Guild Wars 2

PaybackPrahl.3192:

I chose to roll with Artificer and Tailoring (I play a Mesmer). I gather or harvest at pretty much every node I come across, and keep the vast majority of fine crafting mats that drop randomly. I head to the crafting station whenever I stop by a city or settlement that has one and – lo and behold! – I never have the requisite materials to make even the most basic items.

You are not going to have materials for Tailoring from gathering or harvesting. You get cloth from salvaging items, so you need a Salvaging Kit and then salvage cloth items you get from monsters.

Regardless, you should be able to craft some items by now. Have you noticed that you can’t just craft, say, a staff, but rather you need to craft two staff parts and then craft a staff? If you have been gathering wood and killing monsters, you should have at least enough wood and Vials of Weak Blood to make some weapons.

Thank you very much for such an amazing guide. I’m very happy to see how you added the entire information at a single place (what the skills do, what the traits do, and so on) – of course someone is not going to read this while playing the game, and it’s better to have all information here and keep changing tab to read skill descriptions at the wiki.

A very useful and detailed read, thanks :-)

When trying to do jumping puzzle with a new character, I noticed I kept failing a jump I could easily do with a different character. Eventually, it hit me – the previous character had equipped a signet that gives a 10% speed boost, and that boost was enough to make the jump far easier.

Later, I noticed people using Swiftness to make some jumping puzzles easier, since the faster you are moving, the bigger your jump. Same logic as above.

Finally, I have seen a few players using Leap skills to help in jumping puzzles. Skills that make the character leap are often a safer way to jump, and they have a range bigger than anything our characters cam usually.

My question, to both ArenaNet and the community, is: are those things exploits or not? There are three questions here:

a) Is using a minor speed booster, like the +10% speed signets, to make a jumping puzzle easier, an exploit?

b) Is using Swiftness to make jumping puzzles easier an exploit?

c) Is using leap skills to make jumping puzzles easier an exploit?

I’m very happy face to face trading and cash-on-delivery mailing are not in the game. The Trading House is considerably harder to use as a way to exploit other people or as a way to play the market; not to mention how it removes the WTS spam from the game.

This was a great idea, and I hope ArenaNet sticks with it.

I like the idea behind Legendary items, and I’m happy to see that the majority of ingredients don’t really require people to grind, just to play the game normally (or grind if you want them RIGHT NOW). However, there is one thing that annoys me: Legendaries give an incentive for people to play mostly one character, instead of playing equally between multiple characters.

I think that something that takes as much effort to be done with multiple characters as to be done with a single character should give the same reward for both playstyles. Currently, some of the ingredients required for Legendaries don’t follow this idea. For example:

• Obsidian Shards are soulbound. A Legendary requires 250 of them, and they only available by being bought with Karma, at 2.100 for each. In other words, this ingredient requires someone to earn 525.000 Karma with a single character. Since it’s not really easier to get Karma by playing with multiple characters, as opposed to playing with a single character, players who use multiple characters are punished here – they would need to play a lot with a single character to get the Karma for the Shards. ArenaNet could have fixed this by making the Obsidian Shards account bound instead of soulbound, but for some reason they chose to not do so.
• Dungeon tokens are soulbound, not account bound. Since Legendaries usually require 500 of a given dungeon token, this means they require someone to play with the same character multiple times through the same dungeon. Someone who plays with multiple characters is going to end at a loss, even if it’s as hard to do a dungeon’s explorable mode multiple times with a single character as opposed to with multiple characters.
• Map completition is linked to a single character, as well. I have explored the Charr lands with my Charr, the Norn lands with my Norn, and etc. This is as hard as exploring those areas with the same character, yet 100% map completition with a single character rewards two Gifts of Exploration, required for Legendaries; meanwhile, doing the same thing – exploring the entire world – with multiple characters doesn’t give that kind of reward.

Is someone else bothered by this, or am I alone in this concern?

DrakeWurrum.6049:

Except it’s supposed to be able to scale with those incredible numbers. I’m perfectly happy doing an event with 50 random people, I just don’t want the event to fall over entirely because we’re 50 random people.

It doesn’t. ArenaNet has stated that most events scale up to 10 players, and a few big events like the Shatterer scale to up to 100 players.

