Guild Wars 2

Robert Hrouda.1327:

This is indeed considered a terrain exploit and will be fixed in the next patch.

At some point you might consider giving bosses in areas of elaborate geometry powerful ranged attacks they only use when they can’t find something to melee…

If the Queen there had a ranged pull (spider? get it?), she’d be more interesting and less vulnerable to abuse.

Vol.5241:

You’re losing out on efficiency and gold per hour if you’re farming sparks themselves.

Farm shelt/pen, make a lot of money and buy cores to forge up to lodestones.

Because the supply of cores is infinite…

I always enjoy plans to shift the burden of actually getting kitten done on to other people.

Improving your gold per hour without bringing value into the system just devalues the gold.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I’m more curious how we get “Ascended Amulet (Infused)” than “Ascended Amulet”. Will it cost like 500 of these silly Laurels? Will we be able to get them via Fractals? I really don’t want to have to farm a daily achievement thing every day for 2 months to get an amulet.

But if you want full ascended stats, you WILL.

Look, Legendaries were supposed to showcase playing the whole game.

They failed. Grotesquely in some cases.

Now we have an actual tool to showcase playing the whole game. If you want Ascended rings and back piece you play the fractals. If you want an Ascended Amulet, you play dailies. Lets speculate a bit and expand on this. If you want Ascended Boots, you do jump puzzles. If you want Ascened Pants, you do WvWvW. If you want an Asceneded Helmet, you do Dungeons. And so on, until “You want full ascended gear? Play the whole game!”

And finally we have a Legendary accomplishment that works.

Nothing has been said… possibly for fear of unsettling the precious Trading Post.

You’ll know when we know, if it happens at all.

I find a lot of my tanking relies on precise timing of blinds (Virtue of justice, sword button 2), aegis (Virtue of Courage, “Retreat!”), some dodging, immortality via renewed focus, and… running the hell away when its time for someone else to pick up the slack.

Obtena.7952:

I was unaware of the diminishing returns on armor stat. Is that well documented somewhere so we can review it? I would like to see where those percentages are derived.

My understanding is that incoming damage is divided by armor rating (which uses 2600 as a baseline for showing what kind of damage you’re likely to do at level 80).

So the diminising returns of ouch/armor is that if you have only 100, adding 100 cuts your damage taken in half. but then adding 100 to 200 only cuts the damage taken by 1/3. Adding that 100 to 300 only reduces damge taken by 1/4.

By the time you are at 2600 (baseline) armor, adding 100 armor is less than a 4% difference and it just gets worse from there.

Try Blue Ice, Silt, and Butter.

Also the preview screen uses a very dull lightbox, – most gloss effects don’t show up at all until you see it “in the world”

Their price is determined by what people are willing to pay, and as more (worthless) gold piles up in the system (too many faucets, not enough drains) those larger prices become more tenable.

Shaftronics.8651:

So I got interested and gave this build a shot with a set of rares and I’m happy to report that it’s working better than I expected it to, although with quite a few personal tweaks, with a full set of Knights on all my armor pieces and accessories and using a hammer as my off-hand. In PvE situations, as well as being a Charr, using Battle Roar, a blast finisher though Purging Flames and VoJ from the get go means an easy 8 to 10 stacks of might to start a fight with. With a Staff, it was just absurd how easy it was to maintain a great stack of might without losing too much combat effectiveness’ though getting tripped is an issue.

I’m thinking of branching away from your one-handed approach in favor of using a Hammer/Staff just for Empower and to use blast finishers through Purging Flames, and possibly try a tweaked 0/15/10/25/20 instead, using Purging Flames, WoR and Judges Intervention for WvW and maybe PF, Battle Roar and JI for PvE.

Can’t wait to try it out later.

Glad it inspired some experimentation .

I’m on a Norn with my main Guardian, so about the wackiest thing our racial skills allow is sliding past a certian humungous Karka in cat-stealth .

I’ve been tinkering too, and think I’m getting a bit better personal damage output with 10 Valor/10 Virtues. It loses half a second of might, but gains crit magnitude and toughness (70% crit, 22% damage).

