Guild Wars 2

Actually it’s exotic:
22+25=47
16+15=31
16+15=31

crafted
32+21=53
18+13=31
18+13=31

using the exotic Equisite Jewels for the level 80 backpiece and the rare Embellished Brilliant Jewels for the crafted level 78 backpiece.

There is no actual way to mark a forum as read. But going into a forum and opening the latest thread will do it for me. At least until someone else adds a comment to any thread in the forum.

BrettM.9062:

I would disagree that Serene is soloable, but maybe I’m just bad. The others I have soloed many times. I have also died many times while doing Vine Bridge solo and sometimes when doing Shaman or Rustbucket solo, depending on how the spawns go. Getting the bonus for Basket solo is about a 30% chance for me depending on whether Plume stays focused and near the basket or runs off after a trash mob and gets herself killed.

I haven’t done Serene in a long time – as I said, I find her frustrating – but I do remember soloing her on occasion. Doing it with two people is a lot easier, though.

As for the other events, my Dry Top character is a condi thief, and I am by no means a great player. That said:
Vine Bridge has been easy since ANET nerfed the wolves to apply swiftness instead of retaliation. The husks just melt to conditions. I have enough evades that less than three wolves at a time pose no major threat. The leeching thrashers are an exercize in distance control (jump in when the roots come out, jump away when the goo circle comes up), and the vile thrashers are annoying but doable once everything else in the vicinity is dead. The key for me is being careful about the mobs I pull, usually with a ranged attack so I can lure them away from their companions.

The key to Basket Defense is either high burst damage or cripple (which resets the inquest technicians when they pick up things from the basket), and having no more than two players, as with three players the event starts spawning Veterans. I can reliably solo this event with bonus favour (yay off-hand dagger!), as long as I am on time and no-one comes along to upscale it. Having Plume around helps (revive her if you have the time!), but is not necessary.

Shaman is actually the easiest to solo. Just kill everything that’s already there – again, I’m on a condi build, which isn’t exactly known for its high kill speed – and once that’s done and the Shaman starts channelling, kite newly arriving mobs out of the circle before dispatching them. If there are veterans, leave them for last while killing the trash mobs first, then kite the veterans out of the circle and kill them at your leisure.

BrettM.9062:

Abandoned Mine is a pretty sad case, because a bunch of people will come in just to get coin, llama, and/or PoI. If necessary, they will take out a couple of key containment cells just to get the crystals up and then ignore the event.

Yeah, I love the Abandoned Mine event, but I don’t do it anymore for exactly the reasons you stated. Doing this in a group of four (two teams of two players) is a breeze and loads of fun, but normally I was the only one in the mine who was doing the event, and I just don’t have the DPS and skill to solo it.

LONGA.1652:

Crystals Race usually have AFKers or Dust Devil champs that got drag Near the WP. causing randoms scaling = too much inquests and crystals for few people to Handle. Champs are pugs magnet and most pugs don’t read boss description text end up doing no damage.

The Crystal Race, like the Mine Rescue, should probably be labelled as a group event. The zephyrite NPCs are not enough help to be able to solo it and you get overwhelmed by the number of crystals and inquest.
The actual problem with the event, though, is that people are way too focused on killing the inquest instead of simply CCing those that carry crystals and then getting the crystals into the basket.

LONGA.1652:

Tootsie. People stuck at Race have to hop throught some obstacle so They dont bother coming. Most Pugs dont equip , change skill to do interrupting Moa.

Dumb people are not a problem of the event mechanics.

LONGA.1652:

Tendrill. Hard to solo due to tankiness of adds and hard hitting AoE. Always strating with 5 v1 with mobs that down you in 2 hits. Veteran revive mechanic not visually clear.

Mine Zypherite rescue events.Definitely group events with objective that require more than just DPS build .Mobs have load of HP Need more than 5 people who can split up .Lots of movement needed and lots of dead trap

Agreed. Except that 4 people running in two pairs is actually enough for the Rescue Captive Zephyrites event.

LONGA.1652:

Serene escort. Mobs knock you off the cliff. Serene walk too slow. Reduce the time that Serene stop to gather crystal might be good.

I don’t like the event because Serene is so slow, but it is quite doable. Pre-emptively killing mobs before they can get close helps a lot, because Serene will otherwise deviate from her path, fight the mobs and then go back to the point where she left her path instead of simply going on to the next objective from where she is standing right now.

