Guild Wars 2

DiogoSilva.7089:

Grinding the best DPS stat sets available whenever a new expansion comes is, for all intents and purposes, pretty much a less exciting and more convoluted version of the classic gear treadmill from other MMORPGs.

First, there isn’t any need for the vast majority of people to worry about changing stats: zerker and its variations will continue to be good/great for power builds sinister/viper and their variations will continue to be good/great for condi.

Second, people who speed clear or want to be “first” in completing new, challenging group content will always find a ‘need’ to get the latest “best” DPS builds, but even then, then can replace runes/sigils and stat swap their gear. There are only a handful of stats that require anything more than coin.

So gear-grind in GW2 is something that a minority of players impose upon themselves.

Progression in this game (after reaching L80 and maxing masteries) is much more about improving as a player and less about changing your skills/build or gear.

It drops just as often as before. The issue is that it’s account bound on acquisition, so it’s never available via the TP.

For the OP: you sure left out all sorts of stuff.
HoT unlocks HoT story, HoT maps, and 9 HoT elites; PoF doesn’t. Any expansion unlocks Rev and core masteries; that seems perfectly fair to me.

sokeenoppa.5384:

I think they should give hot for free If you buy pof. It is unfair i know but It keeps The hot maps populated.

It costs exactly the same to buy HoT + PoF as it did to buy just HoT in the first place. Would you prefer that everyone pay US$50 for PoF so they can include HoT in the base price?

It’s completely up to ANet to offer customer appreciation gifts as they see fit. The free Living Story Memory Boxes were available for more than a day, but the BL Key + Chest was only available on the specific day of GW2’s launch anniversary.

However, it seems rather shortsighted of them to surprise us with something like that. Think of how different our reactions would be if they did it this way:

Starting a few weeks before 28 Aug, announcements via Twitter/Facebook: “We’re celebrating GW2’s Anniversary this month with discounts and bringing popular favorites back to the gem shop. (Insert list of discounts/date.) Plus on the 14th, 21st, and 28th, we’re going to offer a special gift to players that logon.”

They could repeat the announcements several times, along with a reminder to “don’t forget to logon on the 14th 21st 28th for your free gift”

Are you sure you didn’t buy one of the other items already? That would also result in greying out the option.

Sifu.9745:

Thank you very much, guys. At least i can buy all 5 ascended trinkets for Laurels. I am not very much of a crafting guy, i need to think about is it worth my time and gold …

Btw, any idea why celestial gear is account bound? Is there any specific reasons behind? Also i can’t find Mender stats on TP, if i wanna go more healing oriented build on my Elementalist …

ANet never really said why they did this. One of our frequent posters on all things related to markets|economy|trading has speculated that ANet was running a controlled test to prepare for the future account binding of things like ascended crafting (where source materials can be traded but the finished product cannot). In the context of other such (suspected) experiments, I’m inclined to agree.

If you’re strictly PvE, though, I don’t recommend investing in healing stat-oriented builds — Elementalist can do quite a lot of burst healing via water. And generally, in this game, aggressive tactics (high DPS, low durability) work much better: in effect, shorter fights means you don’t have to survive for very long. And it turns out that the game offers quite a lot of active defense: dodge, blocks, blinds, reflects, and retaliation.

To give you some ideas of other strategies & builds, take a look at MetaBattle (Fractal section for aggressive builds, WvW roamer|backline for more durable ones, even if you don’t fractal or wvw).

No one is saying “it’s impossible”.

What they are saying is that to do as you suggest (“recreate …season 1 from scratch”) is at least as much work (and probably more) as creating an entirely new LS4 or LS5. So it’s not about being innovative or assertive.

It’s about choosing between:

• Attempting to recreate an old story, which can’t possibly meet the diverse expectations of a huge number of players, versus
• Introducing new stories, like those which have historically met or exceeded diverse player expectations.

Or if you’re an automobile fan, it would be like asking Ford why they don’t still make a Mustang II King Cobra, but only new models with new designs.

I agree with everyone who says that the gap between the Personal Story and LS2 is glaring. And I agree that ANet should do something more than a 30-60 second video. But there’s all sorts of other ideas that fall short of insisting that they stop forward progress and rebuild LS1 from scratch… regardless of how streamlined they try to be.

tl;dr no one says it’s nearly impossible; what ANet is telling us is that they have to choose between attempting to retell the old story and telling new ones.

