Airship Cargos and Crystallized Supply Caches
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Hesacon.8735
Start making them before you need them. The ignots themselves are not time gated, the Lumps of Mithrillium are. At about 85 silver each, you might as well make one every day long before you think you’ll need them.
Get rid of forms all together. Turn it into a party buff skill similar to how they changed Guardian wrath tome into the shout “feel my wrath”.
Hell no, plague form is a godsend in spvp. Lich may suck, but plague is diamonds.
Same in wvw. The AoE weakness/cripple in a zerg fight is surprisingly good. Sure, you do no damage, but you soften the enemy up considerably for your teammates to knock out.
I’m currently grinding through T3 fractals (personal level 62ish?, ugh, not close enough) with 150 AR, it’s not hard to get. One issue I’ve seen is some T3 people don’t really know how to not instantly die, so some mechanism to keep them out would be nice.
I keep telling myself T4 will be better for the quality of players, but that may or may not be wishful thinking.
It buys you some spike damage (hits about twice the damage as shroud for my build) in pve, but is suicidal in pvp or wvw because of so many reflections will leave you hitting yourself for 5-6k damage a pop.
I’ve noticed recently I’ve been in fractals fighting a boss and several teammates have died. Sometimes the how is a mystery, but I’m left either trying to kill a legendary with 20% of the party’s DPS or die and reset.
Here’s the problem, we need to reset and give it another attempt but it takes forever to die (how my teammates died I may never know) as necro in marauder’s gear. Could we get the /surrender (and equivalents) in fractals?
I think the main reason that TD is not being completed as often is that one map puts 4 squads on the LFG tool. This map is quickly full, but people try to get into the map. As a result, there are 2-3 overflow maps filled with people trying to get into that one full map.
Any of these overflow maps could organize and do a successful run, except people won’t commit to commanding them or staying on them because each individual player thinks their best shot of winning is that one full map.
The end result is the overflow maps don’t organize, few people get into the full map, and the meta doesn’t get completed.
All because people insist on leaving full maps up on LFG.
Tragedy of the commons at its finest.
(edited by Hesacon.8735)
Speaking of economy manipulation…
this is unacceptable. i have 3 +15 AI. I can only forge one +16 AI with those to get the +5stats / +9AR (that i do not need and can’t even sell). what do I do with the other +15 ? why do I have to fork few more hundred golds just so that I can forge +16 to get AI I do not want ?
please let us deconstruct +14 and above. economy will heal on its own.
Saying the economy will heal on its own is very selfish.
And 5 “5stats/+9AR” is worth more than a +16 agony in gold, so its a great deal, and +16 AR have only use on Fractals, but now that every slot can get a +9 its not even that usefull a +16. and the +5 stats you can use in all content of the game, great deal.You know that if they let you deconstruct it you would lose a lot of gold? Because no one will buy that much of +9AR so it will worth a lot of less gold. A-Net is trying to help you, your sollution will actually make you lose a lot of more gold, and hurt the economy.
In his defense, if he doesn’t need them, it’s not a great deal, it’s junk for junk. His only option is to sell it so someone else can take the deal.
Will this feature be left in the game long-term and allow another path to the 5 stat/9 AR infusions as an alternative to acquiring large numbers of Integrated Fractal Matrices?
Dredge first .
@OP
I took the time to carefully reread your post to understand the difference with your suggestionand 1 UP 1 DOWN and… It has the same problem as 1 UP 1 DOWN : it will break a perfectly balanced match up and push a server up anyway.
You need to keep perfectly balanced match up intact as much as possible because those are the most interesting match up you can be in. Variation when nothing is wrong is not a good thing.
Perfectly balanced match-ups are a myth, you’ll never get them across all tiers at the same time. For example T3’s matchup is balanced, but T4’s is not. By locking T3’s because it’s balanced, you keep T4 unbalanced.
What needs to be aimed for is the best chance at a balanced match.
