Guild Wars 2

I can answer your #4 at least, once you make the recipe in the Forge and consume it you can make the box/satchel as often as you want, providing you are willing to accumulate the large stacks of stuff you need.

I’ve found an Engineer fits my playstyle, which is very much about planning for fights and having a wide variety of options for different situations. Eventually, maybe around “level 160” or so, I’ll have enough practice on him to actually feel competent at it.

In over an hour of trying I never made it up the outdoor Halloween jump puzzle around the cauldron in the center of LA, so I haven’t even bothered to try the Wintersday one with my limited play time.

I feel your pain, BlackIce, when my regular group went in to AC (with only one person at 42 with Elite skill, mind you, everyone else in the 30-35 range) we spent 4 and a half hours and everyone ended up naked more than once. The only thing that kept us going was that we were friends so we wouldn’t quit on each other.

We had much the same experience in CM, though at least it was shorter at only 2 and a half hours.

The dungeons are a huge step up in difficulty from regular PvE, and frankly if I was the devs I’d make the Story modes, especially for the lower level ones, easier so that people can get a more gentle introduction to that. I’m sure some people try them once and swear off them, rather than using them to try to improve their ability to play.

I have hopes that now that 3 of us are 80 and accumulating good gear we may be able to make another less painful run at them, but I still suspect we are going to have a somewhat tough time of it since none of us are that good at memorizing animations or have fast twitch reflexes. And I want some armor specs that only come in dungeons, sigh. . .

Has anyone crunched numbers on what kinds of starting stats you would want to benefit more from the +250 Precision stack vs. the +250 Power stack when using grenades? I’m trying to work out what armor/rune, Sigil, and trinket sets to buy, having just dinged 80.

Oglaf.1074:

They are balanced for their proper level, not 80.

AC is a walk in the park at level 80, and a proper challenge at levels 30-35.

Your problem is being a Thief; Thieves get insta-gibbed in most dungeons of they attempt to melee, sad to say.

You and/or the people you play with must be much better then my friends and I, we took 4.5 hours to do our first AC in story mode, ranging in level from 32-41 (only one of us over 40 and with Elite skill), and 2.5 hours to do our first CM, though by then we actually had one level 80 with us in Rares. We all got insta-gibbed in both dungeons by everything, not just the bosses. That has been all we could get our friends to do so far.

The two of us who really like a challenge hope to keep persuading our friends to try other ones, maybe now that we have 3 of 5 of us with 80s if we can manage to get some Exotic gear hopefully they will go smoother and they will be willing to do them more often to learn them. I doubt we will ever have time to do more than a couple a week as a group, though, we just don’t have that much play time.

AlietteFaye.7316:

Yep. And if you calculate out how much damage you’ll be dishing out with the Sigil of Fire, it comes out to around 10-12% on average. Not to mention it has less effort, and that the stacks of might will be even less useful once stats are working with kits. Then it will only be a little over a 6% damage increase.

What level of Precision and % crit does that assume? Crit % in particular can have a pretty wide variation.

Also, regarding the “on swap” sigils, are those now working when you switch directly from one kit to another, or do you have to switch through the weapon(s) with the sigils to proc them?

I think the GW2 combat system has a lot of depth, and the ability between fights to completely retool weapon and skill sets gives it even more. Perhaps the forums are dominated by much better players then myself and my friends, but given the fact we have not yet broken below 2 hours for a dungeon and many, many deaths there are clearly things we are still learning after months of play. Mind you, it took over 2 months for the first of the six of us to ding 80, and only 2 of us have made it to 80 so far, so things may look very different to a less casual player.

I suspect that as time goes on and the devs have more time to tweak individual skills and powers within skills there will be more viable builds in more professions, and more of the rock/paper/scissors people are looking for. I’ve read some strong arguments, though, that if a MMO build system is TOO unlimited, everyone winds up with ranged tanks, which ironically limits diversity. Only by enforcing some tradeoffs can you really end up with a variety of builds and playstyles within each profession and the game as a whole.

Casia.4281:

This leaves your weapon and armor.
If you are 30 alch, you have 3000 hp from that. and thus 18500 iirc, without WvW buff.