LONGA.1652:

Vine bridges.Mobs drop no loots.

Hmm, sure? I’m fairly certain that I’m getting at least junk from them.

LONGA.1652:

Crash vctims. Same as Tendril events. too much things going on for solo players.People walk pass it when event pop scale it up.

Gather beetles parts. Again mobs drop no loot.Random guys scale the events up

Stop Skirtt from stealing. AFKers and random passby scale evetns

I’m never doing those, so I can’t comment.

LONGA.1652:

So basically most of the events aren’t for soloing and discourage players participating because there are no drops from mobs.

The lack of drops from mobs is more than made up for by the geodes->lock picks->chests mechanic. But I agree that the whole deferred loot thing going on here could be explained better to newcomers in the zone.
As for soloable events, Shaman, Serene, Vine Bridge, Basket Defense and Rustbucket are all soloable, although Rustbucket suffers from the scaling issues that you’ve mentioned due to nearby players.

The difference is that the old stack is “Account Bound On Acquire” while the new one is “Account Bound”. The different ownership restrictions prevent stacking, even if it’s really a distinction without a difference.

FrownyClown.8402:

Lawful.5314:

FrownyClown.8402:

0 30 0 20 20 .

Umm, you probably haven’t been playing recently.

why do you say that?

Because there are only 14 trait points in the game anymore, not 70.

If you have a spare 252k karma and don’t mind being unable to salvage your gear to recover the runes you put in, the temple of Grenth in Cursed Shore sells exotic Berserker gear.

ETA: Alternatively, 5.5 gold and 1k Badges of Honor will get you armor with the same restrictions as the temple armor from the WvW armor vendor.

LONGA.1652:

I was looking forward to do some Amber weapons but the event reward is really bad compared to Silverwastes.

For pure loot, no open world map beats the Silverwastes.

LONGA.1652:

The things is that it encourage people to split off and do events

YES, a zerg-free map. :-) It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

LONGA.1652:

Most of the events are obscure in a random place or require skill play are reward the same as other easy to access simple events.

Then do the simple events. :-) Also, the events follow an almost entirely predictable schedule. Google will easily let you find out what that schedule is, so you can custom-taylor your personal event sequence.

And finally on that point, I’m not at all sure that “most” events in Dry Top require skilled play. Sure, some events or mobs have mechanics that you need to know in order to succeed, but none of the mechanics are all that hard to figure out, or do.

LONGA.1652:

I played Thief and hardly going to survive most of the Champs event because they are immune to CC and speed reduction conditions.But had to tag up and go in first. It take awhile before random people join the fight and when people joined up champ HP just scaled too much .

Uhm, then wait until you have a group of people before attacking the champ? Also, a great many events in Dry Top are sensitive to scaling and are more easily done with a group of roughly the right size, whereas groups either significantly smaller or larger than this will have a hard time. Depending on the event, this “right size” can vary between 1 or 2 players on one end and 10-15 on the other.

LONGA.1652:

Perhaps Drytop should have buff that increase events reward and scale Champs to the less HP especially Gaints and Dust Devil.

Funnily enough you just named two of the events I never do. The Giant is a complete waste of time if you’re going for the maximum amount of Geodes per sand storm, and I rarely see the Dust Devil succeed.

LONGA.1652:

it’s hassle to keep announcing in map chat till you get suppressed

That’s really the only big problem in Dry Top, as far as I am concerned.

Confusion is great in PvP and poor in PvE due to the low attack speed of almost all mobs, and this extends to the Perplexity runes. If you don’t want to splurge on a full set of Scholar runes, I suggest the Flame Legion runes mentioned in the link. If you really want runes with Condition Damage, or the Flame Legion runes are still too expensive for you, I suspect that even the super cheap Aristocracy, Adventurer or Afflicted runes are better DPS in PvE than the Perplexity Runes.

Laulajatar.4253:

I think today’s daily is 1 pristine relic for completing one shard. If you’re in no big hurry, you can wait for 5 such dailies and complete only one shard (instead of all 4) to get your relics.
Should be easy to find a group for only this daily, too.

