Guild Wars 2

I agree that for a lv35 dungeon it’s remarkably catered to lv80’s, though P3 is actually pretty easy and can be done with only 1-2 high levels in the group as long as someone knows the spawn locations.

I will say though, l think there should be lower level dungeons, maybe at 15 and 25. By the time you’re lv35 you’ve been playing for a long time, and then you only have access to 1 dungeon. I’ve seen lots of new guildmates join at ~lv5-8 and get frustrated when they can’t do anything with the guild for several weeks until they hit lv30-35… and then they’re intimidated because everything one-shots them in their slightly underlevel blue/green gear.

Lower level ‘intro’ dungeons would help ease that transition, and to help discourage it from becoming speedrun-only, you could just keep the reward level low – e.g. 25 silvers + 20 tokens redeemable for rares only.

+1 for OP. The fact that you have the whole range from “can’t kill, too impossible” to “we killed it in 14 seconds” to “I soloed it after trying and failing for a week straight” means that it’s highly skill and coordination based.

I love the lupi fight because it’s interesting and requires actually managing skills and cooldowns beyond rotating reflects. And I actually feel a sense of accomplishment when I beat it. The downside is, I can’t convince my guildies to run it with me =(

A boss that can’t be solo’ed usually means that a dps team is simply bursting him down before he can rip your team apart which is horrible design. I can’t really think of any middle ground right now but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Passing aggro across the group, group heals, group boons, utils like reflects (!!), more interrupts.

But in general yeah, it all comes down to “more effective-stats” or “more ability to spam skills at boss”. Which is boring, and with even middle-bosses having huge HP pools (HOTW P1, the guy giving the pep talk to the sons of svanir? wtf…), it cuts down on feasibility of anything other than pure zerk since it takes forever to kill them otherwise. As in, set auto attack, go eat dinner, come back, and it’ll be just about finished.

To OP: Both bring reflects (absorb for thief), both can be specced for high damage, thief brings stealth + blast finishers for might if you have an ele but is squishier, guard brings perma protection (hammer) and mob grouping (GS chains), stability and group aegis/healing and can be specced for group condi removal.

Personally I think guard is more useful, but situationally thieves can be a real godsend for skipping trash.

EDIT: Bad guards don’t do any of the above, whereas bad thieves will usually at least SR on demand. So I guess there’s that. But I prefer to assume that you’d be a good whatever-you-do, and not a bad one =)

Scarlet’s a manipulator, not a negotiator. The sons of svanir don’t have to listen to her to do what she wants. Similarly for dragon minions, you could have bandits or someone “discover” how to control them via pheromones, or other random gizmos you make up on the spot.

Same here, as of today.
EDIT: I can get in as long as I’m not in a party, but then if I join a party it puts me in a separate instance.

It doesn’t seem easier to range at all. You end up missing reflect, boons, heals, condi removal, and hit only 1 target so it takes 3-5x longer to kill a group which means that (a) you take 3-5x more damage (!!) and (b)your damage mitigation skills/buffs run out before killing a significant % of the mobs.

“I honestly can’t think of one mob that isn’t doable with 1 hand on range. Especially spider queen and alphard.”
Erm. Spider queen from range = wtfpoison insteadeath, no?

Oh jeez. I totally didn’t see the stuff on the right hand side of the forum page. I’ve been trained to ignore anything in that space/format, because that’s where the ads always are xD

Getting this error code when I try to login from the game – was fine yesterday, and internet connectivity is fine (am able to login and post on gw2 forums, as evidenced by this post). Anyone else having this issue?

Arikyali.5804:

Wait a minute….the damage counter is incoming damage divided by total defense? Not a formula that subtracts one from the other, or multiplied by a hidden constant?

Yep.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage

Arikyali.5804:

Usually in solo situations against a powerful enemy, I stand back and let my clones do the tanking for me. If one is destroyed, I summon another to replace it. I guess what I really want is the ability to survive more than one enemy. Right now, all I have available are greatsword’s wave skill to push them away, or to blink away. (I know a lot of mesmers don’t like the blink skill for combat, but I find it’s very useful for escaping. It’s like a free dodge.) My skillset is also not built for AOE. It’s more of quickly fighting off one enemy at a time.

