Guild Wars 2

Poorly, but ultimately I don’t care.

Agony.3542:

That’s always the crux of inviational tournaments. Usually there is a “wildcard” or a qualifier held for one or two spots. However I’d consider this as something like a “proof of concept”. If it goes well and if more people (maybe even anet) get involved there may be a “dungeon legends open”.

Sure, but even beyond that, there isn’t a mechanism within this community to really “form a tournament-ready group” outside of “apply for a speed clearing guild”. I think that’s far more important to the general viability of this or any tournament than it’s getting credit for being. Those guilds are big enough that they can “look internally” for people, and outside that you’re pretty much out of luck. Even in a “dungeon legends open” tournament, simply asking in a thread for a team isn’t going to be very effective.

haviz.1340:

Technical support from Anet? Are we that gullible?

I don’t foresee them doing any work for us, but I do foresee them providing gem cards and such as rewards if we can drum up a serious level of interest.

I just wish it were easier to get into a group for this without being in one of the top speed clearing guilds. People have a difficult time getting involved in any of these things and that is going to hurt these sorts of tournaments down the road. We want “fresh meat” as it were or the competitions will get stale very fast and it’ll feel like rewards are just being handed to the same people over and over without new representation.

I’ll speak for myself here—I’m convinced I can compete and am willing to prove it to any team willing to give me a try, but I am not, however, able or willing to just give up my guild of many years and join a dungeon running guild that requires 90% repping. If we placed, I don’t even want any of the rewards; I just want to participate! I’ve never before been so excited for a tournament and yet I feel like I just don’t have the right connections to compete, and that sucks!

RoyalPredator.9163:

Speedexploit for 500g?
Should I take this serious?

Exploits will get you disqualified faster than you can drop your FGS and think to press 4.

I am so excited for this. Special thanks to [DnT] for hosting the first wave of this as we move to get more support from ANet. I will make sure that we get ANet visibility for this when it happens, and I’m fairly confident I can even get a dev or two into the stream itself. That will be the first step to moving towards bigger things.

I like that there is a speed consideration with a twist. I’m glad that went through. I want every ‘twist’ that happens to be done in a way that discourages blindly powerhousing through the dungeons with max dps and super risky things. These risky moves should be balanced against the threat they post to the team’s success. Encouraging teams to maybe go a little bulkier to be successful is very awesome. This is a great place to start.

I guarantee that I would be an asset to any team, I have a L80 of every class geared in meta setups, can think quick on my feet, have soloed GL, and absolutely want to participate. If any team with serious intent to participate needs or wants a member, and wants to test me with any test in-dungeon, please let me know and I will make every attempt to meet and exceed your expectations.

Go dungeon tournaments! Let’s make this a success so that ANet will eventually sponsor these things with gem cards and actual rewards!

Lilith Ajit.6173:

That’s fair. I guess I’m just wondering what to do if the spectator screws up. How does he stay alive, watching everyone, without adding to the fight or becoming his own instability?

My thought is that for trash, he stays far enough back and out of the way to not help in any manner. For bosses, he engages first and dies, then allows the boss to reset, and then the players can participate. Problem then becomes that you have to watch players through the veil of a corpse… It’s really ugly. It’d be nice to have the streamer be alive the whole time, but that just isn’t possible for a majority of the bosses.

Ugh, but thinking about it, the streamer not being in the middle of every fight would make for a pretty hideous viewer experience. I mean because then the viewers never get an up-close viewing of the combat. There are pros and cons to each. Maybe we should just have the streamer be a player.

That said, I also think ANet would support 5-man more than 4-man because it’s how the content was designed.

For the record, I think a standard single elimination bracket is better suited for this type of tournament. Swiss style is a bit trickier, and I think a little harder for viewers to follow. Doing a four-team invitational with single elimination would be simple and easy, especially for a test go.

DigitalKirin.9714:

My thought is that it should be kept to 5 person teams. Since streams like twitch can be embedded, you ideally should be able to make a web page with 2 streams side by side. (I’m not sure how smoothly that implementation would go, but it ought to be feasible.)

The bigger challenge with a five man team is that it puts streaming requirements on the participating teams. This sounds nice with top guilds who stream regularly anyway, but it limits future participation and ultimately hurts the idea of this becoming an actual tournament.

