Guild Wars 2

Seras.5702:

Legendaries are one of the only Prestige items in the game.

Tier 3 cultural costs close to 100g per set, which is basically GW2’s 15k armour (GW1’s Prestige armour), whereas legends are more representative of Obsidian Armour in GW1’s language – still a prestige set, but unobtainable to the casuals or even moderately hardcore.

In PvE the WvW skins I’m pretty sure are unique to WvW too, so players with a full WvW set you know have spent a lot of time helping defend your server.

There’s also some quite expensive and difficult to obtain non-legends such as The Anomaly

So, using GW1’s definition of prestige equipment, there’s no shortage of it in GW2

Many times, it’s one of my favourites.

A quick tip – Stability works on the wind gusts, if you’re getting knocked off a lot consider popping your stability skills for it (ie. Mantra of Concentration, Mist Form, etc)

It’s especially rough as a mesmer since you may be fighting it right up there in it’s face – the clone it’s presently aggro’d on will die or shatter, the AI looks around and says “Huh… my target’s dead. Guess I’ll reset”

And go storming off while I’m wailing on it’s kitten /p>

By putting forward two logical hypotheses you can figure it out looking at the trade data:

1) A decrease in supply, met with an increase in price represents a successful sale.

2) A trader who already has the best sale price, will not unlist an item and undercut himself

So if we look on say, sunrise:
http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/30703-sunrise

We can actually see multiple dips and rises in price, matched with corresponding dips and rises in supply; apparently there is at least a couple sold every day! – That’s quite surprising and would seem to imply that many of the legends you see people running about with were bought for gold, not crafted by the player

The same method can be applied to precursors, and precursors actually have quite a rapid turnover, with units being bought and sold every hour or two

Karma armour is delibrately non-forgable. Karma is very easily obtained and the devs position some time back (After the pepper popper incident, mass precursor forging after launch; and later with the demon horns) is there should not be any major ways to convert karma into gold.

If you’ve found any karma armour that CAN be forged then it is a bug.

Nick.6972:

If I’m making a team to do content X I expect you to know how to play properly or at least to have the ability to adapt fast.
I wouldn’t call this elitism, I want competent players in my team.

And how do you propose that players learn how to do the dungeons “your way” if you never bring them into your team?

From their point of view, when you pass them over because they havn’t done this run this way before (Even though they’ve been playing the game since beta and can probably solo most the bosses), they will label you an elitist jerk.

You’re overlooking that engineers do not “lose” any utility slots by taking kits per-say.

Engineers also have their 4 utility belt slots, if you don’t intend to bring a kit, then you have 3 utilities you pick directly and 4 customisable utilities that are “linked” to their utilities. Any other class gets 3 utilities, and additional 5 fixed skills linked to their weapon.

Another point of consideration is that engineer’s primary weapons are nothing to write home about; if you’re rolling engineer and NOT using any kits, you might want to review why you are playing an engineer as this is an awful lot like when I hear mesmer’s kittening about shatters, elementalists who’d prefer to specialise in a single attunement, and rangers who don’t want a pet.

If you don’t like your classes core mechanic you may want to re-assess which class best suits you.

The high end content is already pretty wasted. I have great difficulty finding (competent, ie. “Don’t aggro everything in the dungeon. Has discovered the dodge button”) parties for explorable dungeons and fractals, that arn’t themselves also elitist jerks (“Do you know how to skip this content or do this pull in the most efficient way possible? – You’re a bad mesmer then! <You have been kicked>”)

Adding even harder content that requires raid-like precision will just skew things even harder towards elitist jerk territory.

Also bare in mind that is possible in SAB world 2, the skins may return – in which case their value will drop like a rock

I’m surprised at the number of people defending this.

In most other respectable, even F2P MMO’s (Star Trek Online, City of Heroes, Neverwinter, even Guild Wars 1), purchasing an outfit or item unlocks it across all characters on your account, forever.

Guild Wars 2 sits with the less respectable MMO’s like Allods Online (Infamous for it’s pay to win components and pay-per-death model), by selling you a one time, soulbound item

Khisanth.2948:

They are also used to make omni infusions.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge/Other_Items#Fine_Infusion_recipes

Passiflora jewellery uses passion flowers not passion fruit. The latter is remarkably rare and you need a large volume to make them, hence the obscene pricing of it’s jewellery.

