Guild Wars 2

To those who don’t know…that is pretty much 1 more second you have to wait to restart your backstab chain. So in the past you can do 4 backstabs in alil over 12 seconds, now you can only do 3.

Even before the nerf we are a bit inferior compared to Warriors in terms of damage, and at cost of half the natural HP. After the nerf this indirectly cut our DPS by at least 1/4th…seriously messed up. That along with critical haste being 50% less effective…I don’t know what our role is in dungeons anymore besides monkeying around dodging and hopping around looking ninja-ish.

And our daggers still don’t cleave whereas Warriors cleave with everything.

Please consider the effects in general PvE/Dungeons before nerfing something for WvW/PvP purposes.

My thoughts is that I think Anet Balance Team mixed up Time Warp with Quickening in general when it comes to PVE…

In PVE quickening did not deserve a nerf, it plays a fun role of risk/reward/burst. Time Warp on the other hand, took that mechanic and just made it super overpowered (no risk, mad reward, not even a burst anymore, just an imba 10 seconds of double damage!!) Please revert Quickening nerf and just nerf Time Warp instead…most mesmers are fine with this Quickening nerf so they should be fine with a half duration Time Warp as well since it’s the same thing.

Personally, I was hoping either nerf CoF gold drop on end boss or put a DR on that thing… Inflation is no joke. From a selfish standpoint, I’ll miss the easy gold runs, but it’s something that has to be addressed sooner than later.

As more and more players flock to CoF path 1, that means less and less players doing other open world farming that brings supply into economy (Tier 6 mats).
The quickness nerf is not an effective nerf to CoF farm and caused way too much collateral damage…many topics on that I wont go into it.

Alternatively, buff drop rates of Tier 6 mats…players in game should not be discouraged to report bots because of the consideration that supply will drop for each bot that is banned. They should not be thinking that bots are a ‘necessary evil’ in an MMO.

Speaking of Tier 6 mats, crystaline dust is going so out of control that promoting materials, a game feature, does not even make sense anymore…Not working as intended as it once did at all. Even if it’s just up’ing the rate on T5/6 dusts by 2x it’ll alleviate the problem a bit.

I remember a blog earlier this year talking about these new patches will emphasize “reward” but as of right now the game is becoming either a CoF farm or buying gold via gems to afford anything…The February patch really shook the economy up with the cheap globs, indirectly increasing the demand of other items used in recipes involving globs (T6 materials) that are more or less untouched in supply.

Anyway, there are many other issues we wish to see addressed in near future, what are your main concerns?

miniatureian.2501:

I agree with and support this change, even without having played it.

The goal of having options (for utilities and elites) is to provide choices. If one ability is so strong that it becomes the ‘right choice’, perhaps it is too strong? Does this change make us weigh other options when building a character?

That punch

The only quickness generating skill that is equipped almost all the time is Time Warp and Quickening Zephyr.

Timewarp is just imbalanced. All mesmers know it, and even with the nerf, they still have a 10 second no-risk AoE quickening…

Quickening Zephyr is just because Rangers absolutely needs it and it’s a Wilderness Survival skill so it synergize with the cooldown trait most DPS rangers usually get as a must. Plus it’s drawback is a lot less harsh than Frenzy and Haste’s.

Warriors have many many good choices for utility. So do thieves. They don’t have Frenzy and Haste as their ‘default best in slot’ utility in PvE.

Your logic is kind of flawed to begin with. As long as a skill is not flat out overpowered (Time warp), it should not be nerfed. Just because they have more generic uses than other utility skills should not warrant a Nerf, on the other hand, its the underpowered junk skills that need to be Buffed. Epidemic should be nerfed with your logic for a condition necromancer.

I play all 8 classes and I know that any good player weighs their choices between their utilities on a fight to fight basis. When you are out of combat, you should be subconsciously thinking about your next fight and what you need for it and change utilities accordingly.

Scribbles.7493:

I said this back in beta. The Quickness boon was ridiculous.

It was essentially a double damage modifier, because you could pump out damage twice as fast at double animation speed.

Instead of attaching all kinds of fancy debuffs to it, they should’ve just been on the ball, realized the 100% effect was overkill, and reduced the effect to a more sane value. Back in beta, noone would’ve complained. Even the 100-blades greatsword warriors were admitting quickness was silly. Now we’re half a year in and everyone’s gotten so used to it that the kneejerk reaction is to stomp the feet and cry like spoiled children.

If it’s not 100% speed it better have longer duration or shorter cooldown. Most people not gonna waste a utility slot on a 4s burst that coolsdown every minute that’s not even a burst anymore, plus making them super vulnerable (heavy armored taking 2x damage, agile classes can’t dodge/heal).

The concept of these quickness skill is a short burst that focuses on moments of heavy risk/reward. (exception being Time Warp which kind of defied that concept and gave only reward, no risk, on a massive scale) This nerf just made it so you aren’t rewarded nearly as much, but an extended second of vulnerability on urself…more risk, less reward.

Worst nerf yet. Hear me out.

