Guild Wars 2

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

I will recommend a YouTube to get you all the way through. She does excellent videos on puzzles such as this one. Here’s the Video for the long JP. Just follow along and pause it bit by bit. I’ve gotten through a lot of puzzles with her videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRYYHUNXK64

I second this. AyinMaiden does a fantastic job on creating those videos. Gets to the point, doesn’t chit chat about random stuff, no bad music that you have to tune down, doesn’t stop to pick flowers or fights, so you don’t have to fast forward. There’s a video in the front page list on my Youtube where someone needs 29 minutes to walk through that JP, Ayin does it in 18. Just pause when you need to, the puzzle took me about an hour or so.

Mystogan.4157:

You couldnt be more wrong. The thiefs ult is for insta stomping. You dont need the weapon to use it. I use s/d and i use the ult to quickly turn a 2v1 in to an instant 1v1. nO STAFF needed, the staff is a one trick pony too. The gs for reaper is for dps and control, axe is ranged and applies alot of vuln, focus helps dps. If your mad about no gs just switch d/wh, youll just have less life force regen. You dont need your new weapon to becone viable. And every class has options to go condition and power. Dont be so narrow minded. Also if your going condi and use gs, your doing it wrong

I know that you don’t need the elite weapon to use the elite trait line. Although, the extra 10% damage from Staff Master as Daredevil make a difference. Every thief I see in fractals uses staff + X, mostly double pistols. Nobody uses sword or dagger in fractals. What is the scenario in fractals where you need to turn a 2 vs 1 into a 1 vs 1 anyway? How does your S/D combination do against the hordes in Urban Battleground or in the Underground fractal? Staff is clearly superior in fractals.

I’m not sure I can trust your judgement about necro Greatsword either, since you are using S/D with thief in fractals. qtfy.eu put a condition reaper build up with Greatsword btw.

http://qtfy.eu/build/Necromancer

So apparently those people do it wrong too, according to your judgement.

I’m new to Necromancer and just gearing up mine. I decided to go for the condition build simply because my main character is a power thief, and I really doubt that power necro could compete with that. I already now how it feels to go full berserker and how much damage you can hand out, and for my necro, going for conditions really seems appropriate. It’s the classic damage source for this class in my experience, and for a power-based character, other classes are better. Necro has so many skills and traits that use conditions, won’t they become less useful if you build a power-reaper?

As I said, I’m new to necro, but that build Mystogan posted has the Reaper elite traited but no Greatsword equipped. Coming from thief, that looks weird to me, since thief’s elite is only really useful if you equip the weapon for it, in this case staff.

Menadena.7482:

If you are not in a rush buy each of the LS3 home instance nodes and some unbound magic gathering tools (or the unlimited ones). Then do your home instance daily and go forth and gather/mine/lumber whatever out in the world. Every month to 6 weeks you will have enough things to go turn in for some ascended goodies.

Now, I wonder why in every thread that asks about ascended trinkets, someone posts this generic answer. The OP specifically said “I want to hurry up and finish out my viper’s set.”

So the quesion if themillwater is in a rush has already been answered. Waiting up to 8 months to get all trinkets obviously is out of question.

Then, how efficient is it really to purchase the nodes for your home instance and only collect the currency from them? One of these nodes costs 50 gold and 10k Unbound Magic. That’s a lot of gold and UM for three nodes. You first have to get those 30k UM, even if you have 150 gold in your wallet that you don’t need for anything else.

I never visit my home instance, have no reason to be there every day. Some roleplayers might port to it before they log off because their character lives there. So for me, the question would be porting to my home instance or to the Skritt area in Ember Bay to get Petrified Wood. There are 3 nodes very close to the waypoint, so I don’t see why I should spend 10k UM and 50 gold on a home node. I can get more than 30 wood in Ember Bay by doing the events and collect the nodes. 3 logs from a home node really make no difference, unless you take a really long term perspective. It’s just not worth the gold and UM.

It’s even worse with Winterberris. You just port to the area and pick the next bush and have 3 berries. I think you can collect about 60 there within 20 minutes. Porting to the home instance for 3 berries is a waste of time, not to mention another 50 gold and 10k UM.