Personally I have no ascended gear as I spent a long period away from the game after laurels were introduced (So I have yet to obtain a full months worth of them to buy any), and I didn’t do much fractals in the early days so I got left behind on the fractal curve.

Now when I approach fractal groups they’re like “Ew, fractal rank 3, newbie… no offence but there’s this OTHER mesmer we could take instead, he’s rank 27 and can rub his face on a keyboard”, even though I’ve played the class since BWE3 – I’m not even a part of a guild right now after our guild leader flipped out and booted me for disagreeing with him while he was stoned (No gear that way) – so I have been pondering obtaining some passiflora jewellery for my ranger

Despite the vast number of AVAILABLE skills, you wouldn’t nessecarily use 99% of the possible combinations due to synergies between skills.

For example while a warrior COULD fill his bar with fire, frost, air and earth spells, a warrior does not possess the energy pool to cast lots of magic, nor would he be able to properly invest into 4 seperate magic schools and still yield useful damage from the spells.

On my ranger for example, I probably only used at most 3 or 4 different combinations of attack skill in across dozens of different builds. While there might be 100 different arrow skills, they didn’t necessarily form useful chains out of context .

GW2’s weapons could afford to have variants, but each represents at least one useful chain, sometimes 3 or 4 chains depending on selection of offhand and stats distribution (For example mesmer sword/focus can be utilised several very different ways depending on traiting)

It’s very easy to look at GW1 through rose tinted glasses while omitting some of the details of how GW1 actually played. It’s also worth remembering GW1 today has about 4 times the skills it had at launch

In both GW1 and GW2 they refer to humans as “meat”, often to their face (lol).

Given they are huge carnivorous predators with a predatory streak a mile wide it seems illogical to kill hordes of a non-charr species and then discard all the bodies, why would they?

Certainly not out of respect for the dead, you’ve seen the concept art of them reclaiming Ascalon, with fields of bodies mounted on their own spears. Likewise humans frequently skinned the charr and used their pelts for leather so neither side had any respect for each other.

I feel I should point out that ranger isn’t the only class constrained by working with AI controlled pets and having no other option but to build their class around them.

Mesmer’s likewise rely upon AI controlled clones and phantasms for their core mechanic, which also suffer from kitten behaviour and pathfinding issues, except unlike rangers mesmer’s cannot directly control their clones so if they do something undesirable they can’t tell them to “heel” or “change target”

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

I would suggest ignoring this person… since he thinks Ranger does less damage than other classes….

He’s not wrong nor is he saying ranger’s do less.

Ranger’s damage is multi-source; many of our attacks deal large amounts of condition damage; a large portion of our damage also comes through our pet – as a result for balance reason our base weapon damage is lower than those of other classes.

Thus our direct damage can be considered “needling” and crit damage is remarkably less effective for ranger’s than warriors or mesmers for example (“less effective” doesn’t mean useless, just, it’s a point of consideration)

Chopps.5047:

I just thought pointing it out in the first place was sort of irrelevant. Few warriors run healing power, in my experience.

A free lunch is still a free lunch even if it’s just a cheese sandwich.

The trader in me says it’s wonderful that it’s RNG – as I nabbed a bunch early relatively cheap and can resell them later for 3 or 4 times the price.

However I was under the impression this was the exact thing that arenanet wanted to avoid in their dungeons; the idea of a token system was that if you had an item you REALLY wanted, you could get the item without having to keep throwing a dice and crossing your fingers?

Oh well… “not my problem” – but I do sympathise and hope they rethink the RNG strategy.

I deliberately made my new Charr ranger black – partly in response to OP’s observations of how common white is and how rare truly black charr are; and partly as a motif of them being being prone to bringing disaster upon those around them

A literal “black cat”

Yah.

The male version has buggy mesh weights that cause some unsightly clipping and stretching. The females are clipping free but their shoulder pads don’t display… it’s a real mess and been that way since at least BWE3 (When I first filed a bug report on it)

Edit: Disregard that, need to learn2read :p

In comparison to all the other pets; they’re made of 100% refined squish.

However “being squishy” != “dying instantly” || “useless”, if you’re managing your pets skilfully then your kitty probably won’t end up being buried at the end of the garden in a plastic box any time soon and will make it worth your while by dishing out huge amounts of damage.

It’s also worth noting that due to their low armour/hitpoints they are actually LESS likely to take aggro than the tankier pets, further helping to keep them in the fight.

…and there goes the market.

Well done OP ¬_¬

I really don’t get how people cannot grasp the basic concept that market value is driven by the players themselves.

