Guild Wars 2

Does each different Fractal get treated as a different time of day in a similar manner? So, for instance, the Solid Ocean Fractal would be night due to there being stars out, the Cliffside fractal would be day, and the Underground Facility fractal would be night due to the underground nature of the area? Is there any way you could confirm which dungeons/fractals are which time of day (day/night) so that we can document it on the wiki?

Thanks for your corroboration either way, Rob. We always appreciate it.

You will probably want to update this to reflect that Fear no longer bypasses Defiant stacks for your Condition Necromancer notes. Otherwise, I think this is a lot more insightful than other guides I’ve read, though I already knew everything said here because I, too, play a Necromancer in high level fractals. :P

I know in a past update, they made AC weapons glow in underground situations as well. I believe they did this because people were sad that they weren’t able to experience the glow of the weapons, but no one can say for certain. I have no idea whether this affects Sigil of the Night or not, all I know is that certain dungeons will always have AC weapons glowing all of the time.

The forums are not a grey market. This thread has been reported.

Let me preface this by saying the following:
I salvaged 175-200 (if my count is right, exactly 184) of the Mithril Snowflake rares for ectos during the course of this Wintersday event and created ecto.

I was not banned for it, nor did they want to ban me for it after I brought it to their attention by ticket because it did not cross into the bannable levels. I consider myself lucky in some ways, but in others I don’t. I lost one of my best friends in-game to this exploit, to a difference of only 75 or so salvages, and this is my post explaining the tale. Having said my piece to ANet about it, and talked to some members of the team personally, I understand their stance, despite not agreeing with it. I want to share my experience with this exploit with you all, so that you can understand that you do not have to be stupid to not realize this was an exploit, you do not have to be malicious in your intent to use this recipe repeatedly, and that this could have happened to anyone.

—

There is a lot of grey area with this exploit that I will cover first. In the game, currently, and noted as not an exploit, there are many ways to create 0-3 ecto out of 0 ecto. This is a typical way of obtaining ectos in the game. Examples include the rares generated through Tailoring, Leatherworking, and Armorsmithing. Along with the Wintersday patch, which is the patch that introduced this exploit, Regina made this post in the news, which discussed a lot of changes to the cost of Ascended items, which, mind, cost a metric boatload of ecto. Now while there is no mention of a new recipe that specifically makes ecto less rare, ANet has set the precedent in the past repeatedly that recipes are meant to be discovered, and are nearly never given out to the public except in rare cases (like the Mystic Chest recipe).

Thus, I make the argument that it is not at all unreasonable for someone to make the connection that “this is ANet’s intentional attempt to make ectoplasm cheaper”. By the time I had personally seen this recipe and what it could do, there were countless posts about it on Reddit and on the forums, no indication by anyone that it was an exploit, and the market had completely balanced around the change. I said to myself that “Finally I can afford to get my Mystic Clovers!” The reduced price of ecto was a godsend, and I had so many Black Lion Salvage Kits that I was never going to use that it was wonderful. I actually thanked ANet in LA and was genuinely really happy with their patch and what could be done with it.

Flash forward a day, and I find out that it was an exploit based on John Smith’s post here. I was terrified! I had no idea what to do, since the deed had already been done. I felt terrible, and although it seemed totally fine to me before because it had been in the game for so many days, I wished I hadn’t done it. I said I’d be more careful in the future.

I do not like being labeled as a cheat, or a fraud, or as actively engaging in wanton and willful destruction of the economy. I did this because I was excited, I thought it was fair because the market had balanced and everything seemed fine, and because at the time the costs balanced out the rewards unless you were really lucky (which I’m not); I have been in good standing with ANet for ~7.5 years, and the only reason I even make mention of that is because I never actively seek to abuse economy-based exploits or things like that.

I don’t think my friend should be banned, but I can’t argue that point with ArenaNet. I can only hope that they reconsider their very harsh stance for an exploit hardly of the same magnitude of the karma weapon exploit of olde. Perhaps they shouldn’t ban people in the hundreds, only the thousands. How do they decide the cutoff between people like me and those inflicting wanton destruction on the economy? The difference for me was 75 salvages. If I had 3 more Black Lion Salvage Kits taking up space in my inventory, I’d be on the other side of the fence right now, banned with no remorse and no appeal. Hopefully they’ll reconsider some of the bans that happened here, and work out a system to better prevent people like me and my friend from getting caught up in the storm.

