, yes, you can just unlock it at the trainer once you have unlocked the Grandmaster tier.

Well, you can … sort of. There is a PS chapter where you take a captured dead Eye on the Fort Trinity airship to do research on it; ICly you are flying out over the ocean, and the view reflects that. Then in the Arah story dungeon you get to fly a long path through the clouds with dragons attacking you, followed by fighting Zhaitan aboard a larger airship.

Otherwise, nope.

(PS: During the Guild Hall CDI there was a lot of talk about how one might implement airships as guild halls. That was just brainstorming, though).

There is a champion to fight in that valley (not that I’ve figured out how to trigger it or had a handy group around to fight it). Also I think one of the lost badges needed for an achieve is there, and if you pay the money the bandits won’t attack you when you go in for it.

Getting the boot box makes you the envy of many who are farming for those, as the only other way to get the boot skin is to pay 1000 crests per armor weight at the vendor.

Silverwastes is a loot nirvana. If you do the fort defense and pack bull escorts you will accrue shovels and crests, and you can buy keys with the crests. Shovels lead you to buried treasure, keys let you open it, and you can open any chest anyone has unearthed. Lots of blues and greens (handy for salvage) and rarely something better — I got an ascended weapon box once! Alas, no boots for me yet, and if I haven’t had one drop by the time I have 4K crests I’ll just be buying all the bits I need.

As I recall (possibly incorrectly), they announced the GW2 release date of August 28 on April 28, 2012. The rejoicing was intense thanks to the raves coming out of the alpha demos. Though … maybe it was the first BWE on April 28, 2012? Whichever, they certainly used the day well.

I do the opposite on wall spokes: I edge out to the end of one so I can jump at the base of the next. Thus the wall acts to stop an overshoot.

Of course, my first tries at the new JP never got past the initial wall spokes, so I may not be the best to advise on this Though I think my sticking point was when I had to jump out from the wall, come to think of it, at that first alcove.

Besides the issue of an established business not needing a “kickstart,” games should not be designed by committees of players, no matter how passionate. An MMO is a huge juggling act and it won’t help one darn thing to make one of the balls suddenly much heavier. Lishtenbird summed up the damage this would do quite nicely.

I’m pretty sure that all the dyes are on the Trading Post and can be previewed from there. It’s a clumsy workaround to something that should be part of the Dyes interface, but I don’t think there’s any dye out there that doesn’t start tradeable and only become account bound once used. Possibly some of the rarer special dyes have sold out on the TP, but they should still be visible with an “amount available” of 0.

Just be careful when previewing the TP dyes (done by putting “dye” in your search field and then sorting by item name) that you don’t click your way into buying one you didn’t mean to.

For open world PvE you will be just fine in exotics. You might want ascended for the skins. But you can do just fine without crafting if you’re willing to miss out on some items.

It is good xp for leveling, though. And unless they’ve fixed it you can get the survivor achieve by just standing at a crafting table getting 5 levels (happened to me to my surprise, way back when). But if you really don’t mind not having the crafting skills, you can instead just harvest all the nodes you find in the world and sell the mats on the TP for good profit.

Hoo boy does that go pretty far into misapplying the “white knight” slur. Jrunyon’s response might have been snarky but where in there do you see “ANet is always 100% right, all hail ANet, no other game can possibly be this perfect, if you have the slightest complaint about this paragon of playtime, gtfo?” Because that’s true white knighting.

As to you, OP, try for some empathy. Think about working fervently on a project, a big complex one, that will have some things that don’t work perfectly even though a lot of it comes out as intended and millions find it pleasing. But you goof up one small part of it, and along comes someone to darn you with faint praise like this going “please screw up everything even more, you horrible person.”

I don’t think this game is perfect even though I love a lot of its core design. I’m playing a couple other MMOs on the side as palate cleansers. But sheesh, I don’t think they’re deliberately sabotaging their own product!

I’d build it up to feel at least as crowded and urban as DR. It’s just felt wrong for the world’s economic hub, in lore housing 40K residents, to be a few scattered buildings around a bay, barely a resort, while the one city of the world’s most dying, diminishing race soars to the skies with enough visible housing to convince a visitor there must be at least 100K in population.

I agree with most of that, Hume, but not that crafting and housing are why games have fared poorly. Indeed, my friends who tried WildStar were wildly enthusiastic about the housing system, it was everything else that bothered them. Horizons was a heavy crafting game that took whole servers to finish projects like bridges to more land, and that was its strength (the weakness lay in terrible rendering causing ungodly lag because the engine rendered even hidden objects before the world would load, as well as fairly clutzy graphics). It also had highly customizable building block housing, albeit made of really large overscaled blocks. DaoC introduced housing (poorly imo) but what killed interest for many there was the stupidly difficult Trials of Atlantis release.

So yes, games that have housing have failed, yet one can hardly logically claim the housing is why.

