Guild Wars 2

Puts the nail in the coffin for SoR, that’s for sure. We are in free fall but gravity is literally not fast enough to get us past rank 12 in time.

Mail sent. I am for this.

The bottom line if you want PvE, do not roll a necro. I am not going sit around seeing folks get led astray down this path even if I main a necro.

As a corollary however, it’s difficult to function on the GW2 PvE scene without a zerker warrior; it’s kind of like not having a car in America. Even if you don’t enjoy the class and assuming you already have a class (either Ele or Engie) that you enjoy, you should probably get a zerker warrior before rolling a Necro for PvP.

Again, this isn’t about running with guilds or speed runs or even doing hard content. I mean you can rattle on about how necros are garbage in PvE and I’d agree considering I main a necro but are you really expecting a fast run when using LFG? I mean seriously, we’re talking about pugs here kitten .

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of these crop up in addition to the usual “zerkers only” “heavies only”, “no necros” and “no rangers or necros” requirements. I’m interested in various opinions on this. In particular, is this actually a useful metric? Like, will it actually result in a better success rate and save time despite shrinking the pool of players available to you?

Personally, I don’t have 5k+ AP so I don’t jump into those groups but I also don’t particularly anticipate myself being remarkably better at the game when I inevitably reach 5k (and magically qualify for my first dungeon run). Just like I’m not exactly in a different league to back when I had 3k, at least in dungeons. This makes sense, since completing dungeons doesn’t directly give you any AP, AFAIK, beyond the first time you do them all.

The instance owner system is an important check on the zerker warrior-guard-mesmers actually. Without being able to open the dungeon yourself (possibly as a warrior and then switching) it would be almost impossible for necros (or sometimes rangers) to LFG into Arah, Aetherpath or Fractals at all.

A pug is a group of players in differing guilds that surprises me. If there’s 3 players in a guild or on voice that are coordinated, it’s not really a pug and likewise if the pug is coordinated through a single strong personality, it’s also not really a pug.

By that definition, a pug will usually have at least some trouble getting through a dungeon which is what makes them fun. A group that gets through too mechanistically is efficient and satisfying (hey, money!) but not fun in and of itself.

I absolutely swear by Ritual of Life as it is because it essentially rewards the Necro for others going down, which I find sublime. And once it pops, it’s almost doubling your healing output.

To be fair, OP isn’t talking about high end Fractals, Aetherpath or Arah here which are where Necros really have to work to market themselves in my experience. I don’t think any of the first seven really justifies kicking a necro these days. You’ll literally lose more time waiting for someone to jump on the LFG even at primetime.

Don’t expect much. Necromancers have historically been the devs’ least favourite class. In the next patch for example, necro is the only class out of eight who is only getting nerfs with no buffs to any aspect of play. Just hope they get around to fixing it before then.

Dungeon people don’t like necros regardless of build, much less a condi necro. That said, it’s not like every single group will kick you for your class. Just whatever you do, don’t say you’re running conditions. People usually don’t notice.

Should’ve stuck with the Krytan throne. Thus always to traitors!

If Trahearne gives a Scarlet is Exhausted speech, I will flip a table too.

The first on the list will be Braham.

Zomorros selects one pure-hearted young girl to save Tyria by overcoming Scarlet with the Power of Friendship and that is how we get Magitechnical Girl Synergistics Taimi.

I don’t know when Krytan nobility are considered to have come of age but if it’s 18 and Jennah has ruled for 10 years, then she is 28 now. Late twenties seems to go pretty well with what we see. A normal house cat only lives 12-14 years. If she’s really had Shadow since childhood, then Shadow is an exceptionally old cat.

But! When you talk to Jennah, your character specifically mentions the cat as if something were off about it. Then she tells you she’s always had it (it’s her shadow) and royal children don’t have many friends. That cat is totes a mesmer illusion. It’s her imaginary childhood friend!

Mind = Blown

The only reason I ever used LA was for LA-specific services like Mystic Forge and dungeon vendors. Spread those out and I’d base out of Divinity’s Reach.

…which is what I do most of the time anyway because Divinity’s Reach is the best city in the world. You demi-humans get out of there. Quickly is fine.

inazuma.7021:

Ruruuiye.8912:

I’ve always hated Lion’s Arch and I think it’s great news that Scarlet is giving that place the Colony Drop

Wait, so Scarlet is dropping a space station on LA?

I think of her tactics as more like the Adama Maneuver, just with a bunch of airships rather than the Galactica.

Well she does have a giant UFO that’s already served its purpose and she always throws things away with a bang.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Ruruuiye.8912:

I’ve always hated Lion’s Arch and I think it’s great news that Scarlet is giving that place the Colony Drop, a nerve gassing and a case of giant robots. This will indeed be a Bloody Valentine War. I think she’s a better hope against the Elder Dragons than Trahearne ever was.

