Guild Wars 2

Yeah, usually (maybe even always? I dunno, I’m sure there are some weird cases with weird attacks out there somewhere) as long as they’re in melee range, they’ll reflect the target’s projectiles.

marquez.7182:

Crion.8465:

Here’s Joculari, my confusion mesmer.

What armor is this?

Looks like it’s at least the same chest and gloves (and I’m pretty sure the boots are the same set as the gloves) as these:

Torrok Blizzard, Norn Mesmer

So Crion or cerulean (or anyone else), what are those chest and gloves? :P

(Crion’s legs are ascended, shoulders are human t2, and mask is of course one of the three starter masks.)

BIRDPUNCHER.8263:

Reminiscent Valkyrie.3109:

LAST EDIT! SUCCESS! WE LOVE YOU ANET! Newest blog post here regarding account bound legendaries instead. https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/account-bound-wxp-legendaries-and-ascended-gear/

Unless I really misread this article, it doesn’t say anything about removing legendaries from the wardrobe — just that they’ll be account bound rather than soul bound.

Yeah, I don’t think it says that legendaries (and ascended weapons) will be exempt from the wardrobe. They could be exempt, of course. But I don’t think the latest blog post says they will be.

(Also, even if they are, that leaves duplicate Whisperblades, Infinite Lights, Volcanuses, etc. to be dealt with, although I know that’s not the topic of this thread.)

Nike.2631:

Even in the absence of Official Policy to that effect, if you’re a duplicate Legendary owner, I’d still put in a ticket to support and plead the case in that form.

Yeah, I think this is the right approach to take if they don’t do anything official. And, just to be clear, even as a duplicate legendary owner who’d like a refund of mats for one of them (if it turns out the only benefit from having two is being able to swap stats on both), I like the wardrobes overall. It’s a great change for the game.

I think the best option for Anet is to grant refunds for extra weapons that people don’t want. If someone has two Sunrises, Mjolnirs, Volcanuses, etc., they should be able to get the mats back for one of them. If someone has two Bolts, Incinerators, Infinite Lights, Whisperblades, etc., and if it’s possible to unlock a skin once and use it in both hands (if not then of course this should only apply to people with three or more of these), they should also be able to get the mats back for the extras.

If someone wants to keep their duplicate legendaries for the stat swapping, fantastic, more power to them. I know I’d rather make a bunch of ascended weapons and give them all the legendary skin, though, if I have the option—it’d save a lot of gold.

hazenvirus.8154:

There are a couple ways for anet to make this fair:
1) Seperate Legendaries from the wardrobe system
2) Make dual wielding the same skin available only after unlocking that same skin twice.
3) Refund Players for their Legendaries (swap to a legendary of equal of lesser value based on the average of each a month before the switch) or return the equivalent gold value.

I agree, but even things like 1 won’t help with other skins like Infinite Light or Whisperblade. And 2 won’t help with people who made Sunrises for multiple characters or whatever. I think refunds are the best bet, but gold equivalent is difficult to calculate. I think refunding the required mats is the fairest for those people, and also for duplicate one-handed weapons if they don’t go with your option 2. Nothing will be ideal—mat prices could be different now than they were when people made their weapons, etc.—but still, I think it’d be the best option.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the update overall. It’s good for the game, and I’m happy about it. But I’m annoyed that I just got a second Bolt, and I’m sure lots of people would like to get something for their second Whisperblade or whatever. I really think the best option would be being able to submit a ticket and get all the mats back from a Bolt, so I could make a different legendary/sell the lodestones/etc. Maybe a lot of work for customer service, but it’d be real nice.

For people who keep thinking that changing stats is great: I would rather use the gold I spent on a legendary on lots of ascended weapons and, if need be, an extra bag slot. I’d still have lots of gold left over. And, again, that doesn’t help people with duplicate Infinite Lights, Whisperblades, etc.