It seems the Sigil of Generosity has changed since Wintersday – it now lists a 10 second cooldown on condition transfers. Probably a good change for balance, since when they came out I don’t think it had an internal cooldown. I’m still liking it, but its less central to the crit-engine.

Make potions. You can get probably 40% of all the crafting XP you need from carrots, jugs of water, and the dust/leather of each tier (Centaur slaying). And most of the rest from water, dust, and raw ore (Dredge slaying)

Some of the potion recipies are absolutely trivial to mass produce. I don think I used a single stick of wood from 158 to 400.

Oh, wait, I did use a few bits of wood… making focus cores to use in Inquest killing potions .

You mistake apathy for jealousy.

“Some of”? When we’re talking about a 3rd legendary? * snort *

Pirate outfit from the gem store.

Those bots are 80th level – map completion being an easy way to level a character and prep a bot for service. Plus it builds an appearant history as a legitimate player. Getting map completion towing a lower level charater (with a permanent 25% speed boost Signet…)behind 3-4 80th level Rangers is literally nothing more than the time it takes to reach the vistas and climb them. They anhilate any map critter without breaking stride.

Don’t forget bot-farming generates skill points – they need to find some way of burning those off for gold/cash.

Not saying they do it often, but how many do you need to be ready to sell them at a moment’s notice? Not many…

You buy the exotic version with 1350 fractal tokens.

That’s the only way that I know of.

There’s no reason to take finished legendaries out of the Trading Posts when crafting them is almost entirely based on stuff you can buy.

They failed to make Legendary weapons a task-based accomplisment at almost every step. At this point if Legendary purple-name gear is ever going to be a prestige item, it’ll be when they introduce Legendary armor and the process isn’t 90% “how much gold do you have to throw at them?”

Dreamer.9072:

Just an update, yesterday I started trying to make Colossus in the mystic forge, 100 rares = 0, today i tried again, after my 4th try i got Colossus!
I now own Juggernaut^^

Grats!

SkinnyT.5382:

I say we raid Anet’s headquarters and demand a location for the staff drop!

Interestingly, there was some mention that the new class specific box-rewards for laurels would be used to get some rare skins into our hands that are currently gated behind RNG.

Man, I hope this skin is in Necromancer boxes! (even at 100:1)

You find it on NPCs.

We’re not that cool

kiba.2768:

those are indeed banded pauldrons.

Which actually fit right on a human. On a Norn they are absurd. Similar problem with the banded boots .

I wanted to double check which helmet that is? Has a fantastic Robocop vibe .

They have their own type of icon rather than the red upward pointing arrow.

They are not boons themselves, thought the Aegis granted by Virtue of Courage is.

I’ll belive they audit when they clean out the orders below vendor price.

This. This over and over.

It means someone wants to be congratulated on their mastery of the Trading Post. Because no one could possibly have gotten enough Mystic Coins of their own to have three Legendaries, and farming 750 of each of the T6 mats is a chore no human being should be asked to do.

Congratulations on making and spending a lot of gold. We are all deeply impressed.

Deeply.

Honest.

Xalugami.2096:

I can vouch for him because he’s the one that found it in my previous example; He tossed it up on the TP for like 8 gold or something a few weeks after FotM went live. I don’t know why you’d think we’d be lying, the Staff isn’t even that great looking.

K… you know that if he had, there would be a permanent entry in the TP for Final Rest forever after… Which there isn’t. So, I don’t know what staff you saw, but that ain’t it.

I just figured since the amount of people who are convinced that “this random (non-boss) weapon skin is somehow the only singular item in the whole entire game to have one pre-set drop location” has been increasing, I’d help you guys out by deciphering the dev posts and providing previous knowledge. I know the idea of it being a special drop is nice & all, but it’s incorrect.

You mean other than the Devs point blank saying so and you having clearly no idea which item the rest of us are talking about based on your “Oh, I’ve seen it and it’s been auctioned” comments.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

So.. your friends stopped playing an MMO because they had to party with other players?

So.. your friends stopped playing an MMO because they had to party with other players?Seriously?

So.. your friends stopped playing an MMO because they had to party with other players?Seriously?That’s no fault of the game, that’s a fault of your friends.

Does being an MMO mean you can’t play it solo at all? Because 90% of my play time is non-grouped, and it seems the Devs are specifically going back and strengthening open world content – possibly in the service of people like me who don’t really care to hang out with strangers.

