Guild Wars 2

- The precursor is 1/4th of the whole process.
- Crafting your way to 80 on several alts will cost you more than enough though that is not the intention.
- It doesn’t have to be 8 characters, it was an example.

szar.9054:

im sorry but unsubstantiated hearsay isnt going o get anyone excited. If there eally were a massive balance patch coming any competent dev team would have released a proper preview of at the very least the general objectives of the changes.

no post no changes

or anet is just dumb

The reason why this doesn’t have to be the case is because during large scale skill changes, there was no such thing, not once.
Just dropped the bomb like that with a whole bunch of skill changes.

After everything was said and done, I’ve been thinking to follow Anet’s original concept of progress in game + experience of a journy that will lead you towards the legendary weapon.

This is not a new concept by the way, and share similarities with Aion’s daevic armor.

Per every character created that hit lv80, you get for example a “legendary fragment” or “shard of wisdom”.
Since we’re still talking about a legendary weapon here, you’ll need 6 ~ 8 fragments to be able to trade in for a precursor.

This way we solve the 1st legendary weapon and make it more enjoyable for everyone, and literally cut the repetitive grind by 50% (leveling an alt can be made in more than a few different ways rather than grinding gold by farming Orr or nodes runs for example)

Would like to hear opinions or further related suggestions if any.

Hurray, that still doesn’t solve the 300g+ spent on gifts, but hey I hope that means I’m nearly 50% there.

If RNG will still be involved, I’d probably wait for quite a few to pop on market before I buy one.

What do you mean play as alts?

All classes, what else?
Depending on what needs to be done, I’ll take that class.

Having played Guardian, Warrior, Elementalist, Thief, Necromancer and Engineer in dungeons all in full exotics.

With the Guardian I can go autopilot sleep mode at any dungeon, some of them I’m playing while being on the phone, others I just read articles online.

Guardian GS #1 + VoJ spam > All elementalists skills, and guess what? I don’ have to worry about being heavily hit, got two insta 75% heals (Staff #4 with altruistic, and signet). And another 50% emergency recovery (pop all virtues + FR Elite)

I agree on one thing though, Elementalist is more fun, but since we’re talking about dungeons here and for some reason enemies got insane amount of HP which supposed to make it challanging or whatever, I’d rather autopilot with my guardian and do something constructive while I’m at it.

Chunning earth + Lightning flash.
Thank you, that’s all I needed to learn.

And here I thought Knight armor set + Berserker jewel set was viable for all classes.
Silly me.

Also did I read right? healing power?
This is taken from gw2wiki:
“Healing scales linearly with healing power. Different sources of health gain add different amounts of healing per point of healing power. For instance, each point of Healing Power adds 0.125 healing for Regeneration, 0.06 healing for Rejuvenation.”
I’d check that stat again if I were you.

As final wvw build I’d say go:
10 Air
30 Earth
10 Water
30 Arcana.

My 2 cents.

As an extremely versatile player (I play on 6 maxed classes)
I must say that I find the ele and engineer the most fun to play only thanks to attunements + conjures / kits.
For me the conjures act as an extra attunement, more of a use-and-destroy per situation needed. So what I’m getting at, is the FGS as well have some great uses, but it must not be treated as a weapon to keep carrying around.
Start seeing conjures as extentions of your attunements, and I believe you’ll find their viable usefulness as I have in battle.

As for tornado I agree that it’s extremely situational (EB puzzle for the lulz or cliff battles).
And the Glyph have some nice uses when you want to set up passive fields and aoe effects.

As last side note… the tons of versatility ele / engi get should be implemented into other classes as well. 2 skillbars per any other class makes it feel dull compared to these two classes.

@ Polle.6908

Thing is, it IS an emergency button, and does a flawless job at that.
I’ve managed to escape through a storming zerg that destroyed a gate the other day thanks to this skill.

KensaiZen.3740:

Stand in front of the door and auto attack lol I hear it still hits the attackers from the inside

This. (With a staff)

Also, pop out of the gate, cast Wall of reflection and pop back in. Then watch all the cool numbers + you helped delaying the destruction of the gate.