I strongly believe for the majority of players, getting the nodes is not an efficient and cheap way to go for ascended trinkets, and yet, I see this recommendation every time the topic arises. And nobody who suggests it mentions the price for the nodes.

Nyx.6532:

Then I look at what that would get me in gold. Anet will sell me roughly 600gold for that price, that is actually far more than my char has on him and even at a 4g/h ratio (which from what I read is pretty high income grind) it is 150hours of grind.

There is No Way in hell the living stories will ever even come close to making or opening something worth 600g.

But why are you looking at what this would get you in gold? I don’t understand your motivation here. Why does it matter to you how much gold you could buy withg gems if you want to play the LW seasons?

I’m trying to understand what you are writing, but it’s really difficult, maybe you can word your sentences a bit more clearly? What has all this to do with gold sellers?

You seem to treat content as investment of your money that needs to have a monetary return. You think that if you invest 600 gold / 25€ in the LW seasons, these seasons should yield you at least an equivalent value in gold/€.

But that’s not how paying money for entertainment works at all. You’ll never get real money back if you buy gems for gold, unless you become a blackmarket goldseller yourself.

If you rather work 2 more hours in your job than playing GW2 for 30 hours, then go ahead and do that.

Maybe you can clarify for yourself and for us why you are playing a game in general? That is an important question that everybody who spends a significant amount of time on something needs to answer for themselves. I guess most of us play for the entertainment, just like we do other things that give us joy. I never get my money back in a monetary way when I buy a ticket to watch a movie or when I go to an entertainment park. I get something for my money that I apparently value higher: entertainment, fun.

If you can make money with it, great! I think a few people can do that, like dulfy with his Youtube channel. But most of the time, people cannot turn their hobby into a business. We pay with time/money, and get entertainment in return. If we start to value the entertainment less than before, we might change the way we spend money on it. If I started thinking that all the movies in the cinema are crap nowadays, I might decide to stop spending money on it. But saying that I don’t want to spend money on cinema tickets because I don’t get a monetary return on investment makes no sense at all. That’s not what I expcted in the first place.

Just like that, I play GW2 to enjoy the content, and when I purchased the LW seasons, my main question was: will it give me enough hours of fun for the money? The second question was how hard I want the Tyria Mastery points ^^

If LW S2 could be played within 3 hours, that would have been too expensive to bother. But I spend much more of my freetime in it, enough that the price per hour became really insignificant, much less than I pay for one hour at the movies.

tl;dr: Answer yourself the question why you play an MMO, then decide if you consider money spent on it lost or invested in entertainment and fun.

Linken.6345:

Yea and you dont have to type at all for any of the fractal instances.

Not sure about that, sometimes I have to type to tell people to stay in the green area in Swamps, or to target the bunny first in Uncategorized, or to stand on a platform in Underground, and so on and so on…

Cheap and easy really depends on what kind of content you prefer, but all accessories, rings and backpacks that have selectable stats (invcluding Viper’s) can be bought with local currency of the LW3 maps. If you prefer to spend time in Bitterfrost frontier, then Winterberries and the Icebrood Horn Backpack are the easiest to get. If you like Lake Doric, then Jade Shards and the White Mantle Scroll is easier.

Check out the Unbound Magic collectors in the new maps to see what they sell.

Here’s a list with all items, consider that earrings and most rings are unique, for example, you cannot use 2 x Black Ice Earring:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unbound_Magic

Items from Bloodstone Fen have an advantage, their stats can be changed as often as you like for a small amount of Unbound Magic.

demitel.1340:

If you open your daily Dragon Chests right away and continue your day while opening any other loot bag, of course it’s going to affect RNG.

No, that’s the gambler’s fallacy. I’m pretty sure that ArenaNet’s random generator creates truely random numbers. The chances for the drop don’t change, no matter how many chests you open. If you throw a coin 10 times and always get head, your chances to get tails with the next throw are still about 50%.

Nyx.6532:

just want a clear number from start of how much it will cost me to enjoy the product fully without all the hidden payment needed to optimize enjoyment.