Glad my PM conversation got Josh involved and reading! This is definitely something we want to pursue, and I’ll be happy to help organize it in any way that I can.

If you want to try smaller scale and need a forum or w/e, I don’t mind setting up gwscr to support it (DnT forum could probably also serve as a hub). I’d just give a few people mod, since I’m becoming more and more inactive

What about using 4 man teams instead of 5? Allows the use of the 5th slot for a referee/judge to make sure theres no funny business going on? Also makes things (slightly) more interesting, imo

Also, Cookie, glad you also support the idea of a four person run I mentioned on the first page. I also think the four person run is good for spectating purposes, because then the spectator can be the streamer.

As for the site forum thing, I think GW2SCR is a better hub. The reason is that it is a neutral middle ground for people, much like how we use Mistpedia for the PvP tournaments.

If you go on top of the table at any point, or jump over it, the mobs cannot path to you, go invulnerable, and thus go hit Hodgins. Avoid the table and you don’t encounter this.

I like it.

I think generalizing the concept to a pseudo-speed run with a major impediment that is a surprise for the run is great. It encourages on-the-spot creativity and also skill. I think ideally we should tell players what the impediment is before they pick their classes, so maybe like an hour beforehand set them up with the information and give them a chance to do things from there. That would be ideal. In the test run perhaps we could just pick the challenge up front (dead players cannot be revived and cannot WP, and a wipe is a loss).

I also think that for a test run to set up the stream software one path is fine, but ultimately for brackets we would want different paths that are not pre-announced, and Arah should not be the only dungeon chosen. With certain impediments or “gambits” in play, other dungeons become much more threatening. CoE and HotW, for instance, can be very tricky under certain circumstances. Furthermore, we’d absolutely want variety so viewing it wouldn’t be boring.

That said, I still strongly suggest the four players and fifth player as a spectator. One of the biggest problems with 5-man teams and one of them having to stream is that it greatly limits the ability for less known teams to participate. One of the most important things for tournaments like this is inclusion, and that is critical if we ever want ANet to support such a tournament with actual rewards.

EDIT:
I also wanted to mention that I reached out to some ANet devs I’ve talked to before with some discussion about this. I’ll see what they have to say, but ideally I’d like ANet involved somehow. Maybe we can start these tournaments small with like a gem card as a reward, and once we prove the concept and drum up some interest, maybe expand to bigger things.

Jerus.4350:

I do really like it, but a few questions.

What if the “spectator” guy screws something up? Agroes something early, falls behind, whatever?

And, how do you really prove any of the skill changes and what not? I could easily swap traits around and no one would ever know.

And you mention having to do Kohler, what about Cave Troll, that’s random locations and sometimes not even something that spawns, how do you deal with that?

I think RNG related events would be skippable. So the troll would not have to be killed if it spawned in AC. Fortunately there aren’t many RNG-related events, so this shouldn’t be a big thing.

As for verifying the load-out, well, there really is no way to prove it. Perhaps we should allow everything there because bad enforcement is no good.

Ideally, the spectator would be someone trustworthy from the community who you could trust to do things right (I’m thinking [DnT] streamers, [rT] streamers, [SC] streamers, so forth). They would have to stay far enough behind. The only sticky situation is that for bosses they have to die to the boss first and let it reset, so in some cases if they’re slow they may lower the time. I could see judges adjusting the times of the run based on that though, to balance it out.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, so here are my precursor thoughts:

• Whatever the challenge is, it be a 4-man challenge
• The fifth player will be a dedicated streamer which goes to a dedicated twitch channel for the competition (centralized location)
• Rewards are a legendary (non-Eternity) of choice for each member of the four-man party, second place gets a precursor of choice, third place gets a gift of fortune/mastery gift (if we can get ANet on-board)
• Reward a precursor to someone viewing the stream somehow… I’m not sure how the ToL did this, but it would be useful because we want viewers.

