Guild Wars 2

Glad to hear it’s going better for you, Egrimm.

Sly.9518:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Sly.9518:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Sly.9518:

Raids must be so hard!! I did my first raid boss last night in a training group, had 3 Reapers, 2 DHs, 1 Chronomancer, 1 PS War, 1 Condi Thief, 2 Druids, and downed him in 5 attempts no one had previous experience outside of 1 player. Once the tank learned how to properly kite around the mechanics by the 3rd attempt it was in the bag, the group improved immensely, but yeah they are so hard that you have to use the Meta Comp and know the fight inside and out before going into /s

Some people find the mechanics easy-enough; many don’t. The first group has trouble understanding the fuss or emphasis on meta; the second group has trouble understanding why the first group thinks it’s easy.

And course, there are probably a lot more people in the middle, who think raids are about the right amount of challenge. And many of those will want to reduce that challenge as much as possible by insisting on a narrow set of builds/comps when they play with randoms, when they train, or when starting a new static group with no experience.

And some groups can succeed with masterwork gear, with six (or fewer) players, or weird comps (Sabetha vs 10 double-Quiped thieves) — that shows us that mechanics matter more than gear/comps.

The group I was with were all first time players to Raids sans 1 who was a Reaper, the group was mostly pugs 6 out of 10. It wasn’t Meta comp in the slightest, one of the 3 reapers was the tank, we did not have 100% Quickness or alacrity uptime the ps couldn’t maintain 25 might stacks, players kept getting ported by Blues mainly the tank, greens were being missed, it took only 5 attempts, only about 45 mins total to clear the boss.

I’m just saying the raids aren’t as hard as people are trying to make them out to be, Meta isn’t needed, having prior is not needed(it helps but is by no means necessary, High dps isn’t needed, only one player was consistently over 10k dps, the rest were around 4-7k sand the Chrono and healer Druid.

VG was killed

And I’m saying raids are, in fact, just as hard as people who try them think they are.
So sure, meta builds are overkill and meta-comps aren’t needed for some people. But that’s not the majority of players.

Put another way, you (and your team) are better players than average. As a result, it might be hard for you to see that it’s difficult for others. Your experience isn’t typical.

It’s so funny people always try to belittle the “average” gw2 player saying they are bad, how do you know how skilled the “average” gw2 player is? But people are quick to say they are bads, so funny.

Yet it’s been proven time and again Raids aren’t the unconquerable, content they make it out to be, all it requires is paying attention to mechanics, nothing more nothing less, no super high dps is needed, no Perma Boons needednon eveyone, no Meta comp, all it takes is paying attention to mechanics, some bosses do need slightly higher dps but not too much higher.

Are you are saying the “average” player can’t remember 3-5 mechanics per fight or play their class in an average manner?

What are you on about? I’m not belittling the average player, I’m complimenting you and your team. In PvE meta events, hero challenges, and the like, we have plenty of opportunity to see how the typical player approaches mechanics. We see folks pushing foes away out of AoE circles, having trouble breaking defiance, and trouble avoiding the worst mechanics.

I don’t think that makes the typical “bad” — that makes them “typical”.

As I’ve said many times, it’s really hard for good players to realize that they are better than the typical player. And it’s hard for people who don’t understand game mechanics to understand why good players think they are easy. That’s got nothing to with having a low opinion or a high opinion — that’s part of the human condition.

Healix.5819:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

You’ve shown the turret farm. You haven’t explained how it’s killing the map.

It’s pretty obvious. I noticed the map die out as soon as people started zerging that area, then the casual AFKing made it far worse. Maps only hold around 50 people before the megaserver logic screws it up, so it only takes half that many to control the map. With a majority of the map at the farm, it means you’re far less likely to encounter players anywhere else, hence the dead map with nobody doing events. Those actually wanting to play end up being spread amongst all the maps, but since AFKing is so popular, the zerg is almost always in control, so the maps are dead and people stop showing up because of it.

This wouldn’t be a problem if megaservers were area based instead of the entire map, but that’s not really a possibility due to events. This is also why ArenaNet should stick to smaller maps, since you’re far more likely to run into other people, making them feel more populated even when they’re actually not.

Sorry, it’s not obvious to me. I go to the map, I see people doing events.

Each of the other maps also has a unique draw for people. Bitterfrost has the winterberry farm and the keyless chest run, Ember Bay has some easy dailies and fun events, Draconis Mons is new + the backpack, and Bloodstone Fen has the stat swappable trinkets plus its own easy farms for nodes & events.

