Guild Wars 2

• How would the game be able to tell a troll portal from a legit one?
• Why couldn’t this be solved by offering new (and arguably better) options for interact. Instead of just the current two possible keys (‘F’ for loot and user-choice for autoloot), why not also offer options for (i) interact with NPC, (ii) interact with object, (iii) interact with chest, (iv) resurrect player, (v) resurrect NPC, and/or (vi) default (interact with anything not on the list above).

The problem with taking the choice out of the player’s hands is that there can be legitimate reasons for placing a portal or siege close to something else that requires [f] to be used.

Syruess.8960:

ah ok that works thank you

Super! Glad you weren’t directly affected. Welcome back to GW2.

I don’t think there is a “best” move — it’s speculation to guess as to whether people will prefer to make legendaries the legacy method (the only one available now) or use the new method. If you aren’t interested in Bifrost for its own sake now, then I’d recommend selling the precursor at an aggressive price. Alternatively, if you are looking for a big project, finish forging the legendary and sell that.

Here’s some “data” that might be of use to you:

• Precursor & legendary prices dropped dramatically when ANet announced the new collection-based method of obtaining legendaries (plus all-but guaranteed new skins).
• Prices have recovered substantially since then, with more precursor and legendary buy|sell offers somewhat below their peak prices and still trending upward.
• No dates for HoT have been announced and many believe that it won’t be any sooner than late August.

tl;dr bird in the hand is worth a pretty penny.

It was changed in the May scheduled update. Without any patch notes referring to the waypoints, it’s hard to tell why. Perhaps as khani suggested, it was to make things consistent with other races. (Others have suggested it was to slow down key farming, since that is one of the big advantages humans have over other races.)

Regardless, it appears to be a permanent change to the game. For what it’s worth, my preference would be that all waypoints for the characters racial city be unlocked at the start.

Syruess.8960:

um, no i cant access any of my old stuff at all

Are you using the wardrobe feature?

• Open the [h]ero panel.
• Choose ‘wardrobe’ from the leftside (you might have to hide the equipment subpanel first).
• Select a weapon or piece of armor on the right.
• Choose the relevant HoM skin from the left (there’s a filter you can use, e.g. ‘heritage’ for the armor).

For miniatures, do the same thing, except select the miniature subpanel instead of the wardrobe.

If for some reason you haven’t unlocked those skins for your account yet, then, yeah, you are out of luck until it gets fixed.

The Hall itself is up. Only the NPC is disabled. This only affects people claiming new rewards; any rewards you already have unlocked are still available.

So it is super annoying for those just coming from GW1 or who have recently upgraded their HoM score.

FYI they have fixed the original bug. What’s taking them a long time to handle is to undo the rewards for those who got them without having earned them. (Especially if they have already applied ‘free’ skins.)

Guhracie.3419:

Kal Spiro.9745:

Aren’t there a couple personal story missions where a near endless stream of whites run by? Could the balm be used in there to farm? That just seems like you would get a bigger bang for your buck, and it could be reset endlessly.

Personal story mobs don’t drop loot anymore.

Even if transformed. OTOH, those mobs will count for weapon mastery.

On IP 35, there were at least three successful Ogre Wars chains completing after the initial update today. (I had to leave shortly after.)

(I’m sure it bugs out consistently — I’m hoping that learning where it went successfully helps in the troubleshooting.)

On my laptop, load times were the shortest they’ve even been (without having changed options). On my desktop, there were longer, maybe 20-40%. Didn’t change anything else about the settings or how I connect.

You can make money by crafting every day. What’s different in GW2 is there are very few items that allow you to make a consistent profit every day and every single one of those items is gated in some fashion.

Making money from crafting is like making money in any other economic venture in any game:

• Crafted item needs to be in sufficient demand that people are willing to pay a premium.
• The supply needs to be sufficiently limited that such demand cannot be filled quickly.

