Guild Wars 2

From the sound of it, you saw the guide for the Mystic weapons in the mystic forge. If you’re looking to jsut use weaponsmithing to craft weapons, you want these:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weaponsmith/Orichalcum_recipes

A dagger will run you 40 Orichalcum ingots, 5 ectos, and 5 T6 fine crafting materials.

Scales are as expensive as they are because they are harder to farm than other items and a lot of people like a full-defensive build.

5/6 Krait runes (6th on my breather):

+193 condition damage
+15% bleed duration
5% chance to cause 10s of bleeding when hit (5s cooldown)
(+100 power while underwater)

The bleed proc does a lot to improve the usefulness of the condition damage I already have. When I buy a new set of armor (I got carrion because of the low cost) I’ll likely change my spec a bit.

I’ve never seen any of those things happen, but I am also not a huge WvW nut, and I play on a middling-low ranked server.

That said, the solution doesn’t address the problem. The problem is that people do these things. The fact that they transferred servers is besides the point. You could do any of those things with a second account, or a large enough guild (theres no shortage of those among WvWvW-heavy guilds) could send over four people on 1-week rotations.

@TsukasaHiiragi: I’m a primarily PvE player, and I’ve queued for WvW with a primary focus on getting my 100%. You’re welcome for those sentries on the road I killed, the quaggan I recruited, the seige I broke, the supply I delivered, the enemy dolyaks I killed, the friendly dolyaks I swiftnessed, and the intel on enemy movement I provided. Because I can’t contribute when running around to every major point on the map, right? Maybe you have a problem with this on your server, but on mine, the commanders frequently ask for players in different areas to provide feedback on what is happening there, and the groups of PvE players moving between exploration objectives are a non-trivial force that brings with it enough supply to stand up a trebuchet in moments. Offer leadership and benefits to these people in exchange for their assistance—they generally don’t mind running halfway across the map to get supply if it gets them another PoI, and bringing that supply to you for your trebuchet to take a tower that they also need benefits everybody. The first failure lies with the general.

@BubbaLicous: When you are severely outnumbered, you cannot fight like you are on equal footing with your opponent—history is full of real-world examples of this. The buff has value, but you need to pick your fights very carefully. The opponent cannot run the entire map, and you might just be able to strike up an alliance with the 3rd server to break the stranglehold that the other one has.

Archer.6485:

Please stop saying that we just need to work hard for it. That isn’t the issue, no one here said they want an easy legendary we just want it to be a stable and tangible goal.

That is exactly it. Anybody that is complining right now is complaining that, in the 42 days the game has been out, they have been, thus far, unable to acquire one of the rarest weapons in the game.

The goal is stable and tangible, the objection is to the RNG in the precursor, but the RNG rears its head in every aspect of building a legendary. Why aren’t people complaining about the RNG being behind the distribution of ectos? It is, if the instability of uniformly distributed pseudo-random systems is a problem, you need to complain about it on all fronts, not just one.

The fact remains that a legendary in 42 days is rediculously fast. If you think you should have one already, you’re wrong—any fair assessment of effort says it should take longer than 42 days. Some people exploited. Some got very lucky. Some profited from the exploits of others. I did the math using the most accurate numbers I can find; your chances of a precursor inside a year are pretty good. That is a much more reasonable time span to look at than 42 days. And if you don’t get one in that time, the market will have had some time to stabilize, and the alternate-form cash option will be much better defined. There is stability, but nobody knows what that stable point is yet—do not blame the system when it is the community of players so desperate for legendaries that has caused the hardship.

Stratzvyda.3921:

However the chances change randomly and with no warning. Their fix to people getting precursors through the god skull glitch was to make those exploited precursors double in price overnight.. Basically sends a strong measure that in order to get anything in this game you need to find a glitch and exploit it, you’ll be rewarded not only by the exploit, but by arenanets overreaction to it.

There was a bug, and it was fixed. The result is a panic-driven surge in price. This is commonly known as a “bubble.” In short, the price inflates due to panic, not due to actual changes in the marketplace. Sure, closing a bug like this does mean the supply drops, but as it resulted from a bug, the intended value is unchanged.

If you want to get antyhing in this game, invest the necessary effort. Not the amount you think is necessary, but the amount that is actually needed.

Malediktus.9250:

I have zero motivation to throw more rares and exotics into the mystic forge. Seeing hours and days of farming destroyed over and over by stupid RNG makes me sad.

Someone in my previous guild got Dusk on his 20th attempt of adding 4 rares to the MF. How is this fair compared to people who did 10x more tries and still have nothing to show for it.

It is fair because they had the same chance of getting a reward on any given attempt. Your old guildmate didn’t exploit the system, didn’t gain any unfair advantage, he was simply lucky. Instead of gambling those rares, maybe it would have been a smarter investment to sell them to others and use the money to buy the precursor outright. (20 × 4 × 10 = 800 rares, at 50s each, less 15% TP fees is 340g—I don’t know the current rates, but thats at least an estimate of what people have put in).