You can go anywhere you like, do the story any time you like, with anyone you like. There are two restrictions and one caveat as follows:

• Your character must be at least at the relevant level to start each story (and progress it if someone of the same race starts it).
• You and your friend must be in the same region (NA or EU), although you can be on any world/server.
• And the caveat: if you & your friend are of the same race and ready for the same story, be thoughtful before agreeing to accept progress after the completion of a mission in which the player character must make a choice — accepting means your character makes the same choice (and potentially, retroactively accepts some previous choices). This only affects a handful of people, so the short of it is: pause before “accepting” anything in this game.

Celestial gear is account bound only; you have to make it yourself. You’ll need to buy the recipes for each piece of gear and the insignia/inscription. In addition, you need to “charge” 5 quartz crystals per piece: you can make one charged quartz per day at a place of power (requires 25 plain quartz per charged quartz).

Since the time gate is substantial, many consider it worthwhile to skip exotics and start building ascended instead — by stat swapping gear with other stats, you only need the recipes for the exotic insignia and inscription. Higher cost, but better value for the effort.

Neither the 1x nor the 10x is better than the other. They just give us an option to trade consistency (1x recipe) for convenience.

• 1x is more stable because more people are likely to get close to average results from ~249 attempts to get to 77 clover.
• 10x is faster because the average result only requires ~24 attempts, but it’s a lot more likely that you’ll need more than average.

If you plan to make 100 legendaries, then it’s unlikely to matter which method you use. Since most of us are unlikely to plan to make more than 1-2 at a time, reasonable people can differ about whether they value convenience more than consistency.

tl;dr are you feeling lucky, forger? go ahead, pull the 10x recipe. (otherwise stick to 1x)

Amaimon.7823:

this one is insane, not only because a precursor is more likely to drop,

Clearly, that’s not true. Lots of people get the drop on the first try; that’s never true of precursor drops.

(The rest of the analysis is similarly peppered with hyperbole that distract from what’s actually going on.)

The fact is that with RNG for so many of the items in the Aurora collection, nearly every player is going to encounter at least one item that seemingly never drops. That’s what happens with random drops.

Alternatives have their own issues, e.g. fixed drops are ultimately boring (go there, do that, done), gathering (e.g. for Mawdrey’s Foxfire) get boring, and scrap collection (e.g. HoT currency) feels grindy after a while.

That’s why most collections include a mix of each method.

Park a toon in Bloodstone Fen. Swap to it while waiting for friends. If the event chain is up, great; give it a whirl. If not, skip it for the day and come back later. It’s not fast, but you’ll get the drop sooner or later (and the drop rate won’t matter so much, if you count the amount of LS3 currency you rake up).

Previous Quotes by Developers on Bringing Back LS1:
ANnet Ben

It would [take] longer than 6 months.

ANet Ben

If things went smoothly, with the entire living world team plus extra veteran developers working on it, maybe 6 months is theoretically possible. But with old content, things rarely go smoothly. Issues pop up that you weren’t expecting that increase the amount of time required. And even if it was feasible in 6 months, taking all those developers off of new content just isn’t worth it IMO. We have way cooler things that we can work on.

ANet Ben

one of the problems is much of the content is not instanced, and theres also a TON of bugs in that content that would need to be fixed, since our game code and tools have changed so much since then.

ANet Ben:

Question: If it had been even a minor priority when this was first requested back at the start of Season 2 — nearly three years ago! — it’d have been done by now, surely?

Answer from ANet Ben: That would have pushed back everything a lot. Season 3 would be behind, the expansions would have been behind, new content is a better use of developer time. I wish Season 1 had been built differently, but alas it was not.

ANet Ben

Question: Any chance that we as players (and surely lot of us are programmers, 3D modelers and coders) could help?

ANet Ben’s Answer: As cool as that sounds, there’s a lot of logistical issues with something like that, and it would still require a lot of dev time to coordinate. Plus, more leak potential.

Mike O’Brien responding to the comment, Will season 1 ever be playable? There are players like me who would love to play it and even pay for it.

It’s a question that comes up a lot. I have favorite moments I’d love to play again too. But we researched it a while back and realized that restoring and updating Season 1 content, and putting it into episode format, isn’t particularly easier than making new episodes. And we think the community is better served with new episodes.

I don’t think people recognize just how much effort it is going to be to make a repeatable version of LS1. Of course it’s possible; it would just take an enormous amount of resources. And that seems like an unnecessary distraction, given that people are already jealous of ANet diverting any resources to anything that doesn’t fit their idea of a better game.

