Guild Wars 2

coglin.1867:

digiowl.9620:

coglin.1867:

nicknamenick.2437:

You can see the problem here.. they are both very defensive builds but stacking only power isnt doing that much of burst damage, if you compare this with condition damage its just to easy to get burst condition damage + allot of defensive stats..

You do not know what your talking about. One thing condition damage absolutely is not, it bursty or burst damage. Condition damage is steady dots, while power direct damage is equivalent damage and in many cases more damage, simply applied upon use of the skill.

I think the bursty here is not so much about huge amount of damage in a small amount of time, but a huge number of varied conditions in a small amount of time. Enough conditions most likely to overwhelm the cleansing capacity of the target. After that the target may well be considered dead man walking.

Isn’t that exactly what direct damage does though? It does more damage then toughness can negate? I fail to see the validity of this argument. Of coarse condition damage is supposed to overwhelm ones ability to cleanse it. If cleansing could keep up with conditions, then it would be a bit pointless to call it condition damage.

I fail to see why it is okay for professions to do 2k direct damage with a skill but people take issue when someone applies a condition that eventually does 2k damage.

It’s because most power users don’t understand conditions and think they should be able to stand there and cleanse indefinitely. I never understood this since they’d certainly not allow a direct damage dealer to stand there and hack at them nor would they expect to take it without taking damage.

I liked Orr as well, I found it felt as it should, but I played it at a time when there were lots of people around in all three zones and it was easy to get groups or help. You didn’t need to wait for a certain day of the week for temples to be cleared, there were always groups on the go doing such things. A big part of the problem with Orr and the temples, is the loot. The reward just isn’t there unless you’re after the karma gear. Blues greens and crappy crest isn’t worth the effort involved, when I can make more harvesting one ori node. Back in the early days, say, pre-November 2012, Orr was actually rewarding beyond the map completion rewards. One could expect decent rewards from temples (And dungeons or dragons as well). But last November (2012), all that changed and rewards for nearly everything were nerfed in to the ground. The only people doing temples were those trying to get temple gear and sufficient groups were often just not there. To make Orr even less appealing, later that winter, common farming events, such as Penetent, Shelter, Jofast, and Plinx were changed so that they weren’t worth or were too difficult to farm. The did increase the drop rate of heavy moldy bags, but it just wasn’t near enough to keep people there. By March, or so, last year Orr was essentially a ghost town and not worth going there.

Nijjion.2069:

Conditions aren’t fine in PvE… you can only have 1 condition user in a group and that is a major flaw in GW2. Even then their damage can be deleted by direct damage classes.

A zerker geared mesmer using Phantasmal Duelist will crit about 80% of the time with fury up. Now look what trait they normally to get if they use a zerker build. Sharper Images … this trait lets illusions do a bleed on each crit. Meaning a possible of 8 with the duelist and 12 with the warden. That is atleast 24-30 bleeds possible but lets say 15-20… now that is a lot of damage to take away/delete from the condition spec people in the group when you aren’t even geared for conditions.

When you can have 5 direct damage dealers in a group and only 1 condition user to be effective… It’s a broken mechanic and it hasn’t been fixed since release.

I’m not entirely sure this is accurate. Yes, you can only have one in a group to be effective, and this IS a serious problem that needs to be addressed AND the fact that non-condition builds can still apply conditions is also a problem in that it weakens a condition user. However, it’s my understanding that in that 25 stack of conditions, only the 25 strongest are counted. So, in theory, pure condition users should have much higher CD than a power build that uses CD as a secondary attack and will get first stab, so to speak, with any remaining slots filled by weaker conditions. However, I do agree that the mechanic is broken. The stack limit should either be raised or condition dealers given their own private stack. I’d be happy with a guaranteed private stack of 20. The obvious, and easiest solution is to raise or remove the stack limit so that it’s more in line with power builds, and will allow condition users to actually team up together. Again, power builds suffer from no such limitations. I remember the glory days of bosses having 50-60, or more, stacks of bleeding. Realistically, only bosses have enough HP to even come close to exceeding the 25 so I never saw the need of capping the condition stack so low.

Another solution would be to cap power builds in a similar way and adjust elite/champion/boss HP accordingly. Then give power users an option similar to dire. This would force more group variety since having all max-power warriors in a group would be no more effective than having all max-condi necros in a group. It would allow condition users to be more viable options, even required, in areas such as dungeons. But I suspect this would be wildly unpopular since a majority of the community uses power builds and really doesn’t understand how condition builds work.

I hold on to all the transmutation stones (Nearly 100 now) in the hopes that eventually there’ll be a recipe to change them in the transmutation crystals.

