Guild Wars 2

Never have. I have one full stack of chests and am up to about 20 on the second stack.
They did nerf the drop rate on chests a while back, not that anyone actually cares.

This is an exceptionally good idea that’s well thought out and brings the kind of awesome flexibility and collectibility I experienced in DCUO to GW2.

But whilst I’ve up-voted it, I still don’t see it happening.

ArenaNet probably believe that at the moment, if they leave it the way it is, it will foster infinite investment in fine transmutation stones.
Of course, it doesn’t really work that way, but in theory it does, and that’s good enough for their economist.

Let’s debunk the theory:
Once people have spent a huge amount of gold or time on one particular style, ArenaNet know that players will do a lot to keep that look, even pay for the privilege.
What ArenaNet DON’T see is that it stifles experimentation in both style and gameplay, as players are reluctant to throw away in-game time and gold as well as real world cash in order to try a different build whilst retaining the look they’ve invested so much in.

Let’s face it, even if you’re really fond of your Tier 3 Cultural set, you’re not going to spend 120 gold every time you acquire a new set of armour in order to give it your favourite look.
ArenaNet would LOVE it if you did, but players are so cash poor in this game, this’ll never become commonplace enough for them to profit off of it.

So eventually, because you’re reluctant to change your aesthetic style in order to try a new build, and because acquiring new, top-tier gear requires a big investment of time, chances are, the majority of players will get locked in to one build. And over time, you’ll get bored of that build.
And when you get bored enough, you’ll stop playing.
If you stop playing, you stop paying.

Adopting the OP’s idea would solve this problem and add a whole swath of new goals for the player base to pursue and encourage investment. Sure, it would also require a lot of work on the art team’s behalf in order to keep things fresh and interesting, but hey, you have to work to make money.

And there’s the other rub: now the game’s out of the door, it’s hard to justify spending more money in order to make more, and people like publishers and shareholders aren’t interested. They want their money, and they want it now for no further investment.
That’s why you see the crap you see in the gem store.
That’s why we have copious amounts of RNG.
That’s why we have the current, callous aesthetic model.

It’s all about investors interested in short-term gain with no interest in better, longer term gains through fostering good relations with the player-base.

Interestingly, I get a LOT of Orichalcum and Ancient Wood Logs by using basic salvage kits on any and all level 80 blues and whites I pick up in lower level areas.
My initial reaction too was that there should be some way of harvesting these materials in all areas, but with the salvage rates currently set the way they are, I’m not sure there’s a need for this.

Interesting observation MithranArkanere, but not really related to my suggestion.

As stated many times Katz, the intention is for you to buy Fine Transmutation Stones from the gemstore and transmute the Tier 3 Cultural armour on to Exotic stats.
Myself, I’ve refused to spend any money on this game since November, so I buy gems with gold.

But yeah, the reason it isn’t Exotic is because ArenaNet want your money.

People fond of Rurik probably didn’t play the Ascalon missions with him in Beta, where he would run ahead into massive groups of mobs, and you were supposed to be keeping him alive.

I recently picked this up to round off my Tier 3 look, and I love the soft white light it projects, both in use and sheathed.
However, it’s then a bit strange to have its attacks rendered with the standard orange flames.
Would it be possible to make it so that attacks with this torch also use the white flame?

There’s another problem with this mechanic that goes against one of their design goals. They stated that they changed the way skills activated so that the player was watching the mob rather than the health bar. GW1 was very much a case of watching red bars and choosing the right time to use a skill, whether that was an interrupt, a spike or a heal.

This mechanic means that once more, CC characters are watching the health bar of the enemy rather than the enemy itself.

Design goal fail ArenaNet.

My Divine Aura.
I was gutted when they didn’t bring that forward for the GW2 collector’s edition. Instead we got a bunch of temporary crap, a useless ring and a never-used elite.

Oh, and my Aion Wings.