WvW/PvP and PVE should really have been separated since launch of the game when it comes to skill effects. Getting bursted down by other players is a WvW/Pv kitten ue, PvE players should not be punished.

The “some champions are made trivial” argument is totally an additional excuse used to convince us….please name a PvE boss that is made ‘trivial BECAUSE of quickness’. Those bosses you are talking about were trivial time-sinks to begin with! Example: even without any quickness, 5 good players can mow down the effigy boss in CoF p1 without taking a single hit at melee range, just takes twice as long and twice as monotonous.

In fact, the whole nerf on the PvE side feels like it’s just to slow down cof path 1 farmers…but there’s just so much collateral damage that is not even uncompensated for (Ranger DPS totally kitten Sigil of Rage might as well be vendored to npcs now since its already garbage to begin with, many many more)

Please, Please, Please do not take the easy way out when balancing…Making quickness half effective is not FUN. No one wants their characters kitten

Remember you guys said u want to take the Fractals concept and apply it to the other dungeons? Do that instead. The fractal bosses are not Trivial, most of them punish melee’ing for extended period of time, which totally brings out the ‘risk reward’ nature of melee damage. If a boss can be melee’d at all times with no risk, it just becomes a punching bag boss that i so boring that people need to fast forward through it via quickness. Using ranged with timewarp or quickness is not that much damage to warrant a nerf and many good ranged fights in pve encourage ppl to spread out (thus no timewarp abuse).

Alternative is to nerf timewarp in pve. Everyone even mesmers think its the most OP skill. Cut its duration by half, shorten its cooldown by 1/4 or whatever. Lets try that first before destroying a fun feature all together. Oh, nerf gold drop from cof 1 too cuz no matter how much you nerf quickness that farm will be most efficient gold. bad for economy.

Actually, with Tier 6 Mats prices going out of hand, a Gift of Fortune costs just as much as a Precursor. Average price of T6 Mats are around 18s, 2000 of them is 360 gold. ~500 globs is around 150 gold…

Precursor and Gift of Fortune both are 1/4 of the Legendary. Gift of Mastery is a freebie, and the Legendary-specific gifts varies but iirc none of which are more than Gift of Fortune due to the reduced Lodestone prices.

Making a legendary is a time commitment, or time/money commitment for people using gem conversions. If there will be a scavenger hunt, it will be in a way that won’t make precursors commonplace.

There will always be people on forums saying how it’s hard or impossible for them to get a legendary because they don’t play enough or whatever. That’s how it is in an MMO. You have to have endgame items that take long to acquire or the hardcore portion of the playerbase gets bored and leave.

Side note, Legendaries are actually extremely easy to get compared to endgame items in most other MMOs…and they are cosmetic.

Twilight issues aside, is it a bad idea to transmute a legendary? Is it intended for the legendary to be just a skin that you transmute over and over or will the legendary’s tier status affect something in the future?

When weapon ascension upgrade hits, will the transmuted Legendaries be upgraded to ascended stats, or do we have to acquire an Ascended Weapon and transmute it again?

Price of dust needs to be reduced for T5-6 promotion recipes to make sense…

Its just silly.

Kind of curious on the droprate of precursors.
Apparently random level 80 mobs in Orr have chance of dropping them. Chests, WvW. etc…

I really want to get precursors from a drop rather than buying them off TP (even though I can)…because I don’t like the concept. I just don’t feel like I’m giving my hard earned gold to some random person that ‘got super lucky’. I feel ok buying other components in my legendary because those can be farmed with a degree of certainty, and their market value more or less justified.

Made a thread in the past asking how people got their precursors and found a lot of players obtained them via Dungeon chests (low level ones usually, AC, CM) or off playerkill loot in WvW. But do each dungeon chests have equal chance, or do certain ones have higher? Because I’d think at one point, Anet would reduce the chance of getting precursors in CoF P1 since that dungeon is 3 chests per 5-10mins. With so many CoF farmers, it’s pretty surprising the stock on precursors is still so low.

Anyone have any suggestions on which direction I should go for Precursors?

This update makes me wonder if they had a new management or new people in charge the guild system…

The guild bonuses and unlocks at the start of the game were not daunting, I took 1 glance at it and knew that a small guild (read: 6~10 active players) was viable and can get all these essential quality of life unlocks within 1 or 2 months and the big ones like Deep Cave within 4 months. Very well designed, where the only difference between huge guilds and small guilds at that point is that they can maintain a constant blanket guild buff/banners whereas small guilds have to use the bonuses sparingly and wisely.

Then yesterday the whole concept changed. Enormous influence requirements for just playable content…small guilds disbanding flocking to big guild just for content…that isn’t right.

Did some addition, might be slightly off but, I think it takes 466,000 influence to unlock all the missions. That’s with no build speed boosts, and get nothing else but researching levels and mission unlocks. That’s about 932gold if you bought commendations. You can make a legendary with that amount.

Right now it’s just so messy to look at. Guilds from every server under the same subforum…

At least divide it into US/EU, and by Servers (alphabetically organized A~D, E~H, etc). I know there are other websites/forums out there but at least make the effort on the main game forums to have organized Guild subforums.

