Guild Wars 2

I was considering that. It’s possible and could go either way. Regardless, this will create another sink for ectos, and those people who haven’t bought an amulet yet (like me) might cash out laurels for an ascended accessory. Note that those accessories appear to support new stat combinations like Clerics and the like which weren’t available before, which is another lure.

We’ll see how this pans out.

I wonder… If we can get ascended accessories by way of Laurels, what are the ascended items that we get with Guild Commendations from the new guild missions? Are those also accessories? If so, that makes acquiring them much easier if you play with your guild (only 12 commendations per ascended item). It’s also possible, however, that the guild mission accessories are different slots… But somehow I don’t think so.

I think the laurels + ectos might be an alternative to the guild missions for those who don’t want to do them. You know, “play how you want to and be rewarded for it” and all that.

Ascended accessories cost 50 ectos a pop, which will add considerably to the value of ectos. Even if you get 2 rares a guild mission, the missions aren’t something you can just farm. They require influence to research, influence to build, time to do all of those things, and then people to execute them. This is not something you’re going to be able to farm like Cursed Shore, and the net of it all will definitely be an increase.

Lol what. 250 ectos to get +5 infusion on a back piece, 50 ectos AND 40 laurels just to GET an ascended accessory (and you need two for your gear), and God knows what the hell it’ll cost to get infused versions of either the amulet or the accessories. Honestly, what do they want from us? Do they have no sense for the market? Do they just want ectos to keep rising in price until only the top 1% of players can afford anything that uses ectos?

I don’t get it, I just don’t get it. It’s like they have a plan of making the game a nightmare for anyone who wants maximum stats on their bloody equipment. It’s like I’m not allowed to enjoy maximizing multiple characters in this game. I should just delete all of my alts because God only knows it takes 3 months to get 115 laurels, the needed amount to gear up any specific character in accessories and an amulet.

Bah this is so frustrating.

Back in the day when the rich ori vein in SSC existed, you could mine it with all of your characters once every 24 hours. Consider that if you had 8 characters, that’s 10-20 (avg 15 without boosts) per character per day, which is 8×15×7 = 840 orichalcum ore in a week, or 420 ingots. Now flash forward ~3 months and that’s 8×15×7x12 = 10080 ore / 2 = 5040 ingots just from that vein. If you also collected the other 2 nodes in SSC and took advantage of server resets well, you can imagine how this explodes fast.

Last night I used so many Skale Venom in WvW trying to go through my pile. I’m going to miss those little buggers.

Last night was amazing in EB. The best part was how IoJ carefully planned the defense of their territory against our superior numbers in order to preserve Veloka, and more importantly their keep. I was very impressed. Good show, everyone, and I can’t wait for more!

Boulderbolg.3460:

Staying on your server in spite of it’s T1 collapse is admirable indeed! Blackgate just has more of those types of players. I think I can be proud of my server based on that.

No doubt!

I’m proud of my server for the people who stayed with us, and the fact that we haven’t collapsed to the absolute bottom. Enough of us care enough, and those of us left are more resolute than ever. I miss the T1 fights, because there are too many clumsy mistakes made in the lower tiers by all servers involved, but SBI is my home, and I’ll stick with it through thick and thin. I also know so many of the people I play with in WvW that I just wouldn’t enjoy myself anywhere else.

I’m proud to still be on SBI even after guilds seeking challenges elsewhere left. Other servers can say what you want about us, and you can act better than us by saying that you’ve stayed strong while we’ve fallen, but we had a really good and long haul in T1. We’re still going to fight as hard as we can with what we’ve got now, and the fights are still as good as ever. That’s what matters.

I had to buy a 25 pack of these things once, and I have never, ever seen a fine transmutation stone from anything else in the game on my account, regardless of the number of BL keys I’ve gotten from story steps or what-not. Meanwhile, I think I have 2 stacks of the garbage transmutation stones.

Next time I want Colin’s response on a thread, I’ll quote something he said out of context first!

I only started noticing this recently, but in WvW, whenever a Warrior uses the Vengeance downed skill and then dies, no matter how much damage you have done to the Warrior, no one gets credit for the kill (no experience, no loot, nothing). I think this bug was introduced with a recent patch or something, as it was not happening to me before this month, but has been happening reliably ever since. I saw another post somewhere about this, but it was ignored by a developer, and I think it has been lost (couldn’t find it).

