Guild Wars 2

Bumping this up for the later half of the week! We’ve had a few new members recently, and we’re always looking for more! I want all of you guys who are looking for guilds that are friend-filled and family-like to give us some thought! It’s nice having people who only show up for guild missions, but we could all do with some more good people that actually chat up and hang out!

I have zero legendaries and it’s fine. Seriously. The TP is a convenience, and so is being able to acquire them at all. Imagine if these precursors were account bound to prevent “market manipulation” as so many naive players clamor for on the forums. Imagine if you couldn’t buy them in response to their rarity. Being able to buy it at all is a privilege, and regardless of the price, you’re paying for that convenience. You’re paying for knowing that “I am getting this item, period” without having to throw 1000-2000g into the MF and gamble for it.

MMORPGs like this always have an element of RNG associated with them, and this is no worse than any other. I remember in GW1 someone in my group looting a q9 Fire Ele BDS, or even better, a q9 Crystalline Sword, and that person had just basically looted an entire Obby armor set. That’s how it goes; some people get lucky and win big, some don’t. If you don’t, you can still work towards your goals. I have multiple Obby armor sets in GW1 due to my own force of will and acquisition through more traditional means. You know what I had to do to get them? I could either BUY the Ecto and Shards from people much like outright buying the precursor today, or I could go into the zones and try to RNG loot the number I needed. See what that is? RNG. Not so different after all.

The prices of Precursors are fine because that’s what people are willing to pay for them. If their supply at any given time is so low that they’re more than what you’re willing to pay, simply wait, or use a buy order. Furthermore, if you’re not willing to buy it at all, there’s the Mystic Forge; have fun.

tl;dr: Just because you can’t afford to buy an item doesn’t mean there’s a problem. If you want an item and don’t want to RNG for it, farm and buy it.

Alvas Visceron.8637:

I do want a solid guild for end-game play, but I also don’t want to be completely on my own for leveling. In terms of exploring the world, questing, and doing world events, I’m a lone wolf. I like to chat with people while I do things, but I play largely alone. However, I would be interested in running dungeons and such with friends, as finding pub groups on a first character can end… badly. So as long as VZ won’t be completely unhelpful (and will help me run dungeons here and there on the way to 80), it sounds like exactly the kind of guild I would want.

Yeah, this actually sounds like a rather good fit then. I’m kind of the same way; when it comes to leveling and questing, I like doing it on my own, but I’m always down for a dungeon when anyone in the guild asks (and I’m not already in one). So long as you’re willing to learn and aren’t going to judge harshly for optimizing runs for time expediency, then that’s great. We actually just had a newer guild member hit 80 the other day on his first character, and he’s pretty much exclusively done so by doing dungeons with us (and on his own, too, during the off hours). We’re mostly EDT, and lots of us have career-related jobs that keep us busy until 7-8PM. Your current level or class in a dungeon largely doesn’t matter so long as you’re willing to learn the tactics and are at least decent at the game (being good at mitigating damage is crucial). For the record, the first actual dungeon is at level 35 (AC Exp), but that gives you 35 levels (they go quick) to explore the world and get used to the combat system and things.

Either way, if you’re interested, I can fire you an invitation when I get home and/or send you some in-game mail to chat more.

They’re rare and people like rare things. Really, whether it is a good buy or not, people have certainly spent money on less meaningful items both in and out of the game. Maybe some of those buyers are collectors who seek the items for their own reasons, or maybe they’re leftover buy orders from a day since gone and people forgot about them / don’t know how to remove them. Seriously, do not underestimate consumers.

The only thing that matters is that they’re valued at those buy prices for the people posting the buy orders.

I think you overestimate the intelligence of the average player. “The sell price is so high, it must be valuable!”

First, let me say that if you have no characters on an account, transferring is free.

I realize you say that you want to make your characters with the guild, so that brings me to my main question: Are you looking for a guild you can explore the PvE wilderness and level up with? Or are you looking for a guild you can hang out with people and chat, but that focuses primarily on end-game content for when you get there (leveling is fast in GW2).

