Guild Wars 2

One thing worth noting, is many players suspect there are multiple levels of diminishing returns. There are also different types of diminishing returns with separate flags, on event rewards, on dungeon rewards, on loot drops, for example.

Based on personal observation, and the observations of other players, it’s my belief that diminishing returns on loot drops has various levels. The more you kill a mob of a certain type, and/or the more you kill any mob within a given zone, you’ll start to see more and more ‘empty kills’ where instead of averaging loot every 2-3 kills, it might start taking 5 or more kills between your average drop, and slowly increases. Whether you inevitably reach a point where no loot will drop at all is still unknown, but that’s the conclusion that was drawn by some people given how the maize balm farm worked.

There’s also per-character flags for diminishing returns, as well as account accrued. He never specifies what type of diminishing returns he rarely sees “in any given hour”. If it’s the absolute ‘no-loot-at-all’ limit, then it’s completely expected that that number would be low. If it’s account wide, then of course that number should be low as well. But what about the initial steps of diminishing returns on loot that many of us suspect exist within as little as 30 minutes (depending on how fast you’re able to kill mobs)?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

It’s like saying “police have only given 5 speeding tickets on this street in the last month so we should just remove the speed limit here”

Except the analogy should be more along the lines of, only 5 people were given $200 speeding tickets in the last month, but every person who drove more than 5mph on the road were charged $1 per mile and most of them don’t even realize it.

It should be respectable, definitely requires mostly low settings and nothing higher than 1366×768 though. What notebook are you looking at? The native resolution of the screen and the thermal management are the most important factors. A lot of these ultra-thin devices that use ULV intel chips tend to throttle more than full sized laptops, and that can limit the maximum potential of the hardware itself.

I’ve tried GW2 on an Ivy Bridge i5 3210m/HD4000 laptop, and it was playable on low settings with medium/high textures only. Smoke effects will absolutely cripple the framerate, especially if you’re stacked in a tight corridor where the smoke takes up most of the screen, but in most other situations the framerate was manageable. You can still do a little WvW/world boss farming thanks to the player model culling settings, but it won’t be smooth.

I’d say you can probably average 20-25fps when it really matters, like in a dungeon run, but you’ll see a lot of dips down to 10-12 when certain effects are happening, particularly smoke (or a 2fps slideshow if it fills the screen). I really wish they’d let us adjust the LoD of the smoke effects as that’s the number one killer of low-end machines.

Of course you’ll see like 45-50fps on occasion, but that’s when taking a leisurely stroll in a mostly empty zone, so don’t let people sway you into thinking that’s the norm. I’ve used HD4000 hardware (HD4400 is slightly better) but my CPU was stronger than the i5 4210u, and it’s playable but barely. Even my everyday use i7 2630qm Nvidia GT 555M machine chokes under smoke/zerg content (even with player model culling) on low settings.

Wanze.8410:

You didnt record the amount of gold you got from the bags?

Nah, sorry, it’s kind of a paltry amount in my opinion so I didn’t think it was worth tracking, but I have seen a spreadsheet on youtube that suggested ~1.75 silver average. There are actually quite a lot of videos of people opening champ bags in bulk, but most of them just deposit their collectibles and salvage the equipment as they go so they aren’t very good for research purposes.

It takes me something like 6 hours plus to do these sessions after months of hoarding bags cause I mostly solo roam and don’t ever follow the latest zerg farm, and there are still a lot of things I don’t keep track of. If I wanted to get really crazy with it I could track every prefix/suffix, check the max buy/min sell value of every item on the TP, and come up with the average amount of coin earned per bag. Something I could still do using the screenshots, but probably won’t, is track how often each specific weapon/armor type drops in relation to one another, like torches to greatswords, offhanders to mainhanders, gloves to chestpieces, etc.

maddoctor.2738:

Varrg.2704:

reading stuff like this, I always ask myself why I still play this game…

If you play a video game for the material rewards then you should ask yourself why you play ANY video game. If the process of playing the thing doesn’t give you enjoyment, then why continue play?

While I don’t exactly share his sentiment, I can kind of see where he’s coming from. Some people actually receive their enjoyment out of the loot more so than the gameplay. Especially if you come from a heavy Diablo-esque background, where loot is the driving force behind the game, as the content itself can be maybe 10 hours long, and then simply repeated on higher “difficulties”.

I’d say it’s kind of a by-product of the fluid combat system in Guild Wars 2 (by MMO standards), where it plays a bit more like an action RPG in the vein of Diablo than your typical high latency, low character control, point-click-wait MMO, where the focus might be more on things like, furnishing a house or keeping a pet. It attracts players of an ARPG background that are used to loot, rinse, repeat, but still like the larger community aspect of a pseudo MMO.

That’s the only thing that’s kept me going for the 5,000+ hours I’ve logged. I can count the number of times I’ve completed an event or a dungeon and thought ‘wow that was actually pretty fun’ on one hand. It’s the loot/gold that drives me, and while I’d probably get more enjoyment out of the game if it were a little less restrictive, it’s not so bad that it makes me wanna quit.

Hell, I once spent like a week playing Animal Crossing on NDS and all I did was run around digging up junk to sell and fishing/gathering fruit for money. I still had the starter size house and not a single piece of furniture, I just wanted to see how much wealth I could acquire. I also remember hitting the million neopoint milestone (which probably isn’t a lot nowadays) on Neopets lol. It’s a weird way to play, but some of us are into that.