Did you also look into the fire spell rings on Alpha, or just the ice spell rings? If the fire spell rings are also in-line, good on ya’. Just trying to make sure that it’s all working as intended. Thanks for your diligence!

Everyone, COME!

Jason King.2647:

We’re working on the minions’ behavior now and will be testing some changes to see how they work. Thank you for your patience, everyone!

I’d find it a lot more enjoyable if his ice spikes were randomly placed instead of always occupying a set path. The set path makes them trivial to dodge, whereas randomizing it would make him potentially terrifying at higher levels (more spikes based on difficulty).

It’s been fixed.

The only reason this makes me sad is because this boss is so horrifically boring. When I could AFK kill him, at least I could better spend the 10 minutes of whittling down his seventy million HP. The sad thing is that I go this entire boss fight (legit) without ever getting hit once, and I know I’m not special, lots of people can do it. Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of a huge waste of time, the boss were actually mechanically challenging or something?

Vol.5241:

If you got those BL kits for ‘free’, either through daily achievements, quests or from chests that you opened from non-bought keys, you can absolutely make profit.

There are sigils out there that cost a lot and only come from drops. There are some armors out there that sell less than the sigil itself. With a BL kit, you can get back that sigil plus profit from selling that sigil back. And don’t forget about the ectos!.

Keep in mind though the taxes on the trading post.

I mean, that’s true, but the profit margins are very weak right now. There have been times in the past where I’ve made significant profit this way, but right now because of the high prices of everything, the margins are shot by taxes. You just don’t make enough gold to justify wasting a BL kit, which even if ‘free’ has a net worth intrinsic to itself based on its value in gems. Thus, they rot in my bank until a good opportunity comes up.

Oh for the love of God, please let it go. Fight in PMs; no one wants to see it here because you’re totally ruining any chance of this thread having relevance to developers. Biology and peoples’ body structures and so forth are totally irrelevant to this discussion.

JonPeters.5630:

Because Jonathan knows more about what we are doing with PvP, and because we don’t say we are doing X until we are 100% doing it or else we get a lot of you said X, I wants it NOW!!!

My.. My PRECIOUSSS!!! WE WANTS IT BACK! (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

This thread’s premise is incorrect. Less than a few weeks ago, someone posted a picture of their Mesmer dual wielding Bolts on Reddit. Furthermore, I’ve seen a Charr Warrior running around in game using Frostfang and Bolt in the offhand.

My problem with BL kits is how to get rid of the 20 something of them I have, not how to get more. The things just aren’t worth wasting on 90% of items in the game. I only tap into them to pull runes / sigils out of something, and even then only if the rune / sigil is worth the use of the BL kit.

They should add a MF recipe to convert a bunch of BL kits into a 100 use kit or something.

It can also be done using the Ranger shout “Search and Rescue!” which can use the pet to resurrect the players after they’ve died to Agony.

I have had an issue where when harvesting, I will get attacked, enter combat, and draw my weapon, which causes my harvesting tools to fail to harvest nodes. This will result in ruined ore chunks and ruined logs, and has been around since forever. The problem is easiest to reproduce if you are out of combat, then get hit by an enemy while harvesting.

More likely than anything else is that your Avast is giving you a false positive; Avast is known for that sort of thing. There is also nothing at that URL (though I suspect you truncated the full URL).

They only become account bound if, when transmuted, the target stats of the new item chosen are not soulbound. If, for instance, you wanted to keep Volcanus’s stats, it would stay soulbound. If you chose the blue items stats, however, it would become account bound.

You can hoard these if you want, but I’d sell before the event is over personally. The reason is because the value of these items hinges on the influx of toy frames, which will cease after Wintersday. Furthermore, since the toy frames are account bound, there’s no way for a player to acquire more post-event. As a result of this, stuffing and glue will become essentially worthless as the frames fall out of the market. This will be especially true given that there are tons of glue/stuffing already on the market, so it’s not like supply will be in shortage.