In that I agree with you, and have expressed that at another place in these forums before. I’m fine with paying for content, I just want to know beforehand. When you are a new player and buy HoT, you have no idea that Living World Season 2 and 3 have to be bought with gems. I assumed I purchased the license to play everything in the game. I would have preferred to know about the additional costs, it wouldn’t have changed my decision to buy HoT anyway. I would just have purchased everything at once.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Perhaps, he/she meant this, https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragon_Chest_ (container), which can also potentially drop https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tequatl%27s_Hoard.

You can save those up, though I doubt it makes a difference.

But that would mean you get 4 exotic chests per day, so 400 in 100 days. If that’s how it works, then OP has opened 2000 exotic chests that have a chance to drop Tequatl’s Hoard without success, plus 500 of the big chests, without success

2500 chests without Tequatl’s Hoard lol

Now I got a question about the Dragon Chest. I slay Tequatl almost every day for the last 2 months or so. You get four chests that you have to manually click into your inventory for the small events that come with Tequatl (defending turrets, batteries and laser).

Then there is the big chest at the end that can contain the shinies. How do you save that? Everything just goes into my inventory because of autoloot, and there is no special chest, right? The big one is the special chest.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragon_Chest_

How can one save 100 Dragon Chests and open them in a row? Not that I’ll try to do this, I know enough about random generators to be sure it’s irrational.

What Khisanth said, and in addition to that, using the boost, you can just skip all the 1 point challenges in Tyria and immediately go to the hero challenges in HoT that give 10 points each. Even with a lot of grind, people who level to 80 in Tyaria can usually only buy half of the elite trait. I did it recently with my mesmer, and 130 × 1 point hero challenges is a lot of work and time. You can get that within 30 minutes in HoT.

Nyx.6532:

yes i got HoT itself. i Finished all the season 3 story stuff.
do i need to pay season 3 episode 1 to get access to it then? still think it is quite iffy but better than what i thought was going on :P

…

i finished the season 3 story as well (don’t own any of it, but it lets you play them through).

I think it’s time for you to realize that you are confusing things, and stop blaming the developers for it. What I get from your posts (and that’s just trying to make sense out of them) is that you returned to GW2 after a break, and logged in recently, so the current Living World Season 3 Episode 5 is unlocked. The other episodes of season 3 are locked and cost 200 gems each to play.

You played through episode 5, and that’s it. That does not unlock the Ancient Magic Mastery track. As the wiki says, you need to enter Bloodstone Fen or Ember Bay, and to do that, you need to buy and play/start episode 1 or 2 of Living World Season 3.

I suggest you sell some materials or save gold and buy 200 gems with it. I think it costs about 58 gold. It’s about 2,60€, don’t know how much that is for you. In many cities in Europe, you don’t even get a regular sized coffee for 2,60€.

I’m fitting out my Reaper these days and need to craft a few armor pieces, chose shaman stats because the insignia is really cheap on the TP. At the end of the day, Yassith’s costs as much as Zojja’s

https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/76710-Yassith's-Guise
https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/48085-Zojja's-Guise

But the recipes cost aurillium, so I spare myself that hassle. I needed to purchase the exotic recipe for the insignia and inscription though.

It’s tough, but I like the small exclusiveness it gives to the Leadership runes I collect for my Chronomancer. Only 120 Crystalline Ore left, or two DS runs. I just lack the aurillium to buy machetes, and I also need ariliium to buy a Viper’s inscription recipe for my other toon ^^

It shows that I was dedicated enough to get the best out of my character and that it’s not just a Chronomancer that uses the stuff from the L80 boost.

Would be nice to make runes visible on armor, with a check box.

Be careful what you wish for. They could just change the mechanics to equal that of Octovines and Triple Trouble to make sure all lanes are finished within the same minute.

@Fluffball: Just in time production is the key. I only buy as much as I need when I craft, and crafting items that require 250+ of anything takes a while to craft anyway. If you suddenly need 500 Hardened Leather Sections, you will pay way too much on the TP. It’s better to buy 50 per day over the course of 10 days. For cheap stuff, it doesn’t matter, and that’s why I’m totally fine with having zero Large Bones in my storage. A stack is about 2 gold, so even if I need one at some point, I’ll just buy.

