Guild Wars 2

Just a caveat to Gaile’s suggestion, I have a friend who’s father (also a player) bought him $50 worth of gems, then about 100 GP, converted it to gold and mailed it to him as a birthday gift. My friend was then perma-banned for “involvement in gold selling”. It was quickly sorted out, and my friend was back on in a couple of days, but we are not sure what flagged the transaction, since neither of them had ever dealt with 3rd party gold sites or anything.

Hopefully the gift gem card will be implemented to make this more reliable.

Konrad.9587:

tl;dr – Before you go to a new dungeon, make some effort and at least watch the tactics on YT.

I didn’t actually find the video guides to be all that helpful, at least the ones from forum links, as some of the encounters that were narrated as “just beat the boss down, he is easy” were killing groups I was in. Perhaps there were subtleties to timing of when the narrator dodged vs. when a boss animation happened, but if so I was missing them. A friend and I were also watching them and marveling at how much damage the narrator was doing, and how much of a beating from mobs he could ignore, so I think there are also build/gear/power/teammate boon contributions which are not obvious.

Personally, the couple of times I have posted to lfg I try to give as much detail as I can reasonably can because I’d rather have nobody interested than have someone join then quit because the run wasn’t what he expected.

When I look for a posting to join, I avoid anything asking for “experienced” because I know I don’t qualify. I’d rather wait, or not do a dungeon that day, than join and get kicked part way through for lying, I’m sure an experienced person can tell that I’m not experienced. I also always mention right after joining what my level of experience is for that dungeon (low to none, depending) because if I AM going to get kicked, or even asked to leave, I’d rather not do it half way through.

My only real disappointment team-wise from lfg so far was a level 25 wanting to lead an AC Explorable to level his character. Fortunately he quit (and fortunately wasn’t the first one in) about a third of the way through after multiple deaths, and I was able to invite a guild mate and we finished.

I’ve seen this be a bit glitchy as well, sometimes going to one of the other tabs fixes it.

Interesting post; my only significantly played MMO before this was City of Heros, which also lacked “the trinity” though it came closer to it than GW2, and particularly needed some aspects of it for certain subsets of play.

While I enjoyed playing a tank, a “healer” (buffers/debuffers were actually preferred to healers in that game, as they were generally more useful), and even a dps, what I most enjoyed about the roles was increasing the effectiveness of a team at doing whatever they were doing. I was not particularly wedded to a specific way of increasing that effectiveness, and I think one of the subtleties of GW2, alluded to by Ojimaru, is that increasing team effectiveness here is (1) more difficult to do, and (2) more difficult to see. Using combos effectively, especially with teammate’s powers, is harder than taunting. Figuring out WHY you have 25 stacks of Might on you in one team, vs. 3 on another, can be tough.

So I think GW2 still has the potential to fulfill that desire to do things the trinity did, but it is not as obvious when you do it or when you see it.

Swagg.9236:

The swiftness one is pretty alright. With even a modest crit chance, you end up getting infinite swiftness in combat. I slotted the trait once and after extended combat, I would always have roughly 20-30 seconds of swiftness still on me. It’s a viable replacement for Speedy Kits if you want to proc Invigorating Speed, the only trade-off (and it’s a big one) is that you don’t have a renewable source of swiftness outside of combat.

This is Infused Precision, the level 10 Firearms trait? That gives 5 seconds of Swiftness, but can only trigger once every 5 seconds, right? I don’t see how that could give long duration swiftness unless you had some kind of Boon Duration going, say from Alchemy, which clearly is possible.

Where I could see it being handy is if you have 10 points or more in Tools, and you toggle from Speedy Kits while traveling to something else like Static Discharge when you get in a fight, relying on Infused Precision for Swiftness. Obviously that is a bit easier in PvE where fights are predictable than PvP/WvW where the fights are less so.

Vol.5241:

But I guess you’d rather have devs spend their entire day chatting up with the forums instead of actually working on the game? That’s not how it works.

And, in particular, if a dev DID spend most of their time chatting on the forums, they would no longer be a dev, in that they have any input or solid data on what changes get made to the game, they would be a Publicist. Has anyone ever seen a Publicist give concrete, useful information?

Gryz.8376:

Stooperdale.3560:

A lot of players have had their butts kicked in AC story, their first dungeon, but then have realized just how much more they can get out of their character. I’m guessing you’ll do the same.

