Guild Wars 2

It can’t be the level requirement as I’ve gone well beyond that. Maybe it’s tied to personal story progression (which I have not kept up to my level)?

Are there ever any breadcrumbs leading a player to a dungeon? An in-game mail from an NPC requesting your help, for example, or a storyline quest that has a stage in a dungeon?

Or are dungeons just something players are supposed to stumble upon on their own and then participate in “just ’cause”.?

I know that the first time you play through a dungeon, you’re participating in the dungeon’s story-mode. I’m just wondering if (example) anyone ever tells you to go to Ascalon Catacombs, or if you’re just supposed to know (through word of mouth) to go their on your own at level 30.

Kimbald.2697:

I actually did an escort event twice today, once alone and once with 3 others.
Alone I got swarmed and died a few times after giving up.

With those 3 others we killed everything easy because… the same ammount of mobs spawned as when i did it before alone.

Honestly, that has totally not been my experience. When I’m alone I face a handful of mobs at most per wave, although I am rarely alone for long. Events tend to attract players quickly. How many hostile NPCs you face also seems to depend on how many friendly NPCs you have along with you (caravan guards, for example).

Are you sure you were completely alone? Players in the vicinity of the event count towards the scaling, even if they’re not participating.

I’m sure there are events that just aren’t scaling correctly (and those would be bugs).

the uprising.6317:

Meh I’m a slow leveler… and literally no one are in my zones. Dredghaunt Cliffs have literally maybe 4 ppl in them. In the lvl 50 Charr area I’m in, I’ve only bumped into 2 other people. This game which was once easy cake with a zerg, is nearly impossible if you and 1-2 others are the only one doing things in the zones. I think the major problem with this game is that there is a complete lack of scaling in either directions. I have never felt like DE’s scaled for a lot of people or lack of people, maybe you have to be in the magic range of people where they scale, but the rareness of the scaling system actually kicking in leads me to conclude they could have just made the feature up and I couldn’t tell otherwise.

WHY DO I GET THE SAME REWARD FOR kittenING SOLOING A DE, AS I WOULD IF I PLAYED WITH A ZERG AND BARELY CONTRIBUTED??

This is an odd comment. Let’s use an escort-style mission as an example. When you solo it, maybe 3 opponents will pop up at each encounter that occurs along the way. If you and another player are duoing the event, suddenly there will be 5-6 mobs at each encounter instead. As more players join the event, more opponents are added and/or their level is increased. I see this every time, so obviously scaling is happening.

You get the same reward for soloing a DE because the difficulty is scaled down appropriately. It’s a risk versus reward thing. Now, if you’re play a build that is fairly range oriented you can hang back whenever a lot of players are participating and pick off opponents from relative safety – but that’s an advantage of your build. I can assure you the fellow up front preparing to melee 20 centaurs that are charging toward him feels anything but safe for the first few moments.

I agree that the rewards are quirky in that there are encounters where I can kill one or two mobs and get a gold medal, and other times I can greatly influence the tide of the entire battle by working hard on a support role and only earn a bronze. But that’s really as far as the oddness goes. You don’t get better rewards when soloing a DE because most of them are designed to be soloed and you simply don’t deserve anything beyond the standard reward for tackling the encounter as designed.

Really don’t understand what the original poster is complaining about. I just started a new character last week, and if anything the events are still way, way, way overcrowded. I eagerly await the day when everyone is so spread out that each event has like 5-10 people participating in it, max. They will be so much more enjoyable at that point.

Zeph, it may be time for you to find another game to play. The simple fact is, you’ve apparently consumed all the content in the game that interests you at a rate that exceeds the developers ability to publish.

Now, it sounds like you enjoyed everything up until this point, so when new content is published you can always come back and enjoy it as well. Fortunately, you can pick right back up where you left off without worrying about whether or not you have an active subscription. And that’s pretty cool.

Beyond that, I personally don’t understand the lack of things to do at max level, but that’s probably because different things interest different people. Until I’ve adventured in every corner of Tyria, there will always be something for me to do. And once that’s done I’ll still enjoy just revisiting the maps and stumbling across events and participating in them. To this day I am still discovering events in zones that I’ve never seen before, even in starting zones, even though I’ve leveled through them a number of times.