I never even cared about this by the way until the recently added mandatory requirement to abandon my small friendly guild and merge into larger metaguilds to simply “Access Content”. But since Anet intends to do that, they should at least clean up their Guilds subforums so we can guild hunt…

Beorn Saxon.4762:

Each character can complete a dungeon path once per day for full rewards.

Your account can complete a path once per 30 minutes for full rewards.

So if you use alts, there is a 30 minute cool down from opening chest, to opening chest. If you run 1,2,1,2,1,2 etc, you shouldn’t hit DR. I run 4 toons everyday this way and never hit DR.

Thanks, did not know about the 30min cooldown per path. Have been doing 1,2,1,2,1,2 as well for past few days and yesterday I guess I did 1’s twice in row at one point and noticed the DR.

Just CoF. This was not an issue since the DR change recently. I was able to utilize all my characters and get 120 tokens per character daily until last night.
I was enjoying it too because it encouraged me to play all the characters i’ve built and it never got boring.

Thanks guys for your answers.
In conclusion it’s as I suspected, they aren’t nearly the ’optimal ’class for dungeons. Despite being versatile, versatility is rarely an element of concern in a 5 man dungeon group.

What is Engi’s best ‘role’. Or are they the epitome of jack of all trades class? What is the best thing they can bring to the table in the dungeon setting that no other class can do better? (Warrior brings DPS, Necro brings AOE Condi, Ele/Guard brings party heal/support etc). Every class I’ve played has at least 1 perk that makes them stand out, but I am having a hard time figuring out my last class.

I noticed yesterday I only got 30 tokens for running CoF p1 back to back on different characters.
Can someone summarize the current DR rules on dungeons?

I’d like a future implementation similar to GW1 where you can spectate the surviving party member.

Back in middleschool I learned a lot by being dead and watching good players in firstperson view. This would help some new players in dungeons.

EasymodeX.4062:

Orpheus.7284:

I appreciate your test. I think the tooltip usually only states the startup/casttime but neglects the animation that follows, I believe this applies to most skills tooltips in the game (and in many other MMOs as well!)

While taking a shower this morning I had the epiphany that the delay is probably related to the hit confirmation of chain abilities.

This was particularly notorious with the Mesmer Scepter1 chain — only chain in the game IIRC that uses ranged projectiles. The result is that the next step in the chain stalls until the prior step detects. This caused a huge slowdown for Scepter111 at max range (like 5 seconds to get a chain off). This effect is obviously much smaller for melee, but is probably adding 0.25s to every AA step from raw latency. Edit: Reminds me of morale ability delays in Warhammer until they eventually got that fixed.

Minor sidenote about other MMOs: MMOs that do not use animation-timed abilities (WoW, SWTOR, Rift) and use raw “GCD” instead, do not have these kinds of issues because the animations simply override each other. Technically the animations don’t really matter at all, since its usually coded such that the attacks will more or less always trigger.

MMOs like GW2/Aion/TERA which use animation-based timing will run into these issues (and animation cancelling, and others), but personally I don’t see what’s hard about it. Just make a 3.5s animation take exactly 3.5s. Kind of facepalm to me. Giving ANet the benefit of the doubt that they can measure “0.5 seconds” as well as a guy with a stopwatch, the issue probably lies with something else like latency rather than raw “fail animation timing”.

Enlightening post.
Side note, I often have epiphanies in showers too.

At least u can throw those garbage into the mystic forge in hopes of a nice named weapon (or precursor!). I got identical pauldrons with Rune of Hoebrak in them on map completion and there’s only a few named armor (Khilbron) that is worth mystic forging for, chances are even worse.

I’m probably right behind you on that, OP.
I’m at 1300hr, 5k AP.

My approach is slightly different as I did not touch the endgame until I had slowly raised 8 characters (different professions) to level 80 (spoke to all named NPCs on every map while at it). Only started doing explorable mode dungeons recently because I met a few good friends to run with.

I also did not play TP even though I know that is the best way to make money. Yet still, I am well within reach of my Incinerator legendary, barring the precursor which I refuse to buy from TP because i rather let it serve as a carrot on a stick to unrewarding dungeon runs.

I really recommend playing other characters, I think all of them have unique playstyle. It’s fun for me to run dungeons and gear all my 8 characters with different dungeon sets. The character select choice makes it feel almost like a pick up and play arcade game and keeps things from getting monotonous.

Keep your hopes up, Anet seems to be working on some great things atm for the game and please try to be vocal about your opinions and try to help them out.

EasymodeX.4062:

So I just tested a few things in-game and the results are annoying. Basically all separate attacks have additional delay and the tooltips don’t work well. Not sure if it’s isolated to 1111 chains or what.

Axe1 takes just about 3s to chain together as Orpheus noted. However, HB – 1111 – HB has a similar delay. (Untraited) HB + 10x autoattacks + HB takes about 15.5-16.5 seconds, whereas the tooltips have an expected 3.5 + 10*.5 + 3.5 = 12 second time. So, you basically lose time when using more than 1 attack in sequence (which is basically all the time every time).