That’s basically how I did it: Learn the Swamp fractal from gw2dungeons.net. Wait for “Daily Fractal” to come around in the rotation. Hop into the Fractal portal. Pre-roll the Swamp fractal. Post an LFG with “Daily 1 fractal only, pre-rolled Swamp”, or alternatively look out for such a listing. Do it. Repeat on four more days.
If you prefer slightly more fighting and less running/jumping around, the Urban Battleground/Ascalon fractal is also quite doable if you have a reasonable idea about what to do and where to go.

Celtic Lady.3729:

I must be doing something wrong. Every time I port out to the SW, the place is dead.

That’s what happens when you combine breach hopping or chest farming with the megaserver.
Silverwastes maps that have advanced the meta event beyond ~50% will quickly get filled to capacity by people taxiing in to do the breach, hence the megaserver will not put you into one of those.
Organized chest farms are also highly sought after if all those LFG posts are any indication, so these maps also quickly fill up.
What’s left? Dead maps where one or two fortresses at best are precariously hanging on, trying to ever so slowly advance the meta event to the point where the breach hoppers come back in again.

This will not, can not, change until breach hopping becomes economically unattractive compared to staying in a map and advancing the meta event.

Esufer.8762:

I’ve spotted this at citadel in WvW, and on the south east borderland entrance. Has only been happening since the removal of the Lunar festival, and I’ve not changed any settings on my PC/changed drivers on my graphics card.

The stuff on the walls? That’s been going on since the end of the Wintersday festival, on both the walls and the ground. It may have been fixed intermittently and come back after the Lunar New Year, but all in all this is not a new thing.

Mystic.5934:

When people leave Dragon Ball games, their positions are not refilled. I am currently sitting in a 1v0. I can either leave or wait another 22 minutes for the match to end.
obviously, I’ll leave, but it really should be putting more people in to fill the spots that were left. I’ve been in many games that were 5v2, or 2v1, etc.

Seeing as I’ve occasionally joined an ongoing game – the last of those about 12 hours ago – I can state with some conviction that positions are refilled with available players, though maybe not as reliably as one might wish.

OTOH I had been in a 1 vs. 2 game earlier this week with no-one coming in and the 2nd player on the other team mostly AFKing, so I know how frustrating it can be when no-one’s coming in to replace players who have left. 1 vs. 1 is sloooowwww.

Electro.4173:

I agree the chat suppression can be a little overzealous at times, but varying your messages can help a lot, as its one of the primary ways the chat filter finds and removes “spam”.

Not just adding a random word or number at the end either, try to use different words altogether, put your words in a different order, that sort of thing.

It doesn’t help nearly enough. I occasionally organize Dry Top runs and have prepared a set of chat messages for announcing upcoming events. By their very nature, the messages are all similar, especially because many events repeat every 15 minutes. But I took care that each message is slightly differently worded and uses a different order for the events. Still, I get suppressed after about an hour, even though I don’t even announce anything in map chat during most of the sandstorm.

I second most of what Akatosh said. The community is friendly and we have a lot of guilds with different “action profiles”. Our night coverage mostly sucks but otherwise Piken is punching above their population class.

I’ve personally found that WvW on Piken varies a lot with the matchup. Sometimes we get our behinds handed to us because we’re up against two servers who can each field two or three blobs for every zerg of ours and it’s a week of paper Keeps. Sometimes we’re totally dominating a matchup and there’s nothing much to do. Sometimes, like apparently this week, it’s a mostly balanced match-up and there’s action to be had on all four maps and of all types – zerging, havoc, roaming.

You must have had really bad luck with your Dry Top instances. :-(

In my experience, Tier 4 is easily achievable with a moderate number of active players doing events, and I do see Tier 4 sandstorms basically every day. Tier 5 takes a few people who know what they are doing but is not unheard-of on weekends.

Announce upcoming events in map chat to guide people to them (google the chat codes for the WPs and POIs). Learn to properly do the events that give bonus favour (basket defense, jungle tendril, crystal race, north mine rescue), and concentrate on events that can be done easily by solo players and small groups within each 5 minute time slot. Basket Defense especially fills both of those requirements, giving bonus fabour and being soloable on any build with low-cooldown access to cripple, but I rarely see it done with bonus favour, or even at all, outside organized maps, unless I do it myself.

The firecrackers are still bugged. I did all five in the WvW Citadel, but the game only registered four of them for the achievement, so I had to find another one in Divinity’s Reach.