Crovax.7854:

My proposition is instant scaling back if people move outside of a fights boundaries and a 10 second countdown when a person dies. The countdown is frozen when another players starts a ress and, should he not ress the player fully, starts at 10 seconds again.

Is there a reason you feel there should be a 10 second window for a dead player? A dead player can’t do damage nor provide buffs, so in my opinion he should be immediately removed from the player pool for scaling.

Edit: And by removed I mean not counted towards the event difficulty scale, not removed from the area by automatically being waypointed.

Also, there is no reference link for that particular bolded line, and the reference links for the others are broken. So the dev team should still be consulted to verify that this is actually the case.

And if it’s true, and events can dynamically scale for afk or non contributing players, then that means they can also easily scale for dead players using similar lines of code, and they should be flagged as such instantly upon death, not within a window.

Eh, I have a problem with fully dead players being waypointed automatically, even if it’s free of charge. There may be instances where actually ressing a fully dead player is more beneficial, even if it’s rare to want to do so, if the possibility exists at all, it should be an option.

A better solution is for a dead player to simply no longer count towards event scaling.

Still no ascended equipment, which is pretty much the only thing I’m actually after. Less than a .05% chance so far, for me personally, not necessarily the game programmed rate.

Round 2 – 950 bags opened on my 80 engineer with extra inventory space so the screens are slightly more organized. I considered trying to keep everything 1:1 using the same quantities of the same types of champion bags, but I got kind of lazy/anxious and just decided to open what I had.

I should note that the 950 bags included 22 Large Candy Bags from Halloween champions, which also included 110 trick or treat bags and 73 pieces of candy corn. If you feel like these time limited bags may skew results slightly you can go through the screenshots and subtract the equipment/material totals yourself.

Another thing worth noting is, this batch includes “renamed” champion bags. For example, Singed Ritualist Bags (previously also known as Elaborate) or Icy Strongboxes (previously also known as Gilded Strongboxes) or Boxes of Lab Equipment (previously also known as Deluxe Gear Boxes). The paranoid side of me thinks, why would they go through the trouble of renaming these bags unless they’re also tweaking droprates? Especially if they haven’t released the corresponding Collections tab, and there are still multiple bags in the game that share the same name but different item ID’s. But what can you do?

http://s1307.photobucket.com/user/shtskate/media/part%202/950totalchampbags_zpsfed919fc.jpg.html?sort=9&o=0

The breakdown:

147 total scrolls of knowledge

448 total weapons (243 one handed, 205 two handed)

493 total armor (158 light, 180 medium, 155 heavy)

9 trinkets (6 rings, 3 amulets)

1265 total tier 5 mats (145 bone, 180 totem, 200 blood, 178 claw, 132 fang, 185 venom, 157 scale, 88 dust)

872 total refinement mats (116 t5 leather, 23 t6 leather, 252 silk, 42 gossamer, 307 mithril, 132 orichalcum)

87 total tier 6 mats (11 bone, 8 totem, 13 blood, 16 claw, 4 fang, 16 venom, 12 scale, 7 dust)

81 total cores (7 glacial, 15 crystal, 11 corrupted, 11 destroyer, 11 onyx, 12 charged, 14 molten)

15 total vial essences

5 total lodestones (1 charged, 2 molten, 1 glacial, 1 crystal)

34 total rares (1 staff, 1 medium boot, 3 medium helm, 1 medium glove, 1 medium shoulder, 3 mace, 2 scepter, 1 focus, 1 trident, 1 longbow, 3 shortbow, 1 greatsword, 1 axe, 1 warhorn, 4 harpoon gun, 2 hammer, 2 light legging, 1 light helm, 1 heavy glove, 1 heavy helm, 1 heavy chest, 1 heavy shoulder)

3 total exotics (1 light boots, 1 dagger, 1 medium helm)

8 special exotics Razah’s Nightmare torch, Monsoon staff, Scepter of the Highborn scepter, Cobalt greatsword, Levvi’s Detector rifle, Guild Defender shield, Mecha Anchor hammer, Rockweed Spire trident

96 of the 448 weapons can be considered profession specific for an engineer, but this is more or less meaningless as only 4 weapon types are usable by this class.

Interestingly, we see almost the exact same slight bias towards medium armor this round as we did towards light armor during the previous batch. 180/493 is roughly 36.5% medium armor for the engineer, while 156/428 is roughly 36.45% light armor for the mesmer. Very consistent numbers, but possibly coincidental? Either way, if you open your loot containers on a light armor class (with the possible exception of bugged necromancers) you lose nothing assuming it’s just coincidence. But if the numbers don’t lie, you could gain about a 12% increased chance for light materials. So it’s a case of, it doesn’t hurt but it could benefit to just use a mesmer/elementalist.

And if you only own medium/heavy classes it’s nothing to be majorly upset over, as ~12% is a pretty small theoretical shift towards profession specific armor drops, nothing like the insane disparity I’ve seen in open world drops (see my post history to find my thread on profession specific bias in the open world, the results may surprise you).

Silk continues to drop 2:1 to leather and I still saw a rather high rate of orichalcum. What’s funny is after salvaging all of the light armor that dropped I had 266 silk scraps and 33 gossamer scraps for a grand total of 518 silk scraps, which isn’t even enough for 2 Bolts of Damask lol.