So, it would require more obnoxious testing to get any further data (e.g. where the delays are being inserted).

A traited HB (~6.5s cooldown) would get about 8 * GS1. Over 10 seconds (HB + cooldown), you’d get an average of around 430 DPS because the AA has the delay all over (similar to Axe1). This is based on an extrapolation of the AAs because the cause of the 60% inefficiency (sidenote: I don’t think the DPS would improve much if I assumed HB was partially responsible, probably to 440-450). Axe1 at a 3s time for the chain nets a DPS around 549 as noted previously.

Fixing the GS sequence would involve inserting more attacks (and using less AAs because the AAs have extra delay for no apparent reason). Could probably get the DPS up to 500 or so using WA and assuming you’re still in range after it, etc. The Vuln is also notable.

Either way, it seems like ANet may want to do a serious quality pass on all the animation timing if they are actually balancing by the tooltip animation times, because those are basically wrong. If they’re not balancing by those, then whatever.

I appreciate your test. I think the tooltip usually only states the startup/casttime but neglects the animation that follows, I believe this applies to most skills tooltips in the game (and in many other MMOs as well!)

EasymodeX,

Just tested in game with a stop watch. 3 seconds minimum for Axe1 chain. You may have to recalculate the base damage. GS 100B is slightly better than Axe in terms of base damage. 100B is also better due to striking more time which means it has better proc’ing (i.e. sigil of fire), negligible. But nonetheless, axe is great and I’m not denying it’s almost on par with Hundred Blades when it comes to raw dps.

Someone should add to wiki that it takes 3 seconds to finish an axe string.

EasymodeX.4062:

Um…I’m curious how Axe1 chain is 14% more damage, EzmodeX. Did you math it or did you compare it side by side. If you just math it the 1.75 sec total cast of Axe1 chain is misleading because that’s not the entire animation. The entire chain is actually around 3+ seconds, almost the timespan of a fully channeled hundred blades. Makes them comparable at best.

Took the numbers off the wiki, so they may or may not be accurate. From memory, the times are approximately correct. I used [edit: I deleted my spreadsheet, brb]

.25 + .75 + 1.5 seconds for the Axe1 chain. Note: the wiki doesn’t list the cast time of the second hit. It’s probably .5s, but I used 0.75s to under-estimate the Axe DPS. The Axe chain is 252 + 538 + 858 = 1648 damage. 659 DPS using the “slow” estimate for the Axe chain (it’s probably 732 DPS).

HB is 3.5s. Base damage of 2030. 580 DPS.

Using the generous estimate, 659 > 580 by 14%. More likely 732 > 580 by 26%, but I think some people would cry if I said Axe1 beats HB by 26%.

Anyways, not sure if most people really notice, but the first 8 hits of HB are really weak. As in, “about the same or weaker than GS autoattacks weak”. I guess the side benefit is that the raw # of hits (9 in 3.5 versus 7 AAs in 3.5) gets some random kitten partial synergy with the forceful trait. The vuln stacks on the GS AA help, too. I’m guessing it’s probably better to just use GS1111 over Hundred blades due to the Vuln stacks.

Whilwind Attack is really where GS stops sucking though. That, and the general mobility. Using the 26% number, it will take something like 15 more stacks of Might than the Axe build to maintain DPS. Lulz.

The cast time is pretty off on the wiki. It’s 3 seconds+ in real time. Don’t quote me on it though I’m at work and only based this off of a YouTube demo of the Axe skill and the skill started at 0:04 and ended at 0:08 into the video so giving it 3.1s minimum time frame. So there could be Fraps or streaming delays. Although GS demo was pretty much 3.5 on the dot.

Um…I’m curious how Axe1 chain is 14% more damage, EzmodeX. Did you math it or did you compare it side by side. If you just math it the 1.75 sec total cast of Axe1 chain is misleading because that’s not the entire animation. The entire chain is actually around 3+ seconds, almost the timespan of a fully channeled hundred blades. Makes them comparable at best.

They are both good weapons, best dps weapons imo.

However, anyone saying Axe auto attack beats a 100B is drunk. Unless you are taking into consideration of 100B’s cooldown and that the warrior does nothing but GS auto attack during the cooldown. Who does that? No decent warrior does that.

My warrior is old and dusty but iirc I had this rotation: 100B→WW→swap to axe (animation cancel accordingly) Evicerate if the WW had put me abit away from target, if not Cyclone Axe first before Evicerate followed by some axe auto attack cycle before switching back to GS to start the rotation again. I don’t think the past few months have made that rotation obsolete.

If you were to choose either or instead of both (which I totally understand because the necessity of Range in certain situations), I’d choose GS, works better with ranged due to its get in get out moves (Rush/WW) and Forceful Greatsword trait gives u some good Might stacks that u can take advantage of even when using the ranged (i.e. 100B→WW away swap Rifle then Kill shot or Volley while the stacks of 5 sec might is still there)

Key thing to remember is warriors usually only have a 5 second weapon swap, take advantage of it and don’t autoattack unless you have to and if you do, autoattacking with axe is better than autoattacking with GS when it comes to dps.

