Guild Wars 2

The exploration is in finding the drop rates. Just discovering what might drop doesn’t provide much value.

Further, I think this would be consistent with ANet’s philosophy of removing PvP from open world content; free markets are only free if everyone has access to the same information. The spread of that information is hampered by the current system, since there are sometimes financial incentives to hoarding details.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

On average, I’ve been getting 1 key for every 3-4 maps completed. Sometimes I go 10 maps without a key, so your mileage will vary.

I had a recent run of luck with a new Ele and got 7 keys in a row (all starter zones and a few 2nd tier zones). It’s purely RNG and I haven’t gotten one since. It’s reportedly a 50/50 chance between a key or transmutation charge (who set those up as equivalent rewards?).

I don’t think it’s 50-50. For my two characters that have PvE map completion, I got 6/25 and 13/25. In WvW, I had 13/32 across 8 toons. That’s a fairly small sample size, but it would suggest odds closer to 4/10 or even 1/3.

Even so, 7 in a row would be phenomenal luck — gz

Wanze.8410:

Not a bad suggestion but i think its bad design unless infinite tools will be a possible reward in game and not only available in the gem store.

I agree: the problem I have the watchwork pick is that it offers a feature that can only be purchased with gems; there is absolutely no way within the game to obtain sprockets at the same.

I think it might be fair if such harvesting ‘sigils’ were available for laurels only. That would give people an interesting choice when deciding whether to spend laurels on T6 mats.

I would pay gems to have an option to cycle minis, especially if:

• I got to choose which minis are in the rotation.
• I would pay extra if there were several possible rotations, similar to area-specific playlists, e.g.:
  • No mini in WvW/PvP, since they make stealth far less useful.
  • Only minis that can swim, when underwater.
  • Ideally, different minis for dungeons and open world.

Centurion.7296:

Do the staff of Anet play gw2?

Yes

Centurion.7296:

And if so would the developers of the thief for example only play thief

No

Centurion.7296:

or play other classes as well?

Yes.

I don’t see why ANet needs to address this any time soon. The vast majority of players are no where close to maximizing this. I salvage a ton of stuff (for experimentation, as well as dealing with loot) and I don’t expect to hit the limit.

I’d prefer they do something for those trying to get Gwynfyrrd rather than those with “too much” luck.

This chain has been bugged for a while. I’ve reported it a couple of times with details about how it bugs. So, I’m not holding my breath.

The only sources I know of for shards are:

• Not So Secret JP (you can park multiple toons for 2/chest/day/toon).
• Farming the aethers along that JP’s route.
• Farming the aethers in EotM
• TA/Aether or Aetherblade Fractal

None of those provide a lot of shards per unit of time.

The only remaining source is the mystic forge recipe and even with dropping sprocket prices, it still requires a lot of effort.

There are two workarounds to complete this step:

• Instead of picking up the head, ignore the statue entirely and walk past the mortar, onto the ‘floor’ above the water. Logout the character and quickly log back in. When you return, you’ll be in the water and can proceed normally.
• Alternatively, take one of the mesmer portals to Rhendak’s tomb and work your way backwards through the mini-dungeon. There will be a chain allowing you to open any gates in your way.

FYI the bug has been noted by ANet; no ETA for a fix.

Harfang.2798:

thnx for info .., but i still dont get WHY my son and friends cant come play on our server

Unless you guys do WvW, your son and his friends will be able to play with you. There’s no important distinction in PvE or PvP. Choose any non-full server in North America region and party up (or represent the same guild). As you zone in to each map, you’ll be together.

If you guys do WvW, then your son (and friends) will just have to be persistent. Try 1-2x whenever possible to transfer to (or create an account in) Tarnished Coast. If possible, try at off-peak hours, whenever the US is predominately at sleep or at work.

Good luck.

mtpelion.4562:

When the game first launched, the drop rate from mobs was VERY high.

Then the rate was nerfed to the point where I didn’t see a single one for a LONG time (over a year).

It would appear that they have recently increased the drop rate, as everyone I know (including myself) have seen them dropping at about the same rate as exotics.

That’s not my perception, which is.