A lot of players got their butts kicked in AC story. And in other story-mode dungeons. But then they realized that the dungeons were just not fun. And there was no way they would enjoy dungeons in GW2. And then left the game. I’ll guess the OP will do the same.

The devs of this game have a lot of data on it, but I suspect this ratio would be a very hard one to figure out. My only contribution, I joined with 6 friends from another MMO we had played together, a total of seven of us.

I and one other friend are trying to improve our play enough to get through dungeons reliably, and eventually lead through them. Months in, neither of us is good enough to do that. Two other friends don’t enjoy dungeons because they are so hard, but will do them with us because we are friends, they are slowly improving their play just from putting in hours, but will never do dungeons enough to learn any mechanics by heart. They much prefer open world PvE, which is more their level of difficulty. Finally, three of them have quit because dungeons are so hard it discouraged them on the whole game. Me and the other “hard mode” guy hope to learn enough dungeon mechanics and get the two “easy mode” friends good enough to some day convince the remaining three to come back and carry them through a dungeon or two, one at a time.

We do wish that Story Mode, which gives relatively low rewards for its time (especially compared to something like the Maw event zerg) was easier, to make a better intro to Explorable Mode dungeons. Right now dungeons are more of a difficulty cliff than a difficulty curve. . .

Vol.5241:

The ectos for ascended gear won’t matter – the laurels are what matters. People will rather do the guild missions.

If you can do the guild missions; all my friends are in our small guild, it could be quite awhile before we can even open those, and they looked tough to do on top of that.

Rika.7249:

The average player can easily do ALL the dungeons.

The terrible player can’t.

So if you’re having difficulties, you now know that you are not the “average” player.

Though as Squally said earlier in the thread, he/she has been struggling to find PUGs that can complete dungeons. That has been my experience as well, I’ve not yet found a group that can make it through CoF2, and my success rate for Explorables overall has been around 50%, including the AC P2 that took close to two hours.

The “average” player is not equivalent to “the average player you know”. If you want to see “average”, join a dozen or so random PUGs in broadcast at various times of day. No guildmates, and you are not allowed to give advice to the group, you are seeing how good THEY are not how good YOU are.

If 50% fail or quit, and 25% struggle but finish, and 25% breeze through, you may legitimately be able to say the average player is terrible, but you can’t say the average player gets through dungeons easily. If 60% breeze through, 25% struggle but finish, and 15% fail, you may be able to argue the average player can easily do the dungeons, though I still suspect a large fraction of players, maybe over half, have never even tried a dungeon because they have heard it is too hard so that may still be too optimistic.

I’m not saying ANet needs to target the average, “terrible” player with Explorable mode, but I think there should be recognition that an average player will find it very hard. Our group didn’t find Story mode noticeably easier, either.

Linc.6834:

I’ve actually taken to leveling and gearing a guardian just because they are so valuable to dungeons

While I’ve never been kicked from a group for being an Engineer, I’ve had my /join requests refused several times, so maybe that was it. And of the PUGs I’ve joined for dungeoning (my guild doesn’t have enough people who enjoy high dungeon difficulty to run with the guild), I’ve got about a 40% failure rate on dungeons. Thus, based on how much easier my Guardian finds it to beat things in outdoor PvE, I’m also leveling and gearing a Guardian for the same reason.

Which is a pity, since concept-wise I find the Engineer more interesting. I just don’t seem to have the skill to play it well enough to be competitive, even in PvE.

An interesting set of questions, it may bring out some different perspectives.
1.) Playing with RL friends, we have a small guild (under 10) and probably always will. We are on FC, one of the three worst servers in WvW, which I actually see as a good thing since our competition won’t be as skilled.
2.) I actually plan to do some WvW once I finish outfitting my first 80 and get a second character to 80 and outfitted so I have a couple of choices to switch between. I don’t get a lot of play time, I started in September 2012 and only have one 80 and one 50. I only expect one guildmate to be willing to play any kind of PvP, though.
3.) Dungeon runs? Our guild has gotten crushed any time we try dungeons, the three of us who are willing to tolerate that are trying to practice them with PUGs. I think I’ve done the most in our guild, at 11, lifetime, 7 of them successful. Given that we are evidently not skilled enough to survive against “dumb AI”, we clearly need to get better before we will have a chance against other players. I’m reading this forum for tips.
4.) I don’t think repair bills are nearly as much of a factor as just the discouraging issue of dying. A lot. See above note about dying in PvE. . .
5.) I know nobody who is going for a Legendary, the only people in my guild with Exotics in fact bought their gold from ANet. Nobody, including me, is fully outfitted yet in Exotics, and nobody has anything Ascended (one friend has done one Fractal).
6.) The total average person hours logged daily by our guild is probably under 8. That is not per person, that is total. We may not swing things the way you think. . .