This is the meat of the content that I really enjoyed while leveling up. It’s not like there’s a switch that turns on when I get a character to 80 that suddenly turns all that content into drudgery, as if it’s suddenly beneath me and not worth spending time on. It’s what I loved doing before 80 and it’s what I continue to love doing after 80.

When I no longer enjoy doing it.. I’ll just go do something else. Eventually the game will be updated with new content and I’ll give that a spin as well. There is no secret solution here, nor am I saying anything that anyone should be surprised about. This is just common sense stuff.. and it’s why threads like this one rarely make any sense.

Party functionality has been broken for the past few days in (at least) Gandarran Fields on the Tarnished Coast server. This problem has happened before and has the same symptoms as other times:

- can’t enter party member’s personal story instance
- can’t see portrait or radar/map dot if party member moves more than a stone’s throw away
- no heart icon next to party portrait to monitor renown task progress
- unable to see pings or scribble lines drawn on map/radar by other party members

In other words, it pretty much acts like nobody is in a group.

Arian Sterling.4372:

Sorry for the double post – it was a computer glitch on my end

Pretty sure Arian means the computer glitch caused the double post, not the problem he was describing. I’m having the exact same problem trying to access the guild bank on Tarnished Coast (different guild, than the above poster, though). Just noticed it today, but I hadn’t visited the guild bank in a few days.

Unless it was two nodes parked right on top of each other, I was able to make two back-to-back mining sequences on a normal node a few weeks back.

Saber.7809:

This message also pops up killing grubs in Celadon Forest (Sylvari start area). Is that intended?

If it is indeed like this for all grubs, I feel bad for anyone needing venom sacs. In any given zone you can probably find more than one type of creature that drops venom sacs. But in some zones (Kessex Hills, for example, where the second tier of crafting begins) grubs are the only creature that are high enough level where the needed tier of venom sacs can be found.

SpectacularYak.6518:

Edge.4180:

Why are you making the assumption that I didn’t already consider this route? Unfortunately, it’s bad advice because the amount of money I can earn through standard play is not even remotely close to being enough to cover the cost of buying the materials on the trade post. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

I must be stretching my imagination to crazy degrees, because I’m closing in on full crafted exotics and I bought almost all my materials off the auction house with money I made just tooling around doing random stuff.

“Not by any stretch of the imagination”. Hyperbole for the win.

Are you not aware that different tiers of crafting materials cost differing amounts on the auction house? Or that characters earn different amounts of money at different levels?

Thus, while your experience at your level and crafting tier may be different than mine, I am completely correct when I say " the amount of money I can earn through standard play is not even remotely close to being enough to cover the cost of buying the materials on the trade post. Not by any stretch of the imagination."

Prior to this patch I wasted so much karma on purchasing recipes with one character with the intent on tossing them in the account bank and picking them up with the character who does the related crafting, only to find out the items were soulbound to the first character. The most annoying part? No warning about the recipes being bound at all is mentioned in their description on the vendors.

Kaz.5430:

OP, the system is obviously harder if you want to only create items of a certain type, they’d have to increase the drop rate to a silly level to do what you are after.

If you ignore 6/7 ingredients then the process is going to be 85% harder to achieve, so it’s going to take 85% longer. I’ve had no problems at all keeping two crafts levelling up at the same rate as my character.

If they increased the drop rate by 85% in order to let you get enough bones to build every weapon and every armour piece to the exclusion of every other type, people would complain that crafting was too easy and that material drops were too frequent.

Admittedly, I have found that bones in particular seem to drop less often than other crafting mats, but maybe that’s because I tend to kill the wrong enemies.

There are a number of things wrong with your statement.

First, you’re making the assumption that I’m ignoring 6 out of the 7 ingredients, when I’m not. I actually used all the ingredients: some for my equipment I intended on using and some to discover/create vendor items for the purpose of getting my skill up to the level I needed it at (as my equipment alone wasn’t enough to get 25 skill points).