Please give us the option to betray the orders of Tyria and join her.

Wait, then which charr is the Red Comet, who killed his warband, who is his sibling, AND WHO IS OUR BRIGHT NOAH!?

I think the player character should be the Red Comet. Why would it have to be a- Oh! Ho! Well done, sir! I think any player character Charr should have a shot at joining Scarlet and be the Red Comet…Scarlet Comet?…Scarlet’s Comet? And then get to betray her again later.

As for Bright, that is obviously Logan. I mean who else could it be?

I’ve always hated Lion’s Arch and I think it’s great news that Scarlet is giving that place the Colony Drop, a nerve gassing and a case of giant robots. This will indeed be a Bloody Valentine War. I think she’s a better hope against the Elder Dragons than Trahearne ever was.

Please give us the option to betray the orders of Tyria and join her.

I find the Asurans are mostly played for laughs. In all honesty, it usually works; they’re funny and make terrific foils for just about every other race. Unlike the Sylvari, their flaws are as obvious to us as they themselves are blind to it. The random conversations they have are some of the best around. Compared to them, just about every human you see is a broomhandle with a smilie face taped on.

Kalavier.1097:

Not really. It’s more like a realistic viewpoint. Charr gained strength from including the females back to the ranks. Humanity has taken many major blows. Kryta is semi-secure, but they hardly have the forces to warrant ANOTHER big war with the Charr or any other race then they already are fighting.

That’s absolutely not what indicates dev bias to me. What does indicate it to me is that the devs openly said that Charr and Asura have the best story development, which is entirely borne out by what I’ve seen of it (basically all of it; I piggyback onto all my pals’ personal stories). The Sylvari meanwhile have a racial mission to take on the dragons and are essentially GW2’s mary sues, immune to corruption and one of their gloomy goth top twelve is swiftly appointed overall commander of the world’s preeminent military force despite lacking any military experience whatsoever (that’s okay because the Dream provides Sylvari with all the knowledge they need).

Meanwhile, the Humans and Norn are left out to dry. Everything the humans have done in the past has gone wrong. Ascalonians by and large are now cast as the villains (or at least ignorant obstacles). Humans nuked their own civilizations twice in a row and have the worst voice acting and dialogue of any of the races. Their entire personal storyline has nothing but how their system fails at every turn. Their capital is under siege at all times by an inferior race of barbarians (the only comparable situation is the Asurans handing all their admin duties over to Inquest and that’s at least played for laughs) and their only recent technological contribution of note was turned on them by another mary sue Sylvari.

There’s actually a perfectly rational reason for this: humans or human-likes tend to be preferred in MMO’s with racial choices and this goes even further in GW2 because GW1 had already established humanity as the dominant race so everything had to be undone to accomodate new races. The story quality and overall ascendance of the side races has to be emphasized or few players would accept them. As it is, Anet has found they’ve only partially succeeded.

The view that the chain of events leading to GW2 as plausible isn’t wrong but it’s only one of many plausible futures. Only a few of those lead to multiple playable races.

Any leadership proposing a reconquista of Ascalon in the near or intermediate future is completely out to lunch and humanity would be better off putting them down ASAP. It’s clear the Charr have military ascendancy and our latest weapons, the watchworks, have security issues to say the least. At the very least, the Charr need to be severely weakened from fighting Kralka and the Pact (which is now Tyria’s supreme military force) needs to break apart on its own.

I’d love to reclaim Ascalon (and I never even played GW1) but it’s pretty clear the devs don’t like humans much.

If it’s about doing things as quickly as possible, then skipping does not help most of the time for a pug in TA or Arah. That’s my problem with skipping, it’s when I have to pug it winds up tanking the entire endeavour because people have forgotten that skipping is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Threw them away.

Do you ever get the feeling that the RNG goddess just doesn’t treat you the same as anyone else? Do you sense her watching you all the time and snerking? Opened thousands of boxes and gotten nothing at all and been assured by the white knights that it’s just bad luck? Falling further and further behind your mates in drops but can’t prove anything?

Share your stories here!

My ticket story is simply that I poured all the saved up gold I had into coffers and never got a ticket nor any hint that the RNG may or may not be subject to DR for large stacks of coffers or purchased as opposed to dropped coffers and since I’m currently travelling and don’t really have a laptop that can handle GW2 well, I won’t be playing enough to do any further farming. I bought a few cupcakes but then my wrist started hurting so I threw all my candy and fireworks away.

The End.

I’m somewhere over 3000 chests. Still nothing. Not even all that many minis.

RoRo.8270:

People need to stop spreading lies. Anet has stated many times magic find doesn’t effect chests.

