Guild Wars 2

Lawton Campbell.8517:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I just did a quick check, and at least the achievement endpoint tells me:

< Expires: Fri, 24 Mar 2017 15:54:35 GMT

when requested at 15:50 GMT. so, it’s telling me I can hold it for a little under four minutes… not an amazing cache lifetime for api.guildwars2.com/v2/achievements?id=1 but not zero either.

I should probably increase that to 24h and flush the cache when the build updates. Hmm.

Is there any chance, Lawton, that you could stick the build number in the ETag header, or something that included the build number? That is probably the most useful cache control indicator for this.

In a past life I used an etag header of “etag: ${build}:YYYY-MM-DD” to track something we didn’t want to live more than 24 hours in a cache, but might want to invalidate sooner, as a cheap way to do that without having to do anything that required deeper knowledge of the content.

(In that case, because we wanted to do cache control and rate limiting in a separate front-end service, that would spare our “real” front-end the cost of fielding lots of “etag match 304” responses, for the usual sort of horrible reasons. It had cheap access to the build number, and local access to the date, so it could tell if the etag was valid or not and respond without coordination with the things that could actually generate the answer.)

Tshakaar.6429:

Hmm, ok, i tried more endpoints.
I’m surprised to see this “Expires” on /v2/backstory/answers but not on /v2/account or /v2/characters/:id/core or /v2/account/wallet…
So, i can’t count on this to know how much time to keep data in cache.

You can read the official rules about HTTP cache headers for details of how this works if you want, but…

…short answer is: no Expires or ETag header => no caching. (Unless you have some out of band knowledge about it. but see my next comment to our friendly dev about that one…)

Tshakaar.6429:

SlippyCheeze, teach me your sorcery. Where do you see that? I’m using network tab of dev tool from Firefox.

I used `curl -V` on it, but it should be present as the Expires header in the response. (I think the format is human readable by default, btw, but if not it’ll be a unix timestamp. How spoilekittenhat I don’t even need remember that any more, huh?

Tshakaar.6429:

darthmaim.6017:

Each response contains cache headers with the correct times used by the endpoint.

From what i see, it’s just the timestamp of when i received the json, not when it was cached on the server.

I just did a quick check, and at least the achievement endpoint tells me:

< Expires: Fri, 24 Mar 2017 15:54:35 GMT

when requested at 15:50 GMT. so, it’s telling me I can hold it for a little under four minutes… not an amazing cache lifetime for api.guildwars2.com/v2/achievements?id=1 but not zero either.

Further to what Justine said, not only is it possible, it’s generally considered that minions are relatively low damage, and their AI is poor, so other than the CC and sustained damage of the flesh golem, they don’t fit that well into most builds.

Sublimatio.6981:

death magic and blood magic are obsolete in light of the new soul reaping build. we are dps class not downed state ressing class, we have druids and other no dps classes (mes) to ress people.

(talking about condi necro ofc, power takes blood always for well recharge)

No class has any forced or fixed role, and while necro lacks the “healing others” focused stuff that most other classes hide somewhere, “downed state ressing” isn’t an unreasonable role for the class.

Heck, I personally think that the utility value of “don’t bleed out”, and “pull out of bad, and partially rez”, are significantly undervalued by most of the pug raids out there — who would benefit from this, by making it much more likely a mistake is “slightly slower kill” rather than “wipe”, but hey….

You, personally, might not like that utility, but it’s definitely something of value. (it’s also 90 percent passive, since you just need to stand near people, or shroud up and hit a damaging skill button, to make it happen.)

I think that “Viper Horror” is now “wear vipers gear, be horrified at the state of necro” or something?

Lahmia.2193:

Kydar Schattendolch.6879:

IMO, they should rework this trait completly. Reaper is supposed to be more or less a Power-Spec, and the trait shoulddo at leaest some dmg everytime chill is applied.
On the other side, this is as well a really boring trait XD

This would be more in line with the idea of this spec IMO….but, there are many other opinions on this^^

And where is is stated that Reaper is supposed to be a power spec? Or is it just that you want it to be a power spec?

