Guild Wars 2

You can choose to get stuff quickly, you can choose to get stuff economically, or you can choose not to get stuff. You can’t choose to get stuff easily and fast.

There isn’t any content that requires spirit shards. Some gear requires spirit shards and you will get them, eventually, by completing maps and doing dailies and yes, opening up champ bags.

The only reason you need to farm them is if you are in an incredible rush to get something. And, if you’re in a rush, you should expect to pay extra in terms of effort or coin. There are very few currencies, aside from coins, for which you can easily increase your acquisition rate. You can’t farm dungeon tokens, geodes, spirit shards, laurels, or a variety of other currencies very quickly.

tl;dr the issue is that the OP wants something now and it was designed so that it couldn’t be acquired that fast.

Unintuitively, one of the most efficient resources is parking storage toons at rich platinum ore. That continues to be worth about 20s/day per rich node. (Even passiflora requires some walking around.)

There are a couple of items that can only be crafted once per day; most are available on the TP. The full list is on the wiki at: time-gated

My advice to people who don’t want to wait and don’t want to overpay is:

• Put in aggressive buy orders for the things you want now.
• Use them when you need to.
• Continue to craft as often as you can and then…
• Sell off the same amount that you bought.

You’ll end up making a small profit or breaking even, thus eating your cake and having your coin, too.

wolfie.2841:

Hi. I’m in her guild. This was the first time this week we have done that mission. Sat nights at 10 pm est (well after reset) is when we do them. No one in the entire guild that was at the puzzle received any commendations. The guild received credit for the mission in the form of merits and influence. None of us received personal credit.

Well, that can’t be good. I can’t think of how you could get merits and not commendations.

I’d recommend that at least a few of you create support tickets and post as many details as you can. You probably don’t have the instance IP address; it does sound like you can provide everything else: guild name [tag], time/date, location/mish, and number of participants.

Then I’d suggest that the most diplomatic among you keep following up with ANet to make sure at least one of those tickets gets looked at by their higher tier of support (not just the first person looking at the issue). This has got to be both unusual and tricky to resolve — I can’t imagine it will be easy for ANet Support to resolve, although I do think they should try.

Good luck — if you learn anything, please let us know.

Magimix.5203:

tnx i did it

Glad to hear it! (Thanks for taking the time to update us.)

It’s nearly impossible to say exactly how much money silverwastes farming is worth, since hardly anyone keeps careful track of all the variables, including:

• Whether they include time spent acquiring crests
• Do they include time spent looking for a farming map? Do they just accept whatever map they find?
• Whether they salvage everything or just some things.
• Plus, do they salvage and sell on the TP while farming? Or throw stuff in the bank and salvage/sell stuff later?
• Whether they open bags on an L51-55 toon or an L80.
• Whether they use custom sell prices or sell to highest offer immediately.

And so on.

Any one of those variables can have a profound impact on earnings/hour and make it nearly impossible to compare results across different reports.

It is, however, completely safe to say that, all else being equal:

• Chest farming results in the speediest loot accumulation.
• Event + breach/vinewrath farming is — at worst — competitive with other farms in the game (dungeons, chasing world bosses, champ farms).
• Your mileage will vary, compared to other people and even compared to yourself.

tl;dr try it yourself. If it doesn’t bore you to tears, keep doing it and learn to perfect your technique (which is easier to do than other types of farming). You’ll laugh all the way to the bank (with a detour to pick up gold at the TP NPC).

Every single BL weapon skin is available on the TP, priced at 80-120g in the first few days and then ending up at 45-110g until it is no longer available for 1 ticket. How much it goes up afterward depends on a variety of factors.

Thus the ticket/scraps don’t “need” to be tradeable nor earnable directly in-game, since the only thing they can be used to purchase is already tradeable (and indirectly earnable).

Just a flesh wound.3589:

For some reason, ANet doesn’t value the anniversary of the game as a celebration instead of a sellabration and this cash shop focus on sellabrating isn’t helping the game.

Well put (and a clever turn-of-phrase, too! full marks, Fleshie!).