Out-of-Game, Historical Context

LS1 was designed and implemented as temporary content. It was part of a (since-discarded) plan by ANet to constantly introduce new content and gradually evolve the game, so that many existing maps would be unrecognizable (in terms of challenges, foes, etc). The idea was: much better use of resources to re-use the same zones and so much more exciting to keep adding new life to the existing world. Hence: the term Living World.

It was a great, epic idea and I wish it would have worked. I think part of the issue was ANet’s implementation (they bit off more than they could chew and there were lots of scaling, technical, and reward issues to start with, leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths about the concept). Part of the issue is also what we’re used to: we like repeatable content. We like being able to be absent from a game, without feeling that we missed something important (reward and lore both). We like having the chance do ALL THE THINGS in the game.

LS1 disrupted all our expectations and its implementation was rough (whether flawed or just slow to get going no longer matters). And ANet, sensibly, dropped the idea and turned LS2 into repeatable content.

Background, In Game Experience

There are three aspects that made LS1 epic:

• It was not repeatable. You had to be there at the right time. (Notice this is exactly one of the primary issues that got ANet to drop the original concept: it was both a great idea and a fatal flaw.)
• The open-world battles were epic. Unlike Auric Basin (which has an achievement for defending the city one hundred times), getting in a single victory was a combination of great mapwide teamwork, individual skill, and a bit of luck. It felt amazing each time (compared to DS, which feels disappointing if it’s not over quickly enough).
• The instanced content was extremely challenging for nearly everyone. People scrambled like crazy to find ways to beat it. Depending on who you talk to (and how good their memories are), many would say it’s comparable to today’s fractals (perhaps T3-4 or less).

Final Background: To Make it Repeatable

To make it repeatable, we’d have to drop all three of the things that made it epic: it won’t be dynamic, it won’t include open world mega battles, and it won’t be super challenging for five people. So let’s presume that the only thing we can get is a facsimile of the story, told in chapters.

The original instances were designed for the mechanics of the day. They were designed to be temporary, so little thought was given to making them last. That means: they’d have to be redone, nearly from the ground up.

There were dialogues that took place in the open world, in areas that don’t exist anymore (or have different NPCs, foes now). Those would have to be turned into instanced content.

The open word battles would have to be included somehow, so that’s new cinematics or entirely new encounters meant to model the idea, with shorter cinematics to show the impact on Tyria.

To do all of the above requires rewriting parts of the story, rewriting the instances, redesigning encounters, adding new cinematics. All of that would need to be translated into French, Spanish, German, and Chinese. Some of the voice actors are no longer available, so ANet would have to hire substitutes (and decide whether to redo old dialogue or not — probably not).

In short, it’s an enormous amount of work to get us … another Living Story, which some people have already seen (and can’t possible meet expectations for epic-ness).
———————————————
So, sure, it’s possible. It’s just not practical given the pressures on ANet at this time.

Faaris.8013:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Sif’s Guide for Casual GW2 Gamers to Grind Gold without Grinding So Hard You’ll Burnout:

• Original Reddit Post
• Direct link to guide

This it he most comprehensive guide I’ve seen to making gold.

No chapter for fractals? They beat every other source for earning gold and the only one mentioned in this “no burnout” guide is the fractal will will certainly burn you out, L40.

In the very first paragraphs, the author asks for feedback and includes their in-game name. If you feel something is missing, tell them.

Regardless, it’s still an incredibly thorough guide, perhaps just a bit less thorough than you hoped.

Ashantara.8731:

Carighan.6758:

The veneer of “your choice matters” was enough at the time, we were all amazed by how amazing the game was.

Nowadays we have less actual choice, but much better systems, but it’s all a wash.

Exactly. It is no longer amazing that way, and the reason is not the fact that the game isn’t “new” to us.

There’s no “fact” either way.

It’s demonstrably true that new games feel fresher to more people than expansions and it’s also true that some people feel reinvigorated or enjoy expansions more for similar reasons.

I never felt that there was “choice that mattered” in GW2 and I was pleased by that. I don’t want to worry about whether choosing an Asura Warrior hurt my playing experience, outside of deciding I don’t like the voice acting.

So each new update, it’s easy for me to be amazed by all the other elements presented, because (to borrow a phrase) the veneer of choice isn’t that important.

So for me, the content is always “personal” and potentially exciting; it just doesn’t depend on the sort of thing the OP is hoping to find in this game (and in my opinion, that GW2 never really had).

