Guild Wars 2

So I did some transmuting of my armor on my beta character last weekend, did they refund those?

They are clearly saving it per toon so why can’t they save it per outfit? I can understand why they don’t have color channels for each piece of the outfit because it’s probably all one piece anyway, but that would be even nicer.

Raven.9603:

For someone who has already been playing, $50 is just for HoT content. And that content costs much more than a normal expansion while containing far less.

And what about all the FREE content your going to get over the next year or three? Does that have no value? I am not arguing that what we get for go live of HoT is necessarily worth $50, but based on Arenanet’s track record I am not worried about it as I am sure over the next few years lots more content is coming.

Raven.9603:

I am not complaining about spending money on the game. I am saying none of the content we have had over the past 3 years would exist if some players didn’t effectively make up the lost revenue of those who choose to play for free. Content costs money. There hasn’t been anything in HoT to suggest that it is as much content as a normal AAA expansion or that they will actually start developing regular content for WvW, and yet they are charging more than the industry standard for the title.

So your complaining they are not doing what you want them to do with the money you give them? Since your being asked to buy an expansion you feel it should come with more ‘content’ where your definition of content is stories and WvW upgrades? Arenanet owns the game and it’s direction, as they should and how they spend their development resources is up to them. The beauty of this game is that except for the first box 3 years ago and $50 now, you are not forced to spend any more if you don’t like their direction. Anyone joining the game for free now is getting a TON of content to explore even considering they miss out on the Living story. The value here is just ridiculously fantastic and yet you expect more.

So outfits won’t take dye permanently? That’s pretty sad.

Raven.9603:

But lets talk money: WoW was ~$144 per year, plus box cost for games. There has not been a single year that I played GW2 that I spent less than that in the gem store. There is nothing free, sorry, “FREE”, about any of the content in GW2. The content some of the people here enjoy for free, sorry, “FREE”, is paid for by those of us that choose to support the game via the gem store at a rate that is greater than or equal too a normal subscription fee. If you didnt spend $144 in the gemstore this year, you are welcome: I paid for some of the content you enjoyed.

But they also claimed they would release an expansion’s worth of content, in increments, over the course of each year through living world events. that didnt happen, ever. if you packaged up season 2 and tried to sell it, how much would you pay for it (exactly 800 gems if on sale, minus dragon p1 and p2, apparently)? Seriously, do you feel you got an expansions worth of content over that year? Season 1 was even less. And keep in mind, that is only 1 side of the 3 sides of this game. PvP has seen even less development since then, and WvW, a huge, vibrant game mode, THE end-game mode that keeps this place running in between Living Story event patches, received basically zero development SINCE THE LAUNCH OF THIS GAME.

So, when Arenanet says “hey man, we really do have an expansion worth of content this time, but it’s $50”, I hesitate. I hesitate because I honestly feel it will be less PvE content than a cheaper expansion from ANY comparable AAA MMO. I hesitate because their track record for developing for WvW is total garbage, and I honestly feel that 1 new map is pretty underwhelming for an entire game mode that needs much more love than that.

I honestly do not believe there is $50 worth of stuff in HoT, and I’m a guy who will pay 1000 gems for a mining pick.

I have spent far more than the cost of the game in the gem store and I went for the full $100 because the game gave me three years with TONS of updates including holiday events, Living Story Season 1 and 2, Fractals, Ascended gear, new areas, PvP upgrades and a whole new WvW area, not to mention performance/server upgrades and I am sure lots I am forgetting. ALL OF THAT came for the price of the initial ‘box’ with no subscription fee.

Yes, Arenanet is making money from the gem store, but it’s completely voluntary and nothing in there is pay to win. In fact everything in there can be earned in the game and traded for by exchanging gold for gems.

What everyone gets for paying $50 is everything that comes out when HoT goes live PLUS everything they add until the next ‘expansion’. How can you put a $ value on content that you will get for FREE over the next few years? If your primarily a WvW player I can see where HoT may not be worth anything to you, and yes they have put WvW on the bottom of the list priority wise, but GW2 is much more focused on the casual player and PvE it seems to me.

I think the fundamental difference here is the usage of the term expansion. To me it’s just a toll booth along the route and considering how many miles I got out of the entry fee, it’s money I have zero problem paying. GW2 is remaking the rules for MMOs so what constitutes an expansion may need to be reconsidered as well.

