Guild Wars 2

It’s not going to “replace” anything — it is part of the reward. It allows people with low magic find to sell directly to people with high MF and earn more, for less effort.

Whether it’s “better” for the game (or for each of us individually) remains to be seen. There’s clearly too little data available, especially since we don’t know yet if ANet is using legit or fake drop rates (they might want to stymie speculation).

Ashantara.8731:

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Do you see how much QQ there are on the forums from everyone going “meh” over the new specs? Can you imagine how much there would be if it were no better than what we already have?

And what does that tell you? Correct: There is something awfully wrong with the whole concept of elite specializations.

On the contrary, it tells use merely that people complain on the forums.

The only reason I think Gen2 (esp the first 5) feel like extra effort is that there aren’t any shortcuts. Gen1 legendaries can literally be purchased directly, as can all of their materials (except for Icy Runestones + Mystic Clover). In contrast, Crystalline Ore has to be gathered (and farmed, if you want it sooner than “eventually”). That’s even without considering that there’s only one way to obtain a Gen2 precursor (again, especially for Gen2.1 legends).

But, as Ayrilana & Cyninja have said, it’s comparable effort.

tl;dr can’t agree with the OP.

Dashingsteel.3410:

Does anyone truly have the numbers on either side? Is there an official record???

We have the income statements from NCSOFT, which include sales figures from GW2. As expected, income went sharply up when HoT was in pre-purchase mode and for a bit after launch. However, it didn’t go up as much as predicted by NCSOFT shareholders and Korean market analysts.

As expected, sales went down after the honeymoon (“expected” because that always happens for every game), hitting GW2’s lowest figures. (That is typical, although wasn’t expected, again because the predictions were very rosy.)

People who disliked HoT (or preferred GW1 over GW2) point to the figures as signs that HoT was a failure. The fact that ANet added staff, doubled down on Raids and Fractals, and plans to release expacs regularly … those are signs that HoT was a success.

The fact that there have been big changes in how the game is hyped, the parts of game worked on, and the sorts of things we’ve seen… those are signs that ANet learned something from HoT’s rough times.

Of course, the community remains divided about what lessons should have been learned and what ANet should do differently as a result.

You are misunderstanding how fraudulent keys can enter an otherwise legit marketplace. For example, say someone steals my credit card info. They buy five copies of PoF… and sell them on one of these sites. The keys are legit until the fraud is discovered, which could be days, but could also be years.

Crinn.7864:

Your personality type isn’t going to mean anything to what classes you enjoy.

What you probably want to know is your Bartle type.

Knowing my bartle type has never helped me choose a class in any game; to me, it’s similar to knowing my Myers-Briggs.

if it hangs, that usually means you’ve missed an update

gw2.exe -image

Run that (as a separate shortcut) first. (You might have to manually quit the game from the Task Manager)

Daddicus.6128:

Rhanoa.3960:

Has the game really failed? Far from it.

Nobody said it did; well, nobody other than you.

We said Heart of Thorns failed. Which it did.

It did not, not by any reasonable measure. It didn’t do as well as predicted, which is very different.

Sifu.9745:

But the best way is to check it by your self on training dummies.

Or visit the wiki. If the information isn’t where you expect, use the “leave feedback” button. Sometimes info is present on the wiki but compartmentalized (so it might be on a different article that you didn’t think to check); sometimes it’s written in a way that’s unclear to some of us; and sometimes it’s missing because no one thought to add it yet. Leaving feedback ensures that these gaps can be filled.

Donari.5237:

I say pick a profession that feels intuitive

The problem with that is that some people on the spectra of the 4 dimensions fall into the category of folks that need a reason first

For those folks, I’d recommend describing the gameplay they prefer or the games/profs they like. Then, others of us can opine about which profs lend themselves well to that.

Machiavell.7396:

• Vial of Liquid Aurillium – item was found once (by apparently someone who hacked it in), which added it to API but it was never enabled as a drop.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/76063-vial-of-liquid-aurillium
The current supply on the TP is 8.

Machiavell.7396:

• Verdant Brink Thingy – we don’t know the name or effect but we know it’s there because devs said each map has one special infusion.

Do you have a link? I’d love to save it for future reference, especially as I don’t remember them saying it.