In contrast, I find the Lake Doric map to be annoying in its hearts, node farms, and it doesn’t (for me) have a fun event farm. It’s the only LS instance for which I didn’t complete the map. Among my friends & guildies, people choose any of the other four maps before returning to LD; it has nothing to do with turrets.

When the farm is nerfed shortly, my guess is that we won’t see any notable increase in people coming to the map for other reasons.

Mine would be: 10 players who knew their prof, like a challenge, are willing to learn, take the encounters seriously, and also have fun with each other. With such a group, I could care less about the the profs or builds, because people would work together to succeed, with whatever folks wanted to bring (and folks would want to be helpful, so we wouldn’t see ‘useless to us’ builds).

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

And, not much of a turret farm, at that.

A heat map showing all players in the most populated instance would be needed to determine the map was ‘dead’ because of a turret farm.

That would be an interesting map, for any instance.

Yakez.7561:

I do care about other regional players as well. Main question what channel would lead to Anet consideration of topic.

ANet can’t afford to be in the business of worrying about currency exchange. That’s why they contract with DigitalRiver. You’d need to ask their management about their policies.

It’s to address an awkward issue with human nature: we don’t value things that are too easily acquired. Games drop a variety of loot so that the ‘good’ drops stand out, so that we feel we are always getting ‘something’ (even if it’s not much), and so that we choose what we want and what we don’t (rather than the game choosing for us).

That has the side effect that all of us will encounter a bunch of stuff we don’t need and must dispose of accordingly. Fortunately, the game largely makes that easy, with instant-sell for junk, salvage-all for gear, and quick-to-sell to the highest buy offer (on the TP).

There’s a balance between making things so hard that the stop being fun and so easy that they become trivial.

I don’t think it’s good for the game to spend resources to reduce the minor challenge of gathering, especially since there are many ways to work around the issue. Personally, I prefer to avoid annoying mobs, saving me time to do something else. Other people take thieves (for stealth) or guardians (for blocks) etc.

Thanks to the moderator + dev who adjusted this — the issue’s status has been updated to “investigating”.

It just occurred to me that the node for crystalline ore is misnamed. They really are…
Obnoxious Pods.

Donari.5237:

Keep in mind that if you do it again on an alt, you will have to craft the special items. Those only come once, via achievements (unless I’ve totally misunderstood). So the remaining weapons after your first one will cost you some valuable materials.

Correct.

Last time I checked, of the 5 weapons, 3 were somewhat cheaper to craft through the usual methods, 2 were cheaper via Ridhais. However, they do require fulgurite — if you don’t do a lot of the original HoT maps, that might be too precious a resource to spend.

edit: adding price details
Here’s a link to pricing details for crafting Hronk’s version of the five weapons, along with a Caladbolg variant (prices are identical for all five).
GW2 Efficiency

Summary: Caladbolg versions are cheaper if you have plenty of Fulgurite and need Viper’s or Commander’s or similarly expensive HoT stats; core ascended is probably easier to make and otherwise similar in price.

• Caladbolg variants cost ~57 gold, plus 30 Fulgurite (worth about 8g total, if you sold jeweled patches)
• More expensive: Hronk’s Wand is ~64g, the GS & sword are ~59g
• Less expensive: Shield ~51g, Dagger ~55g
• Add 5g to turn Hronk’s into e.g. Viper’s

(estimated value of Fulgurite is based on comparing jeweled vs non-jeweled patches & dowels)

I think Pax did a good job of reviewing each point in the original post.

More simply, Lokman, it sounds as if the game hasn’t changed in the direction you’d like it to go. I’m sorry about that, since it also sounds like there are some things you really enjoy.

Unfortunately, ANet cannot please all of its players, so it has to make choices about what to change, what to keep, and what to add… so it’s the best possible game for the greatest number of their target audience. If the current game isn’t to your taste, you might want to come back here after the expansion and check to see if things have changed more to your liking.

Here’s an alternative to paying the high ruble-to-gem costs:

• Find a friend in the US, EU, or UK who has access to a store with gem cards.
• Send them your rubles, via check, money order, or bank transfer.
• Have their bank (or yours) convert to local currency
• The friend buys the gem card and sends it to you (or otherwise gives you the code so you can add it to your account).

Will that save you 100 Rubles per 800 gems? I’m not sure that it would. However, it’s the same thing that Digital River is doing, except they’ve automated the exchanges and paid someone to be their friend (for the purposes of the transfer) (plus, ANet is paying them to be their friend… and ours). They pay the bank fees and deal with the uncertainties of currency exchanges.