As long as kits do not get stats on weapon. And rifle is heavy melee. Get some of your toughness on rifle. Swap to it when you are in close, and need to tank.
Swapping to grenades when you want to kill something, that is CC’d, or in pve.
Frankly any situation where you need to worry about taking damage, you should be in rifle. Theif? mesmer? d/d elem? too mobile for grenades. Rifle lock on is what you need, and CC.
(not going to lie. I just though of this, and blew my own mind. Why haven’t I been doing this? Is there a 179 toughness rifle? Rifle is good damage, but really there is NO reason for me to be running around with a zerker rifle in a grenade build)
*edit yep. Arah’s has one. 179tough, 128power/prec. Looks ideal.

On armor, A bit of each is fine. why not 2 pieces power/tough/vit. 2 of power/prec/crit damage and 2 power/prec/tough?

Thanks for the tips; I am indeed 30 Explosives/30 alchemy/10 Tools (for Speedy Kits when traveling, Kit Refinement in fights). Well, I will be 30 alchemy when I reach 80 at least. I often switch to Bombs in melee since Smoke Bomb, from what I can tell, is one of our most effective CCs even after the nerf, but that is a good idea about a Toughness rifle. I also tend to carry a pistol/shield, and try to use those sometimes so I can get used to those skills, the 4 and 5 skills on those may be very handy in dungeon situations. 5 seems to be the Engineer’s only reliable projectile reflection. I just don’t survive well enough for P/P.

I was indeed thinking of mixing and matching armor, I just don’t have a good enough feel yet for the overall damage system here to be sure exactly what the best mix of precision and crit damage are with power. For dungeons medium term dps, i.e. over the course of 20-30 seconds, seems to be more important than burst damage in 2-3 seconds, so you can start looking at averages for crits, especially with grenades which get a lot of them.

As a “pull power” test I tried using Engineer Magnet (from Tool Kit) in open world PvE this morning, a group of about 10 Dredge at a Dynamic Event. It was a good test because they were +3 levels to me, so I really couldn’t fight the whole group. Every time it dragged just one guy over so I could do a beatdown, worked like a charm. For comparison I tried rifle 1, and that brought 3 or 4 guys over, which I couldn’t survive.

The next best thing I found was merely exposing myself, letting one take a shot at me and running back. That didn’t bring over as many as shooting one of them.

Very different aggro mechanics compared to the last MMO I played. . .

RedStar.4218:

But if you want to really pull an enemy without having the fight its group, use a “Pull” skill.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pull

Will those pull skills actually bring an enemy over without aggroing the rest of the group? My guild has also been struggling with the larger groups in dungeons, and a way to separate some out until we reach 80 and get better gear would be great.

I had also seen a reference to shooting a projectile through a stealth field, such as smoke bomb, as being a way to separate out an enemy, but was never able to get confirmation. Anyone know if that works?

Casia.4281:

High toughness is NOT countering high damage. so, some hp and toughness to reduce damage by a % is fine. but the majority if your avoidance needs to be active skill based on dodge, CC, etc.

Evidently I am not very good at those active skills yet, since in the only two dungeons I’ve done so far with my group, AC and CM, like the rest of my group I died over a dozen times in each. I am trying to figure out what I should get for Exotics at 80 when I reach it in a couple of weeks, so that I can survive these things better. I will probably do a bit of WvW once I hit 80, but am mainly a PvE player.

I’m fine with spamming grenades for main dps. I plan to add some Vitality and Toughness since I stink at active survival, but for the damage side should I focus completely on Power, or try for more of a 50:50 split between Power and Precision, or even a 3-way split of Power/Precision/%crit for the dps side of gear?

It is possible that when the tooltip for the higher end salvage kit says “25% chance for rarer materials” it means “25% higher chance for rarer materials”. Thus, if the base chance is 10%, it could only be going up to 12.5% for example. I’ve seen that kind of “math text” error before (and worse, just completely wrong numbers, which were not discovered for years) in another MMO.

