Guild Wars 2

lol @ marketing. the only time I actually look at anything on the gem store is when I’m waiting for the selling timer to go away. I couldn’t even tell you what’s on sale before that. it’s like popup windows when you go to web pages. why do advertisers still pay to have these there? now if it was a small sidebar to the right of the window, I’d probably at least notice it when I wasn’t looking for it.
My #1 wish for the TP is for it to be more like an actual web browser, with back buttons, cache (to save your last search, for example), multiple windows.

why are you pvping at the end of a jumping puzzle? it’s not pvp at that point, it’s evil. If it were pvp, you would wait at the beginning and fight anyone who approached you – you wouldn’t be chasing everyone that never touched you and is trying their hardest to run away from you. no one does these jumping puzzles to pvp. they either do it because it’s a hazardous jumping puzzle or they do it so they can catch innocent victims unprepared and get free badges themselves. that’s not pvp. don’t think that’s what you’re doing. If they /taunt or are about to attack you, THEN it’s pvp.
I’ve seen pvp in the EB JP. It was done after everyone on all 3 servers got to the chest.

only 4%, yes, but it’s a high turnover as it’s a popular item, and it compounds.
4% profit every 5 minutes for an hour = 60% profit.
it won’t compound forever, but for the short period it’s not bad.
I do prefer larger spreads, but the larger the spread, the less likely it is to both buy cheap and sell expensive.

something to note: that website is only as accurate as people report it. I’ve seen people troll it (possibly in an attempt to reduce lag or overflow?) with faulty info. please don’t do this :P
and there’s still a spawning window when the boss is available to appear, so you can’t know down to the minute unless you have a guildie there, which is most likely the case from your experiences.

I agree with Danikat, once you pay you feel compelled to play. I’m currently starting to get annoyed at GW2 for compelling dailies to get laurels. If there was only any other reliable way to get laurels… it’s really a turn-off to be forced to do something, be it play otherwise the month’s subscription goes to waste, or log on for half an hour to get a laurel.
That really takes the fun out of it.
I have yet to meet the game that I want to pay a subscription to play, nor can I even imagine what such a game might contain.

karma gear can be thrown into the mystic forge to give a random item. if you would sell it, it gives about the same profit as if you had salvaged it instead (unless there’s some good socketed things in it)
wait… are you sure you can’t salvage karma gear? I feel like you can, but can’t remember ever doing it, just comparing salvaging to Mystic Forge and deciding to convert karma to gold via Mystic Forge.
if you have something that you can’t salvage, but you REALLY want the socket out of it, you can use a fine T stone (or normal, if the item level is less than 80) to transmute it into a white item. just make sure to use the white item’s stats and the socket you want to salvage. then you can salvage it to get some mithril and your socket.

personally, I have some rather worthless rare and exotic back pieces that I’d like to be able to salvage. any idea why you can’t salvage those? things like Ghostly Spineguard. so worthless to sell them, but you’d think they should be worth more.
then there’s ascended rings I’d like to salvage as well

Ruprect.7260:

I hope this month they add a Kill 1500 invaders.

For some inexplicable reason, ever since the Living Story, ‘Invader’ has always meant the dredge and flame legion invaders that come out of portals and such to me.
There is the slightest chance it is because of the terminology they use EVERYWHERE ELSE:
“The Gathering Storm
Invaders are attacking in Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau. Take them down before they can displace more refugees!
1 Invaders Killed +1 Achievement points
30 Invaders Killed +1 Achievement points
60 Invaders Killed +1 Achievement points
100 Invaders Killed +1 Achievement points
150 Invaders Killed +1 Achievement points”

meanwhile:
“Realm Avenger
You see dead people. A lot!
1 Total Kill in WvW +1 Achievement points
1,000 Total Kills in WvW +5 Achievement points
3,000 Total Kills in WvW +5 Achievement points
10,000 Total Kills in WvW +10 Achievement points
50,000 Total Kills in WvW +10 Achievement points
250,000 Total Kills in WvW +20 Achievement points Title: Ultimate Dominator”