Also, they are crackers but make no sound.

More data:
1) During the weekend, I happened by the Oasis late during a sandstorm (about hh:55) and noticed that the Shaman event was active. Given that the event normally de-spawns 10 minutes after spawning, I found that rather odd.
2) Today, I had a run where the hh:00 Shaman and the hh:05 Vine Bridge were done well within five minutes of spawning. The hh:15 Shaman failed to spawn, the hh:20 Vine Bridge spawned just fine and was done in about 3 minutes. The hh:30 Shaman spawned again, but the hh:35 Vine Bridge failed to spawn. The map was well into T4 at this point and managed to barely make it to T5 about 30 seconds before the sandstorm started.

I think someone was trying to get the hh:15 Moa event done relatively late for that second run, but I have no idea whether it succeeded.

In short, it’s not just the hh:15 Shaman and hh:20 Vine Bridge events that are unreliable, the hh:30 and hh:35 events also seem to be affected.

Prospect Valley Crash Site – the only currently available JP I haven’t gotten the achievement for, yet.
Skipping Stones – the only JP where I had a mesmer portal me after numerous failed tries.
Troll’s End if you aren’t Asura.

Heibi.4251:

And Bahlol’s post above yours shows that ANeT’s RNG needs to be fixed, as do many of the posts in this thread.

They do no such thing. What they show is that some people get all the coat boxes they want after only a few runs while others have frustratingly long dry spells. Which is to be expected given an unbiased, uniformly distributed RNG as the basis for the drop probability. If that inequality bothers you then don’t play games where dice rolls and other random chance events are a major part of the ruleset. Or petition ANET for an additional way to acquire those coat boxes that isn’t RNG based.

Heibi.4251:

I’m not saying that your randomness statement for the real world is wrong, it’s your statements about the coat box RNG that are wrong. It is broken. Has ANeT secretly told you what its RNG is for the event?

Of course not. But contrary to your dismissive attitude and your repeated insistence that my analysis must be wrong and that the RNG must be broken, my working assumption of an unbiased uniformly distributed RNG and a drop chance of roughly 10% is entirely consistent with the observed behaviour, both in my own experience and in what people have been posting here in this thread.

For a similar situation, look at precursor drops – some people have been playing since the beta without a precursor ever dropping for them. Others seem to be getting them with envy-inducing regularity. Does that mean that ANET’s implementation of their RNG is broken? No, it doesn’t. Does it mean that random drops may not be the optimal delivery vehicle for highly desirable items? Maybe, but this is not the “RNG as a concept” thread, where such game design issues are presumably discussed.

In short: Are you justifiably frustrated by your bad luck in acquiring the coat boxes? Oh, yes. Does that mean that ANET’s RNG is broken? Nope. Would an alternative way of acquiring the coat box and other wanted loot be desirable? Quite possibly.

Heibi.4251:

Then the dice are weighted here. 55 times to get 2 coat boxes? In sheer odds at any casino I should have gotten at least 1 coat box by the 15th try. Even in a casino you get a win when the odds are 10%. Many players have experienced the exact same issue with this event. And then you had players get an extra one the first try, then completed it before trying the vine event even 10 times. Many just after 3 tries.

I’m not going to repeat my post, but I’ll link it here for your, and everyone else’s, edification.

TL;DR: Assuming a 10% drop chance, a 50-chest dry run is about half as likely as getting the two coat boxes in your first two successful Vinewrath events and should affect on average around one in 200 players. You just happen to be one of those.

Heibi.4251:

If it were a flat 10% I would have had all my coats by the 20th try.

sigh Promise me one thing: Don’t ever visit a casino. Because with this one sentence you’ve just conclusively proven that you have no idea how probabilities work. You’ve also strongly indicated that you’ve never played a dice game in your life, or haven’t paid attention when you did, but that’s a slightly different, though related, issue.

A 10% drop chance means that every time a player opens that big chest, there is a 1-in-10 chance that a carapace coat box will drop: The computer will roll a 10-sided dice. If it comes out 10, a coat box falls out. If it rolls a 1-9, no coat box for you. Nothing more. Nothing less. It specifically does NOT mean that a carapace coat box will drop every 10th time someone opens that box, and it certainly does not mean that it will do so every 10th time you, specifically, open that chest.