I recently bought a couple of outfits and was playing around with dye combinations only to find out when I switched outfits, all my work was reset to the same color scheme on the prior outfit. Is that a bug or the way it has always worked? I only used one outfit per character before so I would not have noticed it, but this is a bit of a pain.

Raven.9603:

Just to prelude this: I am completely in the camp of “$50 is 10-20$ too expensive for an expansion pack.” Unless there is some seriously must have content worth that amount, I wont be buying it, though I do regularly spend money in the gem store for things that seem worth the price / convenience. Expansion packs are typically $40 for AAA titles from Blizzard and far less from other vendors.

How can you think this? You play a game completely FREE for years, NO subscription fee and you think $50 for another few years of totally FREE content is to much? This is not really an expansion pack as you get so much more. How much are you paying Blizzard EVERY MONTH and how often do they come out with expansions you ALSO need to pay for???

I have asked many times over the years for some cool dragon T-Shirts, but they are just not interested in merchandising this.

It’s to bad a map has to be ‘built’ for gliding as I am sure people would love to glide all over Tyria. I am also sure sooner or later I will fall to my death expecting a glider to pop out once I have played a lot of HoT. Maybe they could just add a mini parachute or something for the rest of Tyria that would let you land safely. Sure would make some jumping puzzles less annoying.

I didn’t read the 100 pages before this so maybe it’s been said, but for ONE $50 fee you will be getting YEARS worth of FREE updates which will include content AND features. Go buy almost any other MMORPG and start paying $ per month on top of the initial cost. Guild Wars has been and hopefully always will be a bargain even at double the cost they ask.

Jimson.5168:

RaymondFung.2805:

You are good. But I just keep falling from the cliff when I need jump to get a master point

Build up your basic gliding mastery and glide to it. I’m still trying to figure out how to get the one on top of the rocks.

I am not sure if it’s the correct way, but you can hop up and tap F at just the right moment, and then get the point even though your not standing on it.

I guess my biggest issue is what is there to do to level up? How many hours do I have to spend killing the same spawns to get a few masteries? The first one wasn’t too bad, but the second one was twice as long and I got bored before I was even at 50%.

Am I missing something or is the map pretty small? It’s supposed to be 25% and it seems like I got through all of it in one sitting. I could not find anywhere special to glide to that you couldn’t run to and it looks like the mushroom jumps where just short cuts.

Trying to glide down just hit a floor where you get an error and die. Is the full ‘verticality’ of the map really open? Also the events seem pretty limited but they are probably no where near complete yet.

Crafting a Legendary (which really should be the ONLY way to get one, and will be for the new ones) requires a TON of work in all forms and getting map completion is actually a lot less mundane than doing tons of dungeon runs or fractal runs or whatever your favorite flavor of material acquisition is. I have done it on three characters which means I can build SIX Legendary weapons. That seems PLENTY to me considering they are supposed to be you know, LEGENDARY.

I would wager most of the people running around with them got them from some form of playing the Trading Post and for the most part just buying them. I got mine crafting Exotics for profit (before Ascended weapons ruined that).

My point is how many Legendary weapons does someone really need? At TWO per character that actually goes out and completes the map, that’s more than enough.

You can buy about a dozen cheap exotics and salvage them all with BL kits and get a few dark matter pretty reliably. Not cheap, but not ridiculous. Ascended are orders of magnitude more valuable and being forced to treat them like lottery tickets is just wrong.

They specifically mention Ascended Salvage Kits which leads me to believe that ONLY these kits can be used to salvage Ascended items. The fact that a fractals vendor is selling it however makes me thing all of this new Legendary crafting will revolve around or at least require some amount of fractal grinding. This concerns me as I have done some fractals, I certainly don’t want to be required to live there to craft a Legendary.

The fact that Dark Matter only comes from exotic items very much leads to Dark Energy only comes from Ascended items. I don’t think you can get Dark Matter from Exotic Trinkets (I am pretty sure have wasted some gold trying.) so I doubt you can get Dark Energy from Ascended Trinkets. That leaves only armor/weapons which do NOT drop like candy. Add in RNG on salvaging and your looking at a LOT of justifiably frustrated players. We have waited YEARS for a way around RNG to get pre-cursors and they fix that at the same time they repeat the mistake with Dark Energy. These Ascended Salvage kits had better NOT have RNG built in. Make them expensive or something but please fix this BEFORE release.

