Guild Wars 2

We sort of have that in HoT. The Mordrem mobs have differing specialties that can synergize to devastating effect. It’s always fun running Dragon’s Stand and seeing the way players pile onto the Snipers without needing to be told, like, “eff this guy in particular” because each and every one of us has had their face wrecked by a KD on top of the Line of Hurting.

Glad you decided how you wanted to proceed :-)

I took a 3.5 year break myself. I kept my toons, but I played a low-level toon first to relearn navigating the game itself, and then took my main back to do map completion in the racial starting zones to relearn that profession. That worked pretty well for me :-)

Here’s a question, since we’re talking about it: are the LS3 maps the ONLY way to get ascended viper’s rings, accessories, backpiece and amulet? What are the other ways? Is there a faster currency I can build up? Because even winterberries feel an awful lot like “preparing to have fun”.

Oh, okay! I figured it would be proportionate to the gap between, say, exotic berserker’s and exotic viper’s, the latter of which calls for those oiled components instead of the regular ones and so on.

That would be why I deleted my post right away, having thought better of it. Fast reply!

But, you know, now that I think about it… are they, in fact, the ONLY successful major character romance? Yes, I think they are! How about that!

I’m in the consideration phase of switching to condi druid, and while I have quite a bit of gear that I can forge-swap, I would need to make a shortbow. Yassith’s is one of those second-gen, super-ultra-expensive prefixes; my understanding is it’s cheaper to make a basic ascended weapon, like Zojja’s, and then swap it in the Mystic Forge. Is this correct? If yes, what is the cheapest prefix to make before swapping away?

Can you reach the vine? I failed the air phases so many times until I focused on learning to reach the vine.

You run through the updraft to the right of the vine, the updraft launches you, and you deploy glider. If you don’t go high enough on deployment, drop and redeploy just before the ground on top of that same updraft. That should definitely get you high enough to land on the vine. Then you just stand there until the air phase ends. The rocks can’t reach you there, although at the end of the third phase you do have to jump down as some kind of orange circle does start to grow on the vine – I didn’t stick around to find out what it did. Finish off the plant-lizard and collect your shinies. Suddenly easy :-D

EDIT: One other thing that helped me. Can you get to the S3 map Ember Bay? There are at least two spots there where you can train for the move you need to get the maximum lift from the updrafts to reach the vine. They are long chains of updrafts spanning from one peninsula to the next, each with an orb of unbound magic at the bottom. To harvest the magic without dropping into the water, you have to fall into the updraft and only deploy your glider at the last instant; too soon and you don’t get the magic, too late and you fall into the water. This is the same technique you need to get lifted high enough to reach the vine. When I realized this was when I finally cracked through my biggest frustrations with the Mordremoth fight. Ironic that the only “training ground” for this technique is encountered after the fight where it would be most useful.

Oh nooo. Is the insignia at least sellable? Or is it account bound?

I don’t like the megazoom, but I can cope with it. What drives me nuts is the way sometimes, but not always, when you get submerged, you get shoved about 20 feet underwater. It really sucks when I fall off dock ramps or through holes in ice.

Well, the whole world DOES cycle through the same two-hour day and night in perfect unison. Except for the parts that don’t.

I was reading about zenith weapon skins and stumbled onto the wiki page where they list all the known achievement rewards and the thresholds for getting them. This list extends to 60,000 achievement points. But the leaderboard here on the GW2 website shows the highest achievers in the game having 34k APs. How do we know the rewards beyond that?

The berserker support build gives decent DPS and decent healing. The magi build gives worse DPS and better healing. A fractal group that needs that much healing is probably going to fail anyway, and especially with the loss of 1/5 of their team’s DPS. A raid team has more ability to tweak its composition because it has 10 parts instead of 5.

Here’s my suggestion: ascended zerker (or viper – DPS gear anyway) for fractals, because you need the infusion slots. Exotic magi for raids. Exotic magi is actually pretty easy to get ahold of.