I have to admit, if it was intended to be a power-only spec, anet sure as heck screwed up with those traits that put burning, chill and bleed, etc, on shroud auto-attacks.

I’d find it more credible if it was said that core shroud was “intended” to be power only than reaper shroud was.

TheSwede.9512:

Scepter/Dagger + GS is a horrible combo for Necro and you’ll struggle greatly to find a squad that’ll take you along. Reason for that is that Scepter/Dagger is a good Condi set-up, but GS is a Power weapon through and through. It’s absolutely atrocious for a Condi Build. Even with Deathly Chill, its extremely slow AA doesn’t even hold a candle to the Bleed Stacks Scepter tosses out.

cough the condition “meta” builds use it right now. it’s definitely only briefly used, but it brings a bunch to the table in pve with whirl finishers, the grab/chill, etc, coupled with the reaper shroud.

It’s not the thing to camp, but it’s definitely worth having. Not to mention that the “best” condition gear, vipers, brings plenty of power to the table, so GS AA is good for old-world objects that don’t take conditions, etc.

No One.3716:

I like the fast cast with range indicator ground targetting, and lock ground target at maximum range. After some practice its quicker to hold a button down, line up the target and let it up to activate the skill. Again it is down to personal preference.

Double tap to evade seems like a good idea but makes it too easy to accidentally waste your dodges or to go in the wrong direction; I find a dedicated dodge button overall easier to use, since just a single key press can be pressed faster and more reliably than a double tap; provided it is also in a location that you don’t need to use your movement key fingers for.

Yah, with ESDF movement, and A for dodge, it’s easy for manage. Never found myself fumbling for the dodge button, and I stopped rolling off jumping puzzles so often.

Daddicus.6128:

OK, thank you. I’ll check into that.

I will say that I’m not interested in maxing damage, but in staying alive (I hate dying). But, what you’re saying about my carrion makes a lot of sense, especially the expertise part.

FWIW, trailblazer is the highest tankiness possible for a condition necro — it brings both toughness and vitality, along with condition damage and expertise, giving you minimal direct / power damage, but still good condition damage on things.

Old world objects won’t be much fun, but everything else should be pretty good.

PS: remember condition duration only matters on things that stay alive long enough. If you double the duration of an 8 second bleed, that’s gotta stay alive for 16 seconds to fully benefit from it, while extra stacks or extra condi damage deliver improvements faster. So, it’s true that duration increases damage faster for some things, but it’s not the only thing worth considering.

Shauma.5470:

Elden Arnaas.4870:

I feel your pain. I despise jumping, and especially how much in GW2 is gated behind jumping.

I just did world completionist on my Elementalist yesterday, and, to be honest, I didn’t find any of the jump vistas too bad. A few annoying ones, but more a matter of figuring out where to go than the actual mechanics.

I can’t speak for the OP, but it is actually physically difficult for me to do jumping puzzles. Doesn’t stop me struggling through them, but … I usually take the portal on, eg, Morgan’s Leap after falling off the first three or four times … before I get to the top of the first tower.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Danikat.8537:

I can’t wear my husbands jeans because he’s a lot taller than I am, I’d be constantly tripping over them.

But some of my favourite jeans are a style called “boyfriend” which is basically mens straight-leg jeans in womens sizes. They even have pockets you can actually put things in! Like a whole phone or a wallet! (Or a bat or a small snake, if you’re me.)

You know, I avoided the “boyfriend jeans” because I just didn’t like the style. But they have pockets?!?!?! I’m going to have to buy some now. Pockets ftw!

A non-trivial number of women I know shop mens jeans, and report that:

A) pockets!!! pockets? pockets!
B) sizing that is actually predictable
C) nobody noticed over decades, other than the occasional woman who asks, “how did you find pants with real pockets?!?”

Recommended.

PS, OP, did you get the response you wanted when you tried to troll the forums?