Another now and then option would be to use tome of wrath, get on top of the wall and spam #1 on a cluster on enemies.

ANOTHER option would be to pop out of the gate, throw some AoE’s around, throw the enemies into disarray and pop back in.
You can survive any amount of enemies with “Save yourselves” and “Stand your ground”. (for a short duration of time)

Hope this helps.

Bull’s charge = miss
All big 1 hit strikes = miss

As GreyWraith.8394 said, but not just in PvE, in any situation that you can recognize a pattern of an attack that will deal a great damage to you, use blind.

Wait until Gems spike up some more, mayb 1g per 100 gems, then we can start talking about new cash items

This game needs Spamadan.
Just import us that one map that feels right to spam my wares.

Biggest issue here is that you can’t add skills customization without rebuilding the whole system from ground up.

What can be done however:
- Add a 3rd weapon to sawpping, making a whole new veriety of combos and options (seeing as eles and engi’s can do the same).

- Reduce cooldowns significantly on #3~5 skills, utilites, and elites (240s on become the “insert animal”, 30s duration. Just one example out of many)

Tangleknot.8605:

I don’t have a snazzy graph but i’m now fairly convinced MF actaully works.
I’ve been farming the Shelter/ Penitant Events for the last week with my epic maxed-out MF gear and a food boost. On avarage I get about 1 rare per event.
Today started off the same (1 rare per event). I then used a 1 hour MF boost from the Black lion trading… 3 rares per event on average.
After the hour was over I switched to another epic set with no MF, and got a ton of loot but only 1 rare in 1.5 hours.
When farming for rares and gold I found MF is important, however doing enough dps to achieve a “Hit” (% damage need to warrant drop and exp from a mob) is more important. If your attacks don’t register a hit in, you get no loot what-so-ever. Thats why grouping up is important, your party helps you do damage to mobs.

That’s what I call lucky

MF probably helps, but if you got 200%+ (which isn’t real 200% since you can’t add up % like that) that’s still 1.x multiplier to the actualy drop % of a certain item.

Let’s say corrupted lodestone got 0.5%, so now you got 0.8/9%.

The rates are there, but at a price of dps.
And I – for one, cannot stand slow killing.

I’m just glad that this game is so anti-hardcore.
People came to this game with a mindset of farming 24/7 and becoming l33t, yet after all that gold and time spent… nothing to really show for it.

In the end, the casual players will benefit the most out of it, thanks to your hard proofs Anet will eventually fold and ease the process.

Shout effect doesn’t work underwater.

Please fix

@ LameFox.6349

Shhhh!!!! jesus, these are official forums man.

http://www.gw2db.com/items/25082-lemon-s#related:comments

vs Veterans / champs (or any high hp mob) : GS / Scepter + focus / torch
vs groups of mobs: GS / Hammer OR Staff – open with hammer blast and switch OR spam #1 with Staff while GS skills are on CD.

Another tip: 15 in Radiance allows you to spam blind, abuse that and you can practically run around after dishing out all of your AoE’s with your GS, and spam F1 while swinging around inside the group. (you’ll be practically untouchable, mobs will keep dying one after another).

What is the problem again? is there a level 400 dish that you must make and is overpriced?

Otherwise, I just 0 to 400 my Warrior for the sake of leveling today with a marginal cost of 50s + -

If by some random 0.00001% chance I happen to get dusk, first thing I do is put it on TP.

With an increasing demand to fix the issue at hand, there will be – as in all MMO’s, a carebear patch to get the legendary in an easier way than it is now.

Give it a few months.

Vicariuz.1605:

@Kami- “You are wrong.Simply put you can avoid the precursor randomness by just buying one. Getting the gold to do it is just a time investment.”

This honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. The average – semi hardcore player will NEVER amass enough gold for these weapons. I know because I am neither, I’m currently sitting at 370g after dropping 120+ exotics into the forge and getting literally nothing back. Could I personally spend a week in game and get another 100-150g to buy it off the post? Maybe, but then I would be playing the game in a way that is not fun to me, the person who bought it, then I would be grinding even more than I already do, in a game where the building blocks were said to be that of anti grind.

Some insight:
Average gold income for a player is ~1-5 gold a day. That’s 80 days of farming at 5 gold income. That’s pretty unrealistic considering some days I don’t even make 5g. All of that farming, to be dropped in less than a second to buy the item off the TP, at current prices for the greatswords. This kind of grinding again, does not reflect the words of ANET prior to release. This is also assuming that the prices do not fluctuate, which has shown to be untrue, since the price is going up by 50-100g a week or more.

These people, can NEVER (unless they literally win the lottery) get a precursor because due to the rarity, the price will continue to go up.

There are far better ways that could be thought of to get the precursor, like additional instances (story line-esque) requiring you to be skillful at your class (dropping ever increasing sums of gold is not the only or best solution), achievement based, or the many other ways people have brought up in other discussions. Leaving it as is is beneficial to the people who already have the items, and not the player base at large.

I have been sitting with 3/4 of my legendary done for weeks. That last 1/4 I need (after already getting my 77 clovers from the RNG nightmare) is 1 exotic sword. I have spent VAST amounts of gold on this 1 item, more gold than a good percentage of the player base will ever have in their inventory, and I have literally NOTHING to show for it.

I have to say this.

You’ve put so much time and effort into this game, one with such devotion truly deserve a legendary gear.

But considering the available content at the moment, sounds like you’re burning yourself out. The reason I say this is because you are not alone in this frontier.

Which is quite sad…

It got an elite cool down, 5 seconds of delayed inevitable death.

\o/

What Wafflesomg said is the popular build to run, since indeed – it’s the most reliable one. Both stats and traits.

However, he also said that he uses Beryl yet “dmg and crit% does make a big difference”.
That is correct, and Ruby makes a better choice here.

I recommend Draconic Knight set with Soldier runes + Berserker weapons and jewels.

Works very well for me, to be honest I used to run a full berserker with all the %dmg modifiers. Since I consider myself a skilled player, I found glass cannon build useful as well. (just make sure you know what you’re doing)

Leveling and gearing other classes to 80 is so easy and fast, I wonder what stops people from switching over?

Did anyone here even play GW1?
We’re talking about its sequel here.

FoW armor was the biggest gold sink and could be considered “legendary”.
No RNG was involved, yet quite a good bit of farming was.

Here we get a much better complex and appealing way of getting the same status of high end gear – all BUT RNG.

And in case you wondered, there weren’t that many people running around in FoW armors, and actually getting it was easier than making 400g in this game.

Wow this topic still running.

What Anet should really do is simply increase the chances of getting Dusk / Dawn to let’s say, 0.3~5% with rares and 3% with exotics (all lv80)
Considering 1000 rares equal to around 150~180g, plus the rest of the materials you need to create the legendary, all in all seems like a very fair trade.

Before you flip the tables on me…
As Archer.6485 posted, “the legendaries should be a testament to how much we love playing the game, not how much better we are than others at making gold.”
Which is what Anet actually intended according to their li.. I mean description about retrieving a legendary.

over 400g spent on a cool skin is more than enough.
The effort it takes to make that much is actually more than it took to make 1k platinum in gw1 for FoW armor, and guess what – no RNG was involved!

There is no need for such a ludicrous goal to exist, I believe many will agree with me.

@ lackofcheese.5617

Try to think realistically for a moment, even -$1k is still -$1k income for the company in case they revealed any ingame economy affecting information.

As a developer, I’d let the community rot and figure out by themselves the % for anything in the game.
For example, if I’d be asked if the guild mining boost +10% is pure or 10% out of %1 to find an orb from an ori – I’d keep my mouth shut about it.

deathTouch.9706:

Stop whining about precursor prices and figure out a way to make enough money to buy one or craft one like the rest of us did, or re-evaluate your expectations of what you can achieve in the game.

