Guild Wars 2

On that related note: I salvaged 79 exotic armors with BLSK, got 75 dark matter. (And 49 insignias, which is right in line with your .6121.)

Also got 139 ecto, which is more than I was expecting, though maybe I’m confused about that rate.

Just tried this and feedback wasn’t working reliably for me on any of Alphard’s attacks. We were meleeing behind crates, and both normal shots/unload and the scorpion wire kept hitting through it. They weren’t at the very beginning or end of the duration; and we were all inside the bubble, along with Alphard.

It wasn’t a one-time thing, it didn’t depend on which crate we were behind, it didn’t matter if Alphard had been running around a lot or had been standing there for 15 seconds, etc. Sometimes it did reflect, but usually it didn’t.

Sounds like other people have had this problem. Anyone have any ideas about what causes it?

And medium should be 18 elonian and 6 damask. I’m pretty sure they’re all the same as exotics, but with ascended mats instead of t6. That is, I’m pretty sure it’s:

Heavy: 16 deldrimor, 7 damask
Medium: 18 elonian, 6 damask
Light: 18 damask, 6 elonian

Light armor needs 36 damask, because in addition to the 18 you need for inscriptions, you need 18 more for the armor components. Medium and heavy armor components require less (6 for medium and 7 for heavy, I think, for totals of 24 and 25 respectively).

36 days for light!

But I agree: for now, sell damask, unless you really can’t stand to delay things by a few days.

That works for medium and heavy, but those of us that need damask for our armor as well have to go through nearly 10k silk scraps to make one set. It’s not super expensive or anything, but it’s still a ton of silk.

Lesser Vision Crystal is 2 of each (plus an Augur’s Stone). Here’s what it seems like light armor will cost as far as ascended mats go:

36 damask (3 per insignia, 18 for the armor components)
6 elonian leather (for the armor components)
12 dragonite ingots, 12 bloodstone bricks, 12 empyreal stars

Anyone see if I’ve made a mistake here, or if I’m making an incorrect assumption somewhere? I’m too cheap to rush to 500 today if I’m gonna need to spend so long making damask anyway.

I did cliffside on 43, and I didn’t think it was really more difficult at all. If you leave one of the original four cultists alive (and this has been entirely standard for months and months now), you have plenty of time to reset your stacks.

Throwing up reflects was a gamble when we pulled a bunch, though. There were times when I dropped feedback and then did nothing, letting everyone else mop up.

I understand. But I already can do that. Exotics are basically free with dungeons anyway. The only constraint is bag space. (Well, and ascended vs exotic stats.)

Edit: Yeah, I know, they’re not really free. They each cost the several ectos you’d get from using the tokens for rares.

I imagine this might take too much work to be feasible, but the stat swapping on legendaries suggests another addition: let us swap sigils in the same way. That is, change legendaries so that when you apply a sigil to one, it saves the previous sigil rather than overwriting it. When we’re out of combat, let us swap between any sigils that we’ve applied to the weapon.

This would be very useful—you swap sigils for stacks, for night/day, for specific enemies, etc.—but I don’t think it would be overpowered, because all it really does is save you from carrying tons of spare weapons (and losing your legendary, and maybe your legendary stats if you don’t have tons of ascended weapons, when you swap to those spares).

This has been posted a number of times on the forums with no luck, but I’ll try again.

Suppose you’ve crafted Kamohoali’i Kotaki. On some professions (warrior, thief), crits with skill 1 create a spirit shark. On other professions (mesmer, ranger), crits with skill 1 do not create a spirit shark. These are all melee attacks.

Suggestion: Make this behavior consistent across professions. Don’t do this by removing the animations from warriors and thieves, though, because consistency isn’t really the reason to do this anyway—the reason is that the animation is sweet and some of us could get to see it more often without any unfair changes.

(I don’t have a ranger, but a further suggestion, based on the wiki: maybe also add sharks on crit to ranger 2 and 5 skills. Maybe thief 5, too. And the wiki doesn’t say anything about necros, so one more suggestion: check necro skills and make sure that they get the animation on all their melee attacks.)

