Guild Wars 2

Svarty.8019:

I suggest you try them again at 80 with exotics and with other 80s. It’s a completely different experience. The level boosting system needs some analysis.

I have analyzed it.

An 80 in exotics is roughly equivalent to a 30 in top-shelf level 30 gear. The only difference that you see is that level 80s tend to have top-shelf gear, whereas lower level characters tend to not be fully upgraded in the best available gear.

The differences are so minimal that they have less impact than your ping time.

In theory, full Ascended gear will provide a 5-10% buff to your gear which will amount to a 1-3% overall buff.

Grav.4790:

Dungeons are made for 80 lvl teams wearing exotics, fully traited, etc. Yes even the story ones. Sure you can enter it at recommended level but it will be hard and not fun. You will see it for yourself when you come back there later.

I’ve never come across a less accurate statement regarding dungeons…

Most of my characters enjoy dungeons at level-appropriate points, and they are not particularly challenging. If you know how to set up a character right, lower levels can be stronger than higher levels.

Dungeons are considered hard by new players becaue they aren’t prepared for them when they get there. At no time in my trek to level 80 did I need stability or stun breakers. I would not set foot in CM story without them.

CM Story is one of the easiest dungeons I’ve done (disclaimer: I’m a guardian most of the time there; we have awesome stability buffs). Dungeons are not the faceroll dungeons from other games, they require you to actually pay attention and know your stuff and adapt to different situations. Once you know how to do it, it becomes fairly trivial, but the learning curve is very, very steep.

Various theories on the human gods and the exodus:

1. They knew the dragons would rise and feared being corrupted, so they left not only out of self-preservation, but a desire to prevent their power from being turned against humanity.
2. The appearance of new stars led them to investigate elsewhere.
3. They went hunting for the mursaat.
4. They were hunting in the woods and found a strange cave and, upon investigating, accidentally walked back through the wardrobe.

Also, on Abbadon’s distribution of magic: The Bloodstone was supposed to contain all magic that had not been corrupted by the dragons (taken from uncited source on the wiki). It is possible that magic was free for all before the Seer’s created it, and they craeted it defensively to protect against the dragons. If the human gods were taking all that power for themselves, it would be raesonable for one of them to dissent and feel that all races and people should be entitled to wield the magic.

My hunch is that the seeds Ronan found (which were guarded by “powerful plant creatures”) were drops of Mordy’s blood. Allowed to grow without his influence, the result was free from his corruption. While the Pale Tree has dreams, Mordy feeds on Nightmare. The Nightmare Court are his minions, even if they are unaware of it.

robinsiebler.3801:

Developers were required to submit a comment with their fix that explained exactly what the bug fixed in a way that SQA could understand. Most of the people who want that information would be able to understand such a message.Your “race condition” message would be equally useless to me as an SQA engineer as well.

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Exactly; this wasn’t an automated system, you asked people to list what they did. Unintended consequences and “I fixed 92 bugs with ranger pets, I don’t remember what they all were” become issues. When you’re talking simple UI bugs, yeah, these changes are trivial to document, because the developer notes tend to be quite similar to the public notes. When the changes are getting down in the weeds, are highly technical in nature, and have potentially far-reaching consequences… how do you accurately document that?

If all classes had the same base health, percentage-based damage would be unusual. Because some classes have a higher base health, percentage-based damage keeps true to the concept of balanced normalized health which is an underpinning of the game; a guardian sits at ~8k less than a warrior with equal stats. Agony is designed to threaten everyone equally and serve as a gear check on progression.

Is 50+ not implemented and the agony so severe that it is being used as a wall instead of a gate for now? Is 50+ intended for players that have 90+%? Was the agony in lower tiers nerfed so that players could experience a wider range of challenges now and the difficulty could be increased after new gear is released? I don’t have those answers, but time will tell.

robinsiebler.3801:

Uhm….I worked at a company where all the bugs fixed were added automatically to the release notes by a script. No one had to do any extra work at all. Just sayin’.

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Did it also create the list of unintended side effects of the changes?
Did it also translate the bugfixes to meaningful statements for the end user? (The bug might be known as “race condition between triggers in Event #2318” but people want to see “Fixed a progress-blocking bug in Event XYZ”)
Did it extrapolate core engine changes to effects that users could recognize?

I tend to think not, which was the purpose of my post. You can either have a machine tell you the exact details but not the high-level description, or you can have a human-centric process that provides the high-level description but has the potential for error. People can make mistakes, and it is hard to identify all the bad things that can happen from good changes.

Electro.4173:

Absolutely agree with this. Stealth changes are bad.

We don’t need to know the absolute inner workings of the game, we don’t need to know “code changes” or whatever as the above poster joked about. But actual changes that effect the gameplay for players need to be noted.

As an example, the patch on Monday fixed the Ranger traits Opening Strike and the other 3 traits based on it so that they work correctly. And yet those changes were not mentioned in the patch notes at all. That kind of info being excluded is bad.

I work as a software engineer. I don’t make games, but I manage systems that rival or exceed most in complexity, so I think I have relevant experience to say that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

I fixed a bug the other day. See, a database query was rather inefficient and so I poked around with alternate ways of fetching the same data until I reduced the execution time by 85%. This is good and should be in the patch notes, right?