I have sometimes seen someone mention a way they had been making money on the TP, once they have switched to something else. The overall nature of the TP, though, is very dynamic. I’ve twice now happened to stumble on items which had margins between buying the raw materials and crafting the end result of at least 100%. I watched both narrow to more like 10% within minutes.

Thus, to the OP, if your question is “is there any one or two items I can make over and over, and always make a good margin on”, the answer is no. If your question is “having learned a craft (armorsmithing and cooking are actually good ones for this), can I, with a fair amount of research and practice, spot money-making opportunities in one or both of those crafts at any one moment on the TP”, the answer is yes. You will have to learn the TP as well as the craft to do it, though, and don’t expect to make money vastly faster then farming until you have built up a fair amount of capital.

zauselbart.8142:

There’s only one quest, and that is the personal storyline.

GW2 has dynamic events that occur as you explore the maps, and it has ‘heart quests’ (symbolized by a heart on the map). Those heart quests resemble the traditional quests, though you don’t have to talk to the npc. You’re notified what there is to do as soon as you are in the vicinity of that NPS.

To elaborate on this a bit more, you may do an instanced mission in your personal story (5-20 minutes, depending on the mission), then when you come out the next one could be set for 2-3 levels higher. Its very hard to fight over level in this game, so expect about 90% of your leveling to be from the aforementioned dynamic events, exploring, etc., the personal story is an occasional thing you progress when you get high enough level for the next one in the chain. They are nicely done, but certainly won’t carry you to 80 by themselves.

Fay.2735:

Otherwise I’d have to safe up for months to get enough while taking in account various every day costs. Is that what you want us to do?

Actually, I suspect the devs expected most people to take somewhere between multiple months and years to get Legendaries. Because if they added new “best stuff in the game” at a rate fast enough to keep up with people who can play 800 hours in a couple of months (over 13 hours/day?), what fraction of it would the majority of people who get an hour or two a day at most ever see?

Whether or not the highly random component of making legendaries is a good idea is a separate question, but I’m willing to bet that the devs akittengeting an “average” time to Legendary of at least 6 months. Right now that average has a very high standard deviation, because of the small chance for some components.

TravisTrout.6803:

Then you have the people who think that buy prices always reflect fair value. Wrong. If you’re selling ore and bone chips then yeah, typically the difference between the listed buy & sell price is accurately described as honest negotiation. But take a look at big ticket items. The margin there is often best described as the math literate taking advantage of the math challenged. You can wish, hope and even pray that I’ll sell you something that’s made of 1g worth of materials for 75s, but I won’t. Ever.

Unfortunately, others will. Do these people not understand that materials have value? Maybe they look in their inventory and see things, assemble those things into an item, and believe that they “made money” when they exchange that item for coin. Maybe they just don’t care about losing money. Either way the end result is the same; bad times for all of us.

[snip]
So given the system as-is — meaning not entertaining ideas about fundamental changes to how crafting works — the problem, the reason crafting isn’t as profitable as it should be is that people are dumb and/or lazy. It’s difficult to fix that.

A buy price below the cost of materials may indeed be a fair value, if one person is willing to sell at that cost because the XPs + money they get is worth it to them, and one person is willing to buy at that price because the item is worth that to them. You are welcome to not consider it fair.

I’ve seen real life crafters who go broke because they place such a high value on their time nobody is willing to pay the prices they ask. But they have the right to do that. And a buyer has the right to not pay that price. I’ve also seen real life crafters (and other people like contractors) who were perennially overbooked, because they did good work at such a reasonable price that there was huge demand for their services. They could have raised their prices, but for whatever reason, they didn’t. So there are real life, real money examples of people who don’t act in their own economic interest.

Regarding your final point, is there any evidence from the developers of the game that they intend crafting to be a money making activity for the majority of its practitioners? If they really wanted that, simply cutting drop rates for useful gear to 1/5 of what it is now and removing XPs from crafting would probably ensure that. I suspect, though, that they will weigh the interests of the large part of the community that doesn’t craft and doesn’t want to craft against the interests of the crafting community and will not make those changes.