Try clearing your cache and repair your client — that often resolves slow TP loading issues. I use it every day and only experience lag rarely; closing and reopening the TP window resolves it 100% of the time (for me).

(Instructions can be found by following the links to support and typing in “trading post” and “repair” respectively.)

Almost certainly you won’t be able to. ANet can’t let you waive participation for the same reason that you couldn’t participate in the first place

Australia (and Quebec) have rules in place that are theoretically designed to protect participants from scams. Those end up causing a lot of promoters to skip offering contests, because it increases the cost of the contests, without generating a comparable amount of publicity (or participation). In other words, it’s just easier for legit companies to stick to places that offer only basic protections. On the other hand, it’s also easier to prosecute scammers in those locales so that’s good for the grandmas etc.

tl;dr no, there’s probably no way for your design to be considered unless you’re a participant.

Dawdler.8521:

Its called random for a reason. Thats why no sane person is even using the MF for clovers any more, you get tons from reward tracks anyway, for free.

Lots of sane people don’t do content that has reward tracks.

For the OP: 35 tries is not enough to determine whether there’s an issue or not. The odds of getting only 3 successes is about 500:1; that’s bad luck, but not anything close to unprecedented for an MMO, especially one with so many players.

The 10x recipe is a lot faster, but the variance is a lot higher, because a single streak of fails means a lot of ecto/m-coins, whereas the 1x recipe is more tedious but is much more likely to offer near-average results.

Over the years, my average is just over 30%. I have the occasional hot streak and lots of unlucky streaks.

tl;dr if bad streaks frustrate you, swap to the 1x recipe (or take Dawdler’s advice and get your clover from the various reward tracks).

If it makes you feel any better, Quebec is also excluded (even though the rest of Canada is eligible) because reasons.

GW1’s Jeweled Staff became GW2’s Jeweled Trident; there’s no reason the process can’t be reversed.

However, the implication in the OP is incorrect: we know that ANet doesn’t have current plans for improving underwater content, but we don’t know whether or not they have long term plans for it. For example, ANet’s been developing Mounts for years and years, long enough that some of those plans could be leaked a year ago…and yet ANet never officially commented on them nor replied to any of numerous threads about mounts.

In other words, it’s entirely possible ANet has a plan for aquatic content; we just won’t know about it until just before it’s released (or, unfortunately, until it’s leaked, no pun intended).

According to GW2 Efficiency, there is no amount of value that you should have. GW2/E just tells you what other registered users have and you should assume that people who take the time to register are far, far more likely to be heavy earners.

Further, it’s entirely meaningless what your account is worth in gold. If you have at leat one character that you like to play and enough shinies to keep you happy, what difference does it make to you? Unlike RL wealth, you can’t actually do more with higher account value.

If after reading above, you’re still really keen on increasing your account value, buy gems with RL money. That’s by far & away the most efficient method.

Fiery Dragon Sword is the Fiery Dragon Sword.

It’s a bit like asking if my Dr Who TARDIS paperweight should be updated every time the show’s designers change the design — no, because mine is a model, not the real thing.

Mel.3064:

You have to kill them without dieing/downing and you must be alone in the instance

You can down; you can’t die. You can have other people in the instance, it’s just harder to make sure you succeed.

The goal is to kill a fixed number of chak. Just like beginner and expert, you can kill more. The reason the achievement is so wonky is that you get barely enough chak to succeed, so it you miss some for various reasons (see below), you won’t complete the achievement.

And there are many reasons why you might not get ‘credit’. You need to get the “killing blow”, which means that if someone else helps by killing chak, you’re out of luck. Chak that die due to secondary conditions also don’t always count — the condition gets the kill, but you don’t.

And of course, it’s possible that one or more chak might spawn inside a wall, making it hard for you to find/target them. There’s probably a couple of other reasons, too.

That said, plenty of people have completed the achievement despite the issues. You can fail a lot; you only have to succeed once. So my advice is: don’t hold your breath waiting for ANet to simplify this (even though there are so many ways they could).

Practical Advice

• To deal with “hidden” chak, bring a character with access to spammable AoE damage that doesn’t require “line of sight” — the ideal choice is guardian staff. Use that when you run out of visible chak. (Tempest overloads and reaper shroud and such should also work, but it might take longer to tag the chak.)
• To deal with other people getting credit: — let your friends buff or heal you; don’t let them fight.
• To deal with accidental death via conditions: stick to lower DPS power builds.
• To deal with chak dying too quickly: same, stick to lower DPS power builds.