Condition is fine in dungeons and tends to work well on elites/champions where you have time to build your stacks. But yes, if you have more than one primary condition dealer, then you can tend to run in to issues in dungeons because you hit the condition damage limit (Mentioned several times above) very quickly and then it’s casting in to nothingness after that. It’s no different than running a dungeon with all zerkers. There will be issues, though perhaps less due to having no limit placed on the amount of damage power builds can deal. Dungeon teams should have a balance of those who can deal a lot of direct damage and those who can deal/remove conditions and heal. This way, you’re extending survivability of the party while improving the overall damage dealt. A larger problem in dungeons are those who don’t know how to use their profession or just lay there waiting for a res.

For PvE, conditions are fine. I solo cleared most of the map, including Orr, with a carrion build and there a little effort. And still have no problems solo roaming anywhere on the map.

I don’t need two sets of gear, unless they implement an alternate build tab (With traits). Changing gear/traits is too much of a neuscence for how often I switch back and forth between WvW/PvE. I understand and accept the strengths and weaknesses of my build.

Back to dungeons…if people don’t want me in their dungeon party, that’s their problem, not mine. A successful dungeon party is the responsibility of the one forming the party. The last time I tried AC P3, which is typically not bad and was very easy the last time I did it, I was the last to join a pug and before we even went in, I could see it was a terrible mix doomed to fail. It had two necro’s, two thieves and the last was either a ranger or warrior, and when we got in no one was calling targets consistently and everyone was kind of running all over the place…it was mess. I rarely have long periods of time which I can play uninterrupted, so I’m by no means a big dungeon goer and might do one every few months and even I could see this was a doomed group, but I went anyway just for the entertainment value (Mostly because I’m sadistic) and they tried to blame me for the failure…tools. LOL

I consider the gem store responsible for the various loot nerfs and runaway inflation (In part) in the tp. Because of this I refuse to spend a penny more in the gem store. I bought some gems in the early days, back when $50 would actually get you a lot of gems, used them to give myself a bit of starting gold, for bank slots and harvesting tools and still have 1300 left. Had I realized what I was doing with the gem to gold conversion, I probably would have opted to not do it, but hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

For some context, the first major world loot nerf happened mid-November of 2012. If you root around the forums, reddit, scenes sites, from November/December there was A LOT of discussion/complaining about it. This affected all open world content, champions, world bosses and dungeons and closely correspond to the arrival of fractals, which seemed to be the only way to get good gear at the time. Trying to railroad people in to their new content perhaps. Before this happened, say October 2012 and before, one could easily expect exotics from dungeons and dragons most, if not all the time. There was a lot of speculation that Nexon was not seeing the profits it was expecting and exercised it’s weight to force loot in to the ground in order to “encourage” people to use the gem store.

For anyone who has not been around that long, if you’re complaining about the loot, keep in mind, it’s now vastly better than it was last winter.

For the cost in gems, I would not buy it if the the stats were anything less that Journeyman, and would still not use it on any rares. At the current exchange rate, you can get 49g78s79c for your 800 gems. That can buy 324 master salvage kits. 36394 salvaged items which would cost 10g91s82c in salvage-o-matic fees. OR, 5657 basic salvage kits. 141425 salvaged items, which would cost 42g42s75c in fees to the salvage-o-matic. The salvage-o-matic just has too much math against it. Even if it were using master stats, it would still be expensive.

Dragonax.6487:

I would say that this is true for some classes particularly the Necro, they can burst multiple people down incredibly fast while having a kittenload of tankiness, and condition removers don’t work well since they can continuously spam multiple conditions.

Again, not nearly as fast as a max DPS build will put people down, especially if you can cleans conditions. And if I can put multiple people down at once, it’s usually because they’ve got nothing to mitigate the CD. To reduce the amount of condition damage a necro does completely breaks the build. Might as well remove the entire profession from the game. Again what we seem to be talking about here are players who seem to think they should be invincible and able to stand there and deal with all conditions without dying. That’s not how it is nor how it should be.

jalmari.3906:

Everything you mentioned is irrelevant when it comes to balance. Dire gear wasn’t needed, it’s just more cheese over the top. PvE gear balance only matters in small scale WvW where dire is totally ridiculous. No one should care if CD doesn’t do much damage in PvE or WvW zergs it’s totally unchallenging gameplay no one should do.

I’m sure CD users would argue the opposite.

There is nothing wrong with dire stats and it balances the lack of power and pretty much no physical DPS, with some extra toughness. Trust me it’s not all that tough, but at least I’m not a one hit kill now when it comes to bosses like I was with carrion stats. A lot of health is useless without any toughness and even more so since they changed how death shroud works. You know, if you don’t want to deal with conditions or magic users or learn how to survive, go play Counterstrike or something like that where everyone is the same and all you have to worry about is how good your aim is.