Double Tap to Evade – Off
Disable AoE Rings – Off
Double Click to Interact – On
Stop Autoattacking on Target Change – Off
Autotarget – Off
Promote Skill Target – Off
Fast Cast Ground Targeting – On
Melee Assist – Off

Especially interested in the Fast Cast Ground Targeting, pros and cons?

Scepter / Torch definitely needs a buff.

Auto attacking on scepter is just so terrible that using it purely for clone generation is too much of a tradeoff.

Scepter #2 generates clones on block, or u can use it as a blind move which negates the clone generation. Compare this to Blurred Frenzy offered by the sword and it’s really worse in damage, defensive capability and cooldown.

Scepter #3 is too obvious in PvP/WvW and Confusion condition in PvE is overall pretty terrible (subpar duration + low frequency of monster attacks is a bad combination)

Torch #4, Prestige is ok, but breaking out of stealth before it ends should not void the end effect.

Torch #5, imo Retaliation doesn’t do anything and confusion has limitations as well. I find that even on a condition mesmer, iDuelist, swordsman and warden does more damage than this thing. Totally useless especially in PvE.

Very good thread. I actually wanted to make one of these.
This will hopefully impact how future changes/bosses are created.

There are some other ones with great potential:
Sorrow’s Embrace:
1. Tazza (? misspelling) – The asura mesmer in path 1. Atm it is only a challenging fight if you fight both her and her Champion thief henchman. But the thief champion deaggros if you want to fight them in the bigger open space outside instead of near their spawn locations. Fighting both near their spawn location can prove difficult because its so small and mediocre parties would have trouble manuevering in such a confined space.
2. The singularity, gravity control boss is interesting too, it has a big tell on its gravity freeze skill so its almost like the Kholer fight.
3. First boss in Sorrow’s Embrace Path 3, burrow Shoryuken instant downs most players, always fun.
3. Path 2 end boss fight has good concept but still too straightforward.
4. Path 3 destroyer of worlds is a decent fight too bad most ppl cliff snipe it AKA exploit.

CoE:
Agreed on the Alpha. I feel the Norn and Husk gimmick fights are not as fun as the destroyer one.

Sorrow’s Embrace
Path 3 – Redo some of the events like you did for CoF path 2 Magg event. Too many horrible players out there are exploiting events here.

Path 2 – AI Pathing is horrendous during the time you have to escort npc to pick up the Ore. A lot of going back and forth in slow motion. Feels weird that he moves so slow. Maybe redesign it so that instead of escorting him slowly to the Ore while fighting dredge ambushes , we will protect him from waves of dredge while he mines the Ore itself? Throw in some twists so its not the exact same thing as CoF path 2 Magg.

Path 1 – It’s really a shame that its so nerfed that its no longer a unique stealth mission. People just brute force through the patrols now because they’re so weak. I understand that coulda be done before with a strong party but still it was unique to most weaker, less dps parties. Should have lengthened patrol interval or fix the hiding spots that are supposed to hide you but weren’t. That is personal preference though, many do not like/can not do sneaking missions.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I got my zap from the karka event. It didn’t drop for me, but it brought prices for everything down enough that I was able to just barely get enough money to buy it. And by just barely I really mean it. I even had to salvage and sell the armor off my back and both my weapons. When all was said and done I was standing naked in LA with nothing to my name but Zap.

The first thing I did was go to queensdale via asura gate and killed enough level 5 things to get enough money for a WP so I could buy some green armor off a karma vendor in Orr so I could grind enough for a new set of armor.

Lmao, funny story. Very good decision and it’s all worth it in the end.

The clumsy phase 1 in/out of combat fiasco aside (too buggy! cant get out of combat sometimes! too punishing for noobs!), let’s focus on providing helpful information for upcoming Phase 2 that Mr. Hrouda’s team is working on. In his recent blog he specifically encouraged us to do so but lets do it in an orderly fashion so they can actually put up with reading them.

I think it’d be very helpful to sort them by dungeon, by path. Dissect encounters and run through different scenarios, in a very organized, unbiased fashion to provide the best suggestions. Something like:

General Improvement:
- Make a decision on whether dungeons are endgame content or casual content for lower levels and adjust rewards accordingly. Example: AC/CM/TA/SE rewarding level 40~50 rares for 30 tokens despite its difficulty being on par if not greater than the ones that yield 70+ rares (thus, ectos). Set a standard for amount of time you’d like players to complete certain dungeons. Adjust reward accordingly to compensate longer dungeon runs this way some dungeons don’t go completely southsun cove.

Ascalonian Catacombs:
- Path 3, Lovers room, difficulty discrepancy between having an Ice Bow elementalist vs not having one against the graveling burrows. Has not been a big issue ever since the fix on burrows’ target obstruction, but i feel regular weapons still don’t do enough damage to them to keep up with the spawns.

