Guild Wars 2

small area aoe’s won’t aggro spiders — for example guardian scepter #2 aoe can be placed entirely on the tree’s body.

foofad.5162:

Because it would be overpowered. Two handed weapons have a much higher innate damage range than one handed weapons. That’s the short version.

Is this true (has someone calculated DPS numbers?) .. and if true, with a one-handed weapon, your offhand provides some DPS as well.. for example the guardian’s torch seems to have pretty good DPS.

In any case, some weapon sets having 2 sigil slots and some having 1 means it’s harder to balance… with Anet having always struggled with balance (hence the drastic decline in skill choice between GW1 and GW2), it seems they’ve just made their lives more difficult.

Is the end boss Tazza supposed to drop nothing? From what I understand, she used to drop a bunch of silver and the recipe for The Replicator (if you’re really lucky). Is that recipe unobtainable now?

Considering how easy it is to accidentally clear your target via mouse clicks, being able to call a target when roaming solo would help a lot!

Does it kitten everyone else off when mobs reset — in other words, they decide they’re out of combat, (probably because you pulled them too far) and regenerate all their health, meanwhile taking no damage?

It’s really morale breaking when this happens with bosses — especially when you’re playing solo.

I think it’s fine that mobs return “home” when they’ve been pulled too far, and maybe even fair that they take no/less damage when returning. But to have them regenerate all their health when they are clearly still in combat — not fun at all.

Does the 30 second delay showing contested status apply to camps as well?
You can easily kill every NPC in a camp in less than 30 seconds with just a few people.

So we’re supposed to place someone in every camp all the time?
This really affects night crews — when you only have a few people in your whole borderlands, having someone at every camp is not feasible.

Currently, you can have “fast-response” teams who wait for swords to appear, then rush to the camp for defense. The point is, you actually get to fight people because if you’re fast enough, you can get to the camp before it’s flipped.

Now camps are just going to be flipped without anyone around. It’ll be much more PvNPC. I’m hoping we won’t end up simply doing camp flipping trains — reflipping whatever just got flipped.

(This is probably not an issue in higher tier servers, but for the lower tiers, having only 10 people in a borderlands at night is not uncommon.)

potent potions of centaur slaying say that you deal +9% more damage to centaurs.
I tested this in Gendarrian fields and it doesn’t seem to work with condition damage (specifically burning).

I tried potions of inquest slaying in SEp1 dungeon and they didn’t increase my condition damage either.

is there a bug here? Has anyone tested this before?

I believe Anet is satisfied with the slow projectile rate of the scepters and won’t be changing it…

to fix the problem we see in the video, Anet can use a better aiming algorithm.
Currently, projectiles are fired where the foe is predicted to be, taking only your foe’s current position and velocity into account. If instead an average velocity were used
(say, average velocity of your foe over the past 1/2 second or so) then the problem would be less extreme.

Single-handed giver’s weapons have +10% condition duration.

Giver’s two-handed weapons only have 10% condition duration as well.

However, looking at Anet’s patterns regarding two-handed weapons, where prefix stats are usually (just about) doubled from their single-handed counterparts, it would seem that Giver’s two-handed weapons should have +18% (or +19%) condition duration.

For example, the Berserker’s prefix gives +5% critical damage to single-handed weapons while it gives +9% critical damage to two-handed weapons.

It’s understandable that people on a server with queues would be kitten if you’re dueling.
The solution: transfer to NSP! (I’ve only seen queues in the hours after reset.) We could use the population!

Anyone else think that it’s kind of lame that you can spy on your opponents’ movements when you’re lying on the ground dead? It feels like cheating.

On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to watch the remainder of a battle after you’ve been finished.

Maybe your screen should black out if there are no friendlies nearby your corpse?

Shalliko.9328:

Any server have the cathedral of zephrys open? I need to get in badly to pick up some gear and no one is really running the chains over here.

NSP has a zerg that opens temples every day at around 5:00 pacific time.

NSP has a zerg opening all temples at (i believe) around 5:00 pacific time every day.

For those of you who are programmers (maybe the dragon-timer people?), here’s something that would be of great help to guild bounty hunters:

a webpage where players can update the locations of the bosses when they happen upon them.