Edit:
Heck, the /bonus items and function were awesome too. I built up a massive amount over the years, and it made equipping heroes really easy.
Plus, some of the skins were really nice to boot!
This is how much Guild Wars has changed and why I get angry at the “You have to GRIND if you want the best gear!” crowd.
At any time in GW1, I could type /bonus and instantly receive a bunch of top tier gear, making gearing a snip. They weren’t necessarily the best stats and had to have additional things added to them to be completely effective, but it was a LOT better than the current grind for gear in GW2.

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Karizee.8076:

Think about this for a minute.

If you were locked out of doing the event for a week at a time, I could see them upping the drop rates on rares and exotics, but with the event resetting every couple hours it really doesn’t make sense.

There are lots of meta events with big chests – there are ~170 dragon events alone each week. If they all dropped rares and exotics for everyone we’d be vendoring them the way we do blues and greens now.

Maybe what we should be asking for is an event with a reaaaally long reset timer that drops better loot

THIS.

They can’t just make every chest spat out Rares and Exotics. There’s too much of them going on with a short and FIXED reset timer. Either they up the rewards BUT do something about how big world event chains reset or apply some sort of DR for every chest opened per day or per a certain time period OR they can even make these events more CHALLENGING and not predictable. And when I say challenging, I don’t mean a zerg which can totally ignore and make the mechanics of the boss fights obsolete and just spam auto attack on the target while watching the Grammy Awards.

I want an actual dragon fight. I don’t want just an eyecandy dragon that stands there waiting for me to shine up his shoes. Some sort of time limit in the event itself wherein if you fail to slay the dragon or prevent a dragon’s objectives, the Event actually FAILS. A much more engaging combat for a massive ZERG and not an event which only dynamically scale for 10 or 15 players.

Do you really think those dragon event’s wherein you pedicure the dragon’s foot for 5 to 10 minutes every 2 hours or so is worth an exotic gear? Seriously.. -_-

Gah, I hate this “You should have to WORK in a game” opinion.
It poisoned MMOs long ago.
If I want to be effective at trying different builds, it shouldn’t take me a week or more of grinding to get a full set of the relevant equipment. It should be darn well near instant.
The grind should be purely cosmetic.
This is how it was in the first Guild Wars where the wider MMO crowd had no influence, and it’s the way it should be here, but ArenaNet keep bowing to pressure from morons who think time played > skill.

You’re always getting people asking for greatsword on elementalist, rifle on ranger / thief, etc.
How about we open it all the way up and just let all classes use all weapons?
It could be done in really interesting ways, such as Staff on Warrior being more the classic Quarterstaff or Bo staff fighting style, Mace on Elementalist being various ground-pound attacks, Hammer on Mesmer being a throwing weapon, etc.

It would also add a lot more variety to builds.

Thoughts and ideas for certain weapon / profession combinations?

Edit: Oh yeah, and this also makes the game more like the original game, where profession didn’t restrict what weapon you could use.

A compromise that makes this suggestion feel more like GW1:
Have one free WP in every zone.
Problem solved.

I still think that teleporting to the various capital cities should be completely free wherever you are in the world mind you.

And ignoring the greatsword, while I love my hammer, it has nothing on on Axe/Warhorn.
Also, one thing the OP is ignoring which I’ve been thinking about recently and needs addressing in some form or another: dual wielding gives access to two sigils, whereas your 2-handed weapons only give you one.
2-handed weapons either need bigger advantages to make up for the loss of access to a second sigil, or they simply need to be able to slot two sigils.

Let me just clarify my position when comparing Hammer to Axe/Warhorn.
Hammer gives good AoE and good control, while having slow hits.
The adrenal skill Earthshaker is excellent when it hits, but has activation issues and does not work reliably on anything other than flat terrain

Axe gives excellent hit-speed and damage, reasonable AoE, some control and then AoE buffs and debuffs on the Warhorn, made even more potent when traited.
Eviscerate is a fast spike of huge single target damage that rarely misses and activates as soon as you hit the button.

He’s just trolling Grumm; he’s using one of the examples I listed in my initial post in this thread.
“Work for it” is a variation on the “Entitled” argument.
And it has other connotations I find just as hateful.
I go to work to work; I play games to get away from work.
Seriously, when did gamers start getting Stockholm syndrome and believing that their game time should be a boring, mindless grind?