Heibi.4251:

But remember, the drop rate tends to increase after you get the final one. I remember constantly seeing posts in map chat of folks who have it done but keep getting them.

That’s called Confirmation Bias. Look it up. And while you’re at it, read up on the Gambler’s Fallacy as well.

Unless and until someone posts good hard evidence to the contrary, i.e. from thousands, preferably tens of thousands, of Vinewrath events, I stand by my pseudo-analysis from page 5 of this thread: Assuming a roughly 10% drop chance, none of the results posted in this, or any other, thread about the carapace coat box drops are in any way, shape or form outside the expected behaviour of an unbiased, uniformly distributed random number generator.

That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nice if there were a non-RNG way to acquire those coat boxes, but it also doesn’t mean than anything about the RNG needs fixing.

Behellagh.1468:

Yeah, any region logging is right off the city so that’ll be T1.

Not for me, because I need T2 to T4 materials much more than I need T1. So:
Ascalon? Diessa Plateau.
Kryta? Southsun Cove (mostly for foraging or mining, less so for logging), Bloodtide Coast or Gendarran Fields.
Shiverpeaks? Lornar’s Pass or Dredgehaunt Cliffs.
Maguuma Jungle? Brisban Wildlands (I have one character stationed in Dry Top).

metaldude.4132:

Same here..all on all I think it’s friggin’ ridiculous to use ordinary day to day life sentences as a copyright…

Which is why that’s not what happened here. Swift had trademarked those phrases, and in several cases also specific likenesses/visual representations.

Trademarks apply to specific product categories, too, so I’m not at all sure that GW2 would be affected at all.

Lazaar.9123:

Well, when it comes to copyrights on words or phrases, it’s quite easy to fight it if it happens to actually be something that was already commonly used. I’m kind of surprised the copyright “Shake it off” was even approved in the first place.

It wasn’t. They’re trademarks. Which is different from copyrights. Besides, what you’re thinking of with respect to prior art are patents and not copyrights.

But by any means, people, don’t let get facts in the way of a good rant. :-P

Cormac.3871:

I also wonder if some of the problem is caused by people doing the event without the perseverance buff.

But how likely is that? To max out Perseverance for that nice 150% magic find boost you only need to do 5 events. Unless you’re lucky enough to LFG into a map that is just about to Breach and still not full, or you’re hanging around Camp Resolve until the Vinewrath event starts (in which case you deserve your bad drop chance for beeing a leech :-P ), there’s almost no way you can stay in the Silverwastes for any length of time and not acquire several stacks of Perseverance.

xRemainNameless.3842:

The only thing that was different this time was the fact that Moa (Tootsie) finished about 5 minutes late. She did not spawn during her next scheduled time @ 15:00.

I find this intriguing.

xRemainNameless.3842:

Would love some confirmation though

I’ll probably be doing some Dry Top farming over the next two weeks to get the last two fossils and the remaining recipes, so I’ll keep an eye on those events.

Camping means staying on one weapon without swapping. In the case of guardians, swapping back and forth between Sword/X and Greatsword is better than staying always with one of those weapons sets.

The reason is that the Greatsword autoattack is weak while the other skills hit hard, while the Sword has better autoattack damage than the Greatsword. So you do your big hitters on Greatsword and then switch to Sword until the cooldowns on those skills are back up. (That’s an oversimplification as the actual rotation is slightly more involved, but that’s the principle of it.)

Heibi.4251:

I have an idea ANeT could use – the more pre-events you do the bigger your reward.

I’ve had thoughts along those lines myself. And with the Perseverance buff, there’s already a mechanic in place to do this, you’d just need to extend it to 10 or 15 stacks.

There’s one wee little problem, though: it would encourage people to port in at 80% as before, only then they’d be rushing all over the map in large groups, tagging (and upscaling) every event they can find in order to build up event credits. So it would still do nothing for the first 80% of the meta event.

My time of avoiding dungeons seems to be drawing to a close, so I’d like an invite, please. :-)

Danikat.8537:

Any server which isn’t tagged with a language is officially English speaking.

Pretty much this, but substitute effectively for officially. I’m on Piken Square, and map chat is almost exclusively English. You sometimes get announcements from Polish, French or German guilds looking for members, and the occasional conversation in German or French, but that’s it.

Also, with the Megaserver, which server you choose really only counts for WvW, although it will have some influence (along with parties, guilds and friends lists) which players will be put into the same map instance as you.