The very fact that tens of thousands of players are farming the same few things is why the prices of the said “things”; such as ecto – is falling (Supply outstripping demand), and the same tens of thousands of players chasing the same few things in limited demand is why the price in other areas is rising (ie. precursors).

No conspiracies, no malevolent develops, no market manipulators; just thousands of people all desperate to buy and sell the same item

Where do people get the idea that rangers are dedicated long range combatants?

The term “ranger” is used in Lord of the Rings to describe the men of Rohan and Gondor; they traditionally used both sword and bow and were notable for being elusive guardians of the region.

Dungeons and Dragons, the grand-daddy of mainstream RPG’s had a “ranger” class as we know it. These rangers had an affinity for nature and again being elusive in the wilds, they had a pet – and importantly, they were proficient both in dual wielding melee weapons AND in using a bow.

Guild Wars 1 had a “ranger” class, that again had nature magic and a pet – their “native” weapon was a bow, but Guild Wars 1 had a dual classing system, classes were expected to take a second class to gain a second skill set to complement the first. Ranger’s “class” specialty was expertise, which gave them superior evasive skills and reduced the energy cost of ALL martial attacks both bow and melee – so many many many rangers (Not least the famous bunny thumper given a nod in AC) ran melee weapon builds – they were extremel;y proficient at it, creating slightly squishier but far more mobile combatants than primary warriors.

Modern huntsmen hunt fowl and wild animals with a rifle or shotgun while they use dogs to flush them out of hiding; hunting and guns are far from mutually exclusive.

Perhaps some kind’ve “flushing” motif with the likes of vulnerability through combined pet/weapon attacks in order to expose the enemy to slow, high damage precision shots from the rifle?

Well, it IS a very long duration projectile reflection; especially with all these dredge lately and molten gunners you can pretty much shut down their attempts to murderise you while simultaneously damage them.

But there’s better things you could be doing with that time as well, making it rather situational.

Ironically mesmers get better use out of that skill through their phantasmal warden than we do; the warden attacks faster, with a shorter CD and the warden performs the attacks independent of the mesmer, allowing them to continue attacking while using the warden for shelter from projectiles.

Just look at the scope and scale of the fire and frost content or super adventure box.

The sheer amount of assets (sound, music, voiceovers, models, texture art, animation, support material like concept art, videos etc) is staggering, the dev team actively working on GW2 must be huge

The WvW exploration component is VERY VERY controversial. Almost nobody approves of it

Pure PvE players like me hate that we have to walk into a PvP warzone and get shot at, in order to recieve a PvE item The WvW commanders hate that PvE non-combatants are clogging up the queue so that legitimate WvW players cannot enter the zone and reinforce their side.

It gets even worse if you’re at the bottom of your WvW tier, as you’ll often find you never get an opportunity to visit certain parts of the WvW map due to enemy control

It’s a lose/lose situation and one arenanet should really rethink

Literally “hating” your opponents in a game really isn’t healthy.

It’s a game, they’re people too – when you were a kid kicking a ball around in the street you aimed to win out of competitive spirit, to say “I’m best!”, and because it was fun.

If you did it because you hated everyone else you have unaddressed issues.

I expect since you’re only trading in game commodities in both cases; not real money then this falls under the grey market.

In which case “It’s not endorsed, and they take no responsibility for the outcome, nor will they refund stuff if you get scammed”

Meet Mimi; nothing special just 2 pieces of cultural T3 light armour and hall of monuments gear. Big whoop… so, why bother posting her?

….well…

…She’s only level 18! XD

I could go for the full set* but given I’ll need replace her gear every 5-10 levels I figure it’ll be easier to just stick to the most noticeable parts for now so I only transmute a couple each upgrade.

*Actually I could buy 4 or 5 full sets >.>

Gear is the problem less than the builds. The fact different builds and play styles rely heavily on gear; that’s not to say GW1 didn’t depend on gear at all – but typically it was sufficient to have a different attribute headpiece or two in your bag since most of the attributes came from your headgear + rune and most people put their main rune on their headgear to keep it simple.

In GW2 if you want to swap from support to tank to glass cannon DPS, you need to swap as many as 22 items – you can’t just bag those easily (Well you can if you have ~20g to spare on a bag slot and a 20 slot bag) you need to visit your bank and then spend ages loading up or unloading – you need not only a skill swap option but a gear set swap option.

