Guild Wars 2

In terms of timers / schedules, why not leave the system as it is, but have the same set of timers across all servers? That way people who play in the same time block of time aren’t stuck with the same block of bosses.

I don’t understand why the current timer system has to change with the move to underflow servers.

This is consistent with the drops my guild has received. We’ve run 49’s nightly and haven’t seen the increase. Would love to see dev feedback!

I wouldn’t build for staff, but I would learn to swap it in situationally. I find its incredibly valuable for clearing trash in Ascalon and Cliffside. In both situations, the mobs (a) are grouped up well, if you’re doing it right, (b) can hit really hard, but © die really fast. I like to open with Chaos Storm + Chaos Armor and then swap into S/F. By the time you get through one warden spin the trash is all dead anyways, so it’s not like you’re losing any DPS from not switching out into another weapon (the other single-target offhand phants are going to be a waste), and you may just gain some DPS from the retaliation (and whatever minimal damage the storm itself does)

Started with 1000 heavy moldy bags:

49 piles of t5 dust 98 Gossamer scrap
276 silk cloth 59 hardened leather
260 thick leather



58 t5 poison sacs 16 t6 poison sacs
56 t5 fangs 16 t6 fangs
49 t5 dust 22 t6 dust
51 t5 scales 17 t6 scales
50 t5 bones 11 t6 bones
70 t5 claws 20 t6 claws
55 t5 bloods 23 t6 bloods
17 t5 essence 5 t6 essence
9 t6 totems

0.139 t6 mat drop rate

Just chiming in with the same problem; cursor disappearing/going off screen. g500 here.

Rox’s quiver probably won’t be coming back. It went on sale a second time during the “greatest hits” sale that occurred last August around the launch anniversary. I’d be the grenth hood comes up in the next annual sale.

Buttercup.5871:

The next infinite sickle? Well, you don’t have to buy it. If you don’t, though, you will just spend 20 times longer getting those “crit harvests” you need for your next legendary. And the extra crystalline ore, well, that’s just a nice bonus, of course. But hey, it’s all a matter of choice, right? Oh, and be sure to get the new ect-o-matic on the next release, it’s so much more efficient than the old one.

(1) Your entire argument is based on a slippery slope fallacy. I agree with you that if they went to the extreme end of the slippery slope that would be very unfortunate. But I don’t see that happening. Rather, I suspect this is likely a way to keep supply of seasonal materials flowing onto the market during the off-season.

(2) You’ve never bought anything that later became obsolete? Honestly, I get so much value out of my current SOM that if a newer, better version came out later in the future I would buy it, with no regrets. I paid 800gems, purchased with gold, to get the current functionality and consider it an excellent value. Even if something new is released in the future, the existing SOM continues to be functional for the price that I bought it at, and thus I would merrily stick it on an alt.

Here are some thoughts I had about how to improve the Guild UI:

(1) Add a “last online” feature
(2) Add the ability to set separate permissions for guild chat listen & guild chat talk
(3) Add an “officers” channel and the ability to set an “officer” toggle
(4) Assuming that influence pools / guild benefits remain server based (please change that too), at least allow cross-server notification for things like guild missions … and even if you can’t do it through the UI, how about an automated message through guild chat.
(5) Make the guild message of the day (for the guild you were repping on log-off) appear when you first log-in.

I say this not to offend, but to bring some perspective:

Buttercup, are you seriously complaining about the fact that you may not be able to deck out all of your alts in the same gear set, in the manner most conveinent for you?

If I were you, I’d save my nerdrage for more practical concerns. Sprockets should not be one of them, especially after how we’ve seen anet handle the other unusual crafting materials (candy corn, snowflakes, quartz).

(1) You don’t know what P2W means. Adding a chance to get a sprocket is not P2W.

(2) You’re way down a slippery slope with the precursor example.

(a)I find it amazing just how kitten people get about something so worthless (sprockets).

(b) People who bought the previous mining picks knew what they were getting when they bought it; it was a fair transaction. Just because something new and better comes along doesn’t make those previous transactions inequitable.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Scarlet R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtan.

My prediction: Insanity and dreams? Scarlet is possessed by an elder god, of the Lovecraftian sort. The end of the story will involve an exorcism of some sort, and likely her committing suicide in an act of redemption once she comes to her senses.

Because it will be a huge turn off for the 99% of the playerbase who just want to have fun and aren’t going to fiddle with something like that.