Well, the problem is that this caused one bottleneck to disappear and a new bottleneck to appear elsewhere. Long story short, the optimization to this single query was reverted because it resulted in a cascading DDoS attack brought down 95% of our data center.

Compounding unintended consequences, you have forgoten intended consequences. Unless you can automate the generation of the patch notes, human error is a factor. Maybe somebody forgot to include the line about the fix, or the fix resulted from some other change, or who knows what happened to it?

Phantasm damage output was decreased; obviously this was a nerf, not a side effect of a change to AI, right? Everybody knows “Nerfed Phantasms” should be in the patch notes when the actual change could have been “adjusted weighting of various considerations in AI routines” or “tightened timing constraints in network code to combat bots (please don’t tell them we did this or they will immediately adjust and exploit again)” or possibly even “phantasms will now attack more aggressively, but when attacking moving targets will be more likely to miss because they attack from closer to max range.”

Asking for complete patch notes makes the hostile assumption that they are witholding information and want to ruin your game experience. They make mistakes, and requesting clarification / verification is one thing, but the snarky insinuation that they are intentionally sneaking in stealth changes shows a profound lack of respect for a company that goes out of their way to promote a healthy, informed community.

The design is that the dungeon gets more and more difficult until it is, in theory, borderline impossible. This is the design; if you have reached the point of ‘impossible,’ then maybe you need to play at that tier… you are playing because it is fun and challenging, not because you just want to farm masive rewards, right?

PlaneWalker.8346:

Grawl is doable with good team class selection and a few wipes, colossus is impossible for high lvl.

I’m not saying there aren’t bugs or any tuning required, but…

A lot of bugs and shortcuts are going to be fixed in the coming weeks. The challenge will rise and, as was always intended, players will find there is a maximum level of difficulty at which they can complete fractals. Impossible is part of the design, so it is very possible that with current skills and gear progression is not meant to be possible at these tiers.

I disagree with all 5 points as stated:

• ANet has stated that 1 will be addressed, although not in the way you describe. Fragmenting the player base was unintended, however there is a need to isolate capability tiers. Level 80 is hardly a requirement as the scaling is sufficient to make a level 1 character strong enough to handle the content; the inability to equip agony resistance gear is the only stopping point for a sub-80. You admit that you will need mroe tiers to handle future expansion, but that is why infinite scaling is currently in place—game design that requires each update to force a review of all prior content is doomed to slow to a crawl or abandon old content.

• 2 is necessary because my concept of easy and yours probably varies tremendously. I found the Hard Mode in GW1 to be downright trivial in most cases, yet others found it nearly impossible. Infinite scaling is the only way to address this. If particular team builds cease to complete the content at some point, it is because they have reached the limit of what they can do—without infinite scaling, the top-end content will either be impossible for everybody or trivial to some people.

• 3 is a non-issue because, as has been stated many, many times, there will be many ways to procure this gear—what is available now is available because they didn’t want to release fractals without it as that would have made agony a complete barrier to all progress. Unfortunately, they were not ready for an across-the-board rollout of the gear; had it been ready it would have probably been out at release time. The reward system is not the dungeon design, claiming that one invalidates the accomplishemnts of the other is short-sighted at best.

• 4 sounds like nice, varied encounter design to me. The threats are varied and different groups of players must react depending on the encounter and situation. The general design of fractals is that as they get harder, the fundamental strategy does not change, but the margin of error does. This forces groups to abandon failing strategies and adopt others. The goal of agony is not to provide a gear check, but a skill check.

• I’ve never had this issue you describe with the dredge fractal. Enemies respawn because there are always supposed to be enemies there; you must endure their damage while accomplishing the goal. I don’t understand how this is a design flaw, it is a design.

I agree that the limited reward system needs to be addressed, and the fragmentation of the player base is an issue but in terms of design, I think Fractals got it right. Is fragmentation a plague and awful design? No, it is a side effect of scalable content and players that devour content ravenously without any loyalty to a set group of players. My guild doesn’t have the issue because it is our goal to play together, and that is what we do.

I really don’t get it.

http://www.gw2armor.com/human/female/light_list.php

A good 25% have highly visible pants. Not bad for an armor type known for robes.

http://www.gw2armor.com/human/male/heavy_list.php

One could be termed a kilt…maybe two, another a skirt, but the rest… not so much so.

Are poeple seeing the same armor sets over and over and complaining without looking at the huge variety out there?

For the first time that I have ever noticed, my server managed to succeed at the balthazar event… so I bought 400k karma worth of obsidian shards and took the few ectos I had laying around to make Mystic clover. I didn’t have a lot of ecto, only 34. I am not far along on the legendary, it is a long term goal; I figured that doing the clovers first would be a good start since it will supplement the t6 material requirement.

First, try for 10: No clover, and I forget what material and quantity I got, but it was a huge loss. Not cost effective at all.
Second, tone it down to a single shot. Success!
Try 10 more… Success!
Another 10… Success!
Another single… Success!
Another single… 4 T6 bloods, which is failure but still a profit.
Another single…. Success!
Another single…. Success!

So out of a potential 35, I got 24. I’m pretty happy with that.

I don’t expect my luck to continue, but I’m ahead of schedule on this particular component—a turn of bad luck still puts me on track for 12-18 months like I expected.

I completed him twice without using the exploit. The first time we had a party of 3, the second time with 4. It wasn’t a problem.

#3 this was never an issue for me.

