Guild Wars 2

purpleskies.3274:

I think it is very interesting that Anet isn’t talking about buffing this trait to steal more boons or something like that, instead they just are going to give thieves and warriors, two classes who are already bursty, more damage.

Aside from the minor detail the SPECIFICALLY SAID thieves would lose raw burst damage when they get boon hate because their burst is so high to offset their lack of boon penetration abilities.

And if the warrior boon hate is put in a line where it completely fails to synergize with their unrelenting reliance on greatsword, maybe we’ll actually see a warrior or two that has some other weapon equipped… Wouldn’t that be novel?

Boon hate already exists – Spinal Shivers does more damage to people per boon they have, up to 3. It’s probably a good baseline for what the Devs will propegate to other classes (Theives at the loss of some raw burst DPS, warriors to enhance a less popular trait line).

Do guardians live in mortal fear of Necros?

I know we stay aware of Necros for their boon-to-condition conversion, but more versions of Spinal Shivers? Is that what all the caterwauling is about?

I have (in order of leveling to 80) a level 80 Warrior, Guardian, Ranger and Mesmer (with a Necro in the 70s).

While I enjoy my Ranger and do Dungeons with it, I have no doubt I’m having to work harder and be far more cunning to contribute as much with my Ranger as I do with my Warrior or Guardian. There is nothing relaxed about optimal Ranger play – if you aren’t lining up 2-3 targets for piercing shots every second there is more than 1 enemy on the field, you aren’t doing close to enough damage. Shortbow 1 is tracer fire – it lets you know you are lined up so you can put the 2, 4, and 5 down range when they will hit several targets.

My ranger’s utility choices are just feeble compared ot the other classes. Warrior pets (banners) are 100% effective and 100% indestructible. Ranger pets (the spirits) are erratic in benefit and frequently dead on arrival… comparisons of their other utilites lines are similarly underwhelming.

I know they have a bad rap with the Devs as the number one choice to build kill-bots out of, but they really do need a review or even a full revamp to level the field a little – an improvment in the (bot-resistant) complexity of their game play, not just a straight increase to their damage numbers.

Except on several occasions now I’ve gotten an exotic and no rare fromthe mega-bosses – meaning that most of those Final Rests came from the fixed good reward slot (especially since Final Rest has never been in the normal chest drops prior to the new fixed good result…). While I wasn’t farming the heck out of SB with my alts, the number of rolls per day on the table definitely goes down as a result of the change.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I don’t know a single person who even thought about buying an accessory with laurels. What an awful way to get them… Most people have their accessories from Guild missions at this point. At least anyone who has been consistent enough to have 40 laurels.

Well now you’ve met one. I’m not in one of these massive guilds and probably never will be.

My ecto salavaging remains quite favorable.

bpphantom.8243:

I like this change. I still get my rares, I can keep going for the randoms on alts. Nice.

How is “I can get a rare, then run it on an alt later and also get a rare” NOT superior to what you call “nice”?

‘Keep going for the random on alts’… That’s just funny. You could do that for the last, oh, 8 months, and it wasn’t worht doing then and it won’t be worth doing again after this change.

Martin Kerstein.3071:

That is indeed correct. You will get one guaranteed rare drop per boss per account per day. You still have the chance to get pre-cursors/exotics/rares from the regular dragon chests every time you play an event. It is just the guaranteed rare drop that has been restricted.

That “chance” off the normal box for better than green is so low as to have plumetted beyond “insignificant” and reached “insulting every time you mention it”.

Mention it again. Go on. You know you want to.

I think the big announcement that ‘people are playing too much and being rewared for it consistently is a huge problem we’re removing next patch’ is pretty much grounds to scream at the Devs.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!?!!!!!!!!?!

pant-pant

Ok. Now the shocked market can go do whatever it wants, and people with alts can know that the Devs pretty much just hate them.

Radical thought: Reduce the number of urkittenills required for comepletion to 8?!?

