Guild Wars 2

You get <tier>+1 geodes outside of a sandstorm and twice that during a sandstorm. From which it follows that the best way to farm geodes is for the whole map to do as many events as possible before the storm in order to get the tier up and then for you personally to do as many events as possible during the sandstorm to rake in the geodes.

Now, tier 4 is achievable in an active map just by calling out the upcoming events in map chat and pointing out events that give bonus favour (marked by an * in the link below). See https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Talk:Favor_of_the_Zephyrites for the messages to post and general ideas about how to do Dry Top.

Tier 5 needs at a small group or two who know what they’re doing and can do events that don’t normally get done. For tier 6, see the link above – it requires a really well organized team effort.

To maximize the number of events during a sandstorm, start at x:40 with Cull Dust Mites→Haze→ Devourer Queen and continue at x:50 with Cull Dust Mites→Haze→ Dust Mite Twister → Skritt Queen. I’ve seen recommendations to do the Clear the Cave-In event before Haze, but I’ve never gotten that to work reliably.

Laughing Crow.7581:

The issue for all OS variations seems to stem from the Nov 17th patch. I can’t do (daily) events due to constant crashes – prior to Nov 17th patch, almost no crash issues.

Same here. The game ran very stable for me before HoT, has been somewhat unstable since, and has been crashing every 5-10 minutes after the Nov 17th patch.

The critical question is this: what kind of crashes do you get?
If the vast majority of the crashes you experience are OOM crashes and you’re on a 64-bit Windows version, chances are good that the 64-bit client will at least lower the frequency of the game crashes to a point where it’s mostly playable again.
If your crashes are something other than OOM or if you’re not using a 64-bit Windows, the 64-bit client is either not an option for you or would likely do little to help.

A few things come to mind.
1) You’re level 62 in a level 65 area. Higher level mobs do more damage to you and take less damage from you. Find a level-appropriate area (either same level as you or lower – the level downscaling will take care of the difference).
2) Check you gear if you gear is more than a couple levels lower than you, it might be time to get something better.
3) Elementalists are squishy. Learn to time your dodges better, learn to use the active defenses your staff has in other attunings than fire, maybe switch out some of your utilities – which are a bit heavy on the conjures – to something more defensive. Or maybe try a different weapon set. I’m by no means an expert, but I find that while staff has nice damage and utility, I fare better with a dagger/focus or dagger/dagger build when the mobs put some pressure on me.

It is indeed an event.

Wanze.8410:

I am not sure about how reaching Magguma works for new players but i would guess they have to get through dry top and SW in order to get there and there isnt a portal going up.

The shortest way if you don’t already have the map explored is to take the Asura gate to Rata Sum, then head North through Metrica Province and then West through Brisban Wildlands and the Silverwastes.

Wanze.8410:

I am selling PF for 90s now and there are three daily nodes per account in SSC.

Ooh, nice. Thanks for the heads up! I’m sitting on a few stacks of those which I don’t realistically expect to use, ever.

SkyShroud.2865:

Didn’t know that, I don’t visit laurel merchant even though I have 1k+ laurels. But, even with 5 nodes, still need to be very lucky to get 25 crystals to charge per day.

True. With all five nodes you get a guaranteed 22 crystals per day (provided you find a tier 4 Dry Top). The +5 crystals from the home instance node are frequent enough that they add, on average, another 1 crystal per day. The charged quartz from the home instance probably adds the equivalent of 1 more crystal per day (but that one’s already charged, so let’s ignore it). That’s 23 crystals per day per account before gathering bonuses, and I don’t think you can get those high enough to provide the missing 2 crystals, at least not in an economically viable and/or reliable fashion.

Nope, it’s impossible to do, as is the Veteran Slayer. ANET is aware of the problem.

Akashi.3245:

Dont centaurs in pve drop these? Try that

I don’t think there are centaurs in Tyria who are of high enough level to drop these. I’m not sure if any of the fractals have them, though.

LupusCenturion.4123:

Hey dev team, is there a way that you could get the rare mobs to spawn more regularly, i mean a random rare spawn every event line would be nice or every other.

I suspect that the Dune Soarer as part of the new Legendary Track is ANET’s misguided attempt at keeping Dry Top alive despite the focus for the future being in the new maps, and making it regular would directly countervene that goal. Mind, I’m all for keeping Dry Top alive – it’s one of my favourite maps – but this is kind of a frustrating way to go about it…

TL;DR: I don’t think the frequency of the rare mobs in Dry Top is likely to change.

Access to guild banks is the same in the desert borderlands as it was in the alpine borderlands – through the guild registrar at the home borderland citadel. He can be found in the structure with all the other services directly south of the way point in either the low or mid-level back room (I forget which).