I’ve stumbled upon bosses a few times just doing PvE stuff.. if there were such a site, I’d certainly update it when this happens!

Beorn Raukar.4328:

Retrospek.4583:

Plain and simple, none of the guild events should be done with less than 10 people, and I’d recommend a lot more than that if possible.

In my guild we finished a guild bounty training mission with 4 people without scouting first, so it is quite possible. We got Poobadoo, that is an easy boss but with a big route.

To the OP, it really depends on the boss. If you can find him you will need 4-5 people to kill him as the bounties are Champions in a group event, even then with such low numbers you might need some real organization since there are some special mechanics to the bosses. However if you are shooting for a 1/5 chance of success I think it is quite likely you can achieve that, as long as you recruit at least 3 more players.

I did a few practice runs today — just searching for the bosses in various maps — poobadoo was one of them.. coincidentally, a small guild (4-5) was doing a bounty on her .. it didn’t look like poobadoo has any hard mechanic, so maybe that one is possible..
I found poobadoo’s path to be short compared to some others (I also tried to find Brooke in snowden — her path is super long .. I never found her.

On the other hand I also found 2-mult with a guild of 10+ fighting it .. I happened upon them when they had about 6 mins left on their timer — they failed it. 2-Mult was downing people left and right.. it didn’t look very easy!

NSP has a zerg that does all the temples at around 5:00 pacific time every day.

It’s great that at reset time there is cooperation, but there is cooperation because lots of guilds plan to activate pretty much simultaneously: reset time.

At any other time, if two guilds are looking for the same bounty, it’s very unlikely that they have planned to activate at the same time… thus whichever guild activates first ruins the scouting of the other guild (as they may not be ready to activate).

This is really bad. One of the best features of GW2 is the extremely friendly and helpful PvE population — other players are not your competitors, so everyone helps everyone out. The way these bounties work, other players become potential competitors .. so we see behavior such as mentioned in the OP.

weapon skins from gw1 would be cool — I remember farming a ton in Cantha for a skull shield with the stats I wanted .. I never got it.

somewhat on topic: I’d pay anything for faces and hairstyles from GW1. Anything.

thanks for the answers!

I guess I’ll have to train for these training missions

I’ll scout out all the bosses’ paths and find hills/other high points where I get better views of their routes. (I wonder if the end of culling would be to my advantage here? …Actually, has culling been removed from PvE as well as WvW?)
Plus, as a necro, I can trait for lots of speed as wells a perma swiftness.

as for fighting the bosses — I find that a lot of gold-level dungeon bosses can be soloed in 7-8 minutes (if you know their mechanics well) .. so if I find these guys quickly, maybe I can take them down as well.

I’ll probably also help out some small guilds on their build bounties to get more familiarized with the whole thing.

actually, this sounds like a fun challenge!
… and I only need to succeed more than 10% of the time to profit.

as for finding a better use of my building time — I don’t really have much to build anyway because I don’t generate much influence (less than 100 per day)… this is pretty much my only hope for generating large amounts of influence so I guess may as well give it a try.

My one-man guild is about to research guild bounty training (art of war 3 is being researched right now)

I’m interested in guild bounty training solely for the 3000 influence it gives, which I plan to spend on WvW buffs and siege (I’m not actually interested in the “real” guild bounty missions!).

There will only be one boss so I don’t plan to do any pre-event scouting…
I’ll activate the mission, find the boss (hopefully quickly) and beat him/her.
I’ll likely have a few people helping me (plus whoever’s on the map who’s willing to help), but that’s not guaranteed, so…

the question is: which of the bosses do you think would be soloable within a reasonable amount of time?

by the way, I’m very casual about this — I acknowledge that I’ll probably fail some or even most missions — that’s ok! If I succeed 2 out of every 10 tries, then I’ll be making a (influence) profit. Plus, if I fail, it’s only 15 minutes “wasted” anyway.

x per fection x.2096:

Se Path 1 guard solo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jehg3Er_Ojs

This was my first try so some parts are a little sketchy, i don’t know all the safe spots on the bridge but figured out a different way to do it towards the end. The fact that you solo’d the third golem and tazza okittenerker war is amazing, took me until 25% health to figure the golem out and i still can’t find a pattern in tazza, seems like the push/gs toss skills are completely random.