It’s been a while since I walked anyone through this, but when I did (about half dozen folks), this always worked (once it took two tries).

tl;dr slow & steady, use staff guardian (if you can) to find hidden foes

To a certain extent, the Vinewrath of Silverwastes is the Marionette fight done “right”. ANet definitely learned from their experiences with the first Marionette fight:

• There’s no set timer; hop into the zone whenever and progress it to the meta as fast as the rest of the map allows.
• Failure or success doesn’t depend on a random team of 5, but a squadfull (although, those events can succeed with as few kitten especially these days).

I’m sad that we haven’t seen more like Silverwastes, but have seen more like Dry Top (like DT, HoT metas have everything on a timer: you have to work some to prep for meta and then work some afterward to collect loot efficiently; not as bad as DT, but still regimented).

Danikat.8537:

I’ve got a free pass to the Captain’s Airship which came from my free Season 1 Memory Box, and after that I’ve got one from the 5th bithday (going to pick the Mistlock Sanctuary) but it’s definitely not something I’d miss once it’s gone.

Just wait until you’ve lived without Nova Launch, Low Gravity, or return-to-last-location. Or, for that matter, the convenience of all those services within a few clicks (i.e. Nova Launch) of each other.

Fluffy.1932:

The problem with these lists is they are dependent on people’s different experiences.

Yes, that’s exactly why it’s valuable to state up-front the criteria being used. “Most|least likely to fail PUGs” isn’t the only possible criteria, but it’s easily discussed and is relatively independent of the individual’s personal experience. That’s also why it’s more useful to group the encounters into a few categories rather than trying to find a strict rank — it’s easy to disagree about whether Sloth is harder than VG; it’s easy to agree about whether both fail as often or not.

Other reasonable criteria could be:

• Fewest number of people to successfully complete the encounter
• Fastest speed clears.
• How easy it is to find a group (on the theory that easier encounters fill up more quickly, although of course, that’s disputable).

Generally speaking, the lawyers figure out which countries they can negotiate contracts in and defend ANet’s legal rights. For example, Marnsburg might encourage intellectual property theft and miss the list, while Bahkan’s laws might be so over-the-top protective of contestants that it makes it too risky to offer a contest there.

(The last is why Quebec is often an exception to Canadian eligibility.)

I’d prefer the current stat system to be scrapped and replaced with a build-your-own solution.

Currently there are about 4 dozen unique names just for L80 stats, not to mention exceptions for trinkets plus new names associated with ascended gear. Currently, you make each stat roughly the same way: patches|dowel + “activator” + bonus mat (ecto for exotics, dark matter for ascended, nothing for greens & blues).

What if instead of vials of blood producing zerker stats, we used blood to produce power bonus, claws for ferocity, and fangs for precision? Zerker’s “activators” would use something like 4 blood for every claw+fang, while Diviner would use 3 blood, 3 freshwater pearls for every claw+fang.

ANet could restrict stat availability to owners of expacs by restricting which “activator” recipes we could learn.

This allows ANet complete flexibility to offer all sorts of stats, removes the necessity for players to care much about memorizing names, and create a more interesting market, since nearly all of the “fine” materials would be of interest for some stats.

The current system was fine for 2012, but it never was a good model for growing the number or diversity of stat combinations.

There’s two ways to address the lack of accent in lore:

• In Tyria, everyone talks much the same regardless of being cut off from each other for hundreds of years.
• The TARDIS translation solution, in which the listener hears everyone speaking in their own language (and even sees the corresponding lip movements).

Both have long literary precedent — there would be just too many stories that don’t get told, if we had to worry about language & dialect & accent too much.

Harder to explain is ANet’s decision not to hire and direct/instruct voice actors with a distinct flair. Part of it might be that there are quite a lot of accents to cover: North African, Middle Eastern, Persian, and perhaps even other parts of Africa.

Then again, we haven’t seen all of Elona yet, so maybe…

I think you’re reading too much into the legalese.

It’s a standard disclaimer that means that the design shouldn’t promote the real life use of drugs or drink or RL weapons. Obviously it’s okay for a weapon to look like a weapon.

Hesacon.8735:

That’s assuming today’s prices are intended. Coins would adjust in price to meet parity with laurels or ascended crafting items. It would effectively tie a price ceiling of coins to other loyalty chest items, whether it’s 10 coins or 20.

ANet’s been pretty clear that they like high m-coin prices: it’s a good way for wealth to transfer painlessly from rich players impatient to craft to new players impatient for gold. I doubt ANet is going to be concerned about today’s or next month’s prices (which will be higher, after PoF launches).

