Guild Wars 2

people should have been suspicious when Anet held the contents of the meta chest secret. They don’t do it for PvE living world metas.

Frodowise.4209:

I really didn’t mind the difficulty, since I had a group of 4 with one person under leveled for the dungeon, I was just confused because every post on the wiki and other guides said he spawned veterans rather than elites XD .

Thanks for the advice on beating him, we’ll definitely take those into account.

The wiki and guides say veterans because until recently — when Anet renamed them “elites” — silver mobs were called “veterans.”

Enaretos.8079:

Yep that’s when you want to interrupt him.
Last call would probably be the end of the animation for the howl.

A 3-man team can easily interrupt it by using the right utilities or another weapon set.
Killing it becomes slower though.

When I first started doing that dungeon regularly, that’s what my group did. However, he just uses the skill shortly afterwords anyway (I guess NPCs also get the 5 second recharge on interrupt). How are you able to interrupt him so that he doesn’t recast so quickly?

Righteous.4307:

Utilize the release of the upcoming ascended armor release and reward players with a single set of ascended armor.

You must be joking. Ascended armor is Anet’s latest and greatest grind inducer — they wouldn’t consider, even for a millisecond, giving it away as a reward.

For a normal PvE Living Story meta, the main reward is generally a mini or a skin. We got a mini. So working as intended.

Neko.9021:

Black Box.9312:

I think a major part of the problem is the fact that they put the agony instabilities at the BEGINNING of each fractal tier rather than the end. If they had it at every 9th level instead of every 10th then at least players could work their way up to the gear check rather than being required to have the specific amount of AR from the start.

The very purpose of a gear check is to prevent people from completing content, even if they should otherwise be able to complete the rest of the content with skill. Putting the gate at the front of a fractal tier and preventing players from moving forward is working as intended.

And it sucks. I hate the agony-system being reliant on getting Ascended gear, most of which you get from doing things OTHER THAN FRACTALS.

Requiring so much AR at the beginning of the tier that AR is effectively a non-factor for the rest of that tier makes it meaningless as a mechanic. It becomes a solely a gear check. Huge mistake by Anet.

The problem is that the same people who created Scarlet will create her successor. There’s no reason to believe they can do better. That’s the real problem with GW2.

Aeros.2046:

They also need to realize that net world population does not equal WvW population.

They definitely know this. They have all the metrics at their disposal. They are however, choosing to use world population as their measure of server size. Why? Not sure. Maybe they’d feel embarrassed if they released real WvW numbers.

There’s two ways to use skins. One is to replace the skin you have on your current gear. The other is to duplicate your current gear and put your new skin on that.

Second allows people to have different looks for different occasions/moods. Ascended gear really hurts this though. Who is willing to grind a second set of Ascended gear? Anet is really hurting their own bottom line because people are going to be more hesitant about changing skins — especially since skins are one-time use.

It’s a clog in the mystic toilet that causes what goes down to come back up. Call a plumber.

GW1 had templates (at least with the skill bar). Not sure why Anet decided to move a step backwards in this respect.

Sube Dai.8496:

Hunting skills in gw1 was fun because there were so many to acquire. Gw2 by comparoson has hardly any skills, so the effort of finding them would not take very long.

This.

Sube Dai.8496:

But they also just cant add more skills, because having so many skills made the game too hard to balance. You can’t have the best of both worlds.

This is a major problem. Without new skills, the game gets stale. So Anet either has to get better at balancing or face people quitting out of boredom.

Anet has a very poor track record when it comes to balance, so more skills is just going to overwhelm them. I think a better way would be to have a percentage of old skills expire with new skills to replace them on a regular schedule (say, every 4 months, or even 6 months). That way, the game stays fresh, but the number of useable skills doesn’t become overwhelming for Anet. This is what Magic the Gathering does to keep Type II play fresh.

The major problem with this is that people will have to change builds on a regular basis and people who are locked in because of Ascended gear will be very upset if their new build will require different gear.

(In fact this problem will arise no matter what Anet does as long as they introduce new skills — they’ve put themselves in a no-win situation here.)

RedShipRaider.9560:

BondageBill.4021:

In my experience, this is even one of the bigger selling points of expansions in MMOs. I have seen several friends quit MMOs because they cannot keep up with the gear curve, only to rejoin when an expansion is released because they are on par with the rest of the population. Again, this option can be good for the longevity of MMOs as a gear reset may rejuvenate the MMO community.