I like dragons and T-shirts and GW2 and wanted a flaming dragon GW2 T-shirt since before beta but all that’s available is some lame brown T-shirt. What is with that? You have all these artists and all these fans wanting to spend money and advertise the product, why can’t you monetize some of that art?

If we have to farm tons of gold to craft Ascended to salvage for a chance at Dark Energy this is really no different from having to do the same thing for exotics/rares to throw in the Mystic toilet in hopes of a precursor. At least with precursors you could just spend the gold and buy one, but now you can’t even do that. Grinding for a Legendary is one thing but gambling as well is BS.

This just doesn’t make sense. Crafting Ascended weapons and armor is ridiculously expensive and now they expect us to salvage them? For a CHANCE at a ball of dark energy? I can see giving us something to do with the piles of Ascended rings we all have, but not armor and weapons. Most of my tunes only have one set of Ascended gear, if that and I am not giving them up.

I do NOT like the new trait system. All of my characters had the falling damage trait selected because I liked never having to worry about jumping (within reason) and now I am forced to choose a whole trait line that I may want nothing to do with just to get that trait. The old system let me pick up that low level trait with very little penalty, but now I am stuck with essentially four points of traits I am not thrilled about. They really need to let us choose more than three trait lines, but that would mess up the layout of the screen forcing a scroll bar.

Having been there since Beta, following the forums was certainly the best way to keep track of the new stuff as well as lots of information that might not be in the Wiki, but the Wiki is a great place to get up to speed on mostly everything.

This game has many dimensions and lots real estate to cover in those dimensions so really I wouldn’t worry about seeing everything and just wander in the direction that interests you the most at the moment. Oddly enough I did get bored as I had ‘been there done that’ in all the dimensions that interested me and I have been on sabbatical since the last Living Story ended. That did however take over two years so don’t worry about running out of stuff to do.

I would say Exploration was a big driver of mine. You can track your progress with Achievements which is a great way to get an idea and mark your progress in every dimension of the game. My first driving force was the World Completion achievement which lands you the “Gift of Exploration”, a vital part (one of many) to crafting a Legendary Weapon, which was one of my major drivers, Bling. There is lots of Bling in this game and collecting it can be a lot of fun.

Getting World Completion will take you almost everywhere, one of those places being WvW which is such a big dimension, many people do only that. For the most part PvP is not my cup of tea, but WvW ended up being a lot of fun for me and a major part of my GW2 experience. I would recommend mastering PvE a bit first as humans are nothing like what you face wandering around Tyria. I would also recommend getting a Voip system installed as WvW is an order of magnitude better when you can hear your commander and team mates. You do NOT need to have a mic if your worried about that. You will want to find a good guild to run with that matches your personality.

I am certainly in the minority, but I also had lots of fun crafting. Most see it as a pointless waste of time, but it was certainly significant for me and you can make a lot of gold, not to mention it’s required if you want Ascended gear.

There are five races all with distinct story lines to follow, and for the moment eight professions to master with a ninth coming soon. When I started I developed three characters in parallel so they could each take two professions and craft each others gear. Just coordinating that was pretty involved and interesting for me.

Norn’s are hot as well.

Exxcalibur.6203:

LA is too flat. There needs to be more mutli dimensional accessibility.

You should do the new jumping puzzle.

Yes the new LA is pretty but it is not very functional. The previous version was much more user friendly albeit not to pretty. The original was far superior to both unfortunately. The crafting area is so lame now compared to the original. It’s one of the worst on the entire map and it used to be the best in both looks and convenience.

You are completely and totally wrong about this great feature of the game. I have played for years and I can barely remember even having to use this feature to delete something so I would like to know what you have to delete so many of?

On the other hand, clicking the wrong thing because your inventory fills up in the middle of some crazy battle and throwing a Legendary away by accident would cause such rage and frustration that having to type something to confirm a delete is ZERO problem. In fact I bet many people are thrilled when it comes up knowing it just saved them a ton of pain.

Maybe they assume most people are converting gold to gems so they think it’s OK. I think gems to gold is wrong somehow so I don’t do it the other way either. That means they lose the money I might have spent on dyes.

I have spent much more money on Armor, Wardrobe, and non RNG weapon skins than on the game itself, and I have NEVER spent money on their RNG ploys. I wish they would share with us what percentage of their income is from non RNG versus RNG items. Clearly they must be making much more on the fools that blow their coin on RNG, but is it really necessary to do it this way? If they got rid of all of it, and even lowered the prices, would not many more people spend some gems?