Although I think an option for “prioritize self” vs. “normal (current)” combo finishers, with the default set to the current method, would probably be OK.

I would just like one auto attack on staff that isnt a slow moving projectile with a 1s cast time and a huge arc. Maybe turn water blast (staff water 1) a cone AOE or something.

And with so much leather on the market, I doubt this thread is really going to move the leather price. It’s just idle speculation among people who are already speculating.

Don’t forget that one of the backpieces calls for charged lodestones, too. As if there already weren’t enough things requiring charged lodestones.

Forget about daises and confetti. If I had a rainblower for my engineer I would just about die of happiness.

First it was wood. Then it was cloth; silk with gusto, even. Somehow I doubt anet is going to leave leather the leather market in a total state of collapse.

Of course there will be no official comment on this because the powers that be don’t want to move markets. But I was just daydreaming about how anet is going to prop up the leather market beyond increasing the refinement from 2-3. Ascended armor seemed like the perfect opportunity, but instead they made it a total blowout in favor of silk. Leather isn’t used in JC or cooking, so I don’t think they would try to shoehorn it in there.

My guess is something MF related – perhaps new back items or an ingredient for precursor crafting. Anyone else care to speculate on how anet will prop up the leather market?

This is likely not a bug. If you are at level 50 and run a level 50 you will not get a daily chest. I suspect it’s intentional in order to keep you from getting access to the next tier of rewards.

They’d just do it with two thieves, which makes both the doors and bomb path trivial.

Everyone I played with on blackgate expected a chest full of greens. We did not expect the finisher to be limited use. That’s insulting – it’s like taking away your bragging rights after a herculean effort by the entire server. Make the finisher permanent and I’ll be happy.

I was responding to the post above yours. That the queue is random makes no difference when your wvw toon is not your overall toon.

But you still have to be logged on the character you want to play while you wait. That’s the problem with the huge queues, even if they are random

What do people suggest for max dps on maw tentacles? Phantasms seem to die really quick and those tents have a huge attack radius.

The real question is whether they have totally abandonded the fractal system now that they are pushing two-week living story updates.

In 15/30/0/25/0, what do you use for the second tier dueling trait and the first tier inspiration trait?

Also, how do you afford all the ascended weapons you need to swap with the kittenty drops? I’m PR 47, looking forward to hitting PR 48 tonight, and I’m kitten near broke

Why Scepter/Pistol on volcanic? It’s one of the few fights where I actually find GS to be really useful – the knockback and cripples are helpful for controlling the vets in the first fight and the zerker aoe dmg/cripple/knockback seems to help out a lot during the elemental burn phase. I’ll oppen with focus pull, feedback, warden, BF, switch to gs, zerker, dodge out to avoid getting pummelled, blast through a bunch with aa until cd.

It’s also nice to have the knockback/range on GS if something does go wrong – if someone gets downed and you need to finish off a distant ele for a rally, or need to buy someone a few seconds to rally with a knockback.

I agree that meleeing dredge can be very hard, especially if you have to do it while trying to kite. It’s one of those fights where killing fast just doesn’t mitigate damage like it does elsewhere. But why not Scepter/Pistol? At least then you can get the ranged daze from MB.

I was just kind of curious what kind of builds & weapon sets people were running specifically for high end fractals.

I’ve been running 0/20/0/20/30 and have become hooked on IP & VR to maximize my invul uptime. DPS could be slightly higher, but I’ve found it to be handy in skipping the first set of harpies, bomb path dredge, staying alive to melee burst lava elementals, doing the bonfire in snowblind if no thief is around, cliffside seal running, etc…

As for weapons, it’s mostly S/F + whatever situation calls for. I’m kind of curious what weapon sets people are using for the boss fights at the end of each fractal.

Persisting Flames (Fire XI) is supposed to extend the duration of fire fields by 2s. This is broken on Lava Font. It’s not showing up in the tooltip or in practice.

In contrast, the grandmaster trait works with burning retreat.

Tested both tonight while camping for teq.

edit: update – I was trying it out in combat and it seemed to work fine, although the tooltip still was not updating.

I did Arah story back at launch before realizing that I needed to do it again to finish my personal story

I second replacing “spam 2 to win” with flying lupi.