Also, your system introduce a new problem that 1 UP 1 DOWN doesn’t suffer from. For example, let’s take SBI falling down to tier 4. Imagine for a moment that DH utterly destroyed SBI in the match. Which means that SBI rating would go down a lot and DH rating would go up a lot. But, since SBI rating was so much higher than DH at the beginning of the week, even after their loss they would still have a higher rating than DH and be pushed up to suffer in tier 3 for another weeks.
That’s not a problem, that’s intentional. That’s a feature I’d advocate for. In your hypothetical it protects SBI from a bad week. It also protects DH from moving up too fast and suddenly getting trounced in T2/T3.
I don’t think it’s a good idea for a T4 server to hypothetically win T4, then win T3, then win T2 and be in T1 in 3 weeks, which is what a pure one-up-one-down system would allow. It also throws past results and progress out the window and gives reason to stop playing in the case of a blow-out.
It also gives servers incentive to play until reset, which now many matches are settled in the first day or two. By clawing away as much glicko as possible to move up or avoid going down, matches stay interesting longer. This is one of the problems that anet is trying to solve by changing scoring. But this is one of those things were the solution does not have to be complicated to work.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be better than what we have now.
Both of these proposals don’t take into account the complications introduced by server linking, it seems. The fact that “host” servers get all the advantages or disadvantages of the Glicko (or score) earned by their alliance while “guest” servers get nothing (good or bad) will create tumult at the beginning of every relink.
Something something inherited score weighted average? (Weighted by %population in previous link? %population in new link? ???)
No amount of scoring or matchmaking will solve that problem, though. The same servers are the “main” servers at this point, with the 12 remaining servers having to be linked to someone. The “guest” servers glicko ratings are not used at this point.
As a sylvari, I can tell you that Lord Mordremoth is still alive and with the help of our brothers and sisters of the mordrem, we will burn Divinity’s Reach to the ground.
All hail Mordremoth!
It’s not, the difference is explained in the original post.
10 people who know what they’re doing.
I just started Astralaria only to notice there are a lot of tedious time-gated steps preventing me from proceeding in the collection. This was for collection 1 of 4, only to read reports of more time gating to come including charged quartz.
Both the Unholy Sanctuary and Mistlock Singularity activate upon taking a death blow, but Unholy Sanctuary puts you in shroud so you don’t actually die. The Mistlock Singularity still activates and heals 25% of your HP, except you were never going to take a death blow because of Unholy Sanctuary.
The heal works and the activation works, but the activation is quirky since you were not going to die. Instead it just feels like a wasted heal and would be better activated when a necro has too little life force to enter shroud.
I think you just need to get used to using it.
This, it will get you killed but more often it will save you. If you mistime it a couple times, but it saves you more than a couple times, that’s a net win.
Was debating making this topic since everyone and their cousin has a solution to the problem of matchmaking and there is no solution that everyone will be satisfied with.
There’s a lot of controversy over the use of glicko since it was never designed for how it is being used, but I don’t think the issue is with the glicko itself but the matchmaking
Right now glicko causes a couple things:
- Glicko walls/hell where servers are locked in certain tiers
- Stale matchups where the same 3 servers are battling it out every single week
This is because the matchups are based on glicko, with the reasonable (but wrong) idea that servers of similar glicko scores will be similarly matched. But, because of score differences between divisions, a server that is underperforming or overperforming may have no chance to move down/up to get a better matchup.
So the actual idea is we have 4 tiers. Keep glicko as it is, but at the end of every match, look at the glicko scores within each tier. If a server has the most glicko points at the end of the match (regardless of whether or not they won), move them up a tier. If they have the lowest glicko, move them down.
Each new match would be the middle-glicko from the last matchup, the lowest glicko from the tier above it, and the highest from the tier below it. This wouldn’t really help T1 and T4 except to give them different matchups, but they’re not getting anything better now.
This eliminates both the stale matchup and glicko wall problem at the same time. It also prevents a T4 server from moving to T1 in 3 weeks because (somehow) they won each week in a simple winner-moves-up system. Servers still need to earn enough glicko points within a tier to move up.
It also eliminates the need for glicko modification like artificially changing the scores for Crystal Desert.
One big advantage this method has over others is that it could be implemented without the developers needing to modify the glicko in any way. A couple lines of code in matchmaking would suffice. It should not take significant development time away from other areas. A big time-to-quality-of-life tradeoff.