It would be great if this were fixed. As it stands, I feel bad using Vengeance on my Warrior because it denies enemies rewards, though I still do because it’s an important skill. Furthermore, it is very aggravating not getting rewarded at all when enemy Warriors use Vengeance. This needs to be addressed.

Thanks!

John Smith.4610:

High level stones only come from black lion chests and gemstore I believe.

My characters will be forever ugly because of this. I wish there was another means of acquisition.

Moral of the Story: Something doesn’t work in-game, PM it to Evan for it to actually get addressed.

I would like to venture that Berserker Rangers are actually exceedingly effective in high level fractal runs. I bring a Ranger friend of mine with me to all of my L48 runs, and he contributes significantly, and helps a lot if we run into the Grawl fractal.

The only class I feel is really “required” for high-level fractals is a Guardian, and that is mostly as a crutch for the possibility of encountering a high-level Grawl boss. That boss requires so much projectile management that it is unfeasible for other classes to handle it without support from a Guardian’s Aegis spam, reflecting wall, shield of the avenger, and other assorted team-wide utilities. Optimally, this encounter is best handled with 2 Guardians and the other classes being whatever. The second Guardian goes a long way in damage mitigation. I enjoy the difficulty of this boss, personally, but I feel that if he were nerfed, it would lessen the necessity of at least one Guardian in those situations.

And this is a case example of exactly why this tech was so necessary and is so helpful. I’m so very pleased and always very relieved to know that if something were to somehow happen to my account, I wouldn’t be out of luck and out of hard work.

The obvious solution is to remove the cap and change poison and burning (and maybe regeneration) to stack in intensity, not duration, like bleed. Doing this for poison and burn (and definitely regeneration) may require some careful balance considerations, but at large this would obviate the problem and allow all classes to group with all classes without fear of screwing each other over. The very idea that certain team compositions completely ruin each other’s effectiveness goes against the grouping paradigm of GW2, and needs to be addressed.

I wouldn’t wear shoes in my palace either.

A server dropped down from T4, started winning, people got mad, and now after a bunch of offensive posts, SBI players are standing up for themselves and firing back. I don’t particularly enjoy these threads being like this, so I’ve tried to ignore the bad stuff and post good times only. I recommend everyone else do the same and try to stay positive.

The only thing I can suggest is to keep your chin-up and swords ready as all three servers continue to clash. I know I speak for myself and my guild and my friends when I say that this match-up has been very enjoyable. It’s been a long time since I’ve successfully sieged a 40+ player defended, massive defensively sieged, and fully upgraded Langor from Dane with multiple trebs, and boy did it feel good. I’m always looking forward to more.

JQ is a very good server with lots of good guilds and good times to be had. I fought against them for a long, long time, and we (SBI) and them formed a very healthy rivalry. If there is ever a server I root for in the midst of watching T1 from the depths of T5, it’s JQ. If people are lost and desperately want T1 combat, of all the servers there I’d recommend JQ for their community, spirit, determination, and skill.

…But of course, SBI could also use some love these days too.

Good luck JQ, and know that I’m rooting for you to stay on top!

Btw, these sigils don’t stack. You’re wasting a sigil slot having it on both your sword and warhorn together.

Fair point, though if you include their non-content updates, more often than not it falls on a Monday. I guess it really doesn’t matter either way.

On my sub-80’s, I use L35 rares up to L60, at which point I upgrade to L60 rares. I then use these L60 rares all the way up to L80, at which point I get exotics in appropriate stats. The reason I do this is to buy and use cultural armor, as it looks sweet and makes my alt feel less lame (and I don’t want to ruin the cultural armor with transmutation stones). During my leveling process, I always equip green rarity weapons at my current level bought off the TP.

I’ve done AC at level 59 using L35 rares, and let me tell you just how much more terrible your character is compared to a properly geared one. It’s pretty staggering. This is why I typically only bring in my alts for dungeon runs at the very end so I don’t have to weigh down the team where it really counts.

WvW is the end-game, seriously. Live it and love it. Playing WvW seriously makes high-end PvE a complete joke, and it has been thoroughly enjoyable for me when all else in the game gets boring.

The star only shows for the character that achieved it. If you want it on another character, you must get 100% world exploration on that character. This star is a show of dedication to a specific character on your account.

Bumping this one more for some more coverage! We’ve recruited some really great people by word of mouth and PR from this thread, and are always looking for more!

