Guild Wars 2

You can kind of already do this… Convert 5 laurels into 10 Unidentified Dyes, sell the dyes at sell value on the TP, and then buy whatever you want. You can definitely afford ~4-5 ecto with that, or whatever else you like.

No, I definitely agree. I’d personally like to see some more skill-driven rewards, particularly in the vein of legendary equipment. My point is that if you want a legendary item now before ANet either adds new legendaries acquired in different ways or adds new means to get current legendary components, you need to accept what the legendary is at face value and work toward it as that. The ‘now’ part is important. If you’re patient, you can just wait it out and get the new changes when they go live. Colin said recently that the legendary precursor scavenger hunt is a priority for them, so that should be reassuring for you and Mesket and others. Note that in my above post I specified that it might not be a good idea for Mesket to pursue a legendary in its current form if he’s unwilling to pay the base costs required for legendary components. He most certainly can wait for improvements, and those improvements can and will certainly be made in time. My only point above was made for those seeking a legendary now.

I also don’t appreciate the assertion you made that I will twist your words. I’m really just trying to discuss things in this topic to help others understand the situation. If all this discussion is achieving is inspiring users like Svarty to try and troll me and everyone else to distrust the fairness of my arguments, then I’ve nothing more to say. Sorry for all that.

Good times last night in EB. It was nice seeing DR so ferociously defending their points against us! We almost had Bravost! Looking forward to more tonight.

Svarty.8019:

Yes it did. You presumed to know whether or not the Legendary was or was not suitable for that person, thus judging what the Legendary should or should not be.

A legendary costs X currency and takes Y account accomplishments. Player Z is unwilling to pay X currency, but willing to do Y accomplishments. Thus, player Z cannot get the legendary. It is a logical step from here, with no assumptions or presumptions made, to say that a legendary in its current form is not a good fit for player Z because they refuse to pay the base requirement of X currency to achieve it. There is no presuming of what a legendary should or should not be in that logic, only what it is.

Svarty.8019:

Nope. I’d be happy with that.

You might be, others might not be.

grave of hearts.7830:

Clocked enough hours on my necro to know a few things,one of them is i dont see any marks on tower walls other than my own.
That says a lot.

It either says the other Necros are bad, or there are no other Necros. Haha.

That said nothing about the legendary, rather it was a suggestion to the player based on the preferences he listed.

Bumping this up for more to see! I’m glad that some people have shown interest, and I’ve contacted you all in-game!

Jeffrey said in another thread it’ll be fixed in the next content update on the 26th.

I really hope when they redo dungeons, they redo Arah story mode so that Zhaitan is the most epic fight in the game. Rob, I hope you’re reading this!

This is long overdue. I hope this gets addressed in the March update because dear God, WvW rewards are so bad, especially when you factor in how much it costs to upgrade locations and buy siege.

No, it is just a plain axe that looks like it is made of lava.

You expected a game where you didn’t have to use currency to buy items from other players? I’m totally surprised that you bought a game without knowing what you were getting into, because I would personally never do that.

Furthermore, exploring and horizontal progression are all there already either way; you seem to be assuming that the legendary is the only thing you can work towards, which is absolutely wrong. Plenty of players enjoy the game and never think about a legendary because of exactly what you said: it’s not for them and they don’t care for the price tag.

My best advice is to move on; judging from your posts, a legendary really doesn’t seem like a good fit for you.

I have one real question here:

Mesket.5728:

TP should be there just to fasten things up when you have little left to get… Not to buy the majority if not all of it.

Why not?

I’d like to point out that it is illogical to never use the TP. Why in the world would you insist on personally handicapping yourself? I’m not telling you to flip or to sit in LA for hours making marginal profits, but buying/selling items to other players is an integral part of the game.

I casually farm SSC every night before bed because it’s fun and relaxing, and I get anywhere from 5-9 Powerful Blood per run. I can then sell those T6 mats on the market and use them to help with other parts of the legendary, or keep them and stash them for my own legendary. If I can get 5-9 of the most valuable T6 material in one night, I can translate that to a few months of work, all the while making progress toward my legendary. With clovers you also make progress, as you do with the gift of mastery, and same with the gift of the weapon. Once you have all of those, you can play the game normally and casually make money, and eventually you’ll be able to get your legendary. If you’re not in a rush to get it tomorrow, then there’s no problem. Eventually you’ll be able to afford it. That’s how I did it, and that’s how you can do it too.