Since the GW2’s TP covers all players across all worlds (NA & EU), it’s extremely responsive to changes (much to the surprise of most of those who have attempted to manipulate it). In other MMOs, crafting has “guaranteed” niches, in part because each “server” economy is separate and in part because crafting itself is somewhat gated, whereas in GW2, anyone can easily teach their characters to craft anything.

Despite the dynamics, there are certain things that are always money makers:

• Any time-gated recipe for popular item, including damask or heat lamps (for Mawdrey)
• Similarly, recipes for popular items requiring a time-gated item, e.g. ascended inscriptions/insignia.
• Things that require lots of steps, such as various mystic forge recipes (some wouldn’t call it “crafting”, but the mechanics are very similar). MF promotions are also often valuable.
• Things with horribly-expensive components, such as chef-recipes for dyes, certain foods, special weapon skins, …

Given the dynamic GW2 economy, specific items on the list rarely stay the same for long, sometimes only for hours.

tl;dr like making money anywhere outside of a few games, you have to do your market research. Many people make money every day from crafting; you just have to pick & choose carefully.

All the data can be explained by Diminishing Returns, even that posted by Angel:

• Reset is midnight UTC (same as every other 1x/day gate in the game).
• There are multiple types of DR and all would have to reset.
• DR can, seemingly, build up differently on different characters, making it take longer to reset.

The easiest form of DR to observe generally and particularly with Rhendak is Event DR: you get less karma than normal, as well as not getting the ground chest nor the bonus (bouncy) chest. Once that happens, you must do at least one other event. I haven’t done any testing by going into PvP, so I don’t know if that counts.

Sometimes, it takes longer to reset DR and sometimes the ‘reset’ doesn’t last very long. Reliably, I’ve been able to keep one of my characters at Rhendak’s Tomb for 2-3 weeks while another one only lasts 2-3 days tops. In both cases, I can go to WvW to reset DR: for the first, it merely takes killing a caravan or claiming a sentry point (after killing the guard); for the second, it usually takes 2 event involving at least a few kills (either PvE or PvP).

tl;dr @Angel: I’m 99.9999% sure you’re seeing DR and need to reset it.

Magic Find only affects the loot that drops from foes. Its affect is subtle and can only be easily seen over controlled tests involving 100s of foe deaths.

(It also will affect certain PvP loot, which is meant to approximate foe loot. It is further presumed to affect loot from Hidden Bandit Chests, although this is nearly impossible to test. I am not aware of any other exceptions that haven’t already been disproved.)

Always get laurels, with a tiny number of exceptions:

• Laurels are the only item/currency on the list that cannot be readily obtained outside of the login rewards.
• Laurels are easily converted into just about any other item/currency via the purchase of heavy crafting bags (and selling the contents). e.g. you can buy the equivalent ascended mats and have spare change (unless you get two cloth, which is very very unlikely).

There are a couple of exceptions:

• If you are making a legendary right now and lack the necessary items for clover, choose the Chest of Legendary Mats. This very time efficient, even though it’s not economically efficient.
• Similarly, if you hardly ever play and are currently crafting ascended items, you’ll need Vision Crystals and the Chest of Ascended Mats will save you a lot of time. (Frequent players won’t have any trouble putting these together, especially if patient.)

Every time I see ‘Sam’ or ’Rhendak’s Signet’ or ’Commissar’s Manifesto’…only it turns out to be fine|blue instead of orange|exotic.

Sylar.6827:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’m not sure the chests appear; I think the contents (of the chests) appear in your inventory. Of course, I could be mistaken.

Good luck.

hmm good point, maybe i’ll try it again for science..

A number of people have tested this and the results seem to vary, depending on the type of bonus chest (i.e. it appears those from the silverwastes can stack up in greater numbers or at least with others, e.g. dailies).

Despite the mileage-may-vary aspect of how many you can ‘save’, no one has been able to document any rewards being lost due to stacking. (Except, again, some special cases involving full inventory + changing character or maps before resolving that — that’s arguably a different mechanic entirely.)

I still think the question is moot. Don’t wait for people to die. It’s far better to explain the important mechanics before the situation becomes dire.