There’s a use for my 60 shovels? I gotta go to my GH…

I don’t think anything as important as mastery points will ever be infinitely available behind anything as trivial to get as experience points.

It’d be nice, but I doubt it will ever happen, for workload reasons, and also because of asura and charr.

If a person were to go full magi heal druid, does the difference betweeen power and condi become pretty much meaningless? Since at that point you’re only fighting to build up astral force anyway, and maybe help with CC a little.

Morgan’s Leap is in Caledon Forest.

There’s a permanent tonic you can buy in Lake Doric which shrinks your character to the size of a miniature (actually about half a head taller, but anyway) – jumping easy mode for charr and norn! I use it just to make running around feel a little bit faster, especially since my norn is my guardian and doesn’t have any passive speed boosts yet (not buying centaur runes or whatever while leveling).

I now slightly regret making my mesmer a charr instead of an asura, because she’ll never be the pinnacle of mobility and jumping puzzle dominance that asura mesmers can achieve, BUT at least I’m not giving people a false sense of hope when they see me. I’m just as lost and clumsy as they are, following Youtube videos sometimes jump by jump.

LS2: if you get all of the replay achievements, you will have 8 ascended trinkets of varying stats (no zerker or viper but a variety of other stuff), and you will have unlocked the hardest part of the Luminescent Armor collection, which if you complete it (the rest is just running 3 separate chars through LS2, and a large scavenger hunt in the Silverwastes) gets you a free ascended armor piece. Plus beautiful glowy blue butterfly armor skins!

As far as the rest, I like having a direction for my characters. Following the storylines gives them places to go and things to do. And the rewards are nice enough perks to act as carrots IMO; they warm my collector’s heart.

Rognik.2579:

I’m pretty sure Trahearne’s line when he starts fighting, “This won’t end well… for you” is new. So if they recorded that line, they would’ve recorded any other new lines at the same time.

No, he trots that line out occasionally in Orr.

It’s not a Magikarp reference?

Raids are easier than the pre-nerf fight because you have other players to distribute aggro. It was actually fairly easy with two players because the aggro from the boss and adds was halved and our damage was doubled.

Cosplay: you have to do it the old-fashioned way, with armor and dye. There are a LOT of armor skins and dye colors out there; you can achieve some amazing results if you do your homework. One of my guildies is Tony Stark Of Tyria, and he’s managed to replicate the Iron Man armor almost exactly, aside from the helmet (but char is more recognizable with goateed face visible anyway). Another guildie has both his asura and his norn done up like Ronald McDonald.

Doam.8305:

I see no difference

The role that gear treadmills play is a mandatory one for MMO’s. They give players something at the top something to do and those players introduced to the higher tiers reduces the amount of players needed to complete old content thus keeping it active.

In addition it has to be earned thus content must be introduced in order for the player to be able to earn it in the first place. Dungeons died cause it’s all skins and raids will die to if their maximum reward sits at legendary armor. They can’t keep it afloat just adding different legendary armor skins alone.

There’s a difference between earning and grinding, and that difference matters. We earn masteries by going all over the world and completing diverse challenges. Yes, some of those challenges are grindy but most of them are more strategic or performative in some way. You only have to do the thing once, or a few times, sucxessfully, instead of eighty hojillion times only to get kicked in the face with all your work being worthless five seconds into the next expansion. I did in fact feed Hungry Hal 50 times, but if every mastery point was like that I would not still be here.

Other games have gear treadmills. You will notice that I’m not playing them. Mastery treadmills are a much better strategy.

And really, the vast majority of raiders just want a prize to commemorate their victory, that they can flash around in towns and everyone who sees them will know what they accomplished. Knowing that they also have +1 damage over non-raiders is not necessary, and the ones for whom it is necessary, well, they never left WoW and they’re not about to now.

Well that’s good to hear! I only came back to the game at the end of last year; I wasn’t sure how “new” ascended stuff was.