I never have my cursor exactly in the center of an item. I just salvaged a few hundred masterwork items last night without any trouble.

Death Stroke.9875:

2-years after acknowledgement and it is still happening in ever growing situations, everywhere from guild missions to fractals (cliff-side)

How can Moa Morph affect guild missions or fractals, in the way described here? It’s a player mesmer skill applied to opponents.

Commendations are always rewarded the first time each week that an individual completes a guild puzzle (while repping said guild). Guild Merits are rewarded after the time limit.

Are you sure your guild members hadn’t already gotten commendations this “week”?

I don’t blame you for being frustrated.

For those reading along, I’d like to clarify that — on a technical basis — DR isn’t “random” (or at least, not very random); there are a set of rules it follows. However, since ANet won’t share the mechanics with us, it certainly feels arbitrary from a player perspective.

Even so, it’s relatively simple to avoid or mitigate DR:

• Don’t farm any one spot for “too long”.
• Keep moving your characters around.

Of course, it would be much easier if we didn’t have to do that. I would prefer being able to leave the same character at Rhendak all year rather than have to port or complete the puzzle every two twenty days.

tl;dr Yes it’s frustrating and it does take effort to deal with DR. However, it can be dealt with.

We don’t “need” a significant event before the expac releases. I certainly want one and I think ANet made a tactical mistake by not reserving a big enough team to work on events|features while the bulk of staff worked on HoT. I think ANet missed an opportunity for hype by including teasers for veterans and to attract new players.

However, I can’t imagine how ANet could change directions at this point. All the staff they have is working on whatever they’ve been assigned already. For them to be pulled to work on pre-HoT content means that the expac would be delayed and, at this point, I can’t imagine that would be good for ANet or the community.

Lahmia.2193:

Can Anet please add an option to remove the child lock popup (are you sure you want to buy…) when purchasing with certain currencies. Only recently have I discovered that anything bought with spirit shards has this popup. This makes it exceedingly tedious when buying masses of Crystals for forge tossing. I’m sure I speak for many when I say this.

You speak for many when you say this…and there will still be others who disagree. Folks who aren’t as careful as you are when spending hard-to-acquire currencies.

What I’d like to see are more bulk purchase options, in particular being able to set the amount of Obsidian, crystals, or whatever, rather than having to click repeatedly.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

They had this function in Guild Wars 1. There was an NPC you could speak to and preview all the options without needing to buy first.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Anatomical_Engineer_Llye

Yes to this. A lot of folks have suggested some sort of NPC that allowed us to preview changes and spend the gems to keep the look right then and there (if we wanted).

It’s everyone’s right to rant about whatever pet peeve they choose. I think, however, it’s not worth the energy to try to rally others to the cause on this one — ANet is just following marketing strategies and reward strategies of other games and industries.

For example, without “artificial” scarcity, people grow complacent about rewards and stop thinking of them as special. Remember when you started playing and how glad you were to get rares? Remember how welcome the change to guarantee a rare (or even two) for world bosses? Nowadays, veterans get a rare and think “oh meh.”

If anything, ANet is terrible about using artificial scarcity — if they really wanted to get people hyped about the game and make more money, they would be more predictable about a lot of this stuff. If you are going to have a one-day sale (e.g. wings), you want to let the community know about it in advance, so you get as many potential buyers to the gem shop as possible.

Regardless, people aren’t likely to change their mind about whether this “anniversary sale” should be called a “sale” or whether it’s a reasonable (or unreasonable) marketing strategy. For example, I wish ANet would do more interesting things with the gem shop and yet I don’t really care that much that they haven’t (as of yet) with this anniversary.

tl;dr on earth, everyone can hear you rant, even though it’s unlikely to change what happens next.

FYI DR doesn’t disappear because you skip a day — you’d have to move your toon elsewhere and do an event that includes a death (although: completing certain JPs can drop your DR, too — I don’t have good data on whether it works for all situations, I just know it works for commissar).