Success (or failure) rarely is affected by scaling alone; we just need “enough” people to understand the fight (and for as few as possible to misunderstand it). If so many are dead that we’re arguing about waypointing, things are already kittened up [sic]; far better that we get our kittens [sic] in order in the first place.

mtpelion.4562:

The short answer is “everything other than keybinding is bannable”.

The long answer is “while every effective macro is bannable, ArenaNet has so far employed a highly subjective and unpublished method of actually handing out bans”.

Use macros at your own risk.

Well said.
(Although I’d argue it’s not “subjective”, so much as it’s based on criteria hidden to us, which gives the appearance of being arbitrary or subjective.)

Summarizing the above, there is no limit:

• You receive all the rewards.
• The only limitation is how many bouncy chests appear on the screen (3) and how many remain hidden (that number varies somewhat depending on the type.

The only time you might have a problem is if your inventory is full and you get one-too-many bonuses. For this (and many other reasons), it’s a good idea to leave room in your inventory.

The Power of the Mists applies to everyone, regardless of participation in WvW or whether the server ‘wins’ a match. However, the ‘winning’ server builds up the power faster (since it’s determined by total points accrued, same as for ‘winning’).

So it’s mathematically true that the winning server will gain more benefits, even though the mechanics have a different technical requirement. Further, second (and even third) place can earn identical rewards to the winner.

Further, the difference of rewards between the highest-point world and lowest-point world is relatively small, even looking across all matches.

During WvW tournaments, there are additional rewards available to winning servers.

• Those rewards depend on the tournament (they haven’t been identical from tourney to tourney yet).
• There hasn’t been a tournament in…let’s just say a long time.
• The ‘winner’ depends on winning your tier: Gold, Silver, or Bronze. To date, the Bronze winner has earned the same rewards as Gold.
• The rewards have included long-lasting (although temporary) buffs, skins, and other minor items.

The short story is that you have to take your chances on using 3rd party tools to play the game. Is the convenience worth the risk that you might be banned? That your account might be mistakenly flagged as engaged in botting?

Some types of programs are very low risk while others are higher. There’s no way to tell for sure; the best we can do is to keep an eye out for reports from people using particular software over long periods of time. For example, in GW1, tons of people used TexMod safely for years with particular plugins, while other plugins resulted in bans. Thus, we guessed that Cartography Made Easy was ‘allowed’, while others might not be.

ANet can never say specifically that third party tools are supported or even allowed, for a variety of reasons.

• They don’t have time to validate the tools, so can’t be sure it works with the game in all circumstances.
• Similarly, they can’t guarantee that the software doesn’t include malware.
• They don’t want to have to spend time explaining why software A is ‘ok’ while the similar program B is ‘not ok.’
• They want to be able to respond quickly to threats to the game’s or economy’s stability, without having to explain why software once permitted might no longer be ‘ok’. For example, software A works fine as a minor UI convenience is later discovered to make it easy to exploit dungeon pathing.

tl;dr don’t ask if something is ‘bannable’ — there’s won’t be a definitive answer. Ask instead whether folks know of people using such software for long periods of time without issues.

Captain Unusual.9163:

Good times. Wonder if we’ll ever see them again.

Yes, yesterday, the day before, two days earlier, and pretty much every day.

Risingashes.8694:

Also to those claiming the purpose of the limit is to stop RMT: wow. What a joke.

All you’d do is send people high priced liquid items instead. You lose 15%, the money is stolen anyway so who cares.

The RMTs care, that’s why. ANet just decreased their profits significantly, which reduces the premium for buying black market gold. That makes it more likely that people will buy from ANet instead.

Ultimately, financial criminals are always going to find ways to circumvent the law. The trick is to find ways to make it less profitable.

We don’t have enough data to say whether this is working or not. According to ANet, it affects a tiny subset of players and has a big impact on RMT. If that’s true, I’m in favor of being personally inconvenienced.

