Guild Wars 2

Big Tower.5423:

1. Make commanders a waypoint for squad members. i know you think that it can be exploited, but not any worse than portal. just make a anti siege code for it, so no one in a golem can teleport to it!

Portal has a limited range (5,000 units?), a limited capacity, a short window of opportunity and a long cooldown. It also requires a mesmer to cross the distance on foot to set up the portal and thus renders them vulnerable to attack.

Your commander suggestion has none of things (And that is without discussing the already well covered logistical and abuse issues)

Until I got seriously into fractals I’d have said “gosh the very idea is abhorrent” like a wide eyed idealist.

But now I’m getting into higher level fractals; the difference between classes is like night and day. Get a guardian, mesmer support and a few zerker warriors and you’ll tear through bosses in seconds; run a party with no warriors or guardians, but a mix of engineers, rangers and necros and you’re in SERIOUS danger of slamming into a wall and having to abort the run.

Whether engineers, necros and rangers are a bad class, whether warriors are THAT overpowered, or whether only bad players take rangers, engys and necros to fractals I’m not sure; but that is literally how it falls and these days when I open an LFG and see a bunch’ve non-trinity (mesmer/guardian/warrior) sign up, I end up cringing and consigning myself to the fact this is gonna be a 2 hour run.

I’m still not so cruel as to turn them away but… it’s not a matter of elitism; I’ve simply yet to play in a party without a warrior or guardian(1) that didn’t suck horribly.

(1). I’ve yet to do a fractal run without a mesmer, because I am a mesmer.

Practically the entire mesmer grid; especially the domination line is a joke hearkening back to beta, it includes a whole row of minor dedicated to interruption that NOBODY uses.

Gems include:

• Empowered Illusions: Illusions deal 15% more damage – But clones havn’t dealt damage since BWE2
• Furious Interupption: Gain 4 seconds of fury when you interupt – This is a grandmaster trait… no, just, no
• Bountiful Interupption: Gain a random boon when you interupt – Also a grandmaster!, Gosh better not stack this with Furious Interruption!

Foehn.2489:

>Ryuujin.8236

Maybe I should stay off class specifics as I do not intend to downplay the complexity of the situation you might be in. High fractals or PvP, I could list too exactly how to opperate a class but what I want to question is that wouldn’t you too want more out of skills and a higher skill cap? No matter how you spin it after a while the skills are bland in my opinion, let alone being locked to weapons.

More flexibility is always a good thing but you have to draw a line somewhere for the sake of balance and development resources. I personally feel there is already no shortage of depth, at least within this class, as it is a large number of mesmers I meet barely scratch the surface of their classes’ potential prefering to take the path of least resistance (Hanging back on a greatsword spamming clones and laser beams for raw DPS and nothing else)

That’s not to say other classes don’t need some care and attention however…

loseridoit.2756:

Mesmer elites are arguably the strongest but they require coordination

It depends on the game mode. In team PvE, roaming WvW and sPvP mesmer has phenomenal elites.

Yet ironically those same elites are almost useless to the mesmers themselves in most situations. There’s a good reason in solo play many mesmers opt to use their racial elite

• Time warp < Extreme cooldown compared to other class haste skills
• Mass Invisibility < Extreme cooldown compared to other class stealths
• Moa Morph = Useless outside of ultra-small party PvP

This actually works in our favour in PvP.

When you’re faced by a giant norn in spikey armour, and a charr wielding a chainsaw; you don’t tend to notice the tiny asura mesmer behind them who is about to redefine your existance as pain rated on a scale of 1 to 10

Foehn.2489:

• Mesmers just build up clones and either detonate or not dependent on build. The confusion of clones are kinda built in so more is always better. Usually not much of a reason to really keep watch what your foe is up to.

You clearly havn’t mastered mesmer; you may’ve played them but you havn’t come close to truly understanding them.