Beyond that, I suggest a more hardcore style challenge. Let’s get normal timed speed clears out of our minds here, consider the following:

• GW2SCR restricted ruleset applies (some are repeated below for posterity)
• You may not change utilities, characters, traits, gear, or your load-out in any way whatsoever over the course of the run (these are considered locked when the first enemy is aggroed)
  • The streamer will attempt to gauge this as he watches the match go
  • This is to echo the loadout rules of SPvP, but also to discourage the situation where someone with the most gold (and therefore the most impressive selection of items) from having too unfair an advantage over others.
• You have to 4-man a dungeon path that is generally considered very difficult
• Fractals are out because you cannot predict a set four fractal choice
• If players hard-die (except the streamer), they CANNOT BE RESURRECTED AND CANNOT WAYPOINT (this adds to the challenge, meaning that you can ‘full wipe’ a run)
• The streamer will never attack, use a skill, or anything, and must die to a boss and allow that boss to reset before the team engages it (this is the best we can get for spectator mode in PvE vs. bosses)
• For trash the streamer can simply stay back and out of the way and out of combat
• There is a bracket set up, and each tier of the bracket is a different dungeon path
• You “beat” your opponent by one of the following means:
  • The team that beats the path wins (assuming one fails)
  • If you both succeed at the path with your team, the group with the greatest number of surviving team members wins
  • If you both succeed at the path with your team with the same number of players alive, the fastest team wins
  • If you both fail, the team that got the furthest wins (this is decided by priority of the following:
    • …by the last ‘event’ completed in the dungeon
    • …by the last enemy killed
    • …by the furthest any player managed to get by running into the dungeon
    • Judge decisions are final
• Each team gets one ‘official’ run with the shoutcaster at a set time for their team in a specific bracket position (no redo)
• Ideally, each team’s run in a bracket ‘match-up’ will happen at the same time (requiring at least two dedicated streamers). This is to prevent using the results of one match-up to change anything about the other.
• Bracket goes for as many teams as exist (6 rounds for 64 teams, etc)
• Each level of bracket has a different dungeon path
• Only one (1) maximum of any profession in a party (no multiples)
• Skipping, LoS, cornering, stacking, nutrition, FGS on your ele, elite skills, berserker gear, whatever are all allowed
• If there is a dungeon event that pops, you MUST complete it (Would mean that Kohler is required, for instance)
  • Remember that skipping in general speeds up the run, but may also be a risk because people could die. Maybe clearing is the best strategy, who knows!

I think this would be cool because it means everyone does the same thing, but it forces everyone to think differently than they’re used to. It also encourages tankier builds because while berserker is faster, it isn’t the safest and doesn’t allow for messups. Keep in mind, though, that if both teams play effectively and win with everyone alive, the fastest team wins! In this regard, it isn’t good to be slow and steady unless you can keep the whole team alive because you may still lose. This dynamic encourages mixed strategies and would hopefully create some interesting plays. I also think having only four players changes things up a bit and adds that extra layer of difficulty that some people crave.

Thoughts?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, actually.

I don’t necessarily think that doing a speed run is the appropriate approach. Why, you may ask? Because it pits a very, very small group of players against themselves… and frankly, it’s something that those guilds do themselves already. You, naturally, want the challenge to be competitive so that it is at some measure a show of skill, but you want to be inclusive of a greater number of participants.

Another issue is the way you ‘prove’ it. Whatever you ask people to do, they have to prove that it was done somehow. Well, there isn’t a dedicated stream for this sort of thing, and there isn’t any spectator mode for PvE so an observing ‘shoutcaster’-like entity can’t watch your run and record it for you. Asking players to record things automatically cuts out a huge number of participants because you need a beast of a machine to simultaneously record a run and play with good FPS. This level of overhead also discourages participation because it’s more stuff they have to figure out beyond GW2 things. The optimal competition asks the competitors to do nothing beyond simply play the game.

Lastly, the biggest challenge is how do you drum up excitement for this? Spectator mode and big-time streams are great for getting views and getting some good GW2 visibility. How could we do that with dungeons? Note that the most important thing isn’t that it be streamed, it’s that it be streamed in a centralized location.

So these are some challenges to think about. Rewards are tough, but at least feasible. Award a legendary to the winning team. Maybe we can even coordinate with ANet to get those rewards provided if we can build a solid enough competition (this was how the ToL rewards were initiated).

(Message exceeded 5000 characters so see my second post below)

We’ve moved up in the schedule for spawning Tequatl for SBI to a biweekly spawn frequency! This means that our next spawn times are June 22nd and July 6th! We will make it a point to take over the rosters there so that we have an awesome Valorflow running the show.