• During beta, they dropped frequently.
• At launch, only one person in my guild got any.
• For the first 3 months, my guild saw maybe 3 total.
• The rate now does seem to have increased, but nowhere close to the drop rate for exotics. Seeing a BL pinged is still about as rare as seeing a precursor pinged.

Prototypemind.4026:

This game seems to have artificial scarcity down to a science. It’s one thing to make items seasonal if tied to an event, but there’s a point with other items where the desire just begins to fade when players plead for a return and see nothing. The bunny ears were begged for and yet a no show at Easter. Players are trying to throw money at the game, but it doesn’t seem like Anet wants it.

I don’t think that’s an accurate picture. With a tiny number of exceptions, everything that has been in the gem store returns. Those exceptions are mostly about things that existed before the wardrobe changed some of the mechanics. Admittedly, it’s annoying that we’re missing a pair of spectacles, bunny ears, etc, but there are far more items that do return, including the DE weapons, all the dye sets, etc

The other big exception is BL weapon skins, which technically were never available in the gem shop (only via BL tickets).

It was a question of managing resources. If they had made all town clothes into outfits, we probably wouldn’t have seen the wardrobe for another 5-6 months. Much as I like some of the town clothes (and little as I use the tonics), I am happy to have gotten the wardrobe sooner, in exchange for losing out on some cool sets.

Miss Lana.5276:

Unforgiven Azrael.6203:

A) topic already exists post was made about this about 2-3 weeks ago
B) its not gonna happen, as its too much effort for such a small cosmetic change that too few people would even consider wanting, and no, its not as simple as “just mirror the animations”. I will also wager it would be alot more work to accomplish this in GW2 than some ‘fan-made mmo’.

Pretty much this. There would only be a small percentage of people who actually use it.

There are lots of reasons why this probably won’t happen, but “small percentage who actually use it” ought not to be one of them.

Minimum estimates of lefties in industrialized nations (those likely to have players in this game) top 10%; some studies suggest more (depending on the definition). That’s a lot of GW2 players.

That said, as a left-handed dyslexic who actually gets turned around in-game by the main-hand weapon being on the “wrong” side, there are other changes I’d prefer to see than ANet figuring out how to mirror image a huge number of animations.

appleslove.7019:

What frustrates me is the fact that some vistas are super easy to do while others are stupidly designed to be almost impossible to get too. If you want us to be able to do them then my suggestion is to make them easier to access.

One thing I’ve realized is that if I think a vista is “stupidly designed to be almost impossible to get to,” that means I’m doing it ‘wrong’ — that is, there’s an easier way that I haven’t discovered yet. It usually means I’ve started from the wrong place or gone left when I should have gone right. Or up when I needed to go around.

There are jumping puzzles that can be truly difficult, but vistas are almost entirely a matter of trying from a new angle (or asking someone where to start).

Unforgiven Azrael.6203:

Make clovers, most of the time you get T6 mats and lodestones from it, its pretty profitable

Clovers are not as profitable as other uses of karma and ecto.

For the OP: if ANet thinks that more than 0.1% of the community has “too much” obsidian, then sure, provide some other sinks. I suspect there aren’t that many, except for those converting karma into clover for things other than legendaries (which isn’t the most efficient use of the other required resources).

You probably aren’t missing anything per se, but they might not be where you expect. Cycle through each of your toons and use the inventory search for keyword “mini” to double check if you still have those. Take each toon to the black lion armor NPC and ask them about…everything.

If none of that works for you, then contact support (link at the top left) by creating a support ticket. They’ll be able to help you find everything.

There are several issues conflated in the original post, so let’s rephrase it as:

Black Powder trivializes a lot of open world PvE content.

There are a lot of reasons for this, the most important imo is that the AI doesn’t consider moving out of AoE threats of any sort. This, however, is a problem that affects all PvE fights, not just Black Powder.

In fact, changing the AI would affect a lot of meta builds/tactics:

• Ranged mobs wouldn’t turn corners and stack just where we want; they would instead circle strafe around the corner, to back up their melee allies.
• Bosses wouldn’t stand in Meteors (among other AoEs), but would move out of them ASAP.
• All foes in a mob would always target the target member most likely to help the foes, i.e. the weakest (to quickly down and reduce damage they suffer), the deadliest (again to reduce damage), or the one doing the most healing/countering (which interferes with the first two).

