Guild Wars 2

I’ve done this experiment in the past, threw a few gold at the question, and didn’t turn up anything worth more than 20 silver.

It’s very much blind luck/gambling, I for one will be sticking to more reliable income sources

The long and short of it is that no trader who has a corner of the market to themselves will ever go out and tell people “Man I’m making so much money trading X!”.

If they do they’re either a bit dull, drunk or scamming you.

So THAT’S what’s been causing this. This happened several times today and left us scratching our heads; I’m of course a mesmer who happens to appreciate foci (and thus wardens)

I’ve noticed that Orrian undead have a VERY significant tendancy to disregard your clones. Going back to lower level zones this behaviour stops again it juts seems specific to this mob type.

Well, none of the Asuran characters in GW1 are still alive to date. We know for a fact Oola is dead, and has been for a very long time as her lab is now a point of archaeological interest

So, it seems unlikely that it’s significantly above the other races (And there’s no guarantee it’s not SHORTER. generally, small, quick thinking creatures have much shorter lifespans than larger, slower creatures)

yellow stang.5618:

So are you saying that I should just go through the dungeon and not use Moa at all? When exactly do you personally use Moa in the dungeons, if not on the Champions?

Never. Moa is just not a good skill for PvE, it’s unreliable on champions, and anything smaller than a champion is too weak to justify using it on in the first place.

Timewarp is the bread and butter dungeon choice, providing your entire party with a huge DPS boost for 10 seconds. As an Asura I’ve actually found the series D golem to have it’s uses, it has a huge hitpoint pool(even more so covered by an iDefender), has a tendency to take aggro and projects a shield that reflects projectiles making it a good choice to take pressure off the frontline by tanking hits for them.

bri.2359:

@Ryuujin
Providing advice and constructive help to a player to improve their skills to benefit the group is one thing.
Bullying someone into playing the way you think they should play is entirely different…

It’s all about the attitude ….

There’s a difference between bullying someone into playing “a certain way”, and playing in a way that is incredibly inefficient. I would never tell someone to use a specific build, nor outlaw a specific item.

The flamethrower engy is phenomena very specific to engineers for some reason. No class in the game works well when they stick to just one weapon or kit, switching skills to extend your repetoire is the underlying mechanic of every class in the game.

Imagine a warrior who refuses to use a ranged weapon when faced with an enemy that can’t be hit in melee because he’s a “sword warrior”, or an elementalist who refuses to switch out of fire attunement even when all his skills are on cooldown and the target is fire resistant because he’s a “fire ele” – you don’t have to switch builds, you just have to switch your weapon out for something appropriate to the situation.

Flamethrower is a kit that is inappropriate in 90% of situations (it only really starts to shine when 4 or more enemies are bundled up in a tight bunch), even then you should switch out of flamethrower now and then to thrown in some support skills like smoke bombs or flash or freeze grenades. When you see an engineer using flamethrower all the time, every time they are no better then the fire ele or a sword warrior, and speaking as an engineer myself I feel i have the right to call bullkitten when I see an engineer do that.

HOWEVER, I’ll also agree that if you’d gotten that far into the dungeon it probably wasn’t nessecary to kick that guy unless you were having serious difficulty and needed a more proficient player to continue

Long story short, you’re not going to get an exact answer in a public forum.

The second you publicly tell someone “buy X”, 20,000 people are going to read the same message and do the exact thing as their first business venture and collapse the market. Some might PM you some suggestions (not me, I’m too tight ;p)

But it really does come down to “buy low, sell high, do the maths so taxes don’t bite your kitten #8221;, it’s not some arcane secret, you just have to find that niche that turns over at the right speed and spread for your tastes

Imagine TF2 if you couldn’t wear hats in combat

The town-clothes system is a nice idea, but people want to mix and match; I love the pirate hat but what’d be the point of wearing it if i have to unequip the rest of my awesome (combat) outfit?

Because the camera pivot point (the head) is so low to the ground it severely restricts your forward vision and you have almost no upward vision whatsoever; lot of events involving dragons the NPCs are like “look at the skies!” and I’m like “ALL I CAN SEE IS MY HEAD!”

it’s a shame because they made this lovely game world but I can’t see most of it xD

Never under-estimate the psychological aspects of this. When you see gems are worth 70ish silver, and then you only get offered 50 you feel short-changed and that impacts willingness to spend money.

Think of “that other MMO”, they had an XP penalty for resting in the early days, if you didn’t rest you got your XP penalised players were deeply upset by this… They kept the concept but switched around it’s wording; you no longer got an XP penalty for not resting, but you now get an XP bonus for resting – suddenly players were happy.