If you want to make it “fair” then the threshold will probably be somewhere around 700 attempts—on your 700th attempt, you get a precursor. Nobody will ever get a precursor before then, and they will get one for every 700 attempts. I find that considerably less fun than chance.

Reading this thread, I just realized I’ve been doing it all wrong.

I have a MF set that I wear most of the time. Not always, but most. I tend to take it off when I need every advantage I can get, but the stats work with my build—I have effectively traded Vitality for MF.

Up to this point, I didn’t realize that I should be selfish. So, thanks to this thread, I will make the following pledge:

• When I dodge that 1-shot that takes you down, I will not help you back on your feet, becasue I am selfish.
• When I choose utility skills for the group, I will no longer take group stability, protection, aegis, or condition removal, because I am selfish.
• When I know the trick to winning a fight because I’ve done it many times before, I won’t share it with the group, because I am selfish.
• When I loot an item that would be a nice upgrade for a party member, I will not give it to them, because I am selfish.
  </sarcasm>

I am not all players, but you want to penalize me because you have had / are afraid of having bad experiences with players that are undergeared. Seriously, your concern with undergeared players is that they will choose stats that help them instead of the group? Maybe they are wearing that gear because it was what they happened to get (I’ve gotten one exotic weapon so far, and it has MF—also the best all-around stats I’ve gotten on a sword yet)…

I agree, these moochers have to be put in their place. Even worse than the MF crowd arepeople that don’t use consumables (including boosters) in dungeons—if you don’t use those you are intentionally undercutting your peak abilities. If you don’t have a food and sharpening stone at the very least, you’re not trying. Do potions stack? Those should be manadtory too. 5% swiftness booster, 10% armor booster… is there a damage booster? Don’t forget that one too. Any time you group with me, you owe it to me to give it your all, nothing held back, everything ready to go, no expense spared, because it isn’t about getting what you want, its about the team, it is about those other people. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t bother to learn the encoutners and get you killed over and over while htey refuse to listen to your advice. It doesn’t matter if you spend a total of an hour just standing around waiting for them to run back from the nearest waypoint. It doesn’t matter if they can’t dodge to save their life and spend more time on their back than their feet. You owe these people, because you’re a group. So get over yourself, put on your exotics, give them exotics if they don’t already have them, and pop your boosters, potions, sharpening stones, and food, and get in there, and oblitterate the content so fast you get screwed by the DR/anti-exploit code.

How far do you want me to take the elitism?

P.S. That last part is not a dig at the DR/exploit code; I accept that is is mildly buggy, producing false positives, but is a generally worthwhile and necessary system.

I’d just like to see a watchdog timer added; if you can’t complete the event in 30 minutes, somethign went wrong, kill it and restart.

Crater.1625:

I wouldn’t want an automated group finder. What I’d rather see is: When you walk through a dungeon portal, instead of being put directly into the dungeon, you’re ported into a small ‘staging area’ instance which all servers share – like an Overflow, only without a ‘home’ server alternative.

Suddenly, you’re in the same room as everybody else in the world looking for a group for that particular dungeon, and yet the system is not completely randomized and robbed of all social interaction.

I like this solution—it is more or less how GW1 handled it.

On a couple occasions, I’ve been at a farm (lettuce field, strawberry patch, etc) and noticed as I gather that, before I finish, the other nodes disappear.

Now, I know back in BWE, with overflow servers and the like these were great—between multiple servers you could rack up a ton of exp and harvestables.

It seems that in the relatively recent past they were changed so that after harvesting the number of nodes on the map, they all disappear. While I don’t mind the bug with overflow servers (and, in the future, this would likely affect guesting) being closed, this does mean that when I have a 30% chance of getting extra harvests, it actually means I have 0% on these concentrations of crops.

Does anybody know of any word on this being intended or not?

If prices are not stable, that is because the market has not reached equilibrium. They are climbing because, based on supply and demand, people are selling them for less than they are worth.

There is a really old, famous quote:
“Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay.”

If there is one copy of an item in a market, the value is not the mean or median or all the interested buyers’ offers, it is the maximum. However, once that item has been purchsed, that buyer is satisfied and the value of the next drops to the new maximum offer. Sellers, of course, speculate that there are buyers willing to pay more than the highest currently-known offer and try to sell for more. Inflation happens, especially in a world where the economy is still stabilizing and the population is changing at a termendous rate (0-2million in less than a month!)

As time goes on and the market matures and stabilizes, the price of supplied goods and the offers of demands for that good reach a mid-point. At this point, a stable price emerges. Until then, as long as prices are rising, you’re getting a good deal because they are being underpriced. If people stopped buying them, that would be an indication the price has risen above its value—until then, as long as people keep buying, they are being sold for fair market rate or less.

That is exotic precursors on the free market in a nutshell. If you want communism, where the total value of loot is split amongst the population evenly, so all may have the best, you had better find another game.

