Guild Wars 2

I got a few ascended drops from Tequatl (including the hoard) and Triple Trouble, and several pieces from T4 fractals, but you cannot get a full set in a reasonable amount of time. If you want it fast, you craft. Also, the first set cannot be obtained from T4 fractals anway, don’t know about WvW or PvP.

After the first set, it becomes much easier, you simply play and get the chests, then change stats and use them on an alt. However, even now I have four armor chests, a weapon chest and that Tequatl staff in my bank, I will probably craft gloves and helmet for my Elementalist because I don’t wait for the next drops (which could be shoulders or legs, who knows).

I haven’t kept track but although ascended armor is not raining down on people, I can imagine that people who do T4 dailies for a year+ already started salvaging ascended armor to make room in their bank/inventories.

For those that cannot devote 1h 30m+ to do the DS meta. You can enter DS any time and find a few pods. I tried and got 15 Crystalline Ore within 10 minutes or so, just running around looking for single pods. It’s really slow to get all the ore you need that way, but it’s an easy way if your character has high mobility. Just 10 to 15 minutes per day and you certainly have 100 in a week. Since the maps renew every 2 hours or so, this can be done multiple times per day. If you are lucky, you get into a map where the meta failed before and there are more pods.

That’s my solo build for most of the time I spend in GW2:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vZAQNAqaWl8MhSnYjTwwJw/EL/Em3QoN9Em/fFwH42YKA8fA-TRAXAAw+DAA-e

Berserker gear and Scholar runes, lightning and force sigils. Slice of Candied Dragon Roll as standard food, it’s cheap and makes life more relaxed. Most things you stumble over in the old maps die after one Unload + a single shot, you don’t even have to stop running. I picked Critical Ctrikes because the extra damage is quite visible in day to day play, since you are above 90% of your health most of the time. In a team, I change the traits of Trickery to Thrill of the Crime and Bountiful Theft.

When I mostly use staff, I substitute Practiced Tolerance for Ankle Shots. I also replace Trickery with Deadly Arts, since I don’t need that much Initiative in this case. In Deadly Arts I choose Mug, Revealed Training and Executioner. Also, for roaming around in PvE I use Unhindered Combatant. I basically never get away from it to be honest, which once in a while pushes me off a platform in fractals, but I love the distance covered by it so much. Must look kinda stupid though watching me walk into kitten and die. It must be used cautiously. It allows you to solo the consoles in Uncategorized and Aetherblade Fractals T4, love it.

Elite skill can also be Dagger Storm, if you face lots of trash mobs, but I find it more important to be ready to break a defiance bar. When I expect it, I also go for Fist Flurry instead of Shadowstep. I always keep Assassin’s and Agility Signets and only trigger the latter if I need just another Dash but ran out of endurance.

Being used to this build, the other classes I play feel so slow, in movement as well as in killing things.

JoMay.6485:

Nah, it should be free from a golem vendor, they r just expensive, no sense to put other golds for change stats.

From Golem vendor buy a +5+9 giving a different +5+9stats infusion.

Agreed, it’s hassle enough to remove the infusions from gear, change them and put them back in. The removal tool already costs money. I don’t see people changing 18 infusions regularly just for the 90 stat points they give. Probably only once in a lifetime.

sorudo.9054:

something legendary is forged or enchanted uniquely, it is something you can only get by hardship and mystery.
if ppl can just craft it it becomes just another weapon of power, nothing worth putting a legendary title on.

So who do you think should be able to get legendary weapons and who not? Or is it just about semantics and you are arguing that they should not be called “legendary”?

HeavyFerrum.5408:

After the last patch.

Just why?

As someone that not really reading patchnotes and developer posts i just dont know why.

So you are too lazy to read the patch notes but not to write this post and read the replies? I’m confused O_o

allart.3746:

But now to unlock elite specializations, which is a content I paid for when I bought this expansion, I’m forced to farm those kittenty hero points…

Weren’t hero/skill points always a thing in this game? Someone who bought GW1 had to go collect skill points to train things. You find the HP challenge, you kill someone/a group or commune. You can do the same in HoT maps, just find the spots, commune and get 10 points. I found it much more work to get Hero points in Tyria than in HoT, and even if you don’t kill a single champ, you can get enough for your elite spec. With my last character, I didn’t get a single hero point in Tyria, I used the L80 boost and got the HPs I need for the elite from HoT maps within an hour or so. It takes days or weeks to get that many points in Tyria.