Reiko.8249:

TL;DR – if you have 2 legendaries/skins right now, you can use 2. If you only have 1, your characters can only display one at a time. One Quip? Pick the hand that can display quip. 2 Quips? Thief and Engi can both show 2.

Agree that this is the best option for one-handed weapons. Even if stat swapping is worth the cost of a legendary (and of course it isn’t—you can make more than enough ascended weapons to switch between for the cost of a legendary), people with two infinite lights, two whisperblades, etc. will be screwed if they now only need one to get the skin twice.

But this still doesn’t help people who’ve made two sunrises, mjolnirs, volcanuses, etc. for different characters, or even just to have different stats if they wanted them (for the expensive, non-legendary, two-handed skins), and they need compensation, too.

Thanks!

15char

Rewards are actually 31-40 and 41-50 now, but that doesn’t make a difference here. But yes, it might be that your personal reward level is still in the 31-40 range (or lower)—when the game treats runs at levels higher than your personal reward level as runs at that level for reward purposes, it includes the bonus chest.

Edit: Whoops, missed your reply while I was typing. For the rest: since you’re 40 now, if you do a 49, you’ll receive a 31-40 chest (if you haven’t already for the day). But then you’ll be 41, and if you do another 49, you’ll get your first 41-50 chest, even if you do it in the same day.

Crion.8465:

Here’s Joculari, my confusion mesmer.

Ha, I love this. I recognize the other three, but what are the chest, hands, and feet?

Craft if you enjoy it, but you can always get gear that’s at least as good for less money through the trading post. The only exception is very expensive end-game stuff that’s intended as a long-term goal (and doesn’t give much benefit), which you have to craft for yourself. You don’t need to worry about it right now.

Crafting is not in general a good way to make money.

shirabeastly.3156:

Dance of the Kites

Love these colors!

Askeptykal.4138:

Selfie time! My sylvari, Jaea, with Rox Whetstone at The Dead End. This actually took like 40 minutes to get right.

And this is impressive to get right. Nice!

I was going through old screenshots and came across these. I posted a cropped version of one of them before, but I guess I’ll put them all up for posterity, since as far as I know it’s not possible to get here any more. (This is on top of coe. The dome-ish thing is the top of the room with the teleporter in it, where path 2 ends, I’m pretty sure.)

Embrace The Bold.7619:

I think Anet has made some touches up looks better than the last time I went there.

Looks the same to me (compared to a screenshot from July).

Well, in my case, it’s just because I like running through sab and I want world 3. Or even just worlds 1 and 2 again. It’s fun! The skins are nice too (and I’m looking forward to the purple world 4 tribulation skins whenever they roll around), but I’d do at least a handful of runs even if they didn’t exist.

Also, Anet has done an April Fools’ thing since 2007, so they have some history of it, too. (And I’d be thrilled if they brought back the fake patch notes alongside sab! But that I won’t even hold out hope for.)

Ranged attacks are exploiting! You’re avoiding all the melee attacks you’re supposed to have to deal with. I mean, why did they put dodge into the game if they wanted you to be able to complete everything without using it?

And if you’d all start skipping things, thieves would be more useful, too. Right now all that group stealth is useless in pve!

Axelwarrior.9084:

Lindbur.2537:

People keep trying to impose their definition of fun on others.

sigh

Your definition of fun is minimizing gaming time, intentionally skipping most of the game’s content, avoiding combat (a core mechanic of the game) and rushing to get rewards for the work you didn’t do?

Sorry, then.

I of course can’t speak for Lindbur, but one thing (not the only thing! but one thing) I like in games is trying to trivialize them. Good games for me are ones that aren’t easy to trivialize, because then I still have to practice, play better, pay attention, think, etc. Does that mean every moment in every game I’m playing I’m min-maxing every little bit I can? Nope! But it’s one major source of fun for me. I actively enjoy looking for things I can skip (and then skipping them).