P.S. Can the Champion Karka be a [Group Event], ANet?

I love this zone; it’s incredibly relaxing and fun for me as a player. Oftentimes I’ll be that guy soloing random champions and veterans in the zone just because I can. Let me tell you just how fun soloing the Veteran Reef Drake Broodmother is! I’ve also gotten rather good at soloing the Champion Karka, though that takes like 45m to bring down solo. (The Champion Shark is also excellent for underwater combat)

Anyway, I wander around here when I want to unwind after work, or just do something solo. It’s very satisfying, even if the rewards are garbage. I’m not sure I’d enjoy it as much if there were tons of players here regularly, but that’s just me.

Is there a good reason why they’re breaking their content-update-schedule and releasing on a Tuesday instead of a Monday? Are they just saying Tuesday so the Europeans don’t get mad again when it’s actually Tuesday for them, and it’ll be Monday for Americans?

bluewanders.5297:

I don’t blame them for being more taciturn… doesn’t seem to make any difference at all when they aren’t. Irrationally demanding players are irrationally demanding.

That said, this complaint is far from irrational. It is perhaps the biggest issue with condition builds currently, which affects a significant portion of all metagames that GW2 supports. It’s easy to just tell everyone to use power builds in the meantime, but that is neither fair nor an adequate solution, especially when entire sections of multiple classes focus on conditions and run across this issue in any level of coordinated team play.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

I run 3 characters with condition builds and I don’t have an issue with the caps.

It’s only a downside when playing in a zerg and the game isn’t(and shouldn’t) be balanced around zerg play.

I stack 20-something bleeds on my Necromancer on entire groups of enemies in PvE, and trust you in me, I hit the cap repeatedly in groups where there is even one other person using bleeds to even a minor extent.

I fail to see how there are considerations to be made for balance. Condition builds are outright inferior now in dps compared to any of the dps specs of, well, any class. Multiple players together smash opponents in PvP/WvW and PvE with power builds, while condition builds are only tolerable in small scale battles like 1v1’s up to 3v3’s. If you outright removed the cap entirely, you’d do no harm to the balance of the game in a major way, unless you actually want condition builds to be inferior in this regard (which is illogical).

Honestly, if we lose the bleed cap only to see our already-inferior bleed damage drop as a result of counterbalancing, it’ll be two steps forward and one major step back. Seriously, does anyone actually look for condition damage builds in any run of anything? No? Didn’t think so. (Note that conditions like cripple and the like are always valuable, this strictly addresses condition dps vs. power dps)

Good fun this morning and over the weekend. It amused me on Saturday night when IoJ kept trying to take WC from us by building catapults in Dredge that we’d destroy before they were even finished. (Your zerg was in there for half an hour as a mere eight people defended it!) DR put up ferocious fights holding their keep and towers, and it was great sieging alongside [Kiwi] to take Langor and Valley thereafter.

On the flip side, I want to thank a lot of our players for doing the less glorious jobs of defending Dolyaks when we need supply and skirmishing against the other servers to keep our lands safe and green. Your efforts are not lost on us, keep it up!

Looking forward to more over the course of the week. Good show, everyone!

I think part of the issue comes in EB with how difficult Overlook is to siege if you’re red and have lost it and nearby areas. It’s a difficult siege because it’s uphill from nearby towers, and Veloka is easy to defend if you own overlook. This makes a breakout into EB from red’s side particularly difficult and demotivating when it fails, which helps keep third place third.

I think the outmanned buff is one thing and its own discussion, but I also think there should be something like a “Breakout” buff. Basically, if your team has the fewest PPT on a given map, you have the Breakout Buff on that map, which doubles (triples?) the event rewards for that map. This would encourage the players who ARE there to really go after points to bring themselves on the board. This sort of increased rewards is also liable to bring more players to the map in general.

Amusingly, I am in the same boat, and I keep mining more regardless. I look at my bank slot filled to the brim with Orichalcum every night and go “I can craft the universe, mwah!”

This is something that a lot of people take issue with, and ANet would be fools to not recognize as an issue given the magnitude of feedback about it. That said, I’m willing to bet that there’s just no tech to support it yet, and it’s a larger time investment than just switching a number in the back-end (likely related to storage stack issues if you’re a programmer). This all said, there’s a balance issue to be taken into account if this limit were to be lifted or increased, which means the balance team needs to be involved and run a bajillion tests to make sure they don’t fry the state of the game.