No idea what you are complaining about.

If it is a worthless item, why is someone buying it?

Potatoes of Faith

true story bro

Cynz.9437:

Whole reason why i had to move to EU because they changed how teleports interact with high latency which results in teleport spells actually not teleporting you.

Now that’s what I call dedication, welcome to Europe!

I did the Bitterfrost Frontier “defend braziers” when I needed quick HoT XP. There are always Kodans who need help, and at some point in the rhythm several champs spawn. I also got lots of Unbound Magic that way.

Seera.5916:

DeanBB.4268:

Don’t forget that the one with the story step can ping the map/waypoints/poi’s to help guide the helper.

Or place a personal waypoint on the map. You can see the personal waypoints of party members.

Have a friend who occasionally plays that always manages to put a personal waypoint down accidentally.

For those who don’t know (and according to my experience in fractals that’s a lot of people), tagging your personal waypoint works by

alt + left click on the map

Others can see your waypoint. Would show up just like the green story marker.

You know, you don’t have to do Fractals every day. I usually do the T4 dailies, but not every day. They take about 40 minutes average, depending on the selection and the group, and I don’t bother doing this every day, especially if I don’t like the pick on a day. I’m not going to do them as a chore, this is a game, not work. If Snowblind is in the dailies and I’m tired of it, I just skip it. If only 1/3 T4 dailies looks like fun that day, I don’t do Fractals at all and spend my time elsewhere.

Don’t let the game or the random generator decide how you spend your time in it.

Yeah, I don’t get it really. Nothing to see here, move on. Everybody dies at a raid from time to time, doesn’t tell you anything about skill or experience. Maybe his kid climbed him and kicked his coffee over his keyboard, who knows. Been there done that.

Obtena.7952:

It’s actually not, because that’s how the game was originally conceived in the first place. You earn the gold, you buy the mats from the TP. In fact, that’s STILL the relevant approach; there are very few mats you can actually farm for in this game from the traditional MMO sense of the concept of farming.

When I started playing GW2, I tried to farm all materials for crafting myself because that’s how I used to do it. Soon I noticed that this is not the smart way in this game, and started using the trading post. There’s nothing wrong with it, and collecting all mats yourself drives you crazy. Imagine you had to find enough Maguuma Lilies or Freshwater Pearls for your project. Other people got them but don’t need them, so they sell. It makes a good part of what an MMO game is supposed to be in my opinion.

Btw. the Hardened Leather price seems to stabilize already at 22 to 23 silver, while Thick Leather just has the usual fluctuations, same with Silk Scraps. Why doesn’t get Thick Leather cheaper? My guess is that people started their postponed crafting projects and the demand has risen significantly. So much that the additional Thick Leather that the pony farm produces can’t keep up with it.

I also think people are hoarding hardened leather now, maybe because they don’t like the price it sells for. All the Bloodstone Hides that were bought right after the patch should have added to the flood of Hardened Leather too. Those Hides were set up with the expectation that 8% of them contain Hardened Leather, and the price was set according to that. When people noticed that they could buy the Hides cheaply and get leather at a 50% rate, the sales spiked. Shortly after the patch, the supply dropped from 13k to 300 and the price to more than 1g (I think someone or a small group of players quickly doubled their wealth here because they released the hides to the market for 12 silver average and bought for 6). However, thousands of hides must have been salvaged at that time, because people could buy them cheaply and sell the leather for good profit. And yet, the price drop for Heardened Leather is lower than I expected.

One thing I don’t quite understand is that the price for Hides is only twice as much now as before the patch. As far as I know, the drop rate before was 8% (hardened leather) and now it’s about 50%. The hides’ value should be 6 times higher than before.

If you buy 100 hides now for 12g and you get the expected 50 Hardened Leather (no thick leather), you can sell them for 11g. Sounds fair enough, and you make some profit because of the other stuff you get and if salvaging is cheap for you, the better. Why the heck did Hides cost 6 silver before when the drop rate was only 8%?? From 100 Hides for 6g you got only 8 Hardened leather that you could sell for 3g at best. What am I missing here? It would have been stupid to buy the Hides before the patch, who would have done that? There were 13k on the market, and if nobody bought, the price should have dropped. My guess is that I’m missing something, please enlighten me

Djinn.9245:

Faaris.8013:

Just making everything purchasable with gold will never happen.

Good thing I didn’t suggest that GW2 should do that.