I would argue that if condition damage is nerfed that DPS classes such as warriors should not cause any conditions. There’s a terrible imbalance when some of the professions are designed to rely on conditions, AND there is a condition cap, but all professions can apply conditions essentially weakening a condition build that has to fight for those 25 stacks with everyone else. You can’t make it any weaker without destroying the build, or the entire profession in the case of the necro.

I like the personal story as well. Still haven’t finished it, but close at 76. I work on it now and then, but see no need to rush through it.

I don’t know if it was changed with the new system, but it seemed to work on a sliding scale. High MF gave a slightly better chance to get better items, but also reduced the amount of vendor trash and white gear which sounds ideal in theory. The problem is that it was not proportional and the increase in good drops was so small as to not be measurable while the decrease in junk was very noticeable. In then end, running +200% MF gear most often resulted in less gold overall because in high level zones all that vendor trash and white gear adds up. MF was very broken and I can only hope they fixed the underlying logic, not just how the bonus is gained.

digiowl.9620:

And then none of this matters one twit in PVE because of the hard cap on condition stacking…

This!! Those complaining about dire really don’t seem to understand how condition damage works. You can only have 25 stacks, total, now pretty much every class can cause conditions, especially bleeding. So if I’m in a group with a few others and they’re more powerful then me, I can apply my conditions, but only the 25 strongest will be counted in the stack. It doesn’t matter where they come from. So once the 25 is reached, if my conditions are weaker and others are maintaining the full 25 stack, mine never get counted. I might as well not be casting. Power does not suffer from this limitation. You can have 50 warriors of various levels and strengths all doing physical damage all at the same time and it all gets counted.

Dire works well in PvE solo roaming and to a lesser extent in dungeons if you’re the lone primary CD dealer because it does allow you to contribute without dying pretty much immediately. AND, it’s really only useful against stronger foes because it takes time to build the condition stacks. Because of the hard cap, it does not work well for large zergs in PvE, say temple runs. Because of the hard cap, it does not work well in WvW for zergs and is mostly useful when defending keeps/towers when you can hide in the battlements and drop AOE on to invading zergs..

Put five powerful necros all donning dire gear against a champion. How fast will it go down? Not nearly as fast as five warriors will put it down. Why is this? Max power builds do not have a cap on how much damage they can cause. 5 necros can stack 25 bleeds very quickly, then it’s just redundant after that. If I time it right, I can maintain 15 stacks myself, probably the full 25 if I use food. But due to the hard cap, the damage is still much less than a max power build warrior can deal, again, due to there being no limit on power. How can anyone claim CD is overpowered, when the damage is so limited. Back before they implemented the 25 stack limit, you might have had an argument.

I don’t know why there is so much controversy over allowing casters a little survivability. To go pure dire, casters have to give up quite a lot, for me, I had to give up ~7000hp, which is still a lot, even for a necro, and I had to give up nearly all my power (Carrion gear vs. Dire gear and Necromancer Sigils vs. Undead Sigils). Essentially the power stat on everything is replaced with toughness. It is a good build for solo roaming PvE, especially higher level zones, which is what I primarily do. If my main focus was group play or WvW I would have a vastly different build.

Some people have better luck that others…for some it’s almost like being stuck in permanent diminished returns. At a time last winter when farming is Cursed Shore was in full swing and an average player could make 5-12 gold very quickly, for some, if you were affected by this problem you were lucky to make 1 gold for the same effort and it always consistent over time. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but there was a huge thread studying the issue some time ago which identified some patterns in the phenomenon. Everything pointed to a serious bug in the RNG. Of course ANet never conceded there were any issues. I don’t even think they acknowledged the thread and believe they eventually merged the thread with something else in hopes it would die.

digiowl.9620:

Didn’t ANet introduce a trait reset gem store consumable recently?

Why in god’s name would I buy a trait reset at the gem store for 70 gems (5g25s at current exchange) when I can do it at the trainer for a meager 3s50c? This isn’t a fix, or step in the right direction, it’s an insult.

The way I read it is that you want you cake and eat too. You want a high DPS, high burst, high survivability build without sacrificing anything. I run a dire build on my necro and let me tell you I certainly don’t find it to be over powered and I’m certainly not seeing a lot of DPS. I run it mainly for PvE where it’s a good soloing build and in WvW it’s not as useful, but is good for zerg busting during raids, especially when defending.