It baffles me why they insist on hiding dyes behind RNG. If I want to give them real money to get the dye I want, just take it please! They sell armor and weapon skins directly, why not dyes?!?

If they are trying to protect the ‘value’ of rare dyes, can’t they just make the dyes you get account bound? Are they account bound already?

Is it the skin you like or the stats? You can craft/buy the exotic weapon for it’s stats and apply the new skin if that is your primary concern.

To get the ascended stats you want you will need to craft one yourself.

Settlers would be OK for a Necro, especially on a staff, but that would make for a very tough necro assuming your armor had toughness as well.

If a player wants five sets of ascended armor for one character or one set of ascended armor for five characters it takes the person just as much time either way. Each account can only produce one piece of ascended material per day unless you want to buy that allotment from another player.

How many character slots you have does not change this equation. I do not think it’s a punishment. With the changes to skin unlocks you can have all your characters share the ascended look immediately, but the stats will have to be ‘earned’ by playing every day.

Whisper Blade is unfortunately not the same as The Anomaly. I crafted both for my Mesmer and was slightly sad that the shades of pink are slightly different.

I FINALLY got my first Carapace chest drop tonight and coincidentally I also had just got my last Kidney so I am wondering if your odds go up once the rest of the collection is in place besides the box, but it was probably just dumb luck. It would however explain how people are getting lots of drops AFTER they have completed their armor already.

Blocking Luminescent Armor with RNG is just plain LAME! They added special extractors to get the parts you need, why can’t they be available for crests? I am sorry, but this is GRIND, by MY definition as the player has NO OTHER WAY to obtain something they want, a nice, but in NO WAY Legendary or Elite skin. We have earned the achievements and spent far to much of our time in the Silverwastes, why are we the unlucky less deserving of this skin?

If Anet prevents you from spamming anything in chat, including WTS, why can’t they prevent people cluttering up the LFG tool with WTS?

Trying to watch the mini map with enough attention to avoid the wall will have you walking into a sand trap, so no that’s not really a good tell. Not having red lines or circles warning of walls and traps is just lame, not to mention the to bright sand with hazy white swirls on it as markers for what to avoid. This was almost as bad as the grabby golem in Glint’s lair. Thankfully my ranger plus the pet trait to divert pulls got me through that one.

By difficult I meant very long with lots of ways to get lost. Having to fight something would certainly lose any situational awareness I might manage.

Avster.1935:

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

I have seven fully developed level 80 with mostly ascended armor and I am very to somewhat familiar with those seven professions. My eighth character is my level 3 pack mule and is you guessed it a thief. I despise thieves and what is the first character they force you to play? A kittening thief.

I managed to skill spam my way through the story OK, but now I need to get the achievements so I can get the armor skins. I see much frustration and anger in my future. Thanks ANet.

(Yes I can go with a party and get carried through, but that takes the personal accomplishment out of it for me.)

Sigh …the odds of someone disliking thief vs the majority …you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. This argument can be used by anyone with a particular dislike for a certain profession, it’s such a niche issue that it’s almost meh…

I’m sorry that you don’t like that profession, however from what I read, you like personal achievement, so why not attempt to be good at playing an OP thief and get your rewards?

If there was a replay mote that might not be to bad, but that topic is in another thread. Dodge master plus cinematic replay plus thief skills equals fury. Do I really need to jump backwards into who knows what every time I need to heal?

Nothing is worse in a JP than stuff you have to fight. This one sounds very difficult so please NO.

I have seven fully developed level 80 with mostly ascended armor and I am very to somewhat familiar with those seven professions. My eighth character is my level 3 pack mule and is you guessed it a thief. I despise thieves and what is the first character they force you to play? A kittening thief.

I managed to skill spam my way through the story OK, but now I need to get the achievements so I can get the armor skins. I see much frustration and anger in my future. Thanks ANet.

(Yes I can go with a party and get carried through, but that takes the personal accomplishment out of it for me.)

kingbread.6174:

It’s like there’s competing teams at Anet.
1st team does glints lair and grants carapace reward for each character doing story.

2nd team had a bad day and decides to screw with us, no repeatable, no skipping and 1000 crests for an armor piece.