Besides that, we have guild missions tonight, last night’s guild missions were successful, and we keep on keeping on and doing what we enjoy! We’re all very excited about season 2 of the Living Story, so come enjoy it with us if that sounds fun! Talk to one of our officers to learn more about us.

Jabberwock.9014:

There is actually a major bug that personally caused me to lose 50g but could potentially have cost me thousands. If you right click an item to say “sell on trading post” and then switch to another item and sell that item instead, you will instead sell the item you initially clicked for whatever you sold the second item for.

In my case, I right-clicked a lovestruck focus, but ended up trying to sell a keeper’s recipe for 20g. I ended up selling the lovestruck focus for 20g, when the highest buy order was like 60g.

This could have happened to chaos gun dude if he right-clicked chaos gun but then tried to sell some iron ore.

I, too, have encountered this issue and it has cost me several dozens of gold in listing fees when I go from a lower value item to a higher value item and then it lists my Iron Ore for 20g or something insane.

I’d rather the ring, personally. I need that 4.96 silver!

The profit largely comes from the Gift of Exploration, clover RNG, dungeon/WvW tokens, and skill points. Frenzy is also not one of the more worthwhile legendaries to sell for gold right now.

tolunart.2095:

William Bradley Knight.2609:

Someone feel free to poke holes in this as I am sure I ignored something important.

Players will see only “MF guarantees a precursor if I keep throwing stuff in,” which leads to a rush to buy “stuff” that cleans out the cheaper options leaving only very expensive “stuff” for anyone whether they want a precursor or not.

You’re missing a lot here. Supply of rares is constant and flowing. Players can go out in the world and collect 1000 rares on their own without too much trouble, just a lot of time. This ‘solves’ the problem because with RNG forging a precursor, you never know if you’re just RNG’s kitten forever or if you’ll get lucky. With the tokens you can make progress by forging rares you find in the world and never spending a single gold coin.

You get anywhere from 1 to 5 from any given world boss. You loot them from dungeons and random mobs fairly frequently. The initial rush that comes from a token system will spike prices high initially, true, but once those market warriors calm down the supply will keep flowing in fast enough. Also consider all other ways to get rares! You can upforge greens to get rares, and greens drop like candy. You severely underestimate the resilience of the rare market to the notion that you get a guaranteed precursor if you fail at forging too many times.

Things I do see happening:

• All rare weapons and exotic weapons reach a baseline equilibrium value around the same range of each other, some still slightly more valuable than others
• The ecto market fluctuates heavily as more rares are liable to be forged for the precursor tokens than salvaged for the ecto

I personally feel that with this sort of precursor token, precursors obtained this way would equalize to between 600 and 800g, some staying lower due to lower demand.

Hyperion.9704:

Oh well. It could be worse.

Yeah, you could be dead.

Point is, what’s a few more days to get your skin. It’s not like it’s keeping you out of WvW or whatever. Go play and do what you’ve always been doing.

Rouven.7409:

While I like the token idea, I somehow think that there is no extra currency needed. Just make the equivalent of an increased chance working in the background. As soon as you get a precursor it goes back to zero.

While I appreciate this sentiment, I genuinely dislike things that work magically in the background. A newer player would have no idea what’s going on with this sort of system, meanwhile the token system (with a merchant who had the precursors) would be much more explicit and explorable.

Oh wow I would so love to participate in this, but my computer can’t run video recording software. I have an Engineer, a Necromancer, and a Ranger I’ve played a ton with meta builds and would love to work toward this with people who are willing and someone who can record. Unfortunately, I’m not in any of the fancy awesome guilds, but you can check me out in-game if you’d like and weigh my skills appropriately.

I’m NA.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Is it 1 token for rares used, or 1 token for exotics used, or 1 token for both methods?

I’d probably make it 1 token for every rare and 4 tokens for every exotic combined that has a chance to yield a precursor. This means that if you did 3 rares and a mystic forge stone, you’d get 3 tokens. If you did 4 rares, 4 tokens. 4 exotics = 16 tokens. Then, I would scale this so that it takes about 1000 tokens (or 1000 rares or 250 exotics) to get a precursor of your choice. Note that you only get tokens on an unsuccessful precursor forging. This would amount to, at current prices:

0.50g/rare x 1000 rares = 500g
2g/exotic x 250 exotics = 500g

Of course there would be variance in price and the values of rares, ectos, and exotics would fluctuate to adjust for this, but I think this is a very solid baseline. The other neat thing is that doing it this way would make other rare weapons like Harpoon Guns and Tridents more valuable since they could give you these tokens when forged. This would thus work wonders to decrease the overabundance of those items on the TP (their supply currently is regulated only by ecto value now).