Machiavell.7396:

• Leyline Chromatic Effect – the rainbow chromatic desynchronization effect that leylines have, we don’t know the exact name but we do know it’s appearance (in DS medium leyline armor user NPC has this aura on her and she is the only one who has this effect).

Is this “missing” from the game as in there’s an item but we don’t know how to obtain it? Or are you asking ANet to add it, because you speculate that it must (or at least, should) exist, since the effect appears to be separate from the armor?

There are some effects that aren’t connected to items; isn’t it more likely that this is one of them?

Machiavell.7396:

• Mistward Weapons are still missing

These were lost; they are missing from ANet’s backups (and no, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, either, but that’s apparently what happened). They have to recreate them (not quite from scratch, since remnants of the details remain).

Djinn.9245:

So it would make more sense to …imo.

Sure, I get that you don’t agree with ANet’s choices. (I might not either … I’m still on the fence about it.)

My point is that there’s a reasonable argument to be made that the costs are appropriate, especially since the market just spiked due to this and other legendaries being added. I wasn’t so much asking anyone to agree with their choice as providing an opportunity for others to understand that there isn’t a single definition of “fair pricing”.

I’m glad some people like at least some of the skins in this set.

(Just proves for me that no matter how much I dislike a skin, there’s a large group of players who will love it, and vice versa. More variety, I say, the better to appeal to everyone.)

You’re probably better off asking via the website’s comment section.

I’ve looked on gw2tp.net and gw2tp.com and don’t see the terms used on either. Perhaps you could link one of the pages these appear on.

The question is: do you want to take the risk that your key might not be legit and that the issue might not be uncovered for months?

If you buy from an authorized retailer and there’s an issue, the retailer and ANet will work to make it right. If you buy from a reseller and there’s an issue, ANet might not be able to help.

The professions don’t fall neatly into any of the Meyers-Briggs or similar spectra because they can be played in very different ways. Any class can be played aggressively or conservatively, intuitively or with painstaking exactitude

I suspect that the heart is part of the story intro so that new players can see how they work.

They were nominally required for parts of LS#3 (in some cases, you’d have to work pretty hard to leave them incomplete while finishing the story; in a few cases, they were all-but-explicit requirements).

I’m not a fan of hearts generally. But as long as I never need to do them more than once per map or per story, I don’t mind. The Druid Backpack scavenger hunt required repeating hearts over 5 dozen times (4 hearts repeated 16 times each) — now that’s excessive, in my opinion.

tl;dr heart as part of PoF story? eh, that’s ok. (But please no more scavenger hunts that require completing them for ages.)

Ashantara.8731:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ellen Kiel mini says that.

Ohhhhhh! Now I’m feeling stupid. I just purchased her today from the vendor. Wow, that definitely makes her the loudest miniature of them all.

Oh! so it was your own mini. No wonder you were hearing it often

Evon is also talkative; they are both among my favorite (and oft-used) minis.

I give up. You’ve missed the entire point of “surplus”. Not every thing we do in the game has to have a reward in addition to the satisfaction of getting things done (not to mention the other rewards that we got while earning the point).

Thanks for letting us know; I would have missed this.

Ashantara.8731:

Since today, everytime I roam Divinity’s Reach, even when I am in story missions there, I frequently hear a female bandit voice shouting, “Time to lay down the law!”

What’s up with that?

Ellen Kiel mini says that. I imagine some of her fans have dusted off the mini, now that it looks like she’ll be involved in the story again.

Ashantara.8731:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Well, your perception is your perception. I don’t doubt that you get stuck often, but outside of Oakheart’s Reach, I rarely see it happen (and most of those inside instances, where /stuck works like you’d like: it moves you).

When I got stuck during the LWS3 Ep. 6 story mission, after the Self-Doubt pushed me into a wall, /stuck did nothing for me. I had to start the whole mission over.

I don’t agree that the game needs more waypoints, especially if this is the only reason. I’d rather they do a better job of collision detection generally then apply any band-aids…

That’s what I would like to see, too, but then you argued that it would be too much work. Or maybe I misunderstood the intention of your response.

(1) you have to wait for /stuck to work in a story instance; it sometimes takes 30 seconds (during which you cannot move). If it’s not working, /bug report that (ironic, I know, but still).