Everything you see as a Zerg is an event made too easy since it was not made to deal with that many players. Considering how it’s likely that we will only have that many people playing in the same area during release and a few weeks after that, the limits of the current scalling aren’t a problem, IMO.

Most DEs are too easy, though. This is a big issue – if all events are eternally at the most favorable outcome, players won’t be in a dynamic world – players will just be fighting the same enemies over and over while keeping the same status quo. Someone at GW2Guru claimed that a dynamic event should become more difficult the more it has been successful, which IMO is a great idea. So the “Defend the village from centaurs” event would be easy… The first time. The third time players manage to succeed when doing it, the next attack would be so big that it would be almost impossible for players to win, “forcing” the world to change so players actually see how dynamic the events can be.

The GW2Guru community managed to make a guide about how to craft Legendary items, as seen here. It’s quite an accomplishment that the recipe has been discovered so soon, so check it out.

delcore.2078:

So far, I have 2 out of the 4 components needed to forge such a sword.

I have the greatsword, Dawn.
I have the gift of metal. – 250 Ori Ingots, 250 Mithril Ingots, 250 Platinum Ingots, 250 Darksteel Ingots.

I also need to craft the gift of light.

Ah… You are going to need A LOT more than that, probably. There is a very interesting topic about Twilight, Sunrise’s twin, here (in GW2Guru). For now, the current consensus is that Twilight requires:

• The exotic greatsword, Dust
• Gift of Darkness
• Something made with the combination of Gift of Battle, Bloodstone Shard, Obsidian Shards x 250 and Gift of Exploration
• Something made with the combination of Gift of Metal, Mystic Clover, Icy Runestone and one more item

Sunrise will likely require a very similar combination of very hard to acquire items.

In Diessa Plateau, there is an event called Defeat the giant assaulting the Town of Nageling. It’s an event in which a giant (you may remember it from one of the GW2 trailers) is attacking a town, and killing all the NPCs who live in said town.

I really, really hate this event.

Because:

a) There is a single enemy in the entire event. In other big bosses, we fight the boss and some smaller minions. In this case, there is only the big giant, nothing else. The problem with this is that, if a player dies, he is not going to be able to kill the giant and rally; and there is no other enemy nearby for the player to kill, so he will just go to defeated mode. Someone could ask, “And why doesn’t someone just revive the poor guy?”. Simple:

b) The giant is mostly a one trick pony. Once in a while he throws rocks, but it’s very once in a while so it doesn’t really matter. He can Fear people with a very cool looking attack, but it doesn’t really make much of a difference if he makes people run away from him for 2 seconds. And he was a ground stomp that kills everyone around him in a single strike. His only dangerous attack in this stomp, which is rather relevant since it instantly kill people. Now, this isn’t very interesting – if you know about this attack, it’s very easy to avoid it by staying slightly beyond its range (it’s slightly less than a 900 range) and just attack the giant over and over; all his other attacks are insignificant. In other hand, melee characters who try to get close to the giant will die, and will be defeated – the stomp attack is used so often that it cannot be dodged more than two times in a row, and the interval between stomp attacks is shorter than the time it makes to revive someone. Since there is no other enemy to kill and thus rally, a player who is downed by the stomp attack will pretty much be defeated.

c) The giant has a very, very big health pool. It takes so long to kill him that I often see people asking where is the chest after he has been defeated, thinking he was a world boss like the Shatterer.

The result: fighting this giant is a matter of staying at 900 range spamming attacks over and over. No other strategy required, other than feeling bad for people who get too close to him. And it takes a considerable time for the giant to die, so it’s a lot of attacks to be spammed.

IMO, this is the worst Dynamic Event I have seen in the game. It needs to be more threatening, the giant needs to be less predictable and less of a one-trick pony, there should be more enemies so a downed player can rally, and so on.

What do you people think? Do you like this event?

Right now, Metacritic shows 28 reviews for Guild Wars, with the very positive aggregated score of 92 out of 100. All but one review give the game a score of 9 or higher, and the lowest score is still a positive 8.5.

This isn’t a sign of quality, of course – the best sign of quality is playing the game so you can see it by yourself. It is, however, a great achievement for ArenaNet – to see how critics were uniformly happy with the game.