200 gems isn’t even that much, but I’m feeling that on principle, players who achieved the meta achievements for past Living Story season 1 steps should automatically get access to them once they go live. If we went through all of the trouble of getting those achievements and did all of the work already, we should be able to replay them once the journal goes live without having to pay even more.

I recognize that they won’t even be available right away because LS1 wasn’t designed with this journal in mind, but I want to get this idea into the developers’ minds so they think about it and discuss it as a team. Those of us with these meta achievements should unlock the stories automatically once they get ported to the Journal structure.

Thanks for reading.

Far more players buy keys with gems than you give them credit for.

Vol.7601:

For example, for every combination ‘failure’ (no precursor received), you get a token. At a certain # of tokens – let’s say 1000, you can change that in for a guaranteed precursor.

That way, people who are unlucky enough to go on cold streaks end up getting a precursor.

Yes, please. I would actually use the Mystic Forge if my abysmal luck could turnaround into something like this. I also think somewhere around 800 failed attempts would be a good sweet spot for a token system like this. That would mean using mean current prices you would get a precursor after 1060g or so of failed attempts.

Wanze.8410:

I dont hide funds, i invest them:

Hah, and I am supposed to believe that you only have one guild bank!?

Wanze.8410:

PS: There you have it, I am a poor scrub, I am only boasting on these forums. Cant manipulate much markets with 36 silver.

Guild banks are great for hiding funds, aren’t they?

OUR VIEWS ARE OVER 9000!!!!

Okay, but seriously, we’re seeing some nice new recruits, and a lot of oldies have been coming back for the new living story and such. We do dungeons all the time, we have a small but steady PvP group, we all participated greatly in SBI’s placement in the recent WvW tournament, we do Tequatl with SBI nightly and lead and help out whenever we can, and so on! If any of these things sound nice, along with the friendly community, let one of our officers know!

Will unlocking a Mistforged Weapon unlock the lower level Hero’s Weapon equivalent? Or will we have to buy the Hero’s Weapon and upgrade it in order to unlock both?

Delois.3974:

Jessica Boettiger.2563:

Mistforged Hero’s weapons can either be purchased directly for tournament tickets or crafted in the Mystic Forge with:

• 1 Hero’s Weapon (100 tournament tickets)
• 1 Gift of Heroes (200 tournament tickets)
• 4 Bottles of Elonian Wine
• 10 Piles of Crystalline Dust

To clarify, we had planned for the cost of Gift of Heroes to be a combination of tickets and badges, but the item will now only cost tickets. Tournament tickets will not expire.

Do we unlock the regular skin when we buy the mistforged?

This is the question I really want answered.

Branden Gee.2150:

Dwaynas Avatar.1562:

Branden Gee.2150:

EverythingEnds.4261:

Branden Gee.2150:

Thanks for reporting this! This looks like a scaling issue where the effect is scaling the character’s size but the skill itself is not scaling. A fix for this will require some design work so I can’t say a whole lot in regards to when it could be fixed.

While a respect this honest answer, I’m really concernd that we didn’t even get a "soon™ ".

I wish I could say soon™. But this is a pretty interesting issue to address.

Easy fix:
Just make that if you enter a pvp match, you automatically get transformed into a human character, so no issues anymore (for the time you are in this match). Like when you use a tonic or so.
And btw I want an option for myself to let everyone be shown in a pvp match as a human so I finally can see the animations of the Freaking asuras and norn mesmers stop destroying my view…

How would this idea handle things like cultural armors? Won’t turning everyone into humans cause a loss of uniqueness in the game? Every player has specific facial adjustments, body types, heights, armor colors, and weapons; what happens to these?

Since this is getting visibility with ANet, I’ll just say this:

Do what SAB did; normalize the size of all races in PvP. Norn get smaller, and Asura get larger. This preserves the uniqueness of your appearances and also gets rid of the ridiculous advantages certain races have over others.