Right now, my material storage has a sell price of more than 500 gold. That’s 500 gold I cannot use for anyhing else, and I have no idea why I keep those garlic heads that are worth 10 gold, I don’t even cook. Need to sell some of that stuff today

demitel.1340:

Collect at least 100 Dragon Chests and open them all in a row, you are almost guaranteed to get Tequatl’s Hoard.

Is the random generator working differently if you open 100 chests in a row compared to opening one each day for 100 days?

Even then, it’s possible that the hoard is already in the first chest and you slay Tequatl another 99 times on 99 days to open it.

Feanor.2358:

Djinn.9245:

I do care. I care that I was in the map before most of those other people taxi’d in and I am in the middle of an event chain.

You’re taking the selfish stance. That’s fine. But don’t expect to get any sympathy from me.

That’s a bit harsh, although Djinn probably doesn’t give a kitten if you have sympathy for him or not.

The assumption here is that the more people = the easier the meta. And that people who don’t participate in the meta take up space that is better used for participating people. With scaling, the former is not even the case. Often it’s more desirable to have few people at the spot, to not make the boss and champs harder (or cause champs to spawn in the first place). I haven’t done Chak Gerent very often, how many people do you need per lane, 10 to 12? Let’s say 40 people can do the meta. A map can hold 3 or 4 times as many. Triple Trouble needs more than 70 people to succeed, and there’s still room on the map for people who want nothing to do with it.

Is there something I’m missing here?

apharma.3741:

Eh, you don’t all have white mantle portal devices in shared inventory slots to easy mode this?

Scrubs!

What the…!

I didn’t know this exists. 1000 Magnetite Shards :S

Only 964 more to go for me then!

This is a nice gizmo, despite 30 minutes cooldown time. Would use it for the starting wisps at T4 rather than at Bloomhunger though.

I never see anyone pointing out corners at T4 Swamps and it almost never fails. Once someone didn’t return the wisp, but that was because a stupid Ice bow dropped right at it and the player picked it up without noticing the difference. That can happen even if you plan the corners.

Maybe it’s because most people in T4 fractals use mobility pots and there’s plenty of time to get the job done. With Thief and other classes that have short ports, one person can do 2 wisps. When I turn to a wisp and someone is closer, I pick another one. Even if two people already stand at the same wisp for some reason and try to grab it, the one who didn’t pick it can get to another one on the opposite of the instance in time.

cptaylor.2670:

I have another update to add:

Remove Swampland. The worst fractal of them all. Bloomhunger in tier 4 does way too much damage. Has way too much cc, and will repeatedly harass whoever is downed or trying to res the downed. It’s just a nuisance and too many damage sources.

So content you find too hard should be removed? I’ll take that as a yippee!

Means, I read your post as a rant and not a serious suggestion. I love Swamps with guild mates, it’s a pain with a pug. Very often, pugs will just leave the party while fighting Bloomhunger because they get downed or die a couple of times. I also died often in the first T4 Swamp attempts, but I quickly stopped doing that, and I play a Thief with less than 12k health. If it’s too hard for you, don’t ask for it to be removed, just don’t play it.

As far as I can tell, this is absolutely not what GW2 is about, and I wonder if they communicate it well enough, otherwise people who play this game wouldn’t wish for it here on the official forums.

It’s one of GW2’s main selling points that you want to do away with. They advertise their game with the ability to play the way you want when it comes to the combination of skills, combat, crafts, classes. That is one of the unique selling points of the game compared to most other MMO games. Changing this by implementing unique skills for races would probably be breaking with the creators’ vision.

If such unique skills existed, they must be only of cosmetic nature.

Fluffball.8307:

If you haven’t already, use some gold or achievement gems to get the expanded storage. Even the first level makes a HUGE difference.

I disagree, mainly because there are only a couple of materials that pile up in the storage (for most people I guess): Ascended Dust, Crystals and Dragonite Ore and Mithril Ore. And they pile up not only in one stack, but several, so upgrading your material storage would only add a couple of used slots. About 90% of the slots will not exceed 250 items, unless you play for a very long time and never sell anything.

If the stack is cheap, I just sell it, like Large Fangs. Storage is more costly than just buying it back at some point when I need it. I consider the TP storage to rent, even Mithril Ore will be sold in stacks and bought back if I need more than 3 stacks or so (which never happened, despite crafting Lumps of Mithrillium every day).