Dune Soarer is a rare boss and, like all of them, doesn’t have a fixed spawn cycle, as far as I know. It can be found, usually during the Sand Storm phase of the map, but sometimes outside of it, on the plateau above and directly to the west of the Lair of the Beast POI and in the lowlands surrounding the Sparring Rock POI.

Your best bet is probably to spend some time in Dry Top and request via map chat that anyone who spots it calls out the event in map chat.

Flux Capacitor.8142:

(This is the “smallest” post on the forums, in respect to how significant the topic is and how many people who cares – probably just me LOL.)

It’s not just you. I completely agree that there are more pressing issues to fix, but I, too, would like to see the colour of the up/down markers toned down a little, as I find them to visually “loud” for what little information they convey.

Start directly outside the Eastern wall of the blue keep and head North. The path/canyon curves to the West and after a short, maze-like passage opens out to the place that has both the vista and the hero point.

Drow.2081:

Oh, and no aoe unless it’s water/healz aoe.

Hmm, and here I thought that all the many times I have been in zergs that successfully killed the Lich, it was because the tightly stacked players on that cliff corner meant that all the adds would also spawn tightly packed, where a nice big burst of AoE damage from all those tightly stacked players could kill the adds before they could buff up their retaliation.

Sure, boon stripping helps if your group doesn’t have enough AoE damage to kill all the adds in time, and so does AoE heal/regen/cleanse. But the key always seemed to me to stack tightly, stow your pets, and to burn down those adds before they could buff each other.

I’ve seen it on the ledge above and slightly to the West of the Lair of the Beast POI and on the plains around Sparring Rock (where Tootsie is running around), in other words, around the area where the normal wind riders are living. It is, in my experience, one of the rarer Rare Mobs to spawn in Dry Top.

DoctorDing.5890:

For the location under the middle of the desert you need to get to the bottom of the Skritt jumping puzzle in the Grotto. There are two ways:

1. Do the jumping puzzle.
2. Leap blindly from the top of the puzzle and try to hit tiny pool of water that you cannot see.

3. Start the jumping puzzle until you get past the first flag/marker. Then just jump back down to your death. The skrit will come and revive you, and you can continue on your merry way to map completion.

Mystic.5934:

similarly, I’d appreciate it if the search criteria did not reset when you changed what you were searching. for example, if you search for ‘berserker’, then select ‘weapon’, it is no longer searching for ‘berserker’, but you can type it in again and it works. not that I use that a lot, but I’m sure some people do, and whenever I do, I get kittened at it.

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes! At this time that would, for me personally, be the single biggest improvement possible for the TP interface.

Check the language preferences in your browser and make sure that French is in that list.

Without having French in that list, the site would redirect me to the first language on that list (English in my case). Going the the German site, which is also on that browser list, worked fine. Going to the French site only worked for me after adding French to that list.

BrettM.9062:

As for Dry Top being “holy”, I promise you that my “Dry Top: Rules of Engagement” would be even more pointed.

You tease!

Seriously, I’d love to read those, even if I have to say that so far I have luckily only seen a few of your Silverwastes rules practiced to any noticeable extent, and even then not consistently. It was frustrating enough, so I appreciate this thread. :-)

Bellizare.5816:

Yes, the Order of Whispers up to old tricks again.

That POI sure behaves weirdly. On my last two characters to do map completion I received a popup for the Sanctum of Secrets POI at the moment when I got the world map completion done. On both occasions I had already been to the Sanctum of Secrets long before, I was at that moment not anywhere near it in fact I was in Cursed Shore, and both characters are Whispers members (yay Tybalt!).

Nah, that event will run the whole weekend.

Behellagh.1468:

What we don’t know is the rate that silk is coming into the game relative to the amount is being used up crafting Damask. If they did drop the bolt of silk requirement from 100 to 50 so it matched the other two, would a glut start to build again causing a price collapse for silk scraps?

Well, we don’t know, but we can venture an educated guess. Apart from levelling your armor crafting professions from 300 to 400, just about the only sink for silk in the game is ascended crafting, and it’s almost certainly the bigger sink by an order of magnitude or two at least. And when we’re looking at sites like gw2spidy or gw2tp, it seems like the price, as well as supply and demand, for silk has been relatively stable with no major, sustained trends in one direction or the other for a long time.

Conclusion: The amount of silk coming into the game is roughly equal to the amount that is being used up by crafting damask. Meaning that the only way to lower the silk requirements for ascended crafting without collapsing the silk price to the vendor value is to create a new large and sustained sink for it or to drastically lower the drop rate from salvaging and loot bags.

And this kinda ignores a few related problems like all the TP tax we pay on those expensive damask bolts which helps keep inflation in check, or the effect a major change in this market would have on all the other materials that go into ascended gear, first and foremost the already rather expensive T2-T4 cloth scraps (which likely means that damask will not get cheaper when you lower silk prices because linen, wool and cotton will rise and more than make up the difference).