Did anything up to the last quest require you to group?

Does a lack of uniform expectations in an activity not sink in as being a bad thing?

Really, I wish I could be a fly on the wall when some of these decision are made and signed off on, because they are manifestly bad.

Maybe the last mission should have been a jump puzzle instead of a Dungeon – it’d be the same sort of completely nonsensical transition.

Glad you guys are all happy with it then. I don’t think you actually have to look that hard to find out that people are NOT pleased with the implementation.

Because its the same kitten in other games with raiding – you play the game through and at the very end the Devs just can’t figure out how to finish up with the same group size as they started.

And as others have meantioned, the elder dragon CAN be solo’d once you reach that point in the dungeon. The gating is nonsensical.

I hope the Devs have noticed we can’t even have a discussion about a build until that build has AH…

No direct trades. Its what spares us from unending WTS chat.

Since the speculation is the the 6th dragon inadvertently created the Pale Tree, yes the Dream has always had Nightmare, and in fact the Nightmare came FIRST, with a rogue champion (the Pale Tree) intruducing the Dream into the Nightmare landscape as an alternative to mandatory programming fitting in with the Dragon’s goals.

Farming coin is just proving coin is worthless. It does not add value to the economy.

Don’t expect to buy your precursor. Ever.

It’s really as simple as that.

You either take the risk of using the MF yourself, or you pay somone else absolutely top dollar to take the risk for you. But the simple fact that you can grind out hundreds of gold without putting valuable goods into the system is why your coin is worthless for achieving your goals and why inflation will run ahead of you every hour of every day.

The end of the “personal” story was largely fatal to my pleasnat gaming experience.

The shift to group based-dungeoning to see the last page of the story literally ran my roommate and regular teammate right out of the game.

I still haven’t finished it because I want to do it in the company of my friends, and it kitten my friends off so bad they don’t play anymore.

I would imagine there is a “suspended” state everything on the account is put into. The items are neither visible for purchase nor destroyed, just set aside against possible reinstatement.

Or it could be that people have discovered oricalcum isn’t the choke point for the things they want (lodestones…) and just aren’t buying the stuff when its utterly trivial to get the all oricalcum you need with casual harvesting in a fiftieth the time it takes to get the other ingredients.

Glacial cores lack demand and therefore volume of trade. The Sigil they make is a critter type damage sigil (basically the most worthless category of sigil). The runes aren’t particularly used in major builds since most folks scoff at heal power. They aren’t associated with the more highly sought after weapon skins (Frostfang, the two Ice bows). They drop off of ice elementals and ice imps, so people encounter a small trickle of them in the course of normal play.

Or it could just be anyone who really wants them can do the math to see they are cheaper to craft than buy and just laughs at the Lodestone price and makes their own .

If people are buying them it doesn’t matter if its an ebil cartel or someone who just got one by chance putting it up for what appears to be the going rate – its only the going rate if someone buys it.

When the price gets up high enough that people won’t pay it, the sellers are penalized for their listing fees and the true value of the item is finally known.

So far it seems people are still buying them. So maybe these daring speculators aren’t actually charging enough yet…

I see the value of buying them up, even en mass, but I think that the ussual player base of market sharks will do the work for them of charging the absolute limit of what the market will bear without tying up the goldseller’s stock or exposing it to scrutiny.

I would expect that gold sellers don’t list their legendaries. They don’t give a rat’s right buttock about getting gold that way – they have bots for that. They care about being able to SELL YOU a Legendary for real cashey money. Having their stock exposed to being bought in-game for worthless gold or just losing the listing fee when a real money order comes in and they need to take it down to fill it is just stupid for them.

SteepledHat.1345:

I really do find it very unlikely that this is happening. I don’t see Anet allowing it to go on if it were. Wouldn’t that violate their free market philosophy?

This happening IS a Free Market behavior.

If people will pay that much, people will have to pay that much.

I think it likely its not about your bid.

Unless your bid is no longer the highest buy offer, just leave it in place. You know how rare they are… give it a bit to see if someone looking for an entirely different precursor scored your top choice at random and just wants their 400g to get on with chasing after their goal. The “150g difference” means NOTHING to a person who can complete their project with a shot of 400g now, rather than 550 g who-the-heck-knows-when.