So the issue for me is more what to do with lots of stacks of the same material, and expanding my own material storage is costly and ineffective to solve that problem. It’s cheaper to expand the bank slots or buy a new character slot, and gives more flexibility. A new character slot costs the same as the storage expander, and you can put a couple of cheap 18 slot bags in it. It has other uses in addition to that.

I believe expanding your mat storage is the worst option to handle inventory.

Linken.6345:

Cant you get the chrono runes in wvw?

Don’t know, never played WvW, so I’m going with DS to get them. Not everybody does WvW and has the option to get them there. I would guess there are more PvE players than WvW.

Cyninja.2954:

That being said, why would anyone do DS daily when there is easier and faster dailies left and right? 0_0

Interesting question. I usually do the dailies before I go to work, and that certainly doesn’t include DS meta. Today, I did all three others and pinned DS in case I find the time to do it in the evening. That was the JP in Southsun Grove that takes about 30 seconds to complete, then viewing a Vista in Ascalon (cow catapult anyone?) and collecting 4 plants in Orr. I think I spent about 10 minutes to get the 2g, without having to bother with DS. And those people in DS certainly had access to the other locations.

Wintermute.5408:

I can’t shake the feeling that DS will die completely when new expansion lands. Hopefully they’ll make a way to make it less time consuming and team dependent.

People will always do DS for the materials there. If you want the chronomancer runes, you need to do it. I’ll keep doing it because it’s the most fun meta in the game. Only issue is that you need to plan for up to 90 minutes doing it, including opening the pods afterwards. I’m usually kicked from the map shortly after I opened all pods that are not hidden somewhere or heavily protected.

Djinn.9245:

Yes, that is what I was referring to. Commanders often start asking people to leave the map far before the meta starts.

I noticed the same thing, it’s kinda weird and funny. When I’m doing the Q&A achievement in Rata Novus that takes some time, or even if I just want to roam, honestly, I don’t care that people do the meta at the same time. I’m not interfering directly, and that my mere presence on the map keeps one other player from joining it for the meta is not my business.

I get that people want a map where most people do the meta, but asking people to leave is still not ok. You guys can leave coordinated, all at the same time, and a brand new map will open up for you, without plebs like me who just want to do some quests. That’s how gw2community does it when they need a clean map for Triple Trouble.

Nocturnal Lunacy.8563:

The archaic engine gw2 is built on and bottlenecking in wvw which is server side issue.

Or is it your hardware that’s archaic and the bottleneck? Is your CPU 5 years old and wasn’t top notch in 2012 either? Do other people have similar experiences in WvW?

Blude.6812:

Time is one thing but money and being kicked because one is not elite enough is something else altogther.

I tried to explain that time is more valuable than money. When you talk about gold, it really is time spent to get it, like in real life. For me, it would cost less to just pay people to do an escort for me than trying to get that Mastery Point from Hidden Garden or that Jumping Puzzle in Rata Novus, because those take more time.

Unlocking the raid mastery line is cheaper than getting a mastery point if you got all the easy ones already. I spent 2 hours doing that Rata Novus JP. If I spend 1 hour doing T4 fractal dailies on two days, I get enough gold to buy a escort to unlock the mastery track.

When someone says it’s a pain to farm Freshwater Pearls for months to get Minstrel’s armor, we would tell him to not waste his time and just buy them on the TP. Buying the service that raid guilds provide is no different. You can do things that are fun and you are good at, like fractals, and also get the mastery track unlocked. You probably get the gold faster than learning how to raid and finding a group, and do something you despise and are not good at.

The raid mastery track is not locked behind skill if you can just buy it with time spent. And I’m not talking about the hassle to join pugs and maybe get kicked. I’m talking about a deal, you pay a team to let you join the raid while they do the work (that is fun and easy for them), while you trail behind (beware those wargs) and watch, and then get the mastery track unlocked. It’s like hiring Sherpa when you want to climb Mount Everest, nothing wrong with it. I don’t like carrying things, so I pay people when I move into another house. I spend time to get the money they want in exchange of their time. I’m good at my job, they are good at theirs, and everybody is happy. I don’t whine that I have to carry all the stuff, or try to get random people from the street to help me, or complain that I cannot move because “moving is locked behind carrying skill and I don’t like carrying” lol

Well, that is my pragmatic perspective.