#4 is an issue in a lot of places when attacking objects. Disabling auto-target helps a lot.

#6 appeared to be an issue, but did not seem to impede us the first time-the second we didn’t wipe.

This is not the new fight you are doing, this is the fight some of us have been doing right along.

The Kape.3672:

I understand you very well, im also getting boring of this battle system and im talking here about make the battle system like gw1 because was much more freely and wise tactical approuch to play, here i feel like im playing a game with a lot of blocking system.
Feel free to speak here, i realy hope they change this.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Battle-System-PVE-Freedom-while-playing/first#post921215

Since not everyone is familiar with GW1 combat, please allow be to summarize it for those that did not experience it:

1. Warrior pulls a group of enemies around a corner. Ranged AI is now shooting into the wall, and the melees are being body blocked by the warrior.
2. Monks and/or paragons drop massive damage reduction buffs on the warrior to effectively reduce incoming damage to 0. In many cases, the warrior will take 0 damage and heal everything in the area with each hit.
3. Ranged damage dealers (everybody else) drops AEs on the cluster of enemies, being careful to avoid skills that trigger the scatter mechanic. Melee attackers stack +damage buffs and let loose with n-squared damage combos (Whirlwind attack + Hundred blades + battle standard of slaughter, etc.).
4. Everybody bum-rushes the ranged mobs.
5. Loot.
6. Repeat.

When I first experienced it, the content was new and novel. Looking back on it, however, it was all pretty simple, especially following a lot of the skill buffs and 7-hero allowance.

Bosses in GW1 were largely just tank-and-spank fights. Shiro was just a matter of getting everybody in melee range and popping the warrior special skill, or using his leashing mechanics against him. Kanaxai was a straight-up tank-and-spank, urgoz was like kiting a stationary target, almost nothing in EotN was particularly inventive, they were just interesting backstories and groups of enemy builds to counter. Duncan was just a matter of bringing swap on a human-controlled character.

There are only two fights that come to mind as being more than just “kill the enemy” fights: The Iron Forgeman and the wurm boss in the story version of Heart of the Shiverpeaks. These two fights required you to do a lot more than jsut use your skill bar in an effective manner.

While I look back at my time spent in GW1 fondly, it was the environment, lore, and community that made it enjoyable, not the boss fights.

Auesis.7301:

If you want to land a crucial CC skill to stop a boss from doing something that could cause critical failure, you just have to be lucky that your entire team has dragged all the stacks away and then refused to use any more skills of the same nature.

This is why I love Defiant. Groups need to communicate and work together, otherwise they lose out on the control aspects in a boss fight and have to fight on the boss’s terms. An alternative is usually to kite.

Should it come as no small surprise that a lot of pugs kite bosses that organized groups will take on toe-to-toe?

I’m with ExTribble, except I wasn’t up in arms from the start—I had kinda seen it all coming and was ready for it.

The bottom line is there will be stat creep, and they will introduce new abilities over time. Balancing will err on the side of buffs, not nerfs. Expect it to be very gradual and retroactive, as it was with GW1.

They wanted Ascended gear at release, but it wasn’t ready. FotM required ascended gear to be implemented so they decided that a partial implementation was better than no implementation.

The limited availability of ascended gear forces a grind, but when they make it available through additional means, it won’t be a grind any more. A +5-10% stat buff to 3 slots is a mouse fart in the air conditioning (14 inventory slots that, combined, make up ~25% of your stats, this is effectively a 0.5% overall stat buff).

I’d also like WvW monthlies as a separate category (PvP monthlies is not a good fit, either). They probably push me into WvW a little, and while it is nice to step outside my comfort zone every once in a while… WvW was a lot more fun when we were 14th place. Now that we’re 5th, I don’t like it as much.

As a guardian, it is tough to get those kill credits in play that is this heavily organized. None of my other characters, even scaled up, will match what my guardian can do, and since we’re in a competitive bracket now, I feel obligated to bring my best to the fight.

With a full range of WvW monthly objectives, we might have found a way to push players to escort / take out dolyaks and defend objectives.

I melee bosses all the time on my guardian. I can think of several cases where I do not (dredge power suit), but by and large I spend more time in melee on bosses than I do at range.

It is easier to play ranged, and most people want it easy.

My melee damage is probably around 250% of my ranged damage, but I have a 75% duty cycle (25% of my time is spent avoiding hits, not attacking). I must be more attentive, and I need defensive capabilities, and I am more likely to make a fatal or near-fatal mistake, but the reward is still added damage.

This is a risk that many people refuse to take. On one fight that I did for the first time last night, I was actually asked to pop out a greatsword for the boss. The mechanics favored melee.

I’ll wager it has to do with:

1. The amount of data that would need to be added to the datastream for massive fights. In WvW, there are already issues reproting the location info for players, providing exact health amounts and limits would only add to the burden.
2. As players enter an area, enemies scale to adjust. This means HP totals can change during the fight. As people join a fight, you could see the amount of health increase substantially, although the percentage would not be affected.
3. It really isn’t pertinent information. The amount of health an enemy has remaining has so little bearing on your activities that it amounts to little more than a distration—say the enemy has 15,000 hp left; I’m still going to attack it and set up combos the same as if it has 25,000 or 150,000.

Given that helms are optional, I’d like an option to turn on town clothes headpiece instead of just turning off the armor headpiece.