Dungeons remind me a lot of Ninja Gaiden; the game is easy when you know where to jump and when. It is easy when you know what is going to leap from the edge of the screen. It is easy when you know the boss patterns and safe spots. It is close to impossible until you do.

I still love that game, even… wow, its already 23 years old.

From what I’ve seen, and I’m not stating this is guaranteed true or viable, just possible, the legendaries are Bind on Use, so you oculd just buy Sunrise and/or Twilight.

“We have to save something for an expansion” Is what I remember hearing.

Be careful what you wish for. Server-wide LFG chat also means server-wide gold selling spam.

I can see not wanting to replace intended coin sinks with karma. That strieks me as totally fair.

What about non-coin sinks?

Two parts: After I’ve helped a tribe of quaggan by slaughtering krait, I continue to slaughter krait, but they don’t like me any more for this. Treat hearts like leveling to 80; once you hit the cap (complete the heart), repeat a certain level of that feat for a token bonus—the terms for completing the heart the second time can be modified, but it allows the quaggan to show me they appreciate me more. More importantly, it ties into…

Secondly, those quaggan have no doubt killed a few krait of their own and have some goodies to sell. Maybe they have scales—the reason I slaughter krait—or maybe they just have the bags of random crafting materials krait drop, or maybe they have a more specialized sack of random stuff. Just like you need coin sinks, you need karma sinks too.

Toughness vs Vitality:
Condition damage (bleed, burning, poison) ignores your armor, which means it ignores Toughness, too.

You really can’t assess how to balacne the two without knowing the damage you’re likely to be taking.

Crit damage% and precision are similar—precision increases your chance to land a crit, while crit damage increases the strength of it. The math plays out in a similar fashion, but instead of having to consider damage that avoids mitigation, you need to evaluate on-crit effects.

In short, there is no right answer, as the answer changes depending on the situation.

I am currently unable to load guildhead, so I can’t see what you’ve posted, so my comments are based primarily on the context I’ve gleaned from Animus’s response:

I’m told the focus is good, but I don’t really see the benefit, personally. The shield is a party protection skill and projectile shield/heal. The focus is a self-block and blind. The blocking skill is good, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t help the party, and it sounds like you’re going for party support. Blind will do nothing on a boss 90% of the time, and you shouldn’t need it for anything less than a boss. The shield is a solid pick, I think.

I tried Altruistic Healing before and, quite frankly, I was underwhelmed. It never managed to heal me enough to make a big difference, and it was a large investment that I didn’t really need—The other points in that line could have a better impact elsewhere. After trying an altruistic healing build, I went back to a Permeating Wrath one—the 30% boon duration is invaluable as a support-heavy role.

It sounds like you’re placing a lot of emphasis on toughness and vitality. I have found it is difficult to get and hold attention with this type of build, and that is what it is prepared for. Also, while your health pool is among the lowest, your natural toughness is the highest (heavy armor). Over-sepcialization tends to breed more weakness than rounding out your edges.

If you’re looking to tank, then Save Yourselves is a good pick, but I wouldn’t give up Hold the Line or Stand Your Ground in a dungeon, barring specific fights. I also advocate the signet heal—the heal strength is good and the passive condition removal is great for breaking fears (longest fear I ever had on me was over 3 minutes, but it broke after 6s—passive condition removal is sweet).

I tend to run with 15 points in Radiance. I can chain-blind large groups of weak foes and, coupled with permeating wrath and searing flames, hold their attention quite well. I leave the single-target tank/kiting to the warrior and focus on the groups. In a situation like this, I can quite often get close to the Might cap on the party, too (thanks to 5 points in virtues).

Just my 2cp

@Robert Hrouda: I have found, through many years of experimentation, that better/faster results are achieved by flailing ones arms about while holding either bladed objects or confectionaries.

The last time I saw a location in orange, the player was on a different home world. Might be related? Might be a glitch?

bri.2359:

I am a noob to this transmute stuff, and would like to know how this works.

I know you need a transmute stone; a piece of armour or weapon you like the look of; and similar armour piece or weapon you want to change.

Can this done anywhere, by double-clicking on the transmute stone, or do you need to be at the mystic forge as well?

When you double-click on the transmute stone, is there an interface where you place the two items, and is it clearly indicated which item goes where, i.e. the ‘skin’ item goes in a particular slot and the ‘object’ item goes into another?

With my luck, I would wind up transferring lower stats of an item instead of the ‘skin’…

You’re pretty much spot-on with your assumption. You are given a window where you drag two compatible items (two medium chest pieces, two axes, etc). Each item is broken up into its pieces: Appearance, stats, and rune/sigil. You then select one of each type and hit transmute.

My understanding is that the change was made to prevent a bug where you could transmute another race’s cultural armor onto your currently-equipped armor.

Amarath.5132:

I would argue melee is viable it does damage , it just has a larger but not so much large chance to get you killed. Now support.. well support builds are usless in this game thats what you should be focusing on.