People don’t commonly spend much time in areas rich in T3 wood (either from gathering or from salvaging). It’s not so surprising that the total supply dropped below 20k and at that point, I can imagine someone thinking they could try to corner the market. It looks like this wasn’t the first attempt.

Of course, lots of people have all sorts of mats squirreled away for rainy days, so I doubt this represents a change to the equilibrium.

I’m equally sure someone will try the same thing with another mat or three at some point.

Are you sure that it’s this dive that you are missing? People also have trouble with Straits of Devastation, Not So Secret (in Gendarran), or somewhere else?

I ended up being 3 short of completion, but EE Skritssburg wasn’t among them. (Yeah, I had to go back and check all three dozen — nearly three times — before I finally completed the achievement.)

See also: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Dive-Master-Achievement-1
(a similar thread with more details about what people encountered and how they ultimately completed the achievement)

The list of retailers that carry gem cards changes over time for a variety of reasons, most commonly because the retailer runs out of the cards and it takes a while for them to get more. When that happens, employees will frequently tell customers they no longer carry the cards, even though it’s just a stocking issue. (This happens 2-3x/year at specific Target stores in the US or sometimes for their entire system…and yet a few weeks later, they are selling them again.)

According to the wiki, the following stores in Canada have carried gem cards at some point:

• EB Games
• Best Buy
• London Drugs

ANet isn’t likely to want to spend valuable dev time supporting non-standard input devices. Sure, if everything goes smoothly, it could encourage some new players to the game. Except, stuff like this is rarely smooth going and ANet would have to be responsible for Customer Service and bug fixing when things go bork.

Instead, I think it’s more likely that folks might release 3rd party shareware/freeware that can be used to fool the PC into treating controller inputs like a mouse/keyboard, similar to what Logitech does for the G13 or what Belkin does for the Nostromo.

Most of the functionality being asked for is already in the game:

• Skins are separate from stats, except for some skins that are acquired through specific weapons. Those stats are, however, available from other items.
• Other games make it easier to swap looks, but hard to acquire lots of skins. This game makes it easy to acquire and easy to swap, only requiring people to pay a modest transmutation cost. Since you get these ‘free’ from logging in or playing PvP, most players won’t need to spend gold or gems at all.

So, unless I misunderstood, this game is only missing two features:

• Ability to ‘save’ a look to reuse later. I’m sure we’d all love that and I’m sure it’s expensive to implement.
• Ability to pay once and re-use skins forever, like a permanent transmutation charge (either per character or per account). This seems easier to implement. The problem is whether ANet can make up the revenue they get now (from frequent-change artists buying transmutation charges) by selling the perma-unlocks.

Accordingly, the question that ANet would want to know from players might be: how much are you willing to pay to have a permanent unlock? 5,000 gems? 2,000? Unless are lot of folks are willing to pay a lot for this feature, I doubt it will be prioritized.

I don’t see any evidence that the rates have changed.

• The amount of rares dropping from events seems to be the same and few people get exotics regularly.
• The amount of ectos dropping from salvaged rares remains consistent with data and reported rates from 2013-2014.

Again, if you are seeing fewer than 80 ecto per 100 rares salvaged with mystic/master/silver-fed, you should report that here. The number of ecto you get per hour or per day isn’t a good measure of either rate, since your rate of kills might vary considerably between sessions.

tl;dr I think you’re seeing typical variation and (like most of us) remembering/noticing the extreme results.

Behellagh.1468:

Going back to the original announcement the impact from the limit to mail based on their data was around 1 in 32,000 legitimate players would encounter it. Sorry if you’re one of those OP.

The reported data was only for mail. They confirmed later that it did not include transfers from guild banks (whether personal or shared). In that same post, they said they expected that this would inconvenience some guilds, but that was an acceptable downside, since there are workarounds and both restrictions need to be in place to have any impact.

I’m not sure I agree with ANet that there are simple workarounds for large guilds holding lotteries and asking for donations for siege. Still, it’s hard to imagine the system would combat gold selling/buying without limits on the guild system, too.