• Good story means bad MMO. This has been the standard for over 10 years. Good story + MMO means they nailed it. Perhaps not perfect in either regard, but the whole is better than it would be if the focus was on one or the other.
• Games don’t have to be difficult, they just have to be fun. I don’t consider sokoban to be difficult, but I enjoy it.
• Grinding is playing content you do not enjoy to earn the righ to play content you do enjoy. A lack of grinding is the best thing ever.
• GW2 was in development for 5 years, not 2. These things take a long time.
• The game has been out for 3 months. Most MMOs are still working out critical infrastructure bugs at this time, not working on major content pushes.

So, given how off-base you are with your assertions… I call shenanagins.

If you are genuinely serious and not trolling, then find another game; this is obviously not the one you are looking for.

I’m a big fan of teamwork. Working together we can do far more than the combined effects of working alone. However, teamwork is not a replacement for individual ability.

I look at things like jumping puzzles and the swamp as testing the individual as well as the group.

When content is a team sport, the team can carry weaker members. When the content shifts to focus on individual contributions, the weaker links are singled out. Not necessarily eliminated, but identified.

We need both forms of content, if you ask me.

Crafting level 80 rares doesn’t require ecto (and salvaging them is also my primary source of ecto these days), and the gear is almost as good as exotics. Some groups will mandate 80 with exotics, but you don’t want these groups, especially if you’re not familiar with the dungeon in question.

I joined a group for AC explorable the other day on my 34 elementalist (who has done explroable runs before) only to start getting flak from one of the other members. “Too low” was his response to my “Hello.” Knowing that being sub-35 is an issue for people, i was fully prepared to switch to my 80 guardian. His response to “I have an 80 guardian” was “good for you.” Not “ok, well, you better switch” or “OK, thats better.” Some people are jerks. I couldn’t leave that group fast enough and, based on the fact that they were in AC for ~4 hours, I probably made the right choice. Most people are not this way (the other 2 people in the group at the time I joined were very nice), so don’t let it discourage you when you find some that are.

I thought you could do this the way you described… I’ve noticed issues with the mail system where names are case-sensitive. This might be the case here as well?

Lucillia.8297:

Sleepy.2647:

Lucillia.8297:

What do you do in this game? I am genuinely curious.

Certainly not “farm” the same place for hours everyday…are you selling gold or something? Otherwise i don’t know why people is so mad…

There is something called…enjoying the game and playing it normally, not everything has to be about “what gives more profit?…let’s do that!”.

I am certainly not mad, I am just curious as to what they do. They can’t be going for a legendary or progressing into fractals. Upgrading ascended items and obtaining a legendary is rather expensive for some people. Everyone enjoys playing the game differently but the fact that he stated they’re keeping their promise to no grind is flat out wrong.

Edit: If you also read my other comments, I personally don’t mind some grind. What I DO mind is that Anet are quick on their feet to fix farming/grind spots people like to use but there are still bugs known from launch that are still around.

I play dungeons, complete zones, discover new cooking recipies (and convert them to RL ones). I try to play various songs on the organs (try as I might, I can’t get Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy to sound even remotely close to right). I spend time with my friends and family in-game, talking about whatever topics come up, help with quests, and generally just enjoy the atmosphere. Sometimes, when in the right mood, I’ll do PvP or my wife and I will drop into WvW. Through all this, I acquire “stuff” that goes into the bank to one day become a legendary weapon.

I haven’t had to farm or grind anything yet, because it isn’t required to enjoy the game, it isn’t required to enjoy the content. Specific achievements may require it, but you can argue that 100% map completion is “just a grind” or unlocking every dye color is “just a grind.” Any nontrivial task can be labeled a grind, so the differentiation between “time consuming” and “grind” becomes a matter of opinion. I enjoy unlocking recipies, so while it may be repetitive, the only time you are compelled to do it is when you choose to—you can progress and explore and have fun without engaging in this activity if you don’t want to. Stat-capping players based on the number of rare dyes they have unlocked would be a mechanic that promotes grinding—having ~400 unlockable dyes alone does not. Similarly, telling players they need to work for agony resistance to delve into the lower reaches of a dungeon does not change the fact that the players can choose to experience the dungeon on a level that lacks this requirement, or avoid the dungeon altogether if that is their choice (arguments of limited availability of ascended armor are moot, since that has been addressed pretty thoroughly in the AMA). No content but fractals require you to grind fractals, making it more a matter of being rewarded for enjoying the content.

Farming is different than grinding. Grinding is repeating an action to open a content gate. Farming differs because it is not a content restriction, but a means to an end. Farming is repeating an action not because the action is enjoyable, but because the reward is desired.

As I read it, a dungeon boss was farmed because of a disproportionate coin reward. People desired money, so they fought only a boss that had a reward meant to complement a full clear of the dungeon. This was unintended. It was fixed before it could cause a significant spike in inflation.

I honestly don’t see any grinding. I do not have to force content I do not enjoy on myself to unlock content that I do enjoy.

Edit: I know it will take me a long time to get a Legendary at my pace. I’m OK with that. If I wanted it faster, I’d have to work harder, to the point that I would be farming—looking for optimal ways to get a certain reward. But this is not because I need to do it, this is because I want the reward. It would never cross the line to grinding, because it is not a content gate.