“Monthly WvW Player Kills
Enemy invader needs death badly.
5 World Invaders Killed +2 Achievement points
15 World Invaders Killed +2 Achievement points
30 World Invaders Killed +2 Achievement points
50 World Invaders Killed +5 Achievement points”

I have misallocated locations to work on daily/monthly stuffs a couple of times because of this.

it depends on the servers. our current match-up is generally very nice. the last one before that had some seriously different ideals.
personally, I like that you can fight people and make their jumping a harder experience, but a lot of time it does go too far. couple things I’d change:
- no opportunities to portal someone from the very beginning to the very end (which happens to double as a prime spot to ruin someone else’s evening)
- some sort of timer where you take more damage the longer you’ve been in there. then when you leave, they slowly go away. I’m thinking something unnoticeable if you’re just running the puzzle but enough that you can’t camp. like every minute adds a point, and each point means you take an extra 0.2% damage from everything. I’d say it takes maybe 30 minutes on average to run this puzzle, which means 6% extra damage taken. campers = 2 hours = 24% extra damage taken.

Most people I tell about GW2 tell me they haven’t bought it themselves because they assume there is a monthly fee. When I tell them there isn’t, they are all of a sudden really really interested.
I wouldn’t of purchased it if it had a monthly fee. It’s probably good enough for one (if WoW can have one, GW2 definitely can), I just don’t agree with that philosophy. I usually play huge online games for a couple/few years, and even $20/month is $720 after 3 years. too much for something that passes the time. I never get into these games enough to make it my life.

might be too obvious, but is your friend out that 400g? (did he actually click ‘send’?), and is he sure he sent it to you and not someone else by mistake?
I never noticed if there’s a sent mail folder…

if you have pretty good % crit chance (say 50%), with the cooldown, the difference between 30% and 20% is negligible.
let’s say 1 attack per second and both of them just proc’ed.
5s until either can proc again.
after that, the 30% will proc in 3.33s on average. the 20% will proc in 5s on average.
adding the 5s cooldown: superior will proc every 8.33s, while major will proc every 10s.

mine is simply so long that I don’t want to wait for it to load. maybe the same problem?

fire elemental used to be like what you describe. zergs would wipe, piles of corpses, people getting angry at the noobs, etc. let me paint you a picture of what you faced:
1 ember every 1000 range, so you’re almost never out of range of one
fire balls landing everywhere. when they hit you, you get thrown, stunned, and delt half of your life in damage. likely to get hit again before you can get back up. something to note: the effect would happen just before the red circle appeared, making dodging impossible.
flame attack that travels along the ground is about the same as now…
people would be timid and huddle near the bridge, so that was where all these attacks were focused, so you likely got nailed while you were approaching.
don’t even consider going there unless you’re at least level 30 (even though it downlevels you to 15), as you couldn’t even survive one fire ball.
it would take 30-60 minutes of the best skills you could bring to bare, along with 5-20 wp runs, to defeat this beast. even with 50+ players present.

exactly what I said:
as I read the update, each chest will give you reliably blue/green with maybe a rare or exotic here or there (maybe 10% chance at a rare?)
then once a day, you will get an extra 1-3 rares.

I like to salvage (basic kit) anything worth less than 30c or salvageable material, then sell greys, whites, and blues to a vendor, then throw greens into the mystic forge to try to get yellows (only with high levels – I’ve found that levels 80+80+80+14 = level 68-72), then either sell yellows on TP or salvage with Master Salvage Kit, then sell oranges on TP.

blood’s wiki has a typo. it should say:
“+30% chance to life steal on critical. (This effect cannot trigger more than once every 5 seconds.)”
so overall, blood is about 3 times as good as pie (heals you for ~50% more, and also hurts your opponent for about the same amount). but pie adds precision…
I think sigils are meant to be stronger anyways.
their cooldown is not shared, so I will sometimes use both of these at once.

let’s face it: people waiting for a boss are not playing. they wouldn’t be playing somewhere else if they weren’t not playing, they would just be not playing somewhere else.
that’s ignoring the likelihood all of the people waiting for a boss for 1 hour are bots.
I’ve waiting 20 min for a boss before. had GW2 windowed, an episode of The Office on next to it, and eating 2 slices of pizza.