I spazzed and clicked the record button and turned off a little of it but got it back on for the end.

tazza’s basic cycle consists of
one teleport, one knockback, 2 beams of death, and one sword throw

her basic pattern is:
1. teleport,
2. knockback if you’re close to her shortly after the teleport, otherwise, beam of death
3. if 2. was knockback, then beam of death; if 2. was beam of death, then knockback
4. beam of death or sword throw (seems random)
5. if 4. was beam of death, then sword throw, if 4. was sword throw than beam of death

sometimes she will add:

6. beam of death — from observation, it seems like she adds this when she hasn’t done
enough damage in the current cycle

occasionally, she will mix up the ordering and, for example, do the sword throw first.
however, it’s always exactly one sword throw and one knockback per cycle.

by the way, if you’re soloing her using melee, it’s my theory that circling behind her may cause her to lose aggro.

btw, I solo SE path 1 with a necro pretty regularly — it was really fun slowly figuring it out!

Sororita.3465:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4ksDfl84K8

lol… I’m the necro that you guys snow leopard bombed at the end…
Seeing a bunch of snow leopards raining down from the sky — pretty awesome!

Anyone know why the CoE tokens buy you potions of the undead?
shouldn’t it be potions of inquest slaying?
is this a bug or intentional?
..seems like other dungeon tokens can be traded for potions of whatever it is you’re primarily fighting in those dungeons.

Tazza:

• use flesh golem and bone minions, the condition-eating healing (for it’s fast recharge), signet of undeath (for the life force), and signet of the locust for the speed.
• Tazza has an attack cycle, usually: teleportation/red-circles-of-death, knockback, beam-of-death, beam-of-death again, and then bouncing-cloning-sword.
  Sometimes the knockback comes second depending (i believe) on how close you are to Tazza shortly after she teleports. Sometimes there’s a third beam-of-death at the end. Sometimes the bouncing-cloning-sword comes after the first beam-of-death.
• Walk out of the teleportation/red-circles-of-death when they appear, don’t waste your dodges here. When you’re solo, you know exactly where she’ll teleport to so drop marks on that location.
• The beam-of-death deals more damage the farther you are to Tazza. So if you’re gonna get hit by it, run toward her. Also, it’s actually around 6 attacks with one animation so if you dodge late, you will still evade some of the attack.
• In each cycle, try to dodge one beam-of-death and definitely save enough dodges for the bouncing-cloning-sword (its tell is very obvious). I usually step back to avoid the knockback, then take the beam-of-death with death shroud, dodge the next one, and dodge the cloning-sword. If your death shroud is low, run close to Tazza and just take the first beam-of-death, the damage is acceptable as long as you don’t do this too many cycles in a row.
• if you get cloned by the sword, bring up any minions you have available as soon as possible. When Tazza next teleports, it will one-shot the minions and that triggers the death of the clone (I think the clones death may be triggered by the amount of damage done by Tazza — in any case this pretty much always works).
• in general, try to not have all your minions up at the same time as it gets hard to see Tazza and her animations when it’s crowded.
• if by accident you get knocked back, hit death shroud immediately because a beam-of-death comes right after.
• the whole time, drop marks on Tazza: youneed the life force from Soul Reaping trait X.
• This fight is pretty fun except that since you’re solo, she’s got an enormous amount of health.
• This took me a total of around 70 minutes. But that’s because Tazza reset after around half an hour (with 15-20% health left!) when I hit skill 2 in Death Shroud by accident. The second fight was about 40 minutes.

Consumables:

• potion of inquest slaying speeds things up.
• orrian truffle and meat stew (for the 40% endurance refill rate) for the dodges.
  Neither are necessary but will make your life much easier.

Overall: the dungeon is pretty fun with nice boss mechanics. The fights are also pretty forgiving.. you can make mistakes and still win. You can only get one-shotted by Tazza’s teleportation, but it’s a very slow attack.

TL/DR: dodge!

Nokk: this fight is really fun because of his attack mechanics.