Joseph Skyrim.2470:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It was getting pretty abused. We had some solid metrics on it, and decided to kill the loot from one of the bosses in an attempt to slow it down.

It was indeed a hotfix.

So you actively look for the ways people are making coin and then remove or lessen it? That’s pretty scary. If that’s the case I think it will be a long time before I get over 10 gold pieces.

About 2 weeks ago, I spent all my money on a full set of berserker armor and fine transmutation stones so I could transmute it onto T1 cultural armor. I was set back to ~7s.

I now have 16g in the bank. I don’t do anything special—I do a mix of content types, but I don’t sell off large piles of crafting materials—I stockpile them for later use.

My wife had 7g before she reached 80, just from playing content at her pace.

You can do it, but there is no special solution—you jsut play the game because it is fun, and then you will find that you earn coin as a byproduct…

Unless you play like my son, in which case excessive waypointing, poor loot management, and frequent dirt naps will take their toll on your finances.

My guardian tends to run sword + shield and I seldom have a reason to swap during most PvE fights.

At a cooking station it makes a Pile of Divinity Fair Herbs. I don’t think you can put it in the Mystic Forge, though.

Azaziel.3608:

Who says that all hardcore guys need to see higher numbers in their hits…

A request for carrot + treadmill vertical progression amounts to this. Maybe the numbers balance out when you factor in the higher toughness/armor on enemies, but the principle is the same—bigger numbers drive the illusion of progression.

Edit: I recognize not every hardcore player asks for it, but this thread is unconcerned with other hardcore-related requests, only that one.

End-game material starts with level 1 and ends at level 80. As you progress, you open up more varied content, but this is not now, nor will it ever be a game where getting max level is a prerequsitie for participation in the bulk of content.

Guild Wars 2 is designed specifically to not compel players to grind for a carrot that is always out of reach. It is designed so that you can put it down and return to it months later without losing your relative strength. It is designed to avoid the type of obsessive play that ends marriages and it is designed to avoid placing barriers between former players and returning to the game.

In addition to that, did your character progress because every number in the game was just multiplied by 10? You do 10 tiems as much damage, but enemies have 10 tims the hit points. You loot 10 times as much money, but things cost 10 times as much. You didn’t actually progress, you’re in the same point—you’re running on a treadmill. The players that stop running to stay in the same spot fall behind. GW2 is not that type of game—the floor is not going to be pulled out from under you because you stop to take a breather when your dad has cancer, or your child is born, or your house is destroyed by a hurricane. The devs recognize that it is just a game, and it should be fun, and an escape from these problems, not a source of constant anxiety and obligation exceeding that of your career.

For those griping about the vertical progression, ascended gear has not so thoroughly obsoleted all other gear that every player plays only FotM content (from what I’ve seen, it is 8% over exotic, which is less than the rare→exotic difference). It was always known that there would be diversified gear from different areas, requiring a mix of horizontal and vertical progression (agony resistance is a new stat requiring its own vertical progression path, but that path is horizontal relative to the flight-time gear that a hypothetical content push would call for).

“Going down the WoW path” means adding a new dungeon every couple months where the gear is 15-25% better than the last dungeon’s. Rings and Back slots can be ascended now. Three slots received an 8%* boost. This is not the same path, not by a long shot.

(* the lack of exotic backpieces is irrelevant; in theory they would have existed eventually to round out the available gear at existing levels and still serve as a baseline.)

Adeptis.1742:

All super helpful answers! I’m scared to change my key bindings, but I’ll give it a shot if I still can’t effectively dodge after trying the above techniques.

Is there a good heuristic to know what my stats should be for a given level? Should I just make sure my gear lvl requirement is near my level? Some pieces are still from character creation. Should I use my Karma to buy gear, or save for later?

The general rule of thumb that I use is that I will purchase karma armor that is at least 5 levels over what I am wearing (provided the stats are sane for my build) and I will make a trip out of my way to the Trading Post or crafting station to upgrade anything 10+ levels out of date. I will also puchase karma armor that is a significant fashion upgrade. As I have crafters of all sorts, I tend to have crafted armor laying around that fills the 5-levels-out-of-date role.

Upgrade your armor with gems, runes, and other upgrades you find—no need to go overboard on this, and feel free to sell things of value and socket less valuable items, but use at least something.

akamon.2769:

not sure if this fits as getting a quick answer type question – from a numbers / stats perspective, which sigil would i benefit more from? for both hammer and greatsword – sigil of force or sigil of accuracy?

i love crits, but +5% dmg seems pretty decent too. which would do more DPS?

5% damage is just that—5% damage. Pretty straightforward.

5% crit is much less straight forward. Assuming you’re not on the cusp of 100% crit chance, the benefit of 5% crit chance is a 50% damage boost 5% of the time, or a 2.5% boost.

If you have crit damage, this goes up, matching 5% damage at +50% crit damage.

You also gain up to 5% more on-crit procs. When factoring in proc cooldowns, this will most likely be less than 5%.

5% damage has the benefit of increasing your peak damage, while 5% crit increases your average.

My 2cp: For WvW, I would not try to make a scepter build. However, I also wouldn’t travel without one.

No, the damage isn’t great, but it is our long-range option. It is not a great option when measured against other classes, but it is the only one we have. While I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing some more buffs to it, I’m a staunch supporter of working with what you have while asking for better.