It’s not that hard to get 12 points if you follow the guide. It’s easier still if you ask your guildies to help you out — pretty much anyone with HoM points has “extra” wealth in GW1 that can be converted into something that you can use to gain more points. (e.g. I have a friend who has probably donated 150 points to others, if not more; they had been hoarding for just this sort of thing.)

I wish ANet would communicate delays like this better. There are all sorts of things we have to click through to buy HoT — why can’t they say, “due to recent fraud, gems will be delivered within 72-96 hours after applying the HoT code” (or whatever makes sense)?

I realize ANet depends on third parties in each country to manage these sales and they can’t control everything. However, they can control whether customer expectations are properly set.

Even though that’s a great list, I don’t plan to do any of it — it’s a beta; I don’t need to be in absolute best gear or have access to full buffs. I’d rather spend my time before, during, and after the beta doing stuff, rather than preparing (and cleaning up) for beta.

There are quite a few short-availability items, including recipes, minis, etc. Only a portion them have ever been available via laurels.

Elijah.1436:

Thanks for your response.

I just felt like deleting them all to restart since I started all of the characters when I was like 12 years old and now 8 years later I feel like a fresh start and do everything again. I love the game but the characters I created back then is not the choice I’d have made today.

I feel sure you’ll be pleased in the long run if you buy a slot or two for some new toons, rather than delete the old ones. They are great for storing stuff, if nothing else.

There are plenty of things for which we can critique ANet; there’s no need to invent issues out of tin foil.

Every year, even in GW1, there have been anniversary sales, regardless of whether there is new content or not. In 2015, you might have noticed that ANet has put most new content on hold for HoT.

In other words, there’s nothing surprising or unusual about the anniversary sale. If it’s not your cup of tea, don’t buy anything. I’m holding out for discounts and/or new shinies.

opie.5467:

Thanks Illconceived for your explanation. I understand what you are saying and going by that, there is either a bug with this boss or the rules are inconsistent. Either way, Anet should take a look at this. Thanks for your time. Oh, and by the way, haven’t had a chance to do kitten today on another toon as I’ve been too busy in RL and my “timer” and kitten’s “timer” haven’t lined up. Will post again when I’ve killed him.

*edit – kitten = short name of Shatterer

GL, Opie — do update the thread. The more we learn about DR, the better. (And may all your drops be better than average )

If you want to find reasons to be pessimistic about the expac, you can just point to the weird bugs that have popped up the last few releases (like new characters being rewarded with GWAMM or HoM points) and how long those took to fix. You don’t have to (incorrectly) pick apart phrases from ANet staff.

In contrast, there are also plenty of reasons to be optimistic: gliding, fun new specializations, fun new class, (for some) fun new events, etc. IMO, ANet has always delivered hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of great content. And they always seem to overhype the least remarkable things and underhype the best.

tl;dr In terms of my own expectations, I don’t bother with what ANet says about HoT — I care about what they have actually delivered in the past.

Wanze.8410:

Oxidia.8103:

Long before daily rewards i remember coins dropping only from map completion and bl chests. The price was around 20 silvers.

Mystic Coins were never traded for 20 silvers. It went shortly up to 15s in Jan 2013 for a couple of weeks but thats it.

Regardless, Oxidia’s point remains: mystic coins are only just now becoming as expensive as they used to be.

This has been true since these extractors were released. They seem to have been designed to remove agony infusions, not for any other purpose. In the last two years, the lowest gold-equivalent price of a single extractor (if you buy in bulk) has been 30g; in that same time, there haven’t been any upgrades that cost that much to replace (including account bound ones).

tl;dr don’t buy the upgrade extractors except to remove the most expensive agony infusions.

We can’t tell from anyone’s post in this thread if anything has changed in the drop rates for ecto, because no one has posted actual numbers for their last 50-100 tries. The variation on 10 or 20 salvages is enormous.

Human memory is demonstrably unreliable when it comes to keeping track of things like this: we over-count bad results and under-count average or slightly-better-than-average results (since they are boring). Put another way, we treat “51 chances in a 100” as “better than 50-50” which we start thinking of as “more often than not” — and then we remember all the times it was less often (ignoring all the times it was more often).