• return to minion, staff build.
• when you first see him, drop a flesh wurm on the platform where he stands. Fight him with the staff; stand about 1000 range from him on the path that you came from.
  He will drop 3 singularity mobs, one at a time — they barely move; their attack is a short ranged knockback: just step away from them when he summons them near you. When you drop the flesh wurm on the platform, Nokk will almost always drop the first singularity on the wurm, taking pressure off you. Don’t kill the singularities — Nokk will replace them.
• After he drops the third singularity, run across the platform (and past Nokk) to the
  other side with your back facing the door. Stay there for the rest of the fight — the singularities are then a non-issue. This is the most dangerous part of the fight as Nokk has a short/medium ranged white-hula-hoops-of-death attack, which is strong.
• Stay at about 1000 range from Nokk. Sometimes he will walk towards you, especially right after you run across the platform — KEEP HIM AWAY — the hula-hoop attack hurts a lot! Make sure he has no stacks of defiant before you run across the platform and fear him back if he approaches you after you’ve reached the other side.
• Try to keep 3 minions up at all times, ideally a mix of ranged and melee so that they don’t all die in one attack — they take the hits for you, especially the:
• Ball-of-freeze-you-for-8-seconds — Nokk’s tell is pretty obvious.. dodge this attack (always dodge side to side not backwards or forwards — if you dodge backwards, Nokk may choose to approach you; forwards and you’re too close to him). If you do get frozen and he uses his multiple-red-circles confusion attack, hit death shroud to absorbe the damage. His recharge is around 9 seconds on his freezing attack, so when you come out of being frozen, be on immediate alert and dodge his next one.
• Multiple-red-circles confusion attack — if you’ve got minions up, he’ll generally drop the circles on the minions, so you’re pretty safe from this one.
• time: 5-7 minutes.

Golem, mines:

• just run past them, don’t stop. Definitely dodge the first golem’s pull or you’re dead (the mines near it kill down you). Dodge the second one also. Getting pulled by the third and fourth is no big deal (you an use fear to interrupt the pulls if you wish.. death shroud when you do get pulled just to be on the safe side).
• you can fight them if you wish — they’re easy: they can’t move! Just kill them with minions and staff from afar — beware that the mines respawn. The drops here are total garbage compared to the time it takes to kill.

Three Golem bosses:

• Pull them and kill them one-by-one. Electric first (he follows the furthest) then Fire. Pull into the tunnel on the left hand side.
• Don’t use minions for these Golems.
• Electric: dodge his attack to the left or right (backwards and he may lose aggro depending on how far down the tunnel you are). Fight him solo with at most a flesh wurm dropped away from you, preferably to the Golems left side (right side and behind him may cause other Golems to aggro).. don’t drop it close to you as the Golem’s attack will bounce back and forth between you and the wurm.. also, the Golem has an attack that causes you to take damage when near allies.
• If you’re out of dodges, use death shroud to absorb damage.
• I use Blood is Power to make this fight shorter.
• Don’t use your elite, especially the flesh golem’s charge — it will surely aggro the other two golems.

Fire Golem:

• If you want to be safe, use: The-Healing-That-Eats-Conditions, Plague Signet, Well of Power and if you’re human (which I am), Prayer to Kormir — this way, with staff 4, you have 5 condition removals. Also: dodge. Note that you can direct his lava font attack pretty much where you want it to drop so you can save some dodges. Use death shroud if you’re low on health to wait for your heal to recharge.
• This Golem eats conditions, but if you drop staff 2 and 3 on him right after he eats, they will expire before he eats again. Also: if you get burned, give it back to him, it’ll most likely expire before he eats.

Poison Golem:

• He’s the last one left, so fight him in the room.
• To be conservative, use the same build as with the fire golem.
• dodge back and to the left or right when he uses his quick shooting attack and with a bit of movement afterwards you can avoid all damage from it. Also, whittle down his defiant stacks and fear him to interrupt this attack — it’s strong.
• Use flesh golem to take pressure off of you.
• Total time to kill Nokk and Golems: about 30 minutes.

continued, next post…

sorry, no video.. but I finally did it after quite a bit of practice!
Figuring this dungeon out was probably the most fun I’ve had in GW2 outside of WvW and the Wintersday JP.

In total, it took about 2 hrs 10 minutes, but that includes about 30 minutes of almost beating Tazza before I hit the wrong skill and she reset.