I have a friend who bought gems (I think $50 worth, so on the order of 100 GP) from Anet in the official store, converted to gold, then emailed it to his son for his birthday, they were both perma-banned for “gold selling”, despite the fact this was the first time either of them did this. They didn’t find out if it was an automatic thing, but by contacting support they but got it straightened out within a couple of days. This was a couple of months ago, perhaps they have improved their algorithms to recognize this.

Bearlover.8501:

Honestly though the only level 35s who will be running this will be with friends or a guild run. I have never seen a group of pugs accept anything but a level 80 for a explorer dungeon unless its with friends or guildies.

Of the half dozen PUG runs I’ve done of various AC paths, one was started by a level 20 (fortunately he bailed after dying a lot and we recruited someone else), and none was all 80s.

Good to know that having the Ghost Eater fail to go vulnerable at a charged trap was a bug, we fought him for an hour and a half trying to figure out what the key was to making him go vulnerable since this was so inconsistent on our run. We gave up on one trap entirely, it never seemed to work.

Galactic.6453:

Kozai.8269:

Galactic.6453:

There are empty bars that say “trap power”, there’s a white circle around the traps and there are guns lying around that say lift and drag ooze. How could you have not made that connection? You should have at least figured out you need to charge the traps.

We did this, then finally managed to drag the Ghost Eater over, then. . . nothing happened, he was still invulnerable. Then later on, as in a few minutes later, he had a 10 second burst of vulnerability. Working as intended? Bugged? Does it have to do with whether he has other Ectoplasms around him? How do we know?

This hasn’t happened to me yet and it indeed seems to be a bug. I have no idea how a severe bug like this gets past the testing. As well as the horrible drop of fps whenever a burrow appears.

We actually stopped using one of the traps because as far as we could tell it never worked. Maybe we were just unlucky, but we fought this guy for over an hour and a half before getting windows of vulnerability close enough together to drop him. Only one tpk in that time, a testament to a cooperating party, not that I’d say we have particularly good play skills. This fight also seems to be unusually easy to rez people in, because the boss often parks in one place for awhile. Not usually where you want him, mind you, and his lengthy AoEs are annoying for that.

Kumu Honua.2751:

Ghost Eater: Hit the ghost eater to spawn oozes. Target oozes. One person to use the lift beam (Skill 1) Another to use the pull beam (Skill 2) drag to the traps and it will charge the trap. When full charge, ghost eater will lose ghostly shield and can be harmed again. Repeat with next trap. Ghost eater will drop circles of doom. Don’t stand in em.

How long does he typically lose his shield, and how quickly does it happen after he arrives at a full trap? We often had to wait minutes before his shield would drop, and it would only be down for 10-20 seconds, is this normal or bugged behavior?

Galactic.6453:

There are empty bars that say “trap power”, there’s a white circle around the traps and there are guns lying around that say lift and drag ooze. How could you have not made that connection? You should have at least figured out you need to charge the traps.

We did this, then finally managed to drag the Ghost Eater over, then. . . nothing happened, he was still invulnerable. Then later on, as in a few minutes later, he had a 10 second burst of vulnerability. Working as intended? Bugged? Does it have to do with whether he has other Ectoplasms around him? How do we know?

Kain Francois.4328:

Honestly, I believe some of the complaints regarding rezzes could be resolved if perhaps skills had the capabilities to completely resurrect KOed foes. With down, it’s too difficult a decision whether or not to res because you can easily heal them without needing to use a skill. On the other hand, this puts us in harm’s way and makes bosses like Subject Alpha frustrating for certain groups. So the solution in my opinion is to allow skills like Warbanner to resurrect KOed allies. This can be justified with their high recharge cost and use of a slot.