I found leveling up (which I’m still doing, just hit 60 so I can try out Grenadier) to be a good time to test a variety of the Engineer skills. I’ve made sure to spend some time with rifle, and with P/S (P/P didn’t work so well for me, I need something with more defense to survive). I swap various other utilities in and out. I’ve even gotten some offensive and defensive jewelry to change between, so I can try to see how that affects my kill speed and survivability.

My hope is that that way, by the time I hit 80 and buying final armor and equipment is expensive, in gold, karma and/or WvW time, I’ll have a good idea of what matches my playstyle the best. Having a friend playing a Warrior with you is great for that, as you can experiment under more controlled circumstances and take the time to watch what is going on with both you and your foe(s).

Yeah, although I don’t know if I’d keep it visible on another character, it is kinda fun to have an engineer with their seemingly infinite supply of grenades and bombs carry them in a backpack which has apparently caught fire.

Actually, it looks to me like the person listing at 13.5 SP didn’t cut his price enough, as several others have undercut him still further.

Flipping things with a 9 SP margin is great, till someone comes along and is willing to take a 7 SP margin, and someone else comes along and is willing to take a 5 SP margin. You risk getting stuck with a bunch of inventory you may not be able to move now. I’ve seen prices on armor pieces wander around a lot, but they tend to revert to certain levels.

Prophet.6954:

Having save states and “passable leader” would get VERY tricky, as you could abuse it, by coming back in as leader, and bringing everyone in with you at 75% completion, then re-leave, which passes leadership, and they backfill the slot and proceed to only have to run the last say 25. Then when done, bring u back in to re launch them at 75 and repeat.

Or, you have guy 1, whos save is at 75%, save 2 is at 30. Which does it choose, and does it erase one over the other, when someone chooses to revert.

I have seen a system like that implemented with Task Forces in another game (a series of instanced missions), you could stop between missions and pick it up again. The rule was whoever went back and finished it finished the instance, so if you had 5 people log out, and 3 came back early and managed to finish it, it was finished and the two laggards got nothing. The “saved state” was not at the player/client level, it was at the server level, so it recorded the status for everyone in the party. That game had no way to replace teammates mid task force, so the saving idea wasn’t quite as complicated to implement, but I think it could still work if everyone realized that progress by any teammate on the dungeon was party-wide.

I saw in another Engineer thread that BoB does its combo finisher on placement rather than on explosion, any idea if that is true?

Also, I tried a Smoke Bomb/Magnetic Inversion/Thumper Toolbelt/detonate turret chain this morning, and only got stealth to last a couple of seconds after its conclusion. Does a combo finisher only add on what is remaining of the original duration of a combo field, rather than the whole duration? Otherwise, that seems too short. I was hoping to find a way to get 8-10 seconds of stealth, to make it past mobs once in awhile.

VendettaDFA.9368:

Ford doesn’t hypothetically spend 12,000 dollars building a Mustang to sell it for 8500 dollars and label it a success.

Ford may not label it a success, but might the consumer who wants to buy a Mustang label it a success? And there are more consumers then Fords.

This example is actually a kind of ironic one, because it is fairly well known in the industry that auto companies have taken losses for years making and selling small, fuel efficient cars, and in particular on hybrid cars, to keep their “average fleet mileage” high enough that they were allowed to sell profitable large cars and trucks. Kind of like a crafter may be willing to take a loss selling crafted products because they place a higher value on the XPs, or on “making their own gear”, or hope to find a profitable niche once they reach 400.

Even as a crafter who has struggled to find any profitable niche, I still think the server-wide TP is a good idea, as it makes it hard for anyone to control anything but the highest end, slowest moving items. It also keeps prices low, benefiting the majority of players.

If you want to make crafting more profitable, your best bet is to persuade ANet to (1) remove XP awards for leveling it, and (2) dramatically reduce drop rates on useful gear. I doubt you will succeed, but you, like everyone else, are welcome to give it a shot.

tooslow.7801 The trick is having enough gold to control the market, buying up anyone under-cutting you and controlling the selling price.
Four hours a day for 3 months = approx 350 hours. I actually understand that because I was addicted to the TP when the game launched but I prefer farming now. Though I only play maybe an hour a day now. In Orr you’ll make 1.5 gold an hour (some will claim much more) with the right gear. Do the math.

