Guild Wars 2

I have to admit I’m surprised that a savvy trader would give away advice on a public forum. But thanks :p

From the picture, he can’t even get it out of his bank because he doesn’t have any free inventory space o.0

I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get out of the screenshot. There’s no text that says, “this item is soulbound to another character” anywhere; neither the message on the item tooltip nor the red error text that occurs when you try to take a soulbound item out of the bank.

The phantasm does not ignore LoS. The skill that spawns it does. Whether that’s a bug or not remains to be seen. After all, no other working direct target-able skill ignores LOS this way; perhaps it’s an intentional difference.

Probably not, but hey: Mesmers are good at changing the rules, right?

I don’t disagree with you. It’s a very different game with a familiar setting. I do miss the many levels of customization available in GW1. Still, I expect I’ll be playing this game for a while, regardless.

Well… let’s see:
- Damage barely better than auto-attack
- Tiny reticle
- Makes you stop moving to use it

You’d have to be in an utterly ideal situation (they’re not moving, I don’t need to move, they have a boon I definitely want to remove, the ground is angled correctly so I can get a good target) for it to be useful. Most times I’d rather just channel another auto-attack.

Velladin.2578:

I would not mind crafting the gift as my tailoring is at max level but I will need the mats. I have some of them and I have about 100 tokens left on me so ill start running ac
To get the 500 tokens. I have the place on farm with my guild.
If anyone is interested, pm me.

What would the recipe look like? Gift of history + 250 ectos + 250 ori great blade + scroll?

If it does indeed require a Gift, I’d speculate that it to be: scroll + gift + mystic coins + ori weapon components

I run MM when I’m on my necro anymore. Yes, even in Orr it remains quite effective and resilient. Using Mark of Blood, Well of Blood, and traited Life Transfer my minions don’t often die; when they do it’s usually just a Bone Fiend getting stomped on by an AoE.

Your personal damage is nothing to write home about, but add minion damage on top of that and you’re not hurting for killing power.

The best part, though, is that you’re just not going to die to anything unless you try to solo a champion or something. Your minions are great distractions alone, you’ve got regen running constantly from Mark of Blood, and respectable toughness plus a 24k health bar (plus Life Shroud) is just not going to get eaten through in any reasonable amount of time.

The biggest issue with MM is, of course, the awful minion AI and your innately larger aggro radius. It seems like walking within 1500 range of anything means one of your minions somewhere is going to wander a little to close and face pull the mob. Also, the stupid Flesh Golem, who is otherwise awesome (except for its aversion to water) will tend exacerbate the problem by running after anything within 1500 range or more entirely unprompted sigh.

Anyways, long story short: I agree, right now MM performs great at any level of outdoor PvE.

Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s in the pipe along with portal nerfs for next Bloody Nerfing Monday.

@Paladine – Whether or not you’ll take the opportunity to learn, the fact remains that the premise of your presumption is incorrect and there is no ‘Mithril Ore exploit’ responsible for the recent upward trend of Mithril Ore prices.

God, I wish. How I wish. I actually just posted a thread about adding one on the suggestions forum. As far as I know, however (and I’ve searched around quite a bit), there hasn’t been a skin for one found in the GW2 resources. I’m eyeing the glyphic or peacekeeper staves as possible placeholders for now.

So among the interesting exotics you can create with the Mystic Forge, we have the, ‘mesmer-y’ set. These include:

Vision of the Mists (greatsword)
Wall of the Mists (shield)
Reaver of the Mists (axe)
Whisperblade (sword)
Ilya (pistol)
Illusion (spear)
Abyssal Scepter (scepter)
The Anomaly (focus)

Now I recognize that these are all (generally, except the focus) weapon skins for those used by the Mesmer’s phantasms. I also recognize that there isn’t a phantasm that uses a staff. But could we please, please get a staff in the same vein as these weapons? They’re gorgeous, and yet there’s almost no decent-looking staves available that could be paired with any of these for a mesmer.

There will be people who spend all their resources throwing exotic weapons into the Mystic Forge to create precursors to sell. Over time, they establish a relatively stable rate based on the approximate odds of crafting a precursor and the cost of obtaining the rares/exotics used in the process. The price is all over the place right now due to speculation and lack of knowledge of those odds. That won’t always be the case.