I saw a much better rate of rares this time around (over 50% increase):
18/823, 2.21% or 1:46
34/950, 3.58% or 1:28
52/1773, 2.93% or 1:34 bags

Consistency continues with the exotic drop rate:
3/950, 0.316% or 1:317
3/823, 0.365% or 1:274
6/1773, 0.338% or 1:296 bags

Tier 6 material rates are similarly disappointing:
74/823, 8.99% or 1:11
87/950, 9.16% or 1:11
161/1773, 9.08% or 1:11 bags

Scrolls of Knowledge:
135/823, 16.40% or 1:6
147/950, 15.47% or 1:6
282/1773, 15.91% or 1:6 bags

Cores:
58/823, 7.05% or 1:14
81/950, 8.53% or 1:12
139/1773, 7.84% or 1:13 bags

Lodestones:
6/823, 0.729% or 1:137
5/950, 0.526% or 1:190
11/1773, 0.620% or 1:161 bags

Any bag that doesn’t include some sort of special descriptor, such as “X items will fill this bag before other empty spaces” or “items will not appear in vendor list” etc. will allow you to sort.

Currently, the Halloween Pail is the cheapest 20 slot bag (roughly 5-6 gold worth of candy corn cobs) that will allow you to sort inventory. If you’d prefer a cheaper bag, 18 Slot Thick Leather Pack or 18 Slot Mithril Box is probably your best choice.

If the “reactivate” button doesn’t appear in the top right corner of the track UI, it’s probably because you haven’t finished story mode for Sorrows Embrace since the PvP update was released. Completing the story dungeon before the patch came out does not count retroactively.

The reason you’re able to do some dungeon tracks (temporarily) without completing story mode is they’re on a rotation. Every 2 weeks a new dungeon reward track is available for all players, including those that have not completed story mode for that particular dungeon.

There are ways to acquire transmutation charges without buying them from the gem store, that’s simply there for the convenience of players that don’t want to map cities/zones or play PvP for more.

I doubt this is a bug, probably just their effed up way of dealing with people using Kiel to res, but either way it’s annoying, especially when somebody legitimately disconnects.

The only way around it is for the party to wipe and then there’s about a 2-3 second window for everyone to either retry from checkpoint, and/or people outside to spam the consoles to get back in.

Unfortunately, if you’re in a PUG you don’t always have people willing to go down on purpose, so people stuck outside are usually in for a long, boring wait.

Edit: Apparently there’s a second entrance by turning right where the consoles are and heading up the ramp to a wooden door that will warp you into the fight, but hardly anyone knows about it. I’ve only heard this is the case, but never actually verified, cause I’m big bossman and don’t die during this fight.

Anyone continued testing this? Wondering if perhaps they silent nerfed.

Weird, hopefully it’s a bug or they probably should’ve made it clear it was a time-sensitive collection. I didn’t rush to finish mine either cause I figured I could do it at my own leisure once unlocked. This would also make the thousands of Old Pillowcases on the TP essentially useless if it’s not a bug.

This has been happening to me pretty often since around the Halloween release, too. It’s memory-leak like behavior, where I drop into single digit frames for a couple of seconds every so often, but never permanently or for extended periods of time.

Usually when it first happens my screen will go black for a few seconds, showing a menu bar at the top as if it were in Windowed mode, and then the image returns and the periodic frame dips start happening.

However, task manager doesn’t seem to show an abnormal amount of memory usage for Gw2.exe, so perhaps a VRAM leak?

I’ve been monitoring my temperatures to see if might be a hardware issue, and even tried underclocking the GPU and disabling turbo boost for my i7, but temperatures are no higher than normal and underclocking has not been helping any.

Pretty sure it’s a software issue, and unfortunately GW2 is the only game I play, or I guess that might be a good thing in ANet’s eyes, but I should probably start playing some of my other 3D games to see if it persists.

cranked.3812:

lordkrall.7241:

Why do people still keep thinking about these kinds of things as earning/saving money?
They were never supposed to be that. They are simply there for convenience. I for one love having a easy daily gatherer in one (small) place.

I agree for things like the salvage-o-matic because that is a convenience item that keeps bag space clear.

BUT, it’s just as convenient (if not more so) to spend that money on the TP and it costs considerably less so, in this case, I think it’s a pretty fair comparison.

It also comes down to usability, a salvage-o-matic provides different levels of convenience depending on how much you intend to use it, because the action of salvaging is repeatable, up to thousands of times a day if you were so inclined.

Same for an infinite harvesting tool, you can run around the open world harvesting for 8 hours a day if you wish.

These home nodes are novelty items, not convenience items. They provide exactly one use every 24 hours, incredibly limited usability. And essentially they save you from tapping your “O” key and buying up to 12 T1 – T3 light scraps once a day. Which, arguably, I think is actually the more convenient option.

Now if these worked like regular nodes, where they refreshed every hour, then I would consider them convenience items. And they’d work similarly to salvage-o-matics and infinite tools in that what you get out of them is essentially what you’re willing to put into them. I think very few players would actually be disciplined enough to swap to their Home character and mine them every hour on the hour.

But as novelty items, that makes it no different from spending 200g on one skin versus a free to apply skin. If that’s what you’re into, go for it.

If you average 10 silver worth of light materials every day it’ll only take about 3.25 years to recoup the 120g.

Fractals of the mists can reward ascended armor chests rarely, I do 2 tiers pretty much every day for this chance alone. You’ll mostly get rings though, and there’s also a small chance for skins instead of an armor chest. I have a character dedicated to just holding on to the trash ascended rings I don’t need, he’s full up on 100 rings and I’m still getting more.

WvW bonus chests have a very low chance to reward ascended weapon/armor chests.

Guild missions that reward items such as bounty, rush, puzzle, and challenge all have a low chance for ascended weapon/armor chests.

And lastly, champion bags also have a very low chance for ascended equipment. This includes certain PvP loot boxes available from reward tracks.