This would be great, either that or a timer on the rez port so if you wait a couple of minutes even with the group in combat you can do it. That would cut down on rez rushing, and is a significant enough penalty that people would try to improve their game, but cut down on boredom and frustration for the very people the devs are trying to incentivize to learn to play better. The couple of less skilled players in our guild spent about 70% of their time on the floor last time we tried to take them through AC, and they not only stopped dungeoning with us they stopped playing GW2 entirely for awhile. They were often going from up to downed to dead in under 20 seconds from the start of a fight, so it was hard for them to learn much.

skullmount.1758:

Yup tried PUGing Ghost Eater last night. Got him donw to about a third, then we couldn’t seem to get the shield removed (even though we were moving him to traps, which appeared to be full, both visually and according to thing in corner of screen), and then he kept regening life somehow.

We saw something like this, spent over an hour and a half fighting this one boss. We only had one total party kill in that time, but we were never able to figure out why sometimes his shield would drop and other times it wouldn’t for many minutes on end. We weren’t sure if it was bugged or we were doing something wrong.

My two friends and I had finally felt we got AC P2 understood well enough to lead a group on it, and maybe take less experienced guildmates through it after another pass or two, then tried it last night. Two and a half hours, most of it on the final boss, with fortunately very understanding PUGmates. We never were able to find a consistent way of getting the ghost shield turned off, sometimes he would park at a full trap and nothing would happen, other times the shield would turn off, once it even turned off twice at the same trap. The ectoplasms despawned if you tried to pull them too far, so you had to park the Ghost Eater by a trap to get them “inserted”, but then with his super long lasting AoEs it was tough to get more than one or two fed in.

Maybe someone will figure out a good system for it, but so far the dungeons seem to be getting harder faster than we are getting better at the game. AC is the only Exploreable I’d been on a successful run with, I’m 0 for 2 on CoF, I was at least 4 for 6 on AC.

Unique.9351:

So pretty much the best thing i can get from a 150g item is 6 ectos….if lucky?

150 GP item? Nonsense, if you hover over it or offer to sell it to a merchant you will see the value insofar as the game is concerned, usually a few silver pieces.

Now, if you decided to pay another player 150 GP for that item, you may be a bit unhappy with that, but that is not ANet’s problem.

If it is any comfort, I saw a thread recently by someone who had accidentally salvaged their Legendary weapon and was hoping for a rollback. I don’t think it was forthcoming.

Wow, I hope they don’t make AC harder, a couple of friends and I were just starting to get comfortable enough with P2 that we hoped to convince our other friends to take another try at it after repeated tpks led them to quit dungeoning a few weeks back. They need something that is at the easier end of dungeons to let people get an introduction to them.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Ayestes.1273:

It increases the bomb radius for all bomb skills except the traited dodge roll bomb. In that case, it’s bugged because it seems to reduce that explosion to near zero radius.

It has the same effect on the bomb dropped from kit refinement, but yes—besides those two, it works fine and is incredibly useful.

Ah, nice; does it also apply to the explosions from Grenades, or just the Bombs kit and Big Ole Bomb?

JohnDied.3476:

Forceful explosives increases bomb radii. It’s an adept trait from the explosives line so you should be able to take it at level 20 if you want to.

I read that this trait is bugged, and actually makes explosive radius smaller, has it been fixed?

thehipone.6812:

what’s the difference really? just join up with anyone, it is fastest for all. If you are using gw2lfg there is minimal difference in effort between joining a group and starting a group.

Well, if you start a group the others in the group may expect you to be able to lead the way through the dungeon. Neither I nor any friend I have in the game knows any of the dungeon’s well enough to lead a group through them, so we would stick to LFG or send a whisper to someone LFM.

eXs.6210:

. unless you REALLY want the skins from other dungeons, stick to CoF p1 and p2 as a reset for easy-mode

I’ve tried CoF p2 once, the group failed at the end room after half a dozen tries, with different strategies discussed and tried each time, so evidently it is not THAT easy. I have encountered the same problem as the OP, with only a couple of occasions/week when I might have time to run any dungeon once and a lousy memory it is hard to learn their mechanics. It would be nice if they weren’t QUITE such a jump in difficulty from standard content, then I might be able to get 4 more guildmates to join me, but two have sworn off them after initial experiences.

Note that also you can get certain stat combinations from specific dungeons which are not craftable, such as Soldier (Pow/Tough/Vit), so there can be other reasons to run other dungeons.

Thanks for the tips, CassieGold!