The same goes here, right now the perception players have is they’re being short changed by the system, somehow we need to make it feel like the gem trader is getting a better deal buying for money and selling for gold than vice versa

Incidentally, flamethrower kit is awful. If I see a “flamethrower engy” on our PUG member in a serious dungeon they better be packing some REALLY good gear to get their damage up or they get booted at the door and then nobody can complain it happened unfairly.

Speaking as an engy, if you’re relying on flame-thrower kit for doing all your damage, you are doing it WRONG in every way possible; you’re a dis-service to your team (Engy’s have an amazing array of control and support skills) and you’re a disservice to yourself (you’re failing to reach your damage/survivability potential by a long shot), if you arn’t going to pull your weight in a dungeon then someone else is carrying you and I’m not surprised if they say “no”

When a rune has an effect tied to being hit – ie. rune of the golemancer (5% chance to summon a golem, 90 sec CD), does this 5% roll every time you receive a hit, or does it proc every time you recieve damage – ie. If you are hit for 5 ticks of bleed, or 3 bursts of a channelled skill, does it roll the dice 5/3 times respectively?

Also, I presume I’m correct in thinking the cooldown begins once the effect procs successfully and not a cooldown after every attempt regardless of success

It’s true of females too, which shouldn’t be a big surprise seeing male and female asura share the same skeleton and models, differing only in voice set and face/hair/phenotype options

It still makes me wonder; a sylvari has no internal skeleton, they’re just wrapped leaves; so, do they bend? Do the leaves unfurl or fray if damaged? Do they wrap back together if they were unfurled, can they regrow if torn out? What kind’ve organs do they possess (They eat, so presumably they have something akin to a stomach, I envision something like a pitcher plant ;p)

I propose that I test these questions out with the help of a large hammer and a pair of secateurs in the name of the eternal alchemy!

Zenyatoo.4059:

Things way less underwater bro, NP.

You made Newton turn in his grave…

Water’s high density offsets the apparent weight of some low density objects. But a rock is still a rock… even if he lifted it up, it’d fall back down, the fact the land is now out of the ocean implies the underlying bedrock and crust is pushed up with it.

The explanation is simply “with magic” in this context

Ultimately, someone DID take offence to it and reported it, maybe they mis-interpretted your intentions (Like an Asura might be named Mohammed for entirely innocent reasons :p) – but in sensitive cases like this it’s probably better for everyone to err on the side of respect.

Let’s be honest… it’s not like it was a great name to begin with ¬_¬

The gem market came pre-loaded with a certain amount of gems; too many IMO. Once that supply gets bought up then the price will skyrocket, as the gem/gold value increases, it becomes more tempting for people to buy gems for gold and also becomes harder for the botters to compete.

It’ll reach equilibrium at some point in the near future, trust me. (I’m betting it may be as little as the next 2-3 weeks when the halloween costumes and appearance editor kits come out)

Red oni, blue oni... and if Zojja is the “calm” one, you can imagine what kind’ve an impulsive hot headed character Zizi is…

Essarious Quw.8946:

I also got the impression that Zhaitan was supposed to be much bigger, but given that he is made of other dragons, I thought that he was so small in the boss fight because all of the other dragon like champions we fought were bits of him that he sent off out into the world to do his bidding. The undead dragon champions don’t look so much like rotted husks as they do the fleshrevers.

Thats just my theory though.

It’s probably just that if they made him too big then the engine couldn’t render him in the fight scene.

He is actually really big, it’s hard to get a sense of perspective.. Watch closely when he tries to bite at the airship using one of his inner mouths; the mini-dragon-head is easily 8-12ft tall, and those are tiny compared to zhaitan himself.

All I can say is i hope there’s some eidolons left out there or GW2’s heroes are screwed against the Mursaat’s spectral agony

Narcemus.1348:

Although a large amount of the art and such fits much of the Tarnished Coast area, perhaps a sign that the people of Utopia once existed on Tyria?

By “tarnished coast area” you mean “Asura”

The “native” artchitecture was basiclly co-opted wholesale for the Asura
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:%22Native_Architecture%22_concept_art.jpg
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:%22Andes_Temple%22_concept_art_2.jpg

Interestingly this pic:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:%22The_Hub_of_Time%22_concept_art.jpg

Seems to have been a big inspiration for the black citadel

It’s a simple equation why MMO forums are so bad.

Players with an axe to grind, having issues, or just unhappy come on the forum and complain about it. Players who are happy… are too busy playing the game to comment, let alone offer praise.