It should be noted that the chance of getting it even from 4x 80 exotic greatswords, which is your best chance using the mystic forge, is still very, very small.

@Brutality
Do you see value in changing up some Knight’s armor pieces for Orr Heal/Precision/Vitality for some extra health and healing buffer and making up the Toughness in Emerald accessories? That’s what I was looking to invest in as I finish the home stretch to 80. I come from playing a Necro originally and it’s hard for me to look at a 14-15k health pool and not wince.

I was also thinking about a Sigil of Fire to just stack more AoE triggers on crits. This option would be mostly for PvE where I’m fine with standing still and chewing on a pack of mobs so I wouldn’t expect to miss the energy on weapon swap that much.

Also, I would love to read a guide to Staff in WvW. I was trying it out mostly for the sigil and heal/buff on cooldown, but especially in sieges it felt like the auto-attack and orb were pretty hard to leverage and the ward was very situational so I spent a lot of time just standing around and tentatively looking for fools to expose themselves on the walls.

Paladine.6082:

Promega.7628:

Ori was down to almost 2silver per piece and is approaching 4s per peice, which is nearing a 100% increase, not 15-20% like you claim.

Ori has not been under 3s per piece for several weeks. The last 3-5 days mithril price has doubled – ori price has increased about 15-20% again try READING before commenting.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19701

Compare Oct 2nd to today and stop your sniping.

Then look at Mithril Ore’s almost exactly proportional increase over the same time.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19700

Paladine.6082:

Lucubration.8361:

Compare the sale price of 250 Mithril Ore, 5 Dust, and 1 Orichalcum Ore to the sale price of 20 Orichalcum Ore and you have your answer. It’s risen completely proportional to Orichalcum Ore, which went from just over 2s to just under 4s in the last week due to increased respawn timers.

I buy hundreds of ori ore per day it has not been under 3s for some time.

Blatantly wrong. See the first link.

Compare the sale price of 250 Mithril Ore, 5 Dust, and 1 Orichalcum Ore to the sale price of 20 Orichalcum Ore and you have your answer. It’s risen completely proportional to Orichalcum Ore, which went from just over 2s to just under 4s in the last week due to increased respawn timers.

Thank you for taking the time to look into this and respond to us, Lindsey. The issue was, I think that these systems aren’t at all transparent to players (which is a good thing). In appearance, though, it all boils down to, “a window opens, stuff comes out of it and goes into my inventory”, so these different systems can appear entirely related. :p

I’ve noticed this occurring mostly when I’m being attacked as I gather from a resource node. I’ve been paying attention lately and the only single Ruined Ore I got on my last trip through Orr was the one time I let a mob hit me during my second and third hits on a Mithril node.

Thank you, Jason. That clears things up a bit.

One thing this doesn’t answer is why we can harvest all 5 Orichalcum nodes during a 30-minute trip through Cursed Shore, then 24 hours later only the last 2 of those Orichalcum nodes have respawned; the other 3 still show as having been mined if you walk up to them. Definitely not an issue of having overlapped the respawn timer at 5am PST, so are we seeing something else here?

Cotillion.7435:

If the mesmer has 100% map completion you should never have any difficulty at all finding him.

I really wish I could turn that kitten star off.

I guess I don’t want those Gifts of Exploration that badly…

The Mesmer is kinda… bleh in PvE. It works, it’s fairly reliable in its inconsistencies, it may ultimately be tougher for the average mob to kill than most other professions (because they’re really stupid about pets/minions). On the other hand, it’s not good at dealing with a pack of mobs, it’s terrible at on-demand AoE, and it’s pretty lackluster at quick-and-easy kills for farming compared to most other offensively-built professions.

One of my biggest issues with Mesmer in PvE, though, is low-cooldown, reliable condition removal. You’re either waiting on a 45-second utility or praying that your slow and squishy phantasm is willing to throw you a bone.

