Guild Wars 2

JoeytheHutt.1742:

isnt there a bag wich weapons will go to if theres available space in it? I havent tried, just remember I read something about it when unlocking recipes while crafting.
I use safe bags, because I have missclicked compact instead of deposite too many times..

Equipment bags are useless for managing your equipment. There needs to be a free slot in the bag if you want it to “catch” an offhand weapon that has been automatically unequipped, so that means you have to open your inventory and pick out the white/blue/green/yellow gear that gets stuck in there every time you loot.

A Soul/Account Bound bag would still have that problem with trophies and mission items, but those are rare enough that it’s nowhere as inconvenient.

My experience is similar to Vayne’s in that if I don’t party up in an event like Modniir Shaman, I very rarely get champ bags from any of the three warbeasts or from the shaman, only the 1/day big box at the end; conversely if I do party up I am guaranteed champ bags from two of the warbeasts (rarely the third one, because the zerg tends to split up between the remaining two and by the time I’m done with one the third is almost dead/already dead) and one from the shaman.

I found this to be true across all characters (one of every class, all at level 80 and in exotic gear), even with condi-heavy builds that had their DPS lowered because of how conditions work (or rather how they don’t) in zergs.

That being said I never needed to party up to get gold credit for doing the event, which is confusing because you’d think if I did enough to get gold credit I should have done enough to get a drop.

A dev did state the this was a bug with the new wardrobe system that they want to fix, but is a difficult fix and thus won’t be coming soon (not sure what sorcery they did to make changing which string should be displayed so difficult, but apparently it was some terrifying sorcery).

I rather like the idea of a Soul/Account Bound bag as well, it’s a simple and straightforward way to drop your gear back into a proper equipment bag whenever you swap dual-wielded weapons with two-handed weapons or unequip anything (like infinite use harvesting tools) in the Hero window (if you drag to the Equipment tab instead of to the Inventory window).

The only problem I could see arise is if you put the Soul/Account Bound Bag before an Oiled Bag; I would rather have all my trash go to the bottom of the pile, where it can be minimized and forgotten. Why is trash soulbound, ANet!?

Jornophelanthas.1475:

Personally, I hope that the group of characters will be given an in-game name (for example, if they founded a guild), so that this would make this corny developer-pun obsolete.
(And no, I don’t believe “Delaqua Investigations” would cut it.)

Either “Destiny’s Kitten” or “Kitten’s Edge”.

On one hand I like Sanctum Sprint’s loading screen, on the other hand I have no idea why they’re building a space port on top of Kessex Hills.

FrostSpectre.4198:

Aggro exists, Aggro page on Wiki

1. closest target to them
2. who is dealing damage
3. top damage dealers
4. who is using a shield / has more toughness and overall armor
5. others (see Tanking tactics below)

Of course boss monsters would have more unique aggro values, since if they didn’t, we’d have a dedicated tank.

Well, nobody is saying aggro doesn’t exists, it’s that aggro management doesn’t exist, which is necessary for people who want to “tank” with low DPS and high Toughness/Vitality.

Mada.5319:

Monsters aggro onto the guy with the highest armor/toughness. Tried and tested since launch.

Supposedly the highest armor/toughness and lowest vitality, but I haven’t seen that to be true; some seemingly ignore stats and aggro based on distance (Spider Queen in Ascalonian Catacombs comes to mind), others on highest initial DPS (Shurakk in Queen’s Pavilion would fixate on the first high DPS character to hit him, sometimes to the point of ignoring everyone else even if the aggro target hides behind a wall), and still some for seemingly unknown reasons (pretty much any defense event with lots of players participating, mobs will go after just about anybody despite a high toughness/low vit character trying to get their attention).

If it really was as simple as a specific stat combination maintaining aggro then we would have a lot of people advocating the use of “tanks” in organized open-world events to help manage adds – but we don’t.

Dusty Moon.4382:

He might do a little less damage but survive longer( more armor and HP), so it is a crap shoot, depending on how good he was. Zerker isn’t everything in this game.

I see more zerker’s down in fights with world bosses than any other type of gear because they are glass cannons and the world bosses have huge HP pools compared to how much damage Zerkers put out.

You’re exactly right, Zerker isn’t everything in the game. There’s Cleric and Soldier for power builds vs. bosses/structures that can’t be critically hit, Apothecary and Dire for condi builds, and Knight/Cavalier mix for toughness with slightly lower DPS vs mobs. There are already options for being durable without sacrificing too much damage, but the fundamental problem with Nomad is that it potentially gives up damage for healing and tanking stats in a game that doesn’t reward healing and tanking.

The Giver’s set notwithstanding (given the seasonal crafting material), it was previously near impossible to build something that had absolutely no offensive stat; regardless of how you picked your traits, your gear normally gave you some power, condition, or (if you went for Magi) precision (to proc those on-crit traits and sigils); the Nomad set now allows for someone to create a character who has none of that, which people can easily do if they ignore the fact that GW2 actively discourages the Holy Trinity (massive HP pools that scale, timed events, lack of aggro management mechanics, pool healing power scaling, etc.).

So while it’s true that you’re free to play however you want and that not everybody who goes for Nomad is going to build something that contributes nothing to group events (while still scaling it up), you have to realize the potential is there and that contributes a lot to the negativity toward the stat set. The only thing you can do is play well and prove people wrong.

Though chances are for every one of you, there will be ten others proving them right.

Jerus.4350:

The lag, is just absolutely horrid. What kind of change did you guys make at the end of thursday to screw over the entire weekend?

The end of Thursday was the start of the 4th of July.

Maybe someone spilled celebratory beer (totally different from regular beer) on a server during an office party.

I doubt it’ll be fixed this weekend, being the July 4th weekend and all that.

If people can’t flip, they can’t keep paying the TP tax, which reduces the effectiveness of the tax system as a gold sink. Presumably there’s enough flipping going on that ANet sees a fair deal of gold leaving the economy because of it, which would allow them to accurately predict how big an impact stopping flipping would have on the economy.

SkyShroud.2865:

try starting the event….
in other words, talk to the npc to start the event, it might help
also, try to be there at the start of the event, before it turns hostile

Tried that as well, didn’t help me any. I’m going to try on another character to see if it might be a character-specific bug.

That being said, for everyone who’s not getting the achievement: which achievements do you already have? I’ve got all the Dry Top (except this one, natrually) and Gates of Maguuma achievements done, so could it one achievement is blocking progress in this one?

Edit: I tried the event again, but this time with a different character and managed to get the achievement. The fight went pretty much like my last attempt: started the event, got to the platform first, and got knocked once during the fight (but recovered using a stun breaker before reaching the edge). It seems the bug is character-based rather than event-based.

There’s actually a thread in the bug reports forum where people (myself included) are beating her without ever getting knocked, much less falling off the platform, but aren’t getting credit. I’ve done this fight a bunch of times, won four times without every falling off, but still haven’t received credit.

Tempted to cheese it and do as PhoenixIin suggested, but I think I’ll just try with a different character instead.

Edit: welp, tried with thief and did blind spam instead and got the achievement. Seems like the bug is character-specific, for whatever reason.

The entire concept of “grind for RNG” is pretty cancerous, but this at least this is far more tolerable than chance bags. I don’t have to grind Dry Top events for another currency specifically to buy the right to fight one dust mite at a time, for the chance to get a unique drop available nowhere else; it’s just something that drops in the process of my regular playing, so getting nothing from it doesn’t suck, and everything it drops I can easily acquire elsewhere.

It is ridiculously arbitrary that we have to sift through ten piles of sand at a time though.

“Hey, is that a lockpick in that pile of sand?”
“Wouldn’t know, I’m short one pile before I can sift through it.”
“But… it’s a piece of hard metal sticking out of a pile of fine sand…”
“Nope. One more pile.”
“Look, I can just grab itOHJESUS, I LOST MY HAND IN THE SAND!”
“You can look for your hand once I get one more pile, but there’s no guarantee you’ll find anything.”
“THIS MAKES NO SENSE, IT’S STILL CONNECTED TO MY ARM, BUT I CAN’T FIND IT!”
“Reported for spamming.”

A trick I found that did wonders in the EotM bucket jumps as well as this new jump is just to drop a personal waypoint where you’re supposed to land. It won’t help you avoid hitting things on the way down, but it does wonders in helping you figure out if you’re over- or under-shooting the landing.

Danikat.8537:

Even Peter Molyneux learnt that lesson.

I don’t believe that, instead I would like to believe that his company hires big, burly men to tackle and gag him every time he gets near a phone or networked computer to prevent him from communicating with the real world.

I’m also getting this bug, beat her three times without falling off at all, but I’m just not getting credit for the achievement.

Edit: make that four for four now. It’s my last achievement, so I’m done with this map until it’s fixed.

Zackie.8923:

it was reintroduced in the festival? what? i didn’t see it in the rewards list

The rucksack, wind/sun/lightning catcher, and desert rose were drops from the equipment boxes you buy using materials.

I’ve been getting the “This is not your active story. Any progress made in this instance will not be saved” every time I enter my home instance. I know this message is only supposed to pop up when I enter a purple LS transition interact, so it’s a bit out of place.

It wasn’t created with small parties in mind either, unless they really tone down the Marionette defense and platform fights, the LA evacuation requirements, and the Tricolor Knights fights, or find a way for people to form 100-man parties to start the chapters with, it just won’t be possible to do.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Also getting all the armor weights not to clip horrendously with each other would be a nightmare.

To be fair, a lot of armor sets within the same weight class clip with each other anyway, so it’s a bit of a moot point.

People viewing vistas get the Invulnerability buff (so you can actually watch the cutscene without worrying about a stray mob murdering you), allowing vista usage in combat would – and I’m not even using hyperbole here – completely destroy WvW. Zergs would just camp vistas in EBG keeps (also vistas right next to BL garrisons) and fire up a script to spam F to become permanently invulnerable until defenders leave in disgust, leaving them free to take the keep.

Because you’re asking for a seventh piece of equippable gear with stats (which means there’s going to be tons of balancing involved, not only for stats but for runes as well), new UI in the Equipment and Wardrobe (for face items), and a slight increase in hardware requirements (because now every person you see potentially has one more item being rendered on them, up to a maximum of 8 models being rendered on each character).

Behellagh.1468:

You have one camp of players who say “Why can’t I wear/transmute <wrong weight> armor onto my <correct weight> armor?” So they come out with outfits and now another group of players chime in “But why outfits, I want to mix and match?”.

I would argue that those two groups are actually the same. The entire point of wanting cross-weight armor skins was to increase the number of options for building character looks and make results even more varied, which turned out to be infeasible due to technical limitations that ANet wrote itself into early in the game design.

The Outfits system not only completely misses the point, it has managed to produce the exact opposite result by making people who wear the same outfit look alike across all weight classes; worse yet, it was done at the expense of the Town Clothes system, which further reduced customization options.

GuzziHero.2467:

I don’t even think it looks particularly a. ninja-like or b. Japanese. It has more subtle Chinese hints to me, and the only reason people are associating it with ninjas is the name and the mask.

Not sure I’ve ever seen a ‘ninja’ image outside of the worst cartoon depictions where they wear armoured bracers and shinguards, shoulder armour and metal masks.

Sorry, I’m really not seeing it, about the only thing in the shadow assassin outfit that hints at a Chinese influence to me is the use of jade in the male version; conversely the shoes are very obviously tabi, which were used in Japan but not in China, and the style of the robes could be a hanfu or kimono, but the overlapping semi-circle patterns (traditionally used in Japan to symbolize waves) and sakura flowers aren’t used in traditional Chinese clothing at all.

The nodachi also pretty much solidifies the impression that it’s supposed to be a “ninja” outfit, even if it’s not being sold together there’s still an association going on since they’ve been introduced into the game files on the same day.

Edit: another detail I forgot to mention was the belt, which is a thick sash with cords wrapped around it, which is reminiscent of certain styles of Japanese obi, but not a style used in any traditional Chinese robes.

Behellagh.1468:

I am an “any programmer” but thanks.

Well then, you don’t need to go far to confirm the veracity of my claims

GuzziHero.2467:

It isn’t for us, it is for China. So was the Ancestral outfit and so will Belinda’s No-dachi when it is released in the gemstore.

Everything is geared for China now. We are just lucky to have access to it as well.

Dude, that’s like saying a Cuban Revolutionary outfit is targeted toward an American audience. Right general part of the globe, but that’s about as close as you’re getting.

The whole ninja/samurai culture isn’t big (or even small, for that matter) in China, it doesn’t appeal to the average Chinese player any more than any European sword does; the dragon jade weapons would be more culturally relevant than the Japanese-themed items.

(Also potentially less offensive, but I won’t go into that)

Behellagh.1468:

I seen a slightly different problem, that the same item seems to drop with increased frequency. Days where I do get an exotic and choose to put it up for sale there’s a significant uptick of supply for that item over the next few hours. As if that item dropped onto a number of players within the same hour or two. Like if you roll for an exotic, everyone gets the Twin Sisters and since now supply is greater than demand and everyone is undercutting each other it doesn’t seem as special.

Of course there could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. It just seems … odd.

That’s because, as any programmer can tell you, RNGs are not truly random. They all require “seeds” to generate their numbers, the most common (and simplest) being the computer’s clock (because it’s a value that’s constantly changing). You can make the RNG more complex and produce less repeated results by including extra variables (like character’s position, which theoretically should be changing most of the time, total sum of the numeric value of character names on the map, or some other value that should change frequently), but you can’t make it too complex in the interest of efficiency.

So, yeah, it’s likely there’s a time element in ANet’s RNG.

Funset.7893:

Can you use this outfit in combat?

Yes.

Caedmon.6798:

And why are we being disallowed to mix n match ?

Presumably because making armor skins available for all weight classes is too labor intensive, so instead they shoehorned in a one-piece outfit system at the sacrifice of the town clothes system.

It’s nice that outfits can be worn by any weight class, completely misses the point, but a nice gesture nonetheless.

Like the mobs in the Pavilion, almost all the mobs in the LS (not the new zone, the actual LS instances) do not count as kills and thus do not trigger kill effect sigils, food, or traits (complete list here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kill_effect).

I can understand not wanting the mobs to give exp as anti-farming/grinding measures, but can we please get a solution that doesn’t break parts of the game mechanic?

Welp, I wound up grinding more chance bags.

4500 chance bags in total:
16 favors of the pavilion
4 mini toxic hybrids
1 monocle
1 toxic spore skin
1 chaos of lyssa recipe.

So that works out to one item every 195 bags, but since favors are basically worthless, it’s more like one decent item every 643 bags, which is about 129 gauntlet fights, which (if I average 30 second per fight) works out to one item per hour of constantly murdering Hamli.

And that’s not even including the time wasted waiting between fights.

So… wait, if people buy gems and immediately spend it on gem store items instead of converting it to gold, does that not affect the gold->gem conversion rate?

I can understand the rate going down if more people buy gems with real money, but if you _have- to convert it to gold first then the system would be inherently stacked against gold for gems. Who would buy gems to convert to gold with such a skewed exchange rate? Spend $10 on gems so you can convert it to enough gold to buy $6 worth of gems? If that’s the case there’s little wonder people gold->gem rates keep going up and people keep getting suckered by gold sellers.

That’s can’t possibly be the case, I trust.

Apparently the deathly pauldrons (regular, avian, and bull) do not unlock across all weight classes as well.

Like others have already said, just join the blitz channels in teamspeak, TTS was awesome enough to make it available to the community with no requirements beyond (basically) “don’t be a jerk”, so make use of it.

It seems like they did something Monday to improve overall network performance, I’ve noticed most maps are completely lag free (actual network lag, not low FPS/choppy animation “lag”) on first zone-in; previously (ever since the megaserver patch) I would need to rezone half a dozen times before the map would finally give me playable ping (which was really annoying for dungeons).

The problem I have with this idea is that it still does nothing to address the lack of gold sinks; reducing the production of gold from dungeons is a long term solution as the wealthiest of players would still be playing with thousands of gold and effectively dictating the price (either directly or indirectly) of everything on the TP. It would take months, or maybe even years (depending on how bad the situation is, only ANet knows), for prices to normalize, in which time you’ll have new players coming in every day and being turned off by the massively inflated prices and terrible gold drop rate.

And for a game that is supposed to be marketed toward casuals, I don’t believe ANet would want to accidentally make themselves out to be another Lineage 2 in terms of gear/gold grind.

Being simply AFK in the Boss Blitz does not give you credit, you actually have to tag the boss in order to get credit.

That being said, there are a few AFKers who are very obviously botting; they run a simple script that alternates between switching targets and autoattacking, so you’ll see them stand in the same safe spot for hours and tagging anything that comes within range (even when there’s no Boss Blitz going on).

Vol.7601:

You must have some incredibly bad luck. They significantly buffed rewards.

Unless you mean ‘no rewards’ means ‘no recipe’

I opened 2000 bags post-patch and only got 8 favors of the pavilion out of it, so I understand where the OP is coming from.

On the other hand there are people reporting they got 3~4 recipes from less than 500 bags, so it really feels like the RNGod either totally hates you or loves you.

Thing is the fused gauntlet and air filtration device are both items with stats that share skins across weight classes, but each has unlocked skins for all weight classes when I used them; the monocle (and from your linked discussion the breathing mask) are the exceptions to this, so there’s an inconsistency in results.

If someone with the deathly pauldrons could chime in on whether or not those unlocked skins across weight classes it would be helpful.

From what I understand (and experienced) when you unlock a shared skin on a piece of armor for one weight class (such as the zephyr helmets, fused gauntlets, air-filtration devices, etc.), it should unlock for the other two as well, but that currently isn’t happening for monocles. I just unlocked the light armor monocle skin, but medium and heavy are still unavailable.

Oddly I haven’t heard anyone complain about this before, is this a bug that was introduced in the last patch?

Such is the nature of the RNG. It’s not really punitive, per se, but it simply doesn’t reward effort; it’s also the easiest (laziest) form of time sink that all MMOs use to keep players grinding until the next shiny thing can be released.

Nokaru.7831:

Radakill.3469:

I have seen in the past other MMO’s have had similar situations and their solutions for staffing have turned to their player base for help.

So what MMOs are you referring to? I remember Ultima Online had a system of “Counselors” which were basically players that fulfilled the role of volunteer Game Masters but with much less power. It was hard to police them whenever they bent the rules so it inevitably led to abuse and the eventual dismantling of the entire system since it was unfair to all parties involved.

The lesson to take away from this story is that the only people you should give any power in a video game are those that actually have something to lose if they abuse or misuse it – namely their job. Losing an account just isn’t enough of a deterrent in some cases.

I’m pretty sure it was actually the Counselor lawsuit that demanded backed wages (three times minimum wage) for their “volunteer” work in response to some benefits being cut that killed the program. I stopped playing UO by the time the lawsuit came out, but I was in Asheron’s Call and their volunteer program got axed very suddenly when details of the lawsuit came out and I’ve hardly seen any MMOs offer volunteer positions since then.

Harvest.2506:

I have 8 eighties, its stupid easy and fun to do it. just go uplevel in wvw if you’re lazy like me.

OP isn’t complaining about how fast it is to level, it’s how tedious getting traits are now. Doing events to get traits is fine and all, but it gets real old real fast, especially if you’re doing it for multiple alts.

I’m glad I got one of every class to 80 before the patch.

Honestly, if I see two people in the same guild behaving like that I’d just bail. The chances of them doing exactly what happened to you in the end are too high to bother wasting your time with them.

I think it’s an interesting idea in that it would certainly discourage AFKers/botters (yep, seen blatant bots in the event) and late comers from zerging remaining bosses in a desperate attempt to get credit, however I think there’s two problems that can arise:

1) It is punitive toward people who weren’t able to make the donation, which isn’t so bad since a gold blitz only lasts 5-7 minutes, but…
2) It is open to potential abuse by griefers with too much gold and too little sense. A handful of players can quickly fill the donation bar since there’s no maximum amount a single player can donate, which would block other people from donating as well.

I actually used a ranger to get the Subject 7 achievement fairly easily. If I recall correctly, I first dropped a frost spirit (traited to have a 70% chance to give a 10% damage bonus on hit), opened up with Rapid Fire on Subject 7 while walking up to it, Point Blank Shot (maximum knockback since I walked up to it), Lightning Reflexes (traited to have extra damage with full endurance, so I try to avoid dodging) to maximize distance and autoattack damage, around 50% health I used the wolf’s (pet found in WvW map) fear ability to get scare away as many healing slimes as possible, and Healing Spring whenever I dipped below 50% health (sidestepped a lot to help reduce the hits I took).

Might help if you poison Subject 7 to reduce the healing it takes too, the forest spider has a 6s poison, which might make a good choice for the second pet.

Pure berserker ranger (6/6/0/2/0, Steady Focus, Keen Edge, Eagle Eye, Sharpened Edges, Quick Draw, Moment of Clarity, Vigorous Spirit) and gear.

Edit: Idly, I know OP doesn’t care about the achievement, but that was the only attempt I remember beating Subject 7 on. The non-achievement attempt is lost to the veils of time and frustration.

Mityr.1320:

U should use those tickets, need like 3 hours and u can get nice rewards, my self i got 1 lyssa recipe and a monocle out of 1100 chances

I got six favors of the pavilion from 2200+ tickets. No skins or recipe.

I would say people who don’t want to waste their time in unrewarding games of chance should be given an option to do something else with their tickets.

It’s just a prelude to player housing, where we have to build our own homes – brick by bloodystone brick.