Also, just a heads-up for mesmers: you can port people to the boss if you can get there (and you should be able to get there with stealth). There might be other spots that work, but I just go to the right side (if you’re facing the boss), all the way into the corner formed by the bubble and the wall. It’ll reach if you wp back to the first boss area and run a bit north, up against the wall, across from where you dropped the portal. Just be careful of the mobs you ran past to get to the first boss, which will probably be under the wp.

style.6173:

This really just illustrates a point: there needs to be two modes for new content. There are both hardcore and casual players in the game. Each should be able to enjoy the new content. The hardcore types want dungeons or content that are even more challenging than what has been released. The casuals want to experience the new content without the same level of difficulty.

ANET is trying to play in the middle of both groups but that just makes everyone unhappy. It would definitely be better to have two different difficulty modes with different achievements or rewards. Everyone wins.

No, see, 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… totally doesn’t fracture the community into the people who do the hard dungeons and the people who don’t?

No but seriously, this is what the lead designer of Guild Wars 2 actually, genuinely thinks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy7CcwnfUdU#t=16m19s

Right, but since Anet have given themselves no other way to introduce new content, and since they still need to introduce more challenging content from time to time, they’re kind of stuck.

I think consumable means you double-click to use. These you use in a dialogue window that pops up (like keys in gw1, if you played that).

You need 5 keys total (across your entire group). Opening a chest uses a key.

To answer the OP: getting 2/4 after completing this single path is probably a bug, yeah, if that’s what happened (and you hadn’t done TA story yet, which does count as one of the four paths).

The game as a whole could still be for you. That doesn’t mean that all the content will be, though, and the last couple big content additions have focused on endgame content for relatively hardcore players. That might not be the content for you, and that’s fine. We’ve got festivals coming up that should be more generally accessible.

I’m not sure I understand this. The boss with all the aetherblades around him is definitely the easiest in the dungeon, and kind of a faceroll, but for the rest, it seems like you’re complaining about two things: that one person (only one person!) has to kite an ooze around in the Slick/Sparki fight, and that you have to kite holos. Actually, you don’t have to kite holos; you just have to move them around, and that’s easier with pulls than kiting, though of course kiting works, too. And yeah, one person has to kite an ooze around for Slick/Sparki, but it’s just one person, and that person changes. I guess if you really don’t like kiting, that’s a problem. But otherwise I’m not seeing how kiting is the primary mechanic in this dungeon or anything.

Yes, difficulty is your main grievance. You’re asking for things to be easier: “let us heal oozes,” “give us fewer things to have to deal with in the last fight,” etc. You’re criticizing the design, to be sure, but your criticism is that the dungeon is too unforgiving. That you have to play too well to complete it. That’s just criticizing the difficulty. (And yes, it’s is pretty unforgiving if your team is bad. But that’s good! We need more content like that. There’s plenty of faceroll stuff out there already, including most dungeon paths.)

The bosses are not hitpoint sponges. No arah p4 melandru here. They go down fast. I’d be shocked if we didn’t have people doing 20 minute runs of the dungeon within a week. The oozes are easy with coordination. Slick and Sparki are easy as long as everyone knows to drag the ooze around when they have the pheromones. I agree that the foreman could give more rewards, and I guess that’s not a complaint about difficulty, but it’s also not a complaint about anything in the design of the dungeon itself. (And the foreman fight is really easy. If you die a lot there, maybe dungeons just aren’t for you.) The final boss is fine as long as everyone’s on the same page.

There are no endless waves of trash. They did a good job of introducing mechanics one at a time and giving you enough time to learn them, even on a first pass through, without making them tedious on repeated attempts. Well, maybe they’ll get tedious later, but no problems yet after 3 runs. (The unskippable monologues are stupid, though.) There’s tons trash if you don’t kill the mobs whose description tells you that they sound alarms, but that’s fine—unforgiving is a good thing.