Ah, so that’s what caused it. I recently had the same problem, but managed to play through this instance anyway, without any negative consequences, as far as I can tell. The talk at the end was weird, though. No, dude, that wasn’t Destiny’s Edge, that was just you, Trahearne and those two Vigil guys. Have some self-confidence, will you!

Robmanout.9346:

Using any Healing Spell on Mesmer puts unchanneled “Mantra of Resolve” on full Cooldown.

This is a known bug with the first minor trait in Inspiration, “Mender’s Purity”.

Robmanout.9346:

The Healing Spell also triggers the Trait “Harmonious Mantra”.

Not a bug, but working as intended. Mender’s Purity makes you “cast power cleanse when you use healing skill” [sic] which is a mantra.

Hmm, works fine for me (Firefox, Windows, located in Germany, preferred language in the browser set to English before German). Going to https://guildwars2.com redirects to https://guildwars2.com/en as I would expect from the language settings in the browser. Switching the languages around in the browser does the expected and brings up the German version when German is the preferred language. Manually changing to https://guildwars2.com/de gives me the German site, which properly stays German when I navigate around, regardless of the preferred language setting in the browser. Same for https://guildwars2.com/en .

It’s a bug in Mender’s Purity, the first Minor in the Inspiration line. Nothing you can do except a) not use Inspiration or b) not equip the cleansing mantra.

As far as I know, you need to actually land the killing blow for it to count. If the mob dies from a condition tick, retaliation or a pet attack, the kill does not count towards the weapon mastery. Are you sure that’s not what happened here?

It’s available from several different sellers on Amazon.de at http://www.amazon.de/dp/B00SN5JM6W/
And as far as I know, the unlock codes are not NA- or EU-specific.

xlion.3065:

Happens on around half of my characters, too. Can’t see the pattern, though.
… or maybe …
2xMesmer —> exclamation mark
1xGuardian --> exclamation mark
2xRanger —> ok
1xElementalist --> exclamation mark
1xEngineer —> ok
1xWarrior --> ok
1xNecromancer —> exclamation mark
1xThief --> ok
… it’s profession specific …

Yep. I don’t have a Ranger or Necro, but I can confirm the others.

In the first skill line, and only in the first skill line, of each character with this problem, the circle is not complete, although all skills are unlocked.

MasterJake.9375:

Just happened again. Might’ve been from the frost bow from the elementalist.

Yep. That’s where it comes from.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Image.8630:

1. Lightning Pull is completely bugged. It jumps way way further then the target. Not once did it hit the mark. Could not complete it today for daily.

I had no trouble using it as expected.

Lucky you with your nice, stable, low-ping connection.

Lightning Pull is known to be heavily dependent on a good network connection. Lag, especially spiky lag, will frequently make the jump either way too far or too short with the toon rotating in place. It’s the reason why I don’t do Sanctum Sprint anymore unless I need it for a Daily, even though I actually love the activity when things are fine – it’s just too easy for a network hiccup to turn this from enjoyable to utterly frustrating.

Not sure what, exactly, the problem is. Apart from the fact that I’ve seen it at Crash Site 3 multiple times over the last few days, I hope you’re aware that unlike the other two nodes, which are stationary, this quartz crystal node has multiple possible locations and can also be found down in the inquest base.

There are traits, runes, sigils, foods and utilities that boost condition damage (see http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition_Damage for an exhaustive list). My point was that if they do not mention “condition damage”, they only boost direct damage. AFAIK, the only things that can be relied on to boost both are Might and Vulnerability.

Toeofdoom.6152:

I wasn’t convinced until I tried fighting veteran karka with hammer/jails/ventari – the ventari utilities and energy management fit really well and are fun to use.

Same here. I didn’t like the hammer (although I wanted to) until someone pointed me at the hammer/Jalis/Ventari combo and I tested it on some veteran karka. This felt nice, with the main drawback being the somewhat low damage and the entirely useless Hammer #5 (Drop the Hammer): A cc skill with a 2 second cast time might as well be not there at all, AoE or not. And with how short-lived some fields are, a blast finisher with such a long cast time is also of questionable utility. Might be useful for WvW zerg fights, though…

Axe/Mace also felt good (apart from the usual complaint of lack-luster damage), but Axe #2 (Searing Fissure) was clunky – a slight cast time reduction would be nice.

My understanding is that unless explicitly stated otherwise, “more damage” always refers to direct damage only, not condition damage. This goes for runes, sigils, traits as well as boosts from potions, foods and utilities.

Tungsten Monarch.6058:

Forcing a combination field for a swiftness is a poor mechanic.