Changing AI is difficult for variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it has unpredictable affects on every NPC fight in the game. It is never done quickly.

tl;dr regardless of the terminology, the root problem has more to do with AI that hasn’t adapted to the player meta than with any particular skill.

These are loyalty rewards, thus they offer value to those who would be doing this anyhow. If you don’t play every day, you still get rewarded, but not as quickly.

I see about the same concentrations of players wherever I go, with the exception that the L1-15 zones are quieter now than in the week after a 75%-off sale. (That’s exactly what I would expect, as folks tend only to return to those areas for short periods, to tackle World Bosses, dailies, leveling another toon.)

Gold never just goes missing from an account. There are a couple of different up ideas getting mixed together. Let me try to separate them

• Gold, as well as items, will be missing if the account is compromised/hacked. Typically, this should be easier to notice.
• Some players spend money and forget about it, usually due to an impulse purchase or spending more than they realized putting in a buy offer.
• Some don’t get as much money as they intended after selling a valuable item, due to fees/taxes and/or misclicking.
• Finally, as mentioned by others, if the account got gold from an RMT (real money trader), then ANet will remove that money from the account.

Due to the currency restrictions on email, RMTs are apparently now sending items to their customers, who then sell the items for the coin. Thus, those of us on the forums can no longer tell whether someone obtained their coin legit or not if all we know is that the player lost coin after selling stuff on the TP.

PS to OP your English is fine. I didn’t have trouble understanding you.

the account was compromised/hacked, the player spent it (but forgot), the player got less for the item on the TP than intended (for a variety reasons).

On average, I’ve been getting 1 key for every 3-4 maps completed. Sometimes I go 10 maps without a key, so your mileage will vary.

Giving everyone more loot won’t do anything except increase TP prices for everyone.

They might need to balance things so that silverwastes isn’t that much more lucrative than other types of content, but the solution won’t be more loot or more event rewards for every thing else.

In that case , it doesn’t sound like DR. You’ll have to contact ANet by creating a support ticket and working with them. (It also helps to use in the in-game /bug report tool — that gives them extra details about when/where etc.)

Good luck and sorry it’s not resolving for you easily.

rhapsody.3615:

Roxer.4609:

There actually are exotic breathers with a decent attributes variation in GW2 – Rime-Rimmed Mariner’s Rebreather. Not that they are very easy to get, plus they only were obtainable during the wintersday.

How does that help somebody today? They were very easy to get btw- you just had to finish a pvp reward track.

I use traveler runes on four characters, and I always hate going underwater with the 3/4 that don’t have a rune on their breather. It’s personal preference; all the “nay sayers” can simply just not get one if Anet ever fulfills our wish to have craftable aqua breathers.

Those were never “easy to get” for anyone who didn’t PvP.

In any case, since the actual breather isn’t required to swim underwater (take it off — you can still breathe just fine), there’s no reason to require an extra piece of armor + an extra rune. It’s not so bad for those who use only one armor set, but it’s a pain for people that swap often.

RoseofGilead.8907:

True, I forgot about that announcement about portal LFG posts. So yeah, that’s technically not allowed and can be reported as LFG abuse.

Usually, I’m on ANet’s side about exploits/abuses, but I feel this distinction is arbitrary. Plus, it would be mostly a non-issue if there was a separate category for achievements. Some people would post offers to help (and some of those would accept tips); others would offer to sell a service. I’m not sure how that is any different from doing a dungeon for people and selling completion as a service.

Still, it’s their gaming world, so we have to stick with their rules.

For the OP: try just offering the service, without mention of the fee. See if that changes things. (People who do that have said they make good money from tips, but I don’t know how it compares to what you’re making.)

The idea might be simple, but the execution wouldn’t be. As others have pointed out, there are lots of factors involved in determining the difficulty of world bosses. Since pretty much all bosses are still a challenge against smaller groups (as can be seen if you ever get in the “last” map), it’s clear that scaling is one of the major issues. Until that’s addressed, all world bosses will be snoozeable, as soon as people learn the dynamics.