We take very different lessons from the same thing. Rather than putting players on a pointless and endless race, why not just not have a treadmill? More players have already been pushed away by Ascended Crafting than would be lost from a lack of gear progression.

If you have good, quality gameplay people will play it. They will play it without getting in line for more uberawesome gears. But putting in barriers to entry, such as difficult to obtain gear that you are not competitive without, will keep people from playing.

This. There is a fun to rewards balance. If content is more fun, then players are willing to play for fewer rewards (I’m including vertical progression as “rewards”).

The problem is that it doesn’t seem like Anet cares to — or maybe isn’t able to — create fun gameplay. So maybe vertical progression is the only way it can keep people in the game?

If you have a low level character that you’re currently leveling through playing the open world, stop immediately. Instead, run the QD champ train and salvage everything. You’ll level, get karma, luck, and mats.

An interesting idea, but:

There’d probably be huge fights between linked servers where the “big brother” server is accused of talking down upon the smaller server. You’d almost certainly see people from the higher server “ordering” its little brother around:

• “Stay in your own matchup. Do not queue, or enter our matchup.”
• “When our commanders come to your matchup, all your commanders must tag down: it’s for your own good.”
• etc.

Just imagine servers with size/coverage disparities like BG and ET being matched up!

This still might be better than what we’ve got now, though.

Currently, there is no danger for a zerg to move farther and farther from its spawn point as long as its bigger than opponents’ zergs.

With zero rezzing of fully dead, the zerg risks being slowly whittled down in size when too far from spawn. I think this would allow for much more interesting strategic and tatical gameplay.

laharl.8435:

Generally it’s better to just dps than waste time removing stacks for 1 cc. CC is more for pvp in this game. Defiant is a necessary evil in pve it seems, CC is too op on bosses without defiant.

This. In theory, it sounds like great gameplay to coordinate, remove all stacks, and then use CC to stop the boss’ main attack. But usually, the boss just uses the same attack right after getting back up so there’s really not much point.

maxinion.8396:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Bosses have 3 stacks of defiant if you’re soloing. In a party of 3, it’s 5 stacks — not sure how many for a party of 5, but definitely more.

The number of stacks depends on proximity of people when the actual stun goes off, no?

Yes (if you mean after a successful stun).

I recently created a new toon and tried leveling through exploration and events.

The rewards were just too small for the time spent. I couldn’t even keep my gear up to level playing this way. But perhaps more importantly, knowing that Ascended armor was coming up, I wasn’t doing enough to prepare for the grind.

So now I champ train. My gear is pretty much always up to level. I salvage everything — getting tons of luck and lower level mats for the ascended gear.

Without the threat of ascended gear coming out, I’d likely be exploring and doing DEs all over the map instead of the champ train.

If you’re using it a lot, you should be concerned. You’re getting more sigils/runes than you should have, which means you’re making gold that otherwise should not have entered the economy. In the past, that has been a bannable offense.

These sigils/runes are not worth too much individually, but all that extra gold adds up. I personally would buy some basic salvage kits and use them until this thing is resolved.

Bosses have 3 stacks of defiant if you’re soloing. In a party of 3, it’s 5 stacks — not sure how many for a party of 5, but definitely more.

If you have a group that can communicate well, you can still CC bosses. If your group can’t/won’t communicate, you’ll get people resetting the stacks at the worst moments.

I’ve been saving them in order to speed up the leveling process for the unholy ascended armor grind.

sminkiottone.6972:

I’m more worried about the build diversity, most people will stick to the current meta.

But then what happens when the meta changes ? will it ever change after Ascended armors ?

And, will we be able to have more than 1 build ? and what about our alts ?

Imho ascended will cripple WvW

This is the real problem. When your build becomes obsolete because of balancing/nerfing or because of new skills being released, are you going to craft a new set of Ascended gear?

One of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. What about buff conditions instead?

In fact, if you increase the toughness of bosses and decrease vitality, that indirectly buffs condition damage and nerfs direct damage.

Will carrion trinkets finally be available?

Nabrok.9023:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Edit: I doubt you’re in any danger if you use this exploit a few times, but if you’re using it a lot (say to get your monthly crafting via salvaging for blue luck in order to craft green luck), you perhaps should stop and buy some basic kits to use instead for now.

No, the kit rarity makes absolutely no difference to the amount of luck you receive, so luck has not changed.

The only difference is my bags now fill up with a bunch of minor runes and sigils, and while I can sell them for a whopping 16c a piece it’s almost more of an inconvenience due to the bag slots they take up.