Not necessarily, if it’s done right. But in this case, yes, absolutely. Blasting Inspiring Reinforcement with either Phase Smash or Drop The Hammer is clunky as all get-out because those skills have 1.25 and 1.75 second cast times. So you put down the road, then stand still and wait for the cast to go off. Very nice, especially when you want to do this while on the move. Mace #3 Echoing Eruption isn’t quite as bad with its 0.75 second cast time, but it’s still clunky.

And this all ignores the fact that you outrun Inspiring Reinforcement when casting it on the move, anyway, and what use is perma-swiftness if you have to stop and wait in order to keep it up? Swiftness is about moving quickly. Standing around and waiting is kinda, sorta the opposite of that…

My thoughts on this haven’t changed since the last 100 iterations of this thread: An emphatic Yes to the more reliable evade frame. And a No to any other change.

Specifically to your proposition I think that having two different stealth access mechanics on a single weapon set might be a wee bit unbalanced.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The title (above) looks to me as the referring “Rata Sum to LA” portal, which is why I asked.

Yeah, I could have worded that better, sorry. But it looks like y’all know what I’m talking about anyway. :-)

You use the Jeweler crafting profession to combine the raw gems with metals into jewellery (or buy them from the TP) which you can then put into your trinkets (rings, amulets, etc.). Generally speaking, you want a rune set in your armor and sigils in your weapons since they tend to give better benefits than jewellery.

That’s kinda normal, RNG being what it is. So keep killing Vine Wrath, enjoy your loot, and sooner or later you’ll kill one that drops another coat box for you.

The Asura gate from Rata Sum to Lion’s Arch is at the North End of Creator’s Commons, near the Magustan Court Waypoint. Since the rebuilt LA patch, taking the Rata Sum gate in LA dumps you at the South-East end near Metrical Court Waypoint, though. This didn’t use to happen before and should probably be fixed at some point.

Just steal something. Problem solved. :-P

On a related note, are guild halls cross-zone accessible (NA/EU)? Will I as one of only a few EU players in a mostly NA guild
a) be able to access the guild hall?
b) see all the upgrades from the NA players?
c) finally be able to meet those NA players, at least within the guild hall?

Indeed. The fact that it was only in the rotation a few times directly after the new Daily system became active and hasn’t been seen since seems to me a good indication that yes, it’s gone for good. And honestly, getting free ectos for some Luck refinement was rather unbalanced.

Dirdyy.1648:

Second thought was, perhaps it is needed for something to craft like the “grow lamp” for mawdrey, but the amount is much to high for that and most of the players allready have this item.

Your assumption that “most of the players allready have this item” is clearly wrong. The markets for Mawdrey ingredients are still alive and well (if noticeably, and predictably, weaker than a few months ago). Also, crafting Sinister gear needs quartz crystals as well which, in contrast to Nomads being a DPS set, should see some demand.

In other words, there are working sinks for them while the supply side is strictly limited at less than 25 crystals per account per day on average (22 plus RNG-based bonuses like the WvW gathering bonus and the extra drops from the home instance node).

shadow.6174:

Another thing: wth does it have to make calculations at client side so it ends affected by lag? Why can’t the untargeted version just do as said: put you into that pyramid thing?

It’s not so much untargeted as auto-targeted, I suspect. Also, it actually moves the character through 3-d space instead of being a teleport/shadowstep to a fixed location. Movement in GW2 is at least partly handled client-side (hence the existence of flight hacks and similar things) and therefore susceptible to lag when the client and server disagree about where you are.

It’s broken. I soloed the Mordrem champion a few hours ago. Which was no big deal because it wasn’t hitting back. At all. No poison, no nothing. It was just sitting there and letting me burn it down.

Gibson.4036:

I see that there are still toxic seedlings spread around Kessex Hills, thought you get a lot of mushed spore samples for each PTSS you actually receive.

Only harvest the one seedling in the patch that has a description (hold down Ctrl) as that one gives the PTSS. The description-less seedlings give the mushed spore samples.

As far as I know, this has little to do with the March 16 patch, unless I missed something and ANET had smoothed this out before, and the March 16 patch has introduced a regression.

The behaviour was originally introduced with the New Player Experience. Whereas previously your basic stats would increase on each level gain until 80, under the NPE your stats increase by larger increments every 5 levels. Mob stats in lower level zones were adjusted to match the new stat distribution. What ANET failed to do quite correctly is to account for the interplay between stat adjustment – which follows the new scheme – and level scaling – which apparently still follows the old per-level adjustments where secondary stats like crit chance are concerned – for down-levelled characters.

Put the “Account Bound of Acquire” items in your inventory, change maps or logout/login again, and they’re turned into “Account Bound” items, which you are now free to stack with the other “Account Bound” items.