Should be the December 16th patch. Just over a week.

I googled the news announcement. It’s been edited and they still intend 2016, not 2015, if that changes your ultimatum deadline.

Besides the never-click-a-link rule, “Guild Wars 2 Account Will Be Shut Down Inform” is a dead giveaway this is not legit. While most of the email manages decent grammar especially compared to most phishers — albeit not quite in the tone of most ANet communications — the header fails.

My peace of mind is aided by the fact that I simply don’t do anything even vaguely questionable financially with my account, so all the emails of that ilk I’ve gotten through the years regarding such matters I have been quite serene about trash-binning. I think I’ve only fallen for a phisher one time in 30 years, and it wasn’t game related.

In the DR crafting area near the armorsnithing station there is a relatively monochrome grey-beige wall (it does have some mottling and texture). The floor is lighter, so you might have two areas of color to filter out. There is also the marble statue between the bank and TP in DR to get a better lit area — again there’s some mottling, and a different tone by the feet. Just south of the Rurikton WP there is a white brick wall.

I don’t think ANet left a lot of untextured blank areas in the game. There’s a lot of detail everywhere you look.

You likely already know this, but just in case: GW2 jump physics mean you only move forward while pressing your forward move keys, even in a jump. I can’t definitively say if running adds any distance, but on a longer jump you have got to push your forward motion key for all you are worth and if you’re already moving, you de facto start with it pushed and don’t lose the moment it takes to hold it down after the jump.

I agree there should be a safety net as you describe, though there is a way to stay safe: go to your bank and click on the padlocked tab to buy. No more padlocks? You’re maxed. Same with bag tabs on alts.

You’re … slightly? … in luck, Zoada. There is a candy cane hammer, has been since the first year, and it’s way cheap on the TP. You could get it now!

I’m surprised by the number of people saying they don’t get mail. This carrier is how your sent items appear. Don’t you post items for sale on the TP? The griffon will swoop by to take your delivery every time. Now, it does seem to be a longer animation than the pigeon, so I could see people doing volume sales getting irked if that actually slows down posting items.

I’ve sent mail to some guildies just so they could see the griffon arrive; they had not themselves bought it. Their return messages came by pigeon.

It sounds like you are a Ranger. I believe the pet summons is just above your 1-5 skills. Also iirc hitting K brings up a pet panel list.

Failing that, the pet should appear the moment you enter combat. At least, I’ve seen a thread complaining there is no permanent stow pet option.

I’m not familiar with the new player perks of buying the game — if you instead chose a minipet (aka vanity pet), then open your Hero Panel with H, and click the Miniatures tab on the left. You will see all your unlocked minis there and can pick one that will be with you in the world, plus toggle it on and off in that tab.

You don’t have to wait to die, just log out to character screen and back in, you’ll be outside the instance ready for a restart of it.

Which doesn’t help the fact that it would be much better to have checkpoint motes like in Hidden Arcana, but at least you don’t have to let centaurs and earth elementals ravage you.

Anywhere covered in snow, perhaps? Keep in mind that different areas will have different lighting that may vastly affect your character’s look.

The trick is to remember that you can walk freely through the pale white view areas while stealthed. You only get discovered if you are standing in one while doing the KO, or if you get in a golem’s orange ring. Also once an asura turns to face a particular direction, s/he won’t be turning back for more than long enough to do the KO.

So when the golems have moved out of the way, trot to the back end by the force field. Let that guard turn once so you know your window, get behind him, KO him. Then some patience is needed to wait for the confluence of golems far off and researcher turning away, and you can get the two guys by the tables. Note that here you can actually flank them, you needn’t be directly behind, so you can stand outside of that central white view area.

The more of them you clear out, the more maneuvering room you have. Also the fewer to fight off if you do have an oops.

In the third room the golem pattern was easy to spot from several safe locations. The main thing I had to get past was my fear of going in the white vision cones, which you can do just fine so long as you aren’t in one when doing a knockout. Get to the far end, take out the guard there, then use moments of opportunity to get all the asura — you can even flank them, you needn’t be directly behind.

This does not mean I aced it, far from it. I got hung up on lab tables, jammed in corners, the works. It took me and a friend a lot of tries tonight to get the all-stealth achieve thanks to that room. But with a zoomed out camera and a bit of panning, I certainly had no trouble seeing the patterns.

Indeed, my husband’s been working seven years on a government database upgrade project that will hopefully go live this New Years. While I’m no techie, he’s regaled me with all the issues that go with the revamp and the corralling of old data into new formats. (Not to mention the frustrating amounts of infighting amongst programmers who disagree on methodologies, but hopefully ANet has people that aren’t out to backstab each other).

I suppose one less than ideal approach in this case would be to preserve these forums as archives so people can read all the old stuff, but start up new discussions in the new ones. Clumsy at first, but eventually no one’s activating old threads anyway, right? /knows better, given year old thread necros