(2) I didn’t say it would be “too much work”. I said that, as stated, the problem is not solvable, because it’s not a single problem; it’s lots of issues. Each of those can be addressed. The issue is that it takes time to address them (and that they aren’t without side effects).

I further said that ANet has successfully addressed many of the /stuck issues that plagued the game at launch.

I forgot to mention that one of the issues is that there are lots of things that need to be true for us to never get stuck. It would require perfect pathing, perfect collision detection, perfect clarity in distinguishing between when things should collide (and when they shouldn’t), and probably half a dozen other things that aren’t obvious to us as players.

It’s a good goal, to eliminate /stuck situations, but it’s not any one thing, so it takes constant effort to reduce, let alone prevent

tl;dr remains the same: be patient; this will get addressed, just not quickly and it can’t be completely prevented.

(I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not frustrating when it happens; the mesmer staff-2 bug used to drive me nuts, it happened so often after launch. I just didn’t let it affect my enjoyment of the rest of the game.)

Stand The Wall.6987:

allow it to only share stability, resistance, and quickness.

And this would save boonshare mesmer how? And why would this be good for gameplay?

I think, OP, that people who love consoles always want all their games to use them. They’ve figured out how to manage in a world with only a handful of buttons. In contrast, PC gamers can’t get enough buttons — look at gaming mice; each new generation seems to have more buttons and more “states” (allowing multiple uses for each button).

So I suspect you could rephrase your question to, “how many people spend more than 50% of their gaming hours playing console games?” and you’d end up with the same people answering, “yes” as with “would you pay a US$20 premium to play GW2 on a console?”

Well, your perception is your perception. I don’t doubt that you get stuck often, but outside of Oakheart’s Reach, I rarely see it happen (and most of those inside instances, where /stuck works like you’d like: it moves you).

I don’t agree that the game needs more waypoints, especially if this is the only reason. I’d rather they do a better job of collision detection generally then apply any band-aids… unless, of course, my perception is warped and /stuck is a lot more common than I think.

Ok I Did It.2854:

Vayne.8563:

Zoltreez.6435:

Magic find does not worth anything…

there was a video Potatoe Made not long ago about it

he stacked a BUNCH of stuff to get his magic find to arround 800-900….. then oppened a BUNCH of chests and bags and also done some stuff and events…

and there was no visible change in the loot at all….

that stat is the most useless stat in the game right now…

I play accounts with both high and low magic find and I’d disagree with that categorically. Magic find is from drops, not from bags or chests. Killing stuff, a lot of stuff is the only real way to test it.

I get far more rare and exotic drops on my high magic find accounts than I get on my low magic find accounts. Enough to be easily visible to the naked eye.

See that’s funny how that works out, as I maxed out along time ago, and id be lucky to get 1 exotic a month from all content I play, yet my friend who doesn’t believe in it, and only has around 50% MF is getting exotics every couple of days from the same content?

Which brings back the old topic of accounts are tagged to get rare loot vs accounts that are not.

There’s absolutely no evidence of that. Every controlled test about magic find shows significant differences.

Second, you haven’t said how you or your friend spend your time in-game. Some things generate a lot of loot affected by MF; some don’t. Fractals has some of the best loot-per-effort in the game, but MF barely affects it. In contrast, MF affects nearly all the loot from e.g. Halloween Labyrinth farming.

It might be an old topic, but so is the idea that world is flat, despite the amount of evidence showing otherwise (some of it thousands of years old).

In short: MF matters, base MF matters in the long run. Results will vary considerably, especially over small amounts of drops.

This is an invaluable resource for setting up one’s first ascended set:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User:Tanetris/So_You_Want_To_Gear_a_Character

runeblade.7514:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

runeblade.7514:

Instead of a Leftover mastery shop, how about a Mastery Excess system to turn the leftover mastery points to Magic find, Karma gain, Gold gain, etc.

If you put a mastery point to Magic find, you get +1% MF. But you can also retract the mastery point and put it somewhere else or give it to your mastery.

Also, the mastery excess system is locked and all mastery points get refunded until you get all mastery skills. This is so that no one feels pressured to not put points into mastery skills.