All that really proves is that they don’t intend magic find to affect chests in general and possibly dragon coffers in particular. ;p

I sense here an almost religious assumption by certain people that they know exactly how Anet has coded the RNG and that it has been coded as a straight up raw pseudorandom RNG. The difference in Aion of course is that there wasn’t, as far as I know, a unified all-servers economy, at least not back when I was playing and it may have been a function of controlling the wealth of individual servers. (Players that are too rich won’t pay money nor hourly Korean fees to grind.) The problem is, this isn’t a card table at a legitimate casino where the dealer isn’t cheating and the odds related to a pack of cards is common knowledge – they can code the RNG however they want and it really is up to the players to explore how it works. Now mind you I personally don’t believe that RNG is related to zone population (though I tried it anyway, cuz after 1500-2000 empty coffers, I’ll try any negligible cost solution) but that belief is based on reasoning that it is an unncessary complexity, a non-productive piece of coding for Anet to have added and no apparent easy way it could have crept in as a bug. It does not preclude some other form of modification or bug in the RNG.

What I’m actually seeing here is a complete misapplication of Gambler’s Fallacy. Akittens core, Gambler’s Fallacy and Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy is about expecting future results one way or another based on whether past results were positive or negative. It only applies to truly random events (and we have no proof whatsoever that the RNG is truly as random as a simple dice toss) and it does not apply to experimentation.

Blackwyn.8127:

I know guildies that have spent around 300-400$ to get a fusion weapon, do you have any idea how crazy that is?

It’s not crazy. It’s bad and they need to stop even if they can afford it. By doing this and condoning Anet’s current practices they are actively and directly making the game less enjoyable for the rest of us.

Lisa.6102:

That’s the beauty of RNG whether someone has 2 copper or 2000g they both have equal opportunity to get that ticket.

I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of fanboyism it takes to come to that conclusion.

The most important thing for pugs isn’t skill, gear or even coordination, it’s morale. You cannot fail a dungeon without deciding to give up and leave so the higher the team spirit, relaxation quotient and good humour, the longer you will stick around and the greater your chances of getting it done. It doesn’t matter if the group can fight well or fight well together, they need to above all be willing to fight together. It can help to have someone who knows the dungeon but is willing to go along with whatever strategy the group decides to follow. It does NOT help to have an elitist no matter how good they are (just as it doesn’t help the elitist to pug with you if they can solo it). One side wants you to listen to them because they think they know better and you don’t want to listen because you don’t like being pushed around and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that high end groups that achieve the fastest and most efficient clears will promulgate strategies that are utterly unworkable in a pug. Learn to get a feel for your group. Be conversational in chat, lol at jokes and aim to get people around your own skill and experience level.

While I have zero respect for elitists I have to agree that the spider tree is not particularly hard. Actually in all the pugs I’ve run, we’ve never had to run any abnormal levels of reflect (or any reflect) or melee it (which pugs won’t do). I’m sure it helps but it frankly just doesn’t matter. Even in the worst runs the spiders seem to run out eventually so I’m not entirely convinced that it is infinite in the first place.

The problem I see is that there’s a bit of a myth out there that spider spawns or aggro can be avoided somehow. Groups don’t wipe from fighting spiders, they wipe from trying to avoid fighting spiders. If you just bring a pile of AoE and roast all the spiders, even quite bad pugs will have a good (in my case, perfect) success rate.

I just want to say, whoever’s idea it was to make a virtual vuvuzela and sell it for $10, I hope you guys gave him a helluva raise and extra vacation days because he just made bank for you.

What exactly is the achievement of getting a ticket? Look mom, I doubled clicked a whole lot of boxes! All by myself! Frankly I’m okay with the arrangement – Anet gotta eat and servers aren’t free.

But for those of you who delude yourselves into thinking there’s some kind of “achievement” behind this; that you managed to open a lot of RNG boxes and are proud of it and attribute the result to some function on your own part, you guys are the absolute dregs of gaming. Seriously, if you’re going to gamble for a skin, at least recognize what you’re doing.

Please let it happen and have more silly non-combat things to do in WvW generally. SPvP may be srs bsns but IMO WvW should have more things we can do to raise morale and I’d like to be able to sound a charge now and again or light off fireworks in defiance of a siege.

Skritt all the way. You play as a mob of three just like Karka hatchlings. One Skritt holds the mainhand. Another Skritt holds the offhand. The third holds utility. You fully name your first Skritt and pick two letters for the others that replace the first two letters of your name.

Who else wants the skin?

The problem is that a gambling arrangement makes Anet vastly more money so there’s a very strong financial incentive to keep the boxes. Hence I’d suggest a compromise to moderate the RNG to get rid of extremes of luck.

Has anyone done it with a guild? I pugged the F/U like I usually do and didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I don’t think anything’s changed or if anything did change, it’s probably a symptom of a change to some skill or other rather than the dungeon itself.