Second, whether you (example) gather 200 bones or 50 bones, 50 totems, 50 blood, and 50 scales.. you’re still spending the same amount of time farming up 200 drops. Short of one mob-type being extremely plentiful and/or easy to kill compared to the others (and that would be a balance issue), they aren’t going to drop any more or less quickly simply because you’re changing the type of mob you’re targeting. So, no, one route over the other is not going to be “harder” to achieve, nor is it going to take “longer”.

After spending nearly a week doing nothing but grinding out the crafting materials for our next tier of equipment during our game time (instead of playing the game) and gaining so many levels in the process as to make the entire effort pointless, my friends and I have decided to just give up on crafting. I was hoping to see some changes in the patch notes, but no luck.

This is the first MMO with a crafting system we’ve given up on, and we’ve played through some doozies. For me, personally, that speaks volumes regarding how badly it needs fixing.

Tiresias.6473:

Edge.4180:

Dinocool.3069:

Arenanet does not want to making repetitive grinding profitable, killing the same mob over and over again is one example of this.

I seriously almost spit up the water I was drinking when I read this.

After I spent 3 days grinding through the same patch of Grawl to collect the 100+ totem drops I needed to craft my latest equipment set, all I can say is that their hopes clearly aren’t mirrored by the cruel reality of their design.

You are stuck in a WoW mentality.

I am hard-pressed to think of a crafting material that is soulbound in this game. Go out and do something more fun, then use the money generated from that activity to buy your materials.

Why are you making the assumption that I didn’t already consider this route? Unfortunately, it’s bad advice because the amount of money I can earn through standard play is not even remotely close to being enough to cover the cost of buying the materials on the trade post. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Furthermore, the idea here is to craft the gear and then wear it while it’s still useful. If you start hopping through a ton of events to earn money quickly, you’ll end up earning so much experience in the process that you’ll quickly out-level the gear you’re aiming to craft. You also end up with gear drops that are higher level (and thus a superior choice to your crafted gear). It completely kills the point of crafting (for people like me who craft to create and wear their own equipment).

I’m not stuck in the WoW mentality, the drop rate and this particular aspect of the crafting design are.

Feel free to visit the link below if you want to read up more on the problem:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/I-just-want-to-be-able-to-craft-items-I-ll-use-as-I-level/first#post159583

If you have no coin for a respawn on your character, it’s pulled from your account. If there isn’t any on your account, you’re offered the closest spot for free.

Way back at launch (and beta) you used to actually get 2 karma points every time you cleared out a pack of centaur attacking a villager in Shaemore, and then spoke to the villager and instructed him to head for the safety of the inn. It was pretty cool and it totally fit, and a nice incentive to spend a few minutes being the town hero.

You could farm it, but there wasn’t any point in doing so since the events in the real game offer superior amounts of karma. It did encourage me to spend a couple minutes taking some random path through the village and helping the NPCs out before heading to the inn with them. And when they refer to my character (after) as the “Hero of Shaemore”, it felt justified.

When I went through the human tutorial again last week with a new character, I noticed they had removed the karma rewards from it. I thought that was pretty silly, and since I wasn’t being rewarded for my time/actions I felt no reason to spend any time helping out any of the NPCs. Just straight to the inn for me, then to the fort, then to the boss battle. That one change made the tutorial so much lamer, for me.

Dinocool.3069:

Arenanet does not want to making repetitive grinding profitable, killing the same mob over and over again is one example of this.

I seriously almost spit up the water I was drinking when I read this.

After I spent 3 days grinding through the same patch of Grawl to collect the 100+ totem drops I needed to craft my latest equipment set, all I can say is that their hopes clearly aren’t mirrored by the cruel reality of their design.

Well, the fact that players can so easily work together without being in a group is actually by design and a feature Arenanet seems particularly proud of.

I think this actually works in your favor. Like you said, you prefer to remain a duo when playing with your partner. At the same time, you can easily work alongside a third player just by traveling in the same direction for a bit and looking out for one another. If you really need to communicate something important, there’s always local chat.