The thing that made/makes me nervous is the explicit promise that legendaries will always have max stats; it implies the possibility of moving the goalposts of what is max.

Forge-swapping is awesome, but just be aware that it changes the skin of the item to the generic crafted skin; if you’re in love with the original look of the bow you’ll need to use a transmutation charge to get it back.

EDIT: A little context – I came back to GW2 at the end of 2016 after 3.5 years away, so I wasn’t aware of how long ago ascended had been introduced, or that there had been some firm promises by devs that there are no plans to make a new maximum tier. My worries are assuaged! Feel free to continue the discussion if you like though :-)

Ascended is really the frozen limit of expense/difficulty of entry for players with less than a 4-digit /played. Keeping legendary to prestige skins and non-mechanical perks is a good choice, as is wedging in “special” harder-to-obtain ascended items that are easier/cheaper to stat-swap, like the blood ruby and caladbolg items.

This is just to say that, psychologically, there is really no room for another gear tier above ascended. If one were added, just the knowledge that it was there, and that a person would have to grind even harder than they did for ascended to have gear that was as good as any in the game… that knowledge would be enough to get me to leave, I think. The game would have utterly lost its soul at that point. One of the core things I have always loved about the Guild Wars games was that importance decreased as the expense and difficulty of acquiring items increased. Ascended is already a drift away from that ideal; breaking from it entirely would be over the line. It would be just another grinder at that point, however beautiful and challenging.

I think Anet knows this, and the profusion of prestige skins and the nature of legendaries is reassuring, but I just wanted to come right out and say it anyway.

Mesmer if you are a heart, Elementalist if you are a diamond.

I think they’re meant to be roaming quietly in the distance, foraging noms since we never seem to feed them…

Actually, that makes me curious: do pets benefit from our food buffs? It would be awesome flavor if: 1. They did, and 2. The buff showed up on their panel when you target them. As if we share our food with them when we eat it :-D

Travel-friendliness is a huge consideration IMO. You might want to save the boost for a toon that doesn’t have any permanent passive run speed increases, like guardian.

Power primary, precision and ferocity secondary. These three stats increase your direct damage. Builds that maximize them are called power builds. Also good if you happen to stumble across it: Assassin’s, which is precision primary, power and ferocity secondary. Most really fiddly guides actually want several Assassin’s pieces on purpose. Just not head-to-toe, because eventually you max out your crit chance and then precision doesn’t give you any more benefit.

Well, berserker’s is easy to get ahold of. Viper’s is much harder.

Your first set should be berserker or viper so you can navigate the world. For anything short of raids, you can wear full offensive gear and play “hybrid” support by tossing out heals every time Celestial Avatar charges up or your glyphs come off cooldown (if traited with Verdant Etching). No 5-man group or open zerg needs more healing than that, and they DO need the substantial DPS you can do yourself and the DPS boosts you provide others through Spotter, Grace of the Land, Frost Spirit, and Glyph of Empowerment. Offensive druid is also a normal choice in full-on raids as well.

I really like the idea of mutually exclusive elite specs: ie your third trait line can be Druid or [new ranger elite spec], but not both at once. It sort of hearkens back to the days of GW1 with secondary professions. Just so long as the new elite specs don’t so completely stomp the old ones that the old ones become worthless, I think it could be really good for build diversity.

I’ve always been a “main + alts” player. The completionist in me likes to check out all the classes, and experience building characters and decking them all out in aesthetically-pleasing gear; at my worst they even have coordinated names and color schemes. I also like to have a full suite of crafting abilities. But at the end of the day it’s clear to me which character is my main, and which are just my alts.

For me, in GW2, my main is my ranger. She’s the only one with map completion, and the only one with ascended gear outside of trinkets. I’ve probably used four total makeover kits getting her colors exactly right, and well over half the transmutation charges I’ve ever used went to her armor and weapons. I’m pushing story on my alts according to which elite spec weapons are most useful to donate directly to her (Necro for GS – pre-Caladbolg, ele for warhorn, warrior for torch – I made an ascended LB before I knew about the elite spec weapons, or guardian would have come before necro).