Mesmer is an extremely tactile class; deciding when to use which skill in which order, adapting the skills and combos available to you to suit the situation, it can be extremely active in play-style; whether teleport kiting at range, bunkering down within a chaos storm or aggressively diving into a group of enemies and detonating a wall of clones within a blurred frenzy, or positioning yourself within your allies to maximise the spread of support skills and boons

If you go into PvP, or a high level fractal and “just build up clones and either detonate or not” you will fail, utterly; you’ll be hurling your clones into AoE, or into a dodge or into a blocking enemy, and then when you really need that phase retreat or that decoy to break the stun and get out of dodge – too bad. You burned it needlessly earlier. Even “phantasm builds” are still advised to use shatters; the difference is a matter of timing and situational awareness

In solo PvE spamming skills might work, but frankly you can beat open PvE with little more than a blob of gunk and a rusty metal pipe.

Mine came out of an instigator chest today, I’ve only opened 5 or 6 of those chests; and there are people farming them day in day out in massive zergs.

If they come out those chests, then there must be hundreds going into circulation all day long.

Now I have ~1,500g I’m having trouble finding stuff to reliably invest into (routinely being outbid leaving hundreds of gold on the table), even though in principle I’d invest back almost all of it as mystic has said, leaving only 20-30g in pocket.

Afterall, even if you only make 3% per day on your investment that’s still enough to buy virtually all the nice things you could ever want

Advert Paperer.7059:

• a Ranger’s options are fairly limited. Barrage is ideal, but it may not be available due to its long cooldown. Traps are a good option if traited and equipped. Path of Scars is decent, but many Ranger players show up for dungeon runs with a pair of bows and wouldn’t consider using anything else.

This in itself is part the problem; “rangers use bows” attitude amongst rangers themselves. The bows are poor AoE weapons, and fractals and dungeons often involve large numbers of mobs; a ranger with a GS and traps (And a drake pet) can absolutely wreck grouped enemies on a par with a warrior while remaining extremely tanky; yet such rangers are few and far between to actually encounter in PUGs, more often sitting on the back row spamming arrows from their longbow.

Khisanth.2948:

Ryuujin.8236:

The tools explicitly state on them “unlimited uses, can harvest all ore/plants”, changing that would amount to false advertising if they were to take your money and then change the items functionality.

That is not actually true. It says it has unlimited uses and that it is equivalent to an Orichalcum sickle/pick. If some resource ends up requiring a tool higher than orichalcum then these are also going to fail.

“Don’t sign up for level 10+ fractals if you’ve never done a fractal in your life”

“If you don’t speak English do your homework in advance instead of joining an English speaking party and hoping you can just ‘wing it’’”

If only I’d known these in advance of letting 3 portugeuse speakers sign up for a level 10 fractal “speed run” when it quickly became apparent none of them had every done a fractal in their life…

…that’s 2 hours of my life I won’t be getting back and we didn’t even finish the run

Shanks R Us.2489:

jportell.2197:

Thieves guild is easily counterable? HOW? Thief stealths… thieves guild pops you couldn’t interrupt it because several interrupts require a target and if you could… whats that? The thief can just stealth and retry knucks! Once thieves guild pops these guys offer consistent DPS and CC. And by consistent I mean their unload hits for 5k and on the death break down the second most damaging skill is twisting fang (dagger #3 no offhand). Don’t tell me this can be easily countered… When it comes to summons thieves guild out performs every other summons in the game.

Perhaps.

You can dodge the initial volley of their pistol unload and kite them. Also, I play an engineer, so, I have:

-Glue puddle to keep them off me.
-Freeze grenade to keep them & thief off me.
-Flash grenade to make them miss.
-Shield block to block their attacks.

I guess I meant to say I can easily counter it.

And while you’re doing that the thief himself backstabs you… game over, he wins.

When it comes down to it, almost every elite is an in-win skill. I’d rather have seen GW2 elites be more along the line of GW1 elites, an above average skill that is too powerful to be in the same bar as other elites, and helps form your builds playstyle, but not a single skill that flips a battle on it’s head

bobross.5034:

Esplen.3940:

Nah man, what if your Clone does 10 damage? Now it does 11.5 damage.

They should nerf that…seems way op’d.

Yeah, imagine if they had 1,300 clones out; you’d do almost as much damage as a warrior!