Banks charge a bit more than the exchange rate to account for variations (and to ensure profits) and they charge transaction fees (because they can). Similarly, DigitalRiver charges a bit extra because that’s how they make money, which partly goes to dealing with fraud etc.

So the question is:
How many rubles are you willing to spend to save yourself the trouble of waiting to buy gems (and having to trust someone else to get them for, and dealing with the banks)? Is it worth 100 rubles every 800 gems to avoid going through all that? If not, I’m sure someone will be willing to be ‘your friend’… for a low, low fee.

Greener.6204:

You may do it for every character that has completed Hearts and Minds, the last chapter of HoT. You will receive an ascended weapon each time.

If you were just looking for the skins, you can change the ascended weapon your DH got back into a Regrown Caladbolg to then choose a different version.

Be sure to remove any infusions you have — like Zomorros, Ridhais destroys the original and replaces it, so all upgrades are lost.

Sarpan.9074:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It would “save time,” but it would also make the game less interesting. Part of the fun (for some people) is trying to figure out how the game works. On the whole, I prefer ANet to err on the side of making too little information available rather than too much.

It’s also a tool to confound gold farmers and bots, although (in my opinion) one of the less effective ones.

That said, ANet described how the caps work for Bloodstone Fen, so I’d prefer them to be consistent for the other LS3 maps, too.

It would be easy to explain on the wiki the daily account limit for Petrified Wood as has been done for Jade Shards. That would have saved me some frustration not knowing if I was experiencing a bug or if it was working as intended.

The wiki is written by players, not ANet. It requires painstaking research by one or more people to determine the limits and is subject to human error. Notably, Bloodstone Fen limits are hard to test because it’s also based on location, not just the map — it takes additional testing to determine where the boundaries of such limits are and if they exist at all.

There’s a lot of research that I’ve done for game wikis over the year & I’m happy to contribute. There’s also a lot of research I’m not willing to do, because the value is limited. And finding daily limits requires swapping a lot of toons, being sure to write down the instances, and trying to swap instances often. In the case of Petrified Stumps… well, there are often easier ways to farm the things that I can buy with them, so I mistakenly guessed it wouldn’t be much interest to anyone else (except to those who just like academic pursuits).

Or to put it another way, if you really want to know the limits, you could do the research and post your data to the Petrified Stump article’s talk page. I don’t expect you to do that, so I hope it’s reasonable to ask for patience while we wait for someone who is willing to figure it out.

You’ve shown the turret farm. You haven’t explained how it’s killing the map.

Sarpan.9074:

You know, it would really save folk a lot of time just to make this stuff clear.

I don’t know why it’s so hard to do that.

It would “save time,” but it would also make the game less interesting. Part of the fun (for some people) is trying to figure out how the game works. On the whole, I prefer ANet to err on the side of making too little information available rather than too much.

It’s also a tool to confound gold farmers and bots, although (in my opinion) one of the less effective ones.

That said, ANet described how the caps work for Bloodstone Fen, so I’d prefer them to be consistent for the other LS3 maps, too.

• Munificent Gift Skritt — Who doesn’t love the mini that removes those bulky packages from under your Wintersday Tree? Those are a fire hazard, mirite?
• Liadri — earned the hard way. Plus: some of the coolest mini animations in the game.
• Tequatl — somewhat common today (a few gold), it was rare (hundreds of gold) when it first started dropping. It’s a fond reminder of being present at my server’s first successful kill after the first revamp, backing before you could stack conditions.
• Black Moa — closest to the GW1 Moa Chick, my very first mini in either game.
• Ellen Kiel & * Evon Gnashblade — talking minis!
• Spooky Skeleton — Glows in the Dark! (a fun indicator of whether it’s Day or Night in game)

Also the Twisted Nightmare, Twisted Mender (heli-mini!), Panda, Chicenado, Gwynefyrdd.

Honestly, those who aren’t tech savvy have no idea what sort of machine they are getting. They go to a website or some computer shop and they’re encouraged to spend what they can afford. So it’s all-to-easy to end up with a great computer without realizing it.

dave.5913:

I am thinking of buying the HOT expansion. Is the game still fairly busy..or am I going to be running around doing most events by myself..

Depends which events. There have always been popular & unpopular corners of Tyria, places where many go and places where few do.

In the LS3 (newest maps), I always see people about (for a variety of reasons). In the original HoT maps, there are plenty of people for the events with which I think I need help.