If you want to maximize your chances for ascended gear you should do the above guild missions every single week, as many fractal tiers above 11 as you can stomach, farm a handful of champion bags, complete a tier or two of a PvP reward track, and rank up in WvW a few times every single day.

You might not get a full set of exactly the stats you want, but you can save yourself a lot of gold with every ascended chest that drops.

I’m up to 5 ascended armor chests, and 2 ascended weapon chests, mainly from just fractals and champion bags. I stopped playing PvP because hotjoin is god awful at the moment with too many team droppers/swappers, and I don’t enjoy WvW either, nor do I want to a join a large guild just for missions. But if you’re consistent with all of them you’ll definitely see some ascended gear drops.

Probably because a few guilds have given vault access to players that just clean them out and disappear. Unless the cap has been in place since release, then I dunno. But I imagine they’re just trying to limit the amount of damage a guild can do to themselves to not have to deal with related support tickets. I think that was their reasoning for the limited gem exchange feature as well, they want to make it harder for new/dense players to make mistakes so they don’t have to deal with them via support. But that’s just my speculation.

Essence Snow.3194:

So I watched it more and found out what exactly was not being increased. Condition duration and boon duration do not get changed at all.

Those aren’t attributes.

Orpheal.8263:

The numbers that you need to refine the Materials should get changed imo.

Silk should get reduced from 3 to 2
Hardened Leather should get increased from 2 to 4
Hard Wood Plank should get decreased from 3 to 2
Elder Wood Plank should get increased from 3 to 5

Absolutely not, you never ever do this. This is what got us into trouble with the Silk scrap market to begin with. When an item comes along that makes leather more desirable (like ascended crafting did for Silk) you’ve compounded the demand for the item. Then when that happens you’ll be saying Hardened Leather should be decreased from 4 to 2 just like you’re saying Silk should be reduced from 3 to 2.

And once you change the core refining recipe you can never revert, because the hundreds of thousands of people that already crafted all their items using the more expensive recipe will cry about it. This is why Silk was never reverted back to 2 scraps from 3 or the Bolt of Damask requirements lowered from 100 to 50.

They missed an opportunity with the Candy Corn Gobbler, just more short sightedness by Anet. Instead of putting out these one off items (like Candy Corn Gobbler/Mawdrey II) that temporarily handle only one problem, they need to be thinking big picture more. Instead of a “Candy Corn” Gobbler or a Bloodstone eating plant, they should be putting out a universal Gobbler that eats various amounts of any overflowing item/material that can be adjusted as the market changes. When materials could be exchanged for Zephyrite Sanctum Supply Boxes we saw an almost immediate evening out of costs across the board for materials of different tiers.

Temporary rewards for temporary problems that can be adjusted on the fly and don’t affect the core crafting mechanics of the game are a much better solution.

You used to be able to get 60 tokens per character for your first run of each path, rather than per account. Same with the bonus chest for fractals of the mists, per character previously, now per account.

They sell character slots for $10 and then make it less and less rewarding to have multiple characters. Not very business savvy.

Chris Cleary.8017:

This is not an exploit, it’s the playerbase saying “thank you for farming this, because we didn’t want to”.

So how does that logic not apply to every other farm in the game that’s been killed off?

These are called 1 2 3 4 5 players, and people like this are the reason I actually appreciate defiance on champions. It’s a multiplayer game, you just have to roll with it.

Of course it’s possible to kill him, the reward just isn’t worth the effort past the first kill. I had my 3 legendary kill achieves done within the first hour, but I also saw a few zergs wipe multiple times and then just avoid him altogether. And pretty much all scaled events tend to be easier with smaller to medium sized groups, especially when people tend to lay there dead, upscaling the event rather than waypointing.

While it’s good that they didn’t completely butcher loot drops like they did for personal story missions and the second Queen’s Pavilion, 50-75% of the loot is still Trick or Treat Bags which will plummet in value very quickly. The first Halloween dropped masterwork equipment out the wazoo by comparison.

I have a feeling the Labyrinth will still end up a ghost town well before the event’s end simply due to the Lich. The sheer amount of skeleton adds and the power of their non removable retaliation makes the risk/reward ratio not worth the effort, effectively shutting down that entire corner of the zone once everyone has their first achieve kill credit. It’ll also be the source of a lot of map chat toxicity when people are getting verbally abused for opening the purple Lich door on fresh instances.

See the bugs forum, many necromancer players have reported getting drops as if the engine thinks they’re a different class.

Yeah I just had this happen to me the other day in the swamp fractal. Got rooted while in mid-air, couldn’t use any skills to cleanse the condition, couldn’t use any attacks/skills to break the roots even after the wisp timer ran out, basically just had to wait until I got downed.

Megaserver is here to stay, those of us that didn’t like it already did all our kittening when it was first introduced and were ignored. Get used to all events being completed simultaneously instead of in an efficient loop, get used to other people constantly being in your solo farming spots, get used to all world bosses having lagfest zergs with a healthy amount of condition and healing power builds, get used to not being able to tag mobs during popular events because they vanish the second they spawn, get used to not being able to gather materials as efficiently. Thousands of usability tests show that new players don’t understand how to use a guesting system to find higher population maps, and don’t like figuring out efficient ways to make the most out of low population maps. Also, they tend to pee all over the toilet seat.

