Guild Wars 2

Can we at least please increase our ability to stack other conditions to compensate for the confusion nerf?

I’m another one who has gone through the trouble and expense of kitting out completely in Rabid gear. It cost a lot more than gearing up a power build. Now I wish I hadn’t spent so much time and gold on it.

4/30 = shelved mesmer and ele

Guess I’m going to finally level a thief.

I’m not really a casual player. Probably more average, in my playtime. I’m not really interested in a legendary at this point, because none of them really appeal to me, and I have plenty of other things to spend gold and time on first.

This thread, however, resonates with my biggest gripe with the game.

I have two level 80s. One is in max gear except one ring and one accessory. The other is about half in BiS gear. I’d love to finish getting her geared up, and I’m eyeing a third alt to level up as soon as I can get enough gear to craft-level to 40.

I play a couple hours most days. I have fun on the two eighties doing WvW, PvP, zone exploration, jumping puzzles, and DE chains.

Some days I choose to do the ridiculous world boss hop. I can get two to three gold out of my playtime doing this, with an occasional 3-8g bonus if I happen to get an exotic drop.

Doing the stuff I listed first…. the fun stuff, I get a pittance.

So each day I log on for my 1-2 hours I get to choose. Do I make significant advancement toward my goals? Or do I have fun?

I really like so much about this game. It just sucks to have to choose between play and income, because the tedious things (repeatedly run dungeons! waith for 20 minutes then zerg dragons right foot!) make way more money than just immersing in the world (or world v world) and having a blast.

Yes, I could just give up on upgrading gear or craft-leveling an alt (really not interested in doing 1-40 on any more characters) and just play my 80s. Eventually, I’ll accumulate enough money to buy something. But does it really have to be that way?

Burrid.4739:

With my elementalist I wouldn’t do so. Also thief has better mobility, and I like going fast.

Really!?! I have got to try thief, then.

With perma-swiftness, teleport, and RtL I feel like I’m zipping all over the place on my Ele. Thief’s gotta be insane!

If anyone posts a specific item here, how long do you think it will remain profitable? How long before the margin would shrink up to negligible?

Astraea.6075:

Nothing wrong with stating an opinion on the price of these picks, but as they have a cosmetic value in addition to their convenience value, don’t be surprised if others values them differently.

Only a fool would be surprised that others think differently on a game forum.

We’d all do well to mentally put a little “IMO” after every post.

“Molten axe prices are exorbitant” (IMO)

“Their price is fine for a cosmetic, convenience item” (IMO)

As for the matter of account bound vs. soul bound, it’s possible that the cosmetic factor played a part in ANet’s decision to make them soul bound (I’m unaware of any equipable cosmetic items in the game that aren’t soul bound).

Possibly.

There was a time when dye unlocks were going to be account wide. That was, admittedly, before the game launched.

The simplest answer is that they are probably soulbound rather than accountbound because the money people expect that it will bring in more revenue that way.

Cameirus.8407:

dont buy it them, its not compulsory.

This reads as “If you don’t like the price, you’re not allowed to say so,” which is strange for a discussion forum about the game.

What’s wrong with saying, “The price of these items is high”?

Dan.8709:

There’s no point discussing expenses further, we didn’t buy it because we’re saving money, because it’s obvious we’re not.

If you look a little farther up the thread, you’ll see that it wasn’t obvious to everyone.

And there is a point to discussing the expense. If the average player could expect to see a savings in a reasonable amount of time, more people might buy them. Then again, ANet has probably thought that through, and decided that the cost/benefit is in favor of fewer people buying at the higher price.

The animation is awesome, the pick itself looks cool as hell and it’s LIMITED time, ok that a month long, but limited!

I do wonder how long the animation will continue to feel “awesome” to most people. In the videos I’ve seen, I’d rate it as “decent”, not “awesome”, so I have no way to judge how long it would take for “awesome” to wear off.