If you do decide to plunk down the US$30 retail, here are a couple of quick tips:

• Take an hour or three in the original areas, to get used to your character again. A lot of folks find it hard to transition into HoT areas, so be prepared to rethink your build.
• Learn Gliding ASAP — it’s a game changer for the original maps and a huge help in HoT areas.
• If you do find yourself on a map with few people, use the LFG tool (a tab on your Friends list) to join a group on a more populated version of the map.
• Max the “Pact Commander” mastery ASAP also — the reward is ‘true’ autolooting, which is also a huge game changer.
• Despite my use of “ASAP,” take your time — there’s no rush (and those who do rush seem to have a harder and less enjoyable time than those who take it easy).

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I think I needed to add an /s

I’d go whole hog and make it a “/sarcasm” or even use “[sarcasm begins] …[/sarcasm ends]” for those not used to the trope/notation. (Well, go ‘whole walnut’, if you’re a vegan.)

And even then, you’ll encounter the poster who insists that sarcasm isn’t a useful rhetorical device for pointing out flaws in an argument made by someone who isn’t seeing the issue.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Maybe they need to put defiance bars on some of the regular mobs in vanilla PvE. Make the bars easily break using the right skills but the mobs are invulnerable until you do. That way people can learn to both see and react to defiance bars.

Rolling devils have defiance bars that are easily broken; I don’t see people breaking them generally. Pearl-laden clams in Ember Bay can be opened only with CC and yet many people just give up after they can’t damage them.

Admittedly, those aren’t in “vanilla PvE” and they don’t come with special instructions. However, I consider that sufficient circumstantial evidence to suggest that those unfamiliar with CC|defiance need a different sort of help to learn it.

As I (and others) have said in other threads: Vinetooth Prime does die when someone takes the time to explain the fight mechanics before triggering the event, regardless of whether it’s a small party or mini-zerg. Unlike most of the game, this event does require cooperation & coordination to succeed and I think that’s a good thing, because this might be the one place that people come motivated to learn, where the stakes are relatively low and the opportunity for patience is high.

Haleydawn.3764:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ah, totally missed that. Thanks for clarifying.
(And probably, I liked it being just weapons — plenty of other chieves for earning the backpacks.)

Plenty of other achievements for the weapons too, if you care to craft them.

Achievements for the precursors, not the legendary weapons themselves. Regardless, it’s a personal preference, which probably influenced whether I noticed the patch notes about the back items.

Dulfy’s guides are great for helping you with the context of the location. Once you can spot the ‘coin’, you “should” be able to get close without gliding. From whatever spot that is, you should be able to find the place to start your glide mentioned on the wiki.

Another alternative is to use one of the overlay programs, such a GW2 TaCO (TaCtical Overlay), which I believe includes routes for Go For the Gold and similar achievements.

Ryudnard.2587:

Can you allow players to create their chracters with different languages? GW2 has always been a global world.

You can already create characters using different languages, e.g. in theory, you could have George & Jorge & Georg. You can also toggle your language settings, so play in English as George and swap to Spanish for Jorge.

Was there something else that you had in mind?

It entirely depends on so many factors that it’s not worth comparing. The only reliable way to sell quickly without risking undercutting is to sell the highest buy offer. The next most reliable is to sell for 10-20% more than that and a good middle ground between risk|profit is a little more than halfway between buy & sell offers.

Here’s why you should resist your impatience and leave your legendary alone:

• Profit runs from 300 to 800g depending on the weapon.
• The sale price is 1800-3000g.
• It costs you 5% of asking price each time you change an offer, so that’s 90-150g to relist.
• Each relist therefore depletes your profit enormously.

For example:
According to GW2 Efficiency, you can forge Bolt for ~1800g. If you list it for just under the current lowest sale offer of ~3000g, you’ll gross 2400g for a net profit of 600g. If you relist once due to impatience, you’ll lose 150g, so you’d net 450g instead.

Incidentally, if, instead, you happened to have acquired Zap randomly and sold it directly for just under its WTS price of 740g, you’d end up with 629g.

The OP in that thread didn’t measure gold/hour; they only counted loot (and inaccurately at that: the current Silverwastes farm last ~45 min because it includes breach + chest farming).

The one person who mentioned gold/hour said 40 gold in one hour at the TP.

In direct answer to the OP’s question:

Sure, boost your engineer to L80 & try out the turret farm. Come back and tell us if you have 800g by the end of a week (buy offers for legendary weapons range from 1800-3000g).

