Guild Wars 2

You think I liken them to Gods? Most certainly not, sir. I liken them to human beings, and being one of those myself, I know all too well exactly the limitations of their convictions. As a result, I am patient with them, knowing said upper limits. That sentiment practically bleeds from my previous post if you’d care to look at it again.

For the record, users of a software always come up with their own work-arounds to developer issues regardless of both the nature of the software and how well-designed/developed it is. There will be bugs, there will be problems, and there will be features that get left out or pushed back. That’s how development works, and it’s not a flaw of the company; the issue arises from a disjoint of some user expectations and realistic company workflow. Many times things are intentionally released unfinished because perpetually delaying a new piece of content is not a viable marketing strategy. You may say they should wait until it works 110%, but then others will say that they want new content now. You can’t and won’t appease everyone.

Perhaps the difference in our opinions is purely philosophical. I like having new content available, and am willing to endure a few crushing bugs / issues as they get resolved at a later date. I am also willing to accept this because I know how software development works, and know that there are limits as to what can be safely expected from an initial release of new content. Based on my professional experience, the fractals release was well-executed, and a majority of users are enjoying the content while only a select few are facing issues… issues they are now working to resolve for your all’s edification. Perhaps you, judging from your posts and tone, would instead prefer no content at all until it is working perfectly? Thus, if you had your way, we wouldn’t have Fractals until January at the earliest, and we wouldn’t get to enjoy it in the meantime. I can see ups and downs to both approaches, though I feel that their current approach of adding new content at an impressive rate is something I personally enjoy.

For the record, I love that Arah p4 is brutal and crushingly difficult, it makes my Dungeon Master title feel like something I actually like showing off.

It’s not safe out there; here take this: www.gw2lfg.com

It’s not T3 and you just think it is. Cultural armor skins are only available from their respective merchants in the major cities. You could also be talking about cultural weapon skins, which are actually given out in the story steps.

Arah is my favorite dungeon hands down. GL is the crowning achievement of dungeon boss design, and if every other boss in the game took a page out of GL’s book this game would be the ultimate in gamer enjoyment. That said, I also love AC because it’s fast and fun and Kohler amuses me when he murders pubs and they complain about how broken he is.

They haven’t been ignored, it’s just not an easy practice to fix everything. I understand as a consumer I want everything yesterday, but as a developer for a different company than ANet, I also have a good perspective into how difficult solving problems that users consider simple really is. Even when things do get fixed, it’s critical to QA and make sure it isn’t breaking things elsewhere; look at how frequently that happens already with them trying their hardest to make us happy with new content/patches/fixes? Imagine how bad it would be without their QA team doing any of that work; I imagine they’d be breaking more than they fix. At least right now we’re moving in the right direction.

I know, I know, it’s easy to be frustrated and to say that the company is doing a bad job, etc, but the reality is that they’re not. They don’t make billions of dollars a month from our subscriptions (because there are none), so they cannot afford to hire ten thousand employees to solve every First World Tyria problem that comes up the day it appears. I’ve come to terms with that as a player, and try to help where I can by PMing bugs I find and ways to replicate them to the appropriate developers. The fact that the developers even read these forums despite the flak they get from players is a testament to how much they love their game and want to improve it. That alone tells me that I’m in the right place, supporting the right game, and willing to be patient with fixes.

That’s just my take on it, though. You’re still free to believe that you need everything yesterday, and that ANet is doing everything wrong, but I don’t believe that attitude is constructive or beneficial to anyone, least of all yourself. Enjoy the game for what it is, and if something isn’t working, try something else. That’s what gets me through the dark nights in the underbelly of Orr.

Ze Dos Cavalos.6132:

But why does anet first fix the bugs of fractals and not the biggest problem that we can get back in when we dc?

Because adding a block to prevent a jump or turning an Ettin allied before an event is a far easier task to achieve than “make a dungeon support reconnections when it was designed using the architecture for a story step and not that of a typical dungeon”.

They are working on fixing the disconnect issue, and there are countless developer posts reassuring us of that. However, it is not a simple task, so give them some time. If it really bothers you that much, just don’t do FotM until it’s fixed! There’s plenty of other stuff to do in the meantime.

Source #1 / Source #2

Fear not, Rob and his team are already on the case!

Hey Rob, you should check your PM list more often! I PMed that exact description for the Detha problem to you about a week ago. :P I also included an issue I found easy to replicate with Tzark’s path.