Maybe it’s not possible to design dungeons and combat and skills and stuff in an MMO in a way that caters to both people like you and people like me. I like to think it is, but maybe not. But it’s not as though the game would be more fun for everyone if it catered to your preferences.

Yeah, gs makes more sense in big groups if you’re trying to tag things. It’s awful in dungeons/fractals, though. Necessary in those cases where you really want to range a boss, but still not good.

selan.8354:

i mean just look at gw1 mesmers…we need something back from that.

Mesmers will never be what they used to be. They can’t be. Mesmers in gw1 interacted primarily with their target’s energy bar and skill bar, rather than their hp bar. They don’t want to allow that kind of pure shutdown in gw2. (Maybe reasonable, given how much people hate playing against it, but still.)

Also, I’m late on this and clearly should check the forums more regularly, but on the off chance he’s still lurking: Thanks, Powerr, for all you did!

We don’t know for sure. The way it’s written, it sounds like even level 1 characters will have all existing major traits unlocked, but it’s also possible that Anet just wrote that badly. They’ve done it before.

Yeah, I’m holding out hope that we’ll still get SAB because they never announce April Fools stuff in advance.

What runeblade is saying is that they were always elite—only the name has changed. Until recently, elite mobs were distinguishable only by the silver circle on their portrait. Now they have the silver circle and a different name.

Thanks for the doing all the work to test this stuff! Do you (or anyone else) know if scarlet potions work everywhere nightmare and dredge potions work? My guess is yes, which would mean they could also be used in TA and (most) SE, but I haven’t tested it. (I know TA enemies counted for toxic alliance slaying achievements, but haven’t tested the potions themselves.)

Yeah, I agree that it’s a tradeoff between hassle and minimal gain. I think that’s all sigils ever are, really—trying to get an extra 5% here or there. I just think that while this change will make stacking sigils less common, we might still see some people using something like stacking + night/force/accuracy on one set and two of those three on the other.

I’m not even saying I’ll definitely do that. I’m not sure what I’ll do. But I don’t think it’d be crazy, or even a great hassle.

Hmm, air’s that good? I didn’t realize. But yeah, I think it takes close to full stacks to outstrip the 10% damage ones, although I haven’t done the math; I imagine in most cases night+slaying will be better where you can do it.

Eh, I think if you can plan on not going down a lot, one stacking sigil will still be good in places where you can get the stacks, since you don’t need to even get near full stacks to outstrip force/accuracy.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

I can bet this has been touched upon 100 times but just in case:

Make fractal achievements (like 100 fractals done) etc reward fractal skin boxes where you pick your skin. RNG is bad, especially with fractals. There should be sure rewards for those who aren’t blessed by RNG star.

Since we’re reiterating things a bit here, I want to repeat one worry that a few of us raised about this particular kind of implementation: this would allow people to run level 1 fractals over and over and get skins, which devalues them.

One way to get around this, riffing on some suggestions earlier, would be to have the achievement give you a token you can trade into a merchant for rewards, with different rewards requiring different personal reward levels. Then maybe weapon skins could require a few tokens (if we get them every 100 fractals) and level 50, for instance.

(This still doesn’t address the other problem of letting us do something with skins we don’t want. Maybe we could turn unwanted skins into a tokens as well, at some exchange rate or other. It has the other problem of adding yet more currencies to the game, though, which may be unwelcome.)

This would still let you run level 1 fractals to get skins, but at least you’d have to make it to 50 first.

Just wanted to add my voice to the thanks: It’s great to have some feedback, and I’m really happy to hear about some of these fixes (wardens will reliably reflect again!). Thanks!

Vissarion.6509:

2. Remove dredge fractals (or rework).
-A small amount of ppl (those who do it with organised group) don’t have a problem (or do they?), but all those ppl at high tiers that pug fractals its a pain and a waste of 1hour and more for 1 fractal alone.