Everything that requires m-coins is an optional shiny, with the arguable exceptions being:

• Specialization weapon collections — these require the mystic version of the weapon and those are pricier these days.
• Shared food recipes. The cost of these makes it unlikely for any but the super wealthy to want to create new recipes, because it’s simply cheaper to produce lots of the food and transfer by email or g-bank (it’s just horribly inconvenient).

The first one… I’m not sure ANet’s worried about that. Lots of collections include gold and material sinks, so this isn’t unusual. As with m-coins, we’re just used to cheap mystic weapons.

The second one… I think that ANet could be convinced to change the formula, perhaps substituting some mystic stones for mystic coins (or whatever; the details should be left to them). Bulk food has an important use in WvW and perhaps raids; it should be pricey, but not out of reach for the average guild leader.

Hesacon.8735:

One of the options for the loyalty chest as it is today is 7 mystic clovers. These would normally take ~21 mystic coins to make, but mystic coins have other uses. Would we be able to get another option of 21 mystic coins from the chest?

That seems unlikely, since it would make it by far & away the most valuable option. Even laurels have never been worth much more than 20g total. (The first month or two, adding 20+ m-coins to the chest would probably reduce market value of coins, but that would change quickly as people who are making legendaries realize that’s not enough to offset their requirements quickly enough).

I think asking for ~10 m-coins is more likely to get attention, assuming that folks at ANet agree that there ought to be more faucets for coins.

In the meantime, if you want more m-coins, choose the laurel option, then use those to buy medium crafting bags (or heavy — you can check various websites for the most profitable option), sell the contents, and use your funds to buy mystic coins. You’ll get about 14-15 coins at today’s prices.

I’m sure that if someone wins who already owns the Crystalline Dragon Wings and graciously asks support about it, they’ll figure out something.

I think the only folks that might even care that much are the 15 in places 6-20, since they’ll get just a T-shirt, an achievement chest’s worth of gems, and the glider skin.

For reference:

• Guild Wars 2 ‘Design a Weapon’ Contest Announcement
• Contest Rules

PRIZES
1st place

• The integration into the game of the Design entry,
• Printed version of the Design entry signed by the development team,
• Kite City Cook and Becker print,
• Path of Fire T-Shirt,
• Code for 2000 gems
• Guild Wars 2 signed artbook,
• Crystalline Dragon Wings Glider

2nd Place

• Integration into the game of the Design entry
• Printed version of the Design entry signed by the development team,
• Eir Swimming Cook and Becker print,
• Path of Fire T-Shirt,
• Code for 1200 gems,
• Guild Wars 2 signed artbook,
• Crystalline Dragon Wings Glider

3rd place

• Includes the integration into the game of the Design entry,
• Printed version of the Design entry signed by the development team,
• Charr Cook and Becker print,
• Path of Fire T-Shirt,
• Code for 800 gems,
• Guild Wars 2 artbook,
• Crystalline Dragon Wings Glider

4th place

• Printed version of the Design entry signed by the development team,
• Flying past Kite City Cook and Beckerprint,
• Path of Fire T-Shirt,
• Code for 800 gems,
• Guild Wars 2 artbook,
• Crystalline Dragon Wings Glider.

5th place

• Printed version of the Design entry signed by the development team,
• Path of Fire T-Shirt,
• Code for 400 gems,
• Guild Wars 2 artbook,
• Crystalline Dragon Wings Glider.

6th – 20th Place (15 people)

• Path of Fire T-Shirt,
• Code for 400 gems,
• Crystalline Dragon Wings Glider

Kozara.1682:

Did i miss something ?

You did not; someone at ANet didn’t finish putting together their checklist.

• New fractal including in ‘build’? Check
• Fractals renumbered to include new fractal? Check
• Hard-coded references to specific instances by number converted into dynamic references that update each time we add a new fractal? Nope, beyond the scope of current feature; no problem
• Manual update to hard-coded references updated? Um…

Sif’s Guide for Casual GW2 Gamers to Grind Gold without Grinding So Hard You’ll Burnout:

• Original Reddit Post
• Direct link to guide

This is the most comprehensive guide I’ve seen to making gold.

OriOri.8724:

They’ve been developing PoF for almost 2 years now, and have been quiet about mounts, because there was a ton of outcry against them.

It’ s more likely that they were quiet about mounts because they are quiet about anything that is “in development” as opposed to “nearly ready to launch.” There’s lots of people clamoring for mounts even as there are lots railing against them.