It may also be that more people are getting wise to knight’s insignia – that pure zerker isn’t THAT much more powerful for the level of glassyness it introduces.

Especially with nerfs to glamour mesmers and elementalist’s mist form making power/survival look even more attractive.

Thanks for the advice.

The slow cast times on staves were what turned me off ele in the first place during beta and caused me to overlook it’s other features – coming from GW1 my preconception of ele would be that it’d have long cast times and basically amount to mashing the same few spells ad nauseum, and staff looked exactly like my worst fears manifest, so I quickly moved onto testing out the other classes and never gave ele a second thought til now >.<

I can see now from playing a couple days unlike many classes there’s no “cheat sheet” of good reliable combos as there is simply so many of them, and each attunement and combo works best in completely different situations; still that’s half the fun of it, discovering the best strategies for each situation :p

What’s your thoughts on conjured weapons? – I assumed they’d be gimmicky, but they actually seem to hit really hard and have their own self contained synergies, at the same time I havn’t heard anyone really talking about them; besides the firey GS anyway – do they remain useful into the late game or are they more of a curiosity that are just helpful when levelling?

Nobody?

There’s no useful tidbits about how to get in the mindset for ele, just roll D/D and stick with it forever and ever? :p

DiogoSilva.7089:

In GW1, the elementalists and the dervishes are balanced around enchantments. The devs intended for those professions to be that way. And players had no meaningful choice to go against that.

Incorrect.

Dervishes had a number of non-enchantment defenses they can employ when enchantments are a non-option (the name eludes me but I know they had at least 1 defensive stance, not to mention the avatar forms).

Enchantment heavy classes (especially in PvP) routinely brought non-enchantment defenses along, such as tactics line warrior shouts or stances that could provide them with less easily countered defences to back them up when faced with an enchantment hating foe while attacks that leveraged against both were typically elite skills

Unlike a lot of forums there doesn’t seem to be a stickied “Elementalist 101” post for new arrivals to get some idea of how they should “think” as an elementalist to get the most out of the class; basic overview of major synergies, weapon functionality etc.

Just wondering if anyone has any useful resources.

I’ve played a Mesmer almost exclusively since BWE3 and it’s a great class, fun to play, but wanted a change of scene; I tried guardian but the lack of combos made it very dull – creative use of skills wasn’t something guardian seemed big on and made me realise what I like are combos and fiddly skill switching, and looking over the eles this seems to be an area they excel in.

Unfortunately I’m having trouble finding any build discussion beyond D/D (Which I’m having fun with on my lowbie ele, but mastering a single cookie cutter build does not confer a full understanding of the class :p), so a point towards a guide, or a brief rundown of how to think about the different weapons, would be useful. (For example on a mesmer I could say that staff is a close range weapon, great for laying down ethereal combos, generating clones and punishing foes with anti-melee conditions, it’s not for long range combat despite appearances, nor is it a high DPS weapon).

Once I know how to think of my weapons, utilities and attunements theorycrafting gets a lot easier :p

Edit: I mostly play PvE BTW

rizzo.1079:

Even though I don’t see how using the game as an economic simulator is fun, a hardcore TP junkie probably doesn’t see how wandering around killing various evil beasts is fun.

Funnily, from my position it looks almost exactly the other way around.

When my buy orders are set, deals are done and flips listed I love to don my shiny exotic armour and pretty skins and go beat up some monsters – maybe try out a new build and go explore the world, go obscure places, find new challenges and champions to try defeating and see what’s lurking out there – always somewhere and something new to try.

I can’t understand how people could be content grinding the same stuff over and over and over day in, day out simply because it’s the fastest way to get gold (Well, fastest way to get gold that doesn’t involve excel and/or a calculator)

Whether you realise it or not, you’re the working class – breaking your backs farming dungeons and world bosses for meagre amounts of resources and then flogging them on the TP for a few gold.

You may be surprised to learn that the daily gross product of dozens if not hundreds of farmers can be consumed in minutes by a single industrious power trader (And your pay for your work is out of that one individuals pocket)

It feels like they’re trying to reintroduce some of the GW1 meta without reintroducing the diversity of skills we saw in GW1.

In GW1 we had skills that do bonus damage Vs enchanted foes (ie. boons), but what they overlook is that GW1 had other paths to self buffing – enchantments, skills , stances and shouts.

Enchantments (boon equivalents) tended to be “better” but were also the most vulnerable to stripping and hate, hence paragon protectors were very popular and viable, since they used nigh unbreakable shout buffs in place of vulnerable enchantments like a monk.