Moonyeti.3296:

Sonido.6321:

Probably half core dependent. Jk. But seriously how hard can it be for them to add support for it. But as mentioned I think it won’t be added

Refactoring code to take advantage of multithreading when it is originally written for a single core is not a trivial task by any means.

I feel like this understates the issue: this is probably the single hardest, and most risk prone, change you can make to code. Every place it will cause bugs is invisible, and also, super-hard to reason about effectively. All the problems are “implicit” assumptions, not explicit ones.

Which is kind of depressing, since I’d like better performance too, but … it’s the hard reality of this: it would be extremely costly, and relatively speaking, bring not that much to the table.

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

fully enjoying ESO myself and can not wait for the new stuff to come out there. as well as you do not need to sub to still play the game but you can get that if you like .as well as its support for DX11 .

I’m curious — what does DX11 support actually bring to the table here?

Hase.1653:

I’ve been using a case sensitive file system exclusively since 2004, so far I’ve yet to come across an unfixable issue (sometimes needed to rely on disk images or a couple of symlinks). I’ve filed bugs everywhere, sometimes resulting in a fix, sometimes not. I really don’t see where the hostility is coming from.

I’m sorry you feel like my response was hostile. I definitely didn’t intend to be, but I also know it’s sometimes hard for me to see how my “perfectly reasonable” statements come across to others, so if you can explain I’m very happy to try my hardest to understand and avoid that in future.

I agree that problems are, generally, fixable. My own experience was that it wasn’t worth the effort, overall, to keep fighting this battle, but your time is absolutely your own, and if that is how you spend it, great!

I also have no objection to anet fixing the issue you outlined, in case that was unclear. I’m advising based on my own experience what I think will cause the least pain, since that’s all I can do to help someone out here on the forums, which are focused on player to player support rather than getting a lot of “official” anet responses.

FWIW, it’s maybe not as much fun, but I understand some folks have had success with a support ticket, explaining the situation, leading to CS mailing them the collection item and allowing them to progress without the event being completed.

Sadly, at GDC anet revealed that they can’t really kill individual map shards easily, so it’s probably hard for this to end up resolved any way other than “natural” load at this point in time.

Thanks so much for updating us! Did you actually use DSR to render the game larger than physical and scale it down, or did activating it just make the non-DSR size visible again?

So, the trading post is actually a website, running in a browser that sits over/in the game UI. I see that as, more or less, super-jankey fades of the dialogs involved, rather than elsewhere, but I suspect it’s the same thing.

Probably kind of unavoidable, but you might want to contact support and ask them if they have anything they want you to do. (I never bothered, because it worked well enough.)

Oh, and if you used the evon gnashblade trick to get the compact listings, I hear they can cause problems with large searches?

Crinn.7864:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

That is, at best, a “semantics” argument, and at worse, “rules lawyering”. You and I both know exactly what MarkoNS meant when they said that, and pretending otherwise is a cheap shot.

It’s not sematics at all though. Add-ons are direct modifications of the game and it’s functioning. GW2’s meters are just third party programs that provide a overlay.

Ah! These arguments are about ArcDPS, BGDM, and GW2Helper, all of which obtain DPS information by injecting code into the GW2 process and reading the values directly from some part of the memory or network communication of the client.

That explains the confusion. They do, in fact, directly modify the game client in order to obtain the information, as well as to inject themselves into the rendering pipeline in order to draw their on screen displays.

If you were not aware of that, yes, that would seem like a significant distinction to draw.

Note: things like gw2navi, gw2pao, etc, that use the web API as a source of information, yes, are overlays, and thus not “addons” in the classic sense. That doesn’t provide any “real time” information about damage or anything, though, so you can’t build a damage meter like that.

Kako.1930:

Lol, all this over a magical floppy fish animation in a video game. Triggered much? :P

Well, no more than the people here ranting about how this current rash of treating people with respect — sorry, policital correctness — is destroying modern society, I’d have to say?

In any case, no, it’s about the addition of an animation of a creature constantly suffering to a video game that, previously, hadn’t featured that sort of thing. The important part there is “ongoing representation of an animal suffering”.