Entertain me, who’re the “rest of us”?
You make it sound like there’s so many of you precursor owners.

And if 450g sounds reasonable to you, I am definitely not jealous of the lifestyle you are leading. Unless you got Chinese buddies.

lackofcheese.5617:

That’s not entirely true, Horheristo.

Players making gold faster only bothers ArenaNet if it’s gold that’s actually being created, and the biggest reason that’s a problem is that it can cause runaway inflation. It’s the gold faucets that ArenaNet keeps tight control over, and has every reason to keep secret – those gold faucets being drops by mobs, whether via direct gold drops or via items that get vendored. That’s why there’s diminishing returns on farming, and ArenaNet gives very little detail about those diminishing returns.

It’s a very different situation if you’re making gold buying things from other players and/or selling things to other players. That’s a situation where, in an overall sense, you’re getting richer while other players are getting poorer, so it really doesn’t hurt gem purchases anyway.

In fact, buying and selling things on the TP destroys gold due to the 15% tax.

Giving ingame facts like what MF affects, can have a very large effect on the economy.
Correct me if I’m wrong.

@ lackofcheese.5617

My only reply to your long post is an honest answer if you own a legendary / precursor?
Since I do not understand otherwise where this extremely defensive stand is coming from.

You can’t create a goal that 95% of the population cannot reach even after half an year of play. That can drive anyone nuts and lose interest of the game fairly quickly, especially with the lack of content to make it that far, with no choice but to repeat it over and over and over and over endlessly.

The voices of of the undead are already resounding through Cursed shore, and those are not the monsters….

Hippocampus.8470:

No one has gotten screwed by the fact that precursors used to be much cheaper. Yes, some of those earlier sales were the results of exploits, but that’s not the main reason prices were so much lower. The main reason for such low prices was that 50g was a hell of a lot of money a month and a half ago. Regardless of how hard it is to get an item, if you price it higher than the amount of money anyone has, it won’t sell.

450g is not a sane price.

Interesting indeed, I was too focused on alts to try new builds.
Will definitely try it out, hell even sounds like it can do wonders at DE’s combined with GS

What is the cap on number of hits from staff btw? anyone?

I’m shocked and horrified to read the OP’s post about the thief class!

All I’d like to say is – work towards Trickery, Acrobatics and Crit strikes.
As for gear aim for rampager’s set (power, prec, cond)
The secret behind the thief is simple – you’re useless without good initiative regen, so make sure you can keep regaining as much as you can while hitting as hard as you can.

Death blossom and cloak & dagger are your best friends.
When needed, switch to pistols for safe ranged damage (I find the stealth #1 of pistols better than backstab, but that’s just me).

Stack tons of bleed along with caltrops for both utility and traited on dodges, while you’re at it have some good endurance regen for even further caltrops spam.

The thief class is quite fun, and sometimes I feel like a circus performer spreading death amongst my enemies.

Anything that got a slight chance of making you earn gold faster = no dev response.

They’ll basically affect their own income by answering any gold related question.
More gold for players = less gems purchases.

@lackofcheese.5617

I agree, but over a 200g jump in price is not an ordinary patch, and could’ve been fixed much better in many other ways.

Like I’ve said before, I wouldn’t mind paying even 150g for a piece, by knowing I will definitely get it. But this RNG reminds me of Fenris armor in Aion, back in the day when you needed 30m for an attempt, with 30% success rate. (until new patch)

I don’t mind hardcore, but the prices atm are absurd.
There is nothing wrong with a legendary piece costing 400g, that’s rare enough and something to brag about.

we’re talking over 800g here all mats included.

If Anet intended from the beginning for it to take half an year for the semi-hardcore player for a chance to get it, then I’ll keep silent.

You’re still missing the point –
Player A used any of past exploits to get Dusk.
Player B got to buy Dusk cheap for 66g (yes, was that low at one point)
game patched
Player C is screwed.

Why should player C work 3~5x times as hard than Player A or B for his own precursor?