If you’re looking for the latter, then [VZ] seems like it’d be a good fit (we use TS instead of Vent, hope you don’t hate us!). We are an average size guild that focuses on end-game content, but we’re primarily looking for friends, so we’d be more than happy to chat it up with you as you level, and do dungeons and other end-game content with you as you get there. If you’re looking for the former, then you probably wouldn’t find what you’re looking for in VZ (though you’d be more than welcome to join regardless). If you’re curious about the guild and would like more details, feel free to follow the link in my signature and read more.

Either way, though, I hope you find what you’re looking for in a guild. It’s one of the most important parts of the game.

It’s RNG. Someone in my group the other night suggested that “if you start with Ascalon, you always get Cliffside”, to which I called BS. Needless to say, our other fractals were Asura and Dredge, so he was wrong.

Anyway, it’s random, and sometimes it seems like there is a pattern, but with only 8 fractals to RNG from, it’s not all that unlikely to see X following Y. Assuming you start with Y, the chance is 1/7 + (6/7 * 1/6) to get a specific Fractal X in either of the two following events. That’s a 28.5% chance to get X, which is a fairly plausible outcome.

If an item is 20s, you pay 5% of that to list it, which is 1s. Then, if/when the item sells, you pay a selling fee of 10% of the selling price, which is an additional 2s. Thus, the total tax you see for an item listed at 20s is 3s.

Please report this bug here with screenshots so that the art team can address it properly. They will not respond here.

We’re more than happy to work with you as you level-up because we’re primarily looking for cool people who want to chat and enjoy themselves, but I want to emphasize that we’re mostly an end-game guild that runs a lot of dungeons, fractals, and sometimes WvW. When we level-up alts, we normally don’t run around in the wilderness much; we craft, do dungeons, and so on. If you’re specifically looking for people to run around in the wild with, I’ll be honest, you probably won’t find much of it in VZ.

If, however, you’re willing to level up on your own and try out dungeons, and eventually want to enjoy the top-tier PvE content that the game offers, then VZ sounds like it’d be a good fit.

For the record, Gaile Grey says that you can switch servers for free if you delete all of the characters on your account. If you’re not too far along on any one of them, that would be a lot cheaper than the gems required to do it down the road!

And yeah, messages can go across servers. I’ll fire you one tonight when I get home. Looking forward to chatting with you more!

Oh man, I feel bad for anyone in that guild. It literally recruits anyone and everyone who can click an “Accept Guild Invite” button without any consideration for the quality of the member. It’s tragic, really.

But anyway, [VZ] is on the Stormbluff Isle server, so you wouldn’t have to transfer at all. Because of the nature of your post, I’ll address your specific concerns first. We’re a mature and mostly upstanding guild, so what this means is that we have thick skin and don’t mind some vulgarity and use it ourselves. That said, I am pretty confident that the guild wouldn’t appreciate if every other word you typed was the f-bomb or a racial slur, so please try to be conscientious of that. You seem the type of person who knows how that goes and isn’t a complete unfettered lunatic, so I’m confident you’d be fine. :P

Also, we’re currently working towards Guild Treks with our influence. I do keep the 10% Magic Find boost up all of the time because it’s valuable both early-game and end-game (and end-game is our primary focus as a guild). I don’t, however, keep the 5% kill experience boost up at all times, though, because that costs 500 influence every day, which slows down our progress towards higher guild missions substantially. If that’s really a problem, then I understand, though I’ll be frank with you: 90% of your experience leveling up is from events / hearts / story / crafting, so the kill experience booster is mostly worthless (5% of kill experience is so marginal it largely goes unnoticed). You can get the same boost by using a cheap food item from the TP as well.

Anyway, [VZ] is largely an end-game dungeon / WvW / fractal / etc. guild. We focus primarily on end-game content, but we’re certainly willing to help newer players so long as they’re chill, able to accept help, and willing to strive to be the best! You can read more in the link in my signature if you’d like and want to know more.

Either way, good luck in finding the guild you’re looking for! I know how important it is to enjoying the game.

As much as I hate to say it, it’s not theft at all.

