Guild Wars 2

The link you posted contains all of the methods to get Ascended back pieces at present. You missed out on “Method 2.”

Really, though, more importantly- don’t worry about it for now at all. Easier methods are confirmed to be coming and the only stat boost is quite negligible at this time.

Sky, you’re on my server and thus I maybe feel a little more camaraderie- and desire to reassure you- than I would any other random poster here, so if you happen to come back and check this, let’s talk about it a little bit.

1. “no matter what lies you people spout, the fact is that Infusions have stats in addition to Agony resistance” – I’m not sure what people or what lies you are referring to, but you are right of course- the advanced infusions do have stats beyond agony resistance- a total of +5 to one stat of your choice. Do you truly find this to be a significant factor at present?

2. You have 8 characters and multiple builds for character- surely, being capable of doing it in the first place, you realized that this would be a more time-consuming and difficult undertaking than having just one character. Any additions to the game you wanted for more than one of your characters would require more effort on your part than if you only wanted to grab them for one character. This was the case with Exotic armor and superior sune sets, it was the case with Exotic weaponry and superior sigils, it was the case with exotic accessories (which I still don’t have all of on my two main characters personally- you must have a huge /age!). The crucial point here is that you appear to be indicating that you believe you NEED to do all of this (whatever this is, since we’re all speculating) for all your characters… which brings me to my final and most important point.

3. “Even if I played 24/7, I would spend most of my time grinding gear… and very little time enjoying the game.” – Why? What do you consider yourself unable to do now that you were able to do before? What content is inaccessible to you unless you have a 5% increase in base stats? Why would you do something other than what you wanted to do when you log on? This aspect of the entire discussion boggles my mind. It strikes me as something of a holdover attitude I cannot understand from other MMOs, never having played them (besides GW1).

Obviously, if you want to do very high level fractals, you need agony resistance. And you have to get that by either playing lots of fractals (which presumably you want to do if you want to play the high levels) or spending lots of gold. But other than that, I have literally no conception of why someone in your shoes can’t simply ignore ascended gear entirely for the forseeable future and go on your merry way.

Don’t listen to Ahlen, by the way. I heavily value horizontal progression and GW2 has it in spades, and I have no doubt it will continue to be available even by the time you’ve spent 10x the asking price of this game on another.

Anyway, if you ever find yourself wanting to log on and chat about this while doing something you actually enjoy in-game, message Hawkian The Blade.

It’s certainly my favorite online multiplayer game of all time.

What class are you?

It’s easy for my thief to move about unimpeded and take on 3-4 mobs simultaneously. More than that and I quickly succumb to CC and have to stealth away. I don’t really consider it “exceptionally hard” at this point either, just a challenge. But clearly you and I are quite skilled.

I would imagine that a newly-minted level 80 solo elementalist would have a bit of trouble.

Southsun Cove is nowhere near as threatening as Orr and you can do just fine solo there if you’re not pulling Veteran Karka every few seconds. Some of the best farming in the game is there and it’s actually a pretty beautiful, relaxing environment. Feels just like I imagined something called the “Lost Shores” should. I have no clue what you meant by infusion, absolutely nothing outside of the Fractals use Agony.

Orr is (and is meant to feel like) a brutal nightmare in comparison. You’re not supposed to be able to navigate it safely alone, and the atmosphere should be oppressive. It’s the closest thing the game has to the instanced runs in GW1 that you’d be suicidal to attempt alone even with bots.

That said, my thief can sneak around Orr and mine the nodes pretty effectively without any company. Take stunbreaks and stability. :P

No one knows.

Yes, they are.

Welcome! Enjoy your journey.

Hey all, I have an alternative configuration for you to try if interested: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwgV6PdDgkbBTEdzbDdwNm5yTGc/edit?pli=1

You want to File->Save All and then follow instructions.txt (it’s quite simple, promise).

This has been highly refined over months and I think it’s magnificent. Some of the aspects are very similar to this one, while some are altogether different. It’s worth a shot to see what you think, anyway. There are simple changes (Dodge on R3 seems crazy to me; I put it on RT, which I stole from Bayonetta), along with complete overhauls (the way mouse movement, ground-targeting works is completely different).

It uses RB for a modifier in much the same way this one does, but there are some very different applications of it.