The other thing you really have to consider, especially in a zerg or when partied up, is that conditions are only really useful again tougher foes. Regular mobs, or even veterans don’t have enough HP to actually build a stack of conditions on them, so in the end, you’ve done very little damage compared to that of high DPS members in your party which, at least is used to, affects the quality of the loot. Where conditions come in to their own is for tougher mobs, say elites or better, where one actually has time to bleed them and apply condition stacks. But as others have already mentioned, this is limited to a max of 25 stacks per condition and only to those who apply the most powerful conditions. To me this quite limits the condition build compared to a max DPS build, which suffers from no such limits. I usually get damage in because I’m usually among the most powerful conditimancers in an group, but I still think it’s a crappy way to deal with things, to exclude those who aren’t powerful enough.

Substance E.4852:

They created the whole problem when they put in Dire and decided you can have full tank and spank without having to sacrifice anything.

Dire has has the same serious limitations as Carrion (Which gives you ~32000hp when speced for it) except, god forbid, you gain a little more survivability, something most of the caster classes in this game were shamefully lacking. Even the necro, with tons of HP and life force bar, typically goes down way too easy. Aside from the 25 stack limit and max damage dealers only getting credit, other limits on condition builds include inanimate objects like doors (WvW) and mounds (AC P3). You can’t apply conditions to such things making the build quite useless. You can’t use marks, or maybe even AOE in general, on most, if not all, world bosses, seriously limiting the viability of such builds in such situations. 6 of my 10 attacks are AOE, 4 of those are marks which have to be triggered. I usually take on the roll of healing or man other weapons if they’re part if it, such as the mortars during Shatterer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think casters should be squishy, but they should also be the highest damage dealers in the game. Since that’s not the case, and that would make all those zerkers cranky, then they had to balance it to make casters weaker, but tougher than they should be.

Bleed on crit you say?

There’s a necro trait that will do this.

Zanshin.5379:

Leamas.5803:

Zanshin.5379:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Not to mention good TP investments. I know a lot of people make money from that as well, but it requires some good knowledge and intuition and fairly heft start up capital.

And a lot of time. Time that I would rather spend playing.

Depends how much you track it. If you make spreadsheets and track trends, cross reference with gw2spidy, etc, sure it’ll take a long time, but if you stick to low risk markets, and really not pay much attention it doesn’t take nearly as much time. Perhaps 30-45 minutes every day or two. You don’t make as much as quickly, but you can still make decent profits. A lot less commitment than running dungeons and I can make over 20g on a weekend, which is low for TP, but good given the low time commitment and it frees me up to play the game.

That’s already a lot of time for somebody with a full time job.

True, I guess, I usually try to do it in the morning right quick before going to work. Leaves the evenings more free for play, dailies, etc.

Zanshin.5379:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Not to mention good TP investments. I know a lot of people make money from that as well, but it requires some good knowledge and intuition and fairly heft start up capital.

And a lot of time. Time that I would rather spend playing.

Depends how much you track it. If you make spreadsheets and track trends, cross reference with gw2spidy, etc, sure it’ll take a long time, but if you stick to low risk markets, and really not pay much attention it doesn’t take nearly as much time. Perhaps 30-45 minutes every day or two. You don’t make as much as quickly, but you can still make decent profits. A lot less commitment than running dungeons and I can make over 20g on a weekend, which is low for TP, but good given the low time commitment and it frees me up to play the game.

Draco.2806:

This is what we call a “Contradiction”.

The game gives you freedom to respec your skills whenever you want, traits only when you’re far away from combat, and rest of the stats are tied to your gear that takes a long time to get and is very tedious to switch (special mention goes out to Exotics, Ascended and Transmutation Crystals).

“You can change your playstyle whenever you like!”
“On second thought, better not.”
“Changing this when you’re out in the field would be good.”
“But not this!”

It’s schizophrenic.

Yes, you can change whenever you want by going to the retrainer, but if you regularly go back and forth between WvW, PvE, fractals, dungeons, whatever, the builds are not necessarily compatible and retraining your traits is not convenient. It would just be nice if we could make it remember trait sets that would could swap between. I’d still be willing to pay the 4s to change, but doing it manually is too much of a pain, especially if you have a group waiting on you.

angelpaladin.7921:

I wouldn’t mind seeing them do a rework on the winged armor.

I don’t know what it looks like on other classes, but I actually really like the Winged Headpiece (Only 4s40c) on an Asura and transmuted it’s skin over several much more expensive things like the Exalted Masque at 4g32s. I’m running Jatoro’s Mask right now, but and considering changing it over to the Winged Headpiece. The right colors make all the difference.

I agree. I think it would be tremendously useful. They want you to have multiple builds, but the build is only half of it if you don’t tune your traits/slots skills to complement it. I would be happy with multiple trait (Including slot skill selection) tabs even if I had to swap my gear manually. Going to the retrainer and manually changing traits is just too much of a pain to bother with multiple sets.