Heh, I did the same calculation you did; he is averaging 1.3 gold/hour, roughly what I hear you can do via farming in Orr (no 80s yet to check). Interestingly, that supports my theory that the devs don’t want any income stream, be it farming critters, using the TP or crafting to be able to average too much higher then this once the game is at steady state, though I’m sure there are outliers on the TP/crafting front in particular.

I found a few things on the TP where I can average more than this per hour invested, but less than a gold a day, so still not anything where I can race to vast wealth, which is ok, I don’t expect to need vast wealth any time soon in this game.

And regarding buying out anything cheap and controlling the market, I suspect the only markets where that is reliably possible given the huge amount of competition from crafters are (1) very low demand, which means you risk sitting on a lot of tied up inventory for weeks waiting for it to sell, and/or (2) very hard to make, such as precursors or legendaries, or impossible to make because they are drop-only, which runs some of the same risk as above. Therefore it is not a risk-free strategy in general.

I agree a guide like this is very helpful for people new to dungeons; when I told my regular group about the cntrl+T targeting system the first (and so far only) time we’ve tried a dungeon, for example, none of them were aware of it. And I know at least one member has been picking his armor based on the appearance. . .

How useful did you find it, Kuroi, to have a discussion about rotating CC or combo fields when entering? A lot of people in regular PvE have never really had to use those.

Terrahero, any idea how well Condition damage compares to direct damage vs the rather tough mobs in dungeons? There you have a max of 4 teammates, so less condition stacking, burst doesn’t matter as much, but I’m not sure whether dungeon mobs have an equivalent to players Toughness and Vitality.

whosyadaddy.7941:

i know that but the point of crafting was to use it as a way to make money.

Is there anything from the developers of this game, Guild Wars 2, to support this idea?

Dead.7385 @Roz – they don’t even need to be on Yaks bend/(Insert your home server here). Dungeons work cross server.

Really? I didn’t know that, how do you connect with people on other servers for a specific dungeon? The only people I know in GW2 are RL friends so we all went to one server.

One of the helpful things about practicing solo versus Veterans/Champions, Guns, is that you can really focus on learning “tells” for attacks, timing of your own attacks, play around with different utility skills and combos and so on without either holding up a group or trying to figure out what is going on among a haze of special effects from your party. Definitely read up on Combos at the wiki, while you may not know everyone’s in the game, you can at least figure out how to work with the ones YOU can generate. Then you can do things like rotate in crowd control when the boss focuses on you.

Nice work, Ravengyre! Between that and the fact that non-Jeweler crafts almost certainly cost more to level to 375, I would say Jewelrycrafting doesn’t have too much to complain about regarding cost to level.

Outlaw.4078 Why don’t you retry that again using Rubies, which would actually be what a lot of people craft since they’re used for Berserker’s gear?

I thought the complaint was the cost to level Jeweler to 400? The difference between that and the cost to make the particular gear you want may be quite large, and is dependent on what people want to use and thus demand. I would bet that Berserker jewelry sells for more then, say, Cleric jewelry because of that higher cost for Ruby Orbs, so the difference in net cost after you sell what you make may be similar.

Tom Larder.9701:

For this problem to be resolved and thus balance returned to the TP and overall economy I believe firmly, as others have stated, that the precursor weapons need to be account bound and thus literally priceless. NOT at all worthless. But priceless. They need to be removed from the TP.

Lets suppose this is done. How will this help you get a precursor? You just removed one source of supply (the TP), but the Mystic Forge creation system hasn’t changed, so it will still require exactly the same grind it does now, except that you can no longer subcontract that grind out to someone who doesn’t mind doing it and putting it on the TP for you to buy.

Thank you Yushikiro and Kimbald, yes I did have some misconceptions about how these things worked, even after reading the wiki, which is why I asked here.

The thread started a little after mine, “Can we stack stealth time with blast finishers”
discusses other ways to stack stealth from detonating various turrets in Smoke Bomb as well, so that is very timely. You can apparently still get over 10 seconds. If my reading of the wiki is correct, though, attacking in PvE will immediately break stealth, so its mainly useful to sneak past things, not as “in-fight” CC.