They’ve been more open lately, such as with the drop rates for items from black lion chests, and how MF actually works. Given that the PR system is kind of integral to FOTM, I figure why not raise a little bit of noise on the issue?

I don’t think FOTM is any different from the rest of the game – loot is generated at the time of the kill / completion of achievement. The potential for a weapon occurs when you kill Maw, just like the rewards for zone completion are calculated when you complete the zone, not when you open the chest.

Is there any chance of making explorable modes account bound in the future? At launch, the original character-by-character system at least was consistent in that each character had a separate DR on dungeon rewards (not commenting on the merits of the “attachment to your character” excuse for it). But now that all dungeon rewards are account bound, which completely nukes the “attachment to character” justification, there doesn’t seem to be any basis for this. Particularly since dungeon achievements are all account bound.

As an altoholic, I’m also sick of not knowing which of my eight characters has done story mode for which dungeons. If you’re not going to make it account bound, at least integrate story modes into the personal story panel so that each character has a record of what story modes it has completed.

Best way to farm Karma is doing a Teq daily. In terms of time:karma conversion, nothing comes close to beating it.

Is there any chance of getting some disclosure on how the personal reward level system works? In terms of % chance of getting X type of drop at Y PR level?

Worst dungeon: HOTW 2/3.

Best Dungeon:
I really like the new TA path. It’s all skill with no fat HP sack bosses. Of course, I only run it with a regular group or with guildies.

I also like Arah 2 & 3, but really its just fun doing Lupi.

Le sigh. This is why I haven’t touched my ele in over six months. Had so much fun in beta and immediately after release. Now I’m just sad that I unlocked all explorable modes and did world exploration on my ele.

Don’t be too quick to write-off staff. It absolutely sucks for speed clearing, but if you’re doing challenging dungeon content (typically broken, unfun paths for dungeon master, but also applies when learning new content) it can make all the difference by learning to focus on control / support.

Here’s a few tips:

• Water 3/5 + thief cluster bomb spam = full heal for party

• Permanent Weakness from Earth1 is a huge survivability buff for the entire party

• Easily lock down mobs with Water4, Air3, Air5, Earth4, Earth 5 (particularly useful in fights like grawl fractal)

• Eruption can be very potent if you learn to work the timing and placement. It’s really good in heavy movement fights where “fire and forget” skills shine, like Lupi.

Bring a thief, mesmer, and 2 dps warriors and you can cover a lot of tough dungeon ground very fast. And since this comp (or similar comps) won’t typically bring condition damage, for those horrible fights where bosses have giant sacks of HP, your eruption can be very valuable.

To the random guy in overflow who spent two hours last night coaching me through the fight, here’s to you chief – I finished her off this morning!

Hell Avenger.7021:

Mckeone.9804:

What most of you seem to be forgetting is the role of speculation on the market. I’d bet that the reason price would go up with a slight increase in supply is that people with excess income would take advantage of the extra liquidity and pull the precursors off the market, thus jerking prices upward. But if there was too much extra liquidity, they couldn’t corner the supply, which would lead to eventual price decreases.

This is similar to what JP Morgan and Goldman were doing in the commodities markets.

That is far from what JPM energy trader were doing… LOL… they were abusing the taxpayers through regulation loopholes.

No, what they were doing was keeping commodities off the markets in order to drive up prices. After JP Morgan bought a major aluminum storage facility in Michigan, order fulfillment time increased from 2-3 months to 16 months, and the decreased liquidity in the spot market drove prices up – even though production was at an all time high. There was a senate hearing on this just this week (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-07-29/regulators-face-scrutiny-on-banks-commodities-at-senate-hearing)

A very small bump in the precursor rate would encourage a price rise here because speculators would still have enough resources to dominate the market, and they would snap up all the inventory (because of low liquidity in the spot market) and would drive up prices in the interim (from speculators speculatin’). If you increased the precursor market tenfold, there probably would be too much liquidity for the speculators to control, and thus you’d then encounter a steep shift in the price curve.

What most of you seem to be forgetting is the role of speculation on the market. I’d bet that the reason price would go up with a slight increase in supply is that people with excess income would take advantage of the extra liquidity and pull the precursors off the market, thus jerking prices upward. But if there was too much extra liquidity, they couldn’t corner the supply, which would lead to eventual price decreases.

This is similar to what JP Morgan and Goldman were doing in the commodities markets.