• Tequatl: no one could do it; lots of complaints → almost never fails now.
• Clawr of Jormag: tons of people had trouble with being feared in phase 1 and chilled in phase 2 → now, most maps seem to have the hang of this.
• New Golem II: people used to wipe all the time from static etc → lots of people melee the event, since it’s not that hard to avoid the aoe damage.
• Evolved Jungle Worm: no one could do it; lots of complaints → hmmn, well, ANet might have found a way to deal with scaling by forcing us to divide up and require a mix of damage/control/support to succeed.

Event-based influence should properly go to the guild you are repping during the event; it even scales up with more people. Attendance influence is based on which toon you are repping at logon.

But as Merchant of Shadows suggests, it’s easy enough to buy influence. A guild stash (50 slots) costs 2,500 influence, which can be bought for only 5g — still a bargain.

I never thought the bank tabs were closed — the ‘triangle right/down’ mechanic is widely used for navbars and other things to simply hide stuff; doesn’t mean it’s ‘blocked’.

I close some tabs so that i can focus on e.g. just the tab that has my ascended rings. Plus, I wouldn’t want them to be ‘blocked’ because currently it’s too easy to accidentally close them when moving a lot of items from the bank, while a filter is in use; after the last item in the tab is moved, the cursor ends up right over a spot that closes the tab.

Back before megaservers and bosses-on-the-clock, this would also happen. It seemed that you needed to do enough damage at her final spawn and didn’t matter if you did plenty of damage elsewhere.

The difficult was (and perhaps still is) that there can be so many people at that last spot that you are doing less damage than you think: you see big numbers on your screen, but that’s because your computer hasn’t gotten the information from the server that the boss is dead.

Back in those golden olden days of yore, a reliable work-around was to go directly to the final spot, near the chest spawn, and spam skills from before she arrives until the reward pops up.

Since the event has been tweaked since, I’m not sure if that will still work (or if the root cause is even the same).

Good luck and please let us know what you did to finally get the chieve (even if you aren’t quite sure).

I couldn’t see what you were seeing at first until I realized: that’s about the size they appear for asura. Looks like your game isn’t sizing them appropriately when they first display; as soon as you do something that would force them to refresh, it does.

It’s likely to be something on your PC, perhaps a mildly corrupted file. Try using the command line option “repair” (takes 20-40 min, unless you have a fast drive). See the wiki page, http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

If that doesn’t work, you’ll have to contact Support by creating a ticket. Good luck.

I am hoping that the API will eventually identify the contents of containers in the game. Containers are those items which, when ‘used’, drop something else. For example, Trick or Treat bags, various champ bags, etc.

The wiki gurus have developed a number of methods to collect drop rate data, but they are usually hampered by not being able to event identify the possible drops. For example, many of the articles about limited-edition dye packs (e.g. Taimi’s dyes) still don’t have confirmation of the 25 colors that could drop from each. This makes it difficult to crowd source data collection.

It also makes it harder for the average player to make any attempt at deciding whether it’s better to open, sell, or save the container.

I can see potential problems with containers that have generic drops, such as Gift of Mawdrey, Gift of Generosity, or Bag of Gear — each of these has 100s or 1,000s of potential drops, that might even change as new items are added to the game. However, most containers have a defined set of potential drops, such as Trick or Treat bags, Wintersday gifts, etc.

tl;dr recommend adding a mechanism that the API can list the items that might drop from any container.

1. There’s nothing wrong with offering to help people get achievements in silverwastes or other maps.
2. It’s also okay to ask for a fee (although asking for tips seems to work out better).
3. There’s also nothing wrong with people joining a group, taxiing in, and dropping.

tl;dr imo, the OP isn’t doing anything wrong, but neither are those joining the OP’s party.

It would be helpful if ANet would add a category to LFG for “Achievements” and “Farming” (or something like that) — that would make it easier for people to find the right groups.

Nearly all of season 2 takes place in instances. What little takes place in the open world is mostly limited to following the trail of items visible to everyone or speaking to an NPC or two. In contrast, a lot of season 1 took place in the open world. In other words, more stuff like Breach/Vine.

That means, to make it available for replay would require rewriting most of the story, recording appropriate dialogue, and figuring out ways to tell the open world parts of the story. It might not sound that complicated, but the actual effort involved in considerable.