and there need to be no safe zones.
currently: they have fixed attack patterns, and anyone that happens to be in the way gets hit.
ideally: boss launches an attack in the direction of players. maybe a random player, maybe all players, maybe aoe in direction of the largest density of players, w/e.

mcarswell.3768:

i have 4 80s, and i will continue farming the chests on all of them after the patch. that is, unless i notice a decrease in extra rares/exotics. I’m farming for a precursor, and the daily rare is just a bonus.

you will notice a decrease in rares. that’s the point of the update.

agreed. but the good part about infusing an item in the forge is that it turns soulbound into account bound.
I recommend putting basic infusion (costs 75 fractal relics) into rings/back if they are not infused, then put an expensive one in there after you infuse it.
god they need a new name for infused version of the item. or a new name for the infusions you put into the item.

I am a tad sad I just sold 200 ectos for 53g last weekend. could of got 65g right now.

my interpretation of it: if you kill any major boss, you get a daily rare chest. killing any second boss on the same account will not get you another daily rare chest, but you will still get loot from the chest – probably similar to the loot before the update that added guaranteed rares, so you can probably still get rares/exotics from it.

well, ori is what the “25% chance of rarer materials” actually refers to.
so if you recover 200 mithril, you should also recover 67 ori (25% ori, 75% mithril)
but it sounds like it’s item-dependent, meaning some have their recovery things set, and others have the chance of rarer.

it’s worth pointing out that not all appear-gather-disappear characters are bots. some people park alts at nodes and just sequentially log into each character, harvest, log into another. was more common with that rich ori vein, but not unheard of elsewhere.
easiest way to tell the difference is to friend them and see if that same character is still logged on and in that area after they disappear. If they are soon logged on with a different character, they are likely human.

as Lord Aargadon said.
I had natural vigor (adds 50% endurance) on my ranger then used Bowl of Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew (adds 40% endurance, gain might on dodge)
used that for like a month, then decided to test it one day. Results went something like this:
no natural vigor or Orrian Stew = took 10 seconds to refill from 1 dodge
add natural vigor = took 6.7 seconds to refill from 1 dodge
add Orrian Stew = took 6.7 seconds to refill from 1 dodge

if they stacked, the last one would of taken 5.25 seconds
I sold all my Orrian Stews after that :P the might was nice, but overall I preferred other foods if it wasn’t also adding more dodges/minute.

I’m 99% sure you wouldn’t get banned. Anet doesn’t really do anything about any form of scamming, besides warning you to be wary of it.
Reminds me of a post about a month ago of someone who posted that the guild leader stole everything from the guild and wanted to know what they could do about it.

Something I realized after it happened:
I was buying and salvaging lots of mithril trinkets over the weekend. most were salvaged with Mystic SK. I was most focused on the ecto and the socket, so I didn’t pay attention at the time, but afterwards it struck me as weird that I didn’t get a single ori ore from ~300 salvages.
I was salvaging things like Snowflake Mithril Amulet, and it would give me mithril, ecto, and brilliant snowflake. I got around 400 mithril, but maybe only 5 ori. I remember there were a few ori in the first few salvages, but noted that later on I would salvage 50 trinkets and not get a single one. could be the trinkets I was salvaging can’t drop ori? (I was also salvaging non-crafted trinkets as well) or is there DR on that 25% chance to get upgraded materials?

I got 16 ectos from 9 rares with Mystic SK yesterday. you don’t see me complaining
anyways:
Mystic/Master SK = 0.9 ecto/rare
Black Lion SK = 1.25 ecto/rare
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/BL-S-Kits-vs-Master-Kits-Results-Ectos/first

Syeria.4812:

Was this calculating the Mystic cost as buying the forge stones at 5 for 250 or at 10 for 450? I’m still glad I stocked up on those way back when gems were around 75s per 100.