(Edited because nitpicks.)

Actually, with a level 65 embellished jewel in the upgrade slot, the crafting backpacks have a very slightly higher main stat and equal secondary stats to a normal exotic level 80 back item with a level 80 exotic upgrade.

Rozbuska.5263:

Beside charging quartz you can get some from mining quaztz node chance will be around 10% imo. One is in home instance and I also 2 or 3 in Dry Top including rich one. Just switch maps there and mine them over and over.

I’ve only ever gotten Charged Quartz Crystals from the home instance node. The Dry Top nodes have only given me the normal quartz crystals so far. And since I’ve been farming those religiously ever since Dry Top opened, I feel reasonably confident in stating that Charged Quartz Crystals can only be mined from the home instance node.

Beweeted.6532:

Now though, it’s fixed! VICTORY!

Indeed it is. Thanks, ANET!

If you or your group can keep decent burn up-time on the mobs and you have problems maintaining at least 90% of your health for more than half of the fight, Superior Rune of the Flame Legion is a good, cheap alternative.

Tom Gore.4035:

What I don’t understand is why the megaserver system keeps putting people into instances with very few people and 0% progress instead of the dozen almost full instances with 20-50% progress.

I suspect that the megaserver algorithms simply have not been programmed to take the specifics of zones like Dry Top and the Silverwastes into account. In these zones with map-wide meta-events, the megaserver system should take meta-event progress into account when putting people into instances and when deciding which instances to close. It doesn’t, from what I’ve seen.

Behellagh.1468:

I see your problem, you are buying from current sellers. Enjoy throwing money away?

It helps your forum participation if you can actually read. He’s selling by price matching other current sellers.

The described behaviour of the TP is really, really annoying and should be fixed ASAP.

Being only a casual WvWer, I don’t do that much WvW, but of the commanders on Piken Square that I’ve run with:
– Abb the Machine: Tends to be too intense for me, but there’s no question that he gets things done.
– Sir Victimizer: Always calm and polite. Mean strategist who explains not only what we’re doing, but why. Also, calm and polite.
– Sïlq: I’ve never had that much pure, unadulterated fun in this game as when I followed her havoc squad.

OK, let’s math this out, folks.

Assume that a carapace coat box is a perfect sphere of uniform density a drop rate of one in ten, i.e. on average a carapace coat box drops every ten times a player opens that big chest, which would mean that on average people would have to do around 20 successful Vinewrath events to get the two remaining carapace coat skins. Disclaimer: I have no idea whether that is the actual drop rate, I’m just pulling a more or less reasonable looking number out of thin air.)

So, the folks who got two boxes dropped in their first two Vinewrath events? That’s one in every hundred players, so that probably happened to dozens, maybe hundreds, of players. Three drops on three events? One-in-a-thousand chance, i.e. it’s bound to have happened a couple times, maybe a couple dozens times, depending on how many people are doing Silverwaste events right now.

Not getting a single drop in 20 successful events? That’s 0.9^20=0.12 – a 12% chance. That’s every 8th player.
Nothing in 30 events? 4% chance, every 25th player.
Nothing in 40 events? 1.5% chance, one player in 70 has this much bad luck.
Nothing in 50 events? .5% chance, one in 200 players. Note that this is only half as unlikely as getting two drops in a row! So there should be half as many people with 50 dry runs as there are people who did two events and had all carapace coat skins unlocked.

The actual drop rate may be higher or lower than that, but I don’t think it’s by all that much. Almost certainly not by enough to make that little calculation completely irrelevant.

DogTrainer.6038:

I think maybe Gaile is mistaken, and the RNG is not functioning properly. Everyone who talks about drop rate either claims an enormously high rate or a completely barren rate.

Err, that couldn’t possibly be because those with less outlier-like results have no reason to post about their entirely unremarkable drop rate? Here’s another data point then: I got my first random coat box dropped on my 3rd Vinewrath event. Then I spent basically the whole weekend in the Silverwastes with nothing to show for it (except a Glove box from one of the four bandit chests in the room). Make that a dozen Vinewrath events or so, all but one of them successful. Then I got my 2nd random coat box drop late Sunday evening. Which comes out to a drop rate that looks fairly reasonable and not outrageously common or rare.