A good friend of mine was banned because he helped me make ecto using this method since I wasn’t max jeweler at the time. The only reason his numbers must appear so high is because he literally crafted enough of these things for me to burn through all of my BL salvage kits (I had like eight).

Anyway, let me put some perspective to this. When I first realized that this recipe existed, I thought the following: “ANet is intentionally trying to drive down the price of ecto because it is getting out of control, and I applaud their active stance in helping players” Do you know why I thought this? They added dozens of recipes to the game that require full stacks of ectos in order to play the deepest and darkest difficulty FotM that exists currently. They even made posts in their change logs about their continued monitoring of the prices and costs associated with ascended items and how they were going about balancing that. It made perfect sense to me that they did this intentionally. I said to myself “Man, what a great opportunity to get myself some storage space back and maybe get some stuff that requires ectoplasm!” By the time I started having my good friend craft these for me (for which he was banned today), the market had completely normalized; there was no profit to be had from this at all. It cost the price of an ecto to get the materials to gamble for ecto. The only difference was that I had accrued many a Black Lion Salvage Kit through gems and otherwise (which all costs quite a bit of gold), so I only had to make one of these snowflake items. Great, I thought! How wonderful of ANet to help the market like this, I thought!

I didn’t think anything of it until the recipe was removed and subsequently changed. I had already done the deed, but I had no worries because the market had completely stabilized around the new conditions. It had become no more profitable than crafting level 75 rare tailor items to salvage for ectoplasm, which told me that it was totally legitimate and that ANet decided post mortem that “ehh, maybe we went a bit too far”.

Now, because my friend crafted a bunch of these stupid snowflakes for me, he has been banned. I’m not okay with that. If ANet wants to drive their loyal playerbase into the ground, including people like me who have been customers for a few years shy of a decade, then so be it. I have been in good standing in ANet games (and all games) my entire life, and am shocked that I should have been banned for this, and am even more hurt that I have somehow brought a ban upon someone else for this. I have submitted a support ticket in the hopes that I get banned in his stead, but regardless, I need to say it here that I do not condone this ban. I agreed with the karma item exploit bans, but not this. This was market stabilized in less than 24 hours. This seemed fully in-line with everything that was said by ANet in the change log. This appeared to me fully acceptable within every known parameter in-game. This had a profit margin less than that of standard day-to-day market flipping and manipulation. I had every bit of confidence that this was okay by ANet, and that is why I did it. If ANet had made an announcement, maybe in GW2 (the game)‘s news feed, I would’ve stopped or avoided it, but they didn’t. They kept silent until it was too late, and our fates already sealed. I’m not okay with that. I can handle a lot of things, but this takes the cake. I am sorely disappointed with the company for their actions this day, and hope that they remedy this situation and get their procedures straight for the next time anything remotely close to this ‘exploit’ happens.

I’ll only comment on the hard runs. My opinion is based on having completed every jump puzzle in the game repeatedly, and specifically seeking out the hardest ones for the greatest challenge.

The clocktower is by and away the hardest jump puzzle in the game. The Sanctums are pretty tricky given the PvP component. Otherwise, I’d say Griffonrook Run is pretty calamitous and will result in many deaths, though you don’t actually need the bomb to get the achievement, just the chest. Scavenger’s Chasm is a frustrating and time-consuming jump puzzle if you won’t look up hints. It took me 45 minutes to find all of the orbs involved, and some of the jumps are unintuitive, unguided, and downright tricky. I believe that’s probably the ‘hardest’ normal, untimed jump puzzle in the game. I’d say Skipping Stones is easier than all of these, although it is pretty tricky; there are some neat places where you can ‘rest’ and wait for another round of geysers before continuing, which alleviates a lot of the timing stress. Also, shoutout to Professor Portmatt’s Lab, as that one took me forever to figure out the last control panel section (which buttons to configure and how).