I still disagree with the bold claim. I don’t pug every day, but when I do it’s a 49 or 50, and when we get dredge it usually goes fine. People are still learning how to do it without stealth, but it’s not too hard to talk a little and get everyone on the same page.

It’s too long, I agree with that. The clown car is stupid. But everything else is honestly okay imo. Aryilana made a nice comparison over here about the pressure plate room in particular: It’s like getting people to leave a cultist alive in cliffside for the arm seals.

(The next post in that thread also contains some reasonable suggestions for making dredge easier without nerfing it into oblivion. But the most important thing is for people to stop thinking that it’s impossible without stealth, because with that attitude, of course it seems like it should be removed.)

Yeah, I agree with Nage, I think nostalgia is tinting the view for some people of these titles in GW. Even vanq was just a grind, really, especially after they added 7 hero parties.

The only ones that really remained impressive were the ones that took years and years to complete. I don’t know how many people got r15, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t more than a handful. Title tracks like that, pvp or pve, where you unlock different titles the farther you go, might be interesting to bring back.

But everything else will, over time, become more and more common. Even without selling paths, dungeon master would be more common now just because people have had a year and a half to get it. And, to repeat what Nage said, it’s not like these things weren’t being sold in gw. You could buy missions, elite missions, hero-based gate of madness survivor titles, complete books, vanqs, you name it. You could be run past content in prophecies practically from day 1. The only things you couldn’t buy were the things you had to do yourself—cartographer, commander, etc.

Shinki.8045:

One topic I’m not sure if someone has brought up or not, but would solve some of the rewards/currency issues players are having:

A vendor that gets unlocked after completion of the final Fractal. This vendor has things that can be bought based on the difficulty that has been completed, and bought using fractals currency primarily (depending on the value of the item.) As an added way to make it interesting, have the available wares vary depending on what fractals people ran through especially the first one.

Pie in the sky idea: Sell stat infusions from these vendors, or dye kits to color existing fractal weapons, or some other way to show prestige from completing difficult content.

I like this idea, or something like it. An alternative would be to have vendors that sell items to you only if you’re already at a certain personal reward level (like they did briefly with gifts of battle at the wvw vendor).

Conski Deshan.2057:

One Note Chord.5031:

Conski Deshan.2057:

3. The levels and AR are there to allow a tiered system, allowing you to easily gate the rewards which is helpful.

It’s already gated by difficulty. AR is gating it behind money.

It is a form of money gate I guess but it also means that a player must have ascended quality armor which does stop under-geared players, I’m not sure if that’s an acceptable return for people or not.

Yeah, I think this is really what it comes down to. I still wish Anet had stuck with their original vision, only making cosmetic things take huge amounts of time and money. But that ship has sailed, and I think that making AR less important is basically a pipe dream. There are probably more realistic things to focus on in this thread, sadly.

(I do think that account-wide AR is important, though, given the cost of ascended armor and high-value agony infusions.)

Conski Deshan.2057:

3. The levels and AR are there to allow a tiered system, allowing you to easily gate the rewards which is helpful.

It’s already gated by difficulty. AR is gating it behind money.

Agree with the rest, though. In particular, it’s important to make sure that skins still require completing high level fractals. This is one reason I’d prefer being able to trade in 3 or 4 skins for any one skin over being able to buy them with relics.

Top 3:

1. Rewards.

• More gold (I think that even 10s per reward level would be fair, given how long arah p1 and p2 take for 3g).
• Something to do with the rings, skins, and ascended gear we don’t want.
• A way to get drops unique to fotm (weapon skins, tonic) that doesn’t depend completely on rng. It’s fine if it’s expensive—100 pristine relics or 3k normal relics per skin, maybe—or if we have to trade in multiples we don’t want for ones we do—4 skins for a skin of our choice, maybe.

(But if you do the first option then you really have to let us do something with the drops we don’t want, so we don’t feel cheated when we spend all our relics on a skin only to get a duplicate in our next run. Getting ascended chests with stats that we’ll never use or stats we’ve already crafted is bad enough.)

