Guild Wars 2

I spent a lot of time in GW1 getting my “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals” title. It was the culmination of about 5 years of effort. It wasn’t that I wanted to show off the title, I wanted the title to show off what I had done.

I see legendaries as an extension of this—by design they are rare and out of reach of casual players, because it is a badge to show others that you are not casual, that you have invested a great deal of time and effort into a task that serves no other purpose but to convey this. If you received a material reward, it would be imbalancing.

@Zenith: I have written full-fledged combat simulators for testing different builds/mechanics before. When time permits, I love dissecting (or constructing) mechanics like this.

Unless someone beats me to it, I’ll try to confirm that this is still accurate later tonight. I’m at work now and have a desire to not be fired, so I can only spare a minute here and there. :-)

Thanks for the data, I’ll add it to what I take from my own characters when I validate.

In short, you’re kittened. My advice? Do the required mining in a newbie area you haven’t been to before. It is still painful, don’t get me wrong, but you get to further your exploration achievements, see more of the world, and just get a general change of scenery. Leveling the first time, I had to do the sylvari and human areas both just to do Jewelcrafting and Armorsmith (and I bought some materials on the TP)

For budding Jewelcrafters that are reading this thread and despairing at thoughts of needing mounds of ectos just to finish leveling… I used 4. I was kinda miffed at first, but 4 ectos for the last ~13 points of skill wasn’t the end of the world. 3 went to craft myself a new ring, the last to upgrade a gem. I sold the upgraded gem for a hair over the cost of the ecto that I used—still a loss in all, but no more or less of a loss than most of the stuff I made to level.

Possible user error: Each upgrade requries a certain tier of the corresponding upgrade category to be reached (e.g. Economy I, Art of War II, etc.) You need to research these upgrades first. Also, make sure you are representing the guild.

Possible technical issues: There were a lot of issues upgrading guilds for the first week or so—it is possible some are lingering and call for a bug report. If you’re on an overflow server, you might not be able to select/use upgrades. Sometimes the options are greyed out for me, but re-logging fixes it.

My understanding is the “Botting” reports prompt a review of behavior and is the appropriate choice for suspected hacks.

I could be wrong.

Also, connectivity issues can cause you to “bounce” between locations, causing the type of ghosting you describe. Generally, if someone wants to use a teleport hack, they just disappear from one lcoation and appear in another—theres no reason to keep apeparing at a vista (unless the vista is within clicking distance of a trade post NPC)

I have not looked at the numbers since BWE2, but this is how it worked* then:

At any given level, your stats have a certain base value. Each stat will have the same value and no factors aside from your level matter. The function to compute this will be called B, and, for those that are curious, it is an approximation of a n-squared curve that is made from a series of linear segments. The wiki had an article that was mostly accurate on this.

If you take your computed (Base + gear + other effects) stats and divide each by B(actual_level) you will get your normalized stats. Multiply by B(effective_level) and you have your effective stats.

This was confirmed to include food, traits, and other effects. (They are scaled down with you). I did not test scaling up for WvW.

*I had one test case where there was a single off-by-one score, which I attributed to rounding error. Even allowing that error, I had over a thousand matching samples and the accuracy was over 99.9999%

I completed that quest a while ago, so my memory is a little hazy, but I remember a mob getting stuck and keeping me from progressing as my allies wouldn’t move until the undead were all killed. It took a little looking around, but after a few minutes I found and killed the bugger, which unleashed my allies.

In another quest, I took the “road less traveled,” and could not complete the quest: I had navigated up a hill and, in so doing, missed a few lines of dialogue, but no encounters. At the end of the quest, the trigger to complete an event failed to fire and I was stuck in Orr with an unbearably cheery Sylvari. If you’re deviating from the obvious path, this may be contributory and noting this with as much detail as possible may very likely help ANet to track it down.

Hopefully this can help at least one person get un-stuck.

Lets face it, a lot of posts in the forums fall into either suggestions or gripes. In both cases, it is therapeutic to know that your voice has been heard by someone who might be in a position to help.

Obviously an official response is the ideal solution, but we know that there are time constraints that prevent that. Complete silence only reinforces the feelings of helplessness that often come with the need to suggest or gripe. I think it would be a nice middle ground if posts were flagged as having been read by a moderator. We don’t need to know who, when, or how often, just a flag indicating that you’ve been here and read what we had to offer.

Thank you.

I’ve seen several threads in the various profession-specific forums detailing the community’s bug list. I’d love to see an official, sitcky’d post in each of these forums (and other forums, as appropriate) with the list of known issues for the relevant content. The posts would be editable, but not accept replies.

I think the benefit is pretty obvious, but as community, we can, at a glance, see what we don’t need to report. We can have a heads-up before we invest time in pursuing a trait that it is currently not working as inended, etc.

As a community-builder, ANet gets to have a very visible acknowledgement of outstanding issues that they are working on and reduce the clutter of people reporting known issues.

Just my 2cp.

DusK.3849:

How are you guys having so much trouble with this? Every time I finish a map of lower level than me, I always sell all the stuff I get, and considering monsters are dropping same-level gear, I always leave with more money than I had when I started.

Monsters sometimes drop same-level gear. Most drops are level appropriate to the monster, not me. I will take my 80 guardian and go questing with my family in Metrica province. I sell / salvage over 100 items and only 1-2 are in the “level appropriate for an 80” range. Cost for my son to head to a waypoint: 6c. Cost for me: 1s59c (approx.) A few quick jumps around a zone and I am in the red.

Coin rewards for DEs do scale, but not enough to offset costs entirely (a low level player makes 4-10x the cost of a teleport, while i make 80% of the cost).

If my goal is only to clear a map, coin is irrelevant. But when I’m waypoint hopping to help guildmates, it is not uncommon to find myself down 30s. It is at the point where they take a waypoint and I run across the zone to meet them.