Stow your pet beforehand and don’t get hit so they don’t appear. I unsummon all of my Necromancer minions before this event too, for example. That’s the best you can do. You could always just wait for your team to progress and disable the beam field before moving up.

Karl McLain.5604:

… to keep it in line with our general policy of not having a blast finisher in the same weapon set you have a combo field….

I’m curious about this, Karl. Lots of professions have a blast finisher in the same weapon set as a combo field: (Guardian Hammer + GS / Necromancer Staff / etc). I think this functionality is largely why these weapons are so useful, and think that if you have a general profession policy against it that you should revisit the policy. In my humble opinion, I think the reason why many weapon sets across professions in general are so bad is because they lack finishers entirely. Consider Necromancer Axe, Guardian Mace, and so forth and how these are largely considered inferior to other options.

I recognize this is the Elementalist forum, but you talk a lot about general profession policy, so I think this is an appropriate concern to voice.

Everything works fine in SBI. The gates are closed if the event chain is back in an earlier part, too. I’ve seen friends reporting it broken on Darkhaven, for instance, when in-fact the chain just hadn’t been completed yet (it was working an hour later).

The only time it’s truly bugged is when the gates are still closed when the top-right corner says “The pact maintains control over the Gates of Arah”.

Better yet, they should make it like GW1. In GW1, if you equipped a 2H weapon while you previously had 2 1H weapons equipped, you kept your offhand equipped when you switched, it just didn’t do anything. In this sense, all that happened was that the 2H weapon replaced the 1H weapon in your main hand and you never had to worry about your offhand vanishing into your gear pack to get merched.

I think supply is down because hundreds upon hundreds of people are melting 250 stacks of ectoplasm into the abyss through forging for ascended gear. Supply is, actually, horrendously down. FotM giving you a few more RNG chances at ecto per run does nothing to stave off burning through stacks of ecto at a time. Prices will only continue to rise as this trend continues because the material sinks heavily outweigh the material sources now.

I’ll be frank; I wouldn’t survive in this game without 8 bank slots and enough character slots to use as mules for my items. Those are the only things I consider mandatory from the gem store.

Blinds are only 10% effective against foes with Defiant. It is not that statistically unlikely for a Defiant boss to hit through several dozen attacks while blinded for every one of them. If he were immune to blind, you would see the “Immune” text appear when you attempt to use blind against him and no condition would appear on his bar.

A good rule of thumb I have followed is thus:

If 250 unidentified dyes costs less than the value of the best dye you can get out of those 250 unidentified dyes (Abyss), then it is worth it to open them. Otherwise, it is worth it to sell them.

Ever since they hard nerfed the drop rates, it has been far more worth it to sell them.

Haha, he and I have talked about it before! I’m sure he’s well aware how I, and a huge chunk of the community, feel about Arah’s rewards, and he’s also mentioned that he’s looking into it with his design team. I think that this farm got taken advantage of so readily is solid evidence in support of buffing Arah’s ending rewards sooner rather than later, but maybe I’m being a little too hopeful.

I don’t think I’d mind this nerf so much if it didn’t take 2 hours to get 60 Arah tokens and other standardized rewards, when every other dungeon in the game earns you the same rewards for 30 minutes of concentrated effort with a good group. The paths are just sooo long in Arah that it’s not worth the time if you only have so much time to put in a day. If each Arah path rewarded double what it does now, I don’t think it’d be a big deal.

You’re right in the sense that if you optimized your team builds you could probably shave off a minute and change from each run. I usually let people play whatever they want except a Ranger since Rangers are that bad. You’re also right in the sense that if I had the same 5 people doing every run for 3 days straight they’d probably shave another half-minute or so from the run based on familiarity. I’ll make sure to suggest to my guild that they aren’t allowed to go to work, go to the bathroom, or otherwise do anything without my permission the next time something like this comes up. :P

I don’t personally believe that you can down both champs in 2 minutes, factoring in everything and selling, and unless you post a video of it happening, I doubt that belief is going to change regardless of what you say. Not that that matters, of course, and I doubt you care either. Moving on.

I was doing 4-5m runs on average, factoring in things like “Someone on the team has to use the bathroom” and “one of my guildies now wants to FotM, so I had to get a different guildie”. I’m sure in optimal circumstances and without any interruptions, I could make more gold/hour in AC too, so I am still fairly confident that the gold gain comparatively between the two farms is equivalent.