I’ll also say that Only Zuhl is pretty boss considering there are a million traps and it’s more of a falling puzzle than a jumping puzzle. Also, if you’re going it alone, you probably won’t be able to kill the jumping puzzle boss and get the chest in time. I say “in time” because there’s a bug with his event where his event respawns immediately after he dies if you don’t kill him fast enough! You can still get the achievement, though, so no big deal.

I don’t like the invisible walls for mostly aesthetic reasons. I hate seeing accessible areas that I can jump to, but then find myself blocked by an invisible wall. Have those lovely terrain artists of yours put in a new boulder or something, anything, but don’t just add invisible walls!

All forge recipes for events stay around after the events. This was how it was for Halloween, and I doubt they’d change it now.

Thanks, Rob! Now I won’t feel so bad bringing my Necromancer out against GL!

If you want something else to look at in this regard, check out Subject Alpha. I’ve noticed that a couple of his skills seem to spawn excess red rings of AOE death for each summon around, unfairly restricting those builds against him when he uses them. It’s tough to verify for sure, though, because he spawns a ton of those rings, but so long as you look into it and check one way or the other will be good enough. Thanks again!

I definitely support the beta model; I had no idea it ever looked that aesthetically pleasing. Ever since I have gotten this armor for my Guardian, my guildmates (correctly) say that I am wearing a diaper because of how ridiculous it looks. I doubt it’ll ever change, but it does look far inferior to how it used to.

I also support there being more skimpy male armor too, for what it’s worth. Love the gladiator stuff with abs hanging out. There are so many options for both genders, skimpy, and modest that I don’t think there’s any issue. If you wanted modest for female, you wouldn’t pick Arah armor in its current state, you’d pick any of the dozens of modest heavy sets. So why the unwarranted censorship? I totally agree with the OP.

Fine Transmutation Stones is what he means. If they were just skins and ANet didn’t want us to waste FTS’s, they’d have made them work like the HoM skins.

If I were to pay anything for a run, I would expect to pay the gold, join the group, afk for 5 minutes as the people I’m paying finish the last boss, get rewards, and be done. There is no way I’d pay gold and then also have to spend 2 hours of my time helping you, hah!

Make sure that when you transmute it with a level 80 item, you choose the top part (appearance) of the wraith mask and the middle part of the level 80 item (stats). If you do this, it will work and give you an upgrade slot. (If there is an upgrade in the level 80 item, you could move that over to the transmutation as well)

People sold dungeon slots in GW1, ANet never cared; people were profiting doing what they were good at. They changed nothing in GW2 to prevent it, and so people do the same thing; they make money doing what they are good at by selling their services to willing buyers. To me, this is working as intended and is totally acceptable by any sensible moral or ethical standard system.

Precursors can drop from the jump puzzle chests in any of the Borderlands and the Eternal Battlegrounds. Theoretically, they also can drop from players you kill. Both methods of obtaining mentioned here are incredibly rare occurrences.

You can get it in PvP. Have fun earning that Glory!

There’s this really terrible Thief on SBI that has 2 Incinerators and Dreamer. I grouped with him once in Fractals and he was, perhaps, the worst player I’ve ever seen in anything in the game. It was almost depressing. Wish I could have dueled him for his legendaries or something. :P

Iehova.9518:

That is a cheap kitten cop-out and you know it.

As if it prevented us from figuring this out anyway.

Agreed. We did all the research ourselves, and we understand DR really well. The fact that we had to do it this way because they, for whatever reason, assumed we couldn’t figure it out is crazy.

I think you’d be more shocked by how frequently they actually get used right now.

Anyway, I agree with this sentiment. Agony in nearly all cases can be easily dodged to begin with, and in the last case (Maw), the boss is pathetically easy without factoring in Agony. I think the whole Agony paradigm is a mistake, and that making the content actually harder is indeed the answer. Despite that, I harbor no faith that they’ll change the mechanic at all. It’ll just get worse when more ascended gear comes out and Agony hits for even sillier amounts in later end-game content.

I’d personally explain the situation, and handle it on a case-by-case basis. It really depends on how long the group will take to finish (if they could do it at all).

Demerz.6194:

If the party had any brains they’d kicked you while you were crashed

Which would then reset the instance since he was the instance owner.