My friend and I were grouped, and took out a champion monster with the help of a third player who was not in our group. Make use of combos when you see them, help either player get some breathing room whenever one of them needs it, that sort of thing. Went pretty fluidly and effortlessly (the functioning-as-a-group-while-not-grouped part, the fight itself was really challenging. Fun though!).

The call-target/target function only works for groups, as does map & radar pings and sketching. Only party members will be invited to enter your personal instances. Portraits to monitor health and status. Although grouping could be handled better, there are still plenty of reasons to be in one if you’re playing with someone specifically.

I’ve leveled several characters through Queensdale, and despite visiting the area a ridiculous number of times (especially as a chef farming resource patch of lettuce exists there) I have never seen the “Battle of Beetletun” event (which takes place in Beetletun farms) working properly on the Tarnished Coast server. It has always been broken.

If the event is going, it’s always broken at the same point. The farm fields are on fire and the event stage is instructing the players to remove centaurs from the field and recover and return sprinkler pieces to a specific farmer.

However, if you try to turn in sprinkler pieces to the farmer, he says he has all the parts he needs already and is just waiting for the centaurs to be driven off so he can start his repairs. At the same time, the “centaurs remaining” counter is always at zero. No centaurs left to kill, and a farmer who won’t move because he doesn’t realize it. The event never progresses beyond this point.

Zoltar.2873:

Yeah, but it seems aggro table is not so fixed as in some other MMO’s. This probably differs from encounter to encounter, because I’ve seen bosses picking targets on different way.

This is exactly right. The various monsters/encounters don’t all follow the same standard formula for behavior; they can and will act very differently from one another. Some simply prioritize one thing over another. You can have a mob that will purposely focus on ranged targets more than melee, for example. If you’re counting on every mob following a set rule for aggro, that example can seem broken. But it’s not, it’s by design.

Vash.1852:

Most of you aren’t even talking about the same thing as the OP. OP is talking about the survivor achievement, not the monthly achievement. To get survivor you have to not die from the start of your characters life, and obtain 200,000+ experience. If you die you have lost your chance and can only make a new character to try again.

Actually, the OP is referring to the Monthly achievement, not the Hero achievement that you’re referring to. The Hero achievement has 2 tiers, where as the Monthly achievement for survivor has 4 tiers. Note that the original poster said “..and a power outage-both times when I am well into tier 3..”.

Since there is no third tier in the Hero survivor achievement, it’s clear he’s talking about the Monthly survivor achievement instead.

DeXyre.6025:

Edge.4180:

I probably would have had it a dozen times over already. Unfortunately, mine has been stuck for weeks now at the same value, which has made it completely impossible for me to finish the monthly achievement. I’m hoping the reset will fix it (and that it won’t break again this time).

The bar will remain on the max amount of xp you achieved without dieing, if you surpass that amount you will see progress again.

That’s a nice theory and something I considered myself. However, that is not the case here. My bar has been stuck for several weeks at 21,436 xp (first tier). I’ve easily passed that value a number of times without dying (fairly simple to do at higher levels as it takes more XP than that just to gain a single level).

It’s just broken.

Actually, according to the Official GW2 Wiki, it’s bugged:

The Survivor experience counter resets any time you leave an instance. This includes logging out, changing characters/returning, entering the personal storyline, entering The Mists or WvW, or even mapping to some distant waypoints within the same map. In other words, you must plan in advance to remain within the same map for long enough to earn the 100,000 points.

I probably would have had it a dozen times over already. Unfortunately, mine has been stuck for weeks now at the same value, which has made it completely impossible for me to finish the monthly achievement. I’m hoping the reset will fix it (and that it won’t break again this time).

Haishao.6851:

It is a very boring idea for long term play because once you’ve unlocked the palettes on your first character, it become a useless game feature forever.

There’s nearly 400 dyes, aren’t there? With some being more rare than others. I’m just curious how close anyone is to unlocking them all.

esnori.1756:

I avoided the forums for the first month of a new game.

Just some information. First, the forums weren’t even online for the first week and a half (?) after launch. And following that there were only a few sub-forums activated, most dealing with support. Second, once the forums were completely up and running, the mood here was generally much brighter than it is now.