Then add 2 more urchins just to be sure .

Might want to look at other waves of nobles – like the one that anhilates the Pact forces crawling up the hill to the temple of Balthazar…

I’m also find it particularly charming (note the dripping sarcasm) that the Orr monsters pretty much all being given new AoE skills makes Rangers in general and Rangers with Spirits even LESS viable. Its great you tried to make them more challenging to players in moderate to large groups, but in the process you just highlighted the fundamental flaws with your pet AI in the dodge-or-die environments you’ve created.

Perhaps this thread title should be about the superficial nature of moderator reading considering the place they moved the thread to .

You mean like if dungeons were gaurenteed to drop at least one rare? My goodness, the things you say…

A few more (permanently present) interactive objects would go a long way towards enriching lore. Signposts, tattered journals geocached in rock-piles, inscriptions on walls… Just geneally more ways of checking out the world other than swinging a sword at it.

Graybes.8251:

A great change to a huge problem!

Too many players participating on a daily basis is the kind of problem MMOs dream of having. I’m not so sure that shooting rewards in the head is a solution that’s really going to benefit ANet as much as maybe improving the stability of the events would have been.

Out of a million players somebody has to get worst luck of the day.

Lame. They finally had a decent reward for building up alts and now just like laurels, having alts will be meaningless to advancement.

Raif.9507:

While you are correct in nearly everything, if you read that graph correctly, the highest amount of ecto sold is right underneath the 354 mark. Look closely at the graph, the line drops to 0 and only bumps up to show a unique player(s) who sold ecto at that amount. After the 250 mark it only bumps up twice at above the 294 mark and below the 354 mark.

Um… that wouldn’t NEARLY account for the total volume stated. There almost certainly are some zeroes in there, but there’s a heck of a lot of ones required to bring the total to 150,000+

Ori-kal-come

At some point the Devs are going to get it that hype, and particularly over-hype is TOXIC.

What we’ve seen so far would have been vastly more intriguing if we weren’t constantly being told how amazing its gonna be. We’ll tell you if its amazing. Quit trying to tell us and show us some story/content as its ready.

I’m wondering if anyone has observed my anecdotal sense that rares with runes/sigils return higher rates than rares without?

Or that higher vendor cost rare items may return more than lower cost items (coats vs. gloves, 2h weapons vs 1h weapons)?

My hope is that the poorly valued sigils get reworked – shorter internal cooldowns or higher activation chances for the procs – things that don’t throw off the pattern of stat bonuses but would plet players reassess their usefullness…

I actually quite like that the items stay up once posted. I can put stuff up for a bit above the going rate and keep adding items to my stack from out in the field and just wait for the tide to rise. Its a LOT friendlier to casual sellers who don’t want to track the minutia of price patterns day in and day out.

Can I just express mild amazement that someone had over 10 stacks of ectos they wanted to sell?

My account continues to amass value – my stocks of t6s rise, my horde of ectos slowly grows, my goals move more and more into reach, but dayam… I’m a fricken pauper compared to some of these traders.

All the races could benefit from new hairstyles, and the gem store could benefit from making them accessible through the styling and make-over kits.

Its a win-win.

Most of the bots I’ve seen are in mid-levels zones- where they can avoid the massive endgame population.

Bots, bots, and bots. My server is thick with them.

It’d be nice if they were account bound, but not everything is meant to be fodder for the trade post. Laurels for example…

Boon hate was also mentioned as a good fit for warriors. Not sure which warrior tree is so deficient it needs a new theme/flavor… something to tempt them out of using greatsword for every occasion?

Hunter.4783:

Im not sure if im seeing it right but your armor is rampager and you are going for the all stat jewelry…. Either this is a troll build or you actually believe condition dmg matters at all to the guardian.