The developers have specifically said that they will not explain the DR mechanism to players in order to prevent giving exploiters the information they need to circumvent the system.

That said, we as a community have done plenty of research on the topic.

Guild Wars 1 and 2 have always been about optional content. You want to kill the trash? Go for it. You’re not forced to. Kholer is specifically (and developer confirmed) optional. CoF trash is many times skipped. Trash everywhere is skipped if possible; many times being able to skip the content is part of the fun for players. If they intended us not to skip content, they’d make it so we couldn’t skip the content (like the first squad in CoF 1). I am, personally, glad that they allow you to do this. If you want to skip, you can, but if you want to fight, you can. Everyone gets what they want. If you want to do it a specific way, start your own group and do it that way; that’s the best strategy.

FotM is the ‘hardest’ end-game content that exists in the game. You’re choosing to go past the first tier, which means you want the harder content. Keep that in mind; if you can’t handle the harder content, call it quits and stick where you are. The Grawl boss is one of the most satisfying boss fights in the game, and is very doable with a group who has any semblance of an idea of what to do. I hope that they do not nerf it.

They can’t give you your money back or else the BLTP could be used as storage for items (list incredibly high, pay price, get items back later and list fee). This is pretty much how it is designed, and is working as intended.

It sucks to hear that you suffered like this, but we’ve all been there. I just threw 50g away last night by accident doing something equally as silly, and while it pisses me off, them’s the breaks.

I absolutely agree with Strifey. My main, honestly, is a Necromancer, and while I do use it for Fractals because I insist on it, my Warrior, Guardian, and other classes all bring so much more to the table when I do them instead. Strifey’s tiering is absolutely spot-on, too, if you assume perfectly equivalent skill across the board.

There’s one nuance I have to point out, though, and that is that many groups use specific class setups for specific skills. For instance, a Ranger is very valuable in very high level fractals against the Grawl boss because of Entangle. With that one nuance aside, you can likely do well with any class if you’re a talented player, but Strifey’s tier setup is “where it’s really at” if you’re looking to rank what we have.

I don’t know. I considered myself lucky to get 77 Clovers at all… You should look at my ecto salvage rate out of rares if you want to see something really depressing (Currently resting at around 0.2 ectos/rare).

They fixed a bug that allowed Barracuda to drop loot, which was unintentional. This makes it very difficult to farm Armored Scales now, and so what’s on the market is pretty much ‘it’ barring T6 mat bags and the Krait in FotM. As that supply dries up, prices will rise.

JaironKalach.4938:

Because they’re not yet done with it? How long did it take before they even had that concept? IIRC, you had to get your obby armor to be able to get that full hall. How long did you have to spend just get to grind out that armor? How much PvP work did you have to do? Have you even come close to putting that much effort in, yet?

Well, they didn’t have titles for a long time in GW1, but once they did, GWAMM was there. I would have expected GW2 to have something similar as a super long-term goal at least listed, if not feasibly achievable as of yet. I have no issues with putting in more time, but it’d be nice to have something to actually work toward.

To be honest, yeah I do want to “win” the game. Winning means you can move on. For me in GW1, the two biggest accomplishments you could get in the game were GWAMM and the maxed HoM. After that, I stopped playing the game. Why? I felt accomplished, my memories of GW1 were nothing but positive, and I had achieved the ultimate in-game achievements. The game wasn’t subscription based, so ANet didn’t lose any money when I stopped playing. I don’t really see why GW2 has to be different.

This post is your best bet. There’s a section dedicated to explaining the “new” BL Chests.

I ‘won’ GW1 by getting 50/50 in the HoM and earning GWAMM. As for GW2, well, I don’t have anything that feels like a win to me, so I just kind of do stuff and pretend that I’m making progress to some far off goal I haven’t yet identified. It’s worked for me thus far.

It took me 287 one-clover tries to get my 77, if that helps the interests of science and research.

You probably opened a BL chest after the December 14th update and suffered an issue with there being fewer items in the chest than there should have been. This would be a replacement. Of course, that’s just my guess.

Yeah, manipulate that market! I love this forum!

You’ve all been very naughty this year, tssk, tssk. Better not complain about GW2 in 2013!!