I know, it’s completely subjective. It’s great that the animation is so pleasing to some.

Geotherma.2395:

1237 hours 3 months. I play a lot :P

Wow! That’s almost 100 hours a week! It doesn’t exactly answer my question of how many picks you go through in a given week, but it does give some kind of context. You actively play 13 hours a day?

I guess, perhaps at that point it’s going to save you a few gold at some point. Whether or not you even need to save gold would be a whole other question.

And I’d spend the 10 bucks for the animation and unlimited uses (for convenience) alone. the saving money over the months or maybe years of play is cool, but in no way really influenced my purchase. Besides, after all it is a convenience/shiny item

That’s what I was getting at above. For some people convenience might be worth 20 gold, and who’s to say it’s not.

:P Oh and it saved 4 slots of my inventory.

Of course, you could buy an entire new bag slot for half the price.

Unless, of course, you’ve bought all three extra bag slots, equipped twenty slot bags in all seven, an still feel that you need to free up four slots out of the 140 you’re sporting. Which is almost as mind-boggling to me as someone playing thirteen hours a day for three months straight and enjoying the game enough to plan on playing for years to come. You know about “deposit collectibles”, right?

How four? Other than the back up pick you don’t have to carry, what are the other three slots carrying that the molten pick saves for you?

Lafiel.9372:

It’s a convenience item like permanent bank contracts etc. I don’t see a point in making them account bound other than cheapening their value.

Other than that enough of this kind of thing in the game adds up to a discouraging of alts, which also leads to a shorter average play-lifetime per user.

If I only play one character for 20 hours a week, it costs me 800 gems for 20 hours of unlimited mining per week. If I play three characters, it costs me 2400 gems for 20 hours of unlimited mining a week.

There have been several alt-unfriendly design decisions lately.

Nike.2631:

Doesn’t break my heart I’ll never see another ruined ore again because I forgot to flip my picks before digging after changing zones.

I never have this problem, because I only use the Ori tools. Copper profits 6c, and an Ori pick is 4c/use, so that’s still 2c per ore.

Sure, you make a couple more coppers per ore if you switch to a Copper pick, but then for comparison we’re not talking the Molten pick being worth 500 picks, it’s worth vastly more (8000 copper picks?!).

If you really hate thinking about the tools, then perhaps 20 gold is worth never having to think about them again. I can understand that. I paid that much for a name change on one of my characters because it was worth it to me.

I just don’t think anyone who believes that they are going to save “hundreds of gold” with one has really thought that through. Especially if they are buying them on multiple characters.

lordkrall.7241:

You are forgetting the fact that you would need to WP in order to buy said picks aswell.

Why?

You can get picks all over the place. I always keep an extra one of each Ori gathering tool in my pack. As soon as a tool runs out of uses, I switch in the one in my bag, and buy another at the next vendor. Took very little time to get into the habit, uses only three bag slots.

I’ve never used a WP in order to get a new harvesting tool.

For the sake of argument, fine, throw an extra 3 silver on the cost of a pick. It’s still going to take years of very intensive mining to save hundreds(!) of gold with a molten pick.

LordKrall, how many picks would you say you use in a given week of play?

Vol.5241:

haha I thought I was the only one. I never liked wasting gathering tools on lower lvl nodes even though the loss is probably a few copper

Depends on what you count as loss.

Copper ore goes for 8c on the TP, for a profit of 6c. One use of an Ori Pick costs 4c, so you’re still making 2c using one. So you’re not losing any money.

Now, if you switched out to a Copper Pick, it’d only cost .24c/use, so you’d be making 4.26c per ore, so an Ori Pick is losing you 2.26c per ore compared to switching.

Nike.2631:

It also has a fantastic animation when mining and makes picking up copper with 80th level characters completely guilt-free. Zero harvesting overhead.

Zero harvesting overhead? You mean other than the cost of 500 orichalcum picks you spent on it, right?