@lackofcheese – There are still two things unclear about that test:

• Gossamer, while more valuable and higher tier than Silk, is still a Common material. I’m specifically referring to the chance of Ectoplasm from salvaging Rare items, which being a higher quality material may be affected differently by DR.
• Concerning the linked test (and not DR), because Gossamer is a Common material, it may not be affected by the salvage kit’s, “chance to yield rarer items”. It’s unclear what exactly this percentage chance refers to, but “Rare” is also item quality and Gossamer doesn’t fall into it.

Edit:
@Fildydarie – These were consecutive upgrades at the Mystic Forge? Interesting. What day(s) did you perform these trials and how many upgrades did you perform consecutively?

On a side note, I don’t even salvage in a series now; I salvage one or two thing at a time as I loot them, and I will log out and play an alt or wait until tomorrow between salvaging rares trying for ecto. Yes, I am that convinced that DR is being (un?)intentionally applied to every random source of loot.

@Wahaha – The reason why what you’re describing with Mystic Clover won’t experience DR for a couple of reasons:

• There are no ‘lower quality’ Mystic Clover.
• You can only ever receive one Mystic Clover.
• The chances of getting a single Mystic Clover is fixed for the recipe.

I’m not sure that this would even be a valid test, but a pattern of DR for the Mystic Clover recipe might be observable in the number of T6 materials yielded per attempt at creating a Mystic Clover. Since that is a variable number of materials, you might see the amount yielded diminish to the minimum with a large enough series of attempts.

But ignoring the Mystic Clover recipe, the circumstances where I choose to believe that a pattern of DR is observable is:

• The number of upgraded materials received when upgrading a stack of Common/Fine materials.
• The chances of receiving a high-level or -quality item from four random items.

If a couple of people who choose to challenge this are willing to upgrade, say, 15 stacks of the cheapest Fine materials you can find and Fraps the results, we could see whether that series of upgrades is affected. It should only take a couple of series of results being observably unaffected to disprove the theory that DR is applied to upgrading Fine materials in the Mystic Forge.

I wouldn’t ask anyone to sit around trying to upgrade a series of Rares to Exotics just to try to disprove that possible avenue of DR. Plus it’s more difficult to set up those trials. You would need one person to try thousands of consecutive upgrades and also thousands of people to each try a single upgrade to get a large enough sample size to sufficiently reduce noise.

The only issue I see with tying Symbols to this sort of tactic is that a lot of Guardian traits and skills are balanced around Symbols being up fairly consistently. We’re seeing that Symbol of Wrath being on a substantially longer cooldown breaks synergies with traits for symbols.

Hammer has a very frequent combo with its Symbol on its auto-attack chain and #3 granting frequent AoE retaliation – will this, too, be nerfed in coming weeks? Will Guardians get anything in return to bridge the gap in effectiveness that would create?

Reimagining a mechanic is fine, but there’s a lot of pitfalls to navigate if that’s going to happen without breaking the effectiveness or flavor of the profession in the process.

lejean.9615:

Arcanis.2437:

I like Foefire’s Essence more then any Legendary, probably couse im a Guardian. But that’s just me.

I’ve been posting on Map Chat the link to the weapon, to tease people to search for it. Yet not one said that theyve got the recipe. Eather people found the recipe and are not telling, or there are no one trying to find it.

Edit: as anyone tryed Scroll + Coins + Ori comp + Glacial or Charged Lodestone?

I tried with even crystal and charged lodestones but, if I remember, they don’t add to the scroll. And orichalcum comps isn’t good idea, imo, as those weapons are…well, they are spirit, arcane, spectral weapons. They most likely require one of gifts.

The only issue I could see with not using a weapon component is that you would have a tough time differentiating recipes for the various weapon types. For that reason alone I would expect it’d still take a component.

Edit: In the theme of “crafting material that looks like the weapon”, has anyone tried Corrupted Lodestones?

Well, what was the original bug people were exploiting to get a lot of precursors for cheap? It was 4x some named rare called Godskull something-or-other, wasn’t it? Perhaps using a named in general does have a higher probability – I wouldn’t put it past the designers. Doubt it would be guaranteed, though.