Caudecous Manor:
- Path 2, Pillow Room, pillow still bugs out from time to time where when you step on a pillow spikes still pop out to get you.
- Path 1/3, Sure-shot Seamus, knockdown lock is pretty overpowered. I run with experienced guardians so it’s no issue but I fear for the less prepared compositions.
- General: Unless there is reward buff not many people would want to run this dungeon without exploits or content skipping near the end of path 1/3.

Citadel of Flame:
- Path 3, end boss, either lower the damage from lava or make players that die on lava teleport off the lava so they can be ressed instead of going afk for the remainder of the dungeon.

This is just basic template, please contribute if you can. Organize your thoughts, don’t focus on criticizing other people’s suggestions, because if it’s too crazy of a suggestion Anet won’t consider it. Let’s all chip in and improve on those dungeons!

Ilithis Mithilander.3265:

I just recently got a Howl in CM P2 from the Bloody Victoria boss chest (post 1-28).

A friend got The Legend in the maw fractal, I forget which even number fractal level it was (pre 1-28).

The Bloody Victoria boss is CM P1 iirc. Congratulations!

stpetemermaid.5947:

Another player and I got been stuck “in combat” in Orr, when no mob was apparent. I wanted to go to a waypoint, but couldn’t because “we were in combat”. We tried doing an emote (/sit) and it worked! It took us out of combat, one at a time, as we each “sat down.”

Thanks for that suggestion, i’ll try it next time we get into a situation like that. It just felt really buggy when we’re like 2 rooms over from the mobs, no signs of aggro, all mobs regen’d to full hp, and we’re still in combat. Pretty biased towards players it seems to regen mob to full as soon as they are out of combat but for players it doesn’t even count as out of combat until u fly to a different country. lol

For those few lucky individuals that received precursors, do you mind sharing your stories on how you got them? Note: Buying them off the TP doesn’t count haha.

I’ve heard rumors they drop from WvW JP boxes, random Risen mob in a dynamic event in Orr, Temple chests, Dragon chests and, the notorious Mystic Forge. Share your experience, how you felt when you got it, and hopefully motivate other players to not give up and that they are not mere myths and legends!

It’s really up to the rest of the group to decide whether or not to spend time and effort to res the dead ASAP. Keep in mind there are scenarios where the dead can not be ressed (on lava, fell off a cliff), 2 minutes is just too long of sitting around doing nothing imo. Maybe 1 minute.

Anet, If you really want to stick with this “in combat no respawn” thing, can you put an effort into building a spectator mode after death? This way new players can actually learn stuff from experienced players while dead? At the moment new players are punished pretty hard and they don’t really gain any fighting experience from it because they’re dead. I hate to see new players say stuff like “i’m never doing that again” because they died and had to sit their twiddle their thumbs while the 2 experienced players take awhile to finish the boss/event/whatever.

Not sure if I should post this first part in bug section but, with the new changes, sometimes a party member dies (falls off a cliff etc) and we don’t want him/her to just lay there while we play, we try to get out of combat.
We’re over 2000 range away from enemies, no one’s attacking, no one had conditions, no enemies are aggro…still, everyone was in combat. We pretty much had to run another mile to get out of it. There were scenarioes where we can’t get out of combat at all we just mass suicide on purpose even tho we know we can eventually win over time, because we don’t want our friends to just lay there for next 5 mins.

In my opinion, the in combat/no waypoint change is the wrong approach to gravezerging. It feels like a lazy implementation and one can almost speculate that it’s to promote revival orb sales (which as much as I hate to believe, this may well be the case and it breaks my heart because AwesomeNet once cut sales just to preserve the existing players’ game latency experience and this is going the opposite way, I’d understand if you were a cheap free to play kMMO but being the 2012goty with so many players which many have already spent $100s if not $1000s in gems, this is just wrong.)

May I suggest an alternative?

Put a waypoint respawn timer on deaths. If you lay there for lets say 30 seconds and your party isn’t suffering more casualties due to your death, it means the boss poses no challenge to your party overall, your death was a fluke, and it’s just a timesink at that point that you’ll have to sit/afk through. Most of the Waypoints are so far away from the bosses anyway so an additional 30 seconds respawn timer should sufficiently reduce gravezerging.

Gravezerging, in my opinion, is already a really ineffective way of doing dungeons. The punishment for the group, and for the individuals that die is loss of time and lots of walking back in most cases. However, if there are party/build compositions in the game where gravezerging turns out to be more time-efficient, then something needs to be done about it. In this case, a simple flat respawn timer would totally cripple that playstyle.

Shameless bump but, this issue needs to be addressed.
Go to the lfg website and you see 200+ entries of CoF and 10 entries of CM. Not asking for content change or making any dungeons easier but, make doing them worth people’s while. I want friends to benefit from helping each other by being rewarded with stuff they can use regardless if they want the skin/stats (in this case, rares that can be salvaged to globs) from the dungeon in exchange for their tokens.

Sub-L70 Dungeons yielding L35~65 rares for 30 tokens is just a sick, sick joke when CoF/HoTW yields L68+ and being for the most part, easier.

Mod: Move this to Suggestions subforums if you don’t think this topic belongs here.