To throw out an idea, what about new crafted armor / weapon recipes/skins based on vendor trash? I remember at the height of the loot nerfs last year there were many people suggesting that it would be nice if we could craft something like armor from all those porous bones you get in CS. It was so bad it had actually become a running joke. It used to be much worse than it is now. When it was actually worthwhile to farm there you could see upwards of 100 porous bones/hour. Which realistically is ridiculous.

My little Asura necro.
Jatoro’s full set other than the gloves which are a Hell Vambraces. Staff is from the Zenith set which I’m using while I save up for something more befitting a Necro.

Color set is black/blood red/white

Dungeons probably. You get 1g (Plus whatever loot drops) per path per day. Other than that, ya, probably the champ trains or temple runs, if your server does them.

frostgorge is dead on many servers try to guest on bg or jq after the last nerf many ppl stop farming i seen many lvl 80 ppl in queensdale now.

Those in Queens are typically farming karma though since most of those champs are event driven.

In a game like this, I too disagree with DPS being the primary determining factor in rewards. It’s essentially punishment for not picking a DPS build. Condition builds are just as viable AND offer good support roles, but take longer to put mobs down, so we get less credit for the same, or even more effort/contribution. I agreed that resing a defeated player is often a bad thing, but not resing a downed player can often cost you the battle. There is this thing called “teamwork” and in dungeons, they’re so much more difficult if you don’t have someone who can heal and/or cleans conditions. On the other hand if you don’t have enough DPS dungeons are just as hard.

I don’t know if it’s as bad as it used to be but back in the early days of the game DPS build got way better loot than other builds because the loot tables were built to take that in to consideration. There was ALOT of complaining on the forum about it.

I don’t use condition duration food…thanks for the tip. ;-) I rarely remember to use any food/potions or any other buffs. That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it either. If you’re in PvP/WvW spec something to remove conditions, then duration does not matter nearly as much. Or, accept your build if you don’t want to spec it for WvW and party up with guardians or necros or others who can cleans teammates. In WvW, my necro is a crowd control build…so everything is speced to increase CD. I cause very little DPS compared to most others and spec toughness (Dire, I think) to give me extra survivability. BUT, I don’t spec anything for breaking stun and nothing specific for removing conditions, so I don’t solo roam or even small groups and accept that I will die more often than other builds and get less finishers. But I can brake an invading/defending zerg up like nothing and I do love watching them scatter like ants under a magnifying glass. I’m the opposite end of a pure zerker warrior, I’m a pure conditimancer. I enjoy the strengths and accept the weaknesses of the build.

In PvE anything that helps is welcome, but it really only matters for tougher mobs, say veterans and above. Anything below that, by the time you build up a good bleed, they’re dead anyway.

To me, it sounds like you’re whining that you can’t stand in one place and just take the conditions. Should this be possible? Would you expect to stand there and let a warrior hack at you and not take damage? I’ve never understood the problem, other than zerkers thinking they should be invincible. I can’t count how many times I’ve laid marks in WvW, and necro marks are easy to see, and some big tank of a warrior or guardian just comes running straight through. Then they’re the first to complain conditions are overpowered.

It’s my personal opinion that conditions are generally under powered and certain ones, such as poison or disease, should be permanent until removed. So, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not working on the game.

I agree, there was too much collecting and the loot from the toyshop, or whatever you want to call it, was typically garbage although the 15 slot gift boxes were nice it would have been nicer if they were 20. This year I expect more of the same, except the “garbage” will come in a little box this time, with a bit of bloodstone dust and an unidentifiable object. ;-)

I wonder if they’re going to remove the group “dungeon” with this Wintersday like they did this Halloween. I did like the new content with the Bloody Prince, but still missed the dungeon. Only got to do it once last year and the chest bugged out on me, was looking forward to it this year.

I recently read a thread where a guy admitted to spending more than $1600 in the gem store!!! Does that give him an advantage over me? Perhaps marginal, if he used that toward a legendary or ascended weapon, otherwise no. Does it make him a better player that someone who is similarly speced and spent the time to earn whatever gear? I don’t know, but I can tell you who I’d rather have in my party.

Let’s get one thing straight though. The items in the gems store are cosmetic only, with the exception of certain things like boosters, res orbs, repair canisters, harvesting gear, etc. That said, EVERYTHING that is available on the trading post is also available in the gem store through the gem to gold conversion…semantically, this is no different than being in the gem store…it’s just an extra step. Now, because the TP items are available to everyone with enough gold in hand, GW2 is not pay to win, because that gold can be earned through playing the game. I would classify GW2 as a “pay-for-an-early-advantage” game. I still don’t like the gem to gold conversion and believe it causes unnecessary inflation in the market, but it’s certainly not pay to win.