How I did it (TL/DR version at the very bottom):

I used a fully knight’s armor, jewels, weapons build with runes of the forge.
As for traits:

• Death Magic V
• Blood Magic II, V, IX
• Soul Reaping II, X, XII

I use a staff for the entire dungeon.

This build was entirely to get through Tazza. Looking back now, the key was actually the Soul Reaping line for absorbing damage when you’re saving or out of dodges…
I’m pretty sure you can do this faster replacing all the Blood magic with:

• Spite V, VII/IX, XII,

..you’d have to be more consistent, but over a shorter period of time.

Here’s a short (LOL) guide, it’s for a Necro, but I think a lot of the ideas would work with other professions:

Before the Golem boss: get to Golem as fast as possible. Don’t fight the patrols (if possible) — note that there seems to always be one patrol after you meet the Golem. For the patrols: run to lose aggro, then step in a location (for example behind the fence on the right side of the far end of the bridge) where the patrol ignores you and continues on its way.

Golem boss: kill the adds first then the Golem. I use minions in this part of the dungeon: the healing minion, the bone minions, the flesh wurm, the shade, and the flesh golem elite. The buff to the healing minion has really made it viable.

• Use the staff to kill him from afar.
• You need to dodge only around 60% of his energy ball attacks (it guides — strafing doesn’t work). His windup is obvious so this is easy. Your healing minion fixes you up pretty fast. The Golem only targets you with this attack — don’t stand with a minion directly between you and the Golem when he uses this attack or the minion will be collateral damage.
• Drop the flesh wurm between him and yourself. When he shoots his pulling-balls stand behind the wurm — it won’t get pulled and will take the hits for you.
• It should be pretty easy to have at least 2 minions up at all times.
• If you get pulled, hit death shroud and back out. But avoid getting pulled because if the Golem is near the fencing, sometimes the pull flies you off the path and into the lava.
• it takes around 10 mintes to get from the start of the dungeon to killing the Golem.

Turrets/running the path: This is the most unfun part of the dungeon.

• use signet of the locust for speed
• use spectral walk for speed
• hit and run if you wish to do this without dying. When a patrol attacks, run until you lose aggro, step in a place where the patrols ignore you, then run back to turrets. Use spectral walk/dodging/staff 5’s fear/staff 3’s chill to run past patrols when you’re on your way to a turret. If faster is your goal, hit the turrets as much as possible and before dying, jump into the lava — usually you won’t damage armor as you die by falling damage. Turrets are objects so they don’t regenerate health so dying is not a big deal.
• this takes about 20 minutes.
• did i mention this part is not fun at all?

continued, next post.

speaking of more art from GW1.. what about adding hairstyles and faces from GW1?

Anet: that would be worth pretty much whatever amount of gems you’d like to charge!

This is one of the major reasons why people are not happy with Flame & Frost thus far:

Shiren.9532:

• Flame & Frost teaser events/NPCs (phase 2 – calling them phase 1 and phase 2 is where so much of the criticism comes from, if there was a minimum amount of content required to be considered a phase, these two updates combined wouldn’t even qualify)

The other major reason is that the content is not fun at all, especially the recovery of lost artifacts. “Somewhere near the (very long) road” is not a hint that makes good gameplay. It leads to first, combing the land — extremely tedious; and then asking on map chat and praying the answer is from someone who found the artifact after the latest server reset.

Hints that we could use to deduce the position of the artifacts would have been much more engaging. A simple example: “The place where we were attacked: to the east was a mountain that looked like the head of a lion” — this also encourages people to stop and look at the scenery!

even better: a chain of hints, one leading to the next.

The immobilize icon is a chain.
The stun icon is some sort of starburst.

The breaks-stun icon is a chain. It doesn’t break immobilize.

Doesn’t seem quite right!

pita spoon.5708:

the amazing race.. i should have taken pics at the beginning but didn’t really think about it..

but i started at titan and when i saw a defender i took off knowing more were to come.. got outside and turned around to see they were still chasing me and more did show up..

a few times it seemed you guys almost had me.. but i got away.. fun race though..

the map pics are just to show my trail.. man you guys are really persistant and you never give up..

cool! I was one of the chasers (necro).. can only see part of my guild tag in one pic

that was a fun chase.. after realizing we couldn’t get you we figured we should “punish” you by forcing you to start all over at your keep — and it was safe for us since the whole BL was green!