Yes, the clown car takes forever and the bombs are a pain without stealth. Yes, it’s stupid that the default strategy is having two people die on the buttons at the start. But please don’t solve this problem by replacing dredge with a different fractal. Please just solve it by fixing the problems—slightly better scaling, so that there aren’t quite so many enemies, would really do it fine, I think.

(Honestly, while there are certainly problems with other fractals, I’d actually rather they stay in the game as they are right now than be replaced. Dredge is the only one that really sucks as it stands, and even then it’s only because it takes too long.)

Similarly, please don’t do this to other paths that people whine about, like arah p4. Arah p4 has so many cool things in it. The only really stupid parts are grenth and melandru. Fix those, give it like 4g or 5g for a reward because it’s longer, and it’s totally fine.

Edit: Also, please don’t let unskippable monologues become the norm. These things are going to suck after a week. But aside from that the dungeon’s fun and cool. More dungeons like this, please! Just don’t do it at the expense of current content.

Dungeon is not good, please don’t nerf it.

Gergolot.4217:

Poor decision here Anet. I do not ever see a good reason to remove content in a game unless it is broken.

I more or less agree, but it’s worth noting that Anet really doesn’t. The whole point of the living world is to constantly remove content that isn’t broken. I mean, that’s their design strategy.

Length makes it tedious.

Quoting the wiki:

Critical strikes while wielding Kamohoali’i Kotaki will cause a spirit shark to chomp the enemy (visual only). The size of the spirit shark varies depending on the hit-box of the enemy. This animation only appears for the following abilities:

Guardian: Skills 2 and 5
Warrior: Skills F1, 1, 2, 4, and 5
Ranger: Skill 3
Thief: Unknown
Mesmer: Skill 2
Necromancer: Unknown

Judging from this video, the effect appears on Thief skills 1 and 3 but not 2 or 5. No clue about Necro attacks.

Anyway, it seems that at the very least all melee autoattacks should produce the effect, including Rangers’ and Mesmers’ (and Necros’ if they don’t already), given that Thieves’ and Warriors’ do.

Galtrix.7369:

I came from WoW, so they trained me to go after gear for months. I’m an extremely hardcore player, so my view of this could be slightly skewed. If I had my way, exotic gear would take at least 2 weeks to obtain, and ascended gear would take at least 2 months to obtain. (I think that’s a fair amount of time, because some gear took me about 6 months to obtain in WoW).

Sadly, this is the attitude they’re catering to now, despite saying right from the start that they didn’t want vertical progression like WoW’s.

I think something like 150 or 200 hours would be fine, but by that I mean I think that a new player should be able to buy the game and have maxed stats on their main character when its /age says 200 hours.

Yeah, good point. The answer to his questions might be yes. It’s just that they’re acting like it’s no, whether it is or not.

Ascended weapons will not take a casual player 2 weeks to get. Leveling to 500 takes a significant amount of money (or a lot of time spent gathering mats—a lot of time, anyway, for a casual player).

Exotics were great because they were a goal you could reach without a ton of effort. They weren’t automatic when you got to 80, but they weren’t particularly hard to get after that.

Imagine a new player getting their first level 80 character. Now they want an ascended weapon. They still think 5g is a lot, and now they need 100g in mats, whether they gather them or buy them.

(100g might be off, sorry. I haven’t actually done the math, and I’ve seen people throwing lots of numbers around. I’m just estimating roughly from what I’ve used so far/will use in the next few days on my ascended weapon.)

Well, fotm. But setting that aside, you can play everything in rares, too. You can play everything in blues and greens, in fact. That’s how at least a lot of us were doing dungeons in the first couple weeks of the game, anyway—level 80 with blues and greens in (one hoped) the 70-80 range.

But it was still important for exotics to be accessible, because that was one of the goals of the game: don’t make people do things they don’t want to do just to get the stats they want to have. It’s okay to make people do things they don’t want to do in order to get the skins they want. But not stats.