The original question posed by the OP was: is it better for the map if the dead waypoint? Is it better for those who are dead to waypoint?

We now have enough hard data to answer the first question: yes, it’s better for the map if the dead waypoint.

• You quickly reduce the health of the boss (and of added spawns, depending on the event).
• You don’t get in the way of others trying to pick up items (e.g. frost bows) or rez the merely downed.
• You don’t risk losing 5-20 seconds of damage or utilities from those trying to rez the dead. (20 seconds for solo, 5 seconds for a group.)

Is it better for the player with the dead character? That’s harder to answer.

• They have to pay for the WP costs.
• They have to spend time running back — although that’s not difficult, neither is it particularly fun or interesting.
• They do get the same rewards, as long as they tagged in the first place.
• The chances for a successful event are increased, by a hard-to-measure amount.

So we can’t say it’s absolutely better for them; at most, we can say it’s not significantly worse either.

I don’t think that’s a very strong incentive to encourage people to waypoint.

In fact, it’s my impression that trying to convince people that they must WP if dead is ultimately more damaging to the community’s efforts. People end up arguing about proper etiquette, which convinces no one and does nothing to help the fight go more smoothly.

Plus, typically events don’t usually fail because a few people are downed — they fail because there isn’t a critical mass of people who know what to do while in good health. It takes far fewer people to succeed at a lot of these events than most people think, if people know the mechanics. And if people don’t know the mechanics, it often doesn’t matter at all how many there are. In the first case, the events can succeed with plenty of dead and in the second, they can still fail with plenty left alive.

So, instead of criticizing the dead, admonishing them, or threatening to refuse to rez them after it’s all over (and none of this matters)… instead of that, what if people focused on reducing the chance that people die during the event?

Explain mechanics so that newbies (and there are always newbies) can learn, bring some support utilities, take time to rez the downed, and so on.

tl;dr Even though we know the facts to answer the OP’s original question(s), the point is moot. It would be better to work towards success, instead of preparing for catastrophe.

I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the [OP of the message to which I replied] for wanting things to be easy. After all, they bought multiple accounts (which benefits ANet directly). It’s reasonable to think folks shouldn’t be penalized for being successful at earning gold.

However, it’s also reasonable that ANet institute mechanics to prevent gold sellers from transferring money easily. The 500g limit makes it a lot less attractive to potential buyers, since it increases the inconvenience and increases the risk of buying gold on the black market. If that reduces the amount of gold selling substantially, I’m all for it: reducing gold selling benefits the entire community in large and small ways.

tl;dr I’m sympathetic to the OP’s view; I just think ANet is right to go after gold sellers (and buyers), even if it makes things more inconvenient for some of us.

In terms of the specific issues raises, the 500g/week can be worked around, using some creative management. It certainly won’t be as convenient as it was before, which is partly the goal of having a limit.

And for setting up a guild bank, I’m unsure why the primary account can’t buy the influence necessary. Is there some reason the secondary account needs to spend the coin?

edit: this made more sense before the topic was merged

While you can’t get them today, eventually it will be fixed. Speaking for myself, I’d prefer to be at 30/50 before then, so I don’t have more to do afterward. Up to you whether that’s a waste or not.

OP: you might be thinking of the following advice:

• Craft Sunrise, Craft Twilight. Do not bind them.
• Sell them.
• With your money, buy Eternity and bind it.

This unlocks 5 skins for your wardrobe: Dawn, Dusk, Sunrise, Twilight, and Eternity at the lowest possible cost.

Spirited Was Eceni.3869:

…the RNG system in this game …resets on every roll of the dice so there is no way anyone can say 300g or even 2million gold is enough to get you a precursor. As far as the RNG is concerned, every roll is your first roll.

While it’s true that RNG resets on every roll, you can still make some reasonable predictions. Each try of four rares offers an approximately 0.13% chance of returning a precursor. Assuming each rare costs 25 silver (chosen for the easy math, although generally rare staffs, swords, greatswords cost more), 300g can buy 300 initial tries. On average, there’s about a 32% chance of getting at least one precursor from that (chances are better if you recycle the non-pre results). If you spend 50s per rare instead, the chances drop to less than 18%.