In other words, the forums have been up for less than a month, and you missed the best parts by waiting.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

There are no plans to flag a World as an official role-play Word. The amount of customer support overhead involved in enforcing RP names, in-character chat, etc., not to mention creating policies and rules governing RP, is a massive undertaking. We would prefer that community members self-organize.

I feel like you guys dropped the ball here. In my opinion, more than a few players who enjoy seeing their servers enhanced by role-play would have been happy enough with just having a server designated with an RP tag, simply so like-minded played had an official place to gather. Role-players can’t always count on word-of-mouth to get the news of an unofficial server out to everyone.

From there, you could have just added the caveat that RP server would receive no special support, naming rules, or moderation beyond what all the other servers share. Other MMOs have gone this route in the past. Sure, the lack of specially enforced rules and naming conventions would have disappointed a few people, but nowhere near as many people that are currently disappointed with the decision not to designate any server as the official role-playing server.

Heck, you could have just added the tag “(Unoffiicial Role-Play Server)” to Tarnished Coast prior to launch and that would have been enough to satisfy most. Role-players mostly just want other role-players to know where to go (because they want to be surrounded by them), including the ones that select a server without having any idea of what some RP fan-forum designated as their home. You could have really lent a helping hand here.

My two cents.

Also see this bug. I adventure with friends and they always appear to be using the wrong tools for gathering, where as my character appears to use the proper one. Has been this way since beta, I believe. Just one of those little things that makes the game look unnecessarily sloppy, often.

Unless I’m misunderstanding, it sounds like every single person who has been bitten by this bug was grouped with another player at the time, on the exact same quest, and completing it at the exact same time in the same instance.

Is that correct? Or is there anyone who has run into this problem simply by being on this quest while in a group? For example, can two characters who are grouped but not on the same story mission, but playing together through one another’s stories, run into this problem?

I had this same problem last night and had to submit a ticket for it. I got the confirmation email thanking me for my purchase, but no gems. When I checked the GW2 website/twitter/etc I saw the information that the shop has been down for maintenance.

That’s fine, but what’s not acceptable is allowing me to make a purchase and charging my credit card when the shop is incapable of delivering the merchandise immediately because it’s offline. Why even allow us to access it at all when it’s offline (and according to the updates it had been taken offline well before I made my purchase).

That’s (I guess) a beta recipe that is no longer valid.

I would not nearly mind so much farming up (example) 100 blood if I knew it meant killing 100 bats for 100 guaranteed blood drops. What I really hate is the randomness and uncertainty. When you can get unlucky and kill ten bats between blood drops and realize this kind of awful dry streak can happen another 100 times.. that’s just disheartening.

This is probably going to be the first MMO crafting system I actually give up on, and it’s completely due to the drop rates on components. For a game that’s supposed to be moving away from the grind, GW2 sure expects you to do an awful lot of it to craft.

Rukia.4802:

I just don’t see this, because the mob leash is incredibly short… I find it hard to train mobs just to farm them myself, let alone train them to actual players off in the distance. Usually I can only train 3 or so mobs, going any further and a couple will wander from the pack back to their “home”

Simply continue running if you can’t kill em… it’s not like they are able to train archers, how would you NOT be able to get away???

Well, to answer this question, I can point to yet another example that wiped out my party just last night. We were standing next to an NPC vendor selling to clear up our inventories between adventures when I noticed someone training at least 5 elementals to our position (from an event that was taking place nearby). We were actually down-leveled (so it’s not like we were visiting a location that was over our heads), but the mobs were still 5 levels higher than us (like up-leveled to counter the number of players at the nearby event).

As the player raced right through our position, I had enough time to shout “Look out!” before the elementals hit us with a snare attack and then killed us off in one to two hits. Obviously between reviving at the nearest waypoint and repairs that gets expensive.

Sometimes you can not “simply continue running” and avoid this.

“Incomplete effort at complete domination.”

captain kid.8635:

100% disagree. I understand where you’re coming from, guild loyalty and what not but I love being able to switch guilds easily and see which fits best. Without all the drama of actually leaving a guild.
I LOVE this system.