I really like the concept of not having to rely on luck in order to get a reward or not. The fact that dungeon rewards are not random drops from dungeon bosses, but rather a reward for a specific amount of dungeon tokens that are earned in a specific number after dungeon completition, is great.

However, the current system requires players to grind. The issue with grind (as in, doing content that someone does not enjoy doing over and over in order to get a reward) is that, while it increases the longevity of the game, it is simply bad game design. Requiring players to run a dungeon 6 times or 9 times to get a full armor set would be fine – that would mean playing each path 2 or 3 times, which would be ok. Multiplying those numbers by ten, though…

I have a suggestion to fix this beyond the simple “reduce the token cost of armor pieces”. During the last Beta Weekend Events, the dungeon armors were available in two varieties: a 80 level, more expensive set; and a low level, cheaper set. The cheaper set would be a way to acquire the armor skin, but without the stats; however, using the skin would actually require players to use the level 80 transmutation stones. Those are available from many sources, including the Gem Store.

My suggestion, then, has two steps:

1) Make the level 80 transmutation stones to be significantly less common in the world. Don’t make them rewards for area completition or for anything other than opening Black Lion Chests. This way, other than opening the chests, the only reliable way to get them would be buying those stones from the in-game store.

2) Return the low level dungeon armors to the dungeon merchants.

This way, a player who wants to have a dungeon armor with maxed stats has two options:

a) Grind as many tokens as people have to grind today and buy the 80 level armor set, which would keep the exact same price as those sets currently have.

b) Grind less and buy the low level armor… And, buy or craft level 80 armor, and then use the level 80 transmutation stones to move the skin from the low level dungeon armor to the high level armor. Since level 80 transmutation stones would only be available reliably from the Gem Store, this means more people would buy gems, which would give a higher profit to ArenaNet.

This is significantly more subtle than just reducing the price of the dungeon armors, would make players grind less, and would hopefully make more people buy gems. A win/win situation.

LinseyMurdock.4165:

Agreed. They should be Account Bound. I’m looking at getting a fix for this into an upcoming build.

Thanks, Linsey! It’s great to know they will eventually become account bound.

The Grenade Kit works very differently over and under water. On the ground, all skills are “aimed” skills – we get an area of effect marker we can place where we want the grenades to drop. Underwater, in other hand, there is no “aimed” skill – using a grenade throws it at your target, hitting it and any nearby enemy.

What of those two do you people like the most? Do you think the Grenade Kit should be changed to work underwater like it works on the groud? That it should be changed to work on the ground as it does underwater? Or is it fine as it currently is?

Thanks to the entire ArenaNet team for making an awesome game. It was a huge bet, and I’m very happy it worked :-)

This is a minor issue, but it greatly bothers me. During the Headstart, recipes bought from Karma merchants were account bound, which was great – I could buy a Weaponsmith recipe with a Sylvari character in the Brisban Wildlands and send it to my human character at Queensdale so she could actually craft it.

Now, when browsing Karma merchants there is no mention of the recipes being soulbound, but after buying them the recipe can only be used by the character who bought it. It’s very slightly disruptive to gameplay – “Nice, this Karma merchant is offering an Armorsmith recipe, I’ll log off this character, bring my other character who actually has Armorsmith here, and fill this Heart again so I can craft this thing”.

I guess this change was made in order to fix some kind of exploit, but does someone know exactly what happened? Are the Karma recipes soulbound for good, or is this a temporary thing?

I don’t know exactly what the bug here is, but it’s one out of two. Recipes sold by Karma merchants are now soulbound on acquire; I remember this wasn’t the case right after release, so I guess it was changed. The thing is, the tooltip when buying the recipes from the Karma vendors do not state they are soulbound, which has led me to waste quite a bit of Karma.

So the bug is either:

1) Recipes from Karma merchants are not meant to be soulbound, but are.

OR:

2) Recipes from Karma merchants are meant to be soulbound, but their tooltips are not saying so right now.

Of course, I would prefer if the first option were the correct one, but regardless, something is wrong. For an example, see the “Recipe: Match Grade Standard Rifle” recipe being sold by a Karma Merchant in Kessex Hills.