Also, as people have said in other threads, differences in stats have a bigger impact in wvw than in pve, which makes ascended weapons more significant (and so more problematic) there.

Nope. But that generic mmo also wasn’t the sequel to a game that actually did embody the principles that people like Colin were touting during the development of GW2.

I liked GW because it didn’t have vertical progression. I liked the way GW2 sounded because they said it wouldn’t have vertical progression. I liked the first couple months of GW2 because it actually didn’t have vertical progression. Then Lost Shores came, and it was worrying.

Now ascended weapons have come, and those worries have been confirmed. Now there is vertical progression. Now casual players cannot expect to have best in slot gear in anything even remotely resembling a timely fashion.

This isn’t what we were told to expect during the development of GW2, but it’s also not what we were hoping for after GW.

And, again, there’s a difference between promising something and not really delivering, which is what you’re talking about with generic mmos, and actively adding things you explicitly said were bad for games, which is what Colin is now doing.

Colin Johanson once wrote:
“If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players? Can we focus our time on making meaningful and impactful content, rather than filler content to draw out the experience? Can we make something so much fun you might want to play it multiple times because it’s fun, rather than making you do it because the game says you have to? It’s how we played games while growing up. I can’t tell you how many times I played Quest for Glory; the game didn’t give me 25 daily quests I needed to log in and do, I played it multiple times because it was fun!” [my emphasis]

I guess the answer to his questions turned out to be no.

(In the same post, Colin also listed this as a design goal: “The rarest items in the game are not more powerful than other items, so you don’t need them to be the best.” Whoops! Failed on that one.)

And yeah, I get that people are saying that you’re not “forced.” But we have to ask what actually counts as being forced in a game like this. In Colin’s post, it’s clear that they count being required to do something in order to acquire the best gear as a way of being forced. And that’s what they’ve introduced here.

Merciful intervention wouldn’t get you out?

I actually liked grinding for my legendaries, and I’m looking forward to getting more when they add more. If ascended items were only about the infusion slots, and otherwise had the same stats as exotics, I think they’d be a great addition to the game, because I like fotm, and I’d be okay with working to do higher levels (as long as agony never showed up anywhere else in the game)

The problem, like other people have said, is that the actual additions they’ve made are bad for the game. Even Colin Johanson agrees! He once listed these things as bad to have in a game: “loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn”

So Colin is actively striving to put into GW2 things he thinks are bad. That’s a strange approach, and it’s one we’re concerned about.

Irrodesia.3907:

Part 3: The Problem Cont.

This part did a very nice job of talking through the problem. It was great to know that you were done getting stats for your character and could focus entirely on doing things that were fun, grinding only if you wanted, and only for skins. But then it turned out that’s not how the game was going to work.

Sadly, I also agree with IndigoSundown that Anet is never going to come out and discuss why they did a complete 180 on design. For one thing, that would require them to acknowledge that they did a complete 180 on design.

Yeah, no matter how much they insist they’d always planned on vertical progression, it sure feels like they started with what they actually said during development—“Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game. We want everyone on an equal power base.”—and then for some reason decided to shoehorn in everything they said they weren’t going to do.

With tongue in cheek, I’d encourage Colin to resign, since the despite being the game director, the game has in just two years departed entirely from his direction.

(And with tongue not in cheek, I hope that he does, because I liked the direction he talked about two years ago, and I think he’s kittenting all over GW by taking things in the current direction.)

Hey, thanks, finally found a signature for these forums! It sure is remarkable, though, that the direction Guild Wars 2 took is so different from the Game Director’s plan. He must not be very good at his job. Maybe they can get somebody new for Guild Wars 3.

(Some less scrupulous critics might, of course, conclude that Colin was just lying! But I’ll be more charitable and attribute it to gross incompetence.)