So it sounds like one might be able to protect one’s allies using the SB blind by shooting a foe through it, even if the foe is not in the field, so long as you keep applying the Blind faster then the foe shoots at whoever its current target is.

OK, next question, am I correct in interpreting the wiki that if I have a Water field up, for example from Healing Turret, and all my teammates fire off a Blast finisher, all the heals add up?

Also, if I understand it correctly, while Super Elixer S is a combo field, and heals, its combo field is Light so a blast finisher in it provides AoE condition removal, not an additional AoE heal, right?

Finally, do things like the Rifle Turret firing through a combo field inflict the effect, such as a Blind, just like if a player does?

After my small guild of friends and I spent four grueling hours in AC on our level 30-40 characters, I concluded that I need to learn more about combo fields. Since I only play an engineer, ankittenhe theorycrafter for the group, I thought I’d ask about those skills since I am the most familiar with them. At the moment I’m just asking about PvE, may get to PvP some day.

1. Is there some way to use Smoke Bomb, a Combo Field Blind and Stealth, to more effectively single pull critters, say by shooting Projectile Finishers through it?

2. Smoke Bomb lasts about 5 seconds. Does the “makes the first attack miss” text mean that if a foe attacks twice in that time, the second one will hit as normal?

3. I’m not clear on what a blast finisher does in the field. If SB blinds and stealths for 5 seconds, how does doing a blast finisher change that? Does it add fresh duration or something?

4. How would SB stack with something like Grenades #3 (flash grenade), which is also an AoE blind lasting about 5 seconds but not a combo field? If I do a Grenade #3 and Smoke Bomb two seconds later, do I get 7 seconds total Blind (not stacking) or 8 seconds (duration stacks)? Is there a difference if I do them in the other order?

I started with an Asura, love the attitude and Mad Scientist thing, and after seeing Metrica Province was a bit disappointed with the Human, Norn and Charr lands I have seen. They seemed sort of “generic fantasy”, whereas the Asuran structures at least seemed distinct. My second favorite was the Sylvari lands, again they seemed to have a distinct style and flavor. That said, even the most generic of the lands and artwork seem to be quite nicely done, a lot of attention to detail.

That said, I was also surprised at how bustling the starting human zone was compared to what I had seen in Metrica. I think they are right that a lot of people start with those.

It would be nice if the devs could tweak the rewards in Orr and in the “mid range lands” so that some of the level 80 folks would spread out, it would give a more populated feel to all the zones. As I’m getting to zones in the 40-60 range there seem to be fewer people at DEs then in starting zones, as I’d heard.

I like it because I play with friends who have very different amounts of play time/altitis, so its nice to be able to join together a level 15, level 32, and a level 51 in one group and have everyone contribute to the fight. In fact it would be nice if there was upscaling as well, so the guy with the level 51 doesn’t always have to come to the lower zone or instance to play, the lowbies could join him if everyone is willing to accept the reduced ability of the lowbie to contribute (fewer skills, etc.).

coglin.1496:

Man I wish this game had a cosmetic tab like DCUO did. That game was the best I ever played, when it comes to character gear customization.

Did you ever try City of Heros? I think it had the most extensive costume customization of any MMO in existence. You could make yourself a robot, a minotaur, a little girl, a large man with duck feet, a flaming demon with horns dripping “blood”. . . And none of it related at all to your abilities/gear in game, so you could match any character concept you liked. The only time in that game I ever saw even similar costumes was when people developed a coordinated look for a group.

Since it is shutting down and I think GW2 is hiring, perhaps they will get some graphics folks from that. It would be nice if some other legendary gear had the same impressive effects as the Greatswords seem to.

I set up a spreadsheet and spent 3-4 days tracking about 60 items I thought people would find useful (since I did) twice a day to see what typical margins were. I found about 6 of them it was possible to make some kind of reasonable margin on most of the time. Only then did I start making any of them.