Some folks, sure, would find even the level of violence represented in GW2 unpleasant to deal with, and that’s fine. Some folks are fine with significantly greater levels of realism of violence, and that’s … probably also fine, but definitely not my cup of tea.

Everyone has a line, somewhere. Sure, lots more people are going to be uncomfortable given the torture prisoners game to play, than by the flopping fish pet, but that doesn’t mean their discomfort is non-existent, or that you can dismiss them by saying others have it worse.

So, by all means register that you don’t find it a problem, and feel free to correct people if they misstate the cause of your being comfortable with this all.

Just dismissing them out of hand, though, makes you look rather uncompassionate, and using phrases like “triggered much” makes it look like you disrespect the actual suffering of folks with mental illnesses.

That really doesn’t seem like a strong position to gather support for the idea that this is just a joke, and not one that is based on enjoying something suffering. (PS: I’m curious, what the funny part is, if anyone wants to contribute an explanation?)

Fatalyz.7168:

MarkoNS.3261:

So hey here is a whacky idea anet devs keep to your original promise of no adds ever and ban every player that is using them

Good thing DPS meters aren’t add-ons, they are overlays, completely different things.

That is, at best, a “semantics” argument, and at worse, “rules lawyering”. You and I both know exactly what MarkoNS meant when they said that, and pretending otherwise is a cheap shot.

I disagree with the idea that they should be bannable, but mostly because they were already a thing with image recognition DPS meters prior to the “ugh, fine, whatever” statements about memory-reading code injection meters.

You can’t stop people doing this stuff.

Danikat.8537:

(Also if you tell the ESO forum the console version allowed them to fix the issues they’d laugh at you, and then flame you until the topic was locked. According to the forum the game was broken on release and all they’ve done is slightly change the ways it’s broken. But then I’m pretty sure people say that on every MMOs forum.)

<looks at how many times a WoW “killer” was gonna dethrone it because of feature X>

….naaah, mate. that’d never happen, people predicting the doom of something if their favorite feature doesn’t get implemented….

Caedmon.6798:

I think i explained this all well enough several times.

It seems to me that you have missed the point much more significantly:

daze (4s) + stun (3s) + knockback (2s) == 4s wall time spent under CC.

timeline:

1s: lying on the ground, can’t do anything
2s: get up, because knockback wears off, but still stunned and dazed
3s: can move, because stun wears off, but still dazed
4s: can act again, because daze wears off

compare to “CC breaks other CC”:

1s: lying on the ground, can’t do anything, dazed, stunned, and knockbacked
2s: get up, and can act again, because knockback overwrite stunned and dazed

also, compare to the unreasonable thing nobody is asking for, “CC stacks”:

1s: lying on the ground, can’t do anything, dazed, stunned, and knocked back
2s: stand up, now stunned takes effect
5s: stun wears off, so you can move, but daze takes effect
9s: daze finally wears off, but you quit the game already

The last one is unreasonable. Stacking durations or extending them isn’t the right thing to do, and I don’t think anyone disagrees.

What we do disagree with is this sequence:

1. apply daze 4s
2. apply stun 1s, which removes daze 4s totally
3. total time under CC: one second, due to the stun overwriting the daze.

Buy a CPU with the highest single core performance you can afford. Buy any current NVIDIA graphics card at all.

Still won’t get 60fps everywhere, but you should be fairly close most of the time. The limitation will be the single core CPU performance.

Donari.5237:

Slippy, I think OP likely needs the Warbler for the VB section, getting the Scouts to talk — it’s really not needed after that. I don’t know that the sad frog activates that dialogue if you aren’t on the TD part of the story.

Oh, dear. Uh, I didn’t think of that. Um, don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here, crying.

OriOri.8724:

In LD I had a strange bug where I map completed it across 2 days, and even though I got the chest and the experience reward, it still said I only had ~87% completion because 2 of the hearts had been completed the day before.

There was an issue at release that led to a reset of completion for … two, I think? … of the hearts, for map completion. No idea what it was, but you had to do them again after they did the reset to get completion.