Fair point. I understand that in the case of a solo for GL those things could totally be legit. I’m also sort of theorycrafting random stuff I use in pub dungeons lacking dps and for places like Triple Trouble where you can condi cleave Husks. Epidemic is also neat in certain Gauntlet encounters and when small-group killing certain bosses in the Pavilion.

It would be interesting to see some kind of plot of condi duration versus condi damage and see where one becomes more valuable than the other in terms of net dps under identical circumstances.

spoj.9672:

Dalanor.5387:

I get it, warriors benefit from self buffing, but necro? Oo

3 signets (signet mastery) + BiP + battle.

Ill be testing it out once i have enough CM tokens. :P

I was trying this out, assuming a condi build, and I find that the multiple signets really are pretty bad. You’re better off packing Epidemic for condi cleaves. The only signet I run is Spite.

Furthermore, I was comparing CM runes to a 4/2 mix that gets 20% more condi duration for a 100% condi duration build, and I found that while you get more raw dps from your condis with CM runs, you support your team more through exponential Weakness uptime growth. (SoS +100% into Epidemic +100% uptime) You can keep Weakness up basically forever on a large number of trash mobs. Maybe not as useful as before Dredge nerf, but still good when things go bad in certain areas. The bonus Might duration for SoS and BiP is pretty great, still, but it’s nowhere near as good as any other Might generating class… I almost feel like it’s just not worth it for a Necro. I’m still trying out some other stuff, too, but I’m genuinely curious to see where Necro fits into a condi build moving forward.

Some other stuff I’ve been trying in PvE is actually interesting on a Necro. I’ve been running a hybrid with 100% Rampager gear with 100% condi duration (because this gives great returns when you can’t maximize condi damage) and it hits like a truck. I’ve been running D/W and using the numerous procs from Warhorn 5 and auto attacks to trigger bleeds. Interestingly, even DS4 has its applications here due to the number of aoe pulses. The other advantage to this build is that you can Epidemic huge duration condis (like Weakness and Vuln) and ‘steal’ other players’ passive burns with your condi damage and turn them into actual decent DPS on a group. It’s by no means optimal for speed clearing anything, but it is surprisingly effective, and exceptional in keeping pubs alive during encounters where they would otherwise die.

All good stuff to think about. I’ve long since given up having my Necro use Berserker gear because “If I’m going to do power dps, I’m going to swap to a better class for it”. Instead, I use my Necro as a yolo condi/hybrid creature in pubs just to try stuff out.

Just wanted to bring this up to remind everyone that we’re always recruiting new friends and that we love seeing new faces around! We’ll be hosting a guild event Tequatl run this Sunday at 8PM EST, so come join us if you’re into that thing! We kill it regularly with the SBI group, so there’s always that!

Either way, here’s to hoping everyone has a lovely weekend! (It’s long for us Americans!) Furthermore, always remember you can contact one of our officers to learn more about the guild if you’re even remotely interested in it.

Vol.7601:

Rising Dusk.2408:

laokoko.7403:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I totally understand the economics in what is going on here. Someone’s willing to pay an absurd amount of gold for their precursor now, so the item is valued there. Sure, sounds great.

My contempt is with the fact that there are only two ways to get these blasted things. I RNG it from a random drop, or I RNG it from the Mystic Forge. That’s it. Not even considering how this is about the least enthralling way to develop a legendary possible, the fact that there is no way to actually “make progress” on your precursor short of just grinding out gold is absurd. It is nigh time we get precursor building, and the recent up-shift in prices only makes that more pertinent. Seriously, that’s what John Smith’s takeaway from these topics should be.

or you can just buy from the TP.

Even if they added precursor hunt, they never said it’s going to take less effort than grinding 1200 gold.

For instance, when I made Incinerator, I went out and collected that stack of Ghost Peppers myself. Why? Because now I can look back on helping a bunch of randoms in Orr out and making some friends along the way and say that was a worthy investment of time. Looking back on a gold grind is nowhere near as sentimental.

Maybe because you entered that gold grind with the mindset that you find it a chore?

I was predominantly a farmer, and I met many other like-minded farmers that I still talk to this day. My original guild I joined because we had other people who liked to farm shelt/pen day after day.

Experiences vary. You may find it not nearly as sentimental but I enjoy the relaxing, brain dead farming while I talk to friends about other stuff.