• And stop giving us uninfused rings at high levels.

2. AR. Get rid of gear checks. Let us avoid agony by playing well. But AR is still helpful, so also let us get the gear by playing fractals. I made ascended armor solely for the AR, and I felt very stupid doing it. I would have much rather spent that big chunk of money (36 damask!) on horizontal progression, which is what you promised for the game originally. And I’m not making a set for an alt any time soon.

Or, even better, get rid of AR all together. It’s vertical progression in its purest form—spend hundreds of gold so you can play certain content!—and it’s awful. But this would be pretty hard to do without screwing up all your other additions, like special agony infusions that take even more hundreds of gold to make.

3. New fractals and higher levels. Especially higher levels. Give us more to do! But also, don’t remove any existing fractals to add new ones, like you did with TA. We want new content because we want more content, not because we want different content.

Riko.1309:

• Bombs
  Not a bad idea for a room however the sea of dredge calls for stealth either from an engi or a thief (most groups use a thief) and this is simply bad design. Again, lowering the amount of dredge or simply allowing groups to clean/cull the room beforehand would solve everything. As it is right now, without stealth this room is simply impossible to do on a 49.

I don’t mean to single you out, but you’re the last one who said this, and I want to say: This is not true. You can do bombs without stealth. There are actually a couple ways that I know of. The slightly safer way is to clear your way to the back, drop 2 or 3 bombs, run back to the front, clear to the back again, and drop 4 or 5 more bombs (you need 7 total). The faster but slightly riskier way is to clear to the back, drop 2 or 3 bombs, stay there and fight the handful of adds that keep spawning, and then drop 4 or 5 bombs once the ones you used before have respawned.

This doesn’t require a ton of coordination—I’ve done it in pugs. It does get a lot easier with reflects, but that’s a general problem with high-end content in this game.

The clown car is still stupid because it’s so tedious, and they could make all the infinite spawns a little smaller if they wanted to make the fractal easier as a whole (and maybe they should! that would at least bring the difficulty in line with other fractals), but I don’t think things are quite as bad as people have been saying.

Just want to echo everyone else: liked the idea, liked the execution, liked the shout-out to CoX whether it was intentional or not. Not gonna make one, though, because it’s not worth the massive cost in damask and I don’t feel like leveling leatherworking just for this.

RakaNishoo.6071:

3) If ArenaNet is still looking for a ways to provide difficult end-game content, what is the progress after over 1 year?

Colin Johanson lays out their plan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU#t=16m19s

Two reasons to be disappointed. First, they thought they were at least partly rolling out this plan with Fractured, and we all know how miserably they failed there.

Second, Colin’s reasoning is at best difficult to follow. As far as I can tell, it’s this: Hard mode dungeons would fracture the playerbase into the people who play hard mode and the people who don’t, which would be very bad for the game. Instead, we want to make high level fractals and/or some dungeons harder than others, which somehow won’t equally fracture the playerbase into the people who do high level fractals/hard dungeons and the people who stick to the easy ones. (Or maybe it will equally fracture the playerbase, but that fracturing won’t be as bad for some reason.)

Edit: Two other things to keep in mind about old blog posts by Anet. First, as people have said, two weeks after release, dungeons really did take effort to complete! So the post wasn’t quite as laughable when it first went up. But second and more important, they’ve done a complete 180 on plenty of things they said around release. There’s really no reason to think anything they said in 2012 has any bearing on the direction the game’s taking now.

Yeah, this has been in the game for ages. It’s not a holdover from the gw1 notification of how long you’ve been playing—it’s not regular enough for that. But surely it’s not a surprise to Anet that this exists, is it? Well, it could be, but wow, the things they don’t know about their own game…

Same thing on Yak’s Bend.

I think they intended the dungeon armors to be the replacement for this, because they said they didn’t want to make you endlessly run things just for the chance of getting the skin you want.