Heck, I WvW more than anything else in this game, and even I can get a legendary despite the abysmal rewards in WvW. It’s a matter of dedication and anyone can do it.

Charismatic Harm.9683:

No offense, but you should probably stop beating your head against this wall as I have. No matter how well you explain it, they still won’t get it because they’re blinded by their own “wants”. (…)

Mesket.5728:

no matter how many times we try to explain it to you, you just dont get it cause you fail to understand the game as a whole. All you can see is that farm farm farm farm farm,… farm some more and get profit. That’s what a legendary is to you.

Get out of the grinding/farming bubble and realize that many players want an end game reward for reaching the end of the game, not the same repetitive thing over and over again.

I think there’s more to it than that, for both of you. I understand that people want to feel rewarded for “beating” a game. The problem with Mesket’s reasoning is that he assumes that a legendary, being the highest echelon of weapon available, must be that reward. What about the pact weapon you get for beating the personal story? You don’t like that because it’s not as flashy as a legendary? I understand that, but you’re still getting a cool skin for beating the story! This is why people like Ham speak about things like entitlement. You, Mesket, feel entitled to get the best and coolest weapon possible when you “beat a game”, whatever that means in the context of an MMORPG. Think about that for a second, too, can you even ‘beat’ an MMORPG? I’d argue that you can’t, and that is the crux of the challenge here. A player must set their own goals and then work toward achieving them. Legendary items cost a ton of gold, and indeed that’s the whole point. There is a fixed amount of gold they cost, but the rest of their value comes from supply and demand, an economical concept controlled by the players. The more coveted something is compared to how easy/difficult it is to get is what sets its price by the players, and that is why precursors continue to be priced so high and the pact weapons so low.

Coming to terms with how the economy interacts with this is important. Mesket, you clearly want a legendary item, and so you have chosen the highest tier of gear you can possibly work towards. This will either take a tremendous amount of farming or a tremendous amount of luck or a tremendous amount of RL money. The components are rare, but attainable within reason. The BLTP is a part of the game like any other, and true mastery of the game involves gold just like it involves beating dungeons or exploring the map. I realize it is difficult to accept that you can’t just casual-play for a month and get a legendary, but it was specifically designed to be above and beyond that for the more hardcore players who really want something to reach for. By choosing to want one, you are choosing to challenge yourself in these ways. If you’re not willing to accept that challenge, then maybe a legendary isn’t for you. Others are paying the huge prices for precursors and mats because they have accepted that challenge. It’s important that you be prepared for the commitment if you want to make it.

Svarty.8019:

With all of Arenanet’s warnings about account security, it seems highly unlikely that any sensible player would risk giving their account details (and money) to total strangers in return for them playing the game for them. “Runners” are simply not a feasible excuse for leaving the current system in place. Arenanet know this, which is why they are changing it.

That’s not how it’s achieved. What people do is sell slots at the boss of a dungeon. This has been a prevalent attitude in recent months in the Dungeons forum (Selling Arah p4 runs, for instance). There are even a couple relevant front page threads about it currently.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. They’re a part of acquiring end-game content because ANet said they’re a part of acquiring end-game content. If it had been anything else, then that would have been a part of acquiring end-game content, and we’d be right where we started. The point is that anything that is used to create prestige cosmetic items like legendaries will always be, itself, coveted exactly because it is used for those items.

It’s not poor design at all; having an expensive and rare item use components which are themselves expensive and rare is totally acceptable, and is part of what gives legendaries their value and prestige at all.

I think it’ll be cool, but to be honest, I’d continue playing WvW anyway because it is fun. Getting some progression—ANY progression—is better than nothing, though.