It’s a pretty small minority (ie me? :p) who come on the forum when all is well

Irnhide.3428:

No incentive to play right now… it sucks. Paid a full 60 dollars for this game. I feel it should of been free.

Excuse me waiter! – I didn’t like my meal I’ve now eaten… so I shan’t be paying, good day! (People have some strange attitudes xD)

You’re in an asuran map, preparing for an asuran dungeon, fighting an asuran commander. If you’ve learned anything by now, Asura anything is resolved by thinking not smashing your head on it like a big dumb bookah.

Simply position relatively robust “spotters” at points along the bridge; 3 should be sufficient to cover all of it. When he teleports, the nearest spotter can engage him and pin him down so he can’t regenerate until the rest of the team arrive to beat him up; rinse and repeat.

If everyone stays as a group he’ll have time to regenerate; it’s essential that he is intercepted quickly. Once you understand the mechanics of the fight, it’s extremely easy

I will call you out on one count.

*1- Mage needs help yes, but iWarden is a fantastic weapon, it’s simply a matter of mastering it’s usage and coming up with working attack chains ie:

• Leap
• Temporal Curtain → Into the void
• Warden
• Swap
• Blurred frenzy

Warden (Focus in general) is fantastic for just about every PvE scenario since it allows you to reduce large groups of foes into a farmable ball and provides the AoE to follow it up.

But most of the thread is on point and very true. Of course we’ve been arguing this since beta til we’re blue in the face and anet just responds with nerfs rather than improvements so… they certainly like to let us know where we can stuff our suggestions.

Your link isn’t loading :/

Mesmer’s have a tonne of useful support skills that can be woven in to supplement their offence and defence without impacting combat effectiveness, dedicated shatter builds usually sacrifice them (Glamour masteries, warden’s feedback, debilitating dissipation etc) in favour of raw damage.

While such builds can do dungeons most players no matter how bad can “do” a dungeon if only by being carried. You’re doing a dis-service to your team and your class running pure DPS glass cannon pew-pewing, I may be wrong and you’ve come up with a trait configuration that combines support, survivability and shatter DPS as I can’t see your link, but that’s my experience and opinion.

I love this idea xD – so practical and fits in with what we already have in the game mechanics.

If not as /dance, then as a “toy” town clothing slot item

Heh, this story I think has happened a lot.

At launch lot of would be mesmers rolled engineer, now – armed with better knowledge of the game – they’ve returned to the fold.

Short answer: No

Long answer: With a very specific build built around iZerker/iWarden and illusory persona with phantasm damage bonuses, shatter bonuses, insane reflexes and the clone spawning utility skills the Mesmer can achieve competitive DE tagging by spamming what few AoE’s we have, however the build will be pretty rubbish outside of dynamic events and useless in dungeons and even then it is merely “competitive” you still won’t hold a candle to most other classes being played proficiently.

I thought the market wouldn’t be able to support that many people either, but it apparently can. I’ve only been trading about a week and building up my investments – currently around 42g, growing about 10g a day and rising quickly.

I believe timezones partially factor into it; players in one timezone can’t fill enough buy orders to significantly dent supply during their off-hours. Once they go to bed, their buy orders are either out-bid, or run to completion in short order. At which point the market frees up for a new set of players to start bidding, buying and selling, so each market actually can support 4 or 5 successful players, and that’s assuming the player places enough buy orders to secure all produce through his period, if his orders routinely run to completion then there are windows within those hours for other players to get supplies, increasing it to a dozen or more players per market.

That’s my theory anyway * shrug * – all i know is that I place my orders, work my mojo, flip deals, turn profits and walk away richer for it – enough so that I now only play the game component for fun, playing with my friends or for karma, because the markets earn far more gold for me than I can as a mesmer :p

@Vaereh: Very well said! – Kudos

I swear the trade forum reeks of sour lemons and spilt milk xD – I started coming by here lately to see what advice if floating about now I’ve taken up GW2 trading big time and it’s just a place for the bottom 95% to complain about the top 5% and how the system is “broken” (Yet apparently works for us few)

@oZii: Exotic items under best case scenario don’t usually see than about 30% markup on their material value, far from 200% or 300%

There’s a lot of reasons.

Maybe it’s not likely to sell fast enough at the stated price, or has too high risk of being undercut repeatedly. Maybe he wants the sale sooner rather than later and is willing to claim a smaller margin,, maybe he just wants to get it off the books quickly to free up the capital locked in it and isn’t really looking to profit?

Oh… wait. i mean

“How dare someone undercut!”