First I’d like to draw attention to a series of games called Fire Emblem. They are a series of mechanically simple but highly acclaimed turned based strategy games published by Nintendo. What is relevant here is their RNG system: when a character attacks another, she has to roll RNG to see if she hits. Before attacking, the game displays all information, including the chance to hit displayed as a percentage.

Early in the series, when the game said you had a 80% chance of hitting, you actually did have an 80% of hitting. Within a few games, the system changed. In later games, RNG is checked twice. If the game tells you your accuracy is 80%, your actual chance of hitting is in the low 90’s. Conversely, if your displayed odds are 20%, it’s actually much lower than that.

Having a permadeath strategy RPG deliberately misinform you of the odds sounds, on the surface, a terrible idea, but it was deliberately implemented with success. Why? Because the devs came to understand that while RNG’s are great, a raw RNG is a needlessly frustrating experience. Humans by and large can’t kitten odds properly and have an expectation to be lucky. If someone does get lucky and hits a ticket on their first coffer, their satisfaction only lasts until their luck fails them. In fact they have an expectation to be lucky again and in the meantime, any outward joy expressed makes the unlucky people rage (people are like that!). If someone opens 3,000 coffers and doesn’t hit a ticket, they’ll hate you forever. If they do manage to get lucky, they’ll kitten it as “about kitten time”.

Hence, what you should do is moderate the RNG. Make it nigh impossible to hit a ticket in the first few coffers and all but guarantee a ticket at some point. You don’t need to put it in the patch notes. You don’t need to say anything. Hell, you can make everything ten times as rare next time as it is now and watch people throw money at you. Moderating the RNG will temper the amount of rage generated because no extreme dry runs occur and nobody will miss the chance of hitting a ticket on their 20th box because nobody has expectations of that (unless you create it).

Not that I want to encourage Anet to make a profit off human psychology rather than legitimate (if digital) value, but personally I think overall player satisfaction is win-win no matter what the strategy.

You guys are missing the point. What jheryn is actually saying is that none of you represent the majority opinion but that he does.

One suggestion I’d have is to make any regular Moa Races (or any other major/regular sporting event) be a karma betting event. The game needs karma sinks anyway and you could have the reward be in the form of karma as well, or minor useful items. Given karma is gathered by playing the game and can’t be injected directly with cash, I think that would put sports and betting generally into the realm of harmless fun. For the time being, most betting events in the game are relatively minor, I suspect because the devs are nervous about making them so big that people start losing serious amounts of gold. GW2 gold has a direct floating exchange rate with real world currencies. I know the temptation must be great to make a profit off human psychology here but I really hope Anet doesn’t go down that path.

If you have karma betting events I think you could afford to make Moa Races a bigger deal than they are. An actual big track map somewhere, guild sponsored Moas, Quaggan cheering brigades, you name it. There has to be something deeper than the Five Moas/20% Chance Each format we have now though.

Gab Superstar.4059:

Are you saying that after farming 200 mobs you received no more Coffers?

I probably went around a dozen projectors so say 48 mobs or so with no coffers.

You guys are all insane. The true strategery is to ALWAYS BET ON THE MEEP.

The WvW doesn’t use anything from sPvP though. I’ve personally never thought of sPVP as a particularly important part of the game myself. I certainly don’t think the majority of players do much of it although Anet seems to try very hard to push it.

At the end of the day GW2 is an MMORPG, not exactly League or Battlefield here.

Gab Superstar.4059:

Ruruuiye.8912:

Gab Superstar.4059:

The drop rate is ALWAYS 1 Taffy per mob.

Except when coffers drop and you get 3 more.

If it really were 1 taffy per mob you’d have to kill a holographic mob every 7.2 seconds to get two stacks in an hour so anyone claiming that would still be wrong.

Maybe next time you can read my post before quoting it.

Thank you.

Perhaps you should have given the same consideration before quoting my post before assuming that I hadn’t. :p

Again, diminishing returns. By the time I got ~200 candies, the drop rate for all holo mobs dropped to 1 taffy per kill. At that point your expected returns dependent on coffer drops falls off. That means 1 holo mob per 7.2 seconds. That means waypointing to a waypoint near a holo, loading the zone, running there, killing them all and looting them all and then finding the next holo. This is assuming no disconnects, no missed holos etc.

I don’t really have a problem with it save that my toon is currently in her underwear and I have no idea why. I guess because sPvP thinks she has no armour on at all? Has anyone else encountered this?

Gab Superstar.4059:

The drop rate is ALWAYS 1 Taffy per mob.

Except when coffers drop and you get 3 more.

If it really were 1 taffy per mob you’d have to kill a holographic mob every 7.2 seconds to get two stacks in an hour so anyone claiming that would still be wrong.

It also really helps to have a solid state drive – you’ll load out of waypoint travel much faster than off an hdd. :p