The mouse pointer will always recenter to a static point on screen, which makes ground targeting skills much easier and cleaner, and is a pretty revolutionary feature. It also has ESC on the start button, which seems like a silly thing but you will use it ALL THE TIME (exits menus and chat box, dialogue options, deselects targets, opens game menu).

Feel free to pick and choose elements of it as well of course.

Everything is included in the download, but if you don’t trust it, you want a free (legacy) version of Xpadder and the latest version of AutoHotKey.

Hi Gaile!

Just posting here because I wanted to let you know that I would like to send you the sugary confection of your choosing as a general thank-you.

Just a PSA: Since the dungeon update, dungeon sub-bosses (such as Kohler) should never, ever, ever be skipped. They drop silver (which can be boosted with foods) and Bags of Wondrous Goods (which contain a few more silver, karma, and dungeon tokens).

Freyvin, I can honestly sympathize with the game not living up to your expectations. By nature it couldn’t do so for everyone, but you have absolutely every right to be disappointed. It lived up to mine, but we were merely looking for different things in the end and that’s more than fine; in fact it’s a necessary component of the process of delivering an MMO that some people will be satisfied and others won’t.

I want to stress that I didn’t reply to you in defense of any particular qualities of the game. Your question about “when forum posters would not be the minority” stood out to me just because of the objective facts of the case; that, right or wrong, they always will be.

It’s also important to draw a distinction between “success” and your personal enjoyment. By all reasonable metrics- critical and commercial- the game has already been a fairly resounding success. Of course we will see how things go from here, but watch the horizon for numerous Game of the Year nominations about to be announced in the next few days and weeks.

Where it has not succeeded is in being enjoyable to you and your friends (past a certain point- one imagines that during your 670 hours across three 80s, you enjoyed some portion of the experience). And that is regrettable. I’m just saying that perspective is a very important thing.

I leave you with this thought (I’m sure you’ve heard it before, and I don’t mean to be redundant): if you feel the game right now is boring, grindy, and stale, but look forward to a day when it is not those things to you any longer- there’s nothing to be lost by simply taking a break until you hear about significant changes and then coming back and giving it a try. I don’t mean this at all in the “if you don’t like it, then don’t play it” sense- I mean that obviously you want to like it, but there’s no sense in having to strain to do so, and you’re not struggling to get your money’s worth at this point. You might like the direction things go one day, and you might not.

…ArenaNet isn’t a publicly traded company. My bad for being unclear on that one!

ArenaNet isn’t a publicly traded company :-S

Seriously if you’re messing with me, I tip my hat to you in earnest.

Perspective is everything and “from where you stand” is absolutely the key phrase in that paragraph.

You provided some anecdotal evidence that the game is going down the tubes. If I thought there would be some tangible impact, I’d respond anecdotally that my guild has far, far more than 8 regularly active members, and that fewer than 8 of them actual post here (and who could blame them, really? :P), and that thus everything is actually going just fine and this hysteria is nothing more than hysterical.

But instead of responding with anecdotal evidence I just wanted to point out the obvious: that forum posters will always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always be the minority. Of course ArenaNet pays attention to these forums, and of course they reply at a pretty decent rate, and even announce priorities and clarify whether or not things are intentional on these very pages, but on the whole, THIS sort of thread is not indicative of… well, anything. We’re not polling data; we’re noise. I know this is hard to accept, but it really is the truth. And while that may be bad news for you, it’s not bad news for everyone.

Freyvin.5690:

So at what point are forum posters NOT the minority?

Serious question? Sometimes I still feel like I’m just being toyed with constantly around here.

mavet.3047:

The whole point of these nerfs, which are intentional without a doubt, is that you spend more rl money on their piece of crap gem store. No subs so they have to sucker you in some how.

With all due respect, I’ve been laughing to myself over this since the thread began and as I kept following, it started to feel disingenuous to keep my opinion to myself while silently judging anybody who makes this claim so much.

As someone who has not spent (and absolutely will not spend) any real money on gems, yet has purchased about 2500 gems’ worth of stuff from the gem store, it’s a pretty patently ridiculous premise. Furthermore, even if I had spent $200 of my hard-earned cash on gems, I’m drawing a blank as to what advantage it is that you, mavet, and anyone who agrees with you, believe I would have over the version of myself that hadn’t. Help me out!

Holy crap. Keep your head up, Robert <3

Judas.5432:

Honestly, I don’t see why anything should be soulbound. It seems like items being bound to account would be sufficient in every situation.