Josh Foreman.8250:

Draygo.9473:

My problems all stem from attempting it solo. Fighting assassins solo is a grinding experience. When I’m grouped up with guildies we can often kill them quickly, but when your fighting 2-3 of them alone its really hard to avoid taking damage.

It ends up being frustrating and tedious. With a group its much easier to deal with the assassin mobs.

This is as designed. Dungeons are designed for up to 5 people. If you choose to solo a dungeon you should expect this sort of thing. At leas that’s how I look at it. Maybe because SAB doesn’t look like a dungeon there are different expectations? We did clearly communicate when you enter a world that 5 are recommended.

I know this topic is a few pages old, but I’m just coming to the discussion, so there are two problems for me with this, in addition to all the problems with grouping that other people mentioned.

First, world 1 was easily, easily soloable; people are going to keep those expectations this time around whether you like it or not. Second, the last living story instance that said 5 players were recommended was Scarlet’s Playhouse, which was a joke. Sometimes I need a group of 5 for living story dungeons and sometimes I don’t; there’s no consistency, and I no longer trust the “recommended 5 players” things. That’s too bad, but I just don’t believe you any more when you say it’s good to have 5 people.

This isn’t, of course, to say that everyone was able to solo those things. Of course some people wanted groups for them, and that’s fine; different people play at different levels. I’m sure there are things I want a group for that other people solo. The point is just that recommendations don’t seem to me to track anything, really; certainly they don’t seem to me to track difficulty.

(For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced that World 2 is actually one of the places where I want a group; I think the assassins are fine solo, for instance.)

What do you think the stupidest fight is? By that I mean the one where even the most charitable explanation you can come up with for the design ends up being stupid.

There are lots of bad fights, but some of them can still be done quickly with the right group (ta f/u, for instance), and some might be excusable because Anet doesn’t understand how their events scale, even though they should of course know that (dredge clown car, for instance).

Worse than fights of either of these kinds is, I think, the grenth fight in arah p4. The first part is cool—split up, do a little damage, kill two orrians, it’s a fine mechanic. But then you have to kill 20 elite wraiths one at a time, running back and forth through the room to get to them.

The best explanation I can come up with for this is that they wanted grenth’s mark to present a challenge and thought that the way to do it was to start you off with just one wraith and then build up to five. Maybe they misunderstood how easy it would be to not worry about the mark; that can be excused because it was designed before release.

But that still wouldn’t have required 20 wraiths. Someone had to decide that 20 was the right number. “Hey, how many wraiths should we make them kill?” “This path isn’t long enough; better drag the fight out a bit.”

Stratigo.1976:

One Note Chord.5031:

I dunno, 20 per dungeon run doesn’t seem bad to me. If you really wanted to grind out an ascended weapon, it wouldn’t be hard to do 25 dungeon runs in a few days, and for everyone else the 2 week estimate is eminently reasonable. And for people who’d rather zerg, the way you can with meta events for dragonite, there’s wvw camps and towers.

yeah, if you had no life or job and dedicated yourself to playing solely this game for that period of time….

Right. My bad, I should have been more specific: if you’re trying to grind out a weapon as quickly as possible. I don’t want to do that, and I think most people don’t, but a few people will. What I meant was: it doesn’t seem like it’s going to require that much more of people who are working towards ascended weapons, whether they’re rushing to them or just trying to get them done in a month or whatever.

I also regret not making rings and accessories, so I could have six offensive infusion slots or six defensive infusion slots. Save money on filling them with fine infusions whenever I get around to it.

But the problem isn’t me; I’m just using me as an example because it’s the one I know best. The problem is that we’re all going to end up with more than we need, it’s going to happen relatively quickly, and like I said at the end of the op, Anet has a history of making us regret deleting stacks that we had too many of. (If they make them sellable, I’ll be sorry I threw away money. If they do what they did with butter, I’ll be sorry I threw away free mf gambling. Etc.)

Kore wa Sparta.3750:

You’d only get that many stacks from grinding and farming the Aetherblades this past week/2 weeks. A-net didn’t want you to grind, remember?