In terms of the stated purpose of the surplus, that’s not any different; it’s still a “use” for the excess.

The difference is that if ANet decide to add more mastery skills that uses more mastery points. Players can reuse their points rather than find out that they cannot use it anymore because they spent it on the mastery shop.

The same-ness is it would not be a surplus if there is another use for it.

The point isn’t to have extra for potential, future masteries; it’s so people have a meaningful choice about whether to pursue all unlocks or not.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Menadena.7482:

I am wondering how crowded it will be. With previous places it was people that specifically bought the pass from the store. This will have a larger chunk of the playerbase having access.

Since it’s not a separate instance but part of the map it can only have those who are in that map shard. It won’t have everyone going to the same one unless there’s only one version going with insufficient numbers of people to start a second map.

From my experience, the VIP areas aren’t particularly more crowded than anywhere else in the game. At peak periods, there are as many people in Royal Terrace as Rata Sum (at Accountancy Waypoint area) as in the Mistlock Sanctuary, give or take a few.

Ashantara.8731:

Can you please finally fix this issue?

I am 99% sure that they cannot because there is no “this issue” — it’s a variety of different things, some of which require a variety of changes to address.

When the game launched, mesmers would get stuck nearly every day using staff-2 or blink (as well as a couple of other situations). There wasn’t a single cause, so there wasn’t a singular solution. ANet changed the way that collision detection was handled, changed the way that the game calculates paths, and changed the requirements before allowing PCs to teleport. These days, I can’t remember the last time I got stuck using one of those skills.

However, those changes had other consequences (you might have noticed that teleports & shadowsteps suffer an increase of “no valid path” errors, along with other actions that have trouble being executed).

So there’s no one cause & fixes aren’t without their own collateral effects.

The best thing we can do is to report what happens with details, so that ANet can spend most of their energy on identifying & addressing root causes, and not on trying to figure out what we meant.

• Use the in-game /stuck command — that’s nearly instantaneous and automatically reports the location, IP, and most recent actions
• If also reporting on the forums or via in-game /bug reporting tool, include the gory details. What did you just do before getting stuck.

tl;dr patience; these things take a while to address (and help ANet out by using /stuck when it happens)

runeblade.7514:

Instead of a Leftover mastery shop, how about a Mastery Excess system to turn the leftover mastery points to Magic find, Karma gain, Gold gain, etc.

If you put a mastery point to Magic find, you get +1% MF. But you can also retract the mastery point and put it somewhere else or give it to your mastery.

Also, the mastery excess system is locked and all mastery points get refunded until you get all mastery skills. This is so that no one feels pressured to not put points into mastery skills.

In terms of the stated purpose of the surplus, that’s not any different; it’s still a “use” for the excess.

Zoltreez.6435:

Magic find does not worth anything…

there was a video Potatoe Made not long ago about it

he stacked a BUNCH of stuff to get his magic find to arround 800-900….. then oppened a BUNCH of chests and bags and also done some stuff and events…

and there was no visible change in the loot at all….

that stat is the most useless stat in the game right now…

Luck makes a substantive difference over the long haul, which is more than “a bunch of chests”. There’s lots of controlled tests that demonstrate the differences clearly. (The most clear cut case is looking at the results of opening Lunar New Year envelopes with very low versus very high MF.)

There are fewer ‘junk’ and basic drops, more masterwork (and more rare). There’s also more exotic, but the difference is small enough that it’s harder to notice.

I’m pretty sure that they convert from base stats only.

The reasons that BLSK don’t stack haven’t changed.

You can pay US$50 to get both, which is the same price that HoT alone cost when it launched.

Endest.5729:

Does not matter what you call them “casual”, low intesnsity", “noob”, etc. What really matters is that HoT was a massive failure. Never before has a AAA MMO had it first xpac fail utterly. EQ, WOW, FFXIV, etc all of these did not see a drop in players/income until they were three or four or more xpacs in.

HoT wasn’t a massive failure. ANet sold a lot of games. They just didn’t sell nearly as many as they (or NCSOFT investors) expected.

Had it been an actual failure (let alone epic), we wouldn’t be seeing a second expac.

I agree that the text should be updated (or mechanics changed to match the text). I also agree that it’s bad for the game to introduce competition for heart completion (this also happens in some of Lake Doric).