The rate of fire is decent—fast enough that you can put pressure on your target by forcing them to move or take the hits. It won’t win you a 1v1 against a ranger, but zerg vs. zerg most of your shots will probably connect with somebody. Any attention devoted to avoiding your scepter attacks is attention not spent elsewhere. Skill #2 can tag groups of people nicely, and skill #3 is a ranged immobilize—whats not to like there.

I keep one around, either on swap or in my bag, because there are times when scepter is the best weapon I can produce for a fight. Similarly, I am never without a staff—we missed a mesmer when clearing a fort and he managed to portal in a decent zerg to our inner gate. Staffing through the gate put enough pressure on them to slow the attack long enough for reinforcements to arrive and clear them out. I wouldn’t advocate a staff-centric build for general use, but it does what it does well.

DreamOfACure is right that a scepter is very good, but it is only very good at doing what it does, not necessarily what people want it to do. You probably won’t have the ranged damage that a ranger puts out, no matter how you spec or what buffs are made.

Kasei is correct that, in the grand scheme of ranged combat in WvW, it is not very good; it is on the low end of the spectrum. However, it does have its uses—and this is where it is “very good.” Not “great” but “very good.”

Precursor prices last night (as best as I can remember):

• Scepter: 40g
• Horn: 18g
• Pistol: 70g
• Sword: 100g
• Shield: 50g

The problem isn’t the price or rarity of precursors, the problem is the price of the most heavily-demanded precursors.

You’ll notice people are always talking about the greatswords or staff, never the horn, or torch, or pistol. Many of the others are not unreasonably priced.

In GW1, completing a title at an aggressive (but not insane) pace would take about 3 months of effort. GW2 has been out for about 3 months; while 3 months is a long time for a WoW convert, to a GW1 player, 3 months is nothing; long-term goals take a year, minimum.

I did this on my guardian, so your mileage may vary on the elemetnalist.

Stability is your friend. For the dogs, I brought “Stand your Ground!” “Save Yourselves!” and the stability consecration (forget the name offhand). Between these three, lots of area-effect blind, and passive condition removal, we were able to withstand the barrage of fears without issue.

I want to say that “Save Yourselves!” was replaced by Wall of Reflection for most other fights, but it has been a while, so my memory may be a little hazy.

Lacking a guardian, I don’t know a good way to do this, as I’ve never had to without a guardian in the group.

I was under the impression that you only earned character exp when you received a level of crafting. No boosts would modify the amount of character exp received, only crafting exp.

DEKeyzToChaos.7381:

Someone correct me if I’m wrong (I often am), but it’s something like…

Your stats (after food, gear, traits, etc.) are multiplied by the ratio of your base stat at your effective level to the base stat at your actual level. This appears to hold for both upscaling and downscaling (much more testing on down than up).

If I have my numbers right, the bse value at 60 is 572 and it is 916 at 80. So a 60 being scaled to 80 has their stats multiplied by (916/572) ~1.6. Similarly, an 80 being dowscaled to 60 has their stats multiplied by (572/916) ~0.62

If your gear is not up-to-date with your character level, then as your character levels, the effectiveness of your gear diminishes as it is scaled. That said, there is generally enough room for some gear stat slippage as you level—you just don’t want to let it go too far or it becomes challenging to overcome.

Edit: Was thinking this was in a slightly different thread at first. Modified content to be more on-topic/relevant. -1 for multitasking. Also re-edited due to atrocious spelling / typos.

I agree with the DEKeyzToChaos; if you’re crafting your own gear, by all means, use the best you’ve made, but going out of your way prior to 80 is probably more cost than benefit.

The exception is if you’re going to be trying difficult, group-based content. In that case, you owe it to your group to bring whatever you can.

If you’re not big into running dungeons yet, there is no reason to stress over gear right now.

The cultural vendors are very expensive, by design. Gnerally random loot in the TP is a better deal if you are being money-conscious.

Some questions that might help either self-evaluate or bring to light other potential causes:

Are you fighting level-appropriate areas or being downscaled? How does your gear stack up against your actual level?

In the late teens you should be rounding out your gear set with a full 6-piece set of armor and some progress on your rings and accessories.

Have you tried multiple weapons? Sometimes it is a matter of playstyle being at conflict with your skillset.

Are there specific areas/enemies that are problems or is it everywhere?

I’m not at all upset with fractals because I recognize it is not a progression system. The problems you describe originate with the conflict between people that think it is and those that think it isn’t.

People won’t do a lower level fractal because they want the daily. Thats fine for them, but they can’t do another after the daily? OK, maybe not. So what; there are lots of people out there.

But you said a lot in your guild are on lower levels and nobody will help them progress… not even themselves? Don’t the people in your guild, I don’t know… work together to make the team stronger? Can’t one or two people do a lower level to help somebody catch up so that gasp they aren’t a lower level any more?

Here is where we reach the disparity in perception. The people that are tired of grinding it see it as a progression that must be done. Grinding should not be enjoyed, it must be repetitive, and there is no reward worth receiving except progression. They do the daily because that is the way you grind; anything else is a waste of time and does not further their goals. It is a contest and you win by being higher than other people.

The people that don’t look at it as progression to grind out just want to get to the higher levels because that is a natural offshoot of enjoying the content. They want to progress because it makes it easier to get groups, because the rewards are better, and they want to overcome the challenges. They aren’t trying to race, and they will play the content not for the daily—not for the grind—but for the fun.