I have one question…if conditions are so powerful why can warriors solo champions and conditions users not? You can’t lower conditions on a class like a necro, which has very little DPS in a pure CD build without lowering DPS in a pure zerker warrior build. It’s all about balance. Conditions are not overpowered, but you do need to equip something to cleans them or team up with someone like a guardian or necro who can clean conditions or choose to take your chances. Conditions are a huge part of this game and you need to learn to deal with them. You also have to play smart. Stay out of red rings, run away if you’re getting hit with bleeds. I can’t count how many times I’ve hit someone with AOE in WvW and they just stand there while I spam more and more. This is bull-headed and plain dumb. They need to learn to play against condition users. Warriors, more than any other class, seem to believe they should be invincible in WvW. I’ll tell you my conditimancer will teach you otherwise, especially if I’m protected.

Again, I don’t blame ANet for any of this, at the time it happened (Loot nerf, fractals, ascended) it all pointed to the Nexon sale. I think it was forced by Nexon and NCSoft and ANet had little control over the situation. Given their history with GW1 and the first 4 months of GW2, I do feel a little sorry for ANet because I really don’t believe this is what they had in mind for GW2.

Hjorje.9453:

There are things ANET releases that I don’t like, but ascended items aren’t one of them. If I was to look at ascended weapons, you know the hardest part about them is. Getting your crafting to 500, because after that, it really isn’t that hard or grindy to make a weapon. The grind is getting to 500 if you didn’t have a stock pile of mats laying around (which I did for my first 500), then if you had to get it done fast it would be a grind, or take your time and it will take a while to get there.

I agree, I don’t have a problem with the ascended weapons, but I do worry, that they will change the recipes for the legendaries and the various gifts associated to make them will require crafting level 500. I can afford to do one of the gifts now, but certainly not both. I’ve been “playing” the game rather than trying to grind incessantly to the legendary. Now if they make the legendary even more difficult/expensive/grindy to get, I’ll not be impressed.

morrolan.9608:

Hjorje.9453:

Why increase the stats. Well the original idea was for exotics to play that role, guess what, they have increased stats over rares.

Which is belied by comments before launch about BiS being easily available at end game then 2 months after launch anet made exotics easily available with the karma consumables.

But then they nerfed the ability to gain karma, again making it more of a grind.

What many don’t realize is that GW2 WAS released as originally advertised…no grind. The only real heavy grind was for legendaries…as was intended to be. Exotics dropped FAR more frequently than they do now, especially from dragons when you could regularly get 2 exos from the same chest, but it was a similar story in dungeons too. T6 mats also dropped far more frequently. It’s widely believed a stock sale deal that was made with Nexon was largely responsible for an enormous loot nerf throughout all parts of GW2. This was first noticed around mid last November (2012), when several huge (1000’s of posts) threads popped up on the forums, as well as on Reddit and other scene sites, complaining there was something wrong with the loot system. To my knowledge, after following the threads for months, before giving up and stopping play, Arenanet NEVER replied with anything other than vagaries or to close threads to try and bury the issue. It crystalized during Lost Shores when after killing so many karka, so many veterans and champs, bags were all but empty. Then there was the uncharacteristic chest at the end of lost shores which gave out a ridiculous amount of precursors, I know people who received 2. After Lost Shores the reality began to sink in. Jumping puzzle chests very rarely returned anything other blues, greens were rare and the only rares you ever saw where crests. Dungeon, world boss, temple and dragon chests were no better, regular champs never dropped anything, ever. Regular farming areas were nerfed in to the ground or changed to make them too difficult to farm. Everything seemed like it was trying to push you in to the fractals or to buy gems. I detested this ploy and stopped playing the game for a long time.

After 7 months off, I started playing again for Halloween, the clock tower being the only JP I was missing, and while not nearly as good as pre-November 2012, loot is much better than it was last winter. Of course, it may only be temporary while they try to get people to buy in to ascended crafting. Personally, while it’s cheaper than a legendary, I’m, still not convinced and will continue to save a for a legendary until such time I feel comfortable with ascended.

Victory.2879:

Actually the easier solution would be to make them tradeable before first use- which would release all those trinkets people have collected from fractals onto the market as well as opening up a good farm for those that like to do fractals (which isn’t me, I did it once and will never return).

It might even make fractals less of a ghost town as there would be a reason to go there….

To do this they would have to drastically nerf the drop rate within fractals because ascended would quickly become cheaper than exotic. This would hurt fractals, at one little piece of the game that only a portion of the community plays, that they invested so much time in to. I think they should be account bound and never become soul bound…especially the ones purchased though the laurel vendors. Soulbound is punishment for time spend. “Soulbound” is one of the largest reasons I’ve never pursued an alt…not one.

Essentially you’d have to make ascended gear as scarce, even more so presumably, as exotics are in normal dungeons, and what would that do to fracals?