Fortunately, there seems to be a misunderstanding by the OP that currently allows us to ignore the text bug and the competition:

Gudy.3607:

using ley-line magic on “living” unchained wraiths is the most effective way by far for a single player to advance their Renown Heart progress,

Actually, Transfer Magic (skill #4) is far more efficient. If you stand at one of many ideal spots, you can complete the heart with as few as two Ley Organs.

STIHL.2489:

mbhalo.1547:

STIHL.2489:

But, if you really had not idea of the many thing that were done that made HoT unfriendly towards casual players, so much so that you needed to ask this question, I am going to wager that you are nowhere near close to being a casual player yourself, so, no offence to you in any way, but it would be impossible for you to gauge if PoE was in fact casual friendly or not, thus you really could not answer my question.

I consider myself a casual player – 4000 hours played, 16k AP, 5 legendary weapons + legendary backpack, do T4 fractals almost every day and here and there dabble into raiding.

With that resume.. you are very much alone in thinking you are a casual player.

There are all sorts of people who have that sort of resume and consider themselves to be casual.

I don’t know why you keep insisting that there’s some set definition of the term, when clearly this thread (as well as others) show otherwise. More importantly, we can have a perfectly good discussion about what sort of game GW2 was, is, and is becoming, without using the term at all. Instead, we can describe the aspects & gameplay important to us, that might (or might not) be part of our understanding of casual.

The value of words is that they help us communicate with each other. When a word’s meaning is becoming the topic of discussion, it’s time to use different words — “casual” is an impediment to discussing the changes that concern you; try to rephrase, please.

No one took your stuff. You just don’t value it the same as before. Games evolve; there’s no guarantee that what is worth a lot today will be worth a lot tomorrow. Not even in real life.

Still, if you’re convinced that there’s a breach of contract here, contact a lawyer, preferably one familiar with MMOs. And get a legal opinion. Even if you convinced every forum reader that there was an issue, it won’t matter if you can’t get someone to take ANet to court, hoping for the 15% they’d get from a successful class action.

I’m convinced you’ll get the same response: you got exactly what you paid for: in-game currency (gems) for your RL currency; ANet doesn’t have any financial or legal responsibility after that.

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

So now it’s a Dungeon? Needing LFG…

It’s a map with vistas, POI, rewards for map completion, and so on.

This isn’t normal structure anywhere else in the game. Then it relies on 3rd party to actually do the map? That makes the game incomplete.

I’m not against shifting to LFG, but given Anet doesn’t explain any of this in game is really an issue. There needs to be an option to work on map completion not just Meta, but as pointed out 305 players means two playable zones and five players that can’t play as they go, which if I remember correctly is what GW2 is about?

VB, AB, and Tangled Depths don’t prevent exploration and content collection to this degree. It should be scaled down to a small group, this would also open up organic map progression with players able to work on map material without needing a huge mass of players in one place.

I’ve beaten world bosses with 20 or less. So why must this map be soo restrictive?

You can complete nearly all of DS without doing the meta. There are several other maps that gate access to some of the map completion bits (none in Core, as far as I know; just in HoT).

I’m not sure why ANet set it up this way and I’m not big fan of metas that go by a clock. But it’s not onerous; it’s just different.

Asura kids speaking about parents

• Progeny (1): Hey, Yotta, your mama’s IQ is so low, she thinks norn cows go “moot.”
• Progeny (2): Oh, yeah? Your mama’s IQ is so low, she thinks “crafting” is something you do on the “criver.”
• Progeny (1): Well, your mama’s IQ is so low, she thinks sylvari and golems are precious metals.
• Progeny (2): Your mama’s IQ is so low, she thinks Blood Legion is something you should see a doctor about.
• Progeny (1): Your mama’s IQ is so low, she thinks “elemental” is four letters in the middle of the alphabet.
• Progeny (2): Your mama’s IQ is so low, she thinks a golemancer is what you get when you ask a golemquestion.

• Progeny (1): No, but seriously…your mom is really smart.
• Progeny (2): Yeah, yours too.

STIHL.2489:

Which now begs the question, if we always understood that “casual” was a mindset when talking about any other activity, why do we suddenly get so confused when it gets applied to games?