Linken.6345:

So serious raiders would be unhappy to complete thier normal run and a easier run a week for another subset of loot? This aint the 12 ap aday dailies that they have to keep up with mate.

Experience from WoW says, yes, they will absolutely complain about that. Sufficiently so, in fact, that Blizzard changed their approach and made the various difficulties lock each other out, which also provoked a storm of complaint.

GW2 isn’t WoW, but we can probably learn from the experience they had trying the various permutations of how you handle difficulty levels, and how you make raiding more accessible.

Linken.6345:

Oh I dident realise all the raiders wanted was a title… Slap on the legendary hot raider and release all the loot from raids elsewere then.

haha, yeah. no, but what a large enough proportion of raiders want is “recognition”. You can see the same thing come up when anything sufficiently rare is talked about, or made more accessible.

For example, once legendary items in WoW required raiding, but they became more accessible over time. People complained bitterly this destroyed the value of them, because now “unworthy” people could have them. Same deal, basically, with raid titles and other exclusive raid things.

(Heck, look at the complaints when people noticed you could sell the raid minis on the market in GW2 — “only raiders should have access to them!!!” cries abound.)

Linken.6345:

Well I done lfr resently in wow, no scorn there they dont even bother to kick afk people just burn through the bosses and share loot with who ever needs it.

Yeah, LFR itself isn’t that bad, though sometimes you get people raging. What you experience, though, is after multiple generations. Do you remember what it was like when you could get tier pieces that worked with the normal/heroic mode tier set from LFR? Oh, gosh, much saltier.

The change to LFR-specific tier-ish gear, without much concrete mechanical advantage, was a big part of how Blizzard reduced the pain and agony, by making it much less rewarding for a normal or better tier raider to enter LFR at all.

Michael.9403:

Gold is easy to get. Karma, not so much. You can’t have too much karma. When you need it, you need big gobs of it.

[…]

and spent about a 1.7 million to produce a full set of ascended leather armor (6 pieces), so dropped to about 2.5 million in the wallet. Using karma reduced the armor set gold cost to about 10g. Many people complain about the high cost of leather, but I’m not one of them.

Forgive me asking a question vaguely unrelated to the thread, but what path was that for karma to leather? cough not that I might have an interest in a set of ascended armor that requires leather and all…

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Wanze.8410:

try Sonder the Seller in LA.

Collector Terksli is more interested in Shiny Foil Candy Wrappers because they are more shiny than fortune scraps.

Thanks. Sonder does indeed accept the wrappers.

The wiki appears to be in disrepair, as it claims the Desert Rose skin is a rare purchase from him (which in Terksli’s section states that the rare items are not account bound), but it is sadly green and account bound in “real Tyria.”

Alas, my dream of cashing in on those dusty old scraps may be for naught.

Once more, thank to both of you for the quick responses!

Please update the wiki to reflect this. At the very least, add a text note stating what you experienced to the page, to help out the next person in line.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Isn’t it easier just to ask for help in /map? I can’t tell you how many people I’ve ported or guided to a vista or PoI over the years. Lots of people are standing by, practically waiting for your call for assistance.

I’d actually suggest that you absolutely, positively can pay for the vista: offer gold for a port, if you can’t get one otherwise. Somebody might be unwilling to switch characters for free, but I’ll bet that it is less than $20 worth of gold to convince them to do so.

Sekimori.9165:

Reaper’s Shroud in WVW is maddening lately. When in a 2v1, as is our lot in life on BG, everyone is grey when in shroud. Can’t distinguish the blue dots from the red dots (yeah, we’re green this week). We don’t really need the entire screen greyed out to know we’re in Shroud. Pls change thx.

It’s not a fix, but you can turn postprocessing off and have the effect go away as a work-around.

Penny Dreadful.9073:

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but I’m also having constant black screen ‘crashes’ on a PC which previously ran the game flawlessly.

The client is causing the ‘video drivers stopped working but has recovered’ error, the screen goes black for a few seconds during which I can tab out and use the PC as normal.