Charming Rogue.8071:

p.s. I’ve had times where I failed this event multiple times in certain pugs. e.g. lots of bad players. So I know how you feel. Just get new people and try again.

I’ve only had 2 chances to run any Explorable dungeon since I started play a couple of months ago, though I hope to do one tonight with my friends. Thus I’m looking for ways to turn players who are bad because of lack of experience (I include myself in that) into good ones through tactics, since I and my guildmates, who have done fewer Exp dungeons than me, don’t get a lot of chances to learn them by trial and error.

Our guild is having the same issue, right down to a long evening in CM (though not as long as the 4.5 hours in AC), I guess we’ll just have to set aside some time to demo our powers to each other so we can try to learn the visuals. I’ll also have to beat them into sticking with one or at most two characters instead of a flotilla of alts to try to learn this with. . .

Note that sometimes text is wrong, for example some projectiles say “removing condition” each time they fire through a field when they are actually only doing it 20% of the time. Elixer gun #1, for example.

Cauldron.1653:

Now each time you see that animation (and trust me, you will begin to see re-used animations) you know what to anticipate.

That’s the tough part for me; I have a lousy visual memory. If someone swapped all my armor for other random pieces while I was logged out, I’d never notice it. I’ve fought foes for minutes without ever being able to tell you afterwards if they were male or female, my friends have a running joke about it. Spotting specific animations and remembering them has turned out to be very challenging.

Then, it doesn’t help to have below-average reflexes (tested at a science museum, sigh. . .).

Brennus.1435:

If you can’t get past them just simplly ask what you can do to figure it out. There are plenty of people here who would rather help you out than listen to the crying about dungeons being impossible all the time.

I would be interested in what suggestions you have for tactics for a PUG to use, where you don’t know the stats of the gear on the other 4 members and can’t predict what classes are coming in advance. The only tactical suggestion I’ve really seen in this thread apart from using a Chill temp weapon was to call Target on the assassins, and try to focus fire them. Our group tried that, and still couldn’t take them down fast enough with all the other mobs attacking. We had no source of AoE stability or Reflect, as far as I know.

Ellisande.5218:

The problem is that cloth and rare crafting mats simply do not drop at a rate sufficient to match the demand of the crafting recipies.

The fact that everyone seems to have this problem is proof positive that Anet screwed up and needs to either increase the drop rate or reduce the quantity required.

I don’t want to hear any of those pithy “buy off the TP” comments because buying components to use for crafting gear goes against the purpose of crafting gear, which is having level appropriate gear without having to buy it.

If I wanted to resort to the TP to buy the components I might as well have just purchased the gear itself which sells for less than the total cost of the components that go into it.

I think they designed the system so you would have enough “stuff” at any one level to craft. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have exactly the stuff you need for your craft, you may have to “trade” some of it with other people at the TP for the items you need for your craft. If, even after the 15% tax, you still make enough selling the things you don’t need to afford the few items you didn’t personally collect, the devs may feel the system accomplishes their goals.

I did this with a PUG group a couple of weeks ago, and after doing well on the other parts failed this last room as well. No Guardian, we may have had a Warrior, and I think we had three level 80s. I had lots of AoE with a Grenadier Engineer, but it wasn’t enough to take out the mobs before more would spawn and after a few rounds they would overwhelm us. We tried several different tactics once we realized there were foes specifically going after her, putting people in different parts of the room vs. all around Magg, but just didn’t have anyone along who could spot, target, and take down the assassins before they would kill Magg. I even tried swapping out some skills for a more support type build, but after half a dozen tries several of us were out of time (it was a morning run) and we had to leave.

He may have also used something like the Magnetic Shield as a blast finisher, or detonated another turret. Engineers have a lot of blast finishers, they just don’t tend to have access to all of them at once.

Enderr.5416:

The Choosen (precursor for the legendary Flameseeker Prophecies) just dissapeared today from the TP, to reaper after few hours at a double price.
Like 3 weeks ago was 190g, then start to rise up to 250g today, and … suprise ! 499 g on TP now ! If this is not market manipualtion, then I don’t know …

Or, the one at 190 sold to someone who used it, the next person who put one up put it up at a higher price in hopes of getting that higher price, it was bought, and the next person who put one up put it up at a still higher price. It could have even been the same person who had three in storage, and wanted to see what priced it could sell at before posting all three. Or someone was generating one a day, sold it each day for 190 and replaced it, then ran out and another person got one and put it up for 250 GP. The point is there are a lot of possible explanations other than that being a single item which was bought and flipped twice.