So perhaps let’s say simply:

Mounts have been development for 2+ years and we only heard about them (officially) when they were ready for launch. The same might be true for underwater combat and for that matter: build templates, sigil swapping, and overhauling WvW match-ups. ANet is cagey about the stuff they are working on.

In contrast, they are more clear when they are not working on something, e.g. LS1 return, new races, and new professions. (And that doesn’t even mean we’ll never, ever see them; it just means we won’t see them within the next year or three.)

According to Mike Z

All features for the expansion have been revealed, so we shouldn’t expect any other surprising reveals.

Separate from the launch of PoF: LS4 (probably 4 months later, maybe sooner), new fractals, and new raids (the last two will be on their own release schedule, independent of LS4 and PoF). There might also be some new “side stories,” but unlikely that we’ll see them soon after launch.

Every month or so, someone starts a thread about this topic and the responses quickly fall into three categories:

• Those who think multi-guild hurts their guild’s ability to recruit, retain members and to be the go-to place for guildies.
• Those who think multi-guild is great for recruiting, since folks can e.g. be in fractal guild and a wvw guild, without getting frustrated by being in one guild that doesn’t do both.
• Those who don’t care because they don’t join guilds, they only join with a small circle of friends, or they only join one guild anyhow. For them, multi-guild = one guild per account.

There are digressions about storage guilds and per-character guilds, which don’t really change the main points above. Multi-guild supporters don’t see why the game should restrict choice, because guilds can choose to be 100% rep (or nearly so); one-guild fans don’t see how it’s even possible for someone to belong to multiple guilds and be a loyal member to them all.

I’ve yet to see one of these threads end up with someone changing their mind about the topic.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

dace.8019:

The only way to get a Gift of Battle (required for Legendary crafting) is via a WvW reward track.

Please change this, preferably by adding an additional method that can be done by playing exclusively PvE content; be that fractals, open world, dailies, achievements, crafting, dungeons, world bosses – whatever works.

Why would this be a good thing for the game? Why do you think ANet changed the requirements for the GoB more than once, each time making it less convenient for those who are strictly PvE?

The requirements have always been either Badges or the Reward Track. Adding badges to the achievement chests made it more convenient for PvE only players, not less.

Achievement chests have included Badges of Honors since they were introduced in 2013. For example or here

If you mean that introduction made the GoB more convenient to obtain for PvErs, sure. But that was a change to the reward system, not to the acquisition method of the GoB itself. (And one could argue that ANet changed the requirements specifically because they didn’t anticipate that PvErs would use them to bypass WvW.)

The requirements started off as badges only, which required no WvW by full time PvErs via Achievement Chests. ANet added an rank requirement (which, for a time, also wasn’t hard to bypass, due to the availability of liquid WvW xp). The latest change to reward chests changed it again, to make it extremely difficult for PvErs.

In short, each change to the acquisition method for the Gift of Battle made it harder for PvErs. (Or at worst, every change since July 2013.)

That brings me back to the same question: why do we think ANet has kept changing the requirements? Do we think it’s an accident? Or do they have a particular reason?

If they do have a reason, why would they turn around and change the requirements again?

Of course, I’d prefer if they addressed this directly, rather than leaving it up to us to speculate.

you want to create a support ticket to get an individualized response:
https://help.guildwars2.com/anonymous_requests/new

The forums are good for alerting about bugs (or investigating them); you need a ticket to get someone to help you track down what happened for you personally.

Raven Lord.3407:

Thank’s I forgot about how the mystic forge only lets you drag and drop valid recipe items. I was able to get the insignia and anthology of heroes into the mystic forge so looks good!

Good to know! I was hoping you’d come back to confirm (or refute) the recipe. (I don’t have a use for the stat, so I didn’t want to spend precious currency to test.)

Glad it worked out for you.

The characters also show up in the API, so you can use GW2 Efficiency or similar sites to check to see if your demo characters have been purged (or not).

Amineo.8951:

Easy (bosses that PUGs rarely fail): Trio, Escort, Mursaat Overseer, Samarog, Gorseval
Medium (bosses that PUGs can fail easily): VG, Cairn, Sloth, Keep Construct
Hard (bosses that can be an absolute chore to do with PUGs): Sabetha, Xera, Deimos, Matthias

I like your rubric for distinguishing among hard|medium|easy levels of difficulty. It’s measurable and depends mostly on observation rather than opinion. I also agree that it’s better to group encounters together rather than trying to establish whether VG is absolutely harder than Sloth or not.