No problems with any other game. The GPU temps are low. Tried several different iterations of Catalyst and Crimson drivers, but all have the same problem to a certain degree. No Graphics related programs running in background. As I said, this exact same PC configuration ran the game flawlessly before I took a break a few months back. I came back a couple of weeks ago and it’s been nothing but frustration since. Tried various in-game graphics tweaks, V-sync on/off, windowed, even added a TdrDelay in registry, nothing has worked.

Considering my GPU is showing no complaints at running far more graphically intensive games despite being under much more duress, I can only conclude Anet have done something to the client recently. Same ISP and network gear as before too, and that’s not showing anything which could be packet-loss or such. Enormously frustrating.

It’s absolutely possible that GW2 does something graphically that happens to trigger some bug or other in the driver or hardware layer, while other games don’t. Since it actually manages to literally crash the GPU here, I’d certainly eyeball drivers — and see if maybe a more AMD GPU focused forum or something might help?

One point of note, though, is that at least one poster reported that a background GPU temperature monitor managed to crash their GPU/drivers while running GW2. I guess something found a race condition between the two things interacting with the GPU hardware, or the driver, or something.

So maybe see if disabling those, or any other GPU optimization stuff helps? (eg: RivaStatisticsServer, AMD Afterburner, both previously reported by various people as doing undesirable things with some-but-not-all users GW2 stuff, etc.)

Hase.1653:

I honestly don’t understand why you’re so dismissive about this, I need to use a case sensitive file system for work and it’s a supported configuration according to Apple. Note that iPhones etc use case sensitive file systems for everything, and they might even soon be coming to the Mac – the new file system doesn’t even support case insensitive file systems yet. If only the installer were fixed, installing to a case insensitive disk image would be trivially accomplished by anyone.

The developer preview of APFS doesn’t support case insensitive use yet, true, but that’s not the release version. …and, yes, it’s kinda-sorta-maybe not completely unsupported by Apple, but it’s also never really been something they pushed hard to make work.

I’ve also seen people fight the fight for support in the period when it was more likely to succeed (eg: macOS 10.0 through 10.6 or so) with third party vendors, and lose.

(and I feel your pain and agony WRT working with software that depends on the Unix conventions for case sensitive file systems, believe me. I’m just thankful most projects have accepted that case-insensitive is a thing now.)

I don’t oppose the change, but I also don’t think you will get a lot of traction long term with it. I’d encourage using a separate, case-sensitive partition or even disk image for the work related components, and retaining a case-insensitive filesystem for the root and random macOS apps. I eventually gave up and accepted that was the least worst option here.

Khisanth.2948:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW, you should also make sure you /bug this in-game, and check off the “blocking progress” flag. That helps ensure that anet get all their internal debugging details. (Like, which map shard it is, etc)

Posting here also is fine too, of course.

Did you see the date on the first post?

Yup. I also saw someone posting recently on it, and am happy enough to respond ever if someone raised an old thread from the dead. It’s not like the actions that help anet get details required to understand and reproduce the bug vary based on how new or old the issue is…

DarkForcE.9210:

same thing here…
got disconnected on evolved jungle wurm run @ 5% HP left lulz

before i follow someone’s solution, tell me how efficient your solution is…

Well, since you asked: finding out where the problem is, rather than yelling at anet blindly, is vastly more effective. It can, after all, actually solve the problem if it happens to be, oh, something your ISP can help with or whatever.

If the issue isn’t within ANets reach to fix, complaining to them is liking going into Target and yelling at the cashier about “why won’t you accept a return for Walmart!?!”.

So, in return: https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network — where is the problem?

Assuming still nothing, and also, that it wasn’t directed to spam or something, I’d suggest getting in touch with support via a ticket on the web.

DarkMagister.7429:

WeAreTwO.9780:

Would it be legit if I use my own server for static API requests and only use the official API for account bounded requests? My Server would then have its own database of items for example and only updates this database like every 24h?

I really think everyone should go this way.
It requires less time, more search variety, and so on and so forth.
For my software I planned to check for the change in version name, to trigger a database rebuild, but found it is too often, so just press a button after major updates.