Ifyou beleive this, you need to group with more elementalists, guardians, and warriors. (And probably others, but this is where the bulk of my experience lies)

SKuDDer.1860:

Guardians already basically do nothing for keep/tower defense/attacking.

Guardians are no less adept at manning Arrow Carts and Catapults than anyone else. Why is a ranger that could be attacking from the ramparts using a catapult in the courtyard? Why are elementalists on the ramparts with arrow carts when they could be laying down combo fields for a sortie? Too many guardians or not enough supply for defensive seige weaponry? Sortie. It works. If you’re on the attacking side, provide support for your ranged attackers. An elementalist can die really fast, you can keep them alive long enough for them to drop a few spells and fall back. Line of Warding can keep foes from a door or from getting away from a door. Guardians (especially with +healing) can help others back on their feet. There is a lot to do in WvW when attacking and defending keeps.

SKuDDer.1860:

I am just saying by default we have no crippling effects on weapons? You have to either put points into the hammer trait to get this, or slap a rune of ice on your weapon.

Just because the ranger crippled my foe doesn’t mean I can’t chase him. Teamwork. Alternatively, who said it is your job to chase. If they are running away, your side is winning. A foe that is attacking you is (generally) not attacking your allies.

SKuDDer.1860:

But hey, at least you can look pretty in your front line doing nothing while the range is aoeing.

Tome of Wrath can devastate an army, and I can stand up long enough to use it. Sure, it is an elite, but group quickness and ~2kdps/target at 1200 range is a nice spike. But lets say you don’t want to do that, lets say we just ignore the elite altogether. Protecting allies is not nothing. Pushing the enemy back is not nothing. Baiting foes into chasing you is not nothing. Baiting foes into using long cooldowns is not nothing.

Guardians have access to every boon and can give allies most of them too. Guardians can provide some of the best condition removal and damage prevention in the game. Indirect combat may be less glorious than direct damage, but it is strategy, not AoE damage, that wins WvW.

I’m not a big WvWer, so I’m sure there are more optimal builds out there. Regardless, this build seems to work reasonably well for my playstyle.

Traits are 0-15-5-20-30.
Major traits are Searing Flames, Superior Aria, Empowering Might, Consecrated Ground, Master of Consecrations, and Permeating Wrath.

My typical armor is crafted Carrion (Power/Condition Damage/Vitality) exotic with 5/6 Superior Krait runes (6th rune on breather, helm has a Rabid suffix).

Primary weapon set is sword and shield. Secondary is a staff.

Signet of Resolve is my heal skill. I haven’t found a reason to change it in a long time.

My default utilities are Wall of Reflection, “Hold the Line!” and “Stand your Ground!” “Save Yourselves!” will occasionally make an appearance, as well as “Retreat!”.

For an Elite I tend to bring Tome of Wrath.

Alone, I have no difficulty taking down a veteran, so I can claim the flags on the road as needed.

When attacking a fort/tower, I tend to play defensively, granting protection, blocking projectiles, and helping allies get back on their feet. When Tome of Wrath is available, I torch the defenders/arrow carts/cannons/anything on the walls. I can stay standing long enough that most opponents break off and run away before I have to consider backing off myself.

When defending a fort/tower, staff #1 through a door helps keep attackers at bay. Line of warding has obvious uses in chokepoints, and Tome of Wrath from the walls can be effective—it is far more effective on the ground.

When making a sortie from a fort/tower, Wall of Reflection protects me from the majority of the attackers while I pick on a target in melee. Line of Warding can be used to stop a runner from making it back to their lines. I try to avoid outdistancing defensive seige equipment and stay close to the walls, preferably in range of casters and rangers.

In an open battle, I treat it like attacking a keep—hang back and rely on defensive abilities to protect your ranged allies, clear out anyone that makes it into your ranks, and when Tome of Wrath is up, toss up protection, aegis, swiftness, plant a Wall of Reflection at their feet and burn them until they break off or Tome of Wrath ends (usually the former).

Sorry, lost track of the thread (busy life and such)…

New players tend to be in 1-15 zones, and at this point, even casual, helpful players have moved on in most cases. Couple that with the sheer size of the starter zones, and interaction is down a lot.

New players don’t necessarily know about Lion’s Arch, but it is the most convenient city for me to visit.

I play a sylvari now, but when I started in BWE1, I rolled a norn but didn’t know where to go to get to Hoelbrak—I was level 8 before I went into the city. As a sylvari, I looked behind me for the entrance first. I am more inclined to spend time in a capital city than the adjacent newbie zone, so players that don’t know where the city is / have an inclination to enter the city tend to not be available to interact with me.

I think all this amounts to a semi-mature community having problems matching up helpful players with those that need it. That said, I think the learning curve is fairly slow, the tooltips help a lot, and the pacing of new skills/weapons/features does make it easy for a player to learn the ropes without help.

I could go on, but have a back-to-school night to attend shortly—just one of the many reasons I don’t have the in-game time I wish I did.