In addition, I think the whole Legendary concept is flawed.
There is no lore associated with them in their current form, and throughout mythology, weapons usually become legendary through the actions of their wielders and the events they were used in, not through some arbitrary form of instant acquisition.
A true Legendary weapon would be, for example, the one you’ve carried with you from the start, throughout Tyria. It should level up with you as your personal legend grows.
These weapons would only become more valuable when traded to other people, especially to low level characters beginning their journeys. They would have another character’s adventures to add to their story.
There should be a whole section of flavour text associated with the weapon, telling you who wielded it when.
This would make a weapon Legendary; they could even take their names from their history.
To reference a giant of fantasy simulation gaming, Dwarf Fortress does this incredibly well, with notable kills being recorded in a weapon’s history, and sufficiently storied weapons gaining names representative of those stories.
This would make weapons properly Legendary.

I wholeheartedly agree.
I now have my Gift of Mastery, but that’s the smallest part of the Legendary, yet the only one I consider as representing any effort I’ve put into the game.

The rest is just money, money and more money.

If I want to acquire the next items necessary to craft my Legendary without spending the money, it’ll take an ungodly amount of grind, something ArenaNet have put mechanisms in place to prevent.

And all the while, people who were able to take advantage of various exploits and loopholes before ArenaNet closed them have had a substantially easier time acquiring their Legendaries.

On top of all this, raise any complaint like this and you get lambasted by the community saying that getting a Legendary SHOULD be a grind and any complaints you have are just whinging.

It’s an horrific state of affairs, with layers upon layers of unpleasantness surrounding it.
Rebuttals of complaints you WILL see in this thread:

You don’t HAVE to get a Legendary
This is insulting because after a while it becomes apparent that it’s one of very few things you can actually do at top level; everything is optional, sure, but Legendaries have been very carefully designed by ArenaNet as their Carrot on a Stick to ensure you keep playing.
They may as well say “You don’t HAVE to play”.
Oh, and from a gameplay mechanics point of view, ArenaNet have made it very clear that Legendaries will always remain “Best in Slot”. With the introduction of vertical progress, they are very much saying that if you never want to grind again, you need a Legendary.

Just play the TP
For one, this rebuttal makes it sound easy. Secondly, it discounts the fact that this is as interesting as Excel. I’m playing a game for FUN, I go to work for dull monotony.

It’s a Legendary; it’s not SUPPOSED to be easy
This isn’t what we’re saying. If nothing else, surely just being able to buy the majority of components is by far the easiest thing in the world? Helloooooo gemstore.
We want a challenge, something that reflects our abilities to play, not to spend.

Stop being so entitled
Entitled is an easy, lazy buzzword that has found popularity amongst forum goers with a lack of imagination. What they’re implying is that you want your Legendary and you want it NOW. Again, as argued above, definitely not the case. To these I would say “Stop being so confrontational; not everything has to be a situation for you to belittle someone”.

All MMOs have grind. It’s just the way it is
And this is one of the most harmful of all arguments as it stifles innovation. Anything that steps outside of this paradigm is quickly attacked as being bad. It’s fear of the unknown and is stifling the genre as a whole. It’s narrow-minded conservatism.

What you won’t see are discussions of why people think it was designed this way, what the flaws are, whether it has been broken by various exploits and what ArenaNet are doing to address the system. You’ll also never see a developer get involved in such discussions, as they know how volatile they can get, so you’ll never actually get their opinions on the current state of affairs.

I recently got 100% on a second character, and this time around it was a lot harder, but also a lot more satisfying. It got me involved in WvW and taught me how to play it. The thrill when I finally got the final skillpoint in Stonemist was fantastic, as was my final vista in the red team’s forward EB fortress. It felt like I really deserved them, and I had gotten to recognise a lot of the WvW community on my server.
I’d held towers alone against zergs, narrowly escaping at the last minute;
I’d taken countless supply depots in enemy territory with small guerilla raids, attempting to divert a massive opposing enemy force’s attention.
I’d been in tens of zergs sieging towers.
All of that was a lot more engaging than repeating ANY scripted content.