Well, good thing I wasn’t replying to your post with my statement.

DeWolfe.2174:

We had a nice casual farming method to build up the Leather supply. Anyone who complained about that farm, should live with the consequences of a lower leather supply now.

But your casual semi-afk method didn’t make a difference in leather prices at all. The consequences you are talking about caused a price drop of 33% within a day. The supply is pretty constant anyway and seems to have no effect on prices.

Take a look at https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19732-hardened-leather-section

No idea what you are talking about really.

zealex.9410:

Draco not everyone is used to salt premades or other premade groups. Healers make mistakes carry little punishment. They always had so they always carry value now if you and your group are completely capable of doing content without it thats good on you but not everyone does.

Draco just soloes everything, and if that’s too easy, he switches out his keyboard’s binding, to get more of a challenge out of it.

Healers are also valuable for groups that can do the content without them. Not everything needs to be a speed run or perfectly meta. If I have to dodge less or heal myself less, that’s value for me. And even when we smash Old Tom without refreshing the fan, we always start it at the beginning. Could we skip that? Sure, but it doesn’t matter if the whole fractal takes 20 seconds longer that way. I’m not in a race or fleeing from something that I have to hurry that much, I’m playing a game.

mtpelion.4562:

Rates are applied at the time you open bags or salvage items. Can you imagine the ridiculous amount of unnecessary data that would need to be tracked if those things were determined upon drop and stored until opened/salvaged? The game’s servers would have melted within the first year!

Thinking about it, that would be ridiculous. In the worst case, someone loots only a couple of bags per day and has a stack that contains 100 different entries for their content, depending on several things, mabye even the current magic find rate, which can change depedning on the food or gear you wear (not sure if luck goes into opening these bags).

It is also quite ridiculous that people who hoarded bags now have a 50% chance to get heardened leather compared to the people who opened the same drops earlier. Hoarding should not be rewarded.

@Sublimatio: Sure, Illconceived didn’t mention collateral rewards from dungeons, but he also didn’t mention them for the L40 fractal. For every run you get 12 relics, and you have a chance for mists essences, ascended rings and ascended salvage tools to drop. Those give you matrices you can sell. You also get karma which can be turned into gold, and agony infusions.

I guess in the long run, the extra rewards from L40 Fractals are higher than for dungeons.

btw, for me, farming either content sounds more like work than playing.

Right now, we could add LD leather farm to the list of the best farms, but that might change when the leather prices drop even more. Yesterday, I made about 8 gold in 15 minutes there.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I presume the purpose of ddosing someone is to enjoy annoying as many people as possible.

A DDOS attack costs money. It’s supposed to hurt the organisation, not the people who visit thew website or log into a game. Even if the person/group that owns the botnet executes the attack, it takes resources they cannot otherwise use or sell.

Just making everything purchasable with gold will never happen. The problem is that gold can be bought with real money. And if the gem to gold exchange didn’t exist, we would have professional gold farmers/sellers. I won’t explain further why that would be a major problem.

If we could really trust that someone who has 2000 gold spent time and effort in the game to get it, then making everything purchasable might work. Such a system I would embrace, because it would be much closer to “play how you want” than anything we can find now. You would see someone with a legendary weapon and know that he’s not just a whale but did spend time and effort to get it.

What I would like to see is just more diversity. I have all items for Koutalophile except the Siege Commander’s Spoon. I never played WvW and have no plans on doing it in the near future, so I will not complete the collection. I don’t need the mastery point and the rewards are just a token, I would just like to finish this. All other spoons can be collected in the Open World and Fractals, and then they add this one that requires you to play a completely different game mode. Do they want to invite people to test out WvW that way? It’s not working, same as with the mini-games. I don’t try Microsoft’s Edge either because they set it as default browser after upgrading to Win10, and then ask you again if you really don’t want to try it after you already went to the option to change it. That’s not how you convince customers to test stuff out. If I went into WvW just for the spoon, it would probably give me a bad experience. I have nothing against WvW, will try it out on my own, when I think I want to do it, not because ArenaNet wants to force me into it.

@adventures aka mini-games: Being “forced” to do them is like ArenaNet asking you to play a console game to get something in GW2. Imagine they also created jump’n run games for browsers. Then, to promote them, they would tie GW2 stuff to their browser games, like “Please go to www.shootinggallery.com and get at least silver there. You will receive a code that you can enter at this console to unlock the Mastery Point/collection item.” I’ve played a browser game that gave you ingame currency if you tested out their other games that had nothing to do with the game you were actually playing. For me, this is the same as “Adventures”. I don’t want to play another game to get something in the game I want to play.

this is bugged……

Rauderi.8706:

Sell that hoarded overstock while you can, flippers!