In GW2 this isn’t true; ALL buffs count as boons, and boon hate counts against ALL buffs.

Yendorion.2381:

Please make mesmers fight bare handed!!! Their weapons hurt! QQ

A mesmer on a fort using a cannon hit me for some crazy damage; mesmer’s might still kill you if they use a siege weapon, we gotta find a solution to that!

The idea of having 1 stack of confusion do more damage but also wear off once triggered is one I approve of wholeheartedly

In essence this changes confusions behaviour from being along the lines of empathy and backfire, to more like ineptitude and clumsiness from guild wars 1 – still acceptable and in context for mesmers and fills its function as making the attacker think twice before following through.

It solves the WvW problem where newbies mash their attack button over and over and kill themselves from 20 procs of confusion, worst case scenario is the newbies proc confusion once and the mistake is done and over.

It also makes it more viable for PvE usage where mobs rarely attack often enough to proc confusion more than once in it’s short lifespan if the base damage is increased but balanced around only proccing once

Just jumping in, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to get a lot of responses from people pointing out this is exactly how “most other MMO’s work, deal with it”.

But, maybe that’s just it?

GW2 set out to “not be that other MMO”, to critically assess mechanics that are irritating or un-fun and find an alternative solution.

Arenanet might not have set out to introduce this psuedo-mechanic of re-gearing but it’s one that exists and it IS frustrating, so… it might well be worthwhile investigating gameplay solutions to it besides re-grinding everything.

Mesmerism is the art of mind magic; naturally then you want an asuran mesmer since our minds are the greatest of all!

(I have my doubts that norn and sylvari even possess a mind)

Duke Blackrose.4981:

They completely removed a safety net from Mist Form that was useful for glass builds. They lowered healing. Etc. Etc. If this isn’t heavy-handed and without compensation, nothing is.

Oh, oh, oh, wait, but they MIGHT buff Staff later. You know, the weapon that has been underpowered since launch?

Unfortunately it is in my experience that they have a knee jerk reaction to any single skill that is being overused in a specific build regardless of it’s use in the wider scope of the class, so every build get screws.

The strangest part of all this is how unlike arenanet this behaviour is.

In Guild Wars 1, true nerfs were rare – their preferred approach was to instead buff unused skills, or introduce counterskills – for example “invinci-monks” were perfect tanks and farmers in the early game; too good they were nearly unkillable hence the name. Instead of nerfing the build directly, they instead introduced a couple of new skills that could break the mechanic (A combination of enchantments), rendering the invincimonk less than invincible – the build remained viable, but it now had counters and rapidly fell into disuse outside of very specialised scenarios and had no effect on unrelated builds because none of the builds skills were themselves changed.

If you want to see whack a mole check out the new confusion nerf – slashing 50% off the damage. Yes… 50%

If confusion is so overpowered that it needs it’s damage halved how come the entire metagame isn’t built around confusion, and we havn’t seen mass exodus from all the other classes flocking to mesmer and running pure confusion builds?

Even amongst mesmers confusion is typically treated as a secondary source of damage outside of WvW zerg-support builds.

Halving and doubling the damage dealt by skills goes wayyyy beyond what is reasonable, it displays no attempt to fine tune a skill they just wipe it out or make it flavour of the month. (And I bet we won’t see any buffs to mesmer’s damage output to compensate)

We don’t need “new” races persay… we just need some more playable forms of existing races.

If there was a vote I’d sign up for a playable Skrit- wait! – Shiney!

Dashes out of thread

Looks like it’s that time of the year again!

Time to crack out my warning from the future that I posted all the way back in Beta 3 just so I can say “called it!”

~30-60g daily (for 1 hours work)

I just set up my buy orders, go play the game normally or go do something else. Come back later and spend an hour flipping and utilizing them in various ways for profit.

Sitting in the TP wouldn’t net me twice as much however, so it’s not “per hour” earnings, the market only moves at a finite speed and I’m content with what i get from trading so I don’t grind for gold by the hour, just play for fun.

• Editted for accuracy

If I could use a bow on any of my characters I’d get the sparklepony bow in a heartbeat!

I can understand that for some character designs it’d be nice to have a robust looking bow, but I also think there’s a lot of people with serious insecurities to address in this game. Every week you hear people asking for mesmers to have their pink butterflies removed as people want to play one, but can’t bare to go near anything pink xD