The staff is more of an AOE weapon for the mesmer, but I just never liked the staff. I only use it out of necessity in dungeon runs. When I try to solo AOE in PvE, it doesn’t go well. Either I don’t have enough practice with it, my build is too 1 on 1 focused, or I’m too used to having a tanky profession when it comes to AoE.

IMO the staff is really a survival tool. The instant blink on short cooldown really helps put distance between you and the slavering horde, and chaos storm = pretty good CC.

Also as I mentioned above, PU (prismatic understanding i.e. stealth) builds add a lot to survivability at the cost of damage. I.e. you get tons of aggro dropping, protection/regen/aegis. Builds like Blackwater (while intended for WvW, works also for the uses you’re describing) based on PU + rabid gear are basically unkillable by mobs/vets/champs and rely largely on clone bleeds on crit/death to wear enemies down. That said, PU/condi builds are definitely not going to win you any friends in dungeon groups. =)

EDIT:
The build eldenbri linked is PU/power based and probably works on roughly the same principles as blackwater, except based on phantasms instead of ordinary clones.

“Mesmers being light armor, I don’t think toughness would be much of help anyway.”
Actually it’s the other way around. The lower your base armor, the more useful toughness is. It’s because damage = (incoming damage) / (total defense), so increasing a small defense number = decrease damage by a large %. Also, mes has pretty decent base HP so stacking vita isn’t as useful unless you’re vs all conditions.

That said, as mesmer I prefer to not get hit in the first place. I find PU builds fun even in PvE, let the clones kill ’em and stealth anytime something comes sniffing too close. Rampager gear works well for that, or rabid if you prefer to be tanky.

Anyone tried out the new torment sigils with this build? They seem pretty OP from the description. Not sure if they suit this better or blackwater, I would actually guess this one since GS = more likely to proc than slow hitting staff/scepter.

Thanks for the tips guys!

Ross, is that full rabid gear? I’ve been experimenting with sword/torch myself to improve burstiness/chasing ability, and trying to figure out a balance between direct damage and conditions. I might try out scepter/focus instead of staff since that means I can probably swap out centaur runes for something more condition’y (+ gives a pulling tool).

In my brief scan of the topic, I haven’t seen this brought up yet.

In lots of dungeon runs, there are spots that are 999x easier to complete if everyone stacks by a door or corner and cleaves mobs down in big swathes as they come. To name the ones I can think of from the top of my head, this applies to AC (spiders), CM (trash mobs), TA (spiders before Malrona), SE (golems), CoE (golems/bombs), Arah (trash mobs at start, maybe more). So basically anything but CoF.

Doing these things with range or any single-target DPS is very difficult and often leads to party wipes, especially in some cases if reflection runs out before the mobs are dead (cough CM). That said, a lot of these spots can be 3-4 manned with the stacking strategy and a decent tank (cough not CM), but obviously it’s easier if everyone is helping.

Other places like slave driver are very all-or-nothing: Either everyone goes max dps melee to burn it before getting downed, or everyone ranges to prevent getting hit in the first place (equally viable).

In these cases, you’ll usually have at least a couple people going in melee regardless of what you do, and they will hate you if you hang back and plink because it means they will die. And then the people ranging get snotty about the ‘noobs’ who try to melee and get downed, while the melee’s get snotty about the ‘noobs’ who range and get the party killed.

P.S. you can solve all of this by doing what just about everyone does: keep both a ranged and a melee weapon. I.e. a GS and a sword.

I built my mes basically to blackwater spec (swapped to perception/agony sigils though), and it seems like Osicat’s condition build is also similar (perplexity instead of centaur).

I haven’t had a chance to try it extensively yet, but so far I’ve had pretty poor luck so I assume I’m doing something wrong. Mainly I’m having trouble figuring out how to do damage. My initial theory was basically perma stealth and let the clones bleed them out, but it seems like the enemy’s hp bar barely dips, and then they just heal or run away.