The first time round, it was still within 2 weeks of launch, so server transfers were still free and instant. Getting the WvW components meant nothing as no effort was required.

Chickenshoes.6250:

What you call it is irrelevant. This type of game has grind inherently. It’s required to keep the game interesting and to present goals. Maybe you can research what MMOs generally entail before you buy your next one.

This type of post makes me, and probably any game designer serious about their job, innovation and originality, despair.
“It has always been this way and it always will be” is not an argument. It’s not logical. It’s not constructive. It’s dogmatic.
If you keep preaching this, you will never get anything new.

The possibilities offered by a huge community of players in one place are squandered when you begin dividing that massive group up into smaller groups. You may as well be playing Left 4 Dead or any other small group co-operative game.

Scripted content ignores the interesting things that can happen randomly when you let players and emergent systems interact, resulting in the same thing over and over again.

As for grind keeping the game interesting, whatever you’re smoking, it’s probably illegal. Here, have a job in a factory where you do the same repetitive crap every minute of every hour of every day. Are you having fun yet?

The MMO user base don’t want MMOs. They want the same small scale content over and over again.
It’s depressing.

I think the funniest one I’ve heard VERY frequently recently is the NONONO! in the third explorable path of Sorrow’s Embrace.
He. Just. Keeps. Saying. It.

You neglect to mention all the traits for thieves that are easily specced into that regenerate health and initiative faster when stealthed, allow you to move faster when stealthed and clear conditions when stealthed.
That and shadow stepping doesn’t break stealth, making your getaway even more assured. Oh yeah, and then there’s the trait that extends all stealth skills’ durations.
Initiative is trivial to make back, and just using C&D and Tactical Strike will result in a net gain of initiative rather than a loss. You can spam this combination to your heart’s content and never run out of initiative.

Initiative would be fine if it couldn’t be used cheaply for stealth. Unfortunately, it can.

Bad example Blueshield.
Endure Pain has a 90 second cooldown.
Cloak & Dagger has no cooldown except for the 3 second “Revealed” debuff. Which if you’re using S/D is positively laughable anyway, as for a good part of those 3 seconds, the enemy won’t be able to hit you because you’ve stunned them.

Gaudrath.6725:

You haven’t asnwered my question. What method would you prefer? You rule out PvE, you rule out PvP (karma), and you rule out trading.

I mean, that sounds to me like you don’t want to spend time and effort to get them. If I am wrong, I really am interested in hearing what kind of system you envision for getting lodestones.

Look, you respond aggressively, as so many people on these forums do, attempting to make yourself look smart by poo-pooing someone elses opinion, and you expect to get something civil from me?

Did you miss the part where I mentioned I’ve got over 1,500 hours logged, with only 3 lodestones to show for it?
And if we’re getting pathetic and arguing semantics, I didn’t dismiss PvE, I stated that the idea of grinding instanced content did not appeal, but to those with tiny imaginations and a ridiculous tolerance for repetition, they think that instanced content is the whole of PvE.

I would like for drop rates to be slightly more than insulting, so that gaining lodestones through open world play and WvW was just as viable as through instances. Three in 1,500 hours isn’t reasonable, and if you argue otherwise, there’s something drastically wrong with your perception of “reasonable”.

At the moment, any open world farming activity swiftly gets smacked by the DR bat, increasing the time needed to get these things dramatically. In threads discussing lodestones, it’s not uncommon to see people quote rates of 1 every 3 hours.
That’s 3 hours of the doing same stuff in the same place over and over again.
How is that healthy gameplay?

These things should have a drop rate more akin to T6 materials, if a little less frequent.
After all, the quantities required for some legendaries are similar to the T6 material requirements.
Is this an unreasonable request?
They should also drop from any mob in high level areas, not just elementals and destroyers. Pop them in the bags, just do SOMETHING.