In this game, there are hundreds of people that track their results for 1,000s of salvages — if those people haven’t noticed a rate change, then I doubt there is one.

If you think the drop rate has changed, keep track of at least 100 salvages in a row. If your rate is below 80e/100, then post in the forums asking for others to verify those results.

tl;dr the drop rate hasn’t changed; everyone of us will have bad salvage luck some of the time.

opie.5467:

Ok, I get that it might be a DR issue and I will try the boss with another toon.
But what doesn’t make sense though is I don’t leave my Necro “parked” at the boss location, I always return back to the Citadel. I also have several level 80’s that for the moment, all they do is world bosses. For instance, my Ranger IS parked in Mount Maelstrom and all she does is kill Megadestroyer and Golem every day, has done so for a couple of weeks now, and so far I have gotten chests with them. So why wouldn’t DR apply here? The problem has only happened with Shatterer.

Diminishing Returns on events primarily exists to prevent certain types of botting (and less so, to encourage people to ‘play’ the game, rather than farm). So, ANet will never tell us exactly how it works — everything we know is based on player observation (and it’s difficult to get “scientifically useful” observations: controlled testing is impossible & we are primarily concerned with having fun, not rigorous testing). Thus, the following is speculative.

DR doesn’t always trigger. It seems to be a threshold calculation, rather than merely ON|OFF — that is, you build up DR points of some sort and if you have too many, you get diminished returns; some behaviors accumulate more points while others reduce them more quickly.

For example, repeating the same event five times in a row might add say 10 points each while the sixth time adds 50 points or randomly, the fourth time might add 50, so one person might hit DR after 6x, their friend at 5×. Similarly, completing a different event might drop you just below the threshold, not enough to repeat it again twice in a row.

Lower-level characters seem to accumulate DR less quickly, chained events seem to reduce the likelihood of any DR to nearly 0, and so on.

So MegaD, which has you running around (potentially) and doing some of the pre-events might generate DR points very, very slowly, so you might never notice. In contrast, if you hang out at the “nail-polishing” location for Shattererererererer, you might accumulate DR points quickly. Returning to a city or WvW won’t break DR, unless you do events, too.

tl;dr we don’t understand DR very well and your inconsistent symptoms are consistent with what we do know (although other explanations are also plausible).

Chuck Nizzle.6283:

Now the “crisis” seems to be even more insane. With mystic coins now over 14 silver, the law of supply and demand is really beginning to take its toll.

It’s not a crisis until or unless we have no way of obtaining the coins. Right now, plenty roll in. It’s just the demand has increased (since people can afford more of the things you can make with coins), while the supply has remained steady.

Thus, the current market is great for those who don’t care about using mystic coins — a boon to them and not a crisis.

I’m not tired of open-world content; I’m just ready for something new.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

For the OP, I don’t think you can get a ground chest if your actual level is 10 or more levels below that of the event. (And most of the time, you couldn’t even do enough damage to get credit, regardless of any other mechanics in play.)

For the Opie (not the OP), it sounds as if you are experiencing the same sort of event DR that people see with Rhendak. Try doing some other events with your L80 Charrcomancer or bring in a different toon.

Shatterer is a level 50 event, I believe. So, OP wasn’t too low level. But if OP parks his toons at that event and only does that one event, they could have the DR issue like Opie probably has.

I was thinking of the wrong dragon, sorry.

However, 9 levels under is far enough below that you would have a lot of difficulty doing enough damage, unless you were in a party (that was doing damage), so I would think that is still a possible cause.

Zhaid Zhem.6508:

Hello,

As many of you know, Ogre wars bugs permanently since the megaservers.
Sam has become an expensive and too rare item to acquire.

May be today it’s not the priority, but … One year ?
The last post of Anet on the subject dates from ~6 month “we’re working on it”, and that’s all, no more news. Did anet take the time at least ?

So now ? What about Ogre Wars ??? Anet will fix the event or Anet doesn’t give a kitten ? Can we have an answer ?