Then they almost immediately added fractal skins. Whoops. But you can’t sell those, so they’re not quite what you want. But then they also added aetherpath, and those skins are exactly what you’re asking for. I suspect aetherpath is almost never run, though, and that probably makes them think that this sort of reward isn’t worth spending time on (even if the main problem is just that people don’t like aetherpath much, although tbh I do like it and wish I could get people to run it more often).

I didn’t get in on it this time around, but for the heck of it, since it doesn’t sound like we got the same kind of opportunity for screenshots, here’s the aftermath of the last time it blew up:

Some skins were always supposed to be grindy. It was just stats that they promised would never require a grind.

(And then they added ascended stuff, so everything can be grindy now! In fact, a few months before release they listed a lot of things they thought were bad in other MMOs and all those things got added to the game within a year. Oops.)

Only if they make it repeatable for good rewards (unlike other story paths). Otherwise their time could be better spent on content we’ll play multiple times.

Haha, 3 would’ve been better on this run, too, because only 4 got planted the second time around and one person had to go run and get the last one. So yeah, 3 is probably better advice!

For bombs without a thief, just kill your way to the door, drop two bombs only and stay next to the door, kill adds as they spawn, and when all the bombs are up drop five at once. It takes seven bombs to break the door. It’s no problem if you wipe after the door’s down, just kill everything and then do the clown car normally.

Just pugged a 49 a couple hours ago and this worked fine. (We did have a mes and two guards though, and that certainly helped.)

I’m also pessimistic, but we might as well give it a shot and try to get rewards, bugs, dredge, etc. fixed. There’s nothing to be gained being combative or dismissive here.

I do like this part, though. “If there is still concern surrounding how seriously we take community collaboration then please do take the time to think about how much impact the community has had on the working of this game over the year.” It’s like they want to remind us that the community has had zero impact on the way dungeons and fractals have changed over the year.

This would be one nice way to freshen up dungeons a bit. But I think Colin would be worried about it fracturing the playerbase. Here I’m just quoting myself from four months ago:

Colin has this great plan: Instead of making hard mode dungeons, which fractures the community into the people who do hard mode and the people who don’t, you make some dungeons harder than others, with the hard dungeons being intended for a small portion of the community, which definitely won’t fracture the community into the people who do the hard dungeons and the people who don’t.

This really is what the lead designer of Guild Wars 2 actually, genuinely thinks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU#t=16m19s

Dee Jay.2460:

it’s really not as fun as it could be, you know when dungeons were about more than stacking and spaming.

I’m not calling you out specifically; you’re just the last person to echo the topic title. But I want to point out: for some of us, stacking really is more fun. For me, for instance. I play games because I want to trivialize them. That’s what’s fun for me. Good games for me are ones that can’t be fully trivialized, and will still provide a challenge no matter how well I’m playing and no matter how well I understand and exploit the mechanics.

I know that’s not what everyone gets from games. That’s cool. And it’s not the only thing I enjoy in games. I like good stories and good characters (not that Anet has ever produced either of those). Still, some games aren’t for me. (Elder Scrolls games are too easy to completely trivialize, for instance, for me to enjoy them for very long.) Some content in GW2 isn’t for me. Some groups aren’t for me. That’s great. It means that GW2 is catering to a wide audience with diverse and disparate interests.

(Well, actually, they’re not catering very well at all to the dungeon audience, but oh well.)

Just remember: there isn’t some objective notion of fun out there, one that automatically rules out stacking. Different strokes and all that.

I’m not quite sure what the problem is. Cavalier insignias are on the tp for about the same price as other salvaged insignias; currently they’re selling under 5g and buying around 3.5g. That’s roughly the same as the cost to craft any of the other insignias. Maybe a tad bit higher if you go for the selling price, but not much.

The wiki’s a little behind because the ability to salvage these was added two days ago.

Soldier insignias have been up on the tp since the patch. Search soldier insignia?