Sure, and I enjoy it sometimes too! Maybe the precursor crafting can have a 250 Icy Runestone requirement. I certainly think that’s a good idea! There should be a straight gold component to doing it, but do you honestly think farming that gold like that for 1200 gold straight is ideal? Do you think that says something about your experiences in-game? Your ability to master the game? Why can’t gold only be a single component in a grander design? Farm for some parts of it, and maybe some others require some mastery of the game elsewhere, and so forth. Furthermore, you could still farm all the gold for the components if you wanted. That’s important because it enables you to do whatever you want, but having materials like “Iron Ore” or “Ascalonian Tear” or “Laurel” give people milestones to work toward that they can obtain either with straight gold or with playing the game other ways. This gives people the choice to truly play how they want and actually get somewhere on their precursor. Of course people could also still just buy them outright on the TP too if they want!

I don’t find gold farming sentimental, and that’s true. Maybe you do, and maybe that’s why making a legendary doesn’t bother you. But coming out with precursor crafting doesn’t stop you from enjoying farming gold, farming that gold, and buying your precursor. All it does is add a new way for people who derive no or little personal enjoyment from obtaining more and more gold in a never ending chase.

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Here’s a scenario:

• You put Burning on with your Warrior
• The heroic Staff Guardian comes along and uses Virtue of Justice
• Everyone applies their own burning, yours goes away.

I am pretty confident that’s not how it works. I’ve done a lot of testing with this, and I’m fairly confident that the strongest burn is applied first in the duration, then the second strongest, and so forth after that. Note that I don’t want to pretend this is 100% true and would want others to correlate this, but it is how it appears to function when I try to PvE condi because yolo. Poison also appears to function in this manner, while Torment functions like Bleeds (below).

TheMaskedParadigm.3629:

Same with bleeds, they just go on in the order they are applied. You’ll be competing for bleed stacks with everyone else.

This is certainly true. Bottom level stacks are dropped in favor of top level stacks regardless of strength/duration, just like how Might application works.

maha.7902:

Dredge is fine the way it is. The puzzle mechanics are still present, and the final bosses which I always enjoyed fighting haven’t been touched.

This. I agree with this.

laokoko.7403:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I totally understand the economics in what is going on here. Someone’s willing to pay an absurd amount of gold for their precursor now, so the item is valued there. Sure, sounds great.

My contempt is with the fact that there are only two ways to get these blasted things. I RNG it from a random drop, or I RNG it from the Mystic Forge. That’s it. Not even considering how this is about the least enthralling way to develop a legendary possible, the fact that there is no way to actually “make progress” on your precursor short of just grinding out gold is absurd. It is nigh time we get precursor building, and the recent up-shift in prices only makes that more pertinent. Seriously, that’s what John Smith’s takeaway from these topics should be.

or you can just buy from the TP.

Even if they added precursor hunt, they never said it’s going to take less effort than grinding 1200 gold.

I noted that you could grind out the gold to buy it. Furthermore, I don’t care if it takes 1200g to make, I would rather it be 1200g in assorted materials (time-gated and otherwise) that I could ameliorate partially by going out into the world and collecting random crap than 1200g that I grind out from dungeons or flipping on the TP and then buying it from someone else. That “feels” more legendary than just grinding and buying it. I could outright buy a number of legendaries straight off the TP right now, but that is cheap and devalues the whole thing. I want to build a thing from the ground up and enjoy the journey.

For instance, when I made Incinerator, I went out and collected that stack of Ghost Peppers myself. Why? Because now I can look back on helping a bunch of randoms in Orr out and making some friends along the way and say that was a worthy investment of time. Looking back on a gold grind is nowhere near as sentimental.

I totally understand the economics in what is going on here. Someone’s willing to pay an absurd amount of gold for their precursor now, so the item is valued there. Sure, sounds great.

My contempt is with the fact that there are only two ways to get these blasted things. I RNG it from a random drop, or I RNG it from the Mystic Forge. That’s it. Not even considering how this is about the least enthralling way to develop a legendary possible, the fact that there is no way to actually “make progress” on your precursor short of just grinding out gold is absurd. It is nigh time we get precursor building, and the recent up-shift in prices only makes that more pertinent. Seriously, that’s what John Smith’s takeaway from these topics should be.