Geotherma.2395:

800 gems for a pickaxe that will save me hundreds of gold through the time I play seems pretty fine to me.

Save you hundreds of gold!?! You must buy an enormous amount of gathering tools! How many do you buy in a given week?

If you buy 10 a week (wow, that’s a lot of mining), it’s going to take an entire year of play to break even. After two years (!) you will have saved 20 gold. It’ll take you 11 years to save hundreds (200) of gold, and that’s if you do spend so much time mining that you actually go through 10 picks a week.

Really, how many do you use in the average week?

• “Skimpy” medium male armor. There’s light and heavy armor that reveals the back, arms, and legs but no medium. I want to be able to see the bioluminescence on my male Sylvari thief.

• Added option to automatically switch to town clothes whenever character is in one of the six cities.

• Added option to turn off right-click targetting.

• All WvW improvements apply to account, rather than character.

• Added a few more ways for Mesmers to get swiftness without equipping runes to do so.

• Implemented out-of-combat build swaps, including gear.

• Molten Weapon skins now available for direct sale in the gem shop with a commitment to make all new skins available for direct purchase that are placed in Black Lion Gambling Chests.

• Made Guardian more fun to play at range. (Smarter people than me will have to decide how this is managed without making them OP).

• Loot from WvW kills now goes directly into inventory, rather than dropping on ground.

• Increased monetary rewards for kills and event completion in WvW so that players don’t have to choose between earning money on world boss loot pinatas and doing dungeon runs or doing WvW and watching their income dry up.

I wonder.

Are people frustrated by mob CC running around in zerker kill-everything-as-fast-as-possible max-magic-find builds/gearsets? Or are they packing some defenses against CC and conditions?

I don’t tend to change much between WvW and running around in the open world, so I’m wondering if that’s why I don’t have that much trouble in Orr.

Probably just long enough for the player base to realize they will have to mine 50,000 times before they break even over just buying orichalcum picks.

I really enjoy it, too. It’s beautiful in a dark way. Some of the ruins take my breath away, and the giant corals and other indications it was just recently under water are wonderfully alien.

Then again, I don’t spend a great deal of time there trying to farm karma or resource nodes, and I play professions that are pretty good at avoiding mobs whenever I want.

There is a problem when I have to choose whether I want to do something fun in game or something that makes gold.

Do I do WvW today, or waypoint around to bosses as the timer dictates?

In subscriptionless pay-to-win games those of us who don’t spend money play at the expense of the impatient who want to get to max power quickly.

Here in GW2, those of us who don’t spend money after the box sale play at the expense of people too clueless to know that in gambling the house wins.

I wish they’d just offer cool things (like molten weapon skins) for a flat rate in the gem shop, and then I would pay my own share. I refuse to spend money, either in-game or RL, on a chance at something.

If I cared more, I’d find links to all of the threads on Guru with people complaining before launch that Sylvari were just Elf retreads. There are plenty of people who are tired of elves and want something different.

I’m having a hard time, however, imagining that there is a significant group of people out there eyeing GW2 and thinking, “Gee, I like everything about that game, but I’m not sure it’s worth buying becuase it doesn’t have elves.”

Vayne.8563:

The steady diet of fantasy as I get older has worn quite thin. The only thing worse than fantasy to me is fantasy with elves and dwarves. Vampires are in the same boat. They’re over-played and I can do without them.

Chuo.4238:

I feel exactly the same way. I’ve picked up several fantasy novels in the last 10 years, but I don’t think I’ve finished any of them. I occasionally read an old favourite, but mostly I just read other things now. After awhile, they do start to look the same…

I feel the same way about the bulk of fantasy, even though I devoured fantasy novels when I was younger.

One trick I found was picking up the award winners. Books don’t get Nebulas or World Fantasy Awards by being the same old dark elf/tormented mage/vampire schlock. I googled lists of the award winners and have been working my way through them, with great delight. I discovered wonderful novels like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Perdido Street Station, Under Heaven, and The Doomsday Book this way.