While what you said makes perfect sense, I wonder if you’re aware that your comment has likely left many readers (including me!) with a look of disbelief on their face, being shocked that people actually approach being in a guild that way. Heh.

I think what (understandably) frustrates many guild leaders/officers is that they may spend influence points on a perk that you happily take advantage of, but then you don’t help the guild recover any of that spent influence because you’re representing another guild when participating in an activity that would generate influence points. People are generally not happy when they feel like someone is taking advantage of them.

I ran into this problem myself. There was a thread regarding the status of support tickets that was created by Arenanet when the forums were first brought online, which had about ten pages of comments and questions in them (one of which was mine, nothing out of the ordinary).

Over a week later a moderator removes all the comments/questions from said thread and adds this to the post:

“To keep this post as visible as possible and thus beneficial to everyone, we have decided to remove all discussion from this thread. Thank you for your understanding.”

That’s all fine and dandy, but because I happened to have posted in the thread I received a PM informing me of this operation along with a notification that I had received an infraction. That last part left me scratching my head wondering if I had just gotten bitten by a bug or a moderator clicking the wrong button. For all I know everyone who had participated in the thread has received the same infraction. I’ve tried to get more information on whether it was intentional (and if so, why) or just a mistake, but five days later I haven’t heard anything more regarding it.

I honestly don’t understand why this feature even exists. Want to put different characters into different guilds, sure. But having one character in multiple guilds and choosing which to be a part of at any given point on a whim? I certainly don’t want flaky folks like that in my guild without a good reason.

I think this was one of those features that is relying too heavily on players being responsible and/or taking the game seriously. For example.. you have your main band of friends you’re usually associated with: Guild-X. You’re also a member of an order of Rangers that regularly patrols the brand created by Kralkatorrik to keep travelers safe. And once a week you represent an organization that participates in theatrical performances at the festival grounds in Divinity’s Reach for the amusement of your community. Obviously being able to juggle which group you’re representing at any given moment can work well here and be a big help.

I’m pretty sure stuff like that was the intention of this feature. But most players will just use it to exploit guilds and cause most players to look on the entire idea negatively.

Eochaidh.4106:

Edit: Why was the OP infracted by the way? :P

I’m also confused by that as well.

Regardless of how nifty a feature some might think this is, it’s one of those “this is why we can’t have nice things” situations. When it comes down to it, the average gamer doesn’t give a flying fig about your well being. And, in their minds, their time is always going to be more valuable than your time.

For everyone in this thread who will stop and clean up a train they caused, there are players out there who will intentionally abuse this mechanic into the ground. I have seen players repeatedly pull mobs over on top of myself and my friends because they know how easily they they can force us into a role of helping, dying, or wasting time vacating the area. They don’t just do it once and apologize, they continue to do it until you are no longer close enough to “help” them.

I like to help characters who are in trouble as much as the next would-be-hero, but I want it to be by choice, not because someone is gaming the system to force me into action for their benefit.

To the person who suggested just logging whenever you go afk: While that seems like a simple solution, I picked my home server for a reason and (when I’m logged in) prefer to spend as much time on it as possible.. not get stuck in an overflow server for another 30 minutes because I had to walk away from the keyboard for a moment. And unfortunately that is the reality right now with the way the population is bunched up in certain zones. At the same time, it’s not like I just foolishly abandon my character out in the middle of a dangerous area. And yet, I’ve come back after going AFK for not even two minutes next to a zone-line portal and found my character dead from a mob someone trained.

I thought I had seen the last of these with the original Everquest, but unfortunately GW2’s aggro system has managed to bring mob-trains back with a vengeance.

Very often while I or my friends are out adventuring, often working on our own battle or just standing around discussing our next move, complete strangers will lead a trail of hostile mobs right through us and force us into a fight we didn’t want. In what seems like an irrational decision to me, those mobs will decide to forget about the easy prey they obviously have on the run and attack us instead.