Consider the analogy where I give someone in the real world access to a community bank account. If I do not have some kind of signed agreement made with every person I give access to this bank account that has them agree that it is punishable by X if they take stuff without permission, then if they raid the account and bail, it’s not illegal. Note here the requirement of signing some agreement before anything can be done about it. ANet’s guild team could theoretically implement some sort of “Guild Agreement” system to support these agreements, but that’s a lot of work for something that could be fixed by the guild leaders simply having more discretion in who gets what permissions. I’d rather them work on something more productive, honestly, like ‘last logged on’ or a guild calendar.

ANet cannot and will not act on a report that “some dude stole everything from my guild bank” because you implicitly told that person that it was OK for them to take anything they wanted out of the guild bank by giving them the permission to do so. This is, ultimately and unfortunately, not something that can be punished.

Here’s another really bizarre one:

unikittenfect

UNIQUE_EFFECT

I get 4-6 rares every single run of 48 not factoring cores, T6 mats, and the occasional exotic. It varies consistently, but some runs are better and some runs are worse. That’s how RNG goes.

There really needs to be some overarching optimization post with math that supports all of this. I don’t care much for the back-and-forth that constantly happens where one or the other is always better in someone else’s eye.

Let’s get a bottom-line with a graph of the optimization, if possible.

I have some thoughts about the min/maxing of condition dps and net damage that one would need to keep in mind when doing this math.

• Keep in mind that changing runes would negate the 6th bonus on the Rune of the Undead, which adds a significant bonus to condition damage. 1844 Toughness or around there is typical using ascended gear and Rabid stats, which means Undead runes add 92 condition damage.
• Keep in mind that condition damage boosts all condition damage, not just bleed. Runes for bleed duration do nothing to help the damage on poison.
• Some variants with different assumptions would be nice, like 100% condition uptime (never removed), 50% uptime (condition removed when 50% done), etc.
• Assume that all condition boosters in-game work.
• Some other stuff I likely am not thinking about.

This would be more useful than word-of-mouth confirmations.

I had this awesome run the other day where he was alive, but wouldn’t engage Colossus at all and thus wouldn’t use his bubble. My guild group had the time of our lives being forced to beat CR without the bubble to save us from the falling rocks, but we did it!

Dearest Rob:

I want to buy you a beer and talk dungeon design over a game of darts.

Sincerely,
Rising Dusk.2408

No but for real, a dungeon design SotG would be awesome.

Can you mail them all to me? I would put them to a good use!

What server and realm (EU / NA) are you on? What class(es) do you run in FotM? If you want I can just add you to my friends list and whisper you when my guild does a L48 FotM. I don’t want to advertise us as hardcore, though, because we’re definitely not, but we’d be happy to invite you to runs.

This will happen eventually; I’m fairly confident of it.

As an aside, I’d also like to see Underwater Bubbles gear!

Aha, makes sense. I wasn’t sure from your post whether you were saying it like “We who post have this problem so it must be real” or, as you say, trying to convey what I got at. Glad it was cleared up regardless.

Hey there, Mr. Hawaii! :P

I’m not sure if you’re interested in cross-server PvE, but dungeons and fractals can be done across servers, so it isn’t a huge limiting factor. Anyway, my guild, [VZ], is a medium-sized guild of friends and guild bounty mercenaries on the Stormbluff Isle server, and we are quite competent at dungeons and run them frequently. We’re mostly EDT, which is 6 hours ahead of you, but your times online (which are 2300-0600 translated to EDT) gives us a bit of cross-time. I usually, for instance, play from 2000-0200. We have many dungeon masters in the guild, and we also run high-level fractals when we can. I personally am reward level 49, and do level 48 runs frequently. If you want to tag along to those, I’d love to have you! You wouldn’t have to switch servers to be in the guild, though you also wouldn’t earn the guild any influence by being on YB. Needless to say I’d encourage you to switch, but I would never force that on anyone. Just keep it in mind.

Anyway, you can read more about the guild in the link in my signature if you’re interested. If you have any questions, or just want to get some runs of whatever, hit me up in-game or on the forums in any way you see fit. I check all communication avenues frequently.

Cheers, and regardless what happens, good luck finding the guild you’re looking for!

You don’t have to be on the same server to do Guild Missions with a guild and receive credit. You just need to guest onto their server when the missions are happening.

As a helpful hint, if you see something you don’t understand in-game, use the wiki command.

Seriously, try it: “/wiki Unique” without the quotes.