If you are willing to spend 10,000 gold, the odds are almost indistinguishable from 100% that you’ll get “at least one” precursor. If you spend 2,000,000, it’s still possible that you wouldn’t get one, but it’s horribly unlikely. John Smith would be looking at your account to see what went wrong long before.

tl;dr there’s no way anyone can say that this try or that try is going to get a precursor. There are, however, ways to predict the chances of getting a precursor based on how many attempts are made.

In the OP’s case, 300g is a big risk with a big pay off and poor odds. Some people like that sort of risk; most do not.

lighter.2708:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Assume if you spend “only” 300 gold, you’re not going to get a precursor. The lowest sell offers (and highest buy offers) are partly due to the rarity of getting precursors from the forge, i.e. the prices reflect the likelihood of getting them. So if a precursor is being offered at 1,000g (with best offers at 800g), you should predict that anything less than 700g is going to require a lot of luck to succeed.

The people who do “industrial production” of precursors have shown that it’s not unusual to spend 1000s of gold between “successful” forges, although of course, sometimes you spend only a few 100g.

tl;dr 300g is not enough for a good chance; better to save up until you can buy it outright…unless you like the thrill of rolling the dice to see what happens.

You forgot the supply and demand, there are precursors with low price not because they are easier to get compare to dusk, because they have low supply.
while dusk is expansive because it has a high demand

Supply & Demand can be ignored for the purposes of discussion whether 300g is worth gambling on.

• The lowest-priced precursors cost less than 300g, so no one would gamble that much to get one.
• The next tier of prices is 300-500g and it seems unlikely someone would consider risking 300g when they are that close to putting in a competitive buy offer.
• That leaves the highest-priced precursors, where the high demand is reflected in the price of the precursor and in the cost of the inputs, e.g. Dusk is expensive and rare & exotic GS are similarly more expensive than their equivalent bows.

In other words, supply and demand are already implied in my original advice to the OP: to get 1,000g worth of precursor, they’d have to risk a lot more than 300g. I only “forgot” to include the possibility of the OP being interested in getting 400g worth of precursor.

Several others have odd trigger spots, although not so odd that they get a note on the wiki.

However, worse are the diving spots: make sure you check the dive count (in the achievement sub-panel) before and after, to make sure you got credit. A lot of folks ended up being 1-3 dives short and having to re-do them all to figure out which we missed.

Nausicca.6038:

I got Dawn out of the 4 last exo I bought with 300ish gold. It’s doable. Good luck !

Doable? yes. Probable? no.

This game has a lot of players who have thrown 300g into the forge; most do not get a precursor.

Your mileage will vary.

The best way, in my opinion, to learn about combos is to pick just one and practice it. It doesn’t have to be meta or that powerful — the goal is to get used to the idea of chaining particular skills for the combo.

Once you’ve nailed one combination, you can branch out to more complicated rotations, such as throwing down several finishers on the same field or teaming up with party members. Once you can do that , the various guides and wiki articles covering combos will make sense. (Just about every profession subforum here has a sticky that includes combos and all the guides at dulfy, gw2dungeons, etc also have the details you want for “advanced combos”.)

For staff elementalist, I recommend starting with these two easy ones:

• In fire, Lava Font (staff-2) + Arcane Wave, for fire field + blast finisher = AoE might.
• In water, Healing Rain (staff-5) _or+ Geyser (staff-3) + Arcane Wave, for water field + blast finisher = AoE heal.

Once you feel comfortable with those, you can make things more interesting:

• Start your field (in fire or water)
• Swap to Earth and use Eruption (staff-2).

That’s an extra blast that can be applied on top of the field for an extra burst.

Obviously, there are many other combos that you can (and should) use regularly. I picked those because they seem to be easy for folks to add to their skill rotations, even for those who aren’t comfortable with GW2 combat.