My 2cp:

• Ability to send Guild Wide Mail
• Ability to send Officer Mail
  I see this more as ‘send mail to all members of a given set of ranks’ Not all guilds have officer ranks.

• A Chat channel for Guild officers
  This could be useful. Not in my guilds, but I could see it being useful elsewhere.

• a Log in or log off indication in guild chat of members
• Message of the day being auto posted in guild chat upon log in.
• A last log in time for guild members in roster
  Yes, please!

• List of other guilds your members are representing or members of.
  I see this as being their private business.

• Transfer Leadership option
  I was unware there was much of a concept of leadership. I recall kicking somebody from a party requires a vote, instances are based on the person that triggers it, and I seem to recall that anyone can invite/approve a membership request.

• PLEASE allow more in party for group events and WvW with guild and others. 5 is not enough
  Map/Team chat tends to suffice for most communication in these situations. Requiring a formal group for participation excludes the casual player that just happens upon content being experienced by other players.

• PLEASE PLEASE a follow option (sometimes we must bio break, answer the door, help our kids, this is very useful and in 90% of games)
  I would love this as well, but I’m not holding my breath—stopping people from exploiting this feature is more important to me than saving myself a little extra effort.

• Have party members more visible or blinking on world map. Lil blue dot tooo small.
  It is especially difficult to see them when they are standing on a waypoint.

• Friend log on notification
  Yes, please!

• Duels among party members
  I was never a big fan of duels. As long as I can auto-decline (and this is the default for the option) I’m ok with it existing.

• Be able to inspect party members or others
  I’ve seen fights over this for more than a decade now. Personally, I don’t care one way or another. Requiring people to ask and interact has a certain appeal. Allowing inspections will cause conflicts—it has for so many years in so many games. It just isn’t worth it, IMHO.

• Ability to change appearance at a barber with fee (hair & color)
  I’d like to have this

• Ability to wear a title after or below your name (titles are great, Why can’t we display what we earned?)
  I’m ok with them being required to target me. Lots of titles can be very distracting when you’re looking for names in a crowd.

• Wardrobe option in hero tab
  Whats a wardrobe option?

• Ready Check that leader can see (each player gets pop of box with ready or not ready)
  In EQ, we had a really nice solution to this problem. The raid/group leader asked for everyone to state if they were ready or not and people responded with “yes” or “no” I understand the convenience of a formalized system, complete with alert sound effect, but by Balthazar’s flaming hemorrhoids people need to interact on their own once in a while (this is a personal rant of mine that extends well beyond GW2 and MMOs)

• Target Assist Window (small window where you can add party members and see what target they are hitting) Look at LOTRO’s
  The problem with this is that I often do not have a target. Large targets glitch and result in a lot of my attacks missing unless I position myself just right—it is far more effective to simply swing and hit the target. I attack several targets at once, so there is no quick solution of “last attacked” either.

• in Dungeons, let leader indicate who can CNTRL+T (target call)
  It is annoying for a good target to be overwritten, but one of the players that I would have prevented from using this feature actually called target on an add that joined in that the rest of us failed to see. It was a good move he would have been denied his moment to shine had the option been present.

• Ability to highlight and copy chat (to copy links and paste in browser)
  Don’t we have enough gold spam already? Do we really need people directing us to tinyurl links to gold farming/exploit sites? I like convenience, but I see more problems than solutions.

I actively lead and represent two different guilds; standing down and representing a different guild have no effect on rank.

Disclaimer: I have not done extensive research, and much of my preliminary research was during BWE2, so I could very easily be wrong/out-of-date on any/all of this information. hopefully it is a starting point for anyone that cares to look into it more.

I believe that condition duration and bleed duration stack additively—10% and 14% is a 24% increase. I did not look into this, but a friend of mine did, and I believe that he found the percentages simply add together.

Damage is assigned every second on a fixed schedule, so if the bleed does not last an additional second, the damage does not increase.

The 9-ticks-from-2-bleeds is a result of bleeds being applied when a skill is used, but applying damage on a fixed schedule—a 4.7s duration might intersect either 4 or 5 damage ticks:

• A 4.7s bleed is applied at t=0

1. At t=1, damage is applied
2. At t=2, damage is applied
3. At t=3, damage is applied
4. At t=4, damage is applied
5. At t=4.7, the bleed expires

• A 4.7s bleed is applied at t=0.5

1. At t=1, damage is applied
2. At t=2, damage is applied
3. At t=3, damage is applied
4. At t=4, damage is applied
5. At t=5, damage is applied
6. At t=5.2, the bleed expires

If that is the one I think it is… there is a ruined tower where that PoI is. On the west side, drop to ground level (roughly the same elevation as the water line). There should be an obviously visible entrance to the tower.

CoffeeKid.2095:

BernardBlack.4871:

Arena Net, in their infinite wisdom, decided to go completely last-gen on us and build The game only to DX9 spec. Probably to increase Windows XP user support.