I’m getting reasonable amounts of ecto averaging >1 ecto per rare using a Master kit. This is a blatant case of RNG; nothing has changed, and if anything ever does, ANet promised it’d be in a change log.

TheAngryLuddite.1834:

It seems most of us on the forums have been hitting bad RNG there lately.

This is confirmation bias. The only people who post about it on the forums are those with the bad RNG. Those with the good RNG don’t post, and so you get the false feeling that something is wrong when, in-fact, nothing is wrong.

Don’t take this the wrong way; I think Fractal chests need to be more rewarding (at least as much as world boss chests) and have posted repeatedly about that topic, but the RNG and loot for FotM hasn’t changed since it was added.

If you ever need a run of Arah any path except 4 (easy, but too long and tedious) and I’m online and not busy, hit me up. My guild does this dungeon when we feel like it and we do p2 and p3 in 20-25 minutes max with whatever classes we feel like bringing at the time.

Pubs make this dungeon suck, but a good group goes a long way.

Well, hey, this sounds like a really good match-up, honestly.

[VZ] is a medium-sized guild on Stormbluff Isle that focuses really on doing everything. We WvW periodically depending on our moods and what the server needs. We also PvE a lot because that’s a blast, and we do all dungeon content and high-level Fractals when we’re on, again depending on our mood. We have numerous dungeon masters in the guild, and numerous players that are very skilled players running all sorts of content. Lastly, we also do weekly guild bounties, and have been quite successful in that regard. We’re looking for people willing to represent fully, who are more than a little proactive (If you want to do something tell people!), and who aren’t afraid to chat and enjoy themselves in the group.

If that sounds like a good fit or something you’d want to try out, please let me know! If you’re interested in more details, see the link to [VZ]‘s recruitment page in my signature. You can contact me in-game or on the forums however you please (by mail, whisper, PM, whatever), and I’d be happy to answer any questions you have or fire you an invite.

Either way, good luck on finding the guild you’re looking for!

New week, so let’s keep this up toward the top!

We’ve been succeeding our bounties, so many shout-outs to the guild members and mercenaries who have joined us in our exploits! If you’re a member of a smaller guild looking to get in on bounties message me and you can probably join just for the missions and rewards therein.

Also, we’re always looking for members who are interested in high-end PvE, periodic WvW, and so forth. We do all sorts of content whenever we feel like it, and we’d love to have you along! We’re really looking for friends above all else, though; people who want to represent, chat us up, and generally just enjoy the game with no real obligations. We do high-end content and WvW because it’s fun and because we roll that content because we’re good players, but there are really no requirements or demands made! Just have fun!

Anyway, looking forward to hearing from anyone interested!

Please never display kills / deaths to us or others. These create artificial behaviors in players that cause them to play differently just to ‘optimize’ this ratio. We want them to play to win, which sometimes means dying for the greater good.

Mourningcry.9428:

Come on, I think it’s fair to say that any “kill methods” posted in this thread are hypotetical, and are not meant to endorse practicing it.

Oh I certainly agree, I just don’t want people taking this thread the wrong way and to start seeing more of this in pub runs! You’d be surprised how many players go out of their way to grief others; the ones in here that just down a player are totally hilarious to do to your friends, just don’t do the ones that break their armor. :P

Also, as to when it happened to me, during speed runs many times you assume that the Mesmer isn’t trying to get you killed, so you don’t always check the exit location, haha.

In higher level fractals, you need two things as the person on the buckets:

• To have the lowest functional value to the team during the fight.
• To be amazing at dodging all 3 hits of the Powersuit’s Agony.

Needless to say, I’m always the one on the buckets. Necromancer just doesn’t offer as much to the team as the Guardian or Warrior or Mesmer in terms of dps against the Powersuit/Ice Ele (Condition damage is not boosted when he’s superheated). Let me point out that your Guardian(s) should never be the ones on the buckets if you can avoid it; you want their reflects and support in the fray (particularly the aoe Aegis). Your Mesmer and ranged DPS attackers should also never be on the buckets for the same reason. Necromancers and condition Rangers are the best at this role because they have passive 25% movement signets and have alternate ways to dodge the Agony attack (SB 3 on Ranger, DS on Necro). Necro also has the Signet of Undeath which he should run during this event to pop up downs ASAP on the ground from range. Engineers are good too if they’re traited for permanent Swiftness.