I keep hearing things like this. No, its not a troll build. First, there aren’t any other choices for high-precision armor. Second, Sword lays on the 5th hit burn very fast and Torch buttons both burn, so you do some condition damage all the time. If the Precision major, Power/Toughness minor moves out of just the ascended accessories and into armor I’ll swap to that, but Rampagers armor works just dandy for us. Likewise, Guardians can and do benefit from celestial accessories. In this case once you have a high enough Precision/crit chance rounding out your stats is a plus, not a minus.

Lets try this.

One thing the summation on the calculator doesn’t show is that with high crit builds Vigorous Precision (Gain 5 seconds of vigor when you deliver a critical hit. This effect can only trigger once every 5 seconds) is pretty much perma-vigor, which in turn is a LOT of survivability and AoE heals.

Its very similar to my Archon (0/30/10/20/10). I run sword/torch or sword/shield & staff, so again similar. Difference is I made delivering might my primary focus so rather than runes for boon duration I went with 3 pairs of +20% might duration for a total of +70% might duration. 12 stacks for 17 seconds off the staff-4, and able to maintain four to five stacks casually just from normal attacks with empowering might.

I went with Sigil of Accuracy (flat 5% crit bonus) and Sigil of Generosity. With over 75% crit chance Generosity hands off conditions pretty much as soon as you get one, and unlike the signet it doesn’t go into internal cooldown until it’s actually used.

Unspecified.9142:

Salvaging 100 items once is a horrible sample size.

I don’t agree. When an item has 4 outcomes and each of those outcomes is near 25% (like say, a 4-sided die) it doesn’t take a tremendous number of rolls to check the die within a modest tolerance. 60+ rolls is plenty to get a feel for if a die is warped. You need gigantic sample sizes with checking things with very small likelyhoods and you need an extra significant digit or two to feel strongly about your predictions. Massive sample sizes are needed for precurssors far moreso tha they are to read ecto behavior.

The numbers I gave were what I concluded after salvaging around 5,000 items in lots of 250 each time. There were times I salvaged 100 items and got ~150 ectos but the following 150 rares gave around 50 ectos.

My sense is unless those items had the exact same vendor value, salavaging huge lots like that muddied the data, not clarified it. We know that a rare is not a rare is not a rare to the Mystic Forge – rares of different levels/values act differently. If the input data wasn’t tracked flawlessly, 100 items heavy on unsloted rare 73s and a lot heavy on sloted 80s would give very much the type of data you’re describing in my estimation.

No big deal. I’ll be carrying out my test of sloting crafted gear with runes before cracking them and I’ll share my results. Its just a theory about observed behavior and to a degree it is a testable theory.

I just transmuted a handful of gems into orbs with dust that was laying around.

Whereas I see the loss of potential customer play time (get one character to 80 and you never need to run up another) and the mass confusion generated by being at potentially any point in the racial personal storyline and its a can of worms better left unopened.

John Smith.4610:

One is information on the game, one is telling you the mechanics of the game, they are two completely different things.

In my defense I’m ussually more interested in causal relationships rather than specific values. I like to know “are they connected at all” rather than “what is the coefficient in precise case A” .

We’ve been told that the Mystic Forge is sensitive to both the color and level of items being thrown into it when chasing the elusive precursors. It occurs to me that if they have code to quickly connect color and level (which in many ways is synonymous with vendor value) to reward tables there, they likely used the same code to connect savage targets with reward tables for ectos.

Whereas I did run a 100 item run with exactly the same item with BLSK and the averages were 1.5 ecto per item like it was nailed to it – so much so that 0, 1, 2, 3 all appeared to have a 25%. However it was a jewelry item, so it came “pre-slotted”.

While armor slot or 1-h vs 2-h have some impact on vendor value (just as level does) the biggie I am highly suspicious of is “does the item have a rune/sigil slotted?” The change in outcomes between unsloted crafted rares and sloted dropped rares is night and day for me. So much so that my next experiment is checking if slotting some left over major runes from previous dropped-item salvages into crafted armor before hitting them with a salvage kit noticable brings up my average ecto return.