I’ve always loved the hammer for Guardian. It’s good to read about others’ experience and tactics with it. I’ve been poking around with my Mesmer lately, but I’m gonna finish up the 70-80 process over the next few days and this write-up has given me some new ideas. Thanks

“We’ve received reports from players that non-Warriors were occasionally viable. We immediately conducted internal investigations and reached the same conclusion. A fix for this issue has been implemented; Warriors should now be the only viable profession as intended.”

Mere Image.8376:

I can’t believe I made my PvE main a Mesmer. What a waste of time! Warriors can smash 1 while were left with longer cooldowns for phantasms AND one of our only AoE’s. I thought they needed a buff. Screw you people that think we’re OP because they own you in PvP; try leveling one in PvE as a solo character. Guess I will be leveling an Engi now. Or just giving this game a break considering there’s no knowing what will waste my time next. Great patch ArenaNet. I’ve always been so supportive of this game, but every thing keeps getting nerfed to my disadvantage. Keeping phantams alive in dungeons is hard enough…now I can’t even rely on quick recharge times. Fanatastic!

As much as I’m unhappy about this change, I am leveling one in solo PvE right now. It’s not hard; I think I may have died all of twice so far in 1-62. It’s easier and more fun than leveling my MM necro or tanky Guardian were, which is saying a lot.

And I’m definitely only talking about leveling solo in PvE, in response to the quoted post.

Given how difficult they seem to be to obtain from the Mystic Forge, I’m thinking that perhaps it’s justified that they’re so expensive. In which case it’s not price manipulation; they’re just move up towards what ArenaNet feels is their appropriate value. Early ones were from erroneous recipes or apparently too-frequent odds.

(SF) Did not expect this match-up this week. So far all sides are going strong! A good showing early on by EBay. Look forward to seeing how this week plays out.

Unless it’s changed in the last couple of weeks, you can see enemy commander as a buff among the enemy player’s buffs. It looks a bit different than the map icon.

The problem with your proposal is that gold sellers will [/i]always[i] be able to undercut the company. If a player buys 50 gold from a gold seller, that gold could have come from maybe 5 or 10 stolen accounts.

If gold was easier to obtain via ArenaNet’s gem store, there would be more gold in the economy in general. More gold in players’ inventories leads to more gold obtained from stolen accounts, so gold sellers can slash their prices accordingly to again undercut ArenaNet’s lower prices.

Granted, the price for Black Lion Keys is just silly.

The fixed pricing for gem purchases is because they want to establish gems as a real currency with an exchange rate. That’s hard to do when someone could order 50,000 gems that each cost 25% the price as the guy who ordered 500, you know?

BrunoBRS.5178:

as a dagger storm thief, feedback kills us, instantly.

Thank you for that. I’ve now decided on what to slot in my 3rd utility skill. ^.^

Vimanas

(13char)

Ah, I’ve been away from this thread of flaming, accusations, and defensiveness for far too long! Heh.

Congrats on the win this week SoR. I’ve gotten my new mesmer up to 40 and am ready to start this week off strong. See everyone at the reset!

I will read the rest of what you wrote, but unless the Karma gear from temples is an exception, can’t you salvage Karma armor for cloth, Ecto, and particular Runes? That right there could sink the market for those items.

One thing you mentioned was the lack of desire to explore a zone once you’ve got 100% map completion. Something I would appreciate would be other PvE activities to do at 80 besides “exploring” Orr. Orr is a harsh place and is ugly as sin to boot. I don’t enjoy the zone, yet it’s the only level 80 playground we have available to us.

If we had a huge zone (or several large zones) with a great variety of things to do, places to go, monsters to fight, events to complete, and what have you, and I would be happy to keep exploring it all. Instead we’re stuck with Orr, which is like a Dr. Seuss’ nightmare of a barren wasteland.

What is probably ArenaNet’s intention, going back to earlier zones is generally not financially worthwhile (unless you’re pursuing a specific goal) because you will rarely find any tier 6/level 80 stuff that is relevant to your character’s needs.

Dungeon loot isn’t an issue that affects me so I can’t much comment on it; I’m not a huge fan of dungeons in this game for reasons I won’t get into here.