It’s a nice short-term shock, but does anyone have initial data on the estimated new drop rate?

Not a flipper here, but that’s what I did after running through the pony farm for 15 minutes yesterday. Got about 26 hardened leather at a rate of about 50% (too small of a sample, I know) and decided that if I don’t sell my stash now, I’ll lose money. Poor people who set up buying orders for 30 silver and didn’t log in after the patch. When I logged in this morning, hardened leather sold for 20 silver. A price drop of 33% after only 10 hours.

Doing the farm again was a lot of fun, but there were so many people, one half could have switched to another instance. Even with high mobility, it was difficult to land hits. My guess is that the drop rate will be higher when the zerg size will be reasonable. Often, I couldn’t tag a pony, and still got those 26 leather pieces in 15 minutes.

I probably won’t farm there though. I rarely need hardened leather, and soon it will be so cheap that I’ll rather buy it. That farm requires constant attention, you can’t even park somewhere and get a drink from the fridge. It becomes stressful quickly.

Now, I wonder how it works with hoarded Bloodstone Hides. There are people who hoarded hundreds or thousands of those hides because they were too lazy to open that many manually, and don’t really need the stuff. Which drop rate will it be when they open them now? The old 8% or the new 50%? Is the content of bags calculated when you loot them, or when you open them?

Thanks for that mate, some people still haven’t noticed what Unload can do these days. Two days ago I was in a pug doing Chaos 99 and at the end boss, I switched from staff to double pistols when he was at 50%, because of that horrible pull. I don’t trust a pug to break the bar in time always, and one pull wipes all those 11,645 health my Thief has. I was still doing constant 7k dps (and were ready to kill the little golems), but that one guy started making fun of me. Like he has never seen a Thief using double pistols before at T4. He sounded like someone who plays this game for a long time, but lives a bit in the past. He couldn’t imagine pistols to be useful at all, and probably didn’t see the dps. I’m pretty sure that if I had used my staff, the difference in damage would be tiny (not even sure if it would actually deal more against the single target).

I hope your video helps those dinosaurs to realize that things have changed. It would be fun to see how fast those Molten guys go down if 5 double pistol power thieves do it. Let them port around, doesn’t bother my autotarget at all. When Molten Firestorm ports to the edge of his firestorm, it’s all ranged anyway. Don’t know what the dinosaurs would suggest as second weapon set, short bow? Haven’t used the short bow for months.

You didn’t even use life stealing food for this, could have given you a bit more health regeneration.

Kudos also to the dead guy who din’t leave because he has “better things to spend time on”. I hope you told them what you are going to do though, and didn’t just proceed when the pug died. I’ve poll kicked people for staying in the fight alone instead of resetting.

Bloodstone Fen Rubies is probably the only node worth buying. “BF” confused me for a moment because it’s also Bitterfrost Frontier, and buying the node for berries would be a waste.

Abakk.9176:

But i’m still new to this game and i’m sure i ain’t seen nothing yet ^^

Then you cannot know what a decent group with ascended berserker gear can do to a trampling horde of Centaurs. I don’t think we’ll ever see it though without incentives other than “challenge accepted”.

Obtena.7952:

They serve a market; if someone isn’t part of that market, then the player needs to make better choices about what games they play, not the company to try to placate that player with content they want.

But we are part of their market, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. We are not people who just started the game and already know how it could be better and suit our playstyle more. There’s a difference between your scenario and feedback from recurring customers. We are customers not in a traditional sense, we are players. We share the same hobby and feel like we belong to a club that we support financially to keep it running. Saying “just go play another game” ignores that and tries to push players out of the community, and it’s certainly not wise for a game company to say that to their players. There are cases where people’s expectations of the game differ so greatly from reality or the company’s vision that opting out is the best solution, but if players who generally love to spend time playing the game have suggestions and complaints, you better listen, and act where it makes sense.

My guess is that the rewards are not great enough to draw people to the event. Sounds like it’s as much “work” as Tequatl, but probably doesn’t give similar loot. Otherwise I would know about it, and this is the first time I learned about this event.