Lyger.5429:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Over the years, I’ve noticed that ANet often handles things in graduated increments, rather than aiming for extremes. This can be seen with how they originally tried to handle silk and then leather, with how they originally tried to handle the zerker’s+scholar’s meta, how they originally tried to handle condi, and balancing in general.

Of course they’ve also gone too far at times, failed to hit the sweet spot and taken extreme measures. Worse, in my opinion, sometimes they’ve been too slow at making any changes at all, unless shortly after a patch.

All in all, I’d say that running a popular MMO is a nearly-impossible task and it’s all-too-easy to second guess decisions afterward. I think that if we really want to evaluate how well they’ve done, we need to be more thorough and not cherry-pick the examples that support our impressions: make a list of hundreds of issues at stake during a fixed time period and narrow it down to at least 50-100. Was the issue addressed? Was the solution ‘extreme’? Did it solve the problem substantial? Were there major unintended consequences? Did they make appropriate adjustments after the fact?

My guess is that we won’t find a specific pattern; it will be a mixed bag, just like it is for every other major MMO.

The post was just a means of offering my thoughts on the direction concerning certain issues in the game, don’t understand the need for a satirical reply. If you need more examples of what I mean just look at the changes done to certain classes/builds that completely remove them from the meta or ANet’s handling of dungeons by removing all incentive to run them before they adjusted this later on.

It’s not a satirical reply — it’s a serious reply. You’ve cherry picked the examples that suit your point of view, so I cherry picked related examples that show a different point of view.

My main goal was to suggest that it’s more nuanced and that if we really want to see if ANet takes a middle ground, we need to look at the big picture, not a few examples.

Ah, totally missed that. Thanks for clarifying.
(And probably, I liked it being just weapons — plenty of other chieves for earning the backpacks.)

Sly.9518:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Sly.9518:

Raids must be so hard!! I did my first raid boss last night in a training group, had 3 Reapers, 2 DHs, 1 Chronomancer, 1 PS War, 1 Condi Thief, 2 Druids, and downed him in 5 attempts no one had previous experience outside of 1 player. Once the tank learned how to properly kite around the mechanics by the 3rd attempt it was in the bag, the group improved immensely, but yeah they are so hard that you have to use the Meta Comp and know the fight inside and out before going into /s

Some people find the mechanics easy-enough; many don’t. The first group has trouble understanding the fuss or emphasis on meta; the second group has trouble understanding why the first group thinks it’s easy.

And course, there are probably a lot more people in the middle, who think raids are about the right amount of challenge. And many of those will want to reduce that challenge as much as possible by insisting on a narrow set of builds/comps when they play with randoms, when they train, or when starting a new static group with no experience.

And some groups can succeed with masterwork gear, with six (or fewer) players, or weird comps (Sabetha vs 10 double-Quiped thieves) — that shows us that mechanics matter more than gear/comps.

The group I was with were all first time players to Raids sans 1 who was a Reaper, the group was mostly pugs 6 out of 10. It wasn’t Meta comp in the slightest, one of the 3 reapers was the tank, we did not have 100% Quickness or alacrity uptime the ps couldn’t maintain 25 might stacks, players kept getting ported by Blues mainly the tank, greens were being missed, it took only 5 attempts, only about 45 mins total to clear the boss.

I’m just saying the raids aren’t as hard as people are trying to make them out to be, Meta isn’t needed, having prior is not needed(it helps but is by no means necessary, High dps isn’t needed, only one player was consistently over 10k dps, the rest were around 4-7k sand the Chrono and healer Druid.

VG was killed

And I’m saying raids are, in fact, just as hard as people who try them think they are.
So sure, meta builds are overkill and meta-comps aren’t needed for some people. But that’s not the majority of players.

Put another way, you (and your team) are better players than average. As a result, it might be hard for you to see that it’s difficult for others. Your experience isn’t typical.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Ashantara.8731:

I just finished watching the 3-hour movie

That explains this thread. Every summary out there is a far superior delivery of the story than Season 1 was.

It was hogwash among hogwashes, only coming together in the final four releases. Those were the best of it and it tied the rest in. The entire year (14 months to be precise, from The Lost Shores to The Nightmare is Over content) was a mishappen mess of poor delivery, bug-ridden gameplay, and mystery stacked atop of mystery without answer. The answers all came at once (what answers that did come at least) and at the end.