It’s also critical to know when to dodge the Powersuit Agony attack!

The Trick: Wait 1.5 seconds after Stability pops on the boss, then double-dodge.

If you don’t save both dodges or some other blocking skill, you will not dodge them all, and you will get downed. You can actually avoid the down if you’re packing 35 AR and have max HP and your heal skill up, but either way the damage is avoidable so try to mitigate it if you can.

For the record, I much prefer moving clockwise to going back and forth. This is especially valuable against the Ice Ele, because you’re moving him one direction only and don’t have to run by him, which gives him easy opportunities to aoe Agony your team to kingdom come. A good runner on the buckets will have no more/less trouble going clockwise/counterclockwise than he would going back and forth between two buckets.

Mourningcry.9428:

Portal tricks:
COF P1 – Drop the portal inside the boulder field

I’ve had someone do this to me, and while it was sort of funny, I’ve got to admit that I was pretty miffed that he cost me armor repairs and my stacks. Please don’t do this to people; at least in the other examples here most players can at least defend themselves.

Here’s one for JP: “Can you please increase the speed on the Necromancer Staff 1 Projectile?”
This has been the longest standing problem with that weapon, haha.

Try here.

Harder content should reward better loot. Reward players for playing well and beating harder content. That’s really all I can say on this topic anymore.

chrisk.4320:

Solo and team queue need to be two different ladders. In my opinion solo queue does not mean “casuals only” and it’s not like players who queue teams would not ever want to queue solo.

This.

Also, we absolutely need to be able to see our rating, not just our ranking on the leaderboard, for all of the reasons Xeph mentioned in the SotG. Please make it happen; it’s important to know what you’re up against rating-wise.

If you’re intent on staying on SF, you should check out this guild. They have a pretty solid advertisement and are on your targeted server.

If you’re not averse to traveling a little, my guild, VZ, is always looking for people with your credentials and attitude. It’s hard finding people of your capacity looking for guilds on SBI, so I try to venture a little outside the box. We do pretty much all PvE content including high level (and lower level) fractals, all dungeons (we have numerous dungeon masters), dragon events, and more. We also WvW from time to time, have guild bounties, and the whole shebang. We’re always looking for cool members, and you’d be more than welcome to join the guild and try out the guild without changing servers, though if you decide to stay it’d be awesome if you did switch servers (our poor influence!). Anyway, give it some thought, and contact me in-game or on the forums if you’re interested at all or would like more info. (More info can be found in the link in my signature)

Regardless, I hope you find what you’re looking for in a guild! It makes a big difference.

Sell the blood, bones, dust, and carrots on the TP and then buy the butter you need.

I agree that they need to fix the issue of an instance leader owning an instance at all. That said, I am confident that, as of the time of this post, disconnecting as instance leader in FotM or other dungeons will not reset the instance. It happened to me (disconnect) a scant few hours ago and my runs were fine.

Colin (Studio Director) in a recent interview actually said that griefing in the jumping puzzle is half of the fun of it, and intended in its design.

Yes, maddoctor is correct. You can only reset an instance in three ways:

• Everyone in the group leaves the instance.
• The instance leader changes characters.
• The instance leader leaves the group by whatever means.

Here’s another one that’s particularly nasty and happens frequently in the WvW forum:

ikittenerg

IN_A_ZERG

Unfortunately, FotM does not reward guild influence, and this is a major hit to FotM-running guilds. I hope that this is changed sooner rather than later, as this seems very much like a blatant oversight on ANet’s part. (Add a new dungeon, forget to hook up influence)

This is great. As someone who plays a Thief regularly and many other classes, too, I have always felt that builds that rely too heavily on being always stealthed serve as a crutch for the Thief community. There are so many other builds that don’t focus solely on Stealth that require much more planning, skill, and situational awareness and are just as (if not more) devastating. This change will make it so all Thieves who relied on that crutch must get better or get lost, and that’s awesome.

Thanks ANet!

Gotten a few new faces, but always looking for more.