Ah well. I’m certain it does, but it would have been nice to definitively seperate fact from superstition .

More information is always better.

Answering the crazies but not the real questions again .

Simple question mode: does the vendor coin value of a rare affect the ectoplasms-outcome of salvaging it?

Pleeeeeeeease?

John Smith.4610:

merkator.9206:

Hey John, can you tell me the current ecto rates when salvaging rares, depending on the salvage kit used?

I could, I won’t.

Again with the kits. The kits are the least dificult thing to look at. Its hard for us to seperate research from superstition on ecto salavaging but kits aren’t where my questions lie. None of the big data gathering attemps I have found included the data I want most tracked going into it – they focus on what kit was used to salavage. They don’t track the exact level/price of the items being salavaged (lumping together all attempts with items above 68). My superstitious feeling is that either the slot has an effect, or more likely the item’s value in coin has a effect. Without giving percentages, can you answer if any of the following factors influence ecto return rates when salvaging for ectos:

Item value in coin (the number a vendor will offer for it)?
Exact item level (is level 75 different from 76 on otherwise identical items)?
If the item is sloted with a rune or sigil (may just be changing the item’s value)?

The reason I ask is it is my casual observation/superstition that the rares I craft (which have lower value/no rune) have far lower ecto return rates than most “found” rares – which usually have sigils in them and/or much higher vendor values.

Vol.5241:

The ascended accessories alone would hardly make a dent in the ecto price. If it cost just ectos, sure, but the 40 laurels is a huge hinderance to buying it. I don’t think there is any reasonable player out there who would waste 40 laurels on an accessory that you could get cheaply by doing guild missions.

So in your universe we’re all part of big guilds?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

“A way to make pets dodge would be good” is what I took away from it. What if a button existed that could make your pet dodge roll, or gave it evasion for a few frames (no animation!) It could be called the “Dodge!” button, and every time I used it I could make a DBZ Abridged joke to my mates on TS.

I wonder if this could be automated…
…Pets could secretly have an endurance bar just like playars (and subject to the vigor buff too, giving them better synergy opportunities). Then if the pet has at least 1 bar of endurance, when it would be hit by an AoE it automatically avoids it without animation and spending 1 bar of endurance and gaining 1 second of evade results. The nice thing about automated but limited dodges is it works well for Necros who cannot manually control a whole swarm of pets.

Another idea if you want constant player management of ranger pets is to use the aggressive/passive toggle. While agressive they act like they do now. While passive they get MASSIVE AoE resistance (like 70%-80%). That way if you see or know an AoE is comming you can stand them down to avoid it, and click the same button to put them back into action.

I think all of these “it should be about X” statements are wishful thinking. Their cost is govererned by the actions of hundreds of thousands, not the opinions of any individual. Presure on the the price responds to basically every endgame gold-tap in the game. Changes to dungeons will be reflected in ecto price. People taking an evening off to watch a big game on tv will be reflected in the ecto price. It also floats on the aftereffects of the gold sinks. …A gem store sale pulling kilotons of gold coins out of the economy will be refleced in a sudden, temporary scarcity of buyers…

They are used in lodestone promotion too. That’s the main way I end up using mine.

I just got a black lion key upon completing one of the WvW borderlands maps about 3 days ago.

Through the miracle of science (and photoshop) – the armor I wish I had :p

Its a shame that with the Mad King’s Medium armor, I have to use photoshop to get this effect, when the armor clearly has 2 different main regions and room to have a fourth color selection. Please split up the large color block into two selections!

The hairdo itself has some shaders, so the difference is in the ’do, not the dye. That hairstyle on the human is very, very shiney even amongst human choices.

You can test it out – the kit isn’t used ’til you accept the changes. My old kits had the new colors available just fine.

I wonder if forging greens would still be considered worth while now that rares drop from event chests in significant numbers…