While not sellable, my personal pet hate is receiving cash-shop items like bank and TP expresses from dailies. Because you’re never going to need it; it’ll eat up bank space, yet deleting it requires written confirmation

The tools explicitly state on them “unlimited uses, can harvest all ore/plants”, changing that would amount to false advertising if they were to take your money and then change the items functionality.

loseridoit.2756:

These traits had a purpose at one point during the beta events.
Greatsword #3 was a targeted daze. Anet haven’t change the traits every since the nerf

No kidding; we still have seperate “Illusions do more damage” and “Phantasms do more damage”, even though clones no longer deal damage, essentially making the skills duplicates

My suggestion would be to go to GW2LFG.com, find a fractal of level 9 or below, and just /join it (As long as it’s not a speed run). When you come across a fight you’re unfamiliar with, just ask “I havn’t done this fight before is there anything I should know” – many fractals have multiple bosses and paths, no need to tell them you’ve never done any paths before; don’t tell them more than they need to know, then they can only judge you on your actual ability not their preconceptions

Since it’s a low level fractal having a new player along isn’t unusual and it’s in their interest to explain it (It’s not in anyone’s interest to boot someone mid-run as that means they have to 4 man it).

I think you’ll find most people’ll be perfectly reasonable and not scream “hermagerd nooob”, and once you’re comfortable with the different instances you’re no longer a newbie and you can crank it up to level 10 for better rewards, refine your game and get started on obtaining ascended.

Vol.5241:

If we’re gonna want some lore, how are they gonna explain The Dreamer?

The fractal nature of the mists can explain almost anything

BuD.7851:

…. & not needing gems from the gem store, so they were removed to steer us to the gem store.

Can I interest you in a tinfoil hat?

Buying gems Vs buying with gems is irrelevant. The value of gems is dictated by the stocks of gems, when you buy gems with gold, somebody else is essentially footing the bill for you with their gem to gold conversion somewhere else up the line.

It’s all a net gain to arenanet…

S Co T T.7910:

1. It’s just a WoW re brand job

I stopped reading at this line.

Have you actually played World of Warcraft? – For that matter have you played Guild Wars 2 – the two are utterly un-alike.

Behellagh.1468:

In a way ArenaNet does affect the exchange rate but by only putting items in the gem shop players are willing to get but are too cheap to buy the gems with $.

It’s an interesting strategy – As long as players buy gems with gold, then it becomes ever more enticing for players to buy gold using gems – so in essence anet still gets the money either way, just who foots the bill differs

Einlanzer.1627:

Nothing groundbreaking, but you sure can’t complain about getting comprehensive patches every couple of weeks.

The WvW changes are huge – in a good way. Now you get decent reward for your time spent fighting in the mists.

Pedra.4381:

Why do you believe it is?

Because the trends seen in the gold/gem prices appear to reflect what you’d expect. It seems like a lot of effort for arenanet to delibratly mimic predictable trends to get money out of us; when they could let nature takes its course and get exactly the same results

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck – it’s probably not a chicken in disguise.

CureForLiving.5360:

Granted in the more zerg-rush-prone WvW it probably wouldn’t matter a whole lot but in S-PvP it’s definitely a big game changer.

You could always turn off the effect in PvP – like in WvW enemy players always appear in their side’s colour – ignoring their actual armour dyes.

Hostile spells could be set to use their “actual” colours for PvP, and appear coloured for allies and PvE

Let’s change the perspective a little.

Imagine if you could get food that gave a flat 40% reduction to power damage. People’s flip tables, spit dummies; everyone’d reroll necros because odds are everyone in WvW will migrate to using -40% power damage ambrosia

As it is, the closest equivalent (toughness food) yields only a few percent power damage reduction; which makes sense – so what’s my point.

My point is that some classes and builds rely heavily on condition damage; and -40% condition is no less rediculous than -40% power damage, more so in fact since conditions cover both damage AND utility skills. Whereas power is only related to attacks.

As it is, I use lemongrass poultry soup almost exclusively, especially in WvW. All those necro AoE’s and whatnot just slide off – no need to bring a condition removal skill anymore

It’s a nice dream, but honestly; it’s taken the best part of a year for people to get wise to what different skills do (Pink, pink everywhere! Which pink do I do what with!?).

If you now have all the colours of the rainbows exploding around you people’ll be even more confused. "Is that an ethereal field, no… wait… it’s a water field? – Pink? Really?)