In other words, ANet needed to decide whether to focus on a new story or dedicating many of the same resources to retrofitting the old story into the current mechanics. The fact that it’s “part of the story” is, unfortunately not enough of a reason.

Perhaps: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Switching-during-that-minute-before-a-match

Not sure why it takes you more than 30 seconds to swap toons. Even on my laptop, it usually takes less.

In any case, that’s the grace period. If you can’t change that quickly, maybe try staying on the character that’s queuing. The system is designed to speed things along, so that folks aren’t waiting too long or changing things at the last minute.

Khisanth.2948:

“game_types”:[“Dungeon”,“Pve”,“PvpLobby”]

Someone forgot to put “Wvw” in game types where that item can be used.

yeah

a couple of items fit that bill

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2

On 23 January 2012, ArenaNet announced that Guild Wars 2 would launch by the end of that year, following beta tests throughout March and April.

Pre-purchase for Guild Wars 2 started on April 10th, 2012

On 28 June, ArenaNet announced that the game would launch on 28 August 2012.

We’re already past April 10, but then again, adding an expansion is a theoretically a smaller project than launching a new game. If I were to bet, I’d guess mid-May for pre-orders and Aug/Sep for launch…

However, since we don’t know anything about how well testing is going, I don’t think we can make any useful predictions about when pre-orders might begin.

I happen to be pleased with the current system, but I’d still like to see some of these improvements.

• WvW loot drops at your feet, regardless of where the foe is. PvE looting does not.
• AoE auto-loot range is not as far as ranged attacks can hit, so in PvE, you might not be close enough to loot a target that you kill (never mind one that runs off and dies due to conditions).
• By definition, “auto-loot” would mean that loot moves into inventory automatically. Instead, we have to ‘interact’ to grab loot. (As compared to say Diablo where just walking near loot is enough to pick it up.)

tl;dr good system, sure; still room to be improved.

• The least-effort method is just logon for the 55 laurel login rewards. At current values, this generates over 40g/month at a one-time cost of US$10 and ongoing costs of less than 5 minutes/day (taking into account converting laurels etc).
• US$10 could otherwise buy you 800 gems, which converts to ~80g at today’s prices and peaked at 96g in January.

Unless/until ANet changes the laurel rewards, it takes less than 3 months for the account to pay for itself.

As others have noted, you can also do other things with two accounts:

• Increase storage capacity.
• Chest farm via parked characters.
• Farm world bosses (if you know how to multibox within the Terms of Service). Requires level up, which can be done without much effort (albeit slowly) by doing certainly dailies, esp. PvP.
• Obtain additional rewards via achievements, harvesting home instance nodes, etc.

I don’t want a craftable aquatic breather. Instead, I want breathers to be skins only — the stats should come from the headgear; we shouldn’t have to buy a 7th rune for the limited amount of time we spend underwater.

I don’t mind it in GW2; there’s a lot less inventory management compared to most other games I’ve played.

• Deposit all + storage expansion.
• Wallet for a lot of currencies (could be expanding, please)
• Same salvage kit works on everything.

Could it be better? Sure. Do I think it needs to be prioritized over other changes? No, not imo.

Summarizing above in bullets:

• Outfits: buy once, unlock forever; no transmute costs.
• Armor: unlock each piece and get one free transmute (as an item); further transmutes cost one charge per piece.
• Tonics: single-use and everlasting varieties exist, including some that look like town clothes. Some allow combat, some allow costume brawling, and some neither. Some are account-bound on first use or acquisition. Some allow jumping/dodging; some not.

The GW1 wiki has a great guide for getting HoM points.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guide_to_earning_Hall_of_Monuments_rewards

• If you mostly PvP, you can convert your rewards into plat and plat can buy just about anything you need for the PvE-only rewards.
• Tons of players in GW2 that have GW1 accounts have minis they can’t use (in GW1). They are often more than happy to help people out.
• As many have stated, a lot of people earned their 30/50 with heroes alone (and there are guides on the wiki to acquiring heroes quickly, too).

tl;dr it’s already “easy” to get 30/50; you just have to be willing to invest the time.

Essence Snow.3194:

I am reminded every time we get new hairstyles that hair accessory colors are still an issue. Some of the new styles have very noticeable accessories.