Once we get Anet to admit there’s an issue with the constant introduction of low usability/end-of-life items into the game, we can then focus on solutions to them. For example, Aether Keys can be removed from loot tables and instead be bought using Twilight Arbor tokens, or they can be separated into their own loot table along with Blade Shards, Spoons, Mists Essences, and other similar items so that they drop in a separate chest that doesn’t override the potential for equipment or something more useful. Gathering tools and account bound chef ingredients should be removed from loot bags. Instead of getting a random gem store item as a possible daily reward, you should be able to select which one you want, they are after all account bound convenience items, with the exception of BL salvage kits which can potentially have a small impact on the economy, so those could remain randomly chanced.

Meanwhile, all end-of-life items also need some sort of sink, not just Bloodstone Dust, but Dragonite Ore, Empyreal Fragments, ascended rings, Blade Shards, Mists Essences, Globs of Dark Matter, etc. Personally, I wouldn’t mind them being exchangeable in various quantities for tokens that can be used to purchase Tomes of Knowledge and trait unlocks. This would kill two birds with one stone, provide a sink for all of these items as well as negate many of the complaints with the NPE trait and leveling changes.

Essences of Luck can either be exchangeable, or the cap on account wide magic find needs to be lifted, and all levels past 300% should exponentially increase at a set pace so Luck will always be useful, but nobody will be able to gain ridiculous amounts of MF.

Perhaps Mists Essences can be traded to Dessa’s Krewe for a guaranteed fractal path, for example, rather than “rolling” for Swamp, a player can exchange 1 Vial of Mists Essence to guarantee Swamp as their first path, 1 Glob to guarantee their second path, and 1 Shard to guarantee the third path of their choice.

Also, once boost enchantment powder is brought back as a more readily available source, we should be given some sort of option to exchange express items/repair canisters for ones of our choice.

Now that key farming is no longer a viable option, Mystery Tonics aren’t quite the problem they used to be, but there should still be some kind of sink for these worthless items, in my opinion. Also, all other dungeon tonics should be removed as drops, if people really want those they can still pay for them via dungeon tokens. Otherwise, they’re simply merch fodder and hardly worth the space consumed/loot lost.

Sarisa.4731:

The original instance of the Molten Facility had (6?) Mithril nodes, which drop crystals, in the rooms. These are the ones that are present in the Fractals version of Molten Facility.

The original instance also had an Orichalcum node, which dropped orbs, reached by by doing a little jumping in the room with the huge group of trash mobs (where people tend to stack on high levels). This node was not included in the Fractals version of the Molten Facility.

That does make sense, I never considered that all the orbs I’d gotten had dropped from the Orichalcum node, for some reason I just assumed they could’ve been a rare chance from the Mithril nodes as well. Been a long time since the Molten Facility dungeon was around.

But there are instances where higher tier materials drop from lower tier nodes, like the rare chance to receive Blooming Passiflora from Passiflora nodes, or Charged Quartz Crystals from Quartz nodes. So I don’t see why this can’t be done in the Molten Facility fractal, if they really believe that people being able to mine one Orichalcum node a day in a random fractal would be economy breaking…

Jahroots.6791:

ozmaniandevil.6805:

Plus 1 for SKATE. Well put.

What I gathered from that post is just that there’s too much ‘rubbish’ loot in this game, not that Ascended Rings eventually reaching their end-of-life is reasonable.

Indeed, that’s the point I was trying to make. While some players are experiencing an overflow of ascended rings, others that don’t do Fractals as often are having the same issue with other various items. My point is that rather than just looking into further usability of ascended rings, whether it be trading them in for tokens or making them forge/salvageable, if we’re going to implore Anet to make a change, it should encompass all end-of-life items in general, not just ascended rings. Get to the root of the problem, not just one branch.

And to Rhea, just because an item stacks/deposits doesn’t mean on a long enough timeline you won’t overflow your stack and have to deal with another inventory management issue. I am sitting on close to 100 Vials of Mists Essence, eventually I will be forced to make a decision on what to do with them after I’ve filled my deposit tab. I also still have over 14,000 blade shards on a storage character, because let’s face it, 1 green for 100 Blade Shards was not a worthwhile sink, just as five silver for an ascended ring is not deemed a worthwhile trade by many players. Your play style will determine what end-of-life item is the biggest issue for you. I easily have 30 slots being taken up by Bloodstone Dust, as well as another 30+ by Dragonite Ore and Empyreal Fragments combined, and that number will only continue to climb. Just because it stacks doesn’t mean it’s less of a problem for me than ascended rings are.

And personally, I would argue that some of the other end-of-life items are a lot more intrusive than ascended rings, because not only do they end up taking up inventory space, but many of them also take the place of a potential loot table drop that could’ve been something much better, while ascended rings do not override a potential high value drop, since they are mainly acquired through bonus daily chests. And I say this as a player that has 100+ rings sitting on storage characters.

Given the frequency at which spoons drop, I have sold at least 15 Fractal Spoons to merch out of 100+ runs since collectibles came out for example, consider that every Fractal Spoon dropped could have instead been a rare. Consider that one out of every five to ten Fractal Spoons could have possibly been an exotic with a rune/sigil worth 10g. Yes, the spoon itself is worth twice as much as an ascended ring, but the potential value lost is up to several gold. You don’t potentially lose anything when an ascended ring is acquired from a final reward chest, you only gain an inventory problem. All Mists Essences share this issue, all Aether Keys, all Blade Shards, all Copper-Orichalcum tools, and account bound chef ingredients that drop from loot bags share this issue. How many times have you gotten an Instant Repair Canister as a daily reward that you wish were a BL salvage kit or express merchant instead?