Although I agree with some of your points (it’s a really sad that most area of the Solid Ocean is skipped), it’s incredibly difficult to create content that can be enjoyed over and over again, and in general, ArenaNet did an excellent job with fractals.

Imagine you had to do Heart quests over and over again. Of yourse you don’t have to in any case, but imagine they added dailies for Hearts with rewards of similar value as for fractals.

I still enjoy doing fractals, I just don’t always have the time to do the dailies, T4 alone can take 40+ minutes of uninterrupted gameplay.

Maybe the “order” of the first fractals could be changed. Starting with Urban Battleground, then Swamps, then underwater battle sure is a bit discouraging for starters. But people don’t have to start with these, they can join any T1 fractal via LFG. Molten Boss, Molten Furnace, Volcanic, Solid Ocean all have no complex mechanics and are better for starters. I think they should fill the first 4 slots of T1.

Linken.6345:

One person cant join a fractal group and kick the rest out mate, the others in the group have to agree.

There is an exploit that allows people to kick the whole group out of the fractal.

Wondrouswall.7169:

Nothing can be done. People would still join “serious” meta LFGs during dailies and leave if they want to. Just keep the LFGs active.

Indeed, same with fractal daily runs. If you write in LFG that you will do 76, 89, 91, there will be people joining only for 76 because they’ve done the others already. Or if you need to beat the Jade Maw in under 5 minutes for ad infinitum and you advertise it when Solid Ocean is a daily, you will have people joining for that daily and nothing else. If you fail the achievement at the first attempt, they will leave because they got their daily.

It’s best to do these things when they are not dailies.

Well, thinking about it, the bloodstone thing is actually like a legendary one. It only costs 100 Unbound Magic to change stats, that’s basically for free. It’s just a little bit more hassle because you might have to remove the infusion(s) first.

I can see why ArenaNet shouldn’t allow easy and cheap stat swaps on ascended gear.

mtpelion.4562:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blood_Ruby_Backpack

You can use this backpack and also reset the stats using

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bloodstone_Capacitor

Oh wow! Thanks for the hint. Do you know if similar items exist for the Icebrood and Lava Skull backpacks? If not, I hope they’ll add them soon.

But right now, I’ll definitely go for the Bloodstone backpack instead of the others.

I would love to see other ways than infusing backpacks to get a reroll on stat selection.

Until then, best way to get a new one is the LW S3 maps. They have a lot of stat variations to choose from:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Icebrood_Horn_Backpack

I think that metabattle page is not well-maintained. It’s labelled as designed for “Fractals”, but it suggests sigils for dungeons. And in any group, you better use Basilisk Venom instead of Impact Strike as elite skill. Five people with Basilisk Venom reduce the breakbar faster than one with Impact Strike. The page doesn’t even mention that.

Also, there is no Versatile Mighty Infusion anymore in the game since July 2016.

I’m not saying the people on metabattle don’t know what they are doing, just that the info for thief is outdated. They also made no changes to the page after Unload was boosted, which makes double pistol more viable.

I do T4 fractals every day and never equip a bow. I don’t see how might stacking should be an issue when Unload does that perfectly fine. I occasionally use Shadow Refuge for stealth, but that’s it about skipping trash mobs. Everybody uses mobility pots and can just ignore mobs without stealth.

Fun fact, when you dash away from the boss because you are low on health, switch to pistols and Unload a few times (as you say in your last paragraph), your dps doesn’t even drop noticable. I’m pretty sure it would drop if I used a short bow.

I think the Thief build on metabattle was created by old school Thieves who never really bothered to play double pistol, and maybe at that time, fractals were different.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Linken.6345:

Even as a pve player you should be able to do the escort event and boss mate.

No, there are all sorts of reasons why that’s not a realistic option for a huge group of players. (Plus, it’s not as easy for some players — those who have completed raids are going to have trouble seeing why, just as those who haven’t completed any encounters have trouble understanding why raiders keep saying it’s not hard.)