Check in on it every other day or so to confirm its still the top offer, but otherwise get back to playing.

StinVec.3621:

What if…
…the demand and desire for dyes of all colors is also increased at the same time as increasing the easier acquisition capabilities of dyes by also adding the ability to dye areas of your weaponry? This could also increase demand for more common and cheap weaponry over the more expensive and more rare weapon models.

I’m gonna say probably not since by and large weapon dying would be used to match them to your existing prefered armor hues – which the potential buyer already has.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I posted this elsewhere, but just quickly wanted to update where we stand on this issue:

We’re continuing to look into this and have a team of folks sifting through insane amounts of data based on all of your reports. This is an incredibly time intensive and unfortunately mostly manual process while we work on building tools to streamline this in more automated ways so it’s going to take a while.

We’ll update once we have more tangible information to share.

I’m sorry, but from that statement I can’t tell if your side acknowledges a problem even exists, much less that you are pursuing a fix/correction.

I know that people saying they used to get 5 rares a day sounds like a foriegn universe to what I’ve experienced – I’m late to the party so the new rates are really all I know for higher level gameplay, and they are soul crushing.

It almost doesn’t matter if they have changed – what the game is granting as rewards out on the landscape RIGHT NOW are demoralizing. More so when I hear that people who were playing just weeks to a month ahead of me wear raking in literally an order of magnitude more desirable drops. I don’t mean a color shift, I mean 10 times as many desirable results.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Have you used both of the lower level manuals? You can’t skip straight to the L80 manual if you haven’t used the L60 one.

Recognizing you meant L60 and L40, respectively, I have to mention I’m not the only one who tried to save a gold by toughing it out with 10 points in each path until reaching 60 and discovering that the L40 is a prerequisite for the L60’s use. I hear the question regularly in chat.

Surely there is room in the description of these items to make that tiered dependency relationship appearant way back when we look at them for the first time around L10?

Either as a bright red “Prerequisite: Maunal X” or a blue bit of flavore text say “You must have read the Master volume before you can comprehend this knowlege” or something similar that spells it out in no uncertain terms.

Mind typing out you traits?

I’m puttering with 0.20.30.20.0 for survivability and healing via mantra-charging, but would be curious to see other survivability builds.

Mystic Starfish.2586:

I think the ones who use spear underwater is a good generalization. Or at least half the ones who use spears. And sorry, but scythes are not used in the same way as polearms. The motions would be very different

Despite their powerful iconography and association with death via the Grim Reaper, scythes aren’t weapons at all – they are designed for killing grass .

The person you are talking at (not ‘to’, because communication broke down a long way back) is doggedly, nay, pedantically pointing out that since there are recipies that have definite inputs with certain outputs executed through the Magic Fountain you cannot say that as a whole the Magic Fountain is pure gambling. This is a factual statement that completely missed the context.

Don’t sweat it. People who read for comprehension and information transfer (i.e. communication) understood the “the Magic Fountain is pure gambling” was a statement about the large subset of Magic fountain recipies that take 4 loosely associated imputs and deliever a random output.

Aelyn.9574:

Plus, I am assuming that these new lodestones will not be account bound (so that they can stack with the old ones).

Oh… I wouldn’t asume ANYTHING bought with crowns will be tradeable. Crowns and Mystic Coins are identical save for 1 thing – crowns can’t be traded. If the rewards for crowns can be traded, there was no reason to introduce them in the first place: this new vendor would have worked just as well taking mystic coins rather than introducing yet another currency.

As a regular Charged Lodestone farmer, I’m sad to say they are AT resonable amounts now – they are just that hard to acquire. Swapping crowns for Charged Lodestones at any ratio will make them easier to acquire, and the reasonable price will adjust accordingly.

What will be interesting is the leveling effect between the lodestones- if it suddenly takes the same effort to gain any of them via crowns, the differences in their prices will shrink very rapidly. Think that leveling effect will be one of the outcomes the Devs are most interest in achieving IF we can buy lodestones with crowns.

somsom.5201:

Finalized look

Action shot + beauty shot

Human coat/Whispers legs… I like it.