3rd team decides to have no repeat motes but carapace reward per character is back.

theres zero consistency here, its like these things are done on a whim or just done and forgotten about.

In any case, i dont expect them to even acknowledge these concerns unless a crap ton of people take to reddit and scream at the top of their voice

I have to believe they have teams that take on every task as no way one team does all the story parts. The problem is one brilliant team member realized our pain ahead of time and added the replay mote and either that episode was done last or there was no cross team collaboration on such an obvious feature.

What I hope is that it’s not to difficult to retrofit such a feature into future or even present episodes and they get on this pronto, but I am afraid the grind will continue.

Normally I just skip what I consider stupid dodge master achievements but they tied it to a skin so I have to cuss my way through these kitten things. Unfortunately I skipped the only one they did implement because I assumed it was for challenge mode which I had no interest in.

The real question is why does luminescent armor require all three types of armor? What if someone only has ONE character, why do they need to grind out the other two types?

As someone with seven level 80s I would absolutely do the story two more times (one for each class that wanted the armor) than grind out 2000 crests. SQ was fun, but I am so sick of the place and we only have shoulders and gloves so far.

Blaeys.3102:

Axyl.9408:

Also, if you fail, how do you do it again without restarting the story from outside of the library?

To this question, there are challenge motes just before each boss that allow you to reset the fight and try again without doing the entire instance over (I missed them too until someone on the forums pointed them out to me ).

I saw the challenge motes but just assumed they changed the difficulty to something harder so you got a better reward or something like that. Talk about a hidden and misleading feature…

The rewards that come from doing the LS are usually pretty good so I don’t think it’s that big a deal to have to do the story over again to get the achievements. My only issue is listing and waiting for all of the dialog each time you do an episode. If we could skip that somehow I would be happier.

So really not to much siege in general. If we could do some work between attacks to get better siege that would make this much less boring. Mowing down the mobs with an arrow cart would be far superior to slugging it out over and over again by hand.

Also that would let less people on the map maybe go from fort to fort building them up leaving a few behind that could hold them once decent siege was in place. Right now it’s just a matter of getting enough people, but not to many at each fort for X number of defenses.

Killing all those mobs also gets you no loot except crests that you need to convert to shovels and leave forts undefended while you hunt for chests. If I could just get that loot as an event reward directly it would save a lot of running around. If they could scale the loot based on how long you defended a given fort that would encourage participation as well.

Rashy.4165:

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

I think if the ‘time to breach’ could be significantly reduced by coordinated efforts this map could be a lot more fun.

According to a user on reddit or these forums, a fully coordinated group defending all forts took 18 minutes to breach. It actually is fairly quick if everyone is on the same page.

It never seems to go that fast for me, but that’s great if it’s true. I typically defend either amber or blue and have escorted a number of blue and amber dolyaks but never seen any siege at either location except burning oil which doesn’t reach most of the attackers.

Is there some correlation between supply level, number of dolyaks and what seige should be present?

I think if the ‘time to breach’ could be significantly reduced by coordinated efforts this map could be a lot more fun. As it stands, defending forts over and over again with no real payback for your efforts is what gets old. That overall timer that the pact is ‘getting ready’ is what sucks. If that would speed up if we held all the forts and protected all the Dolyaks that would be much better. If we could actually cause siege to be built and protect it, that would seem more fun. Waiting around for however many waves of attacks it takes for the pact to get ready is dull.

The new area was fun while it lasted, but it gets old really fast with the constant attacks and paper thin forts. No matter how hard you work the forts are just doomed as nothing lasts.

And now that the chests got nerfed no big draw for all the farmers.

Huck.1405:

The only problem I had with this fight was that 75% of the time the bubbles that make you fragile that you transfer to the Vortex Crystals spawned in the middle of those AoEs that one-shot you. As a result this fight took a helluva lot longer to do than it should have.

Other than that, it wasn’t too tough.

This was my primary complaint (once I read what the mechanics where), this issue was the only thing that caused frustration. I could sometimes dodge through the death circle and pickup the Fragility, but most of the time it was death and running back in.

I did attempt the whole thing without reading, and was VERY frustrated by the end and vowed never to do it again, but then I read you needed the achievements to get the luminous skin so I had to do some research. Still need to get the Aspect of Strength achievement as the stupid thing pulled me as I stepped into the area.

How about a junk-o-matic that converts junk, or those annoying minor sigils into copper?