TBH the mastery levels should go away. They fly in the face of what Anet said they would never do in GW2: raise the level cap.

You recognize that the two progressions aren’t remotely equal, right? Leveling is per character, while mastery is account bound. Leveling adds to base stats and abilities, while masteries fall into a couple of categories:

• Optional benefits to rewards, e.g. city swiftness, autolooting, increased loot in fractals.
• Content-specific gating, e.g. mushroom jumps & gliding, e.g. anti poison, and quite a lot of LS-3 masteries.
• Optional-crafting gates, e.g. legendary crafting mastery, some of exalted.

None of those are required in core Tyria and none of those are required for HoT Tyria unless you are participating in the content that would unlock them for you. For example, there are enough mastery unlocks via fractals to unlock all of the fractal masteries without leaving fractals and enough other points outside of them to unlock all the other other masteries without stepping foot in fractals.

In short, masteries are an optional form of progression, with lots of wiggle room so that we can entirely avoid content we hate & still unlock the relevant masteries for the content we like.

That’s why it’s inappropriate to sell them in the gem shop. I really don’t care about anyone’s perception of prestige either.

Squee Squashington.5189:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The entire point of raids is that they are intended to be hardcore content. A big reason why the raid team is so efficiency and producing them with high quality is that they only have to design for those interested in that challenge.

If I’m not ready for that, there’s the entire rest of the game for me to play.

So no, raids don’t need difficulty modes; there are players who want them, which is not the same thing.

If we took that logic and said “PoF is going to be a hardcore expansion, intended for the best of the best. If the casuals don’t like it don’t worry there’s tons of other content already in game for them to play!”

Now your expansion fails, people start leaving save the ~5% of “the elite”, profits go down and there’s less resources for you to support new content.

Alarmist? Maybe, but that’s where that train of thought leads. Should someone buy PoF knowing that the raids will be catered to only hardcore players, or will they go to a different MMO where they might be able to raid without as much frustration?

Regardless of whatever opinion you might have, it’s good design and good business to make your content appealing to all members of your player base.

It’s better design and better business to ensure that some content is very appealing to some people, that some content appeals somewhat to everyone, and that everyone likely to buy the game can find something appealing. One size doesn’t fit all; it’s really not possible to design a game to appeal equally in all ways to all people, especially with a player base that’s as diverse as this one.

And of course, no one one would consider extending the logic to apply to an entire expansion. The raid team is tiny compared to the rest of the dev teams; the existence of raids that I might not enjoy isn’t preventing me from finding content I like a lot.

Stat swapping requires only that you can get the relevant exotic insignia|inscription, Seraph in this case. As far as the wiki documents, the only source for these is the Quartermaster in Lake Doric. 1250 unbound|25 jade for insignia, double for inscriptions.

I can’t see why it wouldn’t work — the wiki would almost certainly document it if anyone had reported an exception. People usually don’t bother documenting when something follows the same rules as everything else, which would explain why you might not have found “verification” for this one.

If you still want to test this, you don’t actually need a “spare” set, you just need to get the insignia|inscription and see if it appears in the mystic forge. Since you’d need to acquire this at some point, I don’t see the harm in buying one. Worst case, you can ask support to reimburse you.

Squee Squashington.5189:

Raids have needed difficulty modes since before their release so that the hardcore players will be have their challenging content, casual players will be able to see/complete content and both could pursue rewards from it.

The entire point of raids is that they are intended to be hardcore content. A big reason why the raid team is so efficiency and producing them with high quality is that they only have to design for those interested in that challenge.

If I’m not ready for that, there’s the entire rest of the game for me to play.

So no, raids don’t need difficulty modes; there are players who want them, which is not the same thing.

With one hour/week, you might want to try:

• Fractal dailies — experienced teams can clear in aobut an hour.
• Exploration or building shinies — those can be done at your own pace.
• Pick a different meta or two to do each week (or pick the same one).
• Achievement hunting: armed with your API key + GW2 Efficiency, pick something new to work on.

The thing you absolutely shouldn’t do? Dailies. Those are the “paperwork” of the game — they ought to get done because the value for time spent is good, but it’s also a surefire way to burn yourself out if that’s all you do.

Dungeons aren’t “dead” content: they are in maintenance mode with close to the same rewards as they had before. What’s changed is that they are no longer the easiest, most fun, or quickest way to get loot.

As a result, as Zealex said, “a lot of the community moved on.” It’s still not hard to fill a party.