That is called “mob training”, and I’m not just talking about the players who are trying to get from point-A to point-B as quickly as possible and unintentionally pull mobs through our position. This is also about players who will purposely detour past another player in order to intentionally lose his pursuers. This kind of reckless and/or malicious behavior has even led to other character’s deaths (including mine) when they step away from the computer for a few minutes in an area that should have otherwise been safe.

Accidents are accidents, but these are gamers on the internet. And, like it or not, the internet has its share of jerks who get their laughs off of causing other gamers grief. As much as Arenanet seems to be against this, I simply can not understand why you have made it so easy for players to train mobs onto one another (a practice which is actually a reportable offense in many other MMOs on PvE servers).

I understand that GW2’s aggro system likes to prioritize close targets, but in my opinion hostile mobs should not be prioritizing targets who have yet to take any action against them when they’re already pursuing (or returning home from pursuing) a character that has already aggroed them. You should be teaching players how to deal with their own messes, not making it easy for them to dump their messes on another player’s lap.

I’m not trying to unlock every recipe; far from it. I am, however, attempting to craft items that I actually want to use.

That may mean (example) that I craft more items that focus on power+vitality rather than precision+condition. I don’t want to just make the latter for 90% of my equipment just because it’s the materials I happen to have the most of in storage – at that point you’re just grinding out gear for the sake of watching your skill level rise and can likely find something you like more through a drop fairly easily. That’s not my goal.

That said, I rarely obtain an abundance of one dropped crafting component over the other through the normal leveling process. I only have to focus on grinding one type of mob for a specific component over another after the fact (and regardless of whether I’m killing 250 grawl, 250 bats, 250 raptors, and 250 krait versus focusing just on 1000 grawl, I’m still grinding out 1000 mobs either way).

It also depends on what your crafting procession is. With tailoring you have 6 pieces of armor and you’re outfitted. With a profession like (example) weaponcrafting on a warrior who likes to switch up his weapons based on the situation he’s in.. you’re talking about roughly a dozen weapons to craft versus 6 pieces of armor.

And for a player who has both weapon and armor crafting? The component drops needed add up quickly. I was worried about them both pulling off the same resource nodes (mining), but that’s nothing compared to meeting the component drop demands.

It seems like such a no-brainer: crafting items that can then be used while you level to the next tier, rinse repeat.

It sounds like such a simple expectation and yet so few games ever seem to get it right. I’ve crafted in every MMO I’ve played since Everquest (and I’ve run into some painful crafting systems along the way), and so I was hoping GW2’s spin on crafting would be enjoyable and fun. And in some ways it is, but in one very basic way it’s just not.

The component drops from monsters (bones, totems, scales, etc) are just too rare. They simply do not drop often enough. For example, I spent almost 10 levels playing through the Kessex Hills map, and by the end of it I had 2 – 5 units each of any one those component drops. I had almost 300 butter, though, so I made myself a cookie to cheer myself up.

Next stop: go to a specific source to farm these drops (totems and bones from Grawl, for example). I spend hours grinding on them – more than an entire level worth of XP just from monster kills alone, and I end up with maybe a half dozen totems and bones if I’m lucky. Meanwhile, I’m looking at my crafting wishlist and I need over a 100 units of these things, each. Now, please, don’t tell me to go to the tradepost; they’re simply too expensive. I can not afford them. There was also only 90 of the bones I needed on the tradepost, and if everyone took the “use the TP” advice rather than farmed their own, clearly there isn’t enough to go around.

I could farm more component drops in a shorter amount of time if I was AoE farming events that produced a lot of these mobs quickly, but then we get to the problem with gaining experience – too much of it too quickly makes the gear you want to craft AND WEAR obsolete. Events are worth a lot of XP.

Still, it doesn’t matter. By the time I have enough dropped components to make level 25 gear, I’m level 30. By the time I get the dropped components I need for level 30 gear, I’m level 35. Suddenly I’m a level 35 character with no crafted level 25 gear, no crafted level 30 gear, not enough component drops to craft level 35 gear, and in the process of trying to get them I’m finding a ton of perfectly acceptable level 35 equipment through loot drops. Which, makes me wonder – why am I even crafting?