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Assuming that the project profit has included all expenses is a reasonable assumption. When you have the computer doing some math, it should be doing all the math.

Why doesn’t it ?

As of the last patch it’s ALL there. When you have set up the trade it tells you the projected profit above the sell button including the deduction from taxes.

Indeed, i loved the hinterlands (and also orr’s) “ongoing war effort” that the event chains form. I really hope we see new zones that take this idea and replicate or improve upon it

You have to ask yourself WHY is it out of the sync, and the reason is down to the fact the trading post is cross server. You have 2 million players all trying to sell their items at once.

Let’s say 2,000 people all decide they want to craft and sell the same item.

2,000 people try buy the same craft materials but, there’s a snag there’s only materials for 1,000 items in a reasonable price range. So, people start bidding up to ensure they are the one who gets the materials. A small portion of those players might not have even done the maths properly and pay too much and they won’t even get a profit.

So, we now have 1,000 players who made their items, some are doomed to make a loss already due to paying too much (Usually because they forgot to factor in the sales tax). There might well be demand for 1,000 items… but players get impatient, they want their money NOW, not TOMMOROW – so they under-cut their opponents by 1 copper. let’s say 1/4 of the players engage in under-cutting starting off with an item worth 20 silver (2000 copper).

First bid is 20
Next bid is 19,99
Next is 19,98

After 250 bid-downs, we’re now looking at a sale value of 17,50 and is hovering pretty close to break even possibly even BELOW break-even due to improper understanding of taxes. And this is the problem; now scale this up to a game with 2,000,000 players – there’s far more than just 2,000 players trying to make and sell any given items. It only takes a few impatient players to hike prices and collapse markets for the majority.

Still… not my problem, I’m a trader not a crafter, you guys keep collapsing your markets, I’ll find my arbitrage

In beta, evasive deception as the Duelling rank 15 minor skill, every mesmer got it automaticlly at duelling 15.

The problem was that at this stage clones would over-write phantasms (Something they changed a few weeks after launch), so if you had to dodge, you might end up killing your own iZerker. So as a quick and dirty fix, they moved evasive deception up into the rank 20 major slot so that people could choose whether or not to use the skill.

Now they’d resolved the clone issues it’d make sense to switch it back out, it’s kind’ve silly having EVERY PvE mesmer have to take the same major trait to be playable.

Abarcine.7189:

God why is this still on the front page? The only thing iBerserker needs is to not go through LoS, it’s silly that I can circle kite someone around a pillar forever thanks to the cripple.

He keeps bumping his own topic, I think he hopes that if he can keep the thread up here it’ll look like a genuine concern that needs addressing.

I don’t have it (yet!), but I know someone who does have it, and they confirmed the shoulders are hidden while wearing it.

Mesmer might have to work harder to achieve results in any given area. But they also come with great flexibility to changing situations.

Applying skills in different combination can yield greatly differing results; for example null field can be used to strip boons from an enemy, or strip conditions from your friends, it can be used to add damage by adding confusion to attacks. Illusions can be used as additional sources of damage, or converted into a spike, or a daze, or a shield or they can be left out to serve as decoys to distract a boss from you.

This flexibility obviously requires more input, and more thought, but what we lack in specialisation, we gain in adaptability which can be critical to success in a dungeon when the situation suddenly shifts and this makes Mesmers a fantastic choice for dungeons.

I personally use GS/Sword/Focus for dungeons but me and my guildies are comfortable with me running a bit more towards offence – a staff in place of a GS would be better for party support. Focus is just fantastic. Traitted it offers 2 anti-projectile screens, a high damage AoE phantasm, a cripple, a speed buff and a huge AoE pull skill – you can take control of any situation using a focus.

Well poking about on the structured PvP forum, duellist IS used extensively but most the nerfs don’t really make much of an impact on their game; the cooldowns are still short enough that killing a phanty is at best an inconvenience

In fact, many of the sPvP hardcore assumed that the nerfs were directed at PvE because it hasn’t affected them at all.

…so… yeah. The jury is out on what exactly the devs were trying to do. My theory is that it was aimed at PvP – so that killing phantasms had a meaningful impact instead of the mezzie just replacing it. But they couldn’t make the CD as long as they really wanted because it’d rendered PvE mesmers unplayable.

Few things …
1) Mesmer is a PvP class, like in Gw1
2) Therefore PvP balance is their top priority (and then hopefully traits)
3) Mesmer will become better in PvE with expansions and new content (skills etc.)
EDIT:
4) Real Mesmer players choose it for style and concept, not power or popularity

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
3) Unfounded assertion?
4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Since the patch I basically can’t play, whenever I try move around I get randomly teleported all over the place.