In the JPs, I tend to leave people alone so as to not waste my time and spend more time in the JP than I want to. I’d much rather be out in the wilderness killing people and taking points, but the JPs pay out badges (used for siege) and siege far too well to ignore. If someone attacks me or otherwise appears threatening, I will kill them, and I take great pleasure in getting into good fights with enemies and then throwing them off of cliffs. That said, if you spam emotes and try to avoid combat, I’ll leave you alone because I’d much rather not be there in the first place. This is exactly why I’ll take a portal whenever available, because it speeds it up so much and lets me get back to the really enjoyable part of WvW sooner.

You can do T5 (40-49) pretty easily right now if you have a good group. You just can’t go beyond that because ANet hiked the Agony damage you suffer; you cannot do Jade Maw at 50+ right now. Technically you could still progress, however, if you had a friend at a higher level who would do odd levels with you (you just couldn’t get the daily chests, which is the whole point).

Iehova.9518:

Dungeon master isn’t a requirement for a legendary, nor do I think it should be.

I’m curious as to why you think so, my good man.

Speaking based on my wants, in some sense I think it’d be nice if there were more “I did this” parts to a legendary. I play the game and am a good player, and can achieve basically any “do this” task thrown at me. I had multiple Gifts of Mastery before I ever had any of the other parts for legendary items. If DM were a part of that, I don’t think I’d complain because it’s a rather easy task to accomplish.

That said, I think it waters down the economical task of a legendary item. Hear me out. I think a lot of what gives the components of a legendary value on the market is that they get used in a legendary in the first place. Taking that away would have changed the economy a lot, and rendered a lot of items relatively useless. A legendary item is a material sink, and thinking in the largest scale possible, I’d say that a legendary’s component choices are as much conscious decisions to preserve economic equilibrium as, say, rares salvaging to ectos or the precursor hunt in the Mystic Forge. The legendary has a role to play in all of this, and I think that’s why so much of it can be and is driven by player gold. Stepping back and coming to terms with that for me was, at first, difficult, but makes sense to me now. Keeping the economic role of a legendary in mind, adding more “I did this” stuff to the legendary really wouldn’t improve the experience any or make it feel any more meaningful, it’d just add new layers of stuff to do, which adds tedium. You can just buy your DM title from runners anyway if you really want to, and we’d see more of that than we already do if it were a part of the legendary process, devaluing the title further. Thus, I make the case that it wouldn’t really improve the legendary process any, but it’d risk devaluing the title itself further. Therefore, it’s not a really good thing to include.

If you play well, don’t CC enemies randomly, and do solid DPS, I couldn’t care less what you use. Dungeons are so easy for competent groups that it’s irrelevant what build your team uses if everyone’s good. That said, you should probably use a GS as your weapon swap for its burst; it will help balance your build a lot.

You should probably try deleting the local.dat file and letting the installer redownload it.

P.S. Don’t bump your thread after two minutes, it’s against the rules.

P.P.S. Next time this kind of question goes in the tech support forum, not here.

I love Juggernaut’s effects, but I don’t like the hammer itself. That’s where, I feel, Mjolnir really shines.

I go back to check my characters’ birthdays (I still want a Margonite tonic), but otherwise no. GW2 is too huge an improvement for me.

I loved that picture when it was posted weeks back in the relevant thread. It’s a good representation of the way a lot of us have felt in the downturn since when we were in T1. It feels good to be in a tier where I think we can really show people what we’re made of.

I’m not sure I understand you. You’re taking the position that earning gold, however you achieve that end, is not an accomplishment, nor does being wealthy in-game symbolize what you’ve been doing. I don’t think that makes sense.

If I have invested a lot of my time in-game into mastering the economy of GW2, or perhaps mastering certain instances of GW2 in order to make maximum gold, then if it has resulted in my earning a lot of gold. If I then use that gold to buy a legendary off the TP, I have achieved exactly what Izzy said in that blog post. The in-game measurement of one’s success is multi-faceted, and sometimes it’s a title, but very generally it’s by the amount of gold in your bank. That’s a quantitative measurement of your success, and I do not think that successfully playing the market or farming is any less mastery over the game than being able to do jumping puzzles or WvW or every dungeon path or L80 FotM. ANet has always emphasized that you should be able to achieve your goals by playing the game the way that you want to be playing it. There are some inconsistencies in this right now (WvW sucks at rewards, for instance), but ANet is aware of it and has posted repeatedly that they’re working on it across the forums.