Also, are you certain that you have to use the trebuchets? I know of only few things in this game that cannot be killed by the sheer muscle power of a massive, determined zerg. Would love to see them Centaurs withstand a leather farm zerg like we used to see in Lake Doric before they removed the Centaur area from the game.

I’m sure if you get enough people, trebuchets are not needed.

Ayrilana.1396:

How are they legendary if all that you did was grind world bosses all day which requires little effort as you can semi-AFK them?

You ignore the part where I wrote that the devs need to make sure that the time and effort is similar to other ways of acquisition. This means that just semi-afking a World Boss would not get you closer to a legendary weapon. On the other hand, just exploring the world does that now, every newly discovered waypoint is a little step closer to a legendary weapon. You could literally just hit outorun in one direction and get XP and a tiny bit more world completion, that’s less effort than semi-afking a World Boss.

Ayrilana.1396:

Imagine me being able to get legendary weapons from just doing world bosses because that’s all that I want to do.

Why not? It’s just a question of how killing World Bosses would lead to a legendary weapon. Just having them drop is boring and too easy. World Bosses could drop specific items that are needed though, or achievements could be related to the acquisition. They could even time gate drops like they do with Legendary Insights in raids (for armor though). And material requirements don’t have to change because buying them or farming them is something that can be expected from everybody. Maybe add a challenge mote to World Bosses that triggers their spawn outside the normal schedule. Triple Trouble challenge mote would certainly be something a random pug couldn’t do.

There are ways to let people play the way they want, without diminishing the value of rewards. If World Bosses were a path to a legendary weapon, the devs needed to make sure that the effort and time spent on getting them equals the time and effort people spent on other paths of acquisition. It’s not even like that now, because the material part can be done by sheer monetary power (gems to gold) and some precursors can be bought on the trading post. And you don’t know what people did to get the precursor or the materials.

Draco.9480:

why would ya need a healer? better just take c druid. healer druids are basically leechers in fractals.

They do make a run much more relaxed. They are basically QoL assets, not “needed” ones. I always welcome a good druid who can out-heal Old Tom and the poison so you don’t have to spend time on activating the fan. I also stay close to them at Mai Trin’s or Molten Furnace’s bombardments. Even my thief can face-tank in fractals with a good druid.

LadyHawk.5319:

If you suddenly woke up one day and gas was $10/gal, you would of course think that was normal. Those of us who have been awake longer than you could tell you that price was not normal and why. That is the situation with the leather.

It’s about how we are anchored to a price. I already pay about $6/gal for gas, so yeah, $10 wouldn’t really shock me. I would probably enjoy the roads more than I do now because traffic is horrible. It would mean that I could drive to work instead of using the expensive public transport, because I could park my car in the city.

I won’t really compare this to paying for ascended armor though. I only had to pay the price for the armor once. It will last forever, I don’t have to pay gold to maintain it. the 510 gold were a one time fee. If they increased the fees for using waypoints though, that would really hurt everybody at all levels and times. Armor is not a consumable good, it should be expensive, even houses are not forever, that armor is.

I visited the Monastery in Queensdale again, this is the dialogue:

Abbey Brother: “Here’s a hint: apple peels. A couple handfuls in the keg give a light, fruity tone. Now ask no more!”
Sister Melea: “I wasn’t asking.”
Abbey Brother: “Good, good. Because my lips are airtight.”

Sister’s annoyed tone makes it for me. It’s clear that this was not the first stupid idea he presents to her.

Since I started playing this game in February, the leather prices are normal for me. I don’t remember how it was before because I simply wasn’t here. It’s not a topic I would start complaining about, and this will most likely be the case for most players who started after the changes to recipes were made. This means, the more time goes by and ArenaNet doesn’t change anything, the more people will consider this the normal situation. And to be honest, those who remember the old prices will sound like old people who will always remind you how cheap stuff was when they were young, forgetting that prices and incomes have risen in the last 30 years.

Would I like to have cheaper stuff? Sure I do, I always vote for cheaper stuff ^^

The reality though is that I was able to gear up three characters with ascended stuff in those 4½ months of playing the game. 2 x light and 1 x medium armor. One Zojja’s medium armor set is about 510 gold. In comparison, people get Nevermore that costs more than 2600 gold. I know that there are people who wear exotic armor but carry a legendary weapon.