From what I’ve seen a general rule is that your first 10 hours invested in studying the TP are likely to be less lucrative then your first 10 hours farming Orr (from what I’ve read, nobody high enough to go there yet). The next 10 hours maybe you break even. Then, if you did it right, you should have a few products you can make in a few minutes when you have a chance, post, and generate additional income besides that playing the game. At least the way I operate, though, doing it right involves a lot of tracking and analysis. Some people seem to make good bets on trends, I’d want more capital to work with before I try that, because much like with gambling you hear a lot more about the big success stories then the many people who lose a little.

On this subject, I am also curious about how stacking Swiftness from different sources works; for example does the Swiftness from Elixer H stack in duration with that from Elixer B if you drink both (and get the right effects)?

A good measure of your ability to survive in a dungeon would be how you do in a Champion fight without many other people there. Most normal critters you fight in a dungeon are roughly that level of difficulty, with the bosses harder. Practice against that, pick up some survivability gear, and be willing to listen to direction from someone who has done them before and you should be ok.

Sabo.1485:

I have the same problem, I can’t seem to make money.
[snip] After about 4 days I finally made enough to buy an exotic weapon. And now I’m broke again.

As a note, its very possible that ANet considers 4 days to be a reasonable length of time to accumulate funds for an exotic weapon. If you got everything you wanted at level 80, armor, weapons, jewelry, etc. in 4 days, what would you do for the next 6 months?

So far my experience with the TP is that you can make money at it by watching what things sell well and doing a lot of tracking of what it costs to make them, but frankly you can probably do as well per hour by getting to 80 and playing and selling stuff. I do it because after at least 20 hours invested I think I’ve found a couple of niches I hope to earn some cash at while not playing, and I’m lucky to average 6 hours/week of actual play time (i.e. sessions longer than 10 minutes) so it will be awhile to 80.

Wiser with Age.3714
1) Buy a ton of the Stealth potions from the karma vendor in the Charr 1-15 zone.

Which vendor is that? And how long do they last?

Player.9621:

you realize as soon as the order for minimum is filled its going to be turned around and resold for a huge profit

Maybe; its also possible nobody is buying at 6 silver, and only a few are buying at 1.2 silver (in the OPs example), so no huge profits are to be made. Remember all you can see at any one moment is stuff which has failed to sell. Which is why it can take some fairly careful study and tracking of specific items on the TP to make anything on it.

Arciel.9650
The main problem with the Precursor now is it’s too easy to be controlled. Once a few people manage to have an early monopoly for whatever reason (I won’t throw around accusation) they can maintain an iron-grip on the Precursor market. The output is low enough for them to control, and the entry barrier is pretty much prohibitive at this point.

Lets imagine two scenarios;
1. A few dozen people have precursors because of an early exploit (a favorite theory here, it seems). They trickle them out onto the TP for high prices, making it hard for anyone to afford them.

2. These precursors become account bound, so nobody can trickle them out onto the TP at any price.

You aren’t going to get your precursors any faster with scenario 2, you just lost a way of getting them that you had in scenario 1.

People are conflating two different things, one is a small number of people who may or may not have a pile of precursors, and the other is the system ANet has for making them. They are completely unrelated. If you want ANet to make legendary precursors easier or more reliable to get, just ask for it. I suspect they will refuse, because they want the legendaries to require a great deal of effort to get, and they seem to like the random chance element (which I’m not wild about either, by the way). They certainly can’t change anything about the TP to force those hoarders, if they exist, to cough up their supply at a low price, though.

In another MMO the developers talked about an aspect of AI for the critters where once they were engaged, they “saw” the whole party, and to keep combat varied they could have random factors to make them engage anyone in the group, even the stealthed person around the corner. I don’t know if this game has that, but it seems possible.

PotatoOverdose, is there enough data about PvE foes to know which tends to be more effective there? Do they have anything like Toughness, or just lots of hit points? I’m wondering in particular about Dungeon minions and bosses.

Leiloni.7951
I agree Bruno, they need to get rid of repair costs in WvW. It’s PvP just like sPvP is, and in PvP people tend to die a lot. The entire point is to kill off the enemy team and take over their territories, same as in sPvP just on a much larger scale. There is no reason why we should be paying repair costs for that.