Based on 1 or 2 videos of Osi playing his not-quite-blackwater build, it kind of looks to me like most of the damage comes from perfectly timing a torch re-appearance, torment block and shatter, which seems the opposite of the slow-attrition I was expecting from a toughness-condi build.

Also, staff seems less damaging than I’d expected for a ‘condi’ weapon – only 2/3 of the staff auto condis actually damage, and fury doesn’t really help with no direct damage. Similarly only 1/4 (!) of chaos storm’s conditions are damaging, with the rest of its DPS seeming to come from direct damage. So it almost seems to me like staff is stronger for a power build, which blows my mind. Am I missing something here as well?

In fact, I just re-read your original quote:

Meta (Prefix) – to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.
Examples: “Metamorphasis”

Which clearly means, “An abstraction from morphasis”. Added to which, the real word is spelled with an ‘o’ instead of ‘a’.

This illustrates pretty well why ‘definitions’ of prefixes should be taken with a grain of salt. They generally only convey a rough sense of a meaning, and most of its meaning comes from connotations that you derive based on actual words that use the prefix. Then, people are free to define new words using these prefixes, for which only some of the connotations apply that the community using the word will be most familiar with.

“refers to any planning, preparation, or maneuvering that a player does outside of actual gameplay to gain an advantage”

How does “building character to max effectiveness vs. what you expect to encounter once the fight begins” not fit this definition? The fact that there’s one build/strategy that counters ‘everything’ doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s still building for what you expect to come up against.

Besides, if we take ‘metadata’ as an example, it basically means ‘data about data’. Put that in the context of ‘meta gw2’ or ‘metagame’, and it just means ‘data about the game’.

I bet yall twitched when you read this:

As players work towards completing the meta-achievement, they can occasionally use Tassi’s relay golem to check in on her developments.

KrazyFlyinChicken.5936:

Taking the argument one step further—I’ve heard people refer to PPT gameplay as ‘metagame’. IE: “That commander is great at open-field fighting, but his metagame [ability to take towers] sucks.” which is, even further, just plain wrong.

Actually that doesn’t seem completely wrong. It’s very similar actually to “meta-puzzle”, which in puzzle challenges refers to a solution pieced together from solutions to smaller problems. Winning a ‘war’ via the actual objective of taking keeps, which is a higher level abstraction of winning individual battles.

It didn’t seem like that far of a stretch to me. Meta as a prefix has many connotations including “the big picture, from 100 miles above”, “describing characteristics of” etc. When someone tells me “conditions are the current meta”, I take it to mean “as an overview of what generally works, it’s conditions” or “describing the current state of the game in a nutshell, it’s all conditions”.

I was playing last night pre-patch(?) and the lag really bad. A lot of rubberbanding, a bit of running around pressing buttons and seeing the world frozen for 5-10 seconds at a time.

Heartseeker is pretty weak on targets that aren’t below 50% hp, and only moderately strong until under 25%. Plus it burns initiative and locks you into the animation without giving you any evade. If you spam it and the opponent isn’t pure glass you’ll take them to 50%, run out of initiative, get stomped in a face-to-face fight and then have no initiative for mobility to run away.

crouze.3078:

My idea:

Attack your foe from the shadows, applying vulnerability if you hit from behind. (5 stacks for 10 seconds)

In addition to that i thought about changing heartseeker to trigger on the amount of vulnerability stacks.

Not nearly enough thought put into this. There are so many ways in which this can be broken, to be either exploitable or completely useless.

Besides which as everyone else has mentioned… Backstab is practically the only reason I made a thief. I want to hear that solid ‘thunk’ when I pop out of the shadows, and see the HP bar drop. As opposed to hear a little “plink” and then spend the next 30 seconds maneuvering for an opening to capitalize on that, only to realize that the tiny advantage I got (5 stacks? lol…) disappeared after 10 seconds.

Cool, thanks for the chart Desert – handy reference, and captures all the relevant factors without getting bogged down in specific traits/bonuses etc.

Everyone seems to hate on Assassin’s gear saying full zerk is better, but I don’t think this blanket statement is universally true.