@Apolyon: I’m curious; you said it took you 5 months. As the game’s only been out that long, would it be correct of me to assume that the whole of those 5 months wasn’t exclusively dedicated to farming lodestones?
And even then, although you’ve got the ones you need now and worked hard to get them, do you think it’s reasonable to argue for increasing their availability?

Ye gods, why does it always come down to entitlement with people like you Gaudrath?
As it happens, no, I don’t want them just handed to me, but I’d like a method of acquisition that was fun rather than an abject chore.
Seriously, next time you’re about to post something along the same lines as the above, stop, think, and don’t.

All this about immobilising, blah, blah, blah, well it doesn’t apply. Even with ArenaNet’s attempted culling fixes, Thieves are still able to stay invisible and attack from that invisibility. Their initiative allows them to spam high damage skills from this broken invisibility, while you’ve wasted your immobilise and are now waiting on a cooldown.

In theory, attacking breaks invisibility. In practise, when there are a lot of players on screen, it doesn’t.

Heck, even in other MMOs that utilise stealth, stealth classes can only be stealthed up until the initial strike, then if they want to re-stealth they have to break combat.
Any skill that allows them to stealth during combat has a cooldown measured in MINUTES, not seconds.

Initiative allows for instant reapplication of stealth skills, and the Revealed debuff doesn’t last long enough to allow WvW culling to catch up. On top of that, Thieves have various traits that heal them in stealth, remove conditions, allow them to move faster, etc.

Thief stealth is just downright broken and should never have been introduced; it’s not “stealth”, as it doesn’t require skill to use. Stealth implies awareness of your surroundings, using cover, movement and light to remain hidden. GW2 stealth is invisibility, and invisibility is a ridiculously overpowered ability to have in a multiplayer game. There is no way of balancing it.

Yeah, that doesn’t appeal to me whatsoever.
Welp, guess I’ll just have to save the money to buy them.

So now I have my Gift of Mastery, it all comes down to how much money I can get my hands on?
Wow, that’s really legendary.

I think it comes down to GW2 being built on the GW1 engine and STILL not being a true 3D game; damage is dealt very much on a 2D plane with the vertical axis rarely accounted for.
Compare this to first-person shooters where Quake did this right back in 1996, and all FPS games since have been doing it. There’s a reason deathmatch maps like Bloodrun remain classics to this day; verticality in gameplay is essential and exhilarating.

I’m guessing it’s something to do with the amount of bandwidth and processing required to track RPG-style combat in a 3D environment, or simply that the rules systems are too inflexible to accommodate true 3D.

It’s also quite capricious about how quickly it activates. They need to make it a canceller, so as soon as you press the key, it activates the skill, cancelling any other action you were doing.

I’m getting really fed up with the random nature of all of the warrior’s gap closers. The same can be said of the Ranger escapes too (sword 2 and shortbow 3).

They really need to fix this stuff.

Can anyone tell me how I’m supposed to get these besides mindless farming, buying them from the TP or through grinding dungeons over and over?

I’ve had 3 lodestones of various different flavours drop in over 1,500 hours of play.

You can’t tell me that’s reasonable.

allstick.1405:

You want to see pain? Swing by Reddit and visit r/GuildWars2. Go talk to the guys in the 75% club. That’s pain.

Can I get my Legendary in cornflower blue?

All this and STILL no way of crafting exotic back pieces or breathers.
They added ascended before rounding off the previous gear tier; of course they never planned to have ascended in the game. It’s a last minute bodge-job attempt to retain users who’ve already left.

Instead of all this ascended crap, they need to really focus on finishing what was initially released.
They need to make all stat-combinations of exotic available through all means.
We need more than a few token exotic back pieces only available through karma vendors or fractals.
Breathers stop with Gavebeorn’s green masterwork one and go no further; you can’t even get an exotic breather through WvW.

And then, they can finally concentrate on rolling out ascended properly. I still think it has no place in the game at all, but if they’re going to continue to roll it out, then they should do so with consistency.
When releasing a new type of ascended piece, they need to ensure that all stat combinations are available at the same time, as well as all routes of acquisition: crafting, badges of honour, dungeons, fractals, drops and laurels.