I suspect at least part of the reason is because there are some rewards (XPs, world completion, etc.) that are available in WvW that are not in sPvP. Thus they need to balance the reward with some risk.

In the evenings you may have more older players (i.e. ones who have jobs during the whole day), who may have the patience to learn tactics and listen to instructions. In addition, since their play time is more limited, they may actually focus on using it effectively, whereas someone who plays 10+ hours a day because they are a student or unemployed doesn’t really care if they fail one dungeon during that time.

Kruunch.3714:

Try them again at L80 … they get easier.

Also there is a small public dungeon we found in the northeast corner of the Charr lands. I forgot the name off the top of my head, but it’s marked on the world map as XXX Portal. We were curious so checked it out and it was really neat. An underwater dungeon with a bunch of puzzles to progress through, a boss and a chest at the end.

Yes, I expect they will get easier at 80, but myself and the one other person in the group who really thrives on a challenge wanted to start getting a feel for them, and the others really like to see new stuff so we used that as an incentive to lure them in, heh heh. Also it will be weeks till any of us reaches 80, and probably several months minimum till all of us have (as it was, one person who would have liked to go doesn’t have a 30 yet, even though he started before me).

Thanks for the tip on the mini-dungeon, I’ll see if I can get us through there, it sounds great for one of our usual evenings when we only have an hour or two with all of us on together. We only get a weekend day together, long enough for something like that dungeon, a few times a year. I wonder if there are more things like that? Probably so, there are easter egg like surprise events all over in places I wouldn’t have expected, and I have a terrible memory so I’ll never find them again. :p

With the amount and type of play my friends and I do, I suspect we won’t all have finished all the dungeons yet 6 months from now, almost certainly not all the explorable mode paths (we’ve generally been playing a bit over 3 weeks now, and just managed our first dungeon, with nobody over level 41). We are coming from an MMO, now sadly shutting down, which is 8 years old, and I just went on an equivalent of a dungeon there with someone who had never seen it before. So I think with the wide range of players and alts out there, they will still be getting done.

Kruunch.3714
And I was wearing mostly greens when I first did AC (I tend to be very gear conscious). How many L30s are running around with rares and exotics at the level requirement? The fact that that’s even a point is further evidence of the design issues of the “lower level” dungeons in GW2.

When my guild of friends and I did AC a week ago, the first time any of us had been in a dungeon, our highest level was 41, everyone else was 30-35, and as far as I know only one other person besides me even had full green gear. I’m sure I was the only one who, thanks to some market work, could conceivably have afforded anything better than green. It was, not unexpectedly, four hours of grueling effort to finish the dungeon, and we came really close to stalling out at a 3-minion fight.

I don’t regret it, though, because I think it gave us an incentive to really buckle down and study how our powers worked and how to coordinate them for next time, which is likely to be before any of us reach 80. If we managed to get a combo off on that first time through the dungeon, it would have been accidental, next time we’ll actually, like, PLAN them.

I do agree in one sense with Kruunch, the dungeons are a pretty abrupt change in difficulty from the rest of the game. Had we not all been friends, I don’t know if everyone would have stuck it out for 4 hours, and we came close to having a couple swear off dungeons. It would be nice if they, or some other similar feature of the game, had an easier mode, mid way between regular zone PvE and dungeon story mode. It could have less rewards, but still something a little more then you get from things like Heart events, and would provide an incentive to improve skills for people who, unlike me, don’t get a kick out of maxing out my ability to play and build to in response to a near impossible challenge.

The best screening technique I’ve seen to get decent PUGs in a couple of MMOs now is to see if people can reply coherently to questions. The more members who can and will read a question in party chat and type a vaguely legible reply, the more likely you have people who will read instructions and respond to them in play.

BananaHammock.9718:

We promptly killed him and then went out to get another player.

I’ve only been in one dungeon with guildmates so far, if someone leaves/DCs/etc. can you keep your progress so far and recruit someone new and get them in, or do you have to start over? Does someone have to stay in the dungeon to allow this?