I believe it was a design decision to go with DX9 so that they can reach more people. By more people I mean consoles. Knowing that this game is heavily CPU bound it goes to reason that the move to DX9 is so the consoles can play as well. Having 10 year old hardware isn’t going really cut it when running this game. The frame rates will be too low for enjoyment. Its a great business move to reach a wider audience.

I believe it is consoles that is limiting the innovation and is hurting PC gaming. DX9 is 10 year old technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX). Knowing that new games are being released all of the time using it so that they can be more easily ported.

I recall hearing that reaching the intended audience required supporting DX9, and the effort to make what amounts to two separate game clients to support both DX9 and DX11 would degrade the reliability of both (testing resources for either version would be half what can be allocated to a single one). The decision was to release with DX9 support and work on DX11 for a future update.

I think you have a romanticized view of the GW1 elite missions:

Note that I fielded the same basic 8-man team for all of these—when my wife is present in an 8-man team, her ranger takes the spot of my paragon hero. The closest I come to customizing builds for content is swapping mantras to relevant elements and, rarely, who brings which rez.

• FoW is a 1 hour run for my wife, six heroes, and myself. We don’t do consumables or anything special, and we have to devote some of that time to tending to our children. It is still 1 hour start to finish and we consider it a personal failure if anyone dies.
• Urgoz is 45-90 minutes for my wife, son, eldest daughter, myself, and 8 heroes. It varies a lot depending on whether or not it coincides with my youngest daughter napping. Again, while people might die, it is not a difficult run, it just takes a long time.
• I never found the Deep challenging. My first time in the dungeon I had to back out in the 5th room to swap my hero order. My second time I made it to Kanaxai (solo + 7 heroes). The third time I added my wife, son, daughter, and a hero and we rocked Kanaxai.
• Underworld I haven’t completed yet. I’ve yet to find a good way to deal with both the 4 horsemen and the snowman that doesn’t require a gimmick build. I have completed all of these events at one time or another, just not in the same run. I got tired of trying and moved on.
• Anguish I have not done in full, I’ve only cleared two zones. I nearly had the other two, but a costly mistake at an inopportune time set me back to the beginning in both.

The challenge in these dungeons was learning the fights, but, and I cannot stress this enough, they were not hard, they simply had a learning curve. Well, now that people have learned, they are pretty easy. A quick wiki search told me everything I needed to know to navigate the Deep. This is the natural progression of informaion—over time, people build knowledge stores and benefit from it.

A lot of people are exploring these dungeons. A lot are sharing their information, so that it is easier for the next group of adventurers to venture in, but there is more than that.

GW1 veterans brought with us knowledge of how ArenaNet designed encounters. We understand more, we know what to look for. We’re better dungeon crawlers because of it. We know that we need to bring stability and protection and weakness with us, even if you don’t need these outside of dungeons.

When I was younger, Contra was a difficult game. On a good day I could beat it, using the 30-life code. Now, I’m better. After 3 hours, with 27 lives remaining (from the original 3), a maxed score, and having beaten the game 8 times over, I just stop playing. Contra didn’t get nerfed, I got better.

That said, I expect we’ll see new content, but don’t get your hopes up, young whippersnapper—thats like “padawan”, but for my generation—you’re a better gamer than you used to be, you’re smarter, and the strategic centers of your brain have been exercised, you have better reflexes, and you will overcome challenges faster.

@Sisho: I would be interested in seeing that build—I’m working on mine (only 17, but shes getting bigger every day) and was leaning towards a similar set of traits. I hadn’t given it proper research as it was still a ways off.

The vast majority of the GW1 titles did not exist at launch. Over time, they were added. I expect we’ll see the same here.

If you don’t understand the importance of support, you don’t undertand support.

• Support is reviving a downed ally.
• Support is removing conditions.
• Support is prviding boons.
• Support is creating combo fields/finishers.
• Support is interrupting an enemy.
• Support is applying conditions.

The removal of the holy trinity was not the removal of teamwork, it was the removal of over-specialized roles. Tanks were only ever tanks. Healers were only ever healers, and damage dealers only dealt damage. Everybody contributes to support—some more than others. Similarly, everybody provides a meaningful contribution to damage and control aspects. Some professions/builds have a stronger affinity than others for certain roles, but it is a shared responsibility.

The mindset you’re looking for is more typical of a casual player. Casuals are still climbing to 80, they are getting their bearings, they are learning the content for the first time—and helping new players takes time from those other activities. This means that the most helpful players tend to also invest the least percentage of their meager time in themselves.

I think you’ll see a lot more as time goes on.

Everyone else has more or less already said what I would, so in the interest of adding something to the pile of advice:

Influence is the currency used to build guild upgrades. You need a lot to get high-end upgrades, but can get by with hundreds for lower tier features (50 influence for a consumable banner to give a 5% exp buff for 30 minutes).