I’d also appreciate it if you didn’t insinuate that I am forcing my opinion on others or pretending that I represent ANet. I know well my limitations and my position as a player, I am just trying to explain the situation to an interested individual is all.

Well, I know where you’re coming from, and it seems you have similar work schedules as I and many in my guild do. As an adult working 8-10 hours a day, I know well what it means to be a casual player, but I still play every night and you might take a look at my guild on SBI, [VZ]. I talk a lot about what we stand for, how we operate, and what we do in the post, but we’re a group of 40-50 players (currently 5-10 active at EST after work hours) and are primarily a WvW/PvE guild, we take pride in being very good players while not having obligations that players need to fulfill constantly. You can fire me a mail in-game if you’re interested, PM me here, whisper me in-game (I get home from work in a few hours), or whatever is convenient and we can talk more.

Either way, hope you enjoy your time in-game with your friends.

I don’t think this will make AC harder, just more fun. I look forward to the change.

Interesting and good information. I think the real key to that speed increase is getting behind the door before it closes. I doubt most run-of-the-mill Thieves are that competent.

No, it is not an exploit. It is a natural use of monster behavior to try to split enemy groups into more manageable parts. This exact tactic is why certain skills, like Necrotic Grasp and Scorpion Wire, are valuable in PvE.

I personally think that what really matters is thus:
A) power builds over any other builds, regardless of class
B) knowledge of the path and the ways to save time
C) at least 1 mesmer for the boulder part

Other than that, the class ultimately doesn’t matter. Warriors are just nice because they are pretty resilient and noob-friendly. As far as pugs go, if you get a warrior you’re less inclined to think “If this guy is bad this run is going to be awful”.

Auesis.7301:

7-8 minutes, with a Thief (me), Mesmer, Elementalist, Warrior and Guardian. Using a Thief to burst down the gate controller is unparalleled time-saving.

I personally use Frenzy to burst down the Controller on my Warrior in 3-4 seconds. How fast does your Thief do it? I imagine the times are comparable.

It’s getting nerfed in 6 days; don’t waste your money. Just wait and do it then.

I do personally think it looks way cooler than Juggernaut. If I were to get an end-game hammer, I’d totally get Mjolnir.

Mesket.5728:

Still people fail to understand that Legendaries were promoted as end game achievement reward, to be displayed on characters that completed most if not all the content.

I pugged a Arah once with a player wearing 2 legendaries… when asked if he knew the dungeon his answer was “I only did AC for money runs and thats all i know”

Mesket, your post perfectly represents what I was saying above:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I think the problem people really have with buying and selling legendaries is that they have some premeditated opinion on what a legendary item should be, and the realization that ANet’s definition of a legendary item doesn’t match that person’s definition bothers them.

Let’s be real here. It is an end-game achievement no matter what because it costs a ton of money that you have to earn somehow. Dungeon master isn’t a requirement for a legendary, nor do I think it should be. Even if it was, people could buy runs of a dungeon from other people, which is a legitimate practice, so either way “as long as you have the money you can get a legendary”. That’s what top gear is about in GW2, and that’s okay. That’s what we all really need to come to terms with.

Darknass.1903:

Alright sir or madam you’ve certainly enlightened me, thank you.

I’m glad to hear that it helped.

lures makes good points. His post is essentially the profitability of the clover recipe. That said, there isn’t an equal chance for all of those things to happen… Lodestones have a very low ~5% chance of popping out of the recipe, while each T6 fine material seems to have around a 2/30 chance of appearing. I still think it requires some good luck to actually profit from this, but if we’re assuming you need the clovers anyway, then it’s actually a pretty fair recipe, even if RNG for clovers sucks.

Darknass.1903:

While I understand that obviously money doesn’t just fall out of the sky and that it takes effort to get. What I meant was that I essentially understood from day one that legendaries were meant to be owned solely by people who put effort into playing the game.