If you want to run dungeons / PvE end-game content / little bit of WvW on the side, then check out VZ, especially if you’re already on SBI or thinking of coming here. We’d be more than happy to talk to you guys ahead of time if you’re interested, just let me know!

Where did this interview take place? Can I get a link?

Nikaido.3457:

I wouldn’t want to stack there and spam blinds unless I had a heavy dps group, you can be pretty sure of that.

I wouldn’t want to play FotM at all with a group if I had a single-minded tank or dps group! That’s my point. Your group wasn’t 100% dps, and it had support, even if you don’t necessarily think of it as support. I am willing to bet that a group of 5 warriors using Frenzy and 100 Blades wouldn’t have been so fortunate! The balance between the two (support and DPS) is what makes a team successful. Sometimes one character is full-on support, so you only need that 1 dedicated player, but sometimes many players have varying degrees of support (Healing Shouts warrior, for instance, coupled with a blind spam thief) and that is ‘enough’ too. The key is team structure, and keeping things balanced therein. That’s really all I’m trying to say.

Dahkeus.8243:

Until either player dps is toned down (looking at you, warriors) or damage taken from dungeons is toned up, there’s no point in taking something like an engineer who uses the elixir gun.

Warriors get a bad rap for this, and I think that’s unfair. Warrior’s are largely considered less-desirable in PvP, and you know why? They have poor sustainability. They have arguably the least damage mitigation of any class in the game, and they are optimal in melee range, the most dangerous range to be in for any end-game content. This is counterbalanced by their incredible melee dps if the enemy sits in their attacks. The reason warriors are so good, though, isn’t because they are overpowered or something, it’s because the content that players frequently call for berserker warriors in is so easy that you don’t even really have to mitigate damage. The enemies are so easy that you just take the hits, damage them, and win.

I suspect that class diversity in dungeons, CoF in particular, will see a huge boon once CoF gets revamped and the bosses are no longer pathetically easy. Warriors will still be good, don’t get me wrong (because they should be at that high risk position), but there will be a lot less “warrior only” groups looking for more if ANet handles the revamp properly.

Nikaido.3457:

Well, in my groups I had quite a few who weren’t experienced with 30+ yet and didn’t know about the 30+ culture, and they went immediately for the safe spot and stacked up there before the last seal part. We.. didn’t wipe. To my surprise, we didn’t wipe. The few times I’ve seen something like that happen in my pug dailies, we wiped at 30+ because the group couldn’t kill the cultists quickly enough and the damage killed us one at a time. My warrior/thief/guardian group killed all those before they could do any sort of damage and had no need for this cheesy “pull vet” thing.

I would like to emphasize, Nikaido, that one thief is actually optimal for that cliffside chest seal event. They can spam blind and essentially mitigate all damage from the enemies while the rest of the players burn down the enemies. A thief is actually a better support class in that event than a guardian.

It’s such a shame that so many good guild candidates aren’t interested in changing servers!

Regardless, your OP is exceptional, and I want to dignify it. My guild, [VZ], may be on the Stormbluff Isle server, but you don’t need to be on the same server if you don’t want to change. We can do all dungeon content cross-server. We are a PvX guild operating primarily in the EST/EDT time zone with roughly 60 members and 20 more guests from other servers for guild bounties. We do weekly guild missions, we run dungeons and have many dungeon masters, we run Fractals when we can (I personally am fractal level 49 and there is another in the guild on 64), and we WvW periodically if that interests you at all (I’m a commander and lead occasionally). We pretty much do whatever we feel like at any given time, and while we aren’t super hardcore, we perform the best possible in all areas we play. We are always looking for solid members who want to do more Fractals, and we’d be more than happy to take you on some runs. The major thing to take away, though, is that we have a pretty focused active group that is always looking to grow, and we’re looking for friends in the process. Maybe down the road you’d consider changing servers, but it’s no requirement.

If any of that sounds interesting, fire me a mail in-game, post in the detailed thread for VZ linked in my signature, PM me here, PM me in-game, whatever suits you. I’d be happy to answer your questions and take you on some runs.

Lastly, regardless of how this turns out, I hope you find the guild you’re looking for. Having a good guild is crucial to one’s enjoyment in a game like this. Good luck.