At first I thought I was rubber banding due to lag, but then the teleports started taking to to places I hadn’t been let alone pinged back to.

For example, in Rata Sum, I tried to walk from the central vendors, down to the bank/trading plaza. Suddenly, the game teleported me to the first/second floor ramp. Then it teleported me to the lions arch gate and my character kept walking as if trying to jump off the cube; I fought hard against the controls, and suddenly I appeared in the accountancy department where I wanted to be all along- but then suddenly I was in the doorway to the dynamic college (Dynamics! – bah, what do they know). next I’m 200ft in the air plummeting towards the bottom of the cube…

…at this point I didn’t teleport and was simply rendered into a small pink smear

However… I can’t play like this! – if I can’t get the basic groceries from the store without falling into a temporal vortex how can i hope to fight xD

Bwahaha, I love the firework idea. I am so trying that out.

I know that mesmer portals work too and you can trick them into teleporting to some hazardous or awkward location. but that works with legit players too during events

I think you guys need some perspective.

Shatter might feel “strong” if you’ve never played any other class. But an engineer can put out far far higher DPS, faster, more reliably and with a larger AoE just by mashing the #1 key on his grenade kit.

Shatter is incredibly weak for it’s setup criteria. that said people shouldn’t be making “shatter builds” or “phantasm build”, they should be leveraging the synergy between all of their skills to achieve a greater end result.

Well, I’ve always had a lot of faith in Arenanet’s ability to balance stuff. GW1 was balanced like a throwing knife.

GW2… I’m not sure the right hand knows what the left is doing. We keep seeing nerfs to skills that don’t outwardly appear to have needed them, they’ve avoided nerfing the skills that could probably afford a nerf, and they havn’t fixed any of the skills that are buggy but would make PvE smoother if they fixed.

There is a very good reason to allow point and click movement even if it seem superfluous -* disabilities.*

Plenty of people out there enjoy video games but for whatever reason can only use one arm to do so. In that situation you have to have a way of moving your character using just one hand, the simplest being click-to-move

There’s another MMO out there which has an almost identical class to Mesmer. It’s called Allods Online, and it’s counterpart class was called the Psionicist.

Functionally and thematically they’re very similar, able to use telekinetics to move and bunch up foes, create decoy illusions and bend space and time with their minds. Like Mesmer their strong control abilities meant they they were great in 1 on 1 and team PvP scenarios, but their lack of strong AoE and complex skill chains made them a little weak in PvE and as a result they were one of the more underplayed classes.

And I come with a warning from the future!

You see, just like Moa pisses people off today, and portal could be potentially abused. So too could the psionicist’s counterpart skills – like 10 second AoE chain stuns. Like the mesmer, the class was actually built AROUND these concepts, without the ability to do this they were defenceless, yet when they did them in PvP, it caused much QQ – they wern’t even the strongest PvP class by a long shot, they were more of a force multiplier, but people really don’t like losing control, and a control class like Psion or Mesmer is a class designed to do just that.

Every patch, Psi would be nerfed – the Psionicists would of course protest this pointing out how increasingly unplayable PvE was becoming. But every other class was constantly screaming NERF PSIS at the top of their lungs.

This continued patch after patch, month after month – any single nerf was never that big, but it happened insidiously and constantly for an entire year

12 months later, there were just 1 or 2 viable builds for the class and so few people on the North American servers played Psionicists they were literally known by name to the other players, they were in high demand in PvE fior their unique control talents, but supply was almost non-existant as levelling one was like pulling your own teeth out.

Eventually they introduced a simple cross-class option where players could take one of a small list of skills from another class, unsurprisingly the psionicists signature control ability was one of the most popular and it this stage there was no point rolling a psi at all and the class finally disappeared into obscurity.

Mesmer’s still alive and healthy at this stage – sure some people find them tricky to play in PvE but they are still very strong played properly. But I’m worried – every patch so far we’ve seen nerf after nerf and barely caught a single break. I’ve seen this happen before, and I don’t want to see it happen again, I love this style of gameplay far too much to see the cycle repeat itself.

The psi formerly known as Mindhack (Nezeb server)

Not a new bug, well documented.

You need to have at least one of the traits that give a buff to phantasms/clones (ie. retaliation), otherwise they don’t immediatly attack on spawning.

Why this is isn’t known, it doesn’t make any logical sense, but “that is how it is”

I’m all for getting rid of Moa simply because it is useless… give us more useful elite, I dare you :p

(But imagine the QQ’s)