As far as I can calculate, if you aren’t in a position to backstab (e.g. soloing) and don’t have other +critical chance or +precision modifiers other than Fury (i.e. no banner of discipline), mixing in 2-3 pieces of assassin’s gear can actually increase DPS.

Factors which favor Zerk are group play (easier backstab and banners etc.), and factors which favor Assassin’s are high Power (e.g. Bloodlust sigil shifts favor slightly toward assassin’s, as does traiting high in power) and lower critical chance (e.g. not using signet of Agility, or not having access to Fury).

Just thought I’d throw that out there, since I hate absolute statements.

You guys are missing the point. It’s used for a relative comparison of two different stats, and which will give the higher net benefit.

If you have a dollar value and multiplier, and you have the choice of +0.1 to the multiplier or +$10, which is “better”? Well the answer is, that depends on what the dollar value an multiplier started at.

If the dollar value is in the millions and the multiplier started at 0, obviously take the multiplier increase. If the multiplier is already at 99999 and the dollar value started at 0, obviously take the $10. What wish is calling ‘DR’ is the effect that once you’ve stacked the dollar amount to 100 million, adding $10 (or even $50) is like kitten ing in an ocean compared to taking a small increase in multiplier. And vice versa.

Similarly, your damage from critical hits is (roughly) critical chance * critical multiplier. So:
IN DUNGEON PARTIES WHERE YOU WANT MAX BOSS SUSTAINED DPS – critical chance is fairly low while critical multiplier is already very high. So you benefit more from critical chance.
IN WVW WHERE YOU ONLY EVER BACKSTAB ONCE AND RUN (if that’s your thing) – critical chance is fixed at 100% due to a trait, so only critical multiplier matters.

P.S. Wish’s argument for valk vs. soldier, is that if you want to hit a specific EHP target, you can do so with Soldier’s and maintain higher DPS than if you reached the same EHP with Valkyrie. I.e. you use fewer Soldier’s pieces than Valkyrie to reach the same EHP.

The main issue I have with dagger mainhand is the lack of multi-target damage. Stx’s condition build spamming death blossom is one way of dealing with the issue, though that gimps auto-attack and backstab damage which is no fun at all.

A couple other options are:
-Keep shortbow on swap, and spam the 2 skill for big area damage
-Sword mainhand does multi-target damage on auto attack.

As for frustrating squishiness, I found that pistol offhand’s 5 skill basically lets you sit in the middle of a bunch of enemies and not get hit at all due to permanent area blind. Though of course with pistol offhand, you don’t get backstab at all. =(

I’m curious why you prefer mainhand sword for this trait setup?

I don’t really consider this a backstab build, as more than half the time I use D/P. I usually only switch to D/D when there’s 1-2 mobs left and they’re both blinded and already in melee range – so usually I only need enough for 1-2 backstabs.

I’ve actually switched my build to 0/30/0/15/25 for the extra damage, since in higher level maps the difference does matter somewhat. Sadly it means running a bit low on initiative (especially on D/D as you mentioned), but it’s worth the tradeoff since in the tougher/1 vs. many fights my usual tactic is to shadowstep in, burst a couple skills and dodge/withdraw back out before they can converge on me. At that point I’m looking to do max damage in a short time, and only need enough initiative for a couple big hits.

Hey, just posted my current build here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/PvE-solo-roamer-for-active-playstyle

D/P swap with D/D for super aggressive play – D/P for shadowstep/blind/daze and D/D when you find an opening for C&D/backstab that won’t leave you open to being clobbered. 15-20 in Acrobatics + Withdraw + Roll for Initiative (optional) to support all the evade you need to sustain a melee fight as a non-heavy berserker.

This is where I’ve landed so far – questions/comments/feedback welcome:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fYQQRAoa4YlYmiOXcS4E95Ex2jeuTe6pgsftTBXtKA-jwxAY/BRTQCNRIQJviox2GKiGruGT5SEVDA-e

First a couple disclaimers:
1) Not a WvW, PvP or Dungeon build. This is for running around killing world mobs, including vets/champs.
2) Built for extremely active playstyle – dodging, shadowstepping, weapon swapping and flanking like crazy. Full zerk, and damage mitigation is 100% active.