I can’t confirm, cause I’ve yet to get one, but I think they still have a chance to drop in the Molten Facility fractal. You can mine the mithril nodes there once a day, and they definitely drop azurite crystals, so I would assume they can drop orbs as well, just a really low chance.

What’s odd is that they never allowed you to upgrade crystals to orbs, which isn’t in line with any jeweling material. And the crystals themselves have basically zero use since you’re probably just better off going with ascended quality soldier trinkets over rare azurite ones.

If you get knocked off the platform, after the fight is over the “retry from last checkpoint” box flashes for half a second and disappears. The only way to get the final chest loot is to re-enter the instance by going to the character select screen and returning, because no one is able to res people at the bottom of the pit.

There are quite a few items in the game in general that eventually reach End-Of-Life, most of them account bound. All ascended materials for example, many people are already experiencing excessive Bloodstone Dust which has brought about a few minor sinks, but eventually Dragonite Ore and Empyreal Fragments will have the exact same issue for more and more players.

Vials, Globs, and Shards of Mists Essence all reach EOL once you’ve infused all the equipment you desire.

Essences of Luck will have no further use as more and more people reach their 300% MF cap (and some players already have).

Collectible spoons are only needed once, and those at least have a merchant value of 10 silver, but who’s to say those excess exotic spoon drops might not have otherwise been rares that I could’ve TP’d for 35 silver or more? Aether Keys that drop in the Maguuma Jungle are typically needed only once for most players, and who’s to say those aren’t taking up potential valuable drops in our loot tables that could’ve been masterwork or better? Even most common and fine rarity drops are worth more than Aether Keys.

Globs of Dark Matter have no merchant value and will reach EOL once you’ve crafted all the ascended equipment you desire.

Account bound gathering tools that drop from certain loot bags are useless to many players that don’t bother gathering their own materials, or have sets of infinite tools they use instead. They also have no merchant value and take up a potential loot table drop that could’ve been a t6 material or possibly a lodestone.

Instant Repair Canisters drop a little too often for some players, especially now that repair fees no longer exist (although others may find themselves wishing they had more depending on play style).

Most of these are at least depositable/stackable, but can still end up requiring a few slots more than anyone would like to give up, and nobody likes to destroy resources rather than get SOME kind of use out of them that feels worthwhile (unlike 5 silver or less merch value for an ascended trinket).

Ascended rings just fall into the category of non stacking large inventory space consumers, kind of like Blade Shards did, or still do for some players.

Halcyon.7352:

If there is indeed an intended cap – it would seem that it’s never been working.

I’ve reached 5 minutes on my elementalist, and I frequent 3-5 minutes on my engineer.

Highest I’ve done is about 8 and a half minutes.

I’ve been stacking swiftness on my engineer at least for a year like this.

Edit: Speaking from a PvE/WvW perspective. I don’t sPvP much at all, but it’s not hard for me to get up to 5 minutes in WvW either.

It’s definitely been working for the last several months because I often top out between 1-3 minutes on my engineer who farms with a Superior Sigil of Speed so I can use chocolate MF foods (while under boon + boon duration). Sometimes I cap at only 1.5 minutes or less because of Speedy Kits (10 sec) plus Drop Stimulant (10 sec) as opposed to my theoretical max cap of just over 3 minutes using only the Superior Sigil of Speed bonus (20 secs). But I have reached closer to my 3 minute max cap as well at times. I’ve watched the boon duration not increase on several occasions despite gaining swiftness because the cap has been reached. Someone with a lot of boon/swiftness duration increase would’ve been able to see just under 5 minutes on occasion.

Infernia.9847:

My next attempt will try to avoid events, which can be difficult in populated lvl80 maps. I did participate in two of them and possibly skewed the results on the Ranger. Would you like us to include the junk items as they are in your SS?
I don’t mind including everything that drops in a screen-shot but would like to be consistent with what you are asking for.
Also I wanted to ask which is more important, the 30minute time allotted or the 24 items? I know that in order to get that many items without an event, it will take me longer than 30 minutes to achieve.

You don’t have to do either, most people will normally participate in events so I wouldn’t consider that skewing results exactly, just giving information as to why my results may be the way that they are.

I tend to include the trophies so people that are really interested can get an idea of what I was killing, but I don’t think it’s necessary for anyone else to do so.

And the amount of equipment dropped is the most important factor, it can take one person an hour to get ~25 pieces of equipment and another 15 minutes, but we’re after a decent overall sized sample, so I recommend at least 25 pieces.

There have been dev posts previously confirming that swiftness was capped at 9 stacks. I know for a fact that swiftness was either not capped, or the cap was much higher than 9 stacks when the game was first released, due to being able to hit 4+ minute durations on my engineer using a combo of speedy kits (when it was 5 secs vs 10) and elixirs/drop stimulant.

Recently I’ve been able to reach 14 minute durations of swiftness on my engineer with a Superior Sigil of Speed. Would like dev confirmation on whether this is an intentional change or a bug. And if it’s a bug, I’d just like to add my input that it should remain as-is. Swiftness should not be subject to capped stacks/durations, in my opinion, given it only facilitates map travel, and speed increase is subject to a 25% cap when in combat anyways. Even in WvW/sPvP swiftness is lost upon death or a relog/rezone, so large durations should not be considered a balance issue in these modes.

Also, I never really bothered to test before, but I’m not sure whether the previous max cap system was “smart” in that it would override shorter duration boons, say from Symbol of Swiftness, with ones of a longer duration, for example, Superior Sigil of Speed. This is another issue that needs to be considered if we’re reverted back to the 9 cap system.