I ran a carrion build a LONG time. I recently switched to Jatoro’s Armor. Personally, I would recommend trying a toughness build (Undead sigils rather than Necromancer sigils). Same build as carrion except you swap power for toughness. It really doesn’t hurt too much since a majority of a carrion build’s damage is in condition damage anyway. You can actually get much more CD than with carrion build if you set you traits accordingly and with this build and survivability goes way up too. There is also ascended gear that supports this build quite well. Jade Wind Orb and Vassar’s Band to name a couple.

The other thing to keep in mind in order to play the TP, is that if it looks like too good of a deal, it probably is…check gw2spidy. I don’t make huge profits, but I play very low risk markets. Even then, I can often turn 15g profit for perhaps a 100g invested. A month ago I started with 140g and now have 260g. Some days are better than others and can be a net loss. In the last 15 hours I moved nearly 40g worth of stock and I expect about 30% profit…so 12g clear profit…while I slept and was at work…not too bad for an hour of effort before going to bed…and it’s Friday, so I expect I will move much more before the day is done. Granted, these aren’t huge profits and one can make more in other areas, but I have kids and don’t have to time to grind dungeons ot fractal for hours on end or farm until my fingers bleed.

Aside from the karka chest, which I received The Hunter, which I could not use and think it used up ALL my luck for the remainder of my gaming days, I have no luck in this game. I once was farming Shelter/Penitent/Jofast/Plinx, before ANet made them unfarmible, and received over 90 porous bones in the run of an hour. It was ridiculous, and not long after, I stopped playing. You can only play for so long when you’re getting nothing and those around you are getting consistently decent drops. The ONLY time I can actually make decent money in this game is if I take the RNG out of the equation. I’ve opted to never use the mystic forge again unless it’s a set recipe with no RNG involved.

GOSU.9574:

a t s e.9614:

Yea 2500g is ok but 2700g is not ok . Why keep rising it ? It’s ridiculous , its going to be 4000g in a month then .

It keeps getting “raised” due to supply and demand, as has been pointed out. Basic economics. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, that simple.

Part of the problem is where ANet allows players to buy in game gold with real money. Granted, this is not the only way new money is injected in to the game. In game vendors pay out from a seemingly unlimited pool of money, that I like to think is funded by salvage kits and harvesting tools. While inflation will occur naturally over time as an economy matures, allowing unlimited money to be injected in to the economy is damaging and causes runaway inflation. Without the gem to gold conversion, the price of high end items would not be as high as they are at least not nearly so quickly.

Draknar.5748:

I also set aside $20/mo to spend on gem store to support the game. Not everyone can do this, I understand that, but if you can afford it, I say go for it. Each month I take a look to see if there are any skins or items that interest me, then I will buy them. Anything left over I convert to gold because gem to gold rate right now is pretty sweet.

I had considered something similar, but since I started playing ANet has done a few things to really kitten me off and I just can’t bring myself to spend more “real” money. I enjoy the game and support it and my guild through playing, but will not sink more money in to it.

Less grind content, more global content that gets people traveling the map, that will get more people in to maps. You’ll never get rid of the farmer/grinders, but once past 80 it seems GW2 is all about carrots and inexplicable amounts of grind.

Grind content is easier to make and a quick bandage to temporally appease the masses. It really doesn’t solve the problem though. Like Fractals, like the seasonal releases, like the tower, the releases concentrate people in small areas.

For me, once I hit 80, it closely corresponded with a nasty open world/dungeon loot nerf. So with farming being so incredibly bad, at least for me, and I still think my account was bugged, it was time for other tasks, world completion, jumping puzzles, etc. Once these were out of the way, loot was still terrible, veterans/champions rarely dropped anything, world bosses rarely dropped anything better than a green (And sometimes not even that) and the few decent placing to make money and the occasional T6 mat, such as Shelter, Penitent, Jofast, Plinx, etc were nerfed in to the ground or made so difficult that they weren’t worth doing. (Most of my gold in those days came from porous bones) Cursed Shore became a baron, player free wasteland. It got so bad with champions that even suggesting taking on a champion in world chat often garnered scoffing and outright negative comments. It was really bad for the game.

Being a reward driven player, Anet had taken away all the ways I liked to make money and with it my desire to play the game, so I stopped, for 7 months, until the Halloween patch and wanted to do the Clock Tower. The reward system is now vastly better than last winter, though still not nearly as good as last fall before November, champions are somewhat worth doing again, bosses feel more like bosses should, though the rewards still suck. Sadly, there is still heavy emphasis on the gem store and I worry that the increased crafting level of 500 and emphasis on Ascended will make legendaries even more expensive. Right now I take the game one day at a time, until Anet does something else to drive me away.