Thanks.

Likely, they are working on it by attempting to retain the chain and the root cause is turning out to be elusive or a fix causes issues elsewhere. Likely, they aren’t updating us because there is no one who works at ANet who has work time set aside to update us about bugs. (It’s a more difficult task than most people imagine and not every skilled developer is skilled at communicating with the public.)

So whether they care or not, I don’t expect them to update us unless they have good news.

(Mind you: I’m equally annoyed that they haven’t dropped the idea of fixing the chain and decided to make Sam available elsewhere — I don’t really understand how they can allow collection acquisition to remain bugged, especially for an event that is difficult to farm even if working perfectly.)

You can create a champ train in any but the newbie zones. It’s just a matter of learning the champ locations, spawn rates, and event/event-chains that can be scaled up quickly for champ farming.

For the OP, I don’t think you can get a ground chest if your actual level is 10 or more levels below that of the event. (And most of the time, you couldn’t even do enough damage to get credit, regardless of any other mechanics in play.)

For the Opie (not the OP), it sounds as if you are experiencing the same sort of event DR that people see with Rhendak. Try doing some other events with your L80 Charrcomancer or bring in a different toon.

mtpelion.4562:

Wanze.8410:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Anti-competitive behavior would be doing something that prevents others from entering the market at all or results in a long-term manipulation of prices. Neither of these things can happen as long as unidentified dyes continue to drop and/or people throw dyes at Zommy to see what he gives back.

Dont forget crafting. It hasnt been profitable for the longest time but a couple of weeks back, I made a test run and I didnt lose any gold, while crafting color specific unidentified dyes. The profit wasnt great, considering you also have to pay karma but i think its the reason, why some prices stopped spiking.

I wouldnt try it now, though, as prices for dyes have dropped across the board.

I have a spreadsheet that checks unidentified dye crafting profitability which I use every day when I log in. The color that is profitable changes often, but there is usually almost always one that is profitable.

Shhhh!

The main thing is there isn’t much demand for spectrum-specific unidentified dyes, so the profitability lasts only a few days (or hours). There are a number of other niches that are consistently profitable in the same cyclic way and for the same reasons: the demand is low so folks can’t craft arbitrarily large amounts of the item(s) and still profit, which means the competition remains low.

djsarcher.9263:

I would if I were confident refunds would be given.

Guess I’ll just have to try and see what happens.

Refunds are given for various type of mistakes.

You could send an email now (to your intended recipient), calling it a “certificate” and offering a redemption for the outfit when it becomes available. In other words, you can offer the gift now, even though you don’t have the actual gift yet. This gives you the element of surprise (albeit earlier than expected) and avoids the uncertainty later.

I like the idea of collections for glider skins or even just lots and lots of different ways of acquiring them.

Sturmhard.9475:

I would absolutely pay money for kind of a ‘skin pack’ to turn the Necromancer pets into…

+1
Great idea. I’d love skin packs for Necro pets, for mesmer phantasms, elementalist elementals, and other summoned creatures.

Intuos.3210:

It used to be a fun simple process that would open in a separate window.

Now it’s a simpler process and arguably more fun:

• Select the item to transmute.
• Click the skin
• Repeat until done
• Accept changes.

No need to find two items for each transmute — it’s all in the same window. No need to be careful about which side you click; it’s always the skin on the left, item on the right. No need to be careful about keeping the “right” upgrade or stats; you always keep your original stats.

Intuos.3210:

How do i know which items skin and which stats I’ll get?

Skin is always on the left; stats always on the right.

Intuos.3210:

And we cant choose which rune we want to keep.

You don’t need to ‘choose’ the rune — you keep the one you already have.

Intuos.3210:

We just sort of transmute and hope for the best now?

No, you used to have to “hope” that you didn’t misclick. Now, you always retain the original stats/upgrades.

Dawdler.8521:

They want you to either

A) Spend gems on the salvage machine
B) Make the kit in MF where you eventually need to spend gems for stones
C) Spend gems on bag slots so you can stock up on more kits

Either way, you spend gems for QoL. Just how they intended.