OK, we all know CoF is ran the most among the regular dungeons (non Fractal), even when most people by now has dungeon set for all of their characters. Why, because it is the easiest dungeon that yields ectos (token rares)

Many of the sub L70 dungeons are harder than CoF, yet at the same time the token rares they yield are very low level thus yield no ectos…

This means it’s hard to find groups for those other dungeons if you want to work towards a dungeon set.
I have a few friends that would party with me for those dungeons if I asked them as a favor, but they definitely are more enthusiastic about running those easier and more rewarding dungeons (cof, hotw, etc).

This is very bad. Please consider scaling the rare vendor armors from AC->SE to lvl 80.

Harder content with worse reward is a big issue in this game atm. This is just one example.

Vlaxitov.5693:

Orpheus.7284:

Vlaxitov.5693:

Orpheus.7284:

Trading Post actually requires a lot of game market insight to pull off, average player whines about it because they can’t do it, don’t want to spend time learning about it, and is bitter that other people are doing it.

The irony in that is I’ve come to recognize in several past games that a great deal of mmo market players often play the rest of the game at a below average level.

Pointless and opinionated remark. I’ve seen many great market players also being very great in PVE and PVP. There, i think we just canceled each other out.

If it was a jab at me it’s useless cuz I don’t even play TP.

Oh I have seen great players that play the market too, but I have seen more that it was the other case in my personal experience. I’ve seen it go as far as guilds carrying bads to raid drops via set prices advertised on their websites.

No that wasn’t a direct jab about you. It was a jab at your statement which was also a pointless and opinionated remark. I don’t consider a guy who camps a market in a mmo, sometimes with an auctioneer type mod, to be some victim of “bitter average players.”

The complaints aren’t saying you were wrong if you resorted to market playing in a mmo to get what you want with a reasonable amount of time investment rather than you shouldn’t have had to in the first place as long as you can competently play the game.

What’s considered reasonable amount of time investment, what’s competently play the game? Those are different from people to people. Slaying weak elementals (aka farming open world monsters) to me is not very competent way of playing the game.

No one has to play the TP…it’s just TP players get to the finishing line earlier than the others, and non TP players get jealous. You make it sound like farmers should be just as well off as TPe’rs…that’s not realistic. Again, I don’t play TP, there’s enough content in the game for me to stick around while hunting down legendaries, I don’t care if TP players, or cash players get their legendaries before me by 5 months, I go at my own pace. I just wish other players could see it that way.

Essence Snow.3194:

One thing that is kinda nice about having mulitple lvl 80s is that you can have them spread out across the world and avoid waypoint costs. I have one at each dragon, one at cof, one at ac, one at ta, one at southsun ori, and one in Orr. Currently working on 9th 80…second thief lvl 41 atm who mainly resides in la, but mapping is cheap on her still.

Awesome, I used to do that too then recently pulled all 7 of the characters i don’t play as much to Southsun Ori, will spread them out again once Ori price goes to 1silver.

An MMO keeps its “massively multiplayer” by catering to the long term fans, the hardcore player base that likes to have long term goals. The fast food way of thinking “i want this and i want this in less than x hrs then im done with the game” is simply not beneficial to the longevity of the game. EVEN SO…

GW2 is not very demanding on gold…I have 200 gold that I don’t even know what to do with other than saving for my legendary (and I’m very close to obtaining it too if not for precursors, which is a problem which they said they will balance in the future). I don’t play TP, i don’t farm, I just enjoy the game with my friends in dungeons and explore the world and made new characters to learn about them. Just by doing that I can deck out all 8 of my characters with all exotics. Like I said earlier, I haven’t played another MMO where I can say that . (Note: GW1 does not count because it’s not really an MMO, if Anet can admit that themselves, so could you.)

Rouven.7409:

Orpheus.7284:

(…)

Think about it, if they raise the drop rate of Lodestones on those Earth Elementals, a lot of people will be going to your little farm, you will get less kills per hour, and on top of that the price of Lodestones will drop.

(…)

Sounds good to me.

Farmers just love it when the stuff they’re farming becomes worthless right? Though I’m sure most people on the forum would love lodestones to be worth 5s a piece so they get legendaries, everyone in the game gets legendaries, then they say there’s no endgame grind or long term goal, whine some more, quit. Sounds good to me.

Vlaxitov.5693:

Orpheus.7284:

Trading Post actually requires a lot of game market insight to pull off, average player whines about it because they can’t do it, don’t want to spend time learning about it, and is bitter that other people are doing it.

The irony in that is I’ve come to recognize in several past games that a great deal of mmo market players often play the rest of the game at a below average level.

Pointless and opinionated remark. I’ve seen many great market players also being very great in PVE and PVP. There, i think we just canceled each other out.

If it was a jab at me it’s useless cuz I don’t even play TP.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Orpheus.7284:

I can’t see the fun in killing 7200 earth elementals either. Trading Post actually requires a lot of game market insight to pull off, average player whines about it because they can’t do it, don’t want to spend time learning about it, and is bitter that other people are doing it.

Think about it, if they raise the drop rate of Lodestones on those Earth Elementals, a lot of people will be going to your little farm, you will get less kills per hour, and on top of that the price of Lodestones will drop.