I’m glad you mentioned this.

Standard exotic/whatever-rarity items and armor should absolutely be soulbound. The aspect of both removing them fully from the player-trade economy and ensuring that players can’t simply consecutively give their old items to alts as hand-me-downs is crucial to maintaining a relatively consistent sense of value. Account bound items would make the value of ALL items decrease over time because the value of any indivdual purchased item would skyrocket.

That said, legendaries should reaaaaaaaaaaaallllllllly be account bound. They can’t be sold or traded at all to begin with, and by the time you obtain one you’ve contributed enormously to the in-game economy in a huge number of ways just by playing. Plus, since the effects are literally simply cosmetic, it makes sense that you should be rewarded for your effort by being able to see those effects on all the characters you have that can wield it.

It’s not like making them account bound allows you to copy them, only one character could have it at a time, but you could always toss it in the bank to show off on another character and check out all the shinies.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Two simple possibilities
1. Play-time. They want you to keep doing stuff. So if your goal is to get legendaries for all your chars, you don’t reach that end-goal faster. And they want you to work on your other chars beyond 80 and not just get hand-me-downs.
2. Value. They want to keep each character unique and they earn what they do especially if it’s a legendary weapon.

Neither of these are compelling enough reasons not to do it.

1. If your suggestion is that ArenaNet’s intention is that you go after the same Legendary on every character you have that can wield that weapon class, I don’t even know where to start. That’s just cruel! Considering the enormous time and effort involved in getting one, I’m sure most people going after more than one are either going after a different one, or going after the same one for the same character (to dual-wield Incinerators or whatever).

2. This seems like a good point but if you look at the entire scenario from a wide lens, it falls apart. You can earn and deposit gold, jugs of karma, and crafting materials from any character, all of which can be put toward a legendary that can only be used by one character. Also, dungeon tokens were made account bound, so it’s not like they’d be subverting a hard-and-fast policy.

“Loot is junk, token gear no better than crafted.”

Not the game you’re looking for ;(

ArenaNet, I would just like to voice that I do not want anything resembling the trinity thrust back into this game. Please do not implement any of the Gankfest (haha) ideas to “improve” dungeons.

I only created this thread and held off on transmuting because they specifically mentioned, explicitly, that there would be an option added to have that stuff upgraded to 80 without using a transmutation stone. I am fine continuing to wait, I don’t want to spend another 8 runs getting tokens for the same piece of gear. If this isn’t going to be implemented at all that’s fine too, then I can find a suitable piece to transmute, but I’d like to hear either way.

It works just like any other Rune. The Mad King Armor isn’t even unique, it’s just renamed crafted armor with mad king runes.

Venom buff disappears even if the birds are not called out (if there is no target nearby).

Co-sign! Thank you!

I’ve LOVED this event. I wish that my rune set idea was functioning properly… https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/halloween/Can-someone-test-the-Mad-King-Rune-and-Basilisk-Venom/first#post564096

But other than that I have no complaints, it’s been a blast!

I think it’s bugged. The venom just appears to immediately disappear after activation. If birds attack a target, the target doesn’t get turned to stone, the buff just disappears.

Essentially it makes the skill useless, like the venom isn’t even applying. Can anyone else try this out?

I’m really disappointed at this because I spent a lot of time collecting gold for the runes and the armor set I put together in honor of the Mad King to wear them.

http://i.imgur.com/2KP3K.png

I was really excited to see how the skills/rune interact. But it looks like they just break one another.

Thank god. I was starting to think SE was my own personal hell, and I really like the gear!

Hi there! This is something that was mentioned a while back (being able to upgrade the level 60 and 70 exotic gear to the new 80 versions available at the vendors, for free).

Just wanted to make sure it was still on the docket somewhere.

Is this still a priority?

I got an Ascalon Chestpiece within a few days of starting the game. It’s sadly useless to me now and I don’t want to waste a transmutation stone if I don’t have to!

Feel like an old man reading these…

“Back in my day, Alpha had twice as much health and you still had to run twenty miles uphill in the snow to get back to him when you died…”

Learn the fights- it’s one of the most well-designed boss battles in the game (and they knew this, which is why you fight him in a recurring battle in all paths).

For starters, the concentric circles of death aren’t really something that you should be hit by very often. When you see them, count “One, two, dodge” and you’ll get the timing down pat.