For yellows I’m still using my mystic kit, but if there’s dev confirmation that this is an intended change I probably won’t make another after my current one runs out.

What I meant was that if you’re salvaging for luck, you’re probably using the kit a lot. And if you’re using the kit a lot, then you’re getting many more sigils that you otherwise should be getting (again, assuming this is a bug). So in the end, you’re making gold (in the form of sigils) that you otherwise would not have made — and that’s what’s to be concerned about.

byjiang.1260:

You are assuming this game has a future beyond 2015.

Considering how having Ascended gear discourages players from changing their builds (on one likes to feel like they are losing stats) .. a lot of people are going to get bored earlier than they might have had the gear not locked them in (either that or new skills/skill balances will kill their build, and they’ll be left with worthless Ascended gear and the prospect of regrinding for a new build).

I’d say it’s not too far-fetched that the game will be on life-support by the end of 2015 if this issue is not addressed.

Protoavis.9107:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Protoavis.9107:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Just pray your build doesn’t get nerfed or that there won’t be a more fun build developed for your profession (both are likely because of skill balances and new skills on the horizon).

eh, zerker is always going to be max dps (or close to it) so whatev’s everything else is just weapons/traits/skills which are easily changed.

Don’t be so sure. It looks like Anet is starting to add some boss mechanics that hurt zerker builds — or at least make zerker builds less effective. If you look at the mistlock instabilities, there’s a couple that affect critical damage negatively (levels 34, 44). Even if these are currently ineffective at their goal, the point is that Anet is actively trying to reduce the universal effectiveness of the zerker build.

(Imagine, for example if Anet added more “structure” bosses that don’t even take critical damage.)

The instabilities are situational and doesn’t mean that zerker isn’t top dps

If things were structures it wouldn’t really change anything anyway since there’s no Power primary with secondary condition damage gear (there’s condition primary with power secondary but if everyone stacks condition gear overall is lowered due to max condition stacks). With the other Power primary gear only providing defensive stats it doesn’t alter the DPS.

Without radically changing the core combat mechanics zerker in pve will always be at the top or equal with others at the top in regards to dps.

The mistlock instabilities show (at least IMO) that Anet is thinking about the zerker issue and trying to reduce the effectiveness of zerker gear.

Zerker gear is not optimal in WvW so it is possible under current game mechanics to have fights where zerker is not the best.

The funny thing is that making different types of gear viable and the existence of the (unholy) Ascended gear grind greatly conflict.. I feel Anet has put themselves in a no-win situation here.

Protoavis.9107:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Just pray your build doesn’t get nerfed or that there won’t be a more fun build developed for your profession (both are likely because of skill balances and new skills on the horizon).

eh, zerker is always going to be max dps (or close to it) so whatev’s everything else is just weapons/traits/skills which are easily changed.

Don’t be so sure. It looks like Anet is starting to add some boss mechanics that hurt zerker builds — or at least make zerker builds less effective. If you look at the mistlock instabilities, there’s a couple that affect critical damage negatively (levels 34, 44). Even if these are currently ineffective at their goal, the point is that Anet is actively trying to reduce the universal effectiveness of the zerker build.

(Imagine, for example if Anet added more “structure” bosses that don’t even take critical damage.)

Ewon.5903:

Lord Kuru.3685:

However, if they added a TON of daily APs, there would be a chance, and the competition would be more interesting as people would have to optimize their AP/hours played.

Which means those of us at the top get to stay at the top for longer. Do you really think we haven’t optimized our AP/hours played?

As it is, you just do them all. It’s time consuming, of course, but doable. I’m talking about adding so many more daily APs that it’s not possible to do them all. You’d have to think about which ones to do — making the whole “competition” far more interesting.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

I’ve seen this suggested before and I’m still not in favor of it. While I agree with and understand what people are saying, I still feel that it’s rarely an issue. People who are selfish enough to stay dead will usually end up getting more of their own players killed. There are times when mass ressing happens, yes. And I definitely think something should be done about the time someone is able to stay dead for people who like to spy. But otherwise I just don’t see it as much of a problem.
I know that when an enemy zerg is attacking a tower for example, and I kill a few enemies with an arrow cart, I’ll immediately spam that dead enemy with a ton of arrows the second I see people trying to res them and bam, free kills because they usually can’t evade fast enough. Just take advantage of it instead of watching it happen. When someone, or a few people, are trying to res a buddy run over and stop them.