A point John has made at least once, and an earlier poster made about Mystic Coins, is that there is a LOT of turnover in markets which is not visible because there is nothing on the TP or any monitoring site which tells you how many things have sold in any period of time, only how many are for sale at one moment.

CrakittenestAuto.9108:

What confuses me more is why the Consortium stuff came back down. Someone poured a LOT of money into spiking them, and then seemed to give up.

That happens to a lot of market flippers when they first discover that its not as easy as it sounds on the forums to just “control a market and charge whatever you want”.

The main reason would be if you wanted to store all 6 pieces of armor and didn’t want to take up 6 bank or bag slots. Storage space is one of the main items ANet sells. . .

Lane.3410:

I can’t seem to gauge that ‘sweet spot’ in selling.
[snip]
I’m now completely out of stock because it looked like a good time to sell and prices are still going up, seemingly endlessly. I haven’t lost any money, I’ve definitely turned a profit, but I could have made at least 5s more on each item (ultimately adding up to quite a bit of gold) if I knew what this market was doing. :\

If anyone here could predict exactly when things on markets were going to reach their low and their high points, they would be writing these posts from their yacht on the Mediterranean.

plasmacutter.2709:

Just because the houses sell, does not mean the market is not dysfunctional.

Every month it seems there are articles lamenting that the vast majority of bay-area 20-somethings that should be settling down in their homes to raise families are still with their parents, because they can’t afford a home, or are struggling to pay 2k rents, because the prevailing mortgage rate, credit requirements, and required down payments are that frekin’ high, allowing renters to utterly gouge.

Just because some people are paying the obscene prices does not make a price-fixed economy justified, and does not change the fact that the victims of such manipulation are not just those who can and do end up paying more, but those who go unserved because they simply can’t afford the gouged price.

Those 20-somethings could move elsewhere with cheaper houses, right? Except that they want to live in the Bay area, many I’m sure for excellent reasons. Unfortunately, there are more people that want to live in the Bay area then there are houses for them, I’ve known several people on the East Coast who would move there if they could afford it. Which sounds like a classic problem of demand being higher then supply, so price rises to the point where demand (people who want a house AND can afford it at its outrageous CA price) meets supply. Same with buying Ferrari’s, which are probably a better analogy to cosmetic game gear, demand = people who want it AND can afford it, not just people who want it.

A functional market doesn’t necessarily make all its participants happy, it just matches supply with demand.

No rifle? Are there any particularly cool looking Pistols then?

Manoa.5897:

As far as I know, there are no plans to uplevel characters in higher-level zones in PvE. They tried it during the earlier phases of beta, but scrapped it because too many people were skipping over important content in favor of spending all their time in higher level zones.

Pity, it would be nice for our guild if everyone could join a Personal story, instead of having to stick to the lowest level person’s on the team. I wonder if it could be implemented just for instanced missions?

A classic part of any well designed MMO is that the last, small, increment of “performance” costs substantially more in time, money, and/or effort, then the one before it. That “performance” can be damage, armor, storage, speed, etc., but it is a way to give the hard core min-maxer something to do while not penalizing less hard core players too much. You asymptotically approach best-in-game performance.

Kumakichi.2583:

Watch video’s of the dungeon’s there are plenty of them. Buy level 80 gear, rare is great but at least have greens on.

After my guild took 2 and a half hours doing CM, our 2nd dungeon (4.5 on AC), the other tactically minded person and I tried watching a video for CM. It didn’t really tell us much, groups we had died on in a couple of seconds had the guy making the video charge in and just start killing everything while barely taking damage. In 20 minutes worth, I think his hit points dropped under 50% once, and bounced right back up faster then I could have reacted. We weren’t sure what combination of stats, gear (I was in full Exotic armor for CM, at least) and powers he was using, or maybe it was just a lot more player skill then we had. The video maker had a lot of cheery comments like “this part is really easy”. . .

I suppose we’ll keep looking at it, maybe we can at least figure out what powers were being used (neither of us has a high level Warrior such as he was using).