Had some time to kill and I was curious about non-level-appropriate zone results. Took my level 80 engineer into a starter zone (Metrica Province) and killed mobs ranging from level 2 to 6.

Just to note, I tend to specifically avoid any monsters that spawn as the result of an event. Not asking that anyone else do the same, play as you normally would, just letting it be known that this is how I perform my tests. I only kill open world mobs that are always going to be there. And so far this has included a healthy mix of both neutral (yellow) and aggressive (red) monster types.

Also, I don’t think it has any impact, but might as well note, I did volunteer to reshuffle servers a few times during this specific test, however, the loop/mob type/level of the monsters remained the same throughout.

The results:
16/24 medium armor (4 zone level appropriate, 12 character level appropriate)
3/24 heavy armor (2 zone level appropriate, 1 character level appropriate)
5/24 light armor (2 zone level appropriate, 3 character level appropriate)

6/10 weapons prof spec (2 zone level appropriate, 4 character level appropriate)

4/10 weapons non prof spec (2 zone level appropriate, 2 character level appropriate)

I’m curious about the possibility of profession specific loot being more weighted when killing mobs of an equal level to your character. Every monster killed in my original tests were equal to my character’s level, both 80.

And yes, armor is obviously a more consistent datapoint, since there is an equal 1/3 ratio across all weight types for every profession, as opposed to weapons which will vary depending on class played, however, I still think weapons are subject to heavily biased drops given what I experience with my engineer who only has 4 usable weapon types.

And it’s probably safe to assume that whatever value was applied to armor is also the same value applied to weapons. At least, if I were a developer charged with implementing profession specific loot into the game, that is how I would do it. I see no reason why weapons would be considered more or less important to the overall gearing process than armor. But then again, who knows, they do seem to have a warped mindset, as there’s no reason for profession specific loot to exist in the game at all, given there’s a trading post. This isn’t Diablo 2.

EDIT: I once again forgot to include my rare medium coat in the screenshot, this is because of my 20 slot rare equipment box, sorry.

IndigoSundown.5419:

The thing about the OP that stood out most for me was: three rares in thirty minutes. I’ve had a good week if I get three in thirty hours.

300% magic find helps, I don’t always get 3 rares per 30 min session, though.

Infernia.9847:

I’d love to get on a light armor class to contribute but all I have is a level 80 necro.
If you want I can get on: 2 lvl80 rangers, 1 lvl80 warrior, 1 lvl80 guardian.

The other characters are all under lvl40 (ele, mesmer, thief). It’s taking far too long to level them up in the ‘old’ way so there’s that. If you want though I can take any of them out for a spin.

Yeah we haven’t had any light wearers that aren’t bugged necros contribute anything yet, but whatever class you want would be fine, or all 3 even.

Ashen.2907:

Here are the results of my own accounting:

26 drops total:

4 Light Armor
4 Medium Armor
4 Heavy Armor

11 Weapons that my ranger can use
3 Weapons that my ranger cannot use

Not that big of a deal in my test.

Just to clarify, level 80 ranger, level 80 zone? Wasn’t an instance by any chance was it? Open world?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Engineer-Known-Bugs-Post-Feature-Pack/first#post4422840

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Engineer-Underwater-Grenades-hit-nothing/first#post4046696

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Grenades-underwater/first#post4033064

I’m obvs still very annoyed by underwater grenades.

Here are the results of several fractal runs, please note that trash mob kills and chest loot are mixed and matched, I did not have time to keep everything separated as I was with PUGs. No champ bag loot is included in this screen, only trash mob kills + final chest loot. This was on my level 80 engineer, the same engineer that I used for the very first screenshot session.

To be honest I can’t really say whether the trash mobs inside the instance were dropping profession specific biased loot on the level I was experiencing in the open world, but it didn’t feel that way. And regardless, once you factor in the totals including chest loot, if you mainly do instances you can probably expect reasonably even loot drops. At least in Fractals of the Mists, some day I may get around to doing this for regular dungeon runs as well.

Equipment only, i.e. armor and weapons. Materials and what not aren’t affected.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Okay, hmmm. I’ll run this a couple times since “once” seems like a small sample size.

Also, I might still kinda sorta have DR from last night.

It’s ok to only do it once, the desired effect is to have multiple people contribute small sample sizes so a large burden isn’t on any one player.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I haven’t seen this drastic a change in my loot, enough to be notable. However, if it is requested I keep track of it tonight when I go to play . . . what would be a good time slice to use beyond 30 minutes, because I actually idle a lot rather than grinding through enemies ASAFP.

I will note, I am getting almost equal Light and Medium armor drops, just my salvaging is being stingy on Tier 6. (Sigh). I am also seeing a lot of weapon drops I could . . . in theory . . . use.

See my post above, the time spent playing really doesn’t matter. Empty your bags, then aim for at least 25 pieces of equipment, from doing nothing but killing random mobs in the open world, no loot containers, no chests, no champ bags, no level rewards. Once you have at least 25 pieces of equipment or more sort them in an organized fashion that makes sense, and post your screenshot. No need to show your materials or harvested mats, equipment is the only concern here.

Seera.5916:

30 minutes isn’t a large enough sample size to tell if it is noticeable or not. You could have just been stuck on a bad streak of hitting the % needed to get profession loot.

It’s like flipping a coin 10 times. You’re supposed to get heads 5 times and tails 5 times, right? But you could get heads 10 times or tails 10 times. 10 coin flips is not enough to dispel the coin flipping has a 50% chance statistic.