You’re not going to kill a zerg with that AC. And when they take your tower, they will rez everyone, then proceed to the next tower at full strength.

With a no-rezzing-dead mechanic (even OOC), the zerg gets smaller out every time it loses a man. It may take one tower, but it’ll be smaller for the next. I think that would make the game far more interesting.

Awe.1096:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Of course top AP hunters will want a cap: that makes it harder for people below them to catch up to them.

IMO that is a misconception. By making the AP cap easier, they are increasing the amount of people who are able to do them all. Those top AP hunters will do everything now as well as they will do everything if things are easier. The harder the dailies get, the less people will want to keep up with the pace. For me this is kind of a binary situation. I either do them all or I dont do them at all, which means qutting the game. I suspect this is also the mindset of a large part of top AP hunters (I am not that high myself, but I think my current rank is only a byproduct of doing AP since day 1). Is goal of more dailies is to make some people quit? Strange goal. Actually leaderboard was never my goal. I would be very happy if Arena would remove those leaderboards but I kind find this very unlikely so I am not going to campaign for it. If a magical fairy showed up and offered me to get the daily AP cap and as a trade-off loose my current leaderboard rank and fall to position #73456, I would take that offer in a heartbeat. Again. AP hunting is not about who has the most. It is about the urge of “getting them all”.

The fewer APs that can be earned in one day, the harder it is for people to catch those higher up. Currently, most people know there is zero possibility of getting to the top — especially if they didn’t buy the game when it came out.

However, if they added a TON of daily APs, there would be a chance, and the competition would be more interesting as people would have to optimize their AP/hours played.

And those who just want the AP for the chests would be happy as well.

+1. This would be pure awesome.

Hilarious! By the way, can you use transmutation stones to move AR from one set to another?

Adminir.8140:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Those who go to forums to complain are often referred to as a “vocal minority,” and many people only come to the forums when they want to complain. One thing we don’t know is how many among those who do all the dailies all the time are not coming to the forums because they enjoy the system the way it is. In other words, if a cap were put in, would these people suddenly descend on the forums and demand the cap be removed — and if so, how many are there?

There have already been quite a few people who are among the top AP hunters who have come to this thread and voiced their opinion that they would welcome this change. I have multiple friends who are in the top 100 who are starting to tire of the continuous grind and who fume to me whenever more mindless grinding AP’s are added.

Of course top AP hunters will want a cap: that makes it harder for people below them to catch up to them.

Just pray your build doesn’t get nerfed or that there won’t be a more fun build developed for your profession (both are likely because of skill balances and new skills on the horizon).

Fernling.1729:

Anet was willing to give away 5000 free accounts just for submitting a video of yourself taking the GW2 oath.
Why didn’t you people submit a video to get a free account for a friend, family member or even for yourself as a storage?

Because for many people, it’s not worth publicly embarrassing yourself for the equivalent of $30 (the current sale price).

Singer.8740:

Thobek.1730:

Singer.8740:

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

That alliance makes no sense but neither did the krait and the nightmare court, or the dredge and the flame legion.

!!!!SPOILER WARNING !!!!
FOR ALL THOSE WHO HAVE NOT TALKED TO THE NPC’S INVOLVED. DID NOT PLAY THE GAME AT THE TIME OR OTHERWISE. BELOW IS HEAVY SPOILERS THAT EXPLAIN WHY SCARLET CREATED THESE TWO ALLIANCES, SUMMERISED FROM INGAME CONVERSATIONS.

They make perfect sense if you do a little research. Scarlet persuaded the dredge and FL to ally as it would be mutually beneficial to them do to the fact that dredge have no magic and FL have no tech. Despite this you find out the alliance is very tenuous do to the fact that the two sides don’t see eye to eye culturally and politically. What Scarlet got out of the alliance was the molten alliance created a new metal alloy that she “aquired”.

Oh really? Your the first person to say this – What was the name of this alloy, where did you find this information?

The Information regarding all of the above could be found by talking to various NPC’s through out F&M. You could also talk to the Molten alliance prisoner’s during the below event to find out the tenuous nature of there alliance as well as the first whisperings of Scarlet.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rox:_Avenger_of_the_Dispossessed

The Alloy never received a name. It is simply mentioned at various points that it is what the Molten alliance make all there hybrid weaponry out of and also that the mysterious stranger from the city (Scarlet) has it also. Most of this info can be found in the world or on the wiki if you simply look for it.