It is very unfeasible for people to purely spend real life money on a legendary, but even in smaller amounts, I think being able to spend $20 to make it easier for you to get your legendary sooner totally acceptable. One of the biggest and most important philosophies about GW2, as stated repeatedly by ANet, is that it needs to be rewarding to you to play the game [i]however you so choose to play the game[i]. If that involves farming gold in CoF, or playing Trader Wars 2 and TPing all day long, or earning money IRL and still getting rewarded in-game despite having little time to play, or if you want to explore the world and do it all yourself, so be it! It’s all okay, and ANet encourages that. To me, it is a simple extension of that philosophy to legendary weapons, and their implementations make a lot of sense to me. Allowing legendaries to be traded lets you get rewarded for how you want to play the game, which is exactly how they wanted it.

Darknass.1903:

Also while the original Guild Wars had many items that were sought after and yes were trade-able there was nothing that really equated to the quintessential “legendary”. by that I mean there was nothing that really took a-lot of personal effort throughout the game to obtain.

Not with real money, certainly, but definitely with regards to in-game money. GW1 was a lot more one-dimensional, which maybe helped people see the rewards system as such. You earned platinum, and then used platinum to acquire items. It was simple. Now you can earn account bound components and use them to acquire legendary items. I think ANet implemented this as a means to reward players who want to explore and do those things, though. Consider that you can get all of the account bound components for a legendary, buy the non-account bound parts for X, make the legendary, and then sell the legendary for X + Y, where Y is essentially your monetary reward for the account bound work. I think that’s a good strategy for allowing players to feel personally and monetarily rewarded for their personal work.

Indeed, and I can definitely agree with that. I, personally, earn a swath of dungeon tokens I’ll never put to better use, so I buy exotic Greatswords and chuck them into the forge in the hopes that one day it’ll pay me out a Dawn/Dusk that I can turn around and sell for gold.

You can buy and sell the end-game cosmetics of GW1, too, and yet no one complained about that. It’s curious that buying and selling the end-game cosmetics of GW2 has people in such a frenzy.

That said, it is not zero-effort to buy a legendary, either with real money via gems converted to gold or via in-game money earned as gold by any means. 1200+ gold is no small sum, and in gems that would cost $1056 US to buy outright. If someone is willing to pay an entire paycheck to ANet in order to have the gems to convert to gold to buy their legendary, then more power to them. That is a lot of real life work converted into gold, which is ultimately no less life investment than farming it all in-game. There is no zero-effort here; it’s a ton of effort no matter how you slice the cake.

I think it is very good that legendaries are allowed to be sold. It helps the economy by removing gold from the market on huge sales that the TP taxes. I think the problem people really have with buying and selling legendaries is that they have some premeditated opinion on what a legendary item should be, and the realization that ANet’s definition of a legendary item doesn’t match that person’s definition bothers them. I think if you come to terms with what a legendary is, rather than what you think it ought to be, you’ll find it all makes sense within the framework of the game. (Note: This isn’t advocating complacency, rather that you shouldn’t be trying to imprint your personal vision of the game onto ANet)

Hopefully that has helped.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

And I’ll repeat this line because a lot of people fail to remember: Precursors are free from the Mystic Forge. You just need a lot of luck, because <gasp> it’s RARE </gasp>.

Okay, I agree with most of your points, but the above is wrong and I am compelled to explain why.

Precursors are not “free” from the mystic forge. They cost however many rares (and thus the values of those rares) it takes put into the forge in order to get the precursor out. In many cases the cost of the precursor is greater than the TP price, and in some cases less. It’s a gamble, and you need to know that walking in. If the average chance of getting it out of the MF were a significantly cheaper route than the TP price more often than not, then the prices would rebalance until such an imbalance no longer existed. That is the nature of the economy.

The following is an incredibly safe beginning definition for an exploit, particularly relevant to dungeons:
1 – If you can damage it and it cannot damage you, it is an exploit
2 – If you exit the map topography or geometry, it is an exploit
3 – If you skip events that block progress, it is an exploit

The only tricky one is 3, but it really isn’t that surprising. Things that don’t block progress include events like the ice totems in HotW, Spider / Kohler / Troll in AC, or the ooze event in CoF. Things that do block progress include events like the bandit barrel carry in CM, GL in Arah, Alphard in Arah, and so forth. In the events that block progress, there are clearly erected barriers preventing progress, and bypassing them without completing the event by any means is clearly an exploit.