That said, yes, I am quite relieved that I have all three coat skins now. Without that particular pressure (and no overly large interest in the Luminescent armor skins, and hence the organ parts), I’m looking forward to doing the Silverwastes events in a rather more relaxed state of mind in the future.

DogTrainer.6038:

Aside from that, our issue and our feedback isn’t about drop rate, it’s about making the piece RNG at all.

Agreed. It would be nice if there were an alternative way of earning that piece in addition to the random drop. Especially since there is already so much RNG in acquiring the mordrem organs.

Moldur.6275:

So after I finished the point of no return, I noticed that the skritt who were building their underground ship in the silverwastes in the previous episode were still there. A map on their task board clearly shows how they plan to sail south and past Rata Sum, but I have not found any signs of progress on that side so far. I cannot see why Anet would introduce such a large storyline if it wasn’t planned to be continued, I mean it seems like too much work just for the beginning of a jumping puzzle.

Uhm, have you actually done the whole jumping puzzle? If not, do it, and All Will Be Made Clear. If yes, do it again and pay more attention to the dialog.

Horus Nightlight.1276:

ANet.. REALLY? Some of us who actually like the Bioluminescent Armor worked hard farming over 8k bandit crests over Christmas and New Year hoping to get the full set and you unleash the unspeakable thing called RNG on us? This really is the pits.

And you are surprised why? I thought that outcome was entirely predictable specifically because I read repeatedly how people were saving up their crests so they could outright buy all remaining carapace armor pieces as soon as the update went life.

Mind, I’m not at all happy about it, especially when reading about people who’ve done dozens of Vinewrath events without getting even one additional coat box, but I absolutely expected either RNG or a price of at least 10k crests per chest piece.

Vargamonth.2047:

The pattern is definitely there. I even made a crappy video of it :P

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S244BwtcPDQ

Thank you, that’s rather helpful. I had noticed part of that pattern, but not all of it. Specifically, I was too busy dodging the rocks to notice when they came up. This should make re-doing the instance for the other head pieces a lot more manageable.

- No monthly fees.
– Low-conflict game design: no harvesting node contention, no open-world PvP (read: ganking), almost no kill-stealing.
– No vertical gear grind.
– Dynamic events as an alternative to quest NPCs with icons above their heads.

I can confirm the unreliable spawn for those two events (Shaman at x:15 and Vine Bridge at x:20) at least since before Christmas.

I’ve generally attributed this to the previous round for those events either not finishing at all, or not finishing quickly enough (i.e. substantially later than 5 minutes after the event spawns). But in an organized T6 run, that seems unlikely…

darres.8203:

so my question is when do u guys detonate and why is it better to do so?

As a condi thief, the answer is simple for me: unless I want to blast a field, I detonate. It puts more bleeds on more mobs and the direct damage is the same (or better against larger groups of clustered trash mobs, since it can hit up to 9 targets instead of 5 for the undetonated cluster bomb).

Becka Williams.4978:

I don’t know why the drop rate’s so low.

If the drop rate were higher, people wouldn’t do the event again and again and again…

Reanne.5462:

I put in a bug report last week on this, which they have completely ignored.

How do you know that? In-game bug reports do not generally get a response, unless ANET needs additional information from the player that they can not get from the report, logs and whatever access they have to the in-game state of the account and/or server.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Every time I said Silverwastes is dead or dying, someone tells me otherwise. So I’m not blind to what you’re saying, Gudy.

It’s just that every time I’ve said it, someone else told me I was wrong.

Guess this is just full circle.

:-)
To be honest, I don’t think Silverwaste is dead, but it’s not in the best of places, and it certainly could be in a better place: The rewards aren’t at all bad, and the WvW-light structure is a good idea in general, IMO. If ANET tweaked the rewards a bit more, so that advancing the meta is better than chest farming or breach hopping (although some of the latter is probably due to organ farming for the luminscent armors), possibly through changes to the Perseverance buff, it could live a good life as a farming map that’s less mind-numbingly stupid than the FGS champ train.

As it is, yeah, I can see where it might be dying after the last batch of armor pieces are through.

On Piken Square, I’ve seen Garri, Bay, Hills for the keeps. North camp is almost always just north camp. For other camps and towers I’ve seen both cardinal directions (mostly for camps) and (shortened) names, including the names from other Borderlands. :-)