There is a lot of wealth in the accounts, I think it’s just that people make different choices. They buy dyes, skins, commander tags for 300 gold, they craft ascended back packs etc. And no, I didn’t do dumb farming, like spending hours after hours with the Molten family, or Silverwastes treasure hunt or Lake Doric pony farm. I tried those to see if I can stand it, turned out I don’t want to spend my time doing that. I can do Molten Bosses 40 for an hour, then I need a break of several days from them.. I do T4 daily fractals though, they are fun, challenging and my main source of income.

I’m not rich and I don’t buy gold with gems, getting gold to craft ascended is no miracle in this game. As far as I know, the good old times when leather was cheap were also the times when people were happy about looting 10 silver from a mob. I can see the old rewards sometimes, for example with coin bags in Dungeons. I have to smile imagining that this was reallly good money for people years ago.

I don’t find it unreasonable to pay 510 gold to craft a full medium ascended armor set. It’s not like you are doing it within 2 or 3 days anyway as new player. I think I did one piece every week, for the first set. 10 gold per day, that’s it, if you don’t get materials from farming at all and buy everything from the TP. Maxing the craft from 0 to 500 might have cost 30 gold because I got so much of the lower tier meterials from levelling my character to 80 and just playing the game.

That is my current stance towards leather prices, after reflecting on my own experience as a player with light/medium armor classes and playing since February.

FrostDraco never addressed the suggestion to use instances. I wonder why. There are fractals with very different boss encounters he could fight over and over again, alone. You can even /gg when the boss is at 2% and start over again without having to fight trash mobs again.

So, why are you ignoring the suggestions? You are in a situation where there are things you can influence and things you have no power over. You choose the situation you have no power over and that frustrates you.

Also, maybe you should stop insulting people. If you act in the game like you act here, I can see why people aren’t going away. If you talked to me like that ingame at a champ, I might postpone everything I was planning to do and stay there to kill all the champs you engage.

Just tell the group that you are new to fractals, and don’t try to wing it. This weekend, I had a pug member who carried one of the rocks in Molten Furnace to the steam curtain instead of putting it on the steam hole in the cave. Took us some time to figure out what happened to the rock. If I know that people new to a fractal are in the group, I give explanations without being asked specifically. Mostly people cannot ask specific questions because they don’t know the encounter. When people died at the shock waves (T2 btw), I told them to jump over them. That was enough to make it work the next time.

Also, know your class. I asked the guardian to equip his reflects because people were also dying at the fireballs, but he never used a single shield. He probably didn’t know what to do, and I never played Guardian, so I don’t know the names of those skills (Sanctuary and Wall of Reflection?). I do know that a guardian dying because of projectiles is a bad guardian though.

Just don’t try to get carried. That works if you have at least two people in the team who can carry. In T1 and T2, chances are that 4 people try to get carried, or even everybody in the party. Be honest about your experience and most people will be happy to explain, even if it costs a few minutes. It’s still faster than getting wiped several times because people try to wing it.

IndigoSundown.5419:

So, we went from an open acquisition progression system to a combined open/closed system.

Good point, never saw it that way, probably because I wasn’t here when masteries were implemented. If the idea was indeed to add something similar to levelling, but without XP and linear progress, then the current system is definitely more closed than simple XP-levelling. You get XP for everything you do, the game doesn’t force your to go “out of your way”. You can even level up without killing things, or without doing quests. If you really wanted to spend the time, you could level a character to 80 by harvesting plants and do nothing else. Well, getting to the plants would also give you XP via exploration.

Although I really like the mastery system, and much prefer it over usual levelling and simply increasing max level with every expansion, it certainly is a different approach to force players into content they don’t like.

And please don’t discuss the word “forced” anymore, of course you could just opt out, so it’s not really forced in this sense. Most people here use “forced” like in “if you want to get Tequatl’s Hoard, you are forced to participate in the event.” Because there is no other way to get it.

Not saying that it’s good or bad, but the mastery system is more closed than usual levelling. It also makes it more special. After some time playing, every character will reach level 80, but you can play for years without making it to 186 mastery points. You don’t see how a character got to level 80, could have just logged in every day and used tomes of knowledge all the way, or the boost. When you see a 186, you know this player had at least one raid kill, knows his way around HoT and fractals, and spent a lot of time actively playing the game.

Endless Soul.5178:

I can’t think of any items found in the world. Usually what hakes me smile is various NPC dialog, like these two standing near Swift Arrow in Caledon Forest.

Hayato: Here’s an idea: let’s knock on the humongous gate door, then hide and see what they do when they open up and no one’s there.