I do agree that Season 1 needs to be made part of the story journal – the main reason they haven’t is because the format they used then is simply incompatible with the format now and to make it part of the story journal like all other storylines they’d have to rebuild it from scratch. Which is apparently more work than worth in their opinion as they would rather tell the “cool” stories that are things like Lazarus being Balthazar (which, imo, is almost as kittencarlet Sue’s origin was).

But to say it was the best? Far from it. It was the worst; from a narrative and story delivery viewpoint, it has been the lowest part of all ArenaNet releases. In terms of gameplay, it ranged from bad to awesome (with, it must be said, skewed towards the awesome side). Its writing and voice acting was worse than Season 2 – when that came out I remember being “omg this is so much better!” but going back now I cringe at every third line delivered. Season 3 is definitely the highlight in terms of delivery, even if… things… would be better off not having been done and certain characters being done wholly differently (not just Laz/Balth but Kas/Jory and, especially, Braham).

Furthermore, the fast pace combined with temporary nature made it a stressful “must complete it all!” game rather than the relaxed form that Guild Wars had been from Prophecies, making it hard to be able to accurately critique the chapters because you were too busy trying to do the content then poof it was gone.

The very thing that you hate is what I loved about LS1: it was dynamic, it was urgent, it mattered whether we (as players) could figure out what was going, it kept changing and moving forward.

You’re absolutely correct that there were tons of bugs and disorganization. ANet couldn’t handle the load on the servers or keep us with the changing content. (And sure, it was horrid for anyone whose real life took precedence for a few weeks.)

But it was so much more fun (for me) than LS2, HoT story, or the Personal Story (after the racial stories). LS3 (again, speaking for myself) has done a better job of adding the sense of emergency, but it cuts itself off at the knees because we only get an update every few months.

I like LS3 and I hope that ANet keeps up the good work with Expac2’s story and LS4; it’s a good compromise that takes the best of ANet’s storytelling and leaves out much of the worst. All the same, I felt the most engaged in the story & the game during LS1 — and importantly, because of the speed, I was able to cut ANet much more slack about bugs and poor writing than I am now.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Prophecies appeared the way it did because – from what I heard from John Stumme – there was a disagreement on where the plot should go between the two main writers who were doing the overarching plot direction at the time. Which is why we got that split between focusing on the mursaat and focusing on the undead. It’s ironic because that disagreement seemed to have made it as good as it was, and just one or the other probably would have made it sub-par.

Ironically, you’ve articulated something that has bothered me about Prophecies ever since I first played it and I could never put my finger on it. That split focus makes it horrid for me. It makes it seem like (a) the writers couldn’t agree (which, as it turns out, they couldn’t) and (b) as if the player character is out of their depth. It also, for me, makes the story laborious rather than fun to complete.

In other words, the very thing that improved the story for you, damaged it for me.

Sly.9518:

Raids must be so hard!! I did my first raid boss last night in a training group, had 3 Reapers, 2 DHs, 1 Chronomancer, 1 PS War, 1 Condi Thief, 2 Druids, and downed him in 5 attempts no one had previous experience outside of 1 player. Once the tank learned how to properly kite around the mechanics by the 3rd attempt it was in the bag, the group improved immensely, but yeah they are so hard that you have to use the Meta Comp and know the fight inside and out before going into /s

Some people find the mechanics easy-enough; many don’t. The first group has trouble understanding the fuss or emphasis on meta; the second group has trouble understanding why the first group thinks it’s easy.

And course, there are probably a lot more people in the middle, who think raids are about the right amount of challenge. And many of those will want to reduce that challenge as much as possible by insisting on a narrow set of builds/comps when they play with randoms, when they train, or when starting a new static group with no experience.

And some groups can succeed with masterwork gear, with six (or fewer) players, or weird comps (Sabetha vs 10 double-Quiped thieves) — that shows us that mechanics matter more than gear/comps.

You can shift-click the item and then prepend /wiki to look up each on the wiki. Your result would look something like:

/wiki [Scarlet Briar’s Journal][Power Core Component]

Off the top of my head, here’s what I’ve done with the items you have:

• Scarlet Briar’s Journal: kept, for sentimental reasons (can also make a new one)
• Power Core Components: deleted; can enter Scarlet’s Lair without them now
• Donation Packaging: deleted, no longer any use
• Enchanted Treasure Map (already been there): vendor
• Molten Core Fragments: don’t know what that is.
• Krait Obelisk Shard Transcriber: check if you have toxic krait historian achievement; delete afterward
• Found Heirlooms: deleted, no value any more
• Queen’s Gauntlet Entrance Tickets: saving for the hoped-for return of the Queen’s Gauntlet
• Support Tokens (Ellen Kiel or Evan Gnashblade): saved for sentimental reasons; no value
• Shiny Foil Candy Wrapper: deleted, the raffle was 2014 only. If there’s ever a new one, ANet will use a different token
• Custom Arena Time Token: donate the time to anyone you know who maintains a custom arena (if you don’t know anyone, you can find arenas in the PvP panel or I can point you to a few folks)
• Support Reminder: open them
• Found Belongings: delete; no longer any value (and ANet said at the time they wouldn’t bring them back)
• Toxic Code Fragment: deleted, if less than 25 (if more than 25, enter lair to use)
• Aetherblade Code Fragment: ditto
• Scarlet Lockbox Code Fragment: ditto
• Watchwork Code Fragment: ditto

Fixed — forgot that we can still reach Scarlet’s Lair.

I believe the original limit was 1000 decorations per hall and now it’s 2000.

“Legendary Collector” was introduced to the game before there were legendary back items or armor. As a result, it requires legendary weapons only — the fact that it says “legendary items” instead is an artifact of the achievement’s age.

Like most achievements, it has little to do with the “amount of work” — it’s about giving people a set of tasks related to a common goal. There are all sorts of cheaper/easier ways to go about getting 25 AP and cheaper/easier ways to get a ‘title’ that you can display.

If The Ascension is counting, then that appears to be a bug, rather than that L-armor does not count.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Use the Wiki, as some of Dulfy’s guides are out-of-date.

Good luck.

Dulfy’s guides for this have two issues:

• They were written before you could glide, so there’s easier routes for several of these (if you can glide).
• The numbers don’t match ANet’s (Dulfy’s guide was published before ANet included numbers).

Forum contributor Ayrilana matched up ANet’s numbers with Dulfy’s for this and a few other achievements:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/Updated-DT-Coin-SW-Badge-Locations/5731066

So they aren’t “out of date” so much as not as useful as on the day they were published.

Actually, all of those listings are leftover from the days when it possible to list offers at any price at all; there didn’t used to be any restrictions. It’s an annoying artifact of the old system, but probably not worth adjusting.

Wiki Contributor Tanetris has written the most comprehensive, useful, and legible guide for gearing up I’ve ever seen:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/User:Tanetris/So_You_Want_To_Gear_a_Character

I strongly recommend it for anyone who has questions about which type of gear to get, how to acquire, and for considering cost/effort.

(I hope the mods like it well enough to consider making it easy for folks to find.)

Over the years, I’ve noticed that ANet often handles things in graduated increments, rather than aiming for extremes. This can be seen with how they originally tried to handle silk and then leather, with how they originally tried to handle the zerker’s+scholar’s meta, how they originally tried to handle condi, and balancing in general.

Of course they’ve also gone too far at times, failed to hit the sweet spot and taken extreme measures. Worse, in my opinion, sometimes they’ve been too slow at making any changes at all, unless shortly after a patch.

All in all, I’d say that running a popular MMO is a nearly-impossible task and it’s all-too-easy to second guess decisions afterward. I think that if we really want to evaluate how well they’ve done, we need to be more thorough and not cherry-pick the examples that support our impressions: make a list of hundreds of issues at stake during a fixed time period and narrow it down to at least 50-100. Was the issue addressed? Was the solution ‘extreme’? Did it solve the problem substantial? Were there major unintended consequences? Did they make appropriate adjustments after the fact?

My guess is that we won’t find a specific pattern; it will be a mixed bag, just like it is for every other major MMO.

Well, I guess I’m a fool, because I feel I have lots of options. With the new expac coming sometime in the next 5-9 months, I’d expect at least one more elite spec and more options.

Very few legendary weapons requires events to fail — there is almost always an alternative (and that is almost always posted on the wiki).

Which scavenger hunt step(s) are you working on? Maybe someone can offer a suggestion for how to make it happen

Katastroff.1045:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Katastroff.1045:

The good side is: its not killing the map like the engi farm in Lake Doric.

How is it “killing the map”?

Just 1 exemple:

Imelhoof poped when i tried the engi farming. He was greeted by about 175 turrets. but killing him fail because no one went after him when he left the turret’s range.

I used to go there before that engi farm stuff started, doing the Saindra Heaven events were really fun. But now i rarely see anyone when i go there. So now, i only go there for the peach and magic dailies.