Well, one can change perspective on that. There are guilds that sell raid boss kills. I googled a bit but couldn’t find what the price is these days. Maybe 50 gold, 100? I’m sure one of the raid guilds who do Escort with 8 or 9 people anyway will carry a person for 10 gold each. It’s not much money for them, but it’s basically free. They’ll probably put it into the guild bank.

That is much better than sneaking into a group to get carried, which will make nobody happy. So my perspective then is that unlocking the raid mastery line costs XXg and 15 to 20 minutes of your time. That’s the price, simple. The other mastery lines also have prices, you need to spend time on doing the story to get to the maps. And getting gold to buy a raid kill also takes time, maybe even less than doing the story. You always pay with time, and most people probably already have 100+ gold in form of crafting materials in their storage that they can sell.

One of my guild mates experienced this in a pug about a week ago. That commander was a bit slow though and because of autoloot, he still got the reward for his work.

I asked him what his part was in this and he replied that, at some point of the raid, he asked the commander via whisper why he kept dying (he basically questioned the comander’s skills at raiding, but not shaming him in public. I’m sure everybody else noticed the commander dying anyway. Apparently, the commander took that as an affront and decided to punish my guild mate at the end of the raid.

I think if this keeps getting reported by victims and posted here, people will be less likely to join pugs, and raiding will become even more exclusive as it is now. I wouldn’t like an atmosphere where you have to fear to be kicked shortly before the boss dies if one person feels like punishing you, no matter how well you did your part in the raid.

How does it work in other games, can people do such things? Also, what about people joining parties, then tagging up and disband the party? I think something needs to happen to how parties/squads work. The other day someone was joining fractal groups and kicking the whole team out and there was nothing you could do about it unless you had someone with a commander tag in your group already.

mooseface.3025:

After three weeks of gathering and using my cheapest option (balancing forging vs crafting) it still took me 2 hours to craft one ascended item.

I think you haven’t figured out the most efficient way to craft ascended gear yet. Farming all ingredients yourself for three weeks and then taking 2 hours to craft an item is not how it’s done, not at all… Did you consider buying the ingredients on the Trading Post? And how does crafting it took you 2 hours? If I have all the ingredients, I craft it within 10 minutes (slacking). It takes less than 2 hours to max a craft from 0 to 500.

I think game mechanics are not to blame here.

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

Two of the rings are already infused. I’ll have to try it on the backpacks. Thanks.

It’s cheaper to just farm the LW S3 maps for a new backpack, unless you plan on infusing it anyway (for AR or stat infusions).

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Icebrood_Horn_Backpack_

Among the ingredients is a full stack of ectoplasm. I have the same issue atm with one backpack, but I was planning to infuse it anyway at some point. Just not now.

Getting Artificer or Huntsman crafting to level 500 is really easy and fast, compared to getting all items for the Bo collection or killing Tequatl 30 times. T4 fractals would be faster too.

If you have some 30 to 40 gold and a booster, you can get one of these crafts from 0 to 500 in less than 2 hours. I did that for 3 crafts, took me 2 crafts to learn the drill though.

maddoctor.2738:

That’s true. So many times someone dies on top of a chest and it’s hard to trigger that chest

The only occasions when I resurrect an NPC these days is when they died on top of a node and I would feel bad if I stopped and retargeted the plant.

Or as someone recently wrote in map chat after the Octovines event and the Tarnished Traitor was killed: “When you want to open the chest and there are too many dead around.”

Menadena.7482:

Then after we were in there was no way for me to leave no matter how bad it got (I suppose I could have just force-quit the client).

You get ported to Lion’s Arch when you leave the party, but I guess that information is not useful for you anymore.

@Hannelore: The slow resurrection is a punishment for dying. If you speed it up or allow resurrections from a distance (if I understood you correctly), death becomes even more meaningless than it is now. People would bother even less with staying alive at bosses, it’s effort and stress to watch movements to predict strikes and dodge out of red areas.

And I prefer the current situation over increasing damage to armor. I hated damage to armor/weapons in any game I played, it’s just stupid micro management.

Speeding up ressurection significantly would turn death basically into a stun that lasts as long as a fear. We already have those.

Djinn.9245:

Lol, apparently Anet says “no” if you look at Legendary armor and the video they released.