It would be a great qol update to be able to access our dye banks for accessories. It just seems this should have been added long long ago.

I agree that I would like to be able to change the color of accessories without using up a kit each time.

MrWubzy.3587:

Outfits vs. Armor Skins

Hi, this is just a small survey about Gem Store outfits and armor skins. I thought it would be a cool little experiment (it’s my first survey) and what better topic than this? If you’re not up to completing the survey, feel free to post below about the topic’s…well, topic. I’d also like to hear your opinions about the survey if applicable. Thank you!

What about asking if we’d prefer to get 400 gems for every 500 AP, instead of only every 5,000 AP?

Of course, we all would prefer more armor skins, but they aren’t as easy to make as outfits. So the choice, from ANet’s point of view, is going to be “should we make 5 outfits? or just one full armor set?” The evidence suggests they offer a mix: sometimes we see 3 armor sets (one for each weight) and sometimes we see a couple of outfits in a row.

Now, I’m sure that plenty of people would still choose one armor set over 5 outfits, but not as many as would choose one armor set over one outfit.

ChoChoBo.6503:

Okay, so the level thing wasn’t a bug, but a new mechanic. Sigh, that’s a bit of a let down.

But yeah, 4 level 75-80 axes and got a level 80 rifle. No stones or anything. Was super surprised.

This has happened to me three times.
Except, when I went back to look at what I had actually tossed in (by comparing to what the log said I had obtained), it turned out to be that one of the four ‘identical’ items was something that had a similarly looking icon, i.e. the steam scepter icon looks a lot like the staff (coincidentally, i got a rifle from that particular combine).

I’m not saying that is what happened to the OP; it’s merely a possible explanation.

In the OP’s case, if it was exotics, I’d report it both in-game (to help QA with extra data) and to support (just in case they can help).

If you do each instance together, then when it comes time to choose an order, only the person who started the instance gets to choose. The other person’s choice is to accept that decision or to postpone it. If postponed, they would have to redo that instance and then make a different choice.

It’s a bit confusing because some times the question has a minor impact (help NPC A or let A die and help NPC, but sometimes, as with orders, it has a huge impact…but the interface offers the same choice: progress with the instance-originator or postpone. It can be hard to tell when it matters.

Essence Snow.3194:

I think it’s fair to say that this case is most likely not speculation. Speculation is buying items with the hope that things change due to an “outside” factor/s. Manipulation is the intention to influence change via deliberate action/s.

No, it’s not fair to say that, based on the data we have. All we know for sure is that the supply dropped by a relatively enormous amount and price rose a noticeable amount. We don’t know if it was bought by one person or even one consortium. We don’t know if individual buyers intended to impact prices or if that was a side effect of their actions.

There are all sorts of potential mechanisms that would explain the limited information we can see; manipulation is only one of many.

Khisanth.2948:

Kill Rhendak then go into WvW and kill a sentry is enough.
Unless you go and kill Rhendak a second time then the DR sticks to you like a plague and you have to wait until rollover. For the two daily chests anyway. The one that drops on death doesn’t seem to have this problem.

Not always. I’ve gotten DR from Rhendak (new for that toon) and then gone to WvW for an hour+ (tried ‘regular’ and EotM’) and still had DR on me at Rhendak the next time… or sometimes triggering the time after (i.e. I get a single event at best).

I suspect there’s some randomness to how quickly it builds up and how long (or what effort you need to put in) before it wears off. I also suspect there are more complicated mechanics than we can easily test — the more complicated and the greater the range in any triggers/anti-triggers, the less likely it is that bots can efficiently respond to it.

In any case, for this thread, the tl;dr is DR would explain why some people sometimes lose the opportunity for Shatterer loot. It’s also easy enough to test if that is what’s happening.

Firedancer.8350:

Brother Grimm.5176:

The real tragedy is if you get hacked and the hacker cleans it out….

NO ROLLBACKS FOR GUILD BANK!

^This

I never understood why people are so happy to put expensive stuff in their guild banks …

If you’re going to have that second account

• Not everyone has “that” second account.
• Plenty of those that do use it for gaining extra loot from JPs, events, etc, so they don’t have room for “expensive stuff”