Spyder, I understand that you want to save “exploring other zones” for your alts, but one possibility is that you could run through the other starting zones just enough to get a good collection of Waypoints and some harvesting, with maybe a bit of killing stuff when needed. The upside of this is that you will have the WPs in case a friend or guildmate needs a hand with their character, plus some of the dungeon entrances are in “other race’s” zones. This saves the “lore” of the other zones and associated DEs for your alts, and might make up the extra bit of XPs you need.

My only other suggestion is to make sure you do Lion’s Arch zone completion on each character, as that is reasonable for any race.

I found I was a bit short of XPs to move on to Kessex after completing Queensdale, but I actually wanted to get some WPs in every zone on every character since I have friends with severe alt-itis so I wander around a lot. I was able to pursue the course I suggest above to make up the difference.

Yamagawa.5941:

I am considering these for guild storage, but the lack of level info on the level 35/50 stuff is a problem.
//Yamagawa

Yes, that is annoying, duplicate names at 35 and 50, and you can’t filter between them because they all list as “level 0” in the TP filter. I think the level 65 and 80 ones have the same issue, last I checked.

The only way I found to tell which was which on the TP was from gw2spidy and checking the prices then going through to the materials used to craft them.

SolarNova.1052:

Remember the only thing ur aiming for at the end of a GW2 dungeon is the tokens, which u then use to purchase lvl 80 exotics. Those exotics wont have any better stats than those u can buy or find elsewhere but they do have unique skins. GW2 armor and weapon farming is all about skins at end game..even legendarys.. becouse the stat amounts dont change.

Just as a note, there are some stat combinations like Power/Vitality/Toughness which are not available from crafted armors, just dungeon armors.

I was wondering the same thing too, about a couple of guns I was comparing. Now I will rest assured that I can get the stats I want on a cheap item, since I don’t care how it looks.

RedStar.4218:

But I must admit that in everything I have done so far, AC story mode took me the most time…nearly 3 freaking hours (with a PuG ranging from level 40 to 76 and me as the sole level 30) …even Arah path 4 didn’t take me that long.

My group, all friends I’d played with for years, took 4 and a half hours for AC story mode, though at the time only one of us had their Elite skill at 42, everyone else was low 30s. Then we needed 2 and a half for CM story mode, and by then we had two 80s, though not in exotics yet. I’m not super optimistic that we’ll get enough better to make any of them easy, as even now that I’m 80 in Knights/Carrion exotics, and have played nothing but that one Engineer since starting the game several months ago, I still die on average at least once a “level” just in regular outdoor PvE.

This game places a fairly high premium on fast reflexes and good visual memory, both of which I am below average at, and dungeons amplify that requirement. I think that to people who are average or above at those things, and who have a lot of time to play and practice, it borders on inexplicable why people struggle in dungeons. If they were to contemplate adding one seconds worth of “deciding what to do” time on for every button press, they might see that a dungeon fight gets a lot harder in those circumstances.

I don’t know that Arenanet will be willing to reduce general dungeon difficulty, but I do think it might be nice if Story mode was substantially easier, while keeping the same difficulty for token-rewarding Exploration mode, so that the difficulty curve was more of a hill rather than a cliff. Alternatively, a third, even easier mode might be added with just regular outdoor PvE rewards and a nice chest, and with critters with maybe 2x or 3x normal hit points instead of 10x (or more?). That would let people in it for the “story” get some different content then just normal outdoor stuff.

I would actually like to see some degree of upleveling as well, right now when I’m playing with my friends we can only help with personal story lines and play in the zones of the lowest leveled one of us. It would be nice to be able to add some variety, since we don’t mind having a weaker friend along (less skills opened up, less traits etc.) as long as they don’t get 1-shotted by +10 critters.

Are the golems really any good compared to Supply Crate?

Horheristo.3607:

I’ve got no further interest in the TP besides selling my goods.
Maybe you didn’t read the fluctuation part, or just completely denying that certain goods have been completely inflated and out of reach for the masses, precursors, silver doubloons, lodestones as good example.

Wait, I’m not quite clear on this; if all you want to use the TP for is to sell goods, aren’t high prices for precursors, silver doubloons and lodestones good for you? You never need to buy anything, and would only make more money from drops this way?

Or is the problem that you aren’t getting as many drops of those items as you want? If that is the case, it is a sign that your demand is higher than your supply, and if the same happens with the masses it could be an explanation for the high price. Feel free to ask the devs to change the drop rate, but market traders can’t affect that.

You need a recipe for each different kind of armor you want.