10 for 450

yeah, I bought 10 stones like 6 months ago when gems were 40s for 100. I’m currently only half way through using kit #3. (I was finding so many BLSK early on that those were what I was using on rares for a while :P)

Spidy says … drum roll … 5

I was going to guess 20, but that boot apparently only starts at level 62

it happens easily. if you place several buy orders for crafting materials, say 2000 of each log, that’s potentially 12,000 different transactions. at only around 20 transactions/page, that’s 600 pages from 1 day.
now do that for ore, food, fine, gemstones, random items you buy, rares to salvage into ectos, etc.
I would like it if it only loaded the page that you are viewing, and not all of them. Mine also takes so long to open it’s not useful and I just say “puppy it!”

on a side note, I just bought 10 stacks of superior sigils at 1c above their merchant value for the possibility that Anet will add a recipe to forge these.
If they don’t, I’m out 25s.
If they do, I’m in like 325g (625 rolls, median sigil value is around 60s, minus cost to buy them). Since I don’t need that 50g anytime soon, it’s not that bad of a investment in my opinion

I could just being saying this to drive up the price of cheapo sigils so I can offload these at 50% profit I’m not, but if I happen to see I can sell them at 50% profit, I probably will. investing isn’t the most exciting thing, and this is long-term, so I’d just place new buy orders at 1c above vendor price and they’ll probably eventually be filled.
runes seem to not be this low in price… only like 12 different sigils are even this low.

seasoned wood bottomed out. 2 weeks ago it was around 30-50c each log, now it’s hit the vendor floor at like 7.

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

I was wondering if one of the Math Wiz contributors could take it one step further?

If we assume that the Statical theory is correct here(which i am NOT qualified to do), what is the estimated Return on Investment if one would buy say, 10 Master Kits from a Merchant at its static value and 10 BL Kits at its current Gold to Gem value.

Would the GP RoI yield a conclusive recommendation of using one Kit over the other?

I think I did this already… I made a spreadsheet where you could enter the current ecto cost, current gem price, and drop rates for each type of kit, then it calculated cost per salvage and ectos per salvage and gave you profit per salvage.
some example results:
1.25 ecto/BLSK, 0.9 ecto/MSK
1.9 gold per 100 gems:
ecto = 20s each: BLSK profit = 2.2s, Mystic profit = 16.87s, Master profit = 17.39s
ecto = 30s each: BLSK profit = 14.7s, Mystic profit = 25.87s, Master profit = 26.39s
ecto = 40s each: BLSK profit = 27.2s, Mystic profit = 34.87s, Master profit = 35.39s
1.5 gold per 100 gems:
ecto = 28s each: BLSK profit = 7s, Mystic profit = 17.09s, Master profit = 17.39s
ecto = 30s each: BLSK profit = 19.5s, Mystic profit = 26.09s, Master profit = 26.39s
ecto = 40s each: BLSK profit = 32s, Mystic profit = 35.09s, Master profit = 35.39s

note how BLSK is getting pretty close to MSK in that last one… if ecto price is high enough and gem price is low enough, BLSK will produce the highest profit. This was the case at the beginning of the year when ectos first reached 40s (but only just barely)

I also used this to find that Mystic SK is only cheaper than Master SK if you can buy 100 gems for less than 0.93 gold. not going to happen anytime soon :P

I like to lay down Temporal Curtain. I think that lets you run faster than a centaur… anyways, it also cripples them, so you definitely will run faster

Jeahanne.5209:

My favorite glitch was falling off of the Uncatagorized Fractal in FotM. I somehow fell in short falls down past the starting point and ended up in a long fall down to a mysterious plain underneath. I found new land!

…too bad I died when I hit the ground and couldn’t explore it…

If you have a revive orb, you can walk around down there (done it). there are boundaries, so you can’t just keep running forever. the land below it, for me, was the snow fractal. it was fun to be watching it like I was in space or something. (we did the snow fractal just before that one, so maybe it’ll always be the one before the one you’re doing, or maybe that’s where that ma kitten tored?)
I recommend reviving yourself down there only if you want to look around. once revived, the only way to rejoin your party is for them to finish the fractal (no loot for you) or everyone wipe or go back to the lab.

then there is the RNG excuse
if we’re comparing our experienced drop rates:
In the last 40 boss chests I’ve opened, I only got 1 exotic.
I did fractals level 28 2 weeks ago and found 2 named exotics, both from the maw fractal (yes, 2 in one fractal – it was so much more awesome than 1 worth twice as much. both were worth ~2.5g)
The only exotic I’ve found from a dungeon in the last 2 months (I run about 9 dungeon paths a week) was a exotic sigil of puppy.