30 critical strikes is a no-brainer for damage output
15 in Trickery is mandatory to me for the initiative + fury.
15 in Acrobatics is mandatory to me for the endurance (almost 3 dodges in a row, with a 4th coming up quickly). Vigor-on-heal I’ll swap with might-on-dodge or 50% falling damage situationally, i.e. champ = vigor, trash = might, JP = falling. Combined with Withdraw, you can get almost 6 consecutive dodges.

The remaining 10 points I don’t really care where they go; I bumped up trickery/acro to 20 each because caltrops at 20 is great for battlefield control, and for the last 5 I figured extra vita/boon duration (fury/vigor uptime)/ini would be better than some % damage per ini (I burn ini like crazy in fights). I’ve also considered taking 10 in Shadow Arts for cheaper backstab, but found I don’t use backstab enough for it to make a difference.

I run around mostly with D/P and D/D, though I keep a shortbow in my pack for AOE burst in rare situations where 100 melee trash mobs are biting at my ankles. Caltrops really helps with that too. D/P is my main for spammable shadowstep/blind/AOE blind, and D/D occasionally for ridiculous burst using Cloak&dagger+backstab.

DP3 is especially useful with acrobatics 15 and withdraw, since you can literally be stabbing again as soon as you come out of the roll – it allows for very aggressive play. This is particularly useful against champions or groups of enemies, where you need to dodge frequent attacks and still want to keep DPS up. DP4 is also spammable, and good for interrupting big skills e.g. a golem’s laser beams. DP5 is strong vs. vets/silvers and big clusters of mobs, since they aren’t immune to perma-blind.

DD5/backstab is the highest DPS if a vet/champion is distracted by an NPC or other player, and also sometimes just fun for the 2-shot kill on trash. But I find that the lack of blinds and mobility tends to get me killed if I get DPS-greedy and stay on D/D for too long.

This build is obviously not optimized for max dungeon DPS, but it’s as high as you really need for world roaming and has extreme mobility, dodges and blinds which makes it great for just about anything a world map will throw at you.

A minor modification to improve dungeon DPS is to shift 5 points from Acrobatics to Trickery, and swap caltrops for flanking damage (net +20% damage modifier with flanking/high initiative).

Phira.3970:

I easily hit 11k as a mesmer on Slave Driver with Lightning Hammer on the 3rd combo of the chain. However, this is under 25 might, 25 vuln. (rather easy to achieve though with just two warriors) and scholar runes and Mantra set up (+4% damage per mantra). I only use Healing Mantra and Mantra of Pain for bossing (Signet of Inspiration not needed because we hit 25 might regardless) for total of +8% damage.

Also, you should not be on shatter spec. for CoF since the majority of damage comes from 1 spam. Going 30/10/0/0/30 rather than 30/30/0/0/10 will drop your crits by about 1-2k just for a small initial burst that doesn’t make up for the net damage. Rather than shattering, you should be maintaining those clones/illusions for +3% damage per clone trait and shattering only to finish the boss off.

My friend mesmer who wasn’t convinced of these differences.. well, he used Lightning Hammer on a shatter spec. and crit. for only 7k and he thought that was impressive.

As for the actual damage difference, I’ve already done the math. A Mesmer or Elementalist with Lightning Hammer slightly out damages the Axe chain auto chain. I also know this is true (tested many times) because whenever a GS Warrior leaves and is replaced by my friend Elementalist, our Slave Driver kill time drops dramatically by about 2 seconds.

Are you saying you’re hitting 11k per hit, or total for the full chain? Also, based on your last sentence I can’t figure out if you’re talking about GS dps, Axe dps or the optimized rotation using fast hands.

@Mystic: I don’t think the gems bought with cash come out of the pool.
Buy gems with cash = gems created out of nothing
Sell gems for gold => gems go into pool
Buy gems for gold => gems come out of pool
Use gems in gem store => gems disappear into nowhere

I’m not convinced on the ele/mesmer. 11k in 1 chain means you need to get 4 chains off in the space of one HB, and 2 chains off in the space of one WW. Might make up a bit of time during GS cooldown, but switching to axe keeps sustained damage up (+ tons of vulnerability) for 5 seconds, maybe 2 chains, before getting off another burst.

