Guild Wars 2

I got to level 45 with 25 AR, and could have gotten to 50 and beyond if the patch hadn’t put a stop to it. You can call me what you like, but the reality is that the AR barely helps in 40-49, you die at maw anyway, and I don’t have the good fortune to make enough money to dump 250e on another +5 from the back piece.

That said, of course you will run into scrubs now. There’s nothing that can stop it, because anyone from any level can join you. Just do a gear check and hope for the best if you’re going to pub it.

Kraggy.4169:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bingo. I love difficult content; it’s what I live for in games like this. That said, difficult content with poor rewards is, well, pointless. Why do a difficult encounter for the same (or worse) rewards as a much easier encounter?

So doing something for the challenge alone isn’t something you do, it’s “pointless”. Your ‘love’ of difficult content is dependent on that content yielding phat lewt it seems.

Why have fun for no reward when I can have fun for more reward elsewhere? If you don’t have many hours per day to play, you not only want to play to enjoy yourself, but you also want to make effective use of your time. These events, currently, are not a good use of one’s time regardless of how fun it may be. Just like in real life, I love my job, but if my job didn’t pay me well enough, I’d find another job in the same field that I’d enjoy just as much (if not more) that simultaneously pays better.

Vapor Form doesn’t kill you when it ends, however. Advantage goes to Elementalist. That said, I don’t think the Warrior downed state is nearly as bad as, say, the Necromancer downed state. Vengeance is pretty awesome, and while I think its charge time should probably be reduced a little, I don’t think it’s a real issue.

I’ve considered doing it this way, but it would suck never getting the maw daily chest (the whole reason I want to progress in the first place).

Hrm, +105% isn’t bad. I wonder if the 30% Coin Booster lasts for a long enough period of time to make it worth it.

Lavath.8924:

I used to be on SBI and really loved it. When we came in third, I still loved it. Then drama happened and people fled like it had the plague. When my guild left, I figured it was time to just let the memory of the SBI I knew be just that. So, since I moved on, I don’t know if I can call it pride or loyalty or whatever… but I certainly enjoyed SBI pre-cataclisym.

There’s no less pride for it now than before; arguably the opposite is true. There was no cataclysm, and there was no plague. People just left a server that started losing because other people had left before them. It’s a chain reaction that began with [WM] and continued through dozens of other guilds. Now, those of us who remain are very proud of our server, and are willing to try our hardest to ensure that it stays as competitive as possible, despite people having left it when it needed them the most.

The +20% Gold Find is for utility infusion slots only. Note that the only utility infusion slot we currently have access to is in the Ascended Amulet item slot. That means that the maximum you can currently get is +40% (Omnom Bar) +20% (Infusion) = +60%.

Good call Errant, that is almost definitely the reason for why it kills you regardless of whether you are out of combat or not. Makes sense to me. (Shame the QA team discovered it before we did!! Haha!)

Zenith.7301:

Then you might consider rewarding better than blues and greens. Not just blues and greens with the odd rare and an infinitely small chance for an exotic and even smaller chance for a Precursor.

Bingo. I love difficult content; it’s what I live for in games like this. That said, difficult content with poor rewards is, well, pointless. Why do a difficult encounter for the same (or worse) rewards as a much easier encounter?

That’s good; I have no issue with this solution to whatever exploit he found then.

That said, I am curious as to how the exploit operated and, due to my investigative personality, will hypothesize on the nature of the exploit. I suspect, because most fractals have much smaller maps than dungeons, that what happened is as follows: Person would die in a boss fight, say against something like Bloomhunger, intentionally disconnect and reconnect, come back to life, and then run back to the boss to rejoin the fight. This would have essentially been graveyard zerging.

The curious thing about this is that even if you’re out of combat and disconnect/reconnect, you come back dead. I wonder why it was implemented that way, hrmm..

Does this death damage your armor?

I think the real problem is thus: “If I want a legendary Short Bow because I use Short Bows, I must get the one that shoots rainbow unicorns with ANet logos.” It’s the same problem many Necromancer players who like dark and foreboding effects and go “If I want a legendary Staff because I use Staves, I must get one that is all rainbows and sunshine.”

I think what should really be gotten out of this is thus: Players want the ability to choose. Right now we don’t have that ability. Of course, we could always choose to not get a legendary at all (which is a fine solution), but legendaries should not be exclusively for those who like rainbows and sunshine or darkness and death or whatever. There should be legendaries for all of us.

Transmuting merely takes the appearance, stats, and sockets of two items and allows you to combine them how you want. It will not upgrade your capacitor.

We already know what they are:

Monthly Dungeon Participation (3 tiers)
Monthly Event Participation (4 tiers)
Monthly Salvage Kit Usages (4 tiers)
Monthly Completionist: “You completed your daily category multiple times in a month”

(Source)

Even when there are only five of us on a map, I support my server now more than ever when it needs support the most.

Firstly, it’s important to differentiate between farming for something that has zero effect on how you play, and grinding for something that you need to be the best that you can be. The “legendary grind” as people call it is not a grind at all, because heaven knows you don’t need a legendary for anything. It’s no different than Obsidian Armor in GW1; it looked cool, and that was it. The “legendary grind” really just requires a lot of farming X or Y or Z or whatever makes the most money the fastest, or whatever is most tolerable for your enjoyment of the game, etc.

A lot of people, myself included, were spoiled by playing GW1 for seven years. Nothing was a grind that involved best-in-slot items. You played the game normally, and could even pay someone to run you to Droknar’s Forge early in the game, and buy max stat items for a pittance of plat. Then you didn’t have to worry about it ever again if you didn’t want to, which was wonderful.

GW2 didn’t have a gear grind prior to Ascended items. Ascended items are a gear grind no matter how you slice it, because there is content you must perform repeatedly that you might not do otherwise without the BiS gear at the end of the tunnel. Before, you could do daily achievements and monthy achievements if you wanted to, you were not compelled to. Now, if you don’t, you will miss out on best-in-slot Amulets, which is an important part of maximizing the effectiveness of your character. Similarly, you have to farm Fractals of the Mists to obtain best-in-slot rings, which are another important part of the maximization of your character. These are grinds, and they are forced upon us to be the best that we can be (which is important, regardless of the individual differences seen in the item stats).

I don’t like the grind, but I’ll deal with it because I want my characters to be the best that they can be. It’s really as simple as that, and while I’m pretty confident that ANet has changed their philosophy over the years, I enjoy the game enough that I’ll sit on my thumbs and do what they make me to get my gear. It’s not fun, but it is what it is. That’s my stance.

I will make note that all of the “of the Dragon’s Deep” weapons have generic icons, and do not have icons specifically showing what each of them look like. I anticipate that this is well-known to the devs, but figure I’ll mention it anyway. Thanks for the hard work, art team!

For many people, the gold to change servers is the entirety of their net value in-game (if not more). To put this in perspective, changing servers to a very high server is the same cost as upgrading to the digital deluxe edition of the game, or the cost of more than 3 bank slots. Farming 40g for transferring is prohibitively high, and is beyond reason. It isn’t a matter of transferring to a server because of population here, it’s a matter of “I want to transfer to wherever my friends are”.

I think what was the most unreasonable, however, was maintaining the 7 day wait-time for retrying after the announcement was made that free transfers were ending. Removing that 7 day limitation would have allowed people who made mistakes in that last bit of time another chance to get it right, and would have allowed people to fix mis-coordinations. Being on a different server than your friends if you are a WvW player is perhaps the most game-breaking and experience-thrashing thing that can happen to you, and I honestly feel that it could have been better handled. I think ANet should do something about this, but I highly doubt that will happen, and sympathize with the people who will probably quit the game because of it.

A discussion for this is already happening over here.

I think the best approach here is to keep the lava debuff on them when defeated, but to not make their corpse take damage. It makes them impossible to resurrect even in the heat of battle.

January’s monthly doesn’t reward Laurels for anyone at any time. Monthlies start rewarding them in February.

Abuse his AI for so long that he learns new tricks to nail you with! Mossman must have been playing WvW recently.

Each one has a different infusion type (offensive, defensive, utility).

That’s 3 ticks of 10. When you’re that high, those remaining 7 ticks are more than enough to kill you, and if you die and res, you have to suffer the full 10 ticks all over again.

SBI isn’t dead, but the end of free transfers means we’ll never be able to compete in the top tiers again. We have roughly 2 guilds that stayed with us through thick and thin, and roughly 4 out of every 5 commanders have little experience (but are trying, which is promising). I expect we’ll bottom out somewhere near IoJ in T5, but we’re still able to field enough people to fight well in the T4-T5 region.

In some sense, I look forward to the reset, in others I don’t. In the grand scheme of things, my server will still fight as hard as it always has, through thick and thin, and we look forward to seeing you all on the field. Best of luck.

I support this.

We should be able to get Ascended gear our way, like Colin once said. To accomplish this, amulets and back pieces should be available with Pristine Fractal Relics just as rings are available with Laurels. Furthermore, back pieces should be obtained with laurels, too.

Wow, they have a 20% more gold infusion? That’s like a requirement for farming now. I wonder if they stack….

January’s monthly achievement doesn’t give Laurels no matter what.

I have to craft to get my daily? Jeebus that’s terrible. Did they add the “choose which ones you want to do” system yet, or do we have to do whatever they throw at us?

To be fair, the crafting daily can be done by refining. I finished the crafting daily in 10 sec by refining a pile of jute.

Well that’s a relief, then. I was thinking I’d have to do some 400 recipe crap or whatever.

Doggie.3184:

Then you will burn in the center of the volcano fractal.

Been there, done that.

Doggie.3184:

You simply have no soul if you don’t love them.

I accept this fate.

It’s because the players en masse love Quaggans, so ANet puts Quaggan stuff in the cash shop because they know people will buy it.

What about slow-moving projectiles that are dodged simply by moving away from them mid-combat? Projectiles such as the Necro Staff 1 come to mind where such a scenario is frequent.

No, because it is no less rare than it always was before the rich ori vein was introduced. Now it’ll just return to a little bit under what it was before November 19th. This bubble will pass, especially given the added incentive for players to return to Orr.

If Defiance were replaced with Stability, you’d have the ability to drop Well of Corruption on a boss and corrupt its Stability into Fear for an interrupt. You could also achieve that with Corrupt Boon. That was where I was going with the above idea, and I think that’d help a lot with the class’s shortcomings in dungeons.

I like the idea that others have proposed where Defiance is essentially as follows:

Unshakeable: When struck with Crowd Control while not buffed with Defiance, this unit gains Defiance for X seconds

Defiance: This unit is immune to Crowd Control.
——

To be honest, I almost think it’d be better if, instead of Defiance, you just gave it Stability. This way exceptional players could tech to remove the Stability boon (only a few select few classes can do this). This would be a good way to make Necros, for instance, feel useful in dungeons again since the Fear nerf.

I think Defiance and essential immunity to CC is fine, but I think being able to successfully interrupt a boss is an important part of combat. This is something that existed in GW1 for most bosses, and really added depth to combat. I’m not asking to chuck the boss across the room, knock him down, or even break his AI, but to be able to interrupt a skill they’re using.

In GW1, the solution to this for “big bosses” that were supposed to be difficult to interrupt was to require X interrupts before they got interrupted. This is in-line with how Defiance works now, which is fine, but having this mechanic on every single champion+ in the game essentially makes combat against non-bosses more interesting than combat against bosses. That is a real problem.

So last night EB was depressing. Five different people from a SoR guild were camping every single exit point from the SBI spawn, and we just didn’t have the numbers to even field an even number of players against them. It’ll be a real uphill battle trying to get our keep back this week.

On the flipside, I think our entire WvW force has given up on any map other than our BL. At least that way we can field a competitive group of players even if we are still outnumbered. Hasn’t been too bad, but we definitely have a lot more casuals and non-WvW-hardcore lately. I’ve had to explain what a Mesmer Portal is far too many times for it to be people trolling, haha. Anyway, we’ll keep trying, even if we never go above 65 PPT this week. I look forward to T4.

Skale Venom isn’t too bad, honestly, though it does make a difference in combat. At the least it doesn’t totally change the way you plan defending a point. I was going to buy a stack of Skale Venom, but I think I’ll wait until the patch just in case they get nerf swatted too.

I, personally, agree with the spirit of removing the GiB from WvW. They alter the PvP structure of the game style, and I think that alone is enough reason to remove them regardless of how good they actually are.

It resets in 105 minutes. You get the borderlands based on your color, or placement, in your tier. First place (highest ranking) is green, second place (middle ranking) is blue, and last place (lowest ranking) is red.

The legendary process is too easy, it just requires too much money. I’d much rather obtaining a legendary require that I be an exceptional player and accomplish seemingly impossible feats of gameplay prowess than play Trader Wars 2. Ignoring that, however..

I have always said the following:
- Require a stack of clovers (250) for a legendary
- Guarantee 1 clover from every use of the 1 recipe (and 10 from the 10), as well as 1 (10) of the other items RNG’d

This creates an identical sink, but makes it so you don’t feel as though you’ve wasted money. The RNG as it’s implemented right now is bad in that it makes the players feel cheated, rather than like they got something successfully.

I’m stuck at 81/82, despite having all of the hints checked. If it helps, the last hint I completed was the siege weapon one.

Only a WvW player kills things in PvE and wonders why the loot doesn’t appear at his feet.

Technically it will be CD / Kaineng / YB, and not the way you have it listed in the title.

You need to realize that John cannot answer questions like “What do you think about the lodestone market?” The reason he cannot is because what he says has an extremely significant effect upon the market itself. If he says he thinks they are too expensive, people will sell-sell-sell before they are made more accessible and thus cheaper. If he says they are too cheap, people will buy-buy-buy before their drops get nerfed. See the dilemma? He is, almost assuredly, bound by a specialized NDA that totally disallows him from talking about that sort of thing with the community. It makes perfect sense to me why he doesn’t answer those questions.

4 days. Patience, my friend.

I think the problem with lodestones is that there is a serious imbalance in the number of applications for each type. Crystal Lodestones, for instance, are only used for a smattering of runes and the Reaver of the Mists (and even then, a mere 20). Meanwhile, Charged Lodestones are used for Infinite Light, Mjolnir, Gift of Lightning, and every Foefire weapon in large quantities. Of course they are highly demanded by comparison. I don’t think releasing a bunch of new lodestones into the market is going to help anything, but what ANet should absolutely do is work to balance the supply relative to how much demand they want the item to have. Did they intend for Charged Lodestones to be used for so many things at a market level? Or was it done that way based on ‘flavor’, which in turn dictated the market value?

When you leave a dungeon while dead, you appear where you were when you entered the dungeon, which may or may not be at the dungeon entrance. And while loading screens may not be a problem for uber computers, it’s still an annoyance and makes this functionality you speak of more of a pain than it is worth. Once you get back into the dungeon, if your team is in combat you can’t use WPs, and thus have to run to them. There are very few encounters that could feasibly be zerged in this way.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s a fair solution to say that you can’t enter a dungeon while your team is in combat. What if I just start a dungeon and haven’t joined yet, but a couple people from my team are fighting the Spider Queen from AC without me? Does that mean I am disallowed from joining, helping, and being rewarded? I don’t think your proposal is a fair solution, and addresses a problem I’d hardly consider a problem at all.

Avatar of Belle.9623:

I had to smile at your self titled “underdog-of-the-year.” I’ve been on Eredon Terrace from T1 to T8. If you are the “under-dog-of-the-year” then Eredon Terrace at the bottom of the WvW rankings is “under-dog-of-the-century.”

Kardiamond.6952:

Rising Dusk.2408:

This is not a recruitment post (though if anyone wants to join the underdog-of-the-year in WvW, that’d be awesome)

“Underdog of the year”?

A server from Tier 1 being the underdog? What the heck man.

Haha! Yeah, I was trying to think of something appropriate, considering what happened to HoD and ET in 2012, and figured “year” was acceptable given that 2013 just started and that’s really when we started dropping. Underdog of the month might’ve been better, but really it was just meant as a sarcastic remark to lighten the mood.

We’re T2 and definitely dropping, but I think we may be able to hold out in T3 / T4 depending on how these next few weeks play out for us, and also depending on how many people we can retain during the transfer epidemic before paid transfers go live. We will have to wait and see! I’m positive it’ll play out well enough.

I don’t think there’s anything they could do about that Maled. You can’t force a player not to leave a dungeon instance, nor can you force a dead player outside of a dungeon to be unable to revive. Fortunately, this is alleviated by the fact that:

1) The player when re-entering the dungeon must start from the dungeon entrance (very very long walk)
2) The player now has to pay to revive at a WP outside the dungeon rather than for free inside
3) The player has to go through two additional load screens to do this.

I doubt it’ll be a concern.