It might be populated enough on week ends, but it used to be populated all the time and i dont think Draconis Mons has anything to do with it. Check out Bitterfrost and its always well populated.

So I don’t think your example explains how the turret farm is killing the map. It just illustrates that things change and that there’s a lot of stuff going on.

Bitterfrost is a far easier location to farm unbound (and loot for that matter) than Doric; that’s why it remains populated. Immelhof hardly ever got taken down when Doric first appeared and for many weeks after. That only changed when people started to zerg-farm leather.

The first day and first week and perhaps the first month will be chaotic. There will be the usual Nattering Nabobs of Negativity being quick to judge. Lots of people will be tagging up to gain credit. Then folks will figure out other ways of earning rewards that are less effort or more beneficial, e.g. winning skirmishes, and Doritos-for-Doritos’ sake will stop being a thing.

Put another way, we can’t really say yet what the impact of all these changes will be. That’s why the devs keep saying, “we’re open to the idea of tweaking or changing [xyz], but first, we’d like to see how it plays out with the current mechanics.”

Entenkommando.5208:

I’m pleased to see nobody answered Cliffside yet

I like the current cliffside. It’s just harder-to-do with inexperienced people than most of the other fractals. I can help just about anyone with all the encounters (including the boss fight and neck seals), but haven’t found a reliable way to manage the seals on the torso.

Sarpan.9074:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Whenever people cheat the system to get rewards without effort, it affects everyone else, especially in a game (like GW2) that has a completely global economy. The more bots there are, the more coin flows into the economy, along with other forms of wealth. That affects how much gold there is for bots to buy the shinies they sell on the black market and the price we get for own own loot.

That’s the part that affects you or I, regardless of whether we are concerned about the act of AFK farming or of botting.

That’s all a bit esoteric for my level of involvement in this game, though I can see how those who are much more involved in the economy than I would be annoyed at the skewing by botters. However, for the way I play, it’s not that big of a thing.

So, no, it really doesn’t hurt my enjoyment, but again, breaking the rules is not cool and I report bots when I notice them, I just don’t get too bent out of shape about the whole thing.

Also, I don’t really get the benefit of gold farming in this came since there is an official way to buy gold for real money, unlike WoW back when I played it.

You originally asked how anyone was affected.

You’re right that the impact is indirect, but it’s no less real. If you don’t eat at McDonald’s, you’re not directly affected by their decision (long ago) to introduce the McDLT — but indirectly, that new offering increased the demand on the US (and global) market for tomatoes, which resulted in higher prices and a different type of tomato becoming more commonly sold.

So sure, you can play GW2 contentedly without worrying about bots and gold farmers and gold sellers or hackers… but that doesn’t mean that they don’t affect your game.

The known issue tracker states (as of 2 Jun 2017) that a certain bug was fixed on 17 May 2017. However

• That bug is still present in the game
• There’s no mention in the patch notes of the fix being deployed since then.

Perhaps this should be listed as “final testing” (meaning there’s a fix, but it’s not yet out) or “verifying” (meaning y’all are still testing to make sure it works).

Issue: Draconis Mons: Mercenaries can stop respawning properly for the “Keep mercenaries from charging the lava with bloodstone magic” event
Status: Recently Solved

As of the time of my posting, the bug is present in the game (at least two maps had it stall for over 5 minutes: one case, the delay happened when only one more NPC needed to die; in the other, the delay was over 10 minutes).

tl;dr Known Issue Tracker states the Draconis Mons pre-Wurm mercenaries respawn issue was recently fixed, even though it’s not in the patch notes and the event still stalls. Could you update the listing appropriately? Thanks

Rising Dusk.2408:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s less gold to buy globs directly (unless you’re horribly short on relics)

It’s a real shame what side effects the increase of Mystic Coin value has had on other recipes. That said, remember the demotion recipe creates 3 globs, so you have to divide the cost by 3.

Good point about the 3 versus 1; I forgot about that.

Katastroff.1045:

The good side is: its not killing the map like the engi farm in Lake Doric.

How is it “killing the map”?

Doesn’t the scepter has to be one slot to the left of the torch for this to work?
I never bother, because I swap too many weapons for there always to be a free slot next to where the main hand goes, so I always end up manually moving something.

I would like this to be easier and more intuitive, but I’d rather deal with the inconvenience and have ANet work on other QoL changes, such as a keyring, aura wardrobe, shared gathering tool slot, gathering tool skin, etc.

This situation is annoying and easily worked around. The others require more effort on my part and are even more annoying to me in the long run (your mileage might vary, of course).