Feeds my love for fantasy, while giving me well written literature.

As for all the negative reaction to SAB, it has undermined my faith in the idea that this is a generation completely given over to irony. There’s just no way for that to be true and have so many people taking this game so seriously.

Easy enough lore-wise to develop the Shadow Behemoth and open a permanent portal in swamp.

Anyone else thinking that Komali is ANet’s subtle way of trying to get the Meta thinking about how to deal with D/D bunker eles?

PCs =/= Tyria’s population

PCs do, however, = the heroes fighting the dragons.

So the lore is in tact, from the standpoint that humanity occupies a lot less of the world and is a lot less dominant.

The more interesting thing is why the vast majority of heroes who have chosen to fight the dragons seem to be human…

By the time you have five level 80s you should easily be able to earn enough gold to buy the necessary gems for additional character slots.

I like playing for immersion, rather than achievement. When I’ve hit that flow state, I’m happy. Rewards become secondary.

pixieish.9627:

Hopefully that answers that question.

Thanks for a hilarious post.

You definitely live up to your forum name.

Flamenco.3894:

The exclusion of Cantha will be detrimental, because it was the favourite of many GW1 players and it brought a lot to the lore.

I expect we’ll see a lot more of the Kodan and Tengu, who will fill this niche while being far enough from real-life Asia to avoid offending our NCSoft overlords.

Nappychappy.7046:

This game wouldn’t last a month with a sub-fee, that alone judges how great this game is.

Recent history indicates that’s true of most games. Sub-fees are becoming less and less common.

Rizzy.8293:

Have you found the perfect Guild or Guilds for you?
I don’t like people

Have you made friends to occupy your time in between what you do everyday?
Again, I don’t like people.

Misanthropes will never be content.

Perhaps you should stick to single-player games. I’m all about defending “solo-play” in MMORPGs, to the extent that you don’t need to be grouped up or doing things with the same people for any extent of time to still enjoy the multiplayer aspect. But if you don’t like people at all, what’s the point of playing where there are other people?

thisolderhead.5127:

Mate- your expectations from the first day I read one of your posts was not positive.

I don’t know Dante, but it is often instructive to read post histories. Often the people who complain the most were complaining before the game even launched.

Started reading this thread, ready to post a link to the Super Staff when I got to the end.

Only to find Kasama beat me to it.

The image is fine, but you have to preview it wielded in game to really see it.

I <3 the terrifying sea of red names.

If I’m able to play the game, I play the game. Forum browsing never wins.

Forum browsing is for times where I don’t have access to the game.

Really want that staff.

If all of this lead-up is to just pull, “April Fools! You didn’t really think we’d add a fun mini-game, did you?” I will be very disappointed.

That wouldn’t be funny. Just cruel.

Doggie.3184:

I see so much RNG rage but I don’t see anyone suggesting an alternative that would meet the requirements of human psyc. for satisfaction and reward being offered (just more exploitable bad ideas).

1) Tell us the chance of a BLKit dropping a ticket. Let’s say it’s 1/100, just for the sake of argument.
2) Offer tickets in the TP for 75 times the cost of the key.

Gamblers can risk buying keys in hopes of getting a discount.
People who don’t like gambling can support ANet by buying a ticket outright.

ANet makes money, and both sides are satisfied.

Yeah, I hate those dry spells where you get no ectos and you keep asking yourself if it would just make more sense to sell the rares for 25s a piece or so.

Gambling sucks. Wish this game had a lot less of it. Or that the RNG ranges were tightened up. I’d rather get 1-2 ectos per salvaged rare than 0-3. Even if it works out to 1.5/rare in the long run, it’s very disheartening to scrap a bunch of rares down to 3s of upgrades a piece. :P

Please, ANet, just sell these things outright. Gambling is a loser’s game, and I will never pay for Black Lion Chest Keys, with RL cash or gold.