Interesting. That does sound like a more likely (and realistic) implementation with 2 reservoirs, though if you do away with 1 or both of the reservoirs you could theoretically have the system balance itself much more rapidly. I’ve been looking at the trends on spidy, and there’s definitely a constant trend upwards, even outside of releases of new items. I wonder if this is caused more by inflation, or more by that huge initial reservoir depleting at a slooooooow pace.

Sure, deflation. But keep in mind that large amounts of gold have already been farmed. The net result would be deflation, but proportionally to average total wealth instead of average common-folk wealth. In other words, rich people’s effective worth increases, poor people’s effective worth decreases.

So nerfing CoF doesn’t actually help anything. The core problem to be solved is that it’s so much better than everything else. Answer: Make everything else better. The end result is that other places become equally viable sources of income, without polarizing the economy.

Eh? Where can you get ascended back pieces for gold?

Has ArenaNet posted any official statement on how the gem exchange rates are calculated?

I can see the obvious correlations between new gem store items being released and big hikes in gold-to-gem prices, but I’m curious how the precise mechanics of it work.

At the most basic level, “supply vs. demand”, yes that is obvious. What’s trickier is that in an ordinary exchange, e.g. the TP or even real-world stock exchange, the current buy/sell prices are set by people who have declared intent to buy/sell at specific prices, and allowing others to fulfill at those rates if they want to buy/sell immediately.

In the gem exchange, there are only those who want to buy/sell immediately, and no mechanism for declaring intent, and therefore no natural way to define the going rates.

So, assuming (and yes this is a big assumption) that market supply is exclusively sourced from players buying gems with cash and selling them in the exchange, and demand is exclusively by volume of gems bought by players for gold, my best guess for how the gem exchange rate is set, is a system with the following components:
1) A large-ish ‘reservoir’ of gems
2) A current ‘exchange rate’ price
3) Some fixed tax applied when converting in either direction
4) An algorithm that slowly adjusts the exchange rate to attempt to balance the # of gems in the reservoir – so if it goes too low, the exchange rate would spike to compensate until the reservoir level went back up, or vice versa

Alternatively if the system allows for ‘printing’ of gems/gold and only tries to approximate a free market, dispose of the reservoir and just have an algorithm that changes the exchange rate until the buy/sell rates are roughly equal over a moving time window.

Or if we’re cynical and we think it’s driven purely by the business/marketing division at ArenaNet, just define an arbitrary exchange rate and hike it when cash gem sales are too low.

Any other theories or ideas on how this might work? (or published info)

In theoryland, I don’t think there’s more than a 0.5 second diff at acolytes. Both kill acolytes in 1 hit, so the only difference is the animation time. The rest is player based delay, i.e. being at the right spot at the right time and time to select/attack target. I would also make the point that it only matters how fast you kill 2 of the 4 acolytes, so neither Strife nor the Mesmer should have made a difference if the other teammates played optimally.

Milennin.4825:

Stooperdale.3560:

It is probably the COF1 farmers who drive the price of legendaries so high, out of the price range of players who don’t farm COF1 with speed runs.

That’s right.
People complain about precursors being too expensive, but then they proceed making the situation only worse by pumping huge amounts of money into the game by speedclearing the same dungeon over again.
Well, as soon as ArenaNet nerfs this amount of income, you’ll see the prices of precursors dropping. Assuming speedrunners don’t find the next thing that makes as much as CoF did.

+1 on inflation via gold farming. The better solution though, is either
a) Adjust the gold to loot ratio. Less gold, more/better loot.
b) Make it less stupidly unlikely to get a precursor out of the mystic forge.

bcd.4352:

I love reading threads about players soloing Lupicus, and then right below that, a thread about how he’s impossible for a 5 man team.

Hahaha was just thinking the same. But yeah, I’m proud of myself cause we beat lupi with 1 guy who’d run it like twice before, and 4 first timers, on path 1 xD

…

It may or may not have taken 6-8 hours…

The hardest part of path 2 is fending off the ascalonians. They spawn in 2 waves at each location, and if you fail to clear the first wave fast enough (and/or wipe), you end up with twice as many to deal with when you come back.