It’s not for fun.. because fun for me is to be able to craft my items and then use them while I level. I like to level using the stuff I make. It’s a self sufficiency thing. To me, that’s fun. But the extremely low component drop rates in GW2 are not allowing me to do that.

If the crafting isn’t for players like me, then who exactly is it aimed at? And if it is supposed to be aimed at players like me.. I have to tell you, your current component drop rates are too low and ruining it, and in serious need of buffing.

Jestunhi.7429:

And people need to learn that a single player game with a set amount of mobs & 1 player is completely different to an MMO with hundreds / thousands of characters with their own combination of armour, weapons and dyes. Many of which have AoE / cone attacks which require additional calculations to be done to see who will be hit. And that’s in addition to almost certainly having far more mobs than a single player has at any given time.

Many of the burdens you’re pointing out are handled by the servers, not the client. And these days there are plenty of visually impressive MMOs that run far better than GW2.

I love the game, but lets not pretend the performance couldn’t use some improvements. Even Nvidia representatives are quick to point out that GW2 currently isn’t able to use the GPU to its full potential because it is so CPU dependent. This problem was worse during early beta and has improved quite a bit since then. Hopefully it can improve more. I can’t fault people for wanting to see that.

I completely agree. For example, there’s a serious bug regarding certain personal story quests and grouping that completely wrecks a character’s storyline quest progress. At the same time, the most recent patch notes indicate several story quest issues have been fixed. Does that have anything to do with the aforementioned bug? Or were they completely separate issues? It’s really difficult to tell with the patch notes being so vague in some areas.

This is regarding the fairly important and long standing bug that seems to have something to do with completing certain personal story missions (where choices are made) while grouped, which can then can result in group members becoming bugged and skipping several quests. Seems to happen around level 30, 40, and 70.

Has this bug been fixed yet? The patch notes usually runs a list of quests that have been “fixed” but is extremely vague on the details of what exactly was fixed. I guess I’ve just been waiting to see an announcement that says something more along the lines of “- fixed that horrific group-quest bug that has kept so many of you from continuing your storyline quests either out of fear or bugged progress..”.

Otherwise, the last developer communication I can find regarding this problem stated there was a fix was on the way, but that was a week ago. There was also an earlier claim stating the problem was fixed nearly two weeks ago, but obviously that’s not true given the more recent comment and the reports of blocked progress that keep flooding in even as recently as yesterday.

Just hoping for something resembling an update.

Thankfully, Arenanet doesn’t think it’s “fine as is” and has already stated they’ll be fixing it so discoveries pull from the collections tab/bank as well. It’s just going to take a little more time; they didn’t want to hold up the first part of the fix for crafting while waiting on that part.

You should clarify exactly what about the down-scaling you feel needs fixing. I, for example, dislike that a high level character (e.g. 80) scaled down to a much lower level (e.g. 10) is still loads more powerful than a true level 10 character.

Antihoc.2503:

I think that doing the daily achievement helped a bit on this for me because at least it meant that I was not skipping events etc whilst I was in this area

Yes, completing the daily achievement every day means you are participating in at least 5 events minimum per day. That adds up to a lot of experience; events are worth a lot more than heart tasks.

I don’t think the human zones are bad for leveling at all. My experience has been completely different, where my character is a little over 10 levels ahead of the curve. I could have completely skipped the entire Kessex Hills map after leaving Queensdale and gone straight to Gendarran Fields and still been ahead of the starting range for that zone.

I suspect the players who are struggling to keep up in levels are the types of players who spend significant chunks of time playing the game for long stretches (like starting and completing a zone on the same day). Where as players like myself who are far ahead in levels (compared to the zone) spend upwards of a week on a single map because we only play for a couple of hours per day – and thus automatically complete the daily achievement in a zone many times before moving on.

I think many of these events need to be much more difficult in general, even starting at level 1. I’m not sure if it’s possible for the boss in the Asura tutorial to survive more than 15 seconds once he forms and starts attacking. He’s so huge and cool with some nifty moves and just.. dead in seconds.