Second, he doesn’t have the same set of abilities in all paths. The spike thing makes him by far the most dangerous because it isn’t telegraphed much, but staying to his sides or back the wwhole fight makes it much easier.

Yeeeeep, it’s red.

The Asura path is ridiculous, hilariously bugged and broken.

You did it in 15 minutes by keeping a grenadier alive, right?

Just had it again too.

I’ve gone into explorable mode dungeons with whites. Just make sure you have gear at your level and most importantly, communicate with your team.

I remember what a shock to the system AC story was my first time. Really have to up your level of play and communicate with your team to win, but it’s very satisfying to do so. Just ran a group through there again earlier in the week, and man what a difference the confidence and familiarity makes. Felt downright easy :P

Um? Just want to voice my opinion that having champions in the overworld is GREAT, for nothing but the challenge itself. I love testing out my ability to solo one I run into alone, pinging a friend for help if I know I can’t take it down myself, then finally asking my guildies to come join the hunt if it’s really that tough a mob. 9/10 times we’ll stick together in a party and go hunting for DEs or something after these scenarios.

If anything, the fact that they, in your eyes, never drop good loot should reassure that you aren’t missing anything by skipping them, and leave the big game hunting to folk like us.

“Who will want to go out of their way to kill an elite?”

Me!

Good luck with Arah! Waiting for full exotic EQ to tear that dungeon apart, but I’m excited.

Outstanding patch so far. CoE tweaks were welcome and luckily the challenge is still there. 60 token rewards worked

I’ve done all three paths. Alpha will seem quite a bit easier to veterans of the early days of this dungeon but the overall difficulty is still solid. Punishing for mistimed dodges and bad decisions, rewarding for good teamwork. Faster complete times, but nothing really lost in the challenge. Well done, ArenaNet.

To be clear, resetting him did nothing at all for our run. He simply continued to run through the pillars (not even clipping like the player models do, let alone falling down).

The fight and the mechanic are fine (as you said he doesn’t have much health) but nearly impossible when bugged and we did not have the time or firepower to whittle him down 2dps at a time, so this was blocking our progress.

Just experienced this. It comes at the end of a very long run and needs to be fixed! Reported in-game.

Greetings, and let me start off by saying to the devs at ArenaNet that I adore this game. I will plainly be playing it for years to come and you’ve made hundreds of thousands of gamers happy by creating such a rich and entertaining gameworld to explore.

I welcomed the changes to dungeon rewards described in the patch notes. I am simply looking for official confirmation that the rewards are currently not functioning as intended.

That is to say:

The patch notes state that the first run of any given path of any give dungeon per day should reward 60 tokens. This is occurring properly for some players, but clearly not functioning for others.

So far I have seen two official replies regarding this issue. One from Robert Hrouda: “Diminished Returns system.” This was disconcerting, but I believe Robert simply misunderstood the issue being reported. Then was Jon Peters’:

“All rewards are susceptible to our code that is dealing with people who are speed clearing dungeons. If you find yourself getting less rewards consider whether or not your rate of dungeon completion is extremely high. This did not get reset with the patch.

If you think you are running at a fairly reasonable pace post all of the chains you have run and the times to complete and we will file it to try and figure out if it is a bug. Please post accurate times, otherwise we cannot determine if there are in fact bugs in
the system.

Thanks,

Jon"

I understand the instinct to assume the system is working properly until given proof otherwise- especially considering the tone of many posts regarding these changes.

However, I’m just looking for confirmation that there is a known issue regarding these rewards.

Last night, I ran Twilight Arbor (forward-forward path) and Crucible of Eternity (front door path). I had run one dungeon in preceding 24-hour period (CoE teleporter path).

Upon completion:
-30 tokens in TA
-15 tokens in CoE

Not only were these my first runs of the day, they were the first time I had ever completed those paths. Other party members received numbers from the intended 60 to the same 15 as me. This is simply at odds with the description stated in the patch notes as well as Robert/Jon’s replies. The CoE path in particular was being run for the first time by everyone in the group and took a long time (well over two hours), so speedrunning was not a factor.

I want to be clear that I don’t think this bug means that ArenaNet is irresponsible, or malicious, or doesn’t care about their player base, or embarrassing, yadda yadda yadda- I’d just like to get acknowledgement from someone that it is in fact just that- a bug. As with any bug I expect it simply to be tracked and fixed, and then we’ll all go on to complaining about something else.

Thanks for reading!