At one point there was a small glimmer of hope we could get you, but no such luck…
Next time!

Account.9832:

General Molradovich in Sorrow’s Embrace P3. He casts rings of fire on pets / minions / clones, and there is no way for players to tell those minions to jump on the water and put out the fire, so the pets effectively set fire to other players.

Please don’t get rid of this… I’m pretty sure the fire rings burn Molradovich himself and one strategy (Necro) is to send burning minions to melee him (or casting the wurm right next to him).

in addition, hold back on casting a minion until he burns you, you then cast the minion who will rise next to you and burn also.. that minion proceeds to melee and burn Molradovich).

this is great because the minions are expendable — who cares if they burn to their deaths!

this probably works with other minions as well, e.g. ranger pets.

I feel the diversity in strategy that this allows makes up for the fact that minions can’t douse themselves in the fountains.

anyone notice that spinal shivers no longer states (in tooltip) that it removes 3 boons…
instead, it applies chill and vulnerability (however, i did a quick experiment and it doesn’t actually apply vulnerability)?

it’s really frustrating when you actively look for it…

if you just drop by the reactor every day for a quick look then you’ll eventually see it..

here’s a couple tips:

walk through all the bushes in the jungle room and notice if “interact” shows up.
I’ve seen it lying on the floor in the middle room near a corner.
and I believe it may spawn under the stairs in the ocean room.

JaironKalach.4938:

Lord Kuru.3685:

for those who feel really unlucky: if you do 350 trys, then you should have 99.9999% chance of getting your 77 — i.e. only “1 in a million” will fail to get 77 after 350 tries.

Yeah, but I’ll be that one.

LOL!

here’s an idea: if you still haven’t gotten it after, say, 300 tries, perhaps you should get a “gift of misfortune” which can substitute for the gift of fortune in the recipes.

maybe this would make people feel better about the randomness — in this way, randomness feels like a plus instead of a minus: you feel good/lucky when it takes less than the maximum of 300 tries, whereas now, you’re always feeling unlucky because you haven’t gotten 77 yet, and you don’t know how many more tries you’ll need.

JaironKalach.4938:

Lord Kuru.3685:

oh certainly it’s possible.. that’s why I used a lot of quotation marks in the OP as well as the disclaimer

anyway the post was meant as a morale booster for those who are on bad runs at the forge — the point being that if you gather enough material for 303 tries (assuming the 33% number is correct), then you should feel confident that you’re gonna make it.

It’s not just possible, but it seems likely. Using the same logic of probability that you’re using, if 1000 people get enough for 303 tries, it is likely that at least one of them will not make it.

interestingly, if 1000 people get enough for 303 tries, then there is only a 37% chance that no one will fail!

so what about this:

for those who feel really unlucky: if you do 350 trys, then you should have 99.9999% chance of getting your 77 — i.e. only “1 in a million” will fail to get 77 after 350 tries.

Ayrilana.1396:

I’m sorry but you should research the concept of probability. It’s quite possible that it can take someone over 500 tries. It’s even possible for it to take 1,000 tries.

oh certainly it’s possible.. that’s why I used a lot of quotation marks in the OP as well as the disclaimer

anyway the post was meant as a morale booster for those who are on bad runs at the forge — the point being that if you gather enough material for 303 tries (assuming the 33% number is correct), then you should feel confident that you’re gonna make it.

Astralporing.1957:

So, in other words, one in a hundred players will need at least 285 tries? One in thousand at least 304? In a game with few million accounts that is a huge number.

True… but how many people are actively/seriously working to get legendaries?
That’s actually not a rhetorical question — I’m really curious! is it in the thousands? or tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?

wow… so we have one person with 171 tries to get 77 and another with 287 tries.

interestingly, that’s 154 clovers in 458 tries, which is just about 33.6%

the funny thing is that if the 33% number were correct, (far) fewer than 1% of people would get it as fast as 171 and fewer than 1% would need as many as 287 tries… so we’ve got both the luckiest and unluckiest two players in this thread! The wonders of self-reporting? Probably!