I guess my biggest peeve with staves is they’re all so.. arcane.

Skulls on sticks, statues on sticks, sticks on sticks – the Asura are the foremost mages in GW2, and yet there is very little in the way of staves that reflect the technological nature of the asura.

sereniity seven.5603:

i don’t understand why anet made these colors limited, this is disappointing

It works on many levels for anet economically:

• During the limited period it boosts sales of the dye kits and thus gems
• After the event, the tiny amount of finite supply leads to elevated TP prices for said dyes, and thus encourages gem sales to convert to gold.
• The inherently high trade value of dyes leads to high listing costs and taxes, thus providing a decent amount of gold being taken out the system

Arenanet has to put shoes on the feet of their NPC’s somehow – and this seems like one of the less intrusive ways of doing it.

I’d tend to agree with the OP. They typically arn’t very inspired – take the Asura T3 set for example, amazing set, love it to bits… staff though, it’s just a block on a stick.

I want to see some more techy and interesting staves suitable for asura.

We’re in cahoots with FA? – Man, I wish someone’d told me when they kept kicking our zerg’s kitten in EB today it would’ve changed… well it wouldn’t changed anything we still got our kitten kicked xD.

(Kudos to FA on that one, it’s not often I’ve seen a fight we just could not win when we weren’t grossly out-manned ourselves)

Since I updated my outfit and changed my hairstyle complete strangers keep stopping in the street and commenting about how cute my Asura looks, one even going so far as to ask permissions to take screenshots xD

Outfit is a real mixed bag:

• Exalted head, chest
• CoE pants
• Tier 2 gloves
• Exotic Acolyte boots
• Masterwork Acolyte shoulders

I still don’t know which legendary I want’ none really appeal to me. But to give myself some personal goals I’ve begun work on the gifts of mastery and fortune so that I might make up my mind down the line and it’s a lot easier than I was expecting. I’ve only been working on it for about 2 weeks and now have:

475/500 Badges of honour
43/77 Mystic clovers
0/250 Obsidian
2/1 Gifts of exploration

Plus I already have about 1.5k gold, so obtaining a precursor and the other materials will be trivial. I’m holding out hoping that we’ll see new legends in the near future that don’t look like toys made by Mattel; my money is on them requiring a gift of mastery and fortune so it’s a good time sink.

• Playable Skritt – Not happening but, I can dream!

• New Legendaries – I have the gold, I have the gifts (mostly)… I just don’t have any legends I really want to put them towards.

• Weapon dyes – GW1 had it; GW2 has some great weapons, but matching them to your outfit is a pain in the kitten … pretty plox?

• The Depths – We know the Asura had an entire civilization greater in size than even the human kingdoms that was essentially wiped out by Primordius; I want to see the ruins, what became of it’s citizens and the dwarves eternal underground battlefield.

• Weapon migration – New weapons for old classes. Mainhand pistol for mesmers (Duelling IS their second trait line!), Rifle for thieves (Sniper! – Boom, headshot), you get the idea.

Conncept.7638:

Exactly where in that definition does it say ‘Requiring an obscene amount of time’ and/or ‘Being available solely to the wealthy or financially irresponsible’?

It’s simply the most practical way of doleing these things

You COULD give them away to the players with the highest achievement scores or highest PvP scores – that seems most appropriate. But anyone who hasn’t played continuously since launch could almost certainly never obtain one.

You could mix RNG into things, so players who meet certain more realisticlly achievable criteria (ie. world completion, dungeon mastery, specific WvW or PvP ranks) have a CHANCE to receive them; but people complain there is too much RNG as it is.

Anything else is either going to cause divisions in the population. (ie. in Allods the dragon relic gear could only be obtained from the final raid dungeon which was so insanely difficult that on the NA server there were only a handful extremely hardcore guilds that could complete it – those players stood out as unique in ability and gear; but in a game like GW2 people’d still complain they are too highly gated. – And once a guild gets it done several times they basically have it on farm and then everyone is going to have a precursor.)

My solution: Get rid of legendaries – there is so much needless amateur dramatics over these kitten things the game’d be better off without them.