Once you learn those (or any other combo), you can review guides and start developing your own rotation or imitating the meta effectively.

Good luck.

It’s tempting to buy the stuff that is disappearing.

However, I assume this means that newer opportunities are coming soon to our favorite in-game cash (and converted-coin shop). I’m saving my gems for the two birds in the bush.

PS it wouldn’t surprise me if we will look back nostalgically on the conversion rate of 18-20g per 100 gems. If I’m correct (and the new stuff is indeed worth the wait), a lot of people will start to spend coin for gems, driving the rate up. (Those spending cash to buy gems won’t affect the rate, since their gems never touch the gold:gems market.)

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I’m essentially offering to walk around with free advertising…

Better than that (from ANet’s perspective): you are willing to pay them cash for the privilege of advertising for them.

Assume if you spend “only” 300 gold, you’re not going to get a precursor. The lowest sell offers (and highest buy offers) are partly due to the rarity of getting precursors from the forge, i.e. the prices reflect the likelihood of getting them. So if a precursor is being offered at 1,000g (with best offers at 800g), you should predict that anything less than 700g is going to require a lot of luck to succeed.

The people who do “industrial production” of precursors have shown that it’s not unusual to spend 1000s of gold between “successful” forges, although of course, sometimes you spend only a few 100g.

tl;dr 300g is not enough for a good chance; better to save up until you can buy it outright…unless you like the thrill of rolling the dice to see what happens.

The issue mentioned in (3) is not unique to harpies in the uncat fractal, it’s just more noticeable there. Any time you attack any foe that cannot walk to your position, there is a chance it will become invulnerable.

This is due to a mechanic that is designed to prevent players from exploiting the environment, i.e. so players can hit foes, but foes cannot. Clearly, the mechanic doesn’t always work (e.g. fighting mossman from the water) and sometimes it is overly aggressive (e.g. fighting ranged attackers who can hit you, especially the harpies in the uncat fractal).

Sure, the mechanic should be adjusted so that players can’t exploit foes in some situations and so that foes are never invulnerable if they can hit you (whether within melee distance or line-of-sight for ranged attacks). However, it’s not unique to fractals and it’s probably really difficult to get it to work as intended.

upsdn.5426:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s returning other inscriptions at (what appears to me to be) the same rate. I haven’t had tried any rabids, though.

They supposedly “fixed” the drop rates on non-BLSK kits (the actual was previously much lower than stated in the description), but I don’t remember them mentioning the BLSK behavior

Thanks for letting me know. I’m sure nothing’s wrong with rabids in particular, and I really just experienced a run of bad luck.

Of course, if it happens the next time I salvage 20 exotics, I’ll be back.

As a result of your post, I’m keeping track of my results now. (However, hadn’t anything to salvage recent, sad face.) If accurate (and I assume they are), your results are unlikely at best.

• If the true rate of getting an inscription is 33%, then there’s only a 0.03% chance of 20 salvages returning no inscriptions. That’s 3 chances in 10,000.
• If the true rate is 25%, there’s only a 0.3% chance, i.e. 1 in 1,000.

Since there are probably more than 10,000 people using BL kits to salvage 20 exotics (with potential inscriptions), then someone has to be the one to get none, and so it could be you. Still, that’s the sort of bad luck about which people write blues anthems (e.g. If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all).

tl;dr I’ll keep better records, too. If I see similar results, I’ll post here.

I’ve recently salvaged about half a dozen Shaman’s exotics with BLSKs. Nearly every salvage ended up with an inscription. (I still haven’t had any rabids worth salvaging, so no data for that.)

It seems unlikely that ANet would allow so many people to sell Ascended rings and then change things drastically. I can already imagine the rage.

If you have space, sure, save them. But if you need the inventory slots for anything else (including Dragonite Ore), I’d start selling.

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

I don’t mind subsidizing the gold to gems people.. as long as I don’t have to listen to how gems are “so expensive!” to buy with gold.