These mechanics were in place in GW1 and GW2, long before any QoL items existed. It’s pretty standard for RPGs.

Now, we might all ask why it’s a common mechanic. However, I don’t think it’s reasonable to imply that it’s some sort of Machiavellian manipulation on ANet’s part (evidence is strong that they are extremely bad at anything like that).

I’ve also been following the prices of masterwork dyes and I have seen interesting spikes. I suspect manipulation, since they are always proceeded by a drop in supply.

Here’s the thing tho: these spikes never last more than a week. Prices spike and drop down, sometimes below the previous equilibrium, sometimes above it.

So I wouldn’t call it “anti-competitive” behavior — I’d call it “aggressively competitive”. Someone sees an opportunity, takes advantage of it, and profits off those who fail to look at the history of the item’s prices before they attempt flipping.

Anti-competitive behavior would be doing something that prevents others from entering the market at all or results in a long-term manipulation of prices. Neither of these things can happen as long as unidentified dyes continue to drop and/or people throw dyes at Zommy to see what he gives back.

Lorenzo.8462:

Hello,

Is it possibile get a bag slot expansion back if I’m going to delete a character that has one on it?
Thank you. Best regards

Not as far as I’ve seen. You can try creating a support ticket before you delete the character. Alternatively, I’d recommend creating a new character instead (and if need be, use the old one as a mule).

Runs With Scissors.2896:

Do you know how often they do calculations?

Assume the “full” status isn’t changing any time soon. The current method looks at how active the WvW population is over long periods of time; it’s design to be “static” from hour to hour or day to day (and probably from week to week, too). So there’s no value is attempting to transfer when the status if “full”. (And yes, that’s a change from how it used to be.)

I believe the current calculation is better than the old: it offers some certainty rather than randomness in transferring. The problem, however, is that there’s no incentive for people to transfer from high-pop worlds into those with lower populations, so at the moment, it’s unlikely that the full servers will become merely high pop any time soon.

I am hoping that ANet plans to announce some new tournaments along with new rewards and some new pricing. (Although I fear that might not happen until HoW.)

reapex.8546:

mrstealth.6701:

Fractal Exotic Equipment boxes, like any other special box/bag, will accept any item. The only special feature they have is pulling the specific item type to them. If the Fractal box is the first available free slot in your inventory, it will be used for the next item you obtain no matter what that item is. They will never refuse an item that doesn’t match their item type.

To effectively use these boxes, they need to be farther down in your inventory. Leave standard boxes/bags in the first slots, and allow the special boxes to drag items down to them.

That’s totally strange and in my opinion, should be redesigned. Intuitively, people would think the inventory would look at items from top to bottom not bottom to top. Also, I feel the behavior of the bag should be change to: Use an exotic equipment bag for normal items when all other non exotic bags are filled. But I know this is up to ArenaNet to implement this.

Thank you for the useful insight, I’m not sure about reordering the bags of each of my characters after 2+ years but I may have to work with this backward design.

The mechanic is looking from top to bottom, except that it’s inclusive, i.e. prioritize special item(s) and pull any others, too. You’re thinking of it as an exclusive rule, i.e. only pull the special item(s), not anything else.

In other words, there are two “obvious” intuitions about how it “should” work, each of which is “backwards” to the other.

Regardless, this isn’t a bug so much as the design not match expectations for a significant portion of the community (even as it does match expectations for a different subset of players).

My understanding is that ANet wants them too. Implicitly, they’ve suggested that there’s some technical issue that prevents them from creating “loadable” templates (as opposed to just saving the details of your build). I can’t imagine what that issue is myself. I am assuming that it’s significant, otherwise ANet would have already done this if implementation was as easy as we think.

Tigaseye.2047:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Further, manipulating those mechanics has zero direct benefit to ANet: they don’t make any money out of the high cost of a low-supplied item such as any of the Taimi dyes.

They do, if people use real money to buy gems, to convert to gold, to buy them.

If they cost more gold to buy, Anet receives more real money.