What really gets my goat is the inconsistency of and lack of communication about these changes that are designed to reduce player reward for effort.

I guess it’s time to fire up nVidia Surround again? The irony is that I originally got away from 3-monitor gaming for performance reasons.

The Guild Wars team also implemented a system of DR that did appear to target and was definitely affecting farmers, but was also touted as an ‘anti-botting’ measure.

While I recognize that botting is not desirable for the in-game economy, a player who is actively focusing on farming a particular area or creature type is going to be even more efficient at farming than a bot will be at the same activity. Given that, how, using a system of diminishing returns for repeated activity, could you possibly detect and prevent the botter without affecting the legitimate farmer?

I was running the Scavenger’s Chasm jumping puzzle yesterday and encountered many of the issues with sluggish response time and snapping in/out that you covered in the OP. I’ve also noticed pointer sensitivity and acceleration issues, particularly some weird interactions with Logitech’s SetPoint software. Finally, I can also tell that we’re playing with a very narrow FoV (and wish we could increase it a bit).

blackgoat.5172:

I very much doubt you can sell a Legendary. However what disturbes me the most about the whole “Legendary” thing right now is that the game’s been going a little over a month now and some people already have them. Having one this soon just makes them very un-Legendary IMO

I kind of suspect that’s why (it would appear) T6 nodes just got random placement and respawn timers in the last patch, and DR was ramped up.

I don’t know why you don’t think legendaries should be available for sale. Shouldn’t a player be able to profit from their work if they choose?

That’s really unfortunate.

I did want to mention, when you hovered over your equipment I noticed that while you did have MF runes you didn’t have MF base gear. I still doubt it affects Mystic Forge results, but just in general that might help your results while farming.

I do wish they would remove this RNG component for legendary precursors. It really doesn’t make any sense why one person could get it their first attempt and another could have to try dozens of times and spend hundreds of gold on it.

It is kind of shocking how a reputable company like ArenaNet could first create a worthy successor, then destroy it like this within a couple of months. Guild Wars 2 is going from being a joy to play to being punishing – literally punishing - to play.

If you stop to consider that yellow-text items are classified as “Rare”, it starts to make more sense why that percentage applies to the chance of getting things like Ectoplasm but would not apply to white-text (“Common”) items like Gossamer Scraps.

If the issue is that portals can allow a mesmer to clip through keep walls or something, that should definitely be fixed.

If the “issue” is that portals allow a mesmer to move his allies across a wall, gap, or other obstacle in the terrain…

The only reason you would use a portal is to allow the mesmer alone to bypass an obstacle and lay a path for his allies. If that’s no longer possible, then there’s no reasonable use for the portal. Blink would work just as well and is less cumbersome to set up and use.

griffdog.3927:

Enerjak,

Yup. I do want this to keep going. This statement almost had me in tears from laughing so hard.

“I’ll try once more to be the “bigger man””

You are pure entertainment – why would I want to stop? I know I shouldn’t egg you on but you’re so predictable it’s like forum PVE. And you know how us DH’ers love our PVE.

My suggestion is to take a step back. This is obviously a big deal to you. Anyone can see the tone you post in compared to the rest. It’s a game man – play it, don’t live it.

Much of the sniping in this thread is just venting of frustrations, but the bolded is you declaring that you’re trolling, which is explicitly against forum policy.

Games of one-upmanship in this topic are really unnecessary. You can win or lose an encounter – or the match – without showing poor sportsmanship.

I haven’t been as active this week as I have been in the past in WvW because I’m doing some early levels on a new toon in PvE, but I saw DH and SoR really coordinating well on friday and saturday when I was playing.

I hope we (SF) can up our game to in response, though I’m concerned that we won’t be able to establish strong enough WvW community leadership to achieve that. Attempts at alliances on our server – and so far I’m aware of a couple of them – don’t seem to be attracting the numbers necessary to coordinate a larger force of 30+ during NA prime time. That’s really going to take its toll on our territory control this week.

Vena.8436:

I cannot accept your claim…

I don’t accept yours, either. So there.

It seems a perfectly fine tactic to me.