Yeah, but like I said, even without the farming (and I was only saving for four or five days) I got a stack in a single day of playing (part of which was wasted trudging through fotm 58 only to find out that maw is still impossible). Even if I only play that much twice a week, that’s eight stacks in a month; it’s still going to very quickly outpace my need.

Dungeon tokens, fractal relics, laurels, karma, badges of honor, guild commendations, maybe other things I’m forgetting: once you get what you want, they start piling up. (Karma can at least take a lot longer to hit that cap if you’re making legendaries, but the others not so much. Ascended rings are similar, too, although they aren’t a currency.)

Anet finally discovered that we didn’t like having all this crap fill our banks, so we got wallets. (Edit: Yeah, I know, some of those didn’t take up bank space; they’re just there to demonstrate Anet’s love of currencies that you use a few times and then stop paying attention to.) Now a month later, certainly wiser from their mistakes, they introduce three new materials that face exactly the same problem: they accumulate rapidly but will be used a limited number of times.

If your normal play involves dungeons and meta events and killing champs, which is what Anet actually wants normal play to look like, you’ll eventually have more of these materials than you want. And then, like everything else, they’ll start piling up. Those of us who play more than casually will hit that cap much sooner.

(I’ve gotten 41 stacks of bloodstone dust so far. Even ignoring the 40 from champ boxes that I saved over the last four days, that’s a stack just this afternoon. And judging from today, by the end of the month I’ll have at least several more stacks of dragonite ore and empyreal fragments than I need.)

If Anet could assure us that there would never be any use for these mats aside from making ascended gear, and only ever in quantities comparable to what we now need, we’d be able to destroy them and move on. (While they’re at it, maybe they could assure us that we’ll never regret destroying ascended rings, so we can free up that space, too!) But they’ve shown that they like creating other uses for mats that we’re drowning in, so instead we’re left to wonder why Anet didn’t learn their lesson and give us a better way to store this junk.

I dunno, 20 per dungeon run doesn’t seem bad to me. If you really wanted to grind out an ascended weapon, it wouldn’t be hard to do 25 dungeon runs in a few days, and for everyone else the 2 week estimate is eminently reasonable. And for people who’d rather zerg, the way you can with meta events for dragonite, there’s wvw camps and towers.

ilr.9675:

Why the heck would ya open ALL of your boxes in one sitting??

For greens to salvage for luck, or for money if you need it, or for exotics to salvage for dark matter, or so that the boxes don’t take up storage space (whoops, joke’s on us there, dust takes up way more space), or…

Dust builds up way too quickly. Even setting aside opening saved boxes, which started me off with 40 stacks of dust, I got another stack just from champs in a couple dungeons and a couple meta events. Dust builds up faster than the other two mats even when I’m doing the content that’s supposed to give me those other two mats!

I’m not sure I understand the answer. He says that they want to make dungeons vary in difficulty, so that it’s generally understood that some are for the hardcore players and some are not. But how does that not equally splinter the community into, say, the people who do fractals and the people who don’t? (Of course, the people who do fractals might also do other things, but the people who did hard mode in GW also did other things.)

Just tried it. 55 ar still dies instantly (that is, goes from full hp to dead in one tick) at level 58. Pretty disappointing.

Thanks for the screenshots!

Brandt Tyler.1480:

I think there’s a question too as to whether Crafted exotics salvage for DM. Anybody know for sure yet?

Yes. Salvaged 7 exotics I made to get to 450 with a black lion kit, got 9 dark matter.

Vexien.4790:

Montari.1824:

“Whena the next time I see the six fingered man I will say to him …. Hello My name is Indigo Montari You ate all my nachos prepare to die!”

As a recreation of my gw1 mesmer Indy has been waiting for rapiers for 250 years, He is an amalgamation of the dread pirate Roberts and Inigo Montoya.

That looks great. What armor are you wearing?

That’s Ascalonian (AC armor).