How fast do you get it? Roughly 10/day for everybody that logs on, 2/DE completed, and I believe it is 5 for a PvP win. If you have multiple guild members complete the same DE, the reward per participant increases. Last night my wife and I (guildmates—we have a family guild) did WvW for ~3 hours and walked out with almost 400 influence. That was a fairly productive bout for us, but solo I am extremely lucky to get 100 in 3 hours.

So adding a few people can help a lot, if you play together. Even without, you can get the first few upgrades on your own, it just takes a little longer.

The wiki has some data on this.

But, I’ll warn you now: “Best” is a term so steeped in situation that you will need to run simulations, not numerical analysis, to pick your favorite pony. Even then, it will be blown away when the realities and variety of combat are brought on.

Well-balanced builds tend to average better than others, while specialized builds are always cost/benefit depending on how the fight goes—being kited is much different than kiting something is much different than hit-and-run is much different than tank-and-spank is… etc.

As I understand it…

When one person leaves a team mid-fight, you’d be right to penalize them. But you’re also penalizing the entire team by not replacing them. That is why you have hot-join games and auto-balance. Since far more emphasis is placed on your personal performance than a win/loss, arriving late or being auto-balanced is not a huge penalty, and it makes the match more fun.

Tournaments are meant for organized play; Random hot-join games are meant for casual PvPers. Because these activities are targeted at different groups, the rules change.

I seem to recall hearing in an interview that you can combine the two legendary greatswords to create a third legendary greatsword. I have no idea how true this is but, if so, it does confirm that there are other legendaries out there.

“Should be able to” in the world of software development means that they have either reproduced the symptoms described in a bug, or found a coding flaw that would, in theory, produce the described symptoms. Either way, a fix has been developed which is confirmed by testing to remedy the situation. However, due to the scale, it is impossible to verify that every user is experiencing the same bug—two bugs could produce the same symptoms, and so if there is another bug about which they do not know, this fix may not address your problem.

What else could cause this? Data on your system is corrupt and two items have opposite appearances—for example AC badges and copper ore have the look and text swapped. You think you’re trying to merge stacks of badges, but really the systm thinks you’re swapping copper and badges. Maybe your symptoms resulted from localized network latency and you’ve been able to merge them all along.

I’m not saying these are the case, just that software, especially software that is written by 250 people over 5 years, is really complicated and sometimes, the bugs are just as complicated. Being exposed to this on a regular basis, developers tend to avoid over-promising, because if the system was complex enough to let one bug in, it was complex enough for two.

My son just borked the fight is all. He knew he should have survived.

My brother face-tanked it the whole time (obviously dodging as appropriate, but that is the GW2 variation of face-tanking).

Given how hard it hit him, I don’t think he saw it the second time, either. :-)

So the other night I ran AC story mode for the first time. This is now my second dungeon experience in GW2, the first being CM about a week ago.

The group was my brother, son, wife, and a random player that we picked up. We used no voice chat, even the three of us that were in the same room (Its not like we didn’t talk, but we shared no information vocally that had any relevance to the dungeon).

• Prior to the dungeon, my son’s resume contained only CM story mode. He made a pretty good showing there, but he remains middling in skill for now (hes not bad for a 12-year old). He tends to have issues using the right half of his skill bar.
• My wife doesn’t get to play a lot. If she did, she’d be in the upper middle-high range. She uses the full range of her bar and has a very analytic mind, but lack of playtime means she relies on conscious thought over instinct for now. This is fine in most fights, but when you need to twitch, it doesn’t help. Also, she was playing a RL minion master during this run (more on that later).
• My brother is a MMO veteran and the only member of the group to have done AC before.
• I’m not familiar with the background of our 5th, but he was just standing near the entrance asking if any story mode groups needed 1 more, so we took him.
• I am a MMO veteran of over 10 years. I’ve played a lot of major MMOs, but not in a hardcore capacity. Yes, I’ve raided in most games, but not to the exclusion of all else in my life—always in a casual capacity.

Alright, so that is who went in. Our levels were roughly 30, 40, 50, 80, and 80. We did not change our skill bars for the entire run. We did not talk strategy before going in either—we took only what we used for general-purpose solo content. Despite the family connections, we’re pretty consistent with the makeup of a pug—limited direct experience, diverse backgrounds, levels and abilities, and, of course, minimal planning.

Before each room, my brother gave us a quick 1-2 sentence description of what we’re in for—boss does X, traps, spawns from Y, etc. Nothing elaborate, just a heads-up that you would have after a single run.

Summary of the night’s events:
The necromancer boss almost wiped us. My wife was playing real-life minion master at the time, attempting to appease our 2-year old who had decided she wanted to sit in mommy’s lap and play computer too.

My son was killed once (the only death of the night) when a fight my brother didn't remember broke out. A cave troll plowed through the wall shortly before Adelbern. I took the time to make the obligatory LotR reference while my brother apologized for the oversight--while the troll was smacking him around. My son missed 3 dodges in a row and ended up going down. Before I could get him back on his feet, I had to dodge and he ended up taking a fatal hit.

The dungeon was a lot of fun, we met a new friend, and walked out with a decent pile of money.