Caromi Scout: Please don’t talk to me for the remainder of the shift.

Ah yes, there is also a dialogue in the Monastery in Queensdale between a man and a women that also ends like this, don’t remember the exact words. Will check when I can log in.

I always smile when I stumble over Scout Acan in Verdant Brink playing the lute. Well done addition.

Offair.2563:

Most achievements that give mastery points are just ones you get done by normal play. Like completing a chain event or whacking up some champ/legendary bosses.

Yes, good example is Dragon’s Stand. The first time I participated in the meta, I got 7 Mastery Points, without leaving the meta event chain or doing something special. I knew that putting on that exalted armor gives a point though, would not have done that by chance. I disagree that this goes for most points though. Seeking an adventure or gliding a specific path, and hitting stealth at the right times, ore doing some JP is not something that happens simply by playing the game. I’m pretty sure nobody has ever reached 186 without specifically looking for MPs.

azizul.8469:

people are just lazy and expect to be spoon fed and handed everything….. “i want this but i don’t want to do the requirement for it” kitten….

This is a funny post because obviously, you were too lazy to read the posts in this thread, and instead relied on the impression you got from reading the title. And then you were too lazy to address any specific points people made. Your post could have been copied from some other, completely unrelated thread, and maybe you did just that. I was curious and checked for posts you made that just call people lazy, and there are quite a few. Most of your posts are one-liners anyway, and you almost never address any specifics. Maybe you are the lazy one here?

As for me, I got all the mastery points to get to 186, and so did others here who don’t like adventures. We are clearly not lazy, we just express our unhappiness about content that we think has nothing to do with MMO games but still contains a lot of mastery points.

I would go ahead and use it. You get really nice armor, trinkets and weapons for a Reaper with Rabid stats: Condition Damage, Precision, Toughness. The upgrade slots are filled with other condition boosting items. They really did a decent job with the selection. It’s a shame that these items cannot be used in the forge or stripped off or salvaged. I destroyed all of them after gearing up my Reaper. But you can safely play with this setup and do well.

The game is much more fun after level 80, when you can get gliding. I went ahead and started the HoT episode for gliding just for that, then went back to the main story line.

I don’t understand the logic behind levelling a character first because you cannot reroll a boosted one. You also cannot reroll a manually levelled character either. If you first use the booster and don’t like the class, you level another class to 80. If you level a class to 80 and then don’t like it, you can use the booster. In any case, you have levelled one character and used the booster for another, just in different order.

If you use the booster first, and then don’t like the class, you can at least get access to fun masteries like gliding, and then enjoy levelling another class more. Also, you can get gold more easily using a maxed out character, which makes getting stuff for the character you are levelling more convenient.

As for learning the game, you can do that with a level 80 character just as while levelling. You’ll explore and do hearts and events anyway, if not for fun, then for hero points.

Vayne.8563:

It doesn’t really matter if players have 186 ore 147, as long as they masteries allow them to do what they need to do in the game.

costepj.5120:

But that’s ignoring the fact that the additional masteries are only required for S3 maps. If you haven’t unlocked S3 why would you care about lava tubes and oakheart essences?

For me, that sounds weird, but sure, my idea of playing might be different from what most people consider fun. From a pragmatic point of view, you are both right. You don’t need fractal/raid/S3 masteries if you don’t play the content. But having a “186” at your name tag does make a difference in how others treat you and it feels “complete”. And it was so much fun when I saw that XP bar moving again when I hit 186. It’s not logical, because you only get a spirit shard each time you fill up the bar, but the feeling is nice. And we are not playing the game out of logical reasons, like in real life, we want things we don’t necessarily need.

Taking that to an extreme, which masteries are really needed? If you don’t plan on getting a legendary weapon, you don’t need the masteries. No fractals, raids or Season 3, no need for the masteries. Even if you bought LW S3 episode 5 but don’t like Draconis Mons much and only visit it to get an ascended trinket, the mastery doesn’t make much sense. To be honest, I rarely play there, and not always use the spiderman mastery.

If you follow that line of thinking to an extreme, we could probably say that most people actively use only maybe 20 mastery points playing the game. Everything in the Pact Commander line is useless to me except auto-loot. I basically never use anything Exalted Lore offers, and Auric Silver has no value. I could go on with that, but the truth for me is that I still wanted that 186, simply because completing things is fun.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You really think the majority of players are from within the last week or so?