Pick a secondary crafting that you know which toon has max level of that crafting, and give it to all the toons who need a second slot. You know which toon has max scribing or jewelcrafting, so you won’t get confused by seeing it on other toons.
If it wasn’t FTP I would have never downloaded the game. If I had never downloaded the game I’d have never payed for it.
FTP is how anet got my money after people had been asking me to play the game for years.
Great additions!
In fairness scepter 2 is nearly useless and scepter 3 is only good for life force generation. AA is the only thing scepter has going for it.
Since this kind of thread keeps reappearing, I figured I’d throw together something that might be stickied to answer this question each time it comes up.
Where did the vendor go that allowed me to buy a Gift of Battle for 500 Badges of Honor?
It was removed from the game, the only way to obtain a Gift of Battle is now is to complete the Gift of Battle Reward Track.
Why did anet make this change?
They haven’t said for sure. Conjecture varies, but some think it’s to make legendaries more… legendary and requiring mastery across game modes. Some have speculated it was a way to encourage people to play wvw.
It may have always been their intention to have it harder to acquire from the beginning and never had a meaningful way to do it, and the vendor was always a temporary solution to solving the problem; allowing people to obtain a legendary.
How long does it take to finish the track?
It requires 20,000 reward points to finish any wvw reward track. The maximum acquisition rate is 195 points every 5 minutes at maximum participation, and would take slightly over 8.5 hours to complete while maintaining maximum participation.
This can be sped up by using an experience booster (50% gain) and Guild WvW Reward Track Boost (3-10% increase). With these 60% increases, at maximum participation it would take just shy of 5.5 hours to complete the track.
Increasing participation requires you to… do stuff in wvw. If there is a commander tag on the Eternal Battlegrounds or your server’s borderlands, following them will usually provide some quick participation gains, depending on the quality of the commander and zerg and the opponent you’re facing.
Some commanders will gladly share squad participation (if you ask for it) with scouts and roamers. If you offer to watch over an important objective (and call out enemy activities nearby!), most commanders will gladly share participation with you. This is a vital role while defending any of the 3 keeps in your home borderlands.
There are 4 wvw dailies, 2 rare and 2 exotic chests. The rare chests give 250 points each, the exotics 500 points each. Only doing dailies would take 14 days to complete the track, not counting the points you acquire actually doing the dailies.
Why’s it take so long?
That’s a matter of perspective, world competition and time-gated prerequisites already take a long time (ever make Astralaria?), with many taking far longer than the reward track.
So are all my badges of honor worthless now?
No, there’s still lots of useful things you can buy with them.
- Badges of Tribute are required to level scribing and sell well on the trading post.
- Cultural armor is available for a combination of badges and coins that are cheaper than just coins. Completing the cultural armor collection grants a mastery point.
- Exotic armors and weapons can be acquired for various (but not all) stat types.
- Some Laurel items are cheaper with Badges + Laurels.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Badge_of_Honor#Vendors
Ugh, I hate wvw
Many who enjoy wvw don’t enjoy all the pve activities required to obtain a legendary and still “suffer” through them, in particular map competition. If you go into it with the mindset that you hate it, you will hate it. If you go in with an open mindset you might find you enjoy aspects of wvw. Give it a shot, you might like it.
One other thing to consider is that it’s efficient to obtain karma in wvw (karma training is a derogatory term from more battle-oriented wvw players), and you need a lot of karma for legendaries. I have watched pve players have trouble obtaining the required karma required, take advantage of it while you’re here.
(edited by Hesacon.8735)
Well now we have yet ANOTHER currency, that we cannot stow. Blood Rubies. So they have to take up a slot in players bags or bank until they are spent. So maybe the common sense thing to do is NOT keep adding more currencies if they cannot be stowed and reuse one from the dozens that are already in use?
The problem is not so much that they can’t be stowed. You can throw them in a bank. The problem is that as soon as you deposit one you will acquire another one as a drop, so that same precious inventory space is still used up.