Did you record how many times you killed things? How many times you got a loot drop? What area were you farming? You don’t even give us players enough data to even begin adding to your data. Because if I farm area A and you farmed area B, then we can’t combine data sets. Because the area may be a factor.

You may be right and it may be more noticeable than ANet intended, but your sample size just isn’t large enough. It’s the law of large numbers. The more trials run, the more likely the average profession loot drop will be equal to what % the code has. And in this case a trial is equal to something dropping loot.

The time spent killing does not matter. I don’t know why you guys can’t understand that, and I didn’t think it needed to be explained, but there are enough of you complaining that I guess I must now respond.

I noted that I was in a level 80 zone, I didn’t go into specifics because megaserver has already created too much competition for kills in any given area. My engineer spent roughly 30 minutes to accrue the 28 pieces of equipment dropped. This is what matters, nothing else.

I had the area I was in all to myself when I was playing my engineer, when I repeated the session on my warrior I had to deal with 3-4 other people in the same area, so I had to run for much longer than 30 minutes to get the 27 pieces of equipment dropped. Again, the length of the run does not matter. I aimed for roughly the same amount of equipment dropped.

20 out of the 28 pieces of equipment dropped for my engineer were profession specific. Every piece of armor was medium weight.

21 out of the 27 pieces of equipment dropped for my warrior were profession specific. 9 out of 10 armor drops were heavy weight.

It doesn’t take a statistics major to know that the chances of this being fluke RNG, given the multiple variables involved and the wide possibility of loot options in the game, are ASTRONOMICALLY low. This isn’t 50/50 coin flipping people, there are multiple item types and weights at play.

People can successfully guess exactly which classes were being used. Had I posted 5 drops I got on my engineer alone, and they all happened to be medium/rifles, that would be too small a sample size to be worth noting. The fact that I was able to repeat the skewed results on TWO DIFFERENT CLASSES make this “small sample size” much more credible. The fact that it’s already so evident in such a short amount of time only shows how extreme the level of implementation is.

I agree that the sample size is small, and more results can only be better, however, I have better things to do than farm white/blue/green equipment all day long for several weeks. This is why I posted here, this is a discussion forum, this is why in my original post and nearly every reply I made I encouraged people to post their own results to add to the sample size.

I’m a power player, I make the bulk of my coin off of other items/areas, players like me make up less than 1% of the population. I have almost 5K hours logged,15K AP, 37 character slots, 600 laurels, 4.9 million karma, 10.3 thousand badges of honor, 433 transmutation charges in my wallet, 23 infinite harvesting tools spread across all my characters.

The discrepancy of a few silver on every piece of equipment my engineer gets can add up over a long enough timeline, however, the reality is this affects the average/casual player far far more than someone like me. And purely on principle, inequality of income potential/loot drops based on profession alone does not belong in a game with a player driven economy. A casual player can get a dusk drop in his first week of playing and match my income after thousands of hours of grinding. That’s a possibility and a very rare occurrence. This, on the other hand, is something that affects every player, game wide, on a very large and noticeable scale.

Some of you might think I’m here to complain because I feel this is going to run my earnings into the ground, I’m not. I’ll still make my coin, even though it happens to be slightly less than it could’ve been due to my preferred class, but in the end I’ll still be a 1 percenter that simply powers through it. This is something the average player should be concerned about.

Lishtenbird.2814:

I do not think that 30 minutes are in any way a representative sample for such kind of statistics. I can get 3 exotics within one 30 minute window on one char and 0 on another char; does it mean that one of my characters will always get exotics?

Not even gonna bother picking this post apart. Add to the discussion then, post your own results.

phys.7689:

lakdav.3694:

But if one can get a specific material more reliably because of the class they play/farm with, wouldnt that reduce the demand for that material on the TP for those who want to get it while keeping the rest relatively on the same level as before? Wouldnt that practicly be a balancing aspect in the “leather=worthless – silk=new black gold” equation?

In the long term it could be a balancing factor, farmers will try to play the most effecient class and balance the influx of certain materials. But it kinda sucks for the common joe who has a low value spread of gear.

I wonder if it effects bags/chests/daily rewards as well though

See my other posts for the results of me recently opening 823 champ bags. The results there are very, very different from what I’ve experienced with the open world trash mob farming here in this thread. I’ve been spending most of my time recently in Fractals of the Mists where I dump all my loot after each run, not paying much attention to what’s what, but more whether something should be sold to merchant or listed on the TP. I list/sell/salvage everything like I’m on autopilot. I will now be paying more attention to what I receive from trash mobs in instances, but I can say that chest loot seems to be unaffected.

It wasn’t until now that I decided to pay close to attention to what was dropping out in the open world, and the results honestly surprised me. I speculated profession specific bias could be in effect in the 10-12% range in my thread on champ bags, the results here pretty much prove that loot containers are largely unaffected, while open world mobs are showing an extreme level of profession specific bias, at least in the zone I was in.

Yeah, I originally had the classes I used posted, but decided to edit it out and see if people could guess just to be cynical. And you’re correct, engineer for the first session, warrior for the second.

Remember when they said profession specific loot wouldn’t be noticeable? This is beyond blatantly obvious which weights were used, and fairly easy to tell which specific profession was used as well.

This is not good for the balance of the economy.

I also urge others to give it a shot and post their results just to show this isn’t some coincidental fluke or me pulling strings. Aim for roughly the same number of equipment drops, materials etc. don’t need to be included, time spent playing doesn’t matter.

Same process, same area, same mobs, different character. See if you can guess which classes I was playing based on these results.