Elementalist – When I selected this class back in beta, I wanted to play something like an EQ bard. I wound up with a vanilla WoW druid.

Svarty.8019:

Perhaps the RNG needs to be assisted (in certain circumstances) by a dose of certainty.

Example #1: If someone puts 1000 level 80 rare swords into the mystic forge, he gets a precursor anyway, regardless of what the RNG has given him. It gives people a target. There’s no way I’m going to gamble on a 0.001 chance normally, but with the certainty there, I’d grind towards it.

Example #2: Similarly, if someone opens 100 gem box things, they get a ticket regardless of whether they got another ticket earlier.

Is this too much to ask, and if so, why?

Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core had a system like Example #1. Leveling up was random, but each time you didn’t level up after each fight the odds increased until it eventually hit 100%.

That would be super nice here

Last night I did an AC P2 run and our group wiped on the last stage of the “fix the traps” event. The original set of mobs didn’t despawn and when we get back, a second group popped up. That made finishing impossible.

This a bug? Or intended?

I’m glad they fixed it. Although I can no longer kick back and do some reading while autoattacking the boss, the fight is much, much quicker. Our group just pulls him over to the protection totem and fights him there. The incidential DPS takes down the totem super fast, so the fight ends about 33% earlier than before. The only difference is that every now and then you have to move out of the whirlwind.

^^ you mean you got your ecto drops.

I second the OP. I would love to hear from Robert if there are any plans for revisiting the system, even if he can’t confirm any details.

At least then I’ll know whether I want to work on gearing up my alts for more fractal runs or WvW.

The distribution of aura traits is a rare example of good trait synergy for elementalists. The problem is that the rest of the trees are generally bunk. I’d put together a broad list of the changes I would make with accompanying explanations, but I get the impression it would probably just be wasted.

I think all the elementalist trait lines need to be scratched and rebuilt from the ground up. As they stand now they generally force you to be in that attunement to obtain any benefit. Except for (a) arcane, which everyone is practically required to take because we have to constantly switch attunements due to the huge CDs and (b)a good portion of water. And so (a) + (b) = everyone using the 0/10/0/30/30 build.

It also doesn’t help that many grandmasters are just really, really underpowered (fire 25) or so situationally limited to be functionally useless (grounded).

No other profession has trait lines of such limited value. Instead, (a) their trait lines are built on themes, (b) profession-specific traits are “cross pollinated,” most (if not all) of the minor traits give effects of general applicability, and many (but not all) grandmaster traits are based on skills or effects that are generally available or applicabile. That’s what keeps trait lines interesting and gives players tough choices to make. Warrior, Mesmer, and Guardian do it best IMHO.

How to do this? My suggestion is that instead of having a trait line lock you into an attunement, it should instead promote “attunment bleeding” into others and complement generally applicable elements of elementalist gameplay.

For example:

On minor traits – Fire could improve field effects, Air could improve “transformative effects” (conjures, elementals, other forms like Torando), Earth could add defensive or control effects to attunement swaps, Water could add healing or condition removal to other skills, and Arcane could probably stay close to the same (general improvement to attunement swaps or boons).

On major traits – make them more broadly applicable or, quite frankly, just suck less. Fire 11 should apply to all combo fields. Air 12 should apply to a broader range of effects or have a greater duration window since (a) we have limited access to stuns and (b) the duration is so short. In general, look at how Arcane Abatement works and replicate it across all of the other elementalist traits.

Also, either (a) spread weapon specific traits across the other trait lines and make them not suck (think about how worthless windborne dagger and vigorous scepter are compared to the Mesmer trait that gives reflect to all focus skills) or (b) make the attunement cooldown reduction skills more compelling . . . instead of just 20% recharge, 20% recharge + broad effect, like giving all fields reflect, additional conditions, or passive stat benefits.

Does this make sense? Is this helpful feedback? I really like playing my ele – I played a Bard in EQ, so I guess I just have a thing for pressing lots of buttons all the time – but after branching out more into my alts, I really see how flawed the class is from a design view.

No, you can’t just craft them. You can upgrade/downgrade (5:3 ratio), but you can’t create new ones if you don’t have any (or enough) to convert in the first instance.

I have a guy in my regular group who is swimming in them too. I get the RNG for things like the mystic forge. It just really sucks for progression to be so RNG dependent. I figure if they changed it for the rings, maybe they’ll get the point and change it for the necessary crafting components too.