Most of it is static enough that a background job updating the records, and simply serving “outdated” content that is almost certainly identical, while it runs … works fine.

narcx.3570:

Viper Reaper is pretty easy mode for HoT open world… I would run the Blood variant over the outdated Death Magic/Viper Horror tho—the run speed on Dagger alone makes it worth it. I suppose for especially punishing hero points tho a switch back to Death would be good—especially like solo’ing the Guano HP or the Itzel Ambush one.

Also, taking Rise! instead of epidemic or blood is power is super handy for extra damage reduction and just overall to pop while harvesting winterberries or running through a pack of pocket raptors or whatever… Just those times where you want to ignore the mobs and go about your business.

I’ll note: I used that for ages prior to the recent reaper chill → bleed buff, and it works great. Death is definitely great, both for dagger run speed, and for the huge amount of sustain that minions and the “minions leach and heal you” trait brings to the table.

I think if I found it impossible to complete a hero point or something and really needed to solo it I’d drop back to this. That gives up the huge burst that reaper shroud chill/whirl brings to the table, but it brings a big ol’ pile of sustain along.

I don’t believe you can replace the warbler, but I do have some good news:

Just south of the area is a frog-person hanging out, being all sad. Talk to them and you will learn that they misplaced their heritage warbler (!), and are entirely willing to trade all the <goop> you need for it, if you just go kill the chak guarding it.

You can also simply kill chak and obtain <goop> directly from them.

Both of these paths allow you to continue the quest without owning the warbler. (Also, if you happen to have one, talk to the sad froggy to learn something of great value about the gift you received.)

I also like to mention: if you go direct to 80, skipping all the core Tyria content … you get to do that content later, anyway, for world completion, or at least for obtaining all the waypoints, etc, for world bosses and personal story stuff.

NikeEU.7690:

I’m not convinced at all there is this huge skill gap required to beat ele benchmark dps vs engie vs ranger vs thief.

As I’ve always said, regardless of the role or class you’re playing the first 90 to 95% of benchmark numbers are easy for almost any player to get. It’s that last bit that takes work and its true for every class except maybe hammer guardian. And I do mean work, you have yo out in a lot of practice for that last bit and it does t matter if it’s an ele or a ranger.

This is absolutely true; it is also true that in most cases the mechanical differences between classes are smaller than the variation in DPS caused by player error.

This is why the most reasonable advice is “if you need to ask, play what you know best — because what you know best is where you will screw up the least.”

Sadly, this doesn’t help with the popular perception that you need the same composition as groups that consist predominantly of players good enough that they do notice mechanical differences — like qtfy and their low-player kills, top of the ladder pvp players — or they cannot succeed.

Nah, you can totally complete them over multiple days, and it works fine.

There is no particularly good guidance about this, sorry. Just do them all for the easy version.

Blaeys.3102:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Solution: nearly every major MMO offers difficulty levels. It’s totally normal. As typical as for Anet of course they don’t offer them and that’s why we all have all those little annoying things. There are easy tasks in the raid you can do, but I still understand all the people who don’t want to do it and even can’t fill their mastery level. It’s not really customer friendly.

Difficulty levels would solve so many raid-related problems – it is baffling that the devs have been so resistant to implementing them.

The problems are, as always, people problems — not a technical ones. You can’t solve that with technology, no matter how hard you wish you could. (and, I assure you, the anet developers will feel that as much as you do.)

Setting aside the fact that this is, in fact, a thing which exists, in the form of the challenge mote for now, we can focus on the idea of multiple difficulty levels in raids:

Do they reward the same amount of loot? If so, players will — being human — naturally gravitate to the easier difficulty, and the harder will be disregarded and, essentially, wasted. Only a tiny minority of players will ever bother with challenge for the sake of challenge, compared to those who will take what they see as the most efficient route to completion.

(Want proof? Look no further than the threads talking about the raid “meta” and the difficulties of raiding without following it. Those are, exclusively, players gravitating to, vs resisting, what is seen as the “path of least resistance.”)