Where in the world do you get 7.5g/hr? Your last post says 37s a run, which is pretty standard, and 5m a run, which is also pretty standard. Your last post also specifies correctly that this works out to 4.44g/hr. Again, where does the 7.5g/hr come from?

If those numbers are any indication, I was definitely doing it right. I make comparable gold to that in AC every night, make more karma in AC (4 bags + full run bonus / 20 minutes), get more exotic drops in AC (more chests, more champs/etc), get more rares, get more tokens to turn into exotics and throw into the MF, and so forth. You name it, and you get it better in AC than with this farm. The only reason you’d ever do this farm was for the Arah tokens or if your guild is too terrible to make AC profitable.

I’d probably respond to the fellow’s rabid post, but if it’s been stealth-nerfed, then I find myself no longer caring. Thanks for making p3 full completes less valuable! Guess I’ll go back to farming p2 again with my guild.

Either way, I still make more money (4-5g/hr) in AC, so I have no idea why they’d nerf this and not AC. Not that I’d like them to nerf AC, because quite frankly money-making in this game is relocated to “play the economy or be poor”, but the inconsistency here is boggling.

There are some things to clarify here:
- This ‘farm’ makes less gold/hour than running AC explorable
- This ‘farm’ makes you zero (0) karma, whereas AC explorable also nets you great karma
- You make far fewer tokens doing this (6 at best, but they don’t always drop bags) than you used to back in ye olde’ Arah farm (8 tokens guaranteed, same amount of time for similarly competent groups)
- You get fewer tokens / hour doing this than you would with similarly competent groups running Arah p2
- People in LA are asking for full Arah explorable runs all the time and getting groups for it

Thus, I make the conclusion that you’re blowing this out of proportion. This is not bad, and honestly, I don’t want to see this changed because it sucked so hard before doing Arah and only getting rewarded at the end. Thank the Gods that we get some reward for the easier bosses, because when it hits GL, half of all pub teams fail and you have to fall back on what you’ve earned thus far. ArenaNet’s decision to make the Crusher/Hunter both drop silver/etc was great and I would be incredibly sad if it changed. Now you feel like you’re getting something out of Arah even if you fail the full run, as opposed to what you’re proposing which would bring it back to a total waste of time if you fail.

Anet has confirmed this and will fix it.

Au contraire, good sirs; they should add a Rich Powerful Blood Vein to the game instead! :P

Follow any number of guides, but this one’s pretty good.

No, but do this instead to get to 100:

1 Bag of Flour + 1 Stick of Butter
Make Bowl of Roux – Level 75

T6 materials went up in price in response to their use in crafting Ascended back items in the Mystic Forge. As a result, anything that used these T6 materials (the insignias for crafted exotic armor, for example), has risen to reflect the new prices.

Okay, I’ll bite!

I found a pretty annoying glitch with the T2 Human Cultural armor chest piece for light armor wearers on males. On the inside of the sleeve on both sides, there is always this bright red and textureless mass of model that really detracts from the armor set’s aesthetic qualities.

Detail List for Clarity:
- The only item equipped is the armor piece (And my ghastly headpiece, but the issue is there without it too!)
- Male
- Human
- Necromancer
- T2 Human Cultural Armor
- Chest Piece
- Acquired from T2 Cultural Vendor in Divinity’s Reach
- Untransmuted

Understood. That makes sense. When you guys examine and modify and track the trends of dungeons and then adjust DR, do you make note of it in the patches, or is this something that gets tweaked in the background without notification? I’m curious if the designers are in any state to make adjustments based on the past few months of data or if they’ve been doing it all along in the background.

Rob, what do you think about dungeon DR, then? If a really skilled group can beat a couple dungeon paths in 15m without skipping content, they get smashed hard by DR and actually get penalized for being talented players. My guild, for instance, has to afk during dungeons in order to drag the timer on so that we don’t get DR’d to oblivion at the end. We do AC and CoF and HotW and never skip bosses or mobs (specifically to try and waste time), and we still oftentimes get DR’d without adding in afk-time. It’s not fun at all being forced to do that.

Maybe a tweak to the DR timer is necessary, or is this punishment for being too good without exploiting intentional?

No, they can’t give you the progress you missed out on. If it’s a problem that you constantly disconnect, just wait until the fix that Rob mentioned above before playing FotM; it’s coming soon*.

*soon is a relative term.

X people lost a lot of money, and Y people gained a lot of money. That’s what happened.