Many of the fused weapon skins look great. I’d love to buy them for a fixed price.

Double tap isn’t just bad for jumping puzzles.

There are plenty of narrow walkways like Krait towers and Dredge catwalks where an accidental dodge will send you plummeting to your doom.

Well, the Krait towers you usually end up in the water… but you get the point.

A dodge hotkey gives you just as much, if not more, control than double tap as long as you can press it while also pressing your directional movement keys.

Is boon-hate going to be the new zerg buster in WvW?

There are a lot of builds that apply boons liberally to allies. You get enough people playing together, and they’re stacking boons on each other like crazy without even thinking about it.

Do the boon-hate supporters realize how many boons are being dropped on them all the time by nearby players?

I’d be happy playing an engineer or mesmer underwater. I hate playing elementalist under water. Some professions are just a pain underwater.

Since my main is an Ele, I don’t have a need for an entirely underwater map, in spite of the fact that I find several of the underwater areas in the game fascinating and beautiful.

So boon factory builds will be killed by boon-hate builds, but still be OP against everyone else?

If D/D Ele is OP, tweak how many boons can be stacked how quickly.

Personally, I’d like them to make a few more trait setups available through Karma. It’d give me a use for the stuff.

According to the wiki, you can get Knight’s from Sorrow’s Embrace as well.

Or do your CoF runs for the skins, then use the gold you earn to buy the Knight’s gear right off the TP and…

…Transmute!

A million players playing the game, and people still have the illusion that they can be the unique snowflake.

Currently waiting for a “Tin Foil Hat” item to appear in the TP.

So we can get from this that their money people are happy about the income being generated through the cash shop and continuing box sales.

If they weren’t, we’d be seeing promises of a coming expansion to get a new infusion of funds.

I like the new hoodies.

Now give me the option to check “always show town clothes out of combat” and I will buy one.

Intigo.1653:

If you care so much about open world PvE that this is your only gripe, then sure. :p

It wasn’t my only gripe. The other was out-of-combat mobility.

It seems that me liking Ele over Mesmer has made you defensive. I was just stating the two areas I found Ele more enjoyable, in keeping with the topic of the thread.

I like the two professions equally in WvW and small combat. I like the Ele a lot better in zergy situations and when crossing territory. I don’t have an area where I like the Mesmer better (probably because I don’t sPvP), so Ele is the winner for me.

I didn’t say, “Mesmer’s suck OMG I hate that broken class :P arrrrgghh!!1!”.

Instead of blowing raspberries at my reasons, feel free to contribute why you like Mesmer better, or like them equally.

You might want to look just a few posts down to find a very similar thread.

Mesmer was my first toon that I took to 80. Shortly thereafter I switched to Ele and it is my new main.

Mobility – Eles and Mesmers are both very mobile while in combat. Out of combat, however, they are like night and day. Eles zip around all over the place, while Mesmers feel like turtles to me.

Solo play – Both are excellent solo professions. Very kitey, dropping damage on your opponent as you skip around the battle-field.

PvE Zerg Play – When it comes to Dragons and other world bosses or DEs in Orr, things die very quickly. Mesmers have a ramp-up time getting clones out which makes them very frustrating when things are getting mowed down incredibly fast. Eles can lay down AoE and shovel in the loot.

WvW – Mesmers have some awsome utility for WvW like a pull that can bring the opponent down off of walls, reflects that punish enemies who aren’t paying attention, and the much-hated portal. Eles, on the other hand, have AoE damage to contribute both at range and in close combat (staff vs. dagger) as well as support and CC. They’re both fun in WvW.

Can’t speak to sPvP.

Only problem with using a different weapon to level is that you get to 80 and have to start learning D/D fresh.

Once I got used to D/D, leveling with anything else was frustratingly slow. You can destroy so many mobs so quickly, and zip around the map at crazy speeds.