The way they’re doing it at the moment stinks of panic and rushing.

The argument between Knight’s and Cavalier’s could be compared to old Guild Wars 1 balancing between steady and spike damage, where Knight’s is steady with more crits being dished out (my crit rate for example after charging my sigil of perception is 110%), and Cavalier’s is spike, with occasional high damage output.
The problem is that with spike damage in GW1, you controlled exactly when the spike was applied, whereas in GW2, if you’re sacrificing crit rate in order to boost crit damage, you can’t say eactly when the spike is coming.
Personally, I prefer certainty over uncertainty.

Huh, well waddya know.
You’re going to have me staring intently at the kitten thing now 8|

Bollocks.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Never mind them though, that shark’s doing something weird with wee-wee!

With that flight of fancy out of the way, here’s a less obscure explanation:
Bollocks is a typically British slang and swear term for male genitalia.
And Pistrix, while it’s juvenile, I thought would have been obvious. It’s toilet humour, and alluding to rather fetishistic behaviour.

They are going to implement this, but they saw the suggestion on the forums a little too close to the end of the development cycle of this content roll-out in order to include it.

If they’re going to do this, it should be limited to a particular area in the game, one designated specifically for the purpose. Otherwise, if it can be initiated anywhere in the world, you’re going to end up getting hassled by over-enthusiastic duellists constantly cruising for a fight and getting aggressive when you turn them down.
Hopefully though, this is one area where ArenaNet won’t cave to pressure.

uknortherner.2670:

I think ANet should start with figuring out why the mouse pointer randomly disappears in the first place.

I don’t think it ever actually disappears, rather it gets lost amidst the plethora of particle effects. And because it’s a rather neutral gold colour, it’s hard to pick out when you need to. Rather frustratingly, I usually end up flailing my mouse around in the hopes I’ll be able to spot the movement synchronised to my hand amidst the combat chaos.

So yeah, there’s a couple of hilarious NPC names that slipped through the net during development.

Bolok in the Citadel of Flame.
This one had us howling with laughter when we first came across him. We just wondered why he didn’t have a twin.

Ancient Shark Pistrix in Sparkfly Fen.
I mean, come on, really? You didn’t see it when you named the ancient shark?
I’m sure there’s a hilarious joke here to do with the wind or something.

Has anyone else spotted any other inadvertent slips of the pen on ArenaNet’s behalf?

On Pet Control, I think there should be a third control option added alongside Attack and Heel: Guard.
The pet in this mode would stay near the ranger and attack anyone who closes to melee range, but wouldn’t run off and attack the ranger’s target.

Another great idea, although I hope you don’t mind but I’d like to riff on it a little.
Could we make the cursor customisable, as in colour, size and style?
I too lose the cursor regularly in combat, especially as I’ve enabled quick AoE targetting.
If I could make it more contrasty and easier to pick out, it would greatly help.
If you don’t enable quick AoE targetting, this is less of a problem as the AoE radius helps you locate the cursor, but you lose the convenience of being able activate a skill with one button press.
While it may not tie in with the artistic vision ArenaNet have for the game, a gaudy, large, custom cursor would certainly make the game easier for some people such as myself.

+1’ed.
I knew there was another thing I was wanting to add when I was putting together my Achievement Tracking thread, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
Great minds think alike

Currently, I completely ignore consumables as they’re an inconvenience. They consume materials (potential cash), and they’re a PITA to use.
This would go a long way to making me use them and should have been implemented from the get-go, along with things like Minipet paper doll slots, a dungeon group finder and other such interface conveniences.

The whole concept of transmutation stones is a little stinky, and certainly very much a money grab.

When I compare GW2’s appearance customisation to two other particular MMOs, it pales in comparison.
The two examples I’m thinking of are DCUO and AoC.
No matter what your stats in those games, you could change appearance at will, and changing that appearance didn’t involve permanently consuming the style you wanted.