If nobody is willing to do a lower level once in a while to help others catch up, then you have a downright kitteny guild. How many people are behind in their FotM levels? Probably less than 5 if there isn’t a full group. Nobody has an alt that could progress? Nobody is willing to take a main for a second round after the daily? You can’t find any people in the overflows to pug—spread into multiple overflow zones, it is easy to name drop guildies that can fit into a group. How low of a level are we talking? You can do level 1 with 3 people pretty easily, although it takes longer.

While I understand your frustration, I think it is largely misplaced.

We don’t need them. GMs are not developers, they are customer service representatives. Lets be clear about that. A GM is a CSR that interacts through the game client. Interacting through email is a more versatile solution than in-game contact:

• Real-time contact has a lot of downtime built in; you have a faster response using email-based systems.
• In-game communication cannot be used to resolve connectivity issues.
• Most people cannot access the game client at work, but can access email.

Lets assume they could interact through in-game mail. What would they do?

You think somebody is botting, so you call in a GM and they right click and report so that the activity logs can be pulled and evaluated. What did this accomplish?

You don’t just ban an account for botting because a player said to or because it looks like botting. Invalidating a $60 purchase without cause can get you in legal hot water, EULA or no (they are not enforcable in all regions), you need to have proper evidence of activity in violation of the ToS ready to go.

Also, what makes you think the botter owns the accounts that are botting? How were the accounts compromised? Who is the one running the bots? Aren’t answering these questions so that you can provide a solution to the problem instead of covering up the symptoms more important than keeping the lodestone prices low?

The most common causes of GM intervention in other games:

• Loot disputes
• Accidentally lost/deleted items
• Chat moderation

A GM team doesn’t add anything to the game when the first is a non-issue, the second has no fix, and the third is accomplished by filters + reporting.

Vinny.6924:

Its a one or none.

I never get more then one and half the time I get none.

Using mystic kit and level 80 rares. Now I sell my rares to the tp.

Another anet nerf and cover up

Last night I salvaged 9 items and got 21 ectos. Your bad luck is your bad luck, don’t mistake it for a conspiracy.

Edit:

Here are some numbers, make of them what you will. Salvaged using mystic kits. Salvaged over a period of 8 hours.

batch 1: 50 lv 80 rares = 50 ecto’s
batch 2: 50 lv 80 rares = 49 ecto’s
batch 3: 50 lv 80 rares = 41 ecto’s
batch 4: 50 lv 80 rares = 38 ecto’s

Assuming:

• 25% chance to salvage ecto.
• When ecto is salvaged, the yield is uniformly distributed in the range of 1-3.

Math dictates that:
On average, 50 independent samples will yield ecto 12.5 times, with a yield of 2, for an average tally of 25 ectos/50 rares.

Your low of 38 is 150% of the average. You got lucky and, as the number of samples increased, the yield started to slip closer to the mean. The only thing unusual is your luck at consistently getting yields that are this high above the average.

If there is a diminishing returns system then the starting point is so far above the posted average that it diminishes to the stated salvage rate over time, which is hardly a reason to complain—the return diminishes to the stated probability.

Depending on your group and the fractals you face, the time to complete a set of three can vary greatly.

I was in a group that spent nearly an hour trying to complete the frist part of the swamp. I’ve also been in a group that completed it in less than 2 minutes. How much time can you spare? If you have an hour, doing a set of 3/4 fractals is entirely posible, however it may be difficult to do in that time with certain groups.

Also, the 3 fractals have do be done not only in a single trip into the fractals area, but without returning to the staging area—that means no armor repair or vendor (unless you bring those services with you). This may or may not be news, I point it out because of the potential ambiguity.

Bloodlust.3672:

crafting is an expensive and complicated way to level. i’d rather be leveling in ways in which i’m practicing my combat as well as also earning gold and items.

You can’t have it every way at once.

Crafting is not complicated. If you think it is, then you don’t understand it. Thats a topic for another thread, though.

Crafting is not expensive if you have the materials. If you’re a sell-everything type of player that does not stockpile materials, yes, you will need to buy them or farm them. If you stockpile them, then you can argue opportunity cost, but the is a reward as well, so it is a matter of being willing to pay the price.

You want to practice combat, but you don’t want to kill open-world… do dungeons.

You can already do fractals. I have a now-14 warrior in my semi-regular fractal group.

You can do regular dungeons starting at 30; my elementalist will be leveled from 30-80 from just dungeons, crafting, and the exploration necessary to rech dungeons. I wish I had the time to pursue this more, but while it is going to take me a while, is a compeltely viable path.

80 is not special. The game starts at level 1, not 80; you don’t need to grind to 80 in a way you hate; if you play the game the way you enjoy it, you will find you are 80 eventually.

Blueshield.6291:

MilitiaMasterV.7216:

I don’t think it should be ‘removed’, but I also don’t get why most games make it into an ‘either/or’ situation. Why not just make a slotted section on armor specifically for MF stuff only (and increase the value as you get higher level up to a certain %) that doesn’t interfere with the other more valuable stats? This seems like a ‘no brainer’ to me. /shrug

The same effect, though would essentially be accomplished by simply upping the universal drop rates by between 1 and 5%. The system as it’s implemented does make sense; in order to ensure a higher drop rate you have to sacrifice some combat effectiveness. It’s a perfectly reasonable tradeoff. The only problem is that some people are so greedy or so lazy that they wear Magic Find gear into places they shouldn’t.