Technically GW2 is not supposed to be about farming. But with the crazy requirements for building a legendary…

tmakinen.1048:

After thinking about it for a while a simple solution would be to change the system as following:

Instead of the current recipe

4 x item -> 1 x item

with a probability of p for the resulting item being a precursor, make it as

4 x item -> precursor_shard (probability q) OR 1 x (non-precursor) item (probability 1 – q)

and make precursors available through the recipe

m x precursor_shard + fancy_stuff -> precursor (guaranteed)

By setting q / m = p the expectation value of a precursor stays the same as before. However, instead of an exponential distribution, the system now follows a binomial distribution, with a significantly smaller variance.

In simpler terms, it would be just like the system used for crafting mystic clovers. Can you imagine what it would be like if the only mystic clover recipe had a 1/250 chance of producing 77 clovers in one go, and 249/250 chance of producing random junk?

The suggested solution gives the system a coarse memory through the accumulation of shards, and cuts out worst excesses in both directions. In that system it’s still in average just as hard to get a precursor as before, but now that hardness is reasonably fair.

+1. Someone else made this suggestion earlier, but this post quantifies why it’s better.

I’d just like to point out a few facts.
1) If you’re “saving up” gold to buy a precursor, you’re contributing to high prices by adding demand without increasing supply of any kind.
2) Gold farming directly contributes to price inflation across the board.

The only reliable way for the community (obviously devs can do something about it too) to improve the situation is to focus on farming uniques/exotics via MF/dungeon tokens etc. to increase the supply of precursor “components”.

In other words, the supply of legendaries is gated by the number/effectiveness of people willing to farm the mats for building them.

To the original OP – yeah, timezone is the issue. Everyone in NA is asleep when you’re on. In fact, everyone’s asleep when I’m on too, cause I play after midnight on western time =(

For me, I personally like when I run into random stuff like this while questing. Maybe I’m a RP’er at heart.

You guys are doing it wrong. Just turn on your commander tag and watch other players swarm in and kill it for you

Another point I’d like to make is that the current event system is basically “NPC babysitting”. The mechanic is “players present = territory is gained, players absent = territory lost”. Totally lame, and makes it feel like a chore. Players’ presence should accelerate territory gained and slow territory loss, not be a forward/reverse gear switch.

One way to do this would be for event scaling to take into account “did players faceroll the last 3 events? maybe we should make the next one harder”, until eventually events start to fail even with player intervention, and the enemy takes back some territory. Similarly, if friendlies have been getting hammered, buff up the friendly NPC’s until they take back a bit of territory on their own.

>>[Vol] This happens to a lesser extent in the end-game zones.
Yeah it seems a bit better late game, but (a) events still repeat on a pretty short timer, unless you’re talking about Orr which I don’t have much experience with, and (b) unless players maintain presence, everything inevitably trends to a 100% contested state.

Krosslite – I don’t really know what gold sellers and teleporting harvesters has to do with dynamic events.

Prime time is an interesting point. But if a large-scale initiative takes place over the span of several hours, and there are a few major offensives/defensives happening at slightly randomized times throughout the 24 hour clock on each map, there should be content available to everyone. A worldwide chat, alert, or bulletin system would be helpful to improve player awareness of these events happening. The added benefit of this approach is it would encourage people to go to maps they don’t usually, which seems to be the point of the new map-based Daily achievements except in a less tedious/contrived way.

There are more than enough events happening across the world, that I rarely do more than 5-10% of them any day (I see tons of events that sit there stagnant for hours with nobody jumping in to do them). A stepping stone to the larger more epic event chains could be to just create some larger chains from the separate mini events, and expanding the “event discovery range” or having a bulletin. This would channel larger #’s of players to fewer points of interest, instead of players roaming around and solo-swatting mini events in the middle of nowhere.

Sucks I guess, but tbh do a 10 minute run of CoF and you’ll make back double what you just lost.

Could a mod move this to Suggestions?

Cool, didn’t know about these. I’ll be sure to check them out tonight.