Anet didn’t fix anything, and only made things worse…
We know they can change weapons to another type, meaning they could change the old dusk to another exotic. Since there were so few, they could also find a solution for the players who already owned the as compensation of some sort.

Sell it, there WILL be a patch to make it easier to achieve it. Sell it while you can.

There was another exploit of a precursor weapon popping often after throwing in some rares. People ending up with several dusks on their accounts.

Putting everything aside, 150g I’d still say “ok”, 300g means something went wrong.
Plus, giving the advantage to exploiters or opportunists as mentioned, us regular players got completely screwed.

Best solution is to make these weapons obtainable through a proper recipe, enough with the fake RNG, since I haven’t seen a single proof past the patch that anyone got the weapon even after throwing in 1400+ rares into the forge.

Just how desperate is Anet to make more money out of the gems shop?

Combine with Sup sigil of Hydromancy.

Now it doesn’t look so bad anymore.

Only good vs small groups / sPvP / jumping puzzles though.

Funny how the focus ends up being more protective than the shield.

- Reduce at least 10s off each skill of the shield.
- The Scepter is a great weapon that only needs a speed boost.
- If Staff had some proper cd’s as was mentioned already, I’d seriously consider it as my secondary.
- Hammer needs just a bit faster cast on the symbol attack, it seriously feels like it takes forever.
- Make the Sword’s 3rd skill available on the move, will make the weapon viable again.

Just to help you guys think out of the box a bit…

Try a combo of GS + Hammer. On the hammer put Superior sigil of hydromancy.

Leap towards your enemy, swap, profit.
You can also add the glacial heart to build up more freeze (should be 7s total of freeze I believe which is quite good).

This, by the way, works especially well near cliffs and jumping puzzles.

20 to 30% Virtues + Omnom food (20%) = 40% to 50% boon extention

15secs of “Save myself!”, yummy.

Just add RF 2/3 conditions removal and stability (AoE?) since I was KD’ed quite often when I was still naive about it’s invulnerability.

I can’t believe I failed to notice the synergy between Empowering Might and Altruistic Healing. Thank you for opening my eyes.

I wouldn’t use the hammer though, still quite lacking, considering that GS 1 skill does the job better and faster. (without even mentioning wearling or symbol)

Hammer is an awesome weapon, but for PvP, it has 3 skills with nearly no use in PvE.
The blast is awesome I agree, and works great in combo fields with it’s short CD, but it’s simply not enough to replace the GS.

All in all, thank you for making me think of a new build, and the build itself isn’t bad.

EDIT:
I can’t remember if the first trait in Virtues applies these boons to the whole team or not (I barely party). Anyone willing to shed some light on this?
If it does, then drop 5 off Radiance and dump it on Virtues instead, take Renewing focus instead for greater effect.

Marthiarn.8107:

Currently sporting this spec

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/external?l=http%3A%2F%2Fgw2skills.net%2Feditor%2Fen%2F%3FfUEQNAS8elUgKDHFSLEm4EhlCAKQMFYE%2BXPo4EZIA

In the process of getting full inquisitor berserker style set, and changing the runes to Superior Runes of the Soldier for the 6th set stat (shouts remove conditions) and added toughness and vitality

I like how you made nice use of the C.dmg to make up for tough + bit of extra vit.

I personally run a Virtues build instead, with a bit higher c.rate / dmg stats than yours, that allows me to make full use of all the damage modifiers (25 to 35% additional damage) while supporting my team and my own survivability as well.

props.

Just on a side note here, RF doesn’t break stun, if anything, you’re still suspect to stuns while casting it which is BS

One tactic of many, I see nothing wrong with it.
You expect to rush in and face everything together with your team, that’s chaos, and in many cases – complete chaos =/= victory.

Be happy that you got an easy role to fit into, so you don’t have to beg on /m for a party.

That, btw, is not the only way to clear a dungeon, but nothing wrong with it.

What’s up with the kitten? is that a forum feature? looks like it