Well, there’s a new get rich quick scheme…

Buy a whole bunch’ve cheap mats. Write a guide explaining how to rank up your crafting skill using said mats; promote the pants off it – make bank on materials.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

clocktower
http://gw2.mmorpg-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Mad_Kings_Clock_Tower-33.jpg

I think it’s not that difficult because Anet has proven in a lot of instanced content that they can do it. Clocktower, Winterday, some few Personal Story missions were quite challenging.

But not remotely challenging enough for a precursor – and despite this the forums were ablaze with people complaining it’s too hard. Now imagine a “super-clocktower” that’s 10 times harder and rewards a precursor at the end…

…the forums would burn down forever

You could buy them and hang onto them until they do add something desirable to the chests if you are RNG inclined.

This public service announcement was brought to you by Rata Sum’s accountancy department

It’s come to the attention of our armies of trained financing monkeys that people are upset about recent changes to farming in parts of Orr. We felt it was appropriate therefore to bring to light some unpleasant truths about Legendaries, and obtaining them and how this impacts the majority.

Value is relative

Imagine for a moment that precursors were easily obtainable. People now have the gold they would have put towards a precursor available to place on the other materials, such as T6 mats; the price of T6 mats rises sharply, and people still cannot afford to make a legendary.

Conversely if the T6 mats became super common, there’d be more money to place on obtaining a precursor and the value of precursors would rise sharply. You might point out “Well, I never had the gold to begin with, so this isn’t true”; well maybe you didn’t bookah – but that guy over there; he did and he’s still going to out-bid you on the materials you need! This is because…

Supply is limited

Typically there is fewer than 50 precursors on the market. Each person who wants a precursor is saving all their pocket money to reach that target price; however they and 10,000 other people are all saving money to buy that very same precursor. The first guy to reach the target and cash out gets the item and the next item is more expensive, thus raising the bar. (And if you’re only saving up small amounts per day it’s a target you’re never going to reach – it’s a moving target you’re trying to hit)

This cycle continues and the price forever appears to rise – you’re chasing down zeno’s tortoise

So, you may conclude…

Increase supply of everything then

Well in practice this WOULD probably work; but you’d have to flood the tier 6 and precursor markets to a stupid degree (Like make every boss chest a karka chest). Since the value of exotics and other trade items are tied to the value of these materials, such a flood would essentially render all items worthless – items would be worth no more than vendor value; you could obtain all the gear you needed very cheaply and easily, but you’d ever be able to afford specialty items like gems.

That way everybody would have a legend… but they wouldn’t really be very legendary anymore, would they?

Even if we shoot for a more mdoerate increase in drop rate, we see an equally mdoerate decrease in value. So whereas you may get the T6 mats quicker, it now takes you twice as long to get the 100 rune stones.

Conclusion

As long as any part of the legendary process is tied to economic structure the prices will always be dictated by the highest bidder (Probably not you if you’re upset about it), the drop rate dictated by the ability for the crafting market to absorb it and the effective difficulty of obtaining a legendary approximately static.

If you have any further questions, please direct them towards my assistant

/Gestures towards heavily armed peacemaker golem, exit stage left

During development, prior to release short stories like these were common for fleshing out the backstories and elements of the game. (Mr Sparkles backstory for example ;p)

Sadly the development blog seems to have been taken down now, there was some great shorts in there

Edit: Aha! – Found them:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Tales

Why is it “unrealistic” anyway.

After a major conflict it’s common for pockets of resistance to remain in isolation for months or even years after the war is formally won. Sometimes insurgent elements survive long enough to help over-throw the apparent “victors” with the assistance of allied forces (See example: French resistance in WW2).

For all we know, the Molten Alliance might come back with the support of the destroyers or another dragon :p

OP’s problem is he is setting his sights on a goal and doing the only thing he knows: Grinding loot.

GW2 offers SO many paths to getting gearred:

• WvW rewards (Cost: Killing other players)
• Shrines of the 6 gods (Cost: Karma)
• Dungeon rewards (Cost: Teamwork)
• Fractal rewards (Cost: More teamwork)
• Laurel Vendor (Cost: Patience)
• Crafting (Cost: Exploration!)