The question you need to ask yourself is why would someone buy a more expensive completed thing if they can buy the components for cheaper and throw them in the mystic forge themselves? This is why people who tried to make profit off of Volcanus early on ended up getting the shaft and got heavily undercut (I cannot say how many actually made money off of that because I’m not John Smith). If you seriously want to sell it, I think the best thing you can do is add in 15% due to the TP tax and then estimate what the demand is for the item and up the price based on what you feasibly think you can sell it at. You do not want to get undercut with such a big item.

Currently I’m at this:

1. Frostfang
2. Gift of Mastery, Gift of Frostfang, Tooth of Frostfang
3. Gift of Fortune
[X] – 77 Mystic Clovers
[X] – 250 Globs of Ectoplasm
[ ] – Gift of Might
[ ] – Gift of Magic

Literally all I need is 250 of some of the remaining T6 materials and I’ll have my next legendary. Been farming CS a bit, but given that I can’t dedicate too many hours a day I make progress rather slowly. I will probably break down and just buy the materials eventually, but I’m hoping to avoid that until a downturn in the market.

4. I accept donations if anyone loves me enough! <3 /shameless plug

Nah but really, good luck to everyone working on their legendary items. I’ll probably turn around and sell my Frostfang once I make it, but it will have been a fun adventure collecting the stuff for it.

They already frustrate me enough in PvP and WvW because they are much more difficult to read the animations of. If anything, they should be larger.

And much love to [Kiwi] and other guilds for sticking it out through the Mass Guild Exodus of 2013. After roughing it and being crushed for many weeks straight, it feels good to finally be able to branch out and take some riskier and more forward points again. This has been a very enjoyable match-up for me so far, and am looking forward to more like it.

Zenith.7301:

There is no challenge here.

You stay at range so his arrow misses all the time while you strafe, and when he’s about to shield you just drop a chill and send the guardian to pull mobs in and the mesmer laysdown a feedback, time warp if the aoe is slacking.

It’s not a hard boss. It’s just a PuG destroyer because it requires a specific approach — and pugs don’t do specific or have the guarantee of a guardian to pull kitten in.

My response is primarily philosophical because I think you are trivializing the difficulty of an encounter by claiming that skill nullifies challenge, which is incorrect.

Just because you and I and others can beat a boss doesn’t make it easy or without challenge. No matter how much you know a fight, if the fight is challenging, you slack off and you will die. That’s a part of it being challenging. I have beaten some very high level FotM Grawl bosses, and they are without a doubt challenging. Even for good teams who “know the perfect strategy and have the perfect team setup”, they have to pay close attention and not make mistakes if they are to win. Make no mistake that that is a challenge, regardless of your or my success or your or my strategy.

tl;dr: Don’t mistake a good group succeeding at an encounter as a case for that encounter not being challenging.

Make the other bosses harder instead, please. This boss is one of the few good things about Fractals (and in-game) for challenge-seekers.

Crafting boosters don’t change the experience you gain, only the crafting experience you gain. Using one makes it cheaper to get the same amount of experience is all. You should also absolutely be in your home world to get the WvW bonus to crafting critical chance. No matter what you do, 0-400 gives you 1/8 of the experience to level 80, but how fast you get to 400 from 0 is what the crafting booster and WvW bonus affect.

The reality is that you did it… For science!!

This is, currently, one of the biggest problems with underwater combat. We cannot get waterbreathers above green rarity, which reduces our stats by a non-negligible value. Furthermore, half of the stat combinations aren’t even available for waterbreathers. Right now, the only L80 green waterbreathers come in Rabid for Light and Heavy users, and Soldier’s for Medium armor. That’s pretty limited, and generally fairly useless for most classes.

It’d be really helpful for underwater combat at large if we could get exotic waterbreathers at least so that we can gear up appropriately for underwater combat. Even if we had to craft them, that’d be acceptable.

P.S. Ascended Waterbreathers would be nice, too, but I’m not holding my breath for that any time soon.

Double posting to fix broken topic!