I’m curious why they would follow this approach, while everything else in the game is the opposite. Any race can play any class, you can mix skills, weapons, skills, armor, skins, dyes, it’s basically GW2’s main pitch. Play as you want.

And then they say thieves have to wear coats and not skirts? I mean, this doesn’t affect play style, combat or anything else other than looks. And if someone now says it’s about immersion, I’m not buying it. A trench coat wearing thief can wear a quaggan backpack, a wizard hat, sunglasses and glide on a carpet from One Thousand and One Nights.

Can you link to that video please, I want to hear it with my own ears.

btw. there are lots of thieves wearing the Viper’s skirt and underboob top, so that “trench coat” way has been broken already. I really can’t believe a dev said those stupid things about class silhouettes.

Sly.9518:

Almost all but 2 or 3 HPs can be solo’ed maybe look at your build and see why you can’t solo a HP champ.

I agree now. I would not have agreed 2 months ago though. When you enter HoT with skill and gear that’s just good enough for Tyria, you will die a lot. In Tyria, you can do almost everything without taking care of your build. So my attitude when I entered Maguuma was that I expected it to be like Tyria. I didn’t even have all exotic gear, had no idea how runes work and just used weapon sigils that happened to be on the weapons when I looted them or got them as reward. Didn’t use food or nourishment either. That was all fine for Tyria.

The proper way would have been to play Tyria a few weeks more to get the required skill and gear, and then enter the HoT story. However, I wanted the Masteries, and not play a few more weeks without them. So of course I sucked in HoT the first weeks and thought nothing can be soloed. By now, it’s clear to me that it was not the content that made it difficult, I just sucked. But looking back, I would still want the Masteries and would do it the same way I did it before: playing HoT without being ready for it.

Now, with ascended gear, proper runes and sigils, and more skilled, I don’t find HoT hard. I can solo HP champs and solo events. First thing I did when I was geared up was killing a few stoneheads in Auric Basin because they terrorized me before every time I entered the place. Now they were easy to kill.

I guess the designers didn’t expect players to be at the “enter HoT” stage without being prepared by then. If you ask now if I find HoT and the HP champs hard, I will answer no. But I see where those who say it’s hard are coming from. You don’t want the HPs in 3 weeks, you want them now, to get your elite trait.

Straegen.2938:

Staff would be my second choice since we get an exotic Staff for free with DD unlock.

P/P is way more damage against Single targets now. Chaining 4-5 unloads with 25 might stacks is super easy in PvE.

Please test the dps from staff when you dash to the target and use the initiative for Vault attacks. I prefer P/P against single targets (or even two or three, need to consider backstop) because it’s more fun and you can kill annoying mobs without having to stop running, but looking at the numbers, staff still wins against single targets, especially if 6 Unloads are not enough to kill.

You get a free exotic staff, but it has no Berserker stats to pick. And you can buy exotic pistols on the TP.

So what would happen if they added an option where you can decide to stop gaining XP for Masteries but for another reward, like Spirit Shards.

I believe whatever that reward is, it would become worthless within a day, simply because everybody would get it. Those who maxed Masteries get it, those who don’t have enough Mastery Points to buy the next line would get it, and everybody who decides to not bother with Masteries anymore would get it.

Whatever that item is, we would have a huge surplus within short time. I believe everybody already has more Spirit Shards than he will ever use, so what’s the point of getting more of them? XP comes plentyful, and therefore, any reward would be diminished.

Thanks mate, you inspired to try again, and yesterday I made it in the second attempt. In my former failings, I made the mistake to just restart the dolphin phase when I died. If you die once, you need to start the whole fractal again to get a chance for the achievement. I died, then left the fractal and started it again (freed the prisoners again), then got hooked two times as dolphin and barely made it, but got the achievement and Mastery Point.

HnRkLnXqZ.1870:

The entire situation is created by the players themselves. Teach your people to revive downed people instead of ignoring them.

That is not the experience I have in this game, in Open World content as well as Fractals. It’s rather the opposite, people run to resurrect downed players even if just killing the mob that downed player is hitting from the downed state only needs one more shot to allow rallying. I often think “omg, that is so nice, but it would really help me more if you just killed that trash mob I’m throwing daggers at.”

And people also drop everything and run to resurrect dead people, which makes no sense most of the time.