Of course, this isn’t taking into account the possibility that, if they are very overpriced, they may sell badly and so, end up costing Anet potential money overall…

But, you get what I mean.

No, I don’t get what you mean. You can’t get the Taimi Dye kits today, so ANet can’t make any money off the current prices. As soon as they introduce those kits, how many people do you think are going to buy them that weren’t already planning to spend on in-game lottery tickets? Unless it’s tens of thousands of additional people, the difference isn’t enough to make it worth ANet’s time to try to second guess the market.

Or put another way, it’s a lot easier for ANet just to release limited-edition dyes for limited periods and let the TP market sort itself out. They’ll make just as much in gem sales without trying to psyche-out the community.

People forget that Taimi kits were available for a long time (and dropped from BL chests) and the colors weren’t that popular; they sold for about the same as other limited-edition colors did, while kits were available. It was only later that people decided that they really liked those specific colors and the supply dried up, driving prices up. That isn’t something ANet could have predicted based on the other limited-edition kits.

tl;dr no, ANet can’t easily make more money by doing anything different from what they did in the first place: creating lottery-type items for the gem shop and periodically changing the items for sale. Manipulating those mechanics has zero direct benefit to ANet: they don’t make any money out of the high cost of a low-supplied item such as any of the Taimi dyes.

I have a commander tag and I’ve only used it during g-mish when I’m first to spot a bounty or the only one who knows a route. I’ve never needed it to help in silverwastes or dry top (I just use links to PoI/WP).

HoT is adding a mentor mastery, which will offer something similar for PvE so you might just want to see what that’s like.

Finally, if you just now acquired 300g … I’d recommend that you squirrel it away (hide it in a personal guild bank or on a buy order for Sunrise) and save it for something that will be game changing for you. That might be a really special skin that comes to the TP or gem store, a convenience item, or a gift for a friend.

IMO, unless you command every day for hours, you can get by without the tag.

I’m assuming you trust your friend implicitly and this is just a question of working out the proper mechanics to sell something worth 1,000s of gold. (However, as others have stated, use appropriate caution.)

Your choices are:

1. Friend sends the gold via mail; you send the legendary. It will just take you 5-10 weeks to finish getting the gold from the email.
2. Friend sends the gold via mail; you send the legendary — alternative version. Have friend send two email, each with half the gold. Then wait to absorb the gold in the first email before shipping the legendary.
3. Have the friend ship you mats or other items worth (in your agreed estimation) the same value as the legendary. This works best if the friend was likely to sell these anyhow and you were likely to buy or use them. For example, if you friend has stacks of ecto, powerful blood, etc lying around and you are planning to make another legend, those are great choices. Skins also make good substitute currencies. Obviously a lot less convenient than trading gold.
4. Place the item on the TP and coordinate with your friend. Obvious downside: 15% lost to fees, although you can agree to split the costs.
5. Use a shared guild bank to transfer, as detailed above. I don’t like this choice at all, because I don’t think it gets you any advantage over email exchange, unless you get a third person to manage the exchange. At that point, you are saying you trust the escrow manager more than you trust each other.

tl;dr if you trust the friend, just do it via email. You shouldn’t have any trouble, especially if you both mention in email what you are doing.

Skullpuck.4325:

I thought if you put in 4 x level 80 rare items you have a chance of either getting another level 80 rare or a level 80 exotic.

3 times today I’ve gotten level 78 exotics from a 4 × 80 rare combine of similar items (i.e. all weapons or all armor).

Why am I throwing away my stuff for level 78 junk?

• They changed to loot tables so that there would be a great variety of results. Initially, the average value was about the same, since a lot of the skins were still low-supply on the TP.
• Despite the chance of L75-79 results, the chances of named exotics (including precursors) has stayed the same.

If you do the math & statistics, it turns out that tossing sellable exotics into the mystic forge is a money loser (unless you are doing it on an industrial scale and even then, you have to be careful what you toss in). On the other hand, if you are throwing in non-salvageable, bound exotics. Since those have no other value, getting even L75-79 exotics is a bonus.