That that was so long ago, with zero followups, I suspect Anet just forgot about that plot point.

Buy something from the next set for 1 ticket, sell it on the TP and buy the Dreamthistle skin you actually want (on the TP) using the proceeds.

Protoavis.9107:

Mikuchan.7261:

Besides it’s not the actual precursor that is desired.
It’s the legendary weapon that comes from it.
And that still requires an immense effort to get.
You need to do 100% world exploration, you need to do quite a bit of WvW, you need to do dungeons, you need to get quite alot of karma.

no wvw is required anymore apart from the map completion….achievement chests will drop more than enough badge of honor quite quickly
You need to run a dungeon 9 times…which isn’t a significant effort since most dungeons have a least one path that is easily speed run in less than 15 minutes

the only difficult thing about legendary is the grind for the gifts due to how many mats that requires, and for the most part the mats aren’t difficult to acquire, it’s just time consuming or expensive.

Only map completion is really required. You can buy dungeon runs (if necessary). And materials you should definitely buy instead of farm.

Solstice.1097:

If they just gave ascended armor the ability to change stats OOC and maybe add some cool visual effects or even the ability to change the look of it that would be enough to make it worth grinding out as a PvE player without having to add stat bonuses.

Why do PvE players need stat bonuses? It’s not like ANY PvE content is so hard that you’ll need it.

OOC stat change I would be happy grinding for. Stats increase is definitely what we’re getting instead though.

At most two, but I’ll be very angry about it the whole time I’m grinding for them (WvW player).

Ethics.4519:

They will most likely ban everybody currently abusing this bug.

That’s an interesting thought. The kit is returning far more sigils/runes than it should (assuming this is a bug) so players are getting free sigils/runes they shouldn’t be getting — and that’s equivalent to free gold that they shouldn’t be getting.

So to boil it down, players are using this bug to obtain gold that otherwise would not have entered the economy. That sounds like an exploit to me.

Edit: I doubt you’re in any danger if you use this exploit a few times, but if you’re using it a lot (say to get your monthly crafting via salvaging for blue luck in order to craft green luck), you perhaps should stop and buy some basic kits to use instead for now.

In order to make leaderboards meaninful and not just determined by who started the game earliest, Anet should add even more dailies. A LOT more. That gives people who really want to be at the top that opportunity.

Not sure why so many people think the personal story is a problem. Just wipe it clean so that you have to start over. I doubt many people would care too much about that.

Donari.5237:

If it’s someone we already knew as of that announcement, it couldn’t be Scarlet. As I predominantly play humans my mind goes to Countess Anise (though I prefer her as a Crown loyalist who will do anything to support Jennah) or Lord Faren (who could have been behind a lot of things while presenting a bumbling facade, and has a close friendship with my noble characters to boot).

However, if it’s one person who’s to be the nemesis of every single player character, it can’t be from inside the racial chapter of the PS. Which leaves Order representatives who aren’t our mentors (because there are three mentor choices), or Trahearne. The latter makes no sense at all, no stretch of his story arc turns him into a world-wrecking machiavellian.

Hopefully it will be an omigosh wow! revelation and not just Scarlet who somehow our characters knew about all these years but we did not.

Maybe it’s Palawa Joko? I’m not a GW1 player, so I’m just going on what other fans have said about how cool he was.

If it’s any of these people, that means we’ve gone 9 months (since the announcement) without any hint of who it actually is. I’m beginning to think they meant Scarlet.

Atlas.9704:

Some folks might like Canach over Scarlet, others Scarlet over Canach, and folks like me might choose whoever is the next baddie in the future.

But the personal nemesis is not a state-of-mind thing, it’s someone the storyline is supposed to revolve around. We haven’t even heard a word about Canach for months and months, so unless Anet is choosing to move at a glacial pace, I don’t think it’s him.

Unskippable cut scenes don’t help its popularity.

By the way, you don’t get the bonus reward (40 tokens + gold) the second time you do it each day.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

temples are on a scheduled day

Temples are every day on NSP.

Fortus.6175:

Also, please, your server is 15/24, we have been consistently 21-23/24 for the last 10 months, no matter how much you try, you will never understand how pitiful this is until you transfer here and suffer it on your own skin.

NSP may be 15/24 but it entered silver league as the very bottom server. We have been enormously outmanned for all of the past 6 weeks. In fact, looking at the league rankings, GoM is right in the middle of the pack. So it’s not in as sorry a shape as you may think. In fact, you are winning your matchup at this very moment.