I’d like to propose another way of looking at the problem. Imagine a player who is entirely unconcerned with stats and combat effectiveness, and just wants to look good while he or she journeys through the world. This player finds a set of armor which (s)he thinks is the best-looking set (s)he’s seen yet. Unfortunately, it is a set of common armor with garbage for stats. This player could wear the set of junk armor into a high-level dungeon and ruin his/her combat effectiveness, or (s)he could choose to switch to an appropriate set.

So, because players could wear junk drops into a dungeon, should we remove all junk drops from the game? Or should we consider that the problem is really that the player chose to wear inappropriate gear?

You have just described my son’s armor set. Level 80 wearing a white level 71 breastplate with a major rune—the only rune on his armor at all.

Strangely, his guardian can die (not go downed, fully die) twice per fight and nobody bats an eyelash at him, but my guardian can stay standing through almost anything and carries a single magic find item (shield) with the stacking MF buff sigil (still the best shield i’ve found) and gets comments from people accusing me of stacking MF selfishly (also worth noting that the stat food I ate gave me more stats than I lost on the shield, and your omnomberry bar is more of a reduction relative to real food than I suffered for my shield).

I agree that there is an underlying problem, but the problem is not with gear, it is with people. Anet won’t be swooping in to regulate player activity, we have to do that on our own—that means making known the performance standards and holding people that fail to meet them accountable. It means judging performance, not theory, and it means actually having to interact with people. This is not the MMO where everybody queues for a random dungeon, is teleported there, and completes it with no difficulty or communication between players. This is the MMO where you are part of a community.

I’ve fought him twice on lvl 1, both 4-manning it. My group was all in the same room, but featured a level 13 warrior on both occasions.

The first time we were having difficulty getting the bucket sequence down. We were doing a 4-bucket cycle and the kiters kept getting split, which led to dodging bombs into more bombs, then getting killed. The ranger pet wouldn’t stay in the pet carrier and kept interfering with the kiting. We gave up after a while.

The second group replaced one of the weaker (skill-wise) players with a better one. Instead of being 2 guardians, a warrior, and a ranger, we became 2 warriors, a guardian, and a ranger. We put two people on bucket duty (ranger + warrior) and two on kiting. We had low damage so it took a while, but we won without issue. A couple people downed, but I don’t think anyone died after we adopted the 2-bucketeer strategy. Even with the very low damage on him, he was faster than the miniboss champion.

All told, the fractal is longer than others, but thats a half-empty glass. Some others are faster. The swamp is 2 minutes of running followed by an 8-minute boss fight, if you get it right—some groups cannot. The dredge fractal does nothing to test your ability to handle jump puzzles, but that doesn’t make it bad—they are each meant to be distinct, and that means some are longer than others.

As the title says, I’d like to be able to craft a skin (like the HoM ones) for a weapon or armor as opposed to a full-fledged item. This would be crafted through whatever tradeskill creates the corresponding item type and would be learned through the discovery system.

The discovery recipies would be fairly simple at the low-end, requiring you to forfeit the item with the skin you want as part of it, and a token amount of other materials (including but not necesarily limited to coin) as well.

I’ve seen this request before from time to time, in various forms, but what got me behind it finally was the idea that crafting is so universal there is no value in the skill itself, and the most fun I ever had with crafting was actually many years ago in EverQuest, farming rare materials to throw away in the forge, hoping for skill points, so that I could make rare and exotic items.

Being a 400 weaponsmith doesn’t mean anything on its own, but having a rare-skinned weapon does. By all means, make the weapon / armor skins expensive to make (you could buy cultural armor skins off the trade post for less than the vendor price—no fashion achievement, but you get the looks), but far cheaper than the original item—and make the originals ascended for the really-expensive mystic forge recipies. Bumping them up would mean there is still a reason to have the original item instead of just the skin.

Tradeskills get rare recipies that will be relatively exclusive due to the small number of people willing to sacrifice these items—grinding for the recipies would be far too painful, and the out-of-the-way nature means the gradual trend towards max that MMOs have shouln’t really apply. People not willing or unable to pursue rare-skinned gear have a lower mark they can now hit.

I don’t think this would have worked with exotics as top-shelf gear because they are too easy to manipulate until they have the stats you want. With fixed-stat ascended gear, you can have exclusive combinations and effects very easily, preserving the value of individual items.

I think it would work.

You’ll be fine with that setup, I think. It probably isn’ the most optimal, but it will be fine, as long as you enjoy it.

I play a guardian and my wife plays a ranger. The Fire and Light combo fields I put down combo well with her bow. If you find yourself low on damage with the mace, try a 1-hand sword. It should improve your mobility and up your damage a little bit—again, if it isn’t fun, don’t do it. Better to take 10 more seconds to get a kill and have fun than be bored quickly.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

If there is a difference, it sounds like a bug. So could you go post your screens/video in the bug forum ?

Agreed. I can’t remember what skills I had tested offhand, but I never found a discrepancy. I tested by using a spare character slot on my daughter’s account so I had both characters present at once—I was always able to hit at the same range, although the graphical effect was clearly different.

You can trust what Anet says. Designs and intent can change, but they don’t change for no reason.