How do you come to that conclusion?

I wrote: “For a majority of players, there is no way to avoid Adventures if they want to max out the masteries.”

I didn’t say that because of LW S3, but mainly because of raids and MPs that come from collections or other challenges that take a long time or a lot of luck. But there is still some truth in adding LW S3 to the list of things many players cannot do. I’m not thinking about the people who joined within the last week, but those who join in the future. Everybody who starts GW2 now has an even mkore difficult time to max masteries if he doesn’t buy the S3 episodes. This adventure thing doesn’t only affect existing players, but more so those who will join the game. It affected me when I joined 4 months ago because I didn’t get the first 3 episodes for free.

Vayne.8563:

Anet has gone the other route, adding more points in new zones than are needed to get the masteries in those zones. As time goes on you need to depend, for example, less and less on adventures, because there’s more masteries points to choose from.

30 of 185 HoT Mastery Points are coming adventures. 53 are from Raids and LW S3. Not everybody purchases LW S3 and even less people can get the points from raids. For a majority of players, there is no way to avoid Adventures if they want to max out the masteries. You need 137 HoT Mastery Points to do that.

Even if you get gold in all Adventures, all communes/strongboxes and even do all collections and crazy JPs, you still have to either do raids or purchase an episode LW S3.

It is not easy to max out masteries, that’s why we see much more players with 140 to 170 or less MPs than with 186. On the other hand we see much more characters at level 80 than <80, because maxing your character level is indeed easy. The surplus points in the new zones are a step into the right direction, but 30 points from adventures is a lot.

Endless Soul.5178:

I’ll never understand why people run away from them when aggroed.

Because of low dps

notebene.3190:

The mermaid will be wearing a trenchcoat™.

I don’t see why you are sarcastic about it, it should be obvious that fish should recognize a mermaid class from distance, and the trenchcoat silhouette allows that.

If I see someone fighting a hero point champ or any other mob that drops good loot, I don’t care if he gets the hero points or if he can make it alone, I just weigh the required effort on my side and the reward. If I can land a few bullets I get the loot, that’s it.

Since there is no kill stealing in this game, I think it’s not a game breaker. It’s more a problem at events like Triple Trouble. You will always have random people showing up who can cause the event to fail. The group cannot book a map for its members and restrict access to it. gw2community usually tries to create a new instance by mass porting, and in theory, this map should be full then, and only a taxi can bring more people to it. But even that doesn’t keep randoms from joining.

Open World is not instanced, that’s a fact we have to live with. For testing builds, fractals are great.

I am at Mastery level 186 and I have no Mastery Points left…

In a year, I can probably say the same thing Pax says, that I have X surplus points. Simply because the longer you play, the more of those points you will eventually get. I never met any legendary in The Silverwastes, but by simply playing the game, I will eventually kill them all and that’s another 5 Tyria points. I might even get bored and collect the coins there for another one, or finish a collection.

Same in HoT, maybe one day I play in Tangled Depths someone calls out to do Regurgicidal or kill the Chak Driver and I join and get the Mastery Points.

Then, like Pax, I could post here how easy it was and that there should be enough.

My point is: there are enough points if you play long enough. It’s much more difficult when you start levelling the masteries. I had to explicitly go for Mastery Points to get to 186. After getting all the easy ones, communes and strongboxes, I spent time researching what I have to do to get more. I don’t think I would have maxed the Tyria line without LW Season 2 either. You cannot simply play in The Silverwastes for a few days and expect to get all the points there, the legendaries are basically time gated.

And I am not alone with that, I spoke with people who also struggled to get the last points. But of course, several months later, they have more than necessary. If you want to max your masteries within a reasonable time, it’s difficult and you need to plan what you are doing. If you just play for 3 or 4 years, you will eventually get more than enough and think it was easy. The hard part is to do it without having to play for 3 years.

It took me about 3½ months from the day I started with this game to get to 186. If those points were as abundant as the posters before me want to make us believe, we would see many more players with level 186.

Yes, I would like to see more normal clothing/armor. I’m not a fan of spikes and pompous armor at all. I previewed all outfits I could find, and there is nothing I would put on my characters, except maybe once for fun.

But maybe I’m just weird, I also wouldn’t wear helmets that hide my characters’ faces. I didn’t spend time creating them to just cover them up. Same goes with bodies, you can choose to play a muscled, curved or thin character, or add tattoos. Full body armor hides all that.