Right now I think I have to carry around…
- 7 Keys (dry top, silverwastes, 4 HoT maps, fractals)
- Unrefined sand, because it only refines in batches of 10
- Trophies (chak eggs, Tenebrous Crystal)
- Siege blueprints, since I prefer wvw to pve but partake in both
- Tomes and writs of experience (nearly at the point where I destroy writs, but they just keep reappearing)
- Blood Rubies
Basically if you play more than one game mode, you’re hosed when it comes to inventory clutter. Even for those who don’t wvw, that’s a dozen items permanently locked to their inventory.
Since in GW2, every item or stack of item is a slot and there are finite slots (vs. a game where say “weight” matters but you can otherwise carry everything), this item creep is quickly becoming unmanageable.
Necromancer is good at sustaining condi, so they’re good for things like raids. If you’d rather have spike conditions that do more damage but are harder to maintain at high-damage levels, mesmer, berserker, and now thief are all solid options.
With recent QoL improvements at the community’s request, keeping this thread on the first page give it a reasonable chance of happening alongside one of the LW3 episodes.
It would also be nice if it also remembered gear so I don’t have to manually swap out 6 armor pieces and 4-6 trinkets.
It’s a great map to zone out on and just cruise around on a glider. It’s almost zen-like.
Gliding is the single best addition made to the game, it makes moving around so much easier, even on non-HoT maps.
TT suffers from two problems:
- Organizing it usually takes an hour, and who wants to sit around for that?
- The actual loot is lackluster for an hour-long organization.
Both of which are correctable.
After LW3 was released people were spending a lot of time in bloodstone fen, which has a lot of jungle plant nodes. It may be that the initial rush of bloodstone fen has passed and many people went back to other areas.
That said, the drop rate on them is abysmal and it’s not much more expensive to just craft ascended trailblazer’s rather than exotic. Then it’s not soulbound and you can use infusions.
@OP, I don’t know how the pve version of the build works, but currently condi warrior is overpowered as kitten in wvw and most parties are looking for 3-4 to fill out the condi team.
That said, you’ll notice now that dungeons have basically become a “All welcome” game feature. What changed? Power creep and HoT builds, basically. The average level of DPS+survivability has gone up quite a lot with the arrival of Ascended gear and elite specializations. It means that just one or two good players can easily carry the rest of the party, and so the need for meta team builds is now almost non-existent.
People do dungeons? It took me days to grind out the 5 runs I needed for currency to make my legendary because the LFG was deserted and my parties took forever to fill. Even then the loot was terrible for the time investment vs. HoT maps.
I’m not saying dungeons are deserted, but they’re pretty close.
Golden rule on competitive play: the more people complain about something, the better it must be.
Marauder’s is way better than Valkyrie. Valkyrie is horrible for overall stats when you do the math.
Trailblazer’s is very expensive to craft, start with Dire and if you like Dire, you can go Trailblazer’s. If you don’t like Dire, you’re throwing away a lot of money on Trailblazer’s. For the cost of lillies, you might as well just make ascended since it’s only like three times the price of exotic. You might consider mixing in some rabid because many useful things require crits to activate.
Rune of the pack and rune of durability both work in power builds. For condi builds durability still works, but you could also consider undead, krait, or perplexity depending on goals and budget.
CD is actually in play with their adulterated glicko score to end up in T2. I’d be curious how many points other T2 servers would lose just by virtue of CD being in the matchup.
Right now SBI is losing 15 points despite having 20k more than the next two servers and over 50% of the total points in the matchup.
Anything to get it out of my inventory as one of the 30 items I can’t get rid of would be a welcome change. Exotic crafting material would be fine.
Building trebs, balis, cats and acs on someone’s spawn while they fight your 20 to 30 spawncampers with 10 because they are literally bored to tears and starving for fights.
SF is the one playing Siege Wars 2. SBI/HOD wouldn’t be so starving for fights if ANet wouldn’t artificially inflate a server.
Also would help if the events director wasn’t running the WvW show. They guy doesn’t know jack about WvW. Keep him in his own dept please.
Hammering people into oblivion is not going to get them to play. If I were to log into wvw and see a match where one server controlled 90% of the map including all 12 keeps, I would log back out.