That said, I don’t think I could be satisfied with JUST my ranger. The alts scratch an important itch. And I have, in other games, seen an alt unexpectedly usurp the position of main.

Is there a known breakpoint for the cost of crafting a prec vs buying one? Are there any Gen1 legendaries that are still definitely over the breakpoint? I noticed The Legend is like 900g.

Doesn’t fulgurite only eat one of each HoT mat at a time, at a cost of one obsidian shard? That’s not much of a gobbler, considering two stacks of obsidian is hard enough to get that that’s how much you need for a legendary.

Really, Herta should eat Auric Dust.

Thank you for this! I have yet to try Migraine, but I have encountered the bug where the Blighted Teammate (Tybalt in my case) turns green but never unfreezes, and the rift never becomes available to interact with again. That was frustrating. Also, lighting up the updraft cones for takeoff would be a real gift to vision-impaired players and a major QoL improvement for everyone.

I love the concept of rich underwater content, but I agree it feels lacking as is. What weapons there are feel very weak, and it’s incredibly difficult to enter and stay in melee range with an NPC – when both of you are melee you spend half your time lurching past each other trying to close the gap. Simple fixes might be to buff weapon damage so they feel strong without any clever synergies (since 80% of your skills are disabled underwater there’s not much opportunity for synergy anyway), and add some kind of “tethering” mechanic to help keep foes in the appropriate range. But then of course there’s PvP balance.

I’ve posted before about this, but just wanted to agree again. This quest was a home run in every way.

I only made my ele an asura to see the asura story, but until she hit 80 she leveled in the Verdant Executor outfit (the outfit that says “my main is a sylvari and I wish this toon was too”!) And her color scheme is dark burgundy red with peachy yellow accents.

They’re not really raids. They’re 10-man dungeons.

You have to have content that remains challenging and grindy for your hardest-core players to sink their teeth into. And there is ALWAYS a type of player who sees that content as out of reach for them personally and feels that nothing else in the game matters because that content is there.

Everyone does not have ascended, just everyone who’s been playing nonstop since the beginning. I’m still working on ascended weapons, ankitten owhere near having even one piece of ascended armor, with about 600 hours played.

TIL my celestial rooster glider may not be dignified, but it’s polite :-P

Anela.3867:

I know what you mean. On my Ranger, I feel so bad when my pet gets hurt and limps. I am SUCH a bad Smokescale mom.

When mushroom corpses explode and my pet flops around, I always laugh and then feel guilty. It’s especially comical with wyverns.

DoT: condi necro is pretty fun. A little bit slower to ramp up, so things take a second or two longer to die. And when they don’t take longer, you run into the problem of them dying before you can give them the conditions you put on yourself, which is kind of embarrassing: standing there bleeding, poisoned, and tormented, hoping you don’t tick to death, and you did it all to yourself. Scepter/dagger works very well for condi, plus with a dagger you can trait for a run speed increase which is always good QoL. Out of sheer stubborness I put condi sigils onto a greatsword to swap to, but I won’t pretend it’s optimal; it’s just fun.

I like the boxes – the stacking ones definitely save inventory space on big runs. But I do wish there was an “Open All” option on right click the way there is “Use All” with luck and “Salvage All” with salvage kits.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Ascended is the (atm at least) final gear tier.

Atm?

A-t-kittening-m?

I’m staring down the barrel of trying to level leatherworking and then craft ascended armor for my main, at ruinous expense. The idea that all that work could be undone with the addition of another tier is incredibly disheartening.

Just voicing my encouragement for automated tournaments. Sounds like it might be just the thing to perk up PvP!

What is the difference between dungeons and fractals that makes dungeons so much more costly to develop? Is it the event chains with scripted scenes?