If any single option is boring, then pick another option! – A mixture of all the above will yield a varied diet of gameplay and provide all the stuff you need essentially for free

Precursors are only a piece of the wider legendary jigsaw.

Increasing supply of precursors will decrease their price, but the funds will simply be diverted and raise the price of the T6 mats needed for a legend.

People will bid on the T6 mats, and now they have “spare” gold to throw at it that doesn’t need go on the precursor, it’ll go on the T6 mats; and the net price will change little, and even if it does the price is still dictated by the richer players who will seek to outbid the majority.

The ONLY way to solve the “problem” is to flood the market with every component needed to make a legend to the stage where supply vastly out-strips demand, at which point legendaries are just another craftable weapon and hold no meaning whatsoever other than being a garish ascended+ item.

The Legend
Lions Arch (Mystic forge), x4 exotic staves
~1,100 hours

The Lover
Lion’s Arch (Mystic forge), x4 exotic shortbows
~1,100 hours (Day after legend)

The Collosus
Rata Sum (Portable conduit), x4 exotic hammers
~1,100 hours (Day after Lover).

(I kept none of them, and have no plans to craft a legend at this time, purely business for me :p) I reinvested the funds from juggernaut (~500g) into exotics to see if I could mass produce precursors for a net profit but turned up no additional precursors in around 120 combination attempts leading me to suspect the three I got were more blind luck than a pattern.

My data (180 samples) shows less than 2.5% chance of a precursor when using exotics – and that number has been falling over time since it was front-loaded with the 3 lucky rolls. The odds of getting a precursor with rares is staggeringly low by comparrison. (~0.1%)

Don’t forget that “bolt” combos do fire actual bolts, in order to proc the effect the target has to be struck by a bolt, meaning it’s quite common for a bolt combo to completely miss an adjacent target.

The odds of being hit fall off a square root of distance

The Gift of Mastery is probably the one component for a legendary that I can agree with completely, requiring you to prove you have some degree of mastery over the game.

• Bloodstone Shard: 200 skillpoints, proving your long term commitment
• Gift of Battle: 500 Badges of Honour, proving you are no mere fodder on the battlefield
• Gift of exploration: You’ve travelled the world
• 250 Obi shards: Obtainable a variety of ways, but all require time, patience or skill, not gold

If only the other gifts were so meaningful (Gift of fortune: Requires lots and lots of gold, and a bit of luck, Gift of your weapon: Even more gold, and grinding the same dungeon ad nauseum. Precursor: Pure blind luck).

While I to an extent disagree with PvP being part of a PvE/PvP mixed reward, I find it hard to take a person seriously running about with a legendary weapon if they’re incapable of beating another thinking human being in a fight; being great at farming mobs doesn’t make you a great player, just one with a lot of spare time.

Whatever they decide to do, we need a much larger selection of legendaries before they do it to introduce variety.

In WvW I routinely see multiple legendaries in a single zerg – now imagine if legendaries were easy enough to get to finally appease the masses… the floor is gonna be black and white in sunrise/twilight guano and the air positively glowing in the aurora borealis of a thousand bifrosts

It’s not improbable that he’s used to trading on other MMO’s where there is no tax and hasn’t done his maths. I frequently see people undercutting markets to such a point they are making a loss (And they arn’t the kind’ve markets you can ‘force’)

MIrra.3604:

Now, I’m fine with people using portal to bomb but in this case what for? 2 people? With 25 people? I’m not mad, angry or whatever. Actually, I thought it was quite funny because they failed to killed us with 2 portal bombs. I just confused as to why they would portal bomb 2 people.

Often it’s a mis-understanding. Mesmer’s can and do use portals as a personal combat strategy (There’s a lot more you can do with a portal than just bomb people). Second you open a portal near a zerg everyone jumps in it regardless of it’s purpose or destination…

…I’ve often seen it backfire horribly

Tiger Ashante.1792:

On a funny note, I have some East Europeans friends who laugh whenever they see the name Karka. Aparently, if you remove the r from Karka it’s a baby talk for…ugh s…. and it’s pronounced exactly the same lolz.

I thought that was a US expression.

People in the US couldn’t stop laughing at the Kha’ak in the X series games (The series is German)