In DCUO, you could end up unlocking thousands of styles that could be changed on the fly, and I would happily spend hours hunting down new looks and playing “Dress-up” with my characters. You could certainly pay real money for more appearance options, but unlike GW2’s rather stingy one-off system, that style could be used as many times as you liked on that character.

And in AoC, you would have two armour paper dolls; one showing the armour that your stats derived their bonuses from, the other displaying the cosmetic look you wanted to show. This allowed you to customise your look to your heart’s content, without consuming the original armours (both cosmetic and stat based). You could even revert to the basic armour appearance whenever you wanted at no extra cost. And yet again, dedicated cosmetic styles were available for cash, but wouldn’t be consumed in a one-off fashion.

GW2’s Fine Transmutation Stone system is incredibly stingy in comparison. It revolves around consuming armour and never allowing reversion to the original appearance, unless you want to spend even more money. Imagine if you accidentally transmute a piece of tier 3 armour so that it looks like a basic crafted piece?
No joy for you!
You have to buy the tier 3 piece all over again if you want that look AND buy a new Fine Transmutation Stone from the Gem store.

It comes to something when GW2’s system is actually WORSE than a F2P game’s.

Thinking more about this, could it be also extended to stat tracking?
At the moment if I want to see what differences equipment and skills make to my Precision for example, I have to open the Hero window, obscuring a significant part of my view portal.
Having stats of your choice tracked in a similar way to that outlined above would really help.

With the addition of the Daily tracker, it reminded me of an idea I’ve had since Guild Wars 1.
Would it be possible to add tracking of any achievement you want?
The idea is that ArenaNet would add a checkbox to the side of the achievement tracks in the hero panel. When checked, the achievement track would then appear in the top left corner in much the same way that Dailies are currently tracked.

Personally, I can’t stand dungeons or fractals, or instanced content of any kind, but I’m not going to complain about having to do it for my monthly. If I want the laurels, I have to do the content.
That said, I can sympathise with people complaining about having to do undesirable content, so I hope ArenaNet hurry up with the whole “Do 4 out of 6” thing.

Tim, it has been said multiple times, but exactly what is ridiculous about crafting 10 Green Wood Planks or 10 Copper Ingots?

I want to see moar crying over Dailies.
ArenaNet, please add a “Daily Player Kills” category, so that people are “forced” to play sPVP / Wuvwuv.

A disclaimer first: I do not have a precursor, nor have I ever owned one.
With that out of the way, a lot of the precursors floating around are the result of the Godskull weapon exploit that has since been fixed.
What exact percentage, we will probably never know as ArenaNet are unlikely to reveal figures.

With gold converted to gems?
Sure.
With real money?
Heck no.

All I can think is that anyone stacking Berserker’s is the very definition of “Glass Canon”, so they’re going to die quickly anyway.
Any other stat combination and it starts to get hazy.

I use full Knight’s on my warrior (apart from the back piece for obvious reasons).
If ArenaNet continue to release ascended gear that’s almost, but not quite Knight’s (the Power / Crit. Damage / Toughness set), I’m better off sticking with my exotic Knight’s.
I have a faint glimmer of hope that this is on-purpose and what they’re doing is stealth-nerfing ascended gear by the back door by simply making desirable stat combos unavailable. Any ascended gear you buy that replaces your existing gear will actually reduce the effectiveness of one of your stats.

Still miffed I can’t get my grubby mitts on an exotic Knight’s back-piece or indeed craft one.

At the moment, none of the ascended gear has stats that compliment any of my builds.
So I’m going to continue to bank them for the time being.
I’m also curious to see if ArenaNet will ever actually pull their collective fingers out and let us craft ascended gear. If not, what’s the point of crafting?
So this new, unique currency currently has no value to me whatsoever. If they don’t change rate of acquisition and they continue to be obtuse with releasing different ascended stat combinations, it looks like I’ll be going for the cosmetics.
Although even there the current implementation of minipets and how they are displayed is so half-baked as to be utterly pointless.

I’ll keep collecting them, purely because I always do my daily.

And you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t be spending a single laurel on any of the RNG crap they’ve included for low laurel cost.
Seriously, what a waste.