People have a choice in this game, they can be smart and make a lot of money, or they can refuse to use their heads and go monotonously farm weak monsters. I’m sorry if this game is too cerebral compared to other farmer friendly games you’ve played.

Pat yourself on the back harder? A buy/sell threshold bot can play markets as well as you can, and I don’t doubt that a lot of them are ingame, given the overall bot problems.

I don’t log into this game to play a market sim. I really don’t like the implication that players who wish to earn rewards by um.. adventuring in an adventure game are somehow “stupid”. I don’t buy the argument that a player staring at a market UI is somehow superior to a player actually playing the content.

Your market playing does not address or dismiss the lack of drops in the world. If anything, lack of drops benefits market manipulation.

FYI, i don’t even play TP. I just think it’s quite silly to bash TP players for being unfun while you are mindlessly killing 7200 elementals.
It’s not an adventure game btw, its an MMO, if all those years of MMOs haven’t taught you there’s an econmy in MMOs, then I don’t know what MMOs you have been playing.
So it comes down to how you make money, either very slowly and then complain about it, or, you know, the opposite.

Excuse me as I forget most people on forums will be in favor of increased drops and free candy and instant legendaries, so it doesn’t matter what I say it’ll just be ignored.

As someone who almost has all 8 classes at 80 (none which are powercrafted to 80), I can say it’s a great way to learn and enjoy the game. I will share some of my experience and hopefully can help some players out there.

For me, my first 4 characters each covered a region in the game (Ascalon, Shiverpeak, Maguuma, Kryta), and all have done Orr. Spoke to all the named NPC i could find and explored as much of Personal Story as possible. These 4 characters each had different crafting professions so by the 4th character I no longer need to master other crafts unless its for leveling.

The next few you can choose to be efficient about it and here’s what I chose to do:
Play your next characters to 30, as each race’s beginning storyline varies greatly depending on your character creation choices. The path to 30 is also quite fun because of a sense of progression (unlocking utility slots, skills, and eventually elite)

After 30, you are at the midgame, personal story will begin to look familiar because it becomes streamlined, and mid level zones are usually very empty compared to top level zones and beginner level zones, so it’s a lonely road if you choose to level regularly. Thirdly, you don’t have enough trait points to come up with any fun builds so you are just kind of in limbo for awhile when it comes to character progression.
Thats when I start crafting the following 3 crafts: Chef/Artificer/Jeweler. There are guides out there to help u cost efficiently master those 3 crafts in less than an hour, getting you 30 levels. Consider the gold spent here an investment that you will be getting back real soon.

Now you are level 60, what I consider the beginning of endgame, because starting now you will see more rare drops, and guaranteed exotic items from the lvl 60+ maps upon completion. If you want some math, that’s 12 exotics guaranteed from map completion, most of these are over 1 gold each, from my experience the average is more like 2g each due to lucky sigil/runes. These final 20 levels will also gain you a lot of insight on different possible builds so you can decide what final build you want to be.

If you are really against crafting I’d suggest do some dungeons between 30 to 60, but personally I don’t like doing dungeons unless I’m on my level 80 because that way I can get better tiered loot from chests.

I hope this helped.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

There is a threat with over 600 posts regarding drop rates.

Maybe, just maybe, the OP has a valid point.

This game has the worst drop rate of any MMO I have played in 10 years.

Maybe, just maybe, the game encourages dungeons or fractals, u know, slightly more difficult things. I’ve been getting 3~4 rares minimum per fractal run on top of other loot (cores), and that’s not even the most efficient dungeon for quick guaranteed money. I can afford every armor set weapon set for all 8 of my characters in the game other than the legendaries and I haven’t farmed or ‘played TP’ and I can’t say that about any of the previous MMOs I’ve played.

I can’t see the fun in killing 7200 earth elementals either. Trading Post actually requires a lot of game market insight to pull off, average player whines about it because they can’t do it, don’t want to spend time learning about it, and is bitter that other people are doing it.

Think about it, if they raise the drop rate of Lodestones on those Earth Elementals, a lot of people will be going to your little farm, you will get less kills per hour, and on top of that the price of Lodestones will drop.

People have a choice in this game, they can be smart and make a lot of money, or they can refuse to use their heads and go monotonously farm weak monsters. I’m sorry if this game is too cerebral compared to other farmer friendly games you’ve played.

If they can’t be educated, you can kick them from party. The actual stat is still not at fault, u can’t systematically ban MF from dungeons because some people like to fullclear and do those optional events…because to them, it’s fun and it makes them feel optimistic that exotics will drop more often.

It’s an issue that lies in the players, not the gear themselves. I’m beginning to get the feeling the people that hate magic find are the same group of people in favor of banning guns irl.

Edit: Okay maybe not guns. Maybe cigarettes, which many can then say “yes, exactly! and they banned smoking indoors remember! yes!” but keep in mind if they do that in this scenario they also need to create exceptions for indoor ‘smoking sections’. That’s just a lot of stuff to ask for, Anet has a bunch of other more important issues than this.