TWMagimay.9057:

What data did you base your calculations on?

33% chance of getting a clover per try — according to the wiki…

I hope that number is right… but to now hear that someone did it in 115 tries (the post above) that 33% sounds a bit fishy!

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

If I’m having fun, I win.

Wrong! it’s when you:

crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.

hey everyone.. seems a lot of people are unhappy about the RNG aspect of getting mystic clovers.. I did some computations and it seems here’s a good way of looking at it:

if you do the 1 clover recipe 303 times, you have 99.9% chance of getting the 77 clovers
you need.

So instead of thinking of this as gambling for 77 clovers (which is awful when you’re on a bad run), think of it as: once you’ve saved up enough for 303 applications of the recipe, you’re “guaranteed” to get the 77 you need. You may have a few bad runs at the forge but ignore them — as long as you’ve saved up enough for 303 tries, you’re all set!

Thought of in this way, getting your 77 mystic clovers “equals” grinding for a fixed number of materials — with the bonus that you’ll most likely have some left over!
(perhaps for your second legendary?)

by the way, with the 10 clover recipe, you’re 99.9% guaranteed to get what you need after 31 tries.

here are a few more numbers just for fun (1 clover recipe):

after 230 tries, there’s 50% chance you’ve already got the 77 you need.
after 249 tries, there’s 80% chance you’re already done.
after 259 tries, there’s 90% chance you’re finished.
after 284 tries, there’s 99% chance you’ve already got what you wanted.

Disclaimer: of course it’s possible that you’re the unluckiest person in the world and don’t get your 77 after 303 tries, but then you probably don’t deserve anything named
“gift of fortune” LOL!

Edit: I used 33% probability to get a clover per try (from the wiki) .. but as it’s been pointed out, the 33% is a guess from a sample size of 159. Perhaps someone should add a disclaimer on the wiki?

Edit 2: For those who feel particularly unlucky, 350 tries should give you 99.9999% chance of getting your 77. (still assuming 33% clover rate)

So I went to the Mists to test sigils, in particular combos of superior sigils of air, fire and strength.
The original goal was to determine whether two sigils of Air (on main and off hand weapons) increased trigger probability.

Because the air and fire sigils have 5 second cooldown, every time one of these triggered I paused testing for 6 seconds, so cooldown did not have any effect on these tests.

So here are the results:

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Air/Air: out of 100 critical hits, Air triggered 33 times. This indicates having two Airs has the same effect as using just one!

Theoretically: One Air should trigger 30% of the time… this is quite close to the experimental result. (The guild wars wiki claims that both Airs should have had effect, in which case we should see lightning 51% of the time — not even close!)

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Air/Strength: out of 100 critical hits, Air triggered 27 times and I got might from the Strength sigil 18 times (never both simultaneously). So both sigils have effect and Air takes priority when the probability gods say that both should trigger on the same critical hit (this makes sense because the cooldown of Air supresses the sigil of Strength).

Theoretically: if both Air and Strength were to have effect and Air had priority, then we expect 30% chance of lightening and 21% chance of might. The numbers are quite close to this!

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Air/Fire: I got tired/lazy and simply tested whether both would trigger, or only one.
In this test, I simply let my toon go to town on the golem with auto-attack and I counted the number of times each sigil triggered (much less tedious than the previous two tests, where I had to disable auto-attack).

Both did trigger: out of 30 procs, 18 were Fire and 12 were Air.
Unfortunately, I didn’t record which sigil I had on the main hand and which on the offhand — not sure if there would have been a difference.

Theoretically: we should see a ratio of 30:21 if both sigils have effect and one always has priority over the other. My numbers are 18:12, which is very close! Furthermore, it looks like in this test, Fire always had priority over Air.

By the way, this ratio is consistent with a 51% chance of one or the other sigil triggering (unlike the case with the Air/Air where only one is triggering) — but note that I didn’t count the number of times neither triggered in this test, so further testing is probably in order.

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Conclusion: seems like Air/Air is a waste, Air/Strength works as expected, and Air/Fire has indications of working as expected.

Anyone else done any testing that we might find useful?