Please God, no. FotM is bad enough in its player segregation, the last thing we need is for the rest of the dungeons to be like it.

The option is to toggle ambient lighting on or off, not the Sylvari’s glow on or off. The glow only appears at night-time, which means ambient lighting must be toggled off.

They said the orders were being delayed (not lost) and they’re working on fixing it. This would mean that you get your items/gold when they find and eradicate the bug. (Source)

No, you won’t. He just answered that here.

It’s not. There will be a name change gem purchase item down the road if you’d also like to change your name.

The TP is probably one of the best-designed things in the game as far as market structure is concerned. Either way, you could always risk your goods and try selling off the TP if you care about your 31g that much.

See William’s post above; the daily chest is identical within a given tier.

William Fairfield.1428:

Every even scale below the 10,20,30,40,50,60,70,80 scale levels are considered the same “Daily” so if you complete a scale 2 and a scale 4 Jade Maw, you get the same daily reward.

That’s because it has no level requirement. If you want it to accept upgrades that require up to level N, the required level of the item must be at a minimum N. This can only be accomplished with transmutation stones.

It’s probably a bot designed to switch through hundreds of characters on hundreds of accounts to farm the node repeatedly and obtain thousands upon thousands of the crafting material. This crafting material is then likely transferred to some other bot which sells it on the TP in order to make money to sell on the RMT market.

If you see players like this, report them as fast as you can! Don’t let them get away! Even if they’re not actually a bot, ANet will look into it and make the educated final determination before acting.

I use it to support during the swamp fractal in FotM and it definitely pulls cripple, poison, etc. there. I’m not sure what to suggest, but I have noticed it working and pulsing every 3-5 seconds as Oblivion.8307 above suggested.

Do another run to make up for it. Currently, the tokens are awarded for defeating the final boss, so if you miss that, you miss the bulk of your tokens. Sorry I don’t have anything better to suggest, but that’s how it is.

They definitely care about all of the dungeons. Notice that Rob didn’t say “Time invested doesn’t matter at all”, he just remarked that he feels that dungeon difficulty matters more than dungeon time investment. Note this key statement of his:

Robert Hrouda.1327:

My feelings towards Arah vs AC rewarding is of course that there is an imbalance due to time that is fairly steep, but rewards shouldn’t be based solely on time, but also on difficulty.

See how he clearly denotes his understanding of the imbalance in Arah vs. AC? That’s the most extreme example, of course, but I’m sure he’s aware that dungeons like CoE are leaps and bounds more difficult than AC, and also more time-consuming, and thus deserving of better rewards. These tweaks will be present in future, as-of-yet undetermined, patches for sure.

I think the blanket fix to dungeon rewards helped a lot. It’s a huge step in the right direction, and I’m very glad the developers heard us loud and clear there. Still, I do think there’s more work to be done.

I agree with Rob that rewards shouldn’t be based solely on time, but in general, things take time because they are more difficult. If everything in Arah were as easy as everything in AC, I doubt anyone would mind! That it is the hardest dungeon, however, is virtually indisputable. There is always the argument that “every dungeon is easy for a well-prepared team”, but there is a measure of objective difficulty inherent in many dungeons that are steps above that seen in, for instance, AC. Some tuning would be great, and so long as the team is constantly making tweaks, that is good news to me.

P.S. I still think the lodestone / core idea is a great way to encourage people to do tougher dungeons.

I’m glad my previous post directed the discussion toward “AC is fine, buff other dungeons’ rewards”.

Please God I hope the devs read and appreciate what is being said here. Arah and the high end dungeons desperately need better rewards compared to the lower level dungeons. 60 tokens for a path of Arah is not enough, whereas 60 tokens for a path of AC is perfectly fine. 26s for finishing a run of AC is perfect, but 26s for finishing a run of Arah is a slap in the face. That said, I still believe that above all else (like I and others have said already) lodestones and Cores are the single best way that the developers could improve the value of investing time in higher level dungeons. Guaranteed cores and / or lodestones would do leaps and bounds for making those dungeons worth it to run.

He consistently drops 10s too, which with an omnom makes him worth more than the champion mobs and as much as the final bosses. You also loot his chest for another 3s in merchant fodder, can win big and get a Bag of Wondrous Goods from him, and on your best day have him and troll fight it out for double rewards. He’s now well worth the 3 minutes to kill and, like always, if he kills you then you should lern2dodge. :P