So the fix to this is to have a stacking sigil of the same type above and underwater? Is this a confirmed bug or if this intended?

I mean, I think it’s good that they made an attempt to fix the exploit whereby you could stack on land, keep a stacking sigil underwater, and then swap the on-land weapon and completely bypass the previous “Don’t Unequip the item” limitation they put in place. I hope they fix this issue if it is an issue, though.

It comes from other games.

When I first bought GW2, I knew they’d killed the trinity, but I didn’t realize to what extent. I thought that the stats Toughness, Vitality, and Healing Power were more useful (before we knew numbers), and so I felt that I could serve as a lynchpin for other team members to survive if I was a bit tankier. My first Warrior build for PvE was Soldier’s armor, Berserker’s trinkets, Berserker’s weapons, and healing shouts. I thought that I could have “solid DPS while still being able to take a hit for another player that was very squishy”. I mean, it works… Sort of, but at the time we didn’t realize how easy instances were and how best to handle situations.

Nowadays we know better. You can scarcely do much to save your team outside of crazy amazing utility builds like Hammer Guardian, and so it’s just not worth it in those cases. It’s a learning process, and again, some people just refuse to change the way they think even when faced with unobjectionable evidence.

Lots of fun stuff coming up with the new release bringing back the Queen’s Pavilion and the Bazaar of the Four Winds! Join us as we explore these things together! We’d love to have some new friends around for it.

I’ve also started commanding a lot at SBI’s daily Tequatl runs, so expect to see the guild out in force there as well! We do Tequatl at 8PM EST every night, though I don’t command every night, but you can join us either way. Let one of our officer’s know if you’re interested!

It takes too much effort to transfer my ascended rings to an alt, so I just merch them now. If they were useful, that’d be neat. Why can’t we salvage them yet?

Maybe instead of the stupid gambits paying out gold they could pay some valuable commodity like T6 mats. Then the market would actually deflate slightly as more money gets burned in TP transactions and prices drop due to increased supply.

zone.1073:

This new iteration of D/D ele is actually fun to play, and it’s fun to play against. It’s pretty similar to fighting a warrior. Very obvious animations and tells, very logical flow of combat.

Unless it’s the shortest Asura.

I used to wholeheartedly support Staff Guardians as a thing. I think there’s like a whole thread of my discussing Staff Guardian as a legitimate thing and my trying to find reasons why it was good. Then I discovered Hammer. Even further back, I used to dislike this forum because some [LOD] members really incensed me with their attitudes. I ended up calling them out in some thread I can’t remember, and got into a whole argument based on that (no hard feelings if any of them haven’t quit). No idea if that thread was deleted or not, though.

My Warrior’s first armor set was Soldier’s with Berserker trinkets. My Necromancer’s first armor set was Carrion everything (lawl). My Guardian’s first armor set was Cleric’s everything (double lawl). Nowadays everything wears Berserker everything except my Necro which runs around in Rampager for Triple Trouble and WvW and some pub dungeons because yolo.

Love dungeon forumites. <3

I generally agree with the sentiment that the bonus damage sigils should be removed and those bonuses tied directly to the slayer achievements. Every 100 kills = +1% damage to that creature type. Then we can finally add a Karka Slayer achievement, and I will be happy.

Beyond that, though, there are still a number of very weak sigils even after the balance update. Things are looking better, though, so at least there is that.

We’ve started picking up slots in SBI’s nightly Tequatl guild-sponsor rotation. Our first Tequatl event will be 5/25/2014 @ 8PM EST, so join us if you’re interested! Beyond that, a lot of other great things happen nightly that we participate in. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are our guild mission days, and we’ve always got great turnouts for those. Beyond that, I personally do basically every dungeon every night and I run Fractals 50 regularly, so if you’re interested in any of those things, our guild does ’em too!

Just remember that we’re here to be your friends, and friends are really what we’re looking for. Let an officer know if you’re interested!

We’re still playing a ton and still growing! If you’re a self-reliant player who enjoys playing alone but also enjoys playing with a friendly community of pals, then [VZ] sounds like it could be for you! We’re doing guild missions every week and overall it’s just great times; we’ve gotten some new members these past few weeks which are great too! Come join the fun if you’re interested!

At this point I use a Staff on my Guardian just because she wields it like a stripper pole.