Do they reward loot proportional to some approximation of the challenge required to complete them? If so, does completing “easy” lock out loot for “difficult”? If your answer to the second is “no”, then players will complaint about feeling “compelled” to complete both, in order to keep up. Even without the gear based power gain of other MMOs, you still gate the speed of acquisition of legendary armor on this.

(Also note: do achievements complete in both modes, or are they separate? In the former case, easy mode is the desirable path for legendary armor, if not, you have provided a nice mechanism for “link <think> or kick” in pugs…)

Also, in terms of loot, if you mismanage the conversion — estimate “easy” as 1, and “hard” as 2, but actually turn out to be 1:3, or 2:3, in whatever metric the players latch on to in terms of assessing this, and you suddenly have a “good” mode and a “not enough rewards” mode. Ouch.

Also of note: the wide variety of loot and fame options tied to different levels of raiding in WoW, as they experimented, did not in any way dent elitism. “Looking For Raid” difficulty was scorned as the domain of casuals, and generated enormous amounts of complaint about having to carry them when it had rewards seen as necessary for more serious raiding.

Similarly, people were treated as poorly in PUGs for LFR-only experience, etc, and players still demanded appropriately “you must worship me, peon” perks, titles, achievements, etc, to properly gratify them that they were recognised by the community is definitely better than people who didn’t play through the same difficulty level as them.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t actually solve the problems, it just moves them around a bit to different areas.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Fivona.5061:

Afk farmers at bitter frost frontier will love this thread.

And they’ll be incredibly disappointed.

I’m about two hundred percent certain that a use for karma comes before, not after, AFK farming for it. Also, I wouldn’t die to learn that easy obsidian was a motivator there, TBH, rather than gold.

Retro.5810:

1. Can it solo the hero points like valkyrie reaper can?
2. Is the damage more or less then valkyrie reaper? (for HoT open world only)
3. Would you recommend Staying as a valkyrie reaper or switching to Viper Horror in your opinion?

I use the metabattle “Viper Horror” build, with two changes, in open world content:

Substitute Signet of the Locust for Blood is Power. Some damage loss, but the move speed benefit is worth it. The healing is rarely something I pay any attention to, but it’s not terrible as an extra “heal me” button.

Substitute Flesh Golem for Lich Form. In this case “sustain” is useful in the sense of “damage between the 180 second cooldown”, since most of what you face is relatively fast to kill.

I comfortably soloed all the VB hero points with champions, etc. Greatsword has higher damage, but also much higher “risk”, in that you are much more exposed to damage. Camp scepter for harder targets, and let your minions do some tanking, and kite a lot.

Can’t compare damage from my own experience, but … generally, yes, it’s comparable, others say. Having an effective ranged attack is great for the ol’ “a dead DPS does zero damage” thing though.

Finally, I’d recommend playing what you enjoy.

An awful lot of it comes down to personal taste or habit. The defaults are generally fine.

Personally, I rebind ESDF to forward, backward, and strafe left/right. Then QWRTV to the five weapon skills, and 1-5 to the utility skills. This puts everything within easy reach of my left hand, so I never need to move it in order to activate something.

I am, however, considering using SDF and X or C for the movement set, allowing QWERT for weapon skills…

felincyriac.5981:

this feels like that dude who ranted about the tutorial being too difficult…

I have a lot more sympathy for that, after watching my partner struggle with the tutorial, and getting started in GW2, recently. Can’t say if the video was accurate or not, because I didn’t watch more than a few seconds of it — who needs that ranting? — but …

… the “tutorial” is actually pretty short on useful information, and many of the systems are very opaque to someone who doesn’t know how these things work.

TheQuickFox.3826:

It would be nice if the Raid masteries were just unlocked, allowing players to obtain the mastery points elsewhere if they prefer to and still make it to the maximum mastery rank.

Many players actually like to join a raid group but are disallowed to join because they don’t have or want to play the ‘meta’ builds.

You should consider something other than a random pick-up group in LFG for raiding. For example, