Guild Wars 2

EU and NA worlds are on totally different data centers. There simply isn’t the tech to guest cross-data center, and, honestly, I’m not sure why you would anticipate that there would be. It’s the very same reason why there are even different overflows between the two data centers and why people on one data center’s overflows can’t move to overflows from the other. They are legitimately totally cut off from one-another. Connecting them would require a massive single server for all worlds, which would be at enormous cost to ANet, or a sizable amount of tech for some interfacing, which is a lot of work for very little gain.

I’m sorry that this has negatively impacted some of you and playing with your friends, but maybe you and your friends should coordinate which data center you’d like to play together on. I, personally, anticipated this limitation. In the meantime, before the patch comes out that introduces this, you could always move your account to a different data center so that this is no longer an issue. They recently increased server population limits to ease world transferring in these last days when it is free. That’s the best I can offer.

Jzl.8715:

Will it be purchasable via gems?

As cool as that, admittedly, would be, I think they’d definitely want to sell it for $$$, not gems, which can be obtained either through $$$ or gold.

EU and NA worlds are on totally different data centers. There simply isn’t the tech to guest cross-data center, and, honestly, I’m not sure why you would anticipate that there would be. It’s the very same reason why there are even different overflows between the two data centers and why people on one data center’s overflows can’t move to overflows from the other. They are legitimately totally cut off from one-another. Connecting them would require a massive single server for all worlds, which would be at enormous cost to ANet, or a sizable amount of tech for some interfacing, which is a lot of work for very little gain.

I’m sorry that this has negatively impacted you and playing with your friends, but maybe you and your friends should coordinate which data center you’d like to play together on. That’s the best I can offer.

Not to be negative, but considering how bad the loot is from enemies in general, even if you sat around and waited for them to respawn, you’d still get less loot than just restarting the Urban City fractal repeatedly, breaking the door, and farming the dozens of mobs in there. Heck, this farm can even be soloed because of the lovely NPCs. Honestly, if someone sat around the Ice Fractal and farmed the Svanir, they’d be doing themselves a disservice and wasting their own time.

I remember when WM was on SBI; we weren’t crashing and burning through the tiers. Nowadays we’re outmanned in every map for more than half of every day. It’s depressing what this server transfer has done to our ability to WvW; we just can’t field the players we used to, and no one is transferring to our server to make up the difference.

I’m also sorry for what this has done to the servers WM has been facing. I don’t doubt that you’re all pretty good, but understandably you’re not T1 material due to numbers / coordination / whatever. You don’t deserve a score of 50,216 vs 302,599 vs 39,595. You deserve better. WM is a really good guild with amazing coordination; I’ve run with them before. What they’re doing here, though, is really unfortunate, and we’re all victims as they dominate everything. I wish you all luck in next week’s match-up, and hopefully then you find a more competitively meaningful environment to play in.

I also recognize that WM isn’t the only group on Kaineng. You’re all probably really good, but this transfer (and the others that came with it) was what really sent you sky-high in the scores. Maybe when all is said and done, and if WM abandons you too, you’ll be enjoying healthy WvW weeks as well. Good luck to you all.

The way I look at it is thus:
- Below level 10, have it target pets and summons
- At level 10 and above, have it only target players

This way, low level players just trying to enjoy content can use their ‘clever’ strategy to stay alive, but it gets ‘harder’ for them in higher levels, which not only makes sense, but speeds it up for the good players.

No it isn’t. Rob said he wasn’t going to change the Jade Maw’s behavior with respect to pets because “it is actually pretty clever” (Source).

I can see it now… “The top 200 offenders for most Black Lion Keys obtained through the Captain’s Commendations have been banned; their exploiting has been an act of wanton and willful destruction of the Gem Store and will not be tolerated.”

It’s possible that it could come in the January update, yet just wouldn’t factor the January monthly so as to not exclude players from getting their just rewards. Furthermore, it could also be in the February or March updates that the January update is serving as preparation for. I hope our January update is more than just the fractals stuff, though.

This source from Colin himself gives the scale at which we will be able to earn dyes. 5 days of dailies will reward 10 Unidentified Dyes, if you spend your “crowns” that way.

So for 5 days of dailies I can buy… 10 unidentified, likely-to-be-garbage, dyes? This is in comparison to saving up for a couple months and getting a sweet prestigious minipet, or two weeks for some “Mystic Binding Agent” items, which will undoubtedly be linked somehow to ascended gear. A more comparable number of dyes for that level of effort would be 20. I find more than 10 Unidentified Dyes in a week just running around with no MF gear for but a few hours a day.

Source is here. Note the picture a bit down shows dyes for sale.

It’s been unstickied! Does that mean the official dungeon finder is coming soon? /hopelesslyExcited

I don’t think PVT gear is selfish, bad, or worse than MF, and let me explain why.

I currently, after much deliberation and testing, run a PVT Guardian with Cleric’s accessories. I have found that this is helpful to the team in many ways, but I’ll give you the short list:

- The rest of the team can be much more reckless, and I can keep a full Berserker’s gear team alive while skipping sections of dungeons that would normally annihilate them if they messed up once
- I can use the Sharpening Stones and gain an absolutely massive amount of Power, translating into very impressive DPS
- The entire team can aggro larger squads and stay alive in situations that normally would kill them, allowing the team to clear the dungeon much faster than were I running Berserker’s gear. (Essentially, I can hold aggro very well as PVT, group enemies up, and keep them there for allies to wail on them with their full DPS gear)
- In high level fractals, this durability translates into a much improved survivability for the team in drawn-out encounters if I can hold aggro, which is not particularly difficult with many squads given GS 5 and my high Toughness stat, which in testing is directly linked (somehow) to how aggro works.

I would also like to move that having tried a Berserker set for the same character, I find that the team’s survivability is greatly reduced, and it becomes much more dependent on them dodging constantly. If the other Berserker geared players have to dodge less, the time they would have spent dodging can now be used to improve team DPS. Thus, I argue that my survivability improves their DPS. This is all without factoring in that people tend to get downed far less often when I get enemies attacking me, which also improves team DPS.

I did the dredge fractal on L40 last night, and we definitely all just used Spy Kits and had no trouble. They didn’t cheat and see us, or anything of the such. The Dredge just stood there until we were done, and then despawned as expected. I haven’t tried it on the CoE console, but I know it works for sure without issue or weird aggro issues in the Dredge fractal. Just remember that they have some slow projectiles, so if they shoot you before you use the Spy Kit, they can still down you.

Spy Kits are wonderful and improve my gaming experience in dungeons in pretty much every way. They also give me something to actually spend Karma on, which is wonderful, since there’s nothing else really worth it. I sure hope they don’t nerf / remove them.

Pardon my possible naiveness in the matter, but it doesn’t seem like that troubling an issue to resolve, the issue of risk/reward/effort balancing, that is. You have to calibrate the rewards and the dungeon itself so that the time and effort necessary to get the first “reward” is comparable to the time and effort necessary to get the next “reward”, and then reward people extra for full completion to incentivize doing it all the way. You make mobs more rewarding as you get further in and you “commit” more to the dungeon, and then people get to a point where they “may as well finish the whole thing for the end reward, that is great anyway”.

The solution is two-fold. Give people a core for completion of entire paths when NOT suffering from DR. This does a few things:
- Doesn’t inflate the market
- Massively incentivizes completing a dungeon
- Helps a lot with the current prices of lodestones without being too intrusive a change (Talk to John Smith about it!)
- The DR note is important, because it prevents people from totally facesmashing against a single path (CoF 1 for instance). You would want to avoid DR to get your core, and so people would be very mindful of not blatantly repeating content, and if they chose to, they’d willfully be giving up the cores.

The second part of this is to make drops from later mobs better than earlier mobs, but improve mob drops significantly regardless. This isn’t asking for 1s from every mob, or guaranteed drops, or whatever. Just improve the loot tables, and make the loot tables even better for enemies later in the paths. This further incentivizes players to get further in the dungeon.
- To avoid the risk of people simply running to the end of the path for late-path mobs because they drop better, you could scale it instead to how many mobs have been killed. The more you kill, the better your loot.

These are just some ideas that would go a long way to improve the current situation. I understand design is a difficult task, and has many hoops that you must pass through to get something put into the game and appropriately controlled, but this (risk / reward and dungeon value) is about the #2 most important thing that could be had in dungeons right now, with #1 being exploit / bug fixing.

Yes, making them account bound would be a great plan in the interim as you investigate the harder issues you discuss above. As it stands, I have an entire bank slot dedicated to the silly things from different characters, and it’d make a lot more sense if I could just merge the stacks.

GW2 has a nice split, with the exception of medium armor, which is abysmally stale in all regards. There are also way more modest heavy sets than revealing sets, too. Honestly, I’d say that they could do with more revealing sets in general for both genders to balance it better.

I’m actually a bigger fan of the more revealing hips in the beta version, though the asymmetry of the clutched, partially revealed boob is certainly more aesthetically pleasing as well. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if I could actually dye the random grandma panties they put on the model afterward, but as it stands you can’t. It’d also be nice if the panties weren’t grandma panties and were more like Norn Heavy T3, but well, let’s just go back to the beta version and all will be forgiven.

GvG is very close to tPvP right now, with the exceptions that nowadays, party size is smaller, and the objectives of the game style are different. It seems clearly intentional on ANet’s part to have shrunken the party size. It is possible that one day certain parts of the game will implement greater sized parties, but I don’t think we’ll see any such changes until a major expansion comes out; that is a very significant core change.

I liked GvG as much as the next guy, but GW1 was named after The Guild Wars historical lore-related event, as linked above. Guild Wars 2 is in the same universe and is a direct sequel to the first, and so carries the same name. That’s not an excuse, that’s what happened. If you want GvG, that’s a fine suggestion and one day ANet may implement it, but citing the name of the game as the sole reason for its inclusion is, err, well, unconvincing.

You do not get a cosmetic upgrade in the case of the quivers/books. Furthermore, the capacitor backpiece has an extra upgrade after the +5 AR for an additional 250 ecto. That last upgrade is fine, as it’s no better stat-wise and you’re paying for the shininess. The upgrade to get the AR, however, does not justify that price.

That’s exactly my point; it didn’t seem too good to be true, or at least no more so than my friends creating stacks of BL keys out of candy corn or getting multiple precursors from the Karka event. In hindsight, it still doesn’t seem too good to be true by comparison. Anyway, this’ll be my last post regarding this topic in this thread. I’m more interested in hearing what Mr. Smith has to say about in-game economics than the inevitability of my own ban when I accidentally cross an arbitrary threshold I won’t know exists.

John Smith.4610:

Lets not turn this thread into a discussion of one specific exploit.

Yes, agreed. I’m done, and apologize for bringing it up.

I don’t want to diverge the thread from its original discussion, so I will keep this short. Maybe if you’re creating thousands of snowflakes to salvage, it’s clear that you’re in it to profit. However, I created a stack of ecto, and I didn’t think it was an exploit while doing it. The change to the value of ectos seemed totally intentional to me; people were converting mithril and snowflakes into ecto. It didn’t seem any more radical to me than dropping precursors out of the Ancient Karka chest, dropping Arach/Crossing/Mad Moon out of the MK chest, dropping permanent bank access items out of the MK chest, or allowing people to convert exotic trinkets into BL keys. If I had 1 more BL kit to waste, I would’ve used it, and I’d be banned right now because of it.

It might be easy on the outside looking in to say that it was obviously an exploit, but hindsight is 20/20. If ANet had told me somehow “This is an exploit” I would’ve never done it. As far as I was aware, however, I was converting BL kits, which cost a boatload of gold, and mithril into ecto. That didn’t seem too far-fetched to me, and seemed in-line with Regina’s post about lowering the cost of ascended items (what spurred the increase in ecto value in the first place).

I guess my only point here is thus: Don’t lump everyone into the same boat and give anyone who made hundreds of these snowflakes the black mark of ‘exploiter’. ANet is free to ban whoever they want to whenever they want to, and I won’t argue that, but the difference between me and someone who was banned for the snowflakes is negligible. If ANet had said something, anything, I wouldn’t have salvaged a single one.

Ah, very well Mr. Smith. My friend was banned for having salvaged 337 of the snowflakes, which with BL kits (which I know he used, because he was trying to get rid of his BL kits) is ~1.4 ecto/salvage rate. Thus, he alone created ~468 ecto. I imagine there were several offenders who created well above the average, balancing this out.

He specifically noted that the exploit resulted in that many ectos created; there is no need for all 275,000 of those ectos having been made by those who were banned. Imagine, for instance, that 10,000 players only salvaged around 5 of the snowflakes, resulting in an average of, say, 4.5 ecto created per player. That alone accounts for 45,000 of the ectos without even factoring in those who were banned. I know that I, personally, only narrowly missed the ban cutoff after having salvaged exactly 184 snowflakes. Imagine several hundred other people being in the same boat, and 275,000 ectos created is not so far-fetched.

There are very few places to acquire them:
- Extremely rarely as a loot drop
- Gems purchased with gold (expensive in-game)
- Gems purchased with RL currency (expensive in-real-life)
- As a random drop from BL chests themselves (not feasible as you need a key to maybe get a key)

If they ever re-enable Lionguard Lyns, you may be able to get them with Captain’s Commendations in Lion’s Arch, though it is uncertain whether BL keys will still be available from her when/if she is re-enabled.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

You might be surprised at how many problems that might cause. “Fast cast ground targeting”, for example, is an option you have to turn on under Options, but I regularly see posts from players who can’t figure out why siege weapons won’t work for them. (It’s trying to target their mouse cursor.) If you click on the title line for story steps, meta events, etc., it will hide all of the objectives. You’ll still have the green step title, but it will clear some of the clutter.

Not to blatantly disagree with what you’re saying, but the error message one receives for the fast cast ground targeting and siege weapons can be misleading. If it noted somehow that it’s because of the option being on that the skill failed, no one would have an excuse to be confused.

The reality, however, is that for every option, someone will turn it on, experience the intended effect, not know what happened for whatever reason, and then will report it as a bug. For every dozen players who ask you questions about fast cast ground targeting, I surmise that there are thousands who understand and use it perfectly. I don’t think it’s fair to use those few people as a means to inhibit valuable development for the thousands.

Have an option in the hero panel to disable it. Have it enabled by default. Thus, the only people who would ever have to enable it again already know where it is because to be in that position they had to disable it to begin with.

Elementalists are so powerful as it stands, with 20 skills in a single weapon set while other classes have 5. I need to say that in-combat weapon switching for Elementalists should be out of the question. I am not averse to an out-of-combat weapon switch for Elementalists and Engineers, however, as a quality of life improvement.

Eh, I finished this achievement, and I wasn’t that bothered by it. If there were a title, I wouldn’t wear it. Either way it’s not as prestigious as GWAMM or DM. I don’t necessarily disagree with this suggestion, I just don’t think it will make it any more meaningful to most players. If they add something similar to GWAMM in GW1, then yes, definitely having a title would mean a lot. (Currently that analog does not exist in GW2)

I think difficulty can indeed exist. Positioning matters a lot in this combat, so area of effect indicators can follow specific, predictable (or unpredictable) patterns to create threatening and yet dodgeable situations. You can put pressure on a team that inhibits their ability to dodge everything; you have to choose your dodges, or perfectly position yourself, etc. There are already a couple very good examples of this in-game.

As an example: I never wipe against GL with my guild. That said, GL is still a ‘difficult’ boss. He requires situational awareness, class knowledge, team planning, tanking, utility planning, trait planning, and the whole nine yards. This makes him fun. I don’t think GL is nearly as hard as things could be. I can personally think up about a dozen boss mechanics that could easily trump GL. Here’s another example: Grawl Shaman Boss in L50+ FotM. Ridiculously challenging considering the number of things that you have to be aware of, and yet one of the most enjoyable boss experiences in the game because of it.

tl;dr: I think difficulty can be done, just not with more HP and more auto-attack boss damage. I think ANet knows this, and is moving in the right direction. (Also better rewards for good players!)

It’s not the only case. The other case is when you enter into an Overflow. The “You’re in an overflow” pops up after 5-8 seconds, which causes this exact same type of frustration by causing hero panels etc. to pop up as you’re typing. If you’re fixing this one with PvP, can you also fix that one with overflow messages? Thanks Evan.

The issue that most people have is mostly the following:
- I encounter a Veteran opponent
- I kill some of his buddies (Takes, let’s say 45 seconds to kill a couple dudes)
- I fight and kill the veteran (Takes roughly 2 minutes)
- The buddies I just killed to make the Veteran fight easier have now respawned

This gives the illusion of “enemies I just killed respawning before my very eyes”, and most players, without thinking beyond “OMG JUST KILLED YOU” and raging, as seen in the OP. No one is really sure how exactly respawns work for areas because we’re not ANet, but I think in general it would be better if enemies in an area don’t start their respawn timers until there are no longer any enemies in the area, or something along those lines.

Here’s one instance where this happens a lot, Jeff:
Outside Owain’s Refuge in Southsun Cove, there is a little canyon area where there are a lot of Young Karka. Typically, I’ll fight these Karka, and as I fight them, others patrol into me. That’s no big deal. However, many times there are enough Karka that I cannot kill them fast enough before the first ones I killed start respawning. This isn’t to say that, individually, their respawn timers are too short (indeed, I think they respawn fine), but that when you fight a group and cant kill them simultaneously (it’s easier to kill them one by one as it lessens the damage stress you must endure), you will be overwhelmed when they respawn and then patrol back into you or as they appear next to you.

That’s just one example.

No, Slacker, that is incorrect. It costs 50 ecto to create the first level of the non-capacitor back pieces (whereas the first level capacitor costs only relics). It then costs 250 ectos to upgrade it to (Infused), which is necessary for the current maximum of 30 AR. The infusion costs a stack of ecto regardless of being a capacitor or book/quiver.

EDIT: Apparently Slacker deleted his post after realizing he was wrong, so mine doesn’t make much sense now. Suffice to say that I agree with the OP. I would be more than happy to shell out 10,000 fractal relics to avoid paying 250 ectos.

Maybe it’s enough that you can get a pretty skin for your hard work (or, rather, RNG in this case), but it’s not for me. I don’t want any of the fractal weapons. I have several, and would happily give them away if I could, but I can’t. Do you know what ‘skill’ was required to get them? A lucky L20 run. That says nothing about my talent as a player beyond that I could get to L20, which is no feat at all. There is no skill requirement to them right now. They are not a reward, and they are barely even rare. I’ve seen so many more of them than I’ve seen of other coveted weapons, such as Volcanus or Mjolnir or Infinite Light.

Guild Wars 1 had the right idea here; everything unique you could obtain from a dungeon, every coveted item could be traded. It didn’t make them any less valuable or sought after. It didn’t make you any less deserving of the item. Making money is a skill in itself. I, personally, can beat every instance in this game, period, and I have practiced and become incredibly good at playing the game. I cannot afford anything special or that makes me look accomplished, however, because nothing is rewarding outside of farming boring and easy dungeon paths. There is no reward for a good player in this game.

One of the most important things that this game lacks right now is a way to make money for being a good player of the game (not the TP). Seriously, think about every single aspect of the game right now, and see if you can list a single thing that actually makes a good amount of money that actually requires skill. Think about what everyone has done to make money in this game: CS Plinx Farming, Arah p3 Farming, CoF p1 Speed Running, AC Speed Running. These are all very simple things to accomplish, require no skill, and pay out way better than anything else you can do, even if you factor in drops. Now think about what FotM rewards you with at let’s say level 60. 25-50 silver, some rares, and maybe some cores. There is nothing coveted about that, and more often than not you don’t even fare that well. The only things that matter about FotM you can’t even make money off of, which is terrible.

Now I knew walking into this thread that none of my suggestions would even get considered by ANet for FotM, but this serves as an example of what they should absolutely do in the future. Give skilled players a way to make money by being skilled players. That is the ultimate point here. Make coveted weapons obtained from skill at the game tradeable so that they can convert their own abilities into a way to make money.

As much as it’d be nice to just turn it into the other dungeons, I think skilled players really need a way to turn their skill into a reliable way to make gold. I can beat any dungeon in the game, can take on the hardest difficulties of FotM, and do you know what I have to do to make money because those things don’t matter? I have to farm CoF. As a player who prides himself on being a really good player, the game just doesn’t offer anything that rewards being a really good player. It’s all backwards. FotM is as good an opportunity as they’re ever going to get to actually create some rewarding elite dungeon content at higher difficulties.

FotM is a very valuable dungeon to run because it has a decent loot table, good rare drops, good exotic drops, good chest drops (cores / lodestones), and so forth. However, these things only go so far. There is a set of very rare skins that is highly coveted from FotM, but ANet is not capitalizing on it properly and allowing players to capitalize on it properly. They should take one from their own book and look back at Tormented weapons and how you got them.

Here is my proposal to make FotM truly rewarding for those who push to the deepest and darkest levels:

1. Make Fractal Weapons Soulbound on Use, Not Account Bound
Let people trade them. I understand not letting people trade the karma skin items that can be obtained from FotM chests, but letting people trade Fractal Weapons is crucial for this even being a valuable means of achieving anything for players.

2. Remove Fractal Weapons from the RNG Daily Chest Loot Tables
Those who already have them will have Account Bound versions, so they wouldn’t mess up the economy for those who get them after. Removing them from RNG and making them earned by tokens would be critical for this suggestion to work.

3. Allow Players to Trade Pristine Fractal Relics, Fractal Relics, & Fractal Weapons
Being able to trade these allows players to actually make money from their runs. You may say that this removes the prestige of finding one, but in-fact it does not. If you can afford to buy it, you deserve it no less than someone who is skilled enough to find one. Note that this would only apply to Fractal Weapon skins earned after this change was implemented; the ones found before would remain Account Bound.

4. Make Higher Tiers of FotM Reward More Pristine Fractal Relics
This is a big one. Consider the following proposal of how much to reward per daily chest:
00-09: 0 Pristine Fractal Relics
10-19: 1 Pristine Fractal Relic
20-29: 2 Pristine Fractal Relics
30-39: 3 Pristine Fractal Relics
40-49: 4 Pristine Fractal Relics
50-59: 5 Pristine Fractal Relics
60-69: 6 Pristine Fractal Relics
70-79: 7 Pristine Fractal Relics
80: 8 Pristine Fractal Relics

This makes it actually rewarding to go deeper. The deeper you go, the more of these pristines you earn for your efforts. This is important to reward players beyond going deeper for the sake of challenge.

5. Add the following Mystic Forge recipes to obtain tradeable Fractal Weapon skins

1 Mystic Scroll + 250 Pristine Fractal Relics + 1 Gift of Ascension + 100 Orichalcum / Ancient Weapon Item

You specify which fractal weapon you want with the orichalcum / ancient weapon item (ie. Orichalcum Greatsword Hilt), and the rest is earned from paying some skill points, some fractal relics, and more importantly, the now-tradeable Pristine Fractal Relics. A full stack of these for one skin would make these skins valuable, and simultaneously continue rewarding players who go deeper into FotM to earn more per daily chest. So not only could players earn money (without inflating the value of gold) by earning Pristine Fractal Relics, they could turn around, make the coveted fractal skins, and sell those for a good return on effort as well.

What have we accomplished?
- We have made Fractal Weapons obtainable through hard work instead of RNG
- We have allowed exceptional players a way to earn good, sustainable, non-inflating income by being good players, something GW2 sorely lacks at present

There’s only good to be done from this. What do you guys think? I welcome feedback, and thanks for reading.

I loved DoA because it was so difficult when it first came out and later on HM that most people couldn’t complete it, which meant that the rewards you got out of a HM run (or the runs when it was first released) were very valuable. I was a very, very good player of GW1, and I made my entire fortune running DoA. It wasn’t even a small amount of money, either; I made hundreds of thousands of plat and essentially could afford anything in the game that I wanted. I loved being able to make money from playing the game. That is sorely missing from GW2, which now rewards you more money for playing the market than playing the game.

What I’d like to see ANet take away from this is that they should introduce either a new dungeon or a new difficulty so challenging that less than 1% of the population can complete it, with rewards that can then be sold to other players. I want to be able to translate my skill in GW2 into gold to then actually get the items I want. FotM, unfortunately, doesn’t allow this due to the nature of the RNG rewards and the fact that everything unique you can get out of FotM is account bound, which is a major disappointment.

Report exploits to “exploits@arena.net” without the quotes, not on the forums.

I think support builds are important. What’s bad is investing too heavily in Healing Power over other stats. Healing Power doesn’t make up for the stats you lose elsewhere, and the benefits they could’ve provided. It’s important to remember that.

I play a support Guardian, and I play an indestructible build. If I’m playing properly, I cannot die, period. Not even GL can take me down if I’m paying attention and on top of my game. That said, I don’t run a lot of healing. I run enough to get the job done, and run support traits to keep myself alive and to help out across the board, but I don’t overdo it. My support extends to the rest of the team, too, by applying tons of might, reflecting, blinding, the works. People say that healing builds don’t really work, and while you’re not going to be keeping everyone alive through the worst of it, I can keep people alive usually better than they can keep themselves alive without investing much (if any) into Healing Power.

I carry something like 6 different weapons for different situations. In doing so, I can adapt to what the team needs and when. GS is critical, but sometimes I want other things. Realistically my dps isn’t very high compared to a Warrior, but if I wanted to do massive dps, I wouldn’t be using a Guardian to begin with. Deal decent dps, use reasonable amounts of CC, support through your offensive strategies, never go down, and you will do fine.

It works with cultural armor, yes, but it maintains the “Race Restriction” field. ie. You could transfer the cultural armor anywhere, but can’t use it on other races. Cultural weapons are not race-restricted and can be bought by any race, so they work as expected.

Only certain paths of certain dungeons count for the Hobby Dungeon Explorer title track, not all of them. If you do a path that doesn’t count, it won’t increment (of course), but if you do one that does, it will. It counts for any character on your account.

What we should have is not a dedicated development team member, but a dedicated development team liaison. This person just needs to bloody communicate with the player base about what’s going on in each class, why they’re considering it, and enact conversations with the community. They don’t have to promise anything, or even confirm anything. They could pose theoretical questions weekly or whatever and ask for the players’ opinions on assorted topics, then assess the threads at the end of the week. Heck, they could even start inane topics about what we like most about a given profession, and even that would substantially improve how we feel about the class/the development team/the game.

I don’t want more developers, I want more communication.

Yes, yes, ever the community’s job to answer questions about the game as the developer looks at the code with all the answers and cackles.

Thanks again for the clarification about the Fractal ToD situation, though. Would be a nice fix, but yeah, I’m sure you’re a busy fellow and have more pressing nuts to crack for the January update.

It is likely an oversight on ANet’s part. I would consider this a bug.

In the future, I also wouldn’t be half surprised if they made a Mystic Forge recipe that required both pistols, and created another pistol with a unique skin called Lyssa. It seems almost too obvious to pass up for them.

It’s probably not finished yet, or they want to expand it in a future content update before giving it its own achievement. They did this with a number of jumping puzzles in the Lost Shores update, for example.

Let me preface this by saying that I agree that the Commander icon should not be purchased with gold.

However, the major issue with this is the impact it has on the legendary grind. You propose one thing that bothers me here. If JPs no longer award badge, the only plausible venue for a player to get their legendary without killing players repeatedly has been removed. You may argue that’s a good thing, but I feel that there’s no doubt that badges coming from those chests and then being used for legendaries is fully intentional on ANet’s part. Quite frankly, I agree with them there.

I’d much rather the solution be to not use badges at all for the Commander icon, but some type of WvW title. ie. You get a title that is the “Commander” title, and while worn, you get the icon. This Commander title could require T2 of every one of the other titles in WvW, or something along those lines. That way you know that everyone with the Commander title (and thus icon) is a solid and experienced WvW player. This also removes the issue of the jump puzzle from the equation entirely without damaging the process of obtaining a legendary weapon for anyone.

Took me 80 minutes to do Sunday, so, yeah. I don’t think it’s that bad. Definitely not worth the time as far as monetary/loot-based rewards are concerned, but if you need/want Arah tokens, it’s pretty good.