It’s not SBI’s fault they’re stuck in T4, but it is their fault they’re bored and starved for fights. Let the other servers hold onto a T3 tower or don’t re-paper a keep every 10 minutes and the populations of those servers won’t be so low.
You can’t blame them for not putting up a fight where they are going to die in every encounter.
With YB and SoS bleeding glicko points to CD (despite CD coming in third), there is a glicko wall forming that will prevent movement between T2 and T3.
The real thing at issue is no matter who is in T4, SF or DH are hosed.
Offer people 200 gems or something to transfer from T1 or T2 to SF or DH.
You could have an armor with 10000% outgoing healing, which would be outrageous, but it isn’t what you need so it’s not what people would take.
I dunno, one piece of armor with that stat bonus everyone would take because every heal becomes a full heal.
Berserker’s is higher DPS than Marauder, so it depends on what you’re trying to do.
The problem is the glicko changes were based on the original glicko scores, but the matchup-generation was based on the glicko modifications anet made.
SoS and YB bled a combined 82 glicko points despite CD coming in last. Mind you last week’s matchup was way more fun than the mag/SBI matchup SoS has had for the last several months (any different opponents would have been nice).
Whoever fell to T4 last week by virtue of the RNG was doomed to stay there because the glicko changes were based on the original scores. Had any other server fallen (and it could have been 5 of them), they would’ve been stuck there in the bottomless pit of T4.
I used to get one every 2-3 days playing 2-3 hours per day.
I saw the same thing this morning. I don’t believe YB is colluding with hackers, I think it’s just a couple kittens that just happened to pick YB. It could happen to anyone.
Either way they’ve been reported 50 times in-game by now.
Buy gems and sell for gold.
Crafting tables first.
Axe is for shroud-focused builds. The weapon all but screams at you “I’m not for auto-attacking.” Using it that way, it’s beyond terrible- because that’s not what it’s for. If you want to deal high, consistent damage out of shroud you can grab dagger or GS.
It is Known. The point of Axe is burst LF generation. A/F will generate a third or more of a bar of LF in a few seconds with Touch, Shivers (if you’ve got Chilling Victory), then Claws. (That’s roughly double what Soul Marks will give in that time, even blowing all 4 mark cooldowns.) By the time you’ve got that done, you’ve got a couple more seconds to drop a shout or a well or something, then get back in shroud until your LF drops to about 60% and you do it again.
That’s exactly the problem. Reaper traits are very important to Power DPS. And that means that you end up with a ranged weapon and melee shroud. Doesn’t sound good.
Axe is good for applying Vulnerability and will proc a few more stacks of Siphoned Power.
Some fast tests on Kitty golems with full buffs and with only self-buffs only:
GS/Axe ratio is 1.32 with full buffs and all the way down to 1.07 with self-buffs only. So I wouldn’t say Axe is bad, it just doesn’t work well with group buffs.
You also have to take into account what you’re fighting. If you’re fighting something that hops around a lot, the time spent chasing the target eats into the ideal DPS. Many HoT bosses (or mobs, really), enemies in spvp/wvw, etc. aren’t going to stay in that 130 range the entire time.
Prices have actually been coming down.
This. Other than maybe T6 leather prices have been dropping since the patch. Elder wood is down 25% in price, ectos are down about the same amount. It’s hard to say if we’ve hit the new equilibrium, but compared to a month ago it’s far cheaper.
I think there is no need really. The drop rate of rubies is quite low (too low in my opinion), so it should not take more then one slot.
And if Anet made it an item, it means they can have a plan for the future chained to it. Maybe some recipe.
So have them tradeable for the item required in the recipe, so if people want to use the recipe they can still get the item but it doesn’t clutter up everyone else’s inventories.
If nothing else, the Blood Rubies are salvageable. So unless that is changed I don’t think they’ll go into wallet.
Trading it for an item that can be opened for the salvage result now would have the exact same result.
These extra items being carried around are not a big deal if it were one or two of them, but it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts at this point.
They always do it on a mesmer. A couple months ago we lost a T3 tower because they hacked through a wall and ported a zerg inside.