This all said, I agree that this is something they need to fix. As a Necromancer player whose stacks are constantly getting lost to the limit in pretty much every dungeon run I do, I understand well and good the problem here.

I have so many Fractals weapons it’s stupid, and yet the two Fractal weapons everyone hates (Spear / Trident) are the ones I want, and yet never get. I’d happily trade someone a Fractal Sword or Dagger or Axe for one of those if I could. ;-;

There’s literally no downside to announcing a sale a few days in advance. Sure, someone will still complain as someone always will, but it will be a courtesy towards the players and will give the appearance of being informative to the community. The enterprising business would jump on something like that.

This mission frustrates me, not because of the combat content, but because of the actual story behind it. You walk through a marsh killing a hundred undead or so, and then you set up some mortars, you look down into the marsh and see a hundred undead, and then you order the mortars to fire. Apparently none of the other troops are even looking at what they’re shooting at, and apparently when it turns out that somehow the undead made you see undead when you were actually shooting pact troops is your fault. Everyone turn around and says “Jeez, look at that mistake you made!” and other such gems like “Not your day’s best work!” and the like.

Seriously, what is the point of this? To make the commander “make a mistake” even though he didn’t make a mistake? Everyone, Trahearne included, outright blames the commander (player character) for this “atrocity”, and you have to go dive into some volcano to “make it right”, yeah okay.

This component of the story is weak, and the pact reacts to it naively. The player character does exactly the right thing, and some plot and character massaging is done to make the character look like a bad guy throughout the whole ordeal, as though you have to earn back into the graces of the pact. If you wanted to make it appear that the character can make mistakes, you should give that choice to the player. Every commander is forced through this story step as it stands, and nothing can avert the “error in judgment”. This just highlights that the player needs more control over their own story. There is some splitting of paths, but no paths within the story steps that allows the player to make their own decisions. It would also be nice if the characters were not so one-dimensional, and did not bandwagon against the commander as if he is some sort of pariah after this situation. (Sure you go after the illusionist later, but that barely makes up for how the player is treated by the NPCs inbetween)

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I had to say. Maybe someone else will agree with me, and better yet, maybe this will inspire some better storytelling in the future and maybe more spliting paths.

We’ve had some really good matches so far! IoJ is really serious about keeping their holdings in EB, while it took us a good amount of effort to finally break down DR’s points.

Also, to the DR Charr Mesmer from [SKY] I just dueled twice: You’re a good player, and the duels were good, but I’m 2 for 2 against you.

Looking forward to more!

The holiday celebrations in GW1 were largely because the ANet employees love the holidays enough themselves that they put in countless extra hours beyond their normal 40 a week to get them done. This tradition has continued into GW2 as well, and a lot of employees put in a lot of extra hours getting them done right. What it shows is that the employees aren’t that enthused about Valentine’s Day. Apparently someone made some roses, but that’s it. That sort of “extra effort” is what makes ANet holidays happen, and well, it’d be crazy as customers to expect them to put in those extra hours for every Tom, Dick, and Harry holiday out there. That said, GW2 seems to be making these content updates more regularly (ie. monthly), and seem to only be pursuing ‘holiday events’ for those that were a big deal in GW1 (ie. traditions).

CassieGold.7460:

Not that I don’t like the parts of HotW armor, cultural armor or other things that can be blended into a character look…. but if TA armor gave you a sylvari like glow on the armor, or AC armor actually turned ghostly at night like the weapons do.…. these would give incentive to wearing that armor more

Bolded for awesome points.

Easy-to-acquire Berserker armor is great no matter how you cut it.

There are multiple parts, and some of the interview hasn’t been transcribed yet. You can see the tweet they made during their interview with him regarding it here.

Awh Skale Venom! I actually thought that one was awesome when everyone on both sides of a battle used it.

Just the other day, Colin Johanson, a development lead for GW2, said that the scavenger hunt was a priority. You can read the DragonSeason interview (it’s posted on reddit) for more of what he said, too.

This is actually a bug. Many people I talk to have noticed a significant drop in FPS when that trap is pulled. This is probably more relevant and would see a bug fix more quickly if it were in the bug report forum.

Colin, the other day, said that this was a “priority”. What exactly that means is anyone’s guess.

Dawn is worth a lot less on the market right now than Dusk. This would be a bad trade for anyone with Dusk. Furthermore, the forums are not a gray market, and so should not be used as such.