understandable. personally, leveling is so transient that you shouldn’t really ever focus on it. focus on map completion or events or wvw or dungeon stories or achievements or boss fights or roaming the countryside, and leveling will just happen.

you don’t even have to have excel. depends how they save it, but the player data is likely in a database for easy access, in which case all you have to do is call it with a cleverly worded function.
usually it might be “return all_data where player_id=your_character’s_id”, but for this it would be a bit more complicated: “return player_name,player_gold_in_hand,player_gold_in_bank order by player_gold_in_hand+player_gold_in_bank, descending”, then just display the first 50 records.
they do the similar when you do a TP search and sort by price. it would just be with player data instead of TP data.

I agree with everyone else: 30 of those 50 will be gold sellers with names like “ixusyenp4837”
It would be interesting to see a top-50 list of legitimate players, with maybe just the first and last letter of their name and their server. give you an idea of how poor you are. but that list would have to exclude all the gold sellers, and if they knew how to do that, they would of banned them already.

CoF path 1.
each run takes 5-20 minutes and gives you about 1 level.

people always remember the times things happen, not the times they don’t.
If you’re out looking for exotics, you remember getting them all the time, so of course your estimate is higher. you might think to yourself: “I’ve found maybe 4 in recent memory, and recent memory is maybe 2 weeks, so I found 2 per week”, forgetting that 2 of those were from the mystic forge, and 1 of them was purchased off the TP.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for all the times you didn’t get an exotic, your general impression is that you haven’t gotten any in a long time, and you can remember 2 weeks back, so you get less than 0 from 2 weeks.
human memory is highly unreliable. Just ask Sammy Jenkins

Who says major corporations or billionaires can’t launder money on ginormous scales?
I’m sure it happens in the real world, and probably even accounts for the vast majority of money illegally transferred.
the person who posted it was the first to post it, so they had no competition, and wanted some rich kid to pay $1000 of his parent’s money to buy it.

it’s supposed to reset at 4:00 pm here (I have noticed this before). it’s 4:39 pm.

his biggest threat is his ability to control an army of undead. who said he had to be all-powerful?
that said – he should at least be able to control an army of undead. undead adds that attack you and prevent you from attacking him?

camerrell.1963:

I put 4 non infused ascended rings into the forge and got 1 random non infused ascended ring back. So it is possible but still nothing to see here.

Let us salvage these rings for globs or combine them for a chance at a better infused ring/item.

O.O they added this!?!? I tried to do this about a month ago and it wouldn’t let me.
not that I have so many alts that I don’t have infused rings for them… salvaging them for ectos would be preferable, but it’s good to have at least some use for them.

I agree – more technical details is what I want. but there should be an option for it: default is clutter-free, checkbox to show technical details such as how much damage, recharge time, etc.

Diablo 3 has this. the tooltips default to basic “dash forward and deal extra damage”, but there is a setting that you can have it show actual amounts: “dash forward and deal 4,822 damage, 20 second cooldown”, then you just compare that to the regular attack “swing for 2,411 damage, 1/2 second cooldown”

reasons to pick offense or defense over utility:
1) a lot of people think mf is useless, and don’t know where gf is used
2) only way to gain more AR for fotm 30+
3) min/maxing for PvP

it’s always funny how some people demand certain conditions, such as at the same time of day, when it’s night time in-game, alternating master/BL to account for potential DR, days until the next blue moon, etc. anything superstitious. most of these are technically possible, though highly unlikely and no one else, not even the I-just-salvaged-an-exotic-and-got-0-ectos-has-there-been-a-stealth-nerf people, has thought that they are a possibility.

yet they ignore the likely points: does Master SK have the same drop rate as Mystic SK?
that is the last thing I’d like to know.
400 data points is conclusive enough for me
thanks for your hard work!

ideally, it should display:
Price per unit:
Total Price: 100%
Listing Fee: 5%
Projected Return: 90% (note that this is the current “Projected Profit”)
Projected Profit: 85%

well… it’s a great TP, just could use a lot of UI improvements.