There’s a body of language experts and common usage that helps keep the meaning of words relatively stable. Words that are new and coming from evolving social habits or technology don’t have any “experts” to define them.

“Casual stroll” is a well-defined phrase and has been used in its current form for ages. “Casual gamer” is a new concept and doesn’t have any standardized meaning.

“Tight” is a word that can be good as in “the musicians were really tight tonight” or “I’m in really tight with Kim & Kanye”. It can be bad as in “he got tight tonight and was arrested for driving drunk” or “her parents are too tight; they won’t let her out on dates” (although these days, we tend to call that “uptight”).

Or put another way, there’s no International Association of Casual Gamers that sets standards for what casual means, no “Bureau of Gaming Standards” that can certify your game play as “casual” or “hardcore.”

Let’s make it simple: you spent real money to buy gems; none of those gems were taken from you. What you chose to do with the gems afterward is your business.

You might buy something from the gem shop only to see a more interesting alternative show up a year later (or a major discount). You might convert to gold when the rate is low, only to see it increase later. You might use your gold-from-gems to buy consumables that were meta for a year, only for the meta to change for all sorts of reasons: new content, new techniques, and, of course, changes to the games’ mechanics.

But none of that affects the gems you bought.

So it’s simple: you didn’t lose anything. You might or might not have been 100% shrewd in your choice of investments.

phys.7689:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

phys.7689:

i understand both sides, but i will say this, mastery points are designed to be an incentive to complete content. At the point at which they become surplus, with no purpose, they no longer achieve their goal.

If that was the sole purpose, then sure, that would be a mismatch.

However, I again urge people to read what the devs have actually written about this, they want a surplus of mastery point unlocks so that people feel free to pick and choose. Adding a potential reward for maxing changes that calculus.

It’s a deliberate design decision to offer a surplus, not an accident of different teams working independently.

their purpose is to be something to incentivize exploration/mastery in each expansion. Being free to pick and choose, in order to get mastery levels is not mutually exclusive with having a different use.

yes, having surplus points over what you need for full mastery is good, no after achieving full mastery, all mastery serving no purpose at all is not good.

yes some people will complain due to completionitis, but already some will complain due to percieved waste of effort.

having some purpose or use for excess mastery points is consistent with the concept of rewarding and incentivizing the gameplay. What form it could take is up to them. It doesnt have to be crazy.

You apparently haven’t read what the devs have said about it when they added 9 more mastery unlocks to core Tyria.

SaskiaElite.8132:

in game economy problems and lack of pve content ruined it for me.

What is it that you do like? That might make it easier for people to address whether there are substantive changes about things that you care deeply about.

I can guarantee that the economy will be much the same (only remains to see the details of which items are scarce/abudant, high- or low-demand). I can almost guarantee that the amount of pve content will be about the same.

AegisRunestone.8672:

(I don’t even know if our normal characters can reach Elona)

They cannot reach Elona. And PoF toons can’t go back to non-PoF areas.

Baseraver.7241:

Still havent received anything.

Did you create a support ticket? If so, work with them. If not, start one now (but be prepared to wait — there’s an expansion demo this weekend plus a lot of new players).

It’s mathematically likely that, without using LFG, you’ll end up in empty maps even during meta prep periods:

• If a map is preparing for meta, it fills quickly; you won’t get in without being in group due to the so-called “soft-cap”.
• Those using LFG who spawn into a low-pop map will move to a high pop map.
• Those who remain will feel as if they have been abandoned — while technically true, that can be solved by starting new LFGs.

Or in other words, use of LFG is often the difference between feeling that the maps are always populated and feeling left out. It’s obviously easier to join someone else’s LFG, but don’t be afraid to start your own — if you LFG it, they will come (providing there’s enough time before the meta).

Worst case: you can’t use the Guild Pillar soulbound to the other character. In which case, contact support and they’ll help you out.

Bugabuga.9721:

Oh. I wonder if that was the case. Or AOE on its finisher is large enough that when two people go down sequentially avenger 1 might actually finish person 2 instead. Makes sense.

Nope. The avenger can only finish the person whose down-state caused it to spawn. (That’s what changed recently.)

I’ve not had any trouble CCing the avengers, whether due to my being downed or someone else.