As someone subsidized by kind spenders such as yourself, thank you.

Also: yeah, I also have little patience for complaints about the gem:gold exchange rate either. It’s standard for any MMO economy that the trend of prices is up. However, it’s relatively modest in GW2. I was able to stock up on gems February, March, & April; the rate was 12.5g-15g/100 gems often, which was much lower than the 18-20g of November 2014.

Is the friends-list functionality sufficient? No probably not. There are several features and behaviors I’ve wanted to see since GW1, including the fact that, as the OP says , the default should be: no extra information provided unless the accounts are mutual friends.

But is this urgently required? No, I don’t think so, especially compared to other features and bugfixes that affect more people more often.

It’s returning other inscriptions at (what appears to me to be) the same rate. I haven’t had tried any rabids, though.

They supposedly “fixed” the drop rates on non-BLSK kits (the actual was previously much lower than stated in the description), but I don’t remember them mentioning the BLSK behavior

Thanks for adding to your original information. There are a couple of different mechanics involved in what’s going on and I’d like to separate them, since it confuses the issue (if there is one):

Amount of Rares
You are getting fewer ‘rare’ pieces of gear than before from following world bosses. Presumably, you mean from the ground chest (since the bonus chest is a guaranteed rare, if not two).

Are you not getting the ground chest? If so, that could be the result of Diminished Returns. If you are, then I think you’re just seeing normal ebb & flow of luck — I certainly don’t get as many rares as you have.

tl; dr I think that maybe you are seeing standard rates of rare drops for world bosses or perhaps some sort of Diminished Returns. I’d like to see more about which bosses on how many rares per event (and whether you use one toon for the entire set of bosses or leave one in place near each).

Salvaging Exotics
Exotics can drop 0-3 ecto and 0-3 dark matter. It’s not at all unusual to salvage 5-10 and not see either mat drop. “A couple of exotics” is not representative — you really want to collect data on a 100 or more before you can start to see a pattern (and folks that do that see a lot of variation even with that many results).

Salvaging with Rares
Again without specific numbers of rares, it’s hard to tell if you’re seeing a pattern or just typical variation. Are you getting far fewer than 80 ecto per 100 rares? Then something might have changed. 5-10 or even 20-40 rares are just not enough to tell.

I usually save up to salvage 10-20 rares at a time and I see anything from 3-4 ecto to 12-14. Any time I’ve tracked over 100+, it’s always been consistent with the rates on the wiki, regardless of my magic find.

tl;dr I don’t think you have enough results to support speculation that something changed in the ecto drop rates.

I spent nothing on gems. All converted from gold. (Sorry ANet — I’m broke.)

Vayne.8563:

In my opinion the trait changes occurred because of an unhealthy lack of progression in the game.

People would level to 80, get top level gear relatively quickly, and then stop playing. Ascended gear was introduced as a stopgap measure of sorts to keep people playing longer, but ultimately didn’t work. Too many people didn’t care about the small stat difference, or didn’t want to craft.

The idea behind making you “work” to get your traits isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but the implementation was awful.

I have to disagree with your characterization of the leveling system at launch as “unhealthy.” The idea was to make leveling a natural aspect of “just playing the game” and it succeeded in that. A lot of traditional MMOers “ran out” of things to do, because they were used to always having more leveling to do. That doesn’t mean the system was inherently bad, it means it didn’t meet the expectations of a particular subset of players.

Further, I don’t understand why we assume that “working to level” has to mean gating or repetition. We didn’t have to “work” for skill points before the change and we still don’t have to “work” for them either. ANet only changed the rules for traits.

As you say, regardless of the intent, the implementation was horrible. I haven’t “leveled” a character since the change. Under the original system, I probably would have bought another 4 to 8 character slots (and be more invested in the current game, with or without new content). Under the current system, I have no interest in being forced to do content I’ve done several times nor in paying massive amounts of gold and skill points to avoid something.

I like playing the game; I don’t like being forced to repeat content, regardless of how fun it might have been the first or even 10th time.