I do wish they would take such a heavy emphasis off fractals and work on more open world content. And really, c’mon, some useful infusions for those of us who don’t want to do fractals would be nice. +4 condition damage, for what, 20…25 laurels? That’s obscene and not even worth 5 laurels when one considers my base condition damage is over 1500. What about effect infusions that add an effect, or an aura to an item? That would be cool.

morrolan.9608:

Come to think of it has anyone got 3 ectos from a rare recently?

I got 3 from a rare a day or two ago, but it is very infrequent.

It would probably make me angry enough to leave the game again. It’s not like I have a shortage of games to play and the Steam Xmas sales aren’t far away so I can get more games I don’t have time to play.

J Season.9156:

I’m assuming you’re speaking of the Gift recipes, and not the precursor recipes said to be released in the future at some point (next year sometime is the latest eta I believe). I wouldn’t think the Gift recipes would shift requirement levels at all. Crafting a gift for a legendary is very different than crafting a precursor itself, which will most likely require 500.

A crafted Gift is only a piece of a much larger puzzle. Crafting a gift for a legendary is indeed “less awesome” than an ascended weapon, since it is useless unless it is combined to create a legendary weapon.

Yes, I’m talking about the gifts. (Gift of Color, Gift of Energy, etc.) Making them require 500, would make the legendary much more expensive and more grind and GW2 is oh so much grind now.

Obsidian.1328:

Rares have a 1% chance to drop?…

Good grief that’s low. In my head that should be the % on exotics lol.

The drop rates are appalling, have been for a long time. They were much better before November of last year (2012). I still salvage for MF, though only from random drops, but it used to be that high MF actually made drops worse and I hold out some hope they fixed it.

As a show of odds…
I do know that if you drop 4 rares in to the MF, you have about 20% (1/5) chance of getting an exotic and 0.6% (6/1000) chance of that being a precursor. So the chances of getting a precursor out of the forge are 6 in 5000 or 1 in 834 tries…remember that’s 4 rares per try and many people have gone far beyond 834 before getting the PC. You’re better off grinding gold, and the price of the precursors reflect this trend.

hmmm Might be prudent to buy the recipes now and at least craft the one gift I can.

With the impending increase of all crafting to 500, please tell me the recipes for the legendaries will not change and the gifts required through personal crafting will remain at 400.

This has been a complaint since last year. Don’t know about fractals, but I thought they changed dungeons so you could not invite in to the instance after the group entered. It was quite a common practice in the early days, a couple strong players would go in with some random guys, kick them at the final boss and invite their weaker friends so they get the chest and rewards in those days were substantially better than they are now. I thought they changed it so you could not do this.

It’s not about easy or hard, it’s about time spent. They want people to take a long time to spec ascended. ANet wants you to play, and to tie laurels, and indirectly, ascended trinkets, to dailies/monthlies is fairly clever and makes it a huge incentive for people to do these things, which quite frankly was a dying habit when I was playing last winter. Very few people I knew bothered with dailies because they were tedious (Before they implemented choice, and very rarely rewarding. Laurels are the only reason I do them now. People want ascended, and to get them you have to do the dailies/monthlies…. Currently you can get ~40 laurels per month if you complete everything…so an uninfused ascended trinket per month…or you can play the fractals and, in theory, get ascended stuff there. When you think about it, this is substantially less work and much less time than it takes for legendary weapons. You also get laurels from achievement chests, but these are so few as to not be really be worth mentioning. I also know people who have had ascended stuff drop from WvW.

I’m not opposed to diversity, but laurels in particular, are one thing I’d like to remain unfarmable. There should be a limit on how many you can get in a given time frame, otherwise they will be farmed and abused. You get what you get and there is no way to increase that number. To many things in this game are prone to abuse by those who would exploit it.

Can’t you essentially do this already depending on the profession, skills, traits, runes, sigils, trinkets, weapons and armor you choose? My conditionmancer build does very little DPS compared to say that of a warrior but does huge CD compared to most other classes. Currently I only have 2400atk, only because I can’t get trinkets yet that stat vit/toughness/CD…some ascended do (Jade Wind Orb, for instance), but these are uber expensive at the laurel vendors and take time to get. You can’t completely get rid of any base attribute without a complete from the ground up redesign, but you can spec to grossly increase certain things for a certain play style. Jatoro’s armor with a full set of Superior Runes of the Undead, plus carrion weapons and Superior Sigil of Corruption, plus similarly speced trinkets, traits and slot skills to take advantage of the build, can boost the condition damage stat over 1800 while sacrificing power (Physical damage) for toughness to get armor to around 2600 for a little more survivability. That said, you really have to play a class thoroughly and try different builds to see what really works for you.

Not to be a party pooper, but if they made laurels easy to get, they might as well give everyone a free set of ascended trinkets.