I’m looking forward to explorable mode. Well done ArenaNet, thank you.

@solanu: Each elementalist weapon serves a purpose. You don’t go into a single-target fight with a staff and you don’t go into an AoE fest with a dagger. Each weapon fits a role. Yes, Elementalists have more skills per weapon, but this doesn’t change the roles filled by those weapons.

As it stands now, Elementalists are deprived of two inventory slots (they only have one aquatic weapon, or it would be three). As a guardian, I keep my AoE weapons and solo target weapons equipped at all times. I don’t have to dig in my bags to find where I put them. As an elementalist, I need to ask my group to stop while I look through my bags to find an item that nearly any other class would already have equipped, and access with a single key press.

Swap in combat would break the balance, but the first three words in this thread are “Out of combat!” Nobody gets anything in return because they have their own class-specific strengths already. Part of the class design was to remove in-combat weapon swaps. That was a good idea, and is not the topic of this thread. The logistical pain that is manual swaps, however, is. It isn’t fun, and, as was my experience, it can have a lasting negative effect.

100% Map gives you 2 copies of an item—you must use one to craft each legendary.

To the OP, for a long time I couldn’t find anyone on my server that really cared, either. So I went looking in Lion’s Arch for ~10 people that cared not for WvW, but for the 100% Map. We took a couple keeps, had a good time, got pretty much all of our objectives. Not all, but most. We now have a half-decent server representation in WvW, so it is easier to get the remainder.

It might take a while, and some luck, but it can be done. You’re in no hurry, right? After all, you have how much ecto/karma farming to go?

If you want to avoid the waypoint cost on death, travel with friends. Short of a full wipe, you save yourself that much.

I’ve rezzed many random strangers that died, going out of my way to do so, because I saw the dead player mark on the map. Sadly, far many more have waypointed before I could make it to them.

I salvaged my focus on my elementalist last night because i swapped to staff… the scepter went into my gear bag, but the focus ended up getting mixed with other loot, so i salvaged it by accident when i needed to free up inventory space.

I agree; organizing one’s inventory should not be an integral part of combat. An out-of-combat weapon swap does so little to alter the general balance of classes.

I can’t speak to engineers, as I don’t play one at all (saving up gold for character slots), but it seems reasonable.

lady krottos.7940:

I didn’t bother reading the book you wrote on the subject, but all I have to say is alot of players cry about things being hard enough as it is w/o tanks and healers. Even though, they will most likely add there version of “heroic” instances later, right now, people are not good enough at skill based games (as apposed to gear based) to want that right now.

Not to belittle your point, but the frequency of posts like this on the dungeon forum are why I felt compelled to post something here.

I don’t think they are too hard or too easy. I think they have a relatively low margin of error which leads to a steep learning curve. Once you’ve learned it, and are in similarly-educated company, the difficulty drops sharply.

Unfortunately, this makes it intimidating to new players (my son was scared kittenless on his first dungeon run, and that was story mode). It also means that experienced players have an easy time farming and have a rewarding but unfulfilling pastime.

I don’t really like the idea of variable difficulty, but I also don’t like hopping over to the dungeon forum and seeing rant after polarized rant. It is time for a bipartisan solution.

While the exact implementation would need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, some thoughts on how to adjust the content:

Easy mode lowers the magnitude of damage spikes. Also, enemy health and/or armor are dropped to make the fights shorter. In a dungeon fight players are asked to perform with minimal error; shorter fights equate to fewer opportunities to make mistakes. Lower spikes reduce the chance of somebody being downed, which allows everyone to focus on fewer aspects of combat—one player’s ability to learn the fight is not penalized for another’s mistakes. Knockback, fear, etc…. perhaps tone down the frequency but players need to be prepared to deal with these.

Hard mode cannot be established by simply reducing the margin of error—other games have tried this and it generally does not go over well. Adding new tricks doesn’t work well, either, because players will learn them and adapt. A player should not know everything there is to know about an enemy by looking at it—this means that enemies get special abilities at random and the players have no way of knowing what (perhaps a warrior foe gets a burn proc, or a ranged attacker immobilizes. A similar effect could be added by adding weapon-swaps to NPCs—a warrior foe swapping from sword to hammer just went from bleed to knockdown, while the ranger is now doing AE instead of single-target damage. If you’re in the catacombs, for example, there might be a cave-in mid fight. Unlike a foe casting a spell, events of this sort are not announced—the red circle appears as damage/knockdown starts. This doesn’t have to be fatal, or anywhere near it, but a kiter that is knocked down will need to adapt, and quickly.

Obviously, rewards scale with difficulty. A party opting for hard mode should face a genuine challenge and be forced to adapt and be rewarded in excess of what could be done had the same group oblittered easy or normal mode for the same length of time. Easy mode is intended to be a learning mode, so most of the reward should be in the form of knowledge / skill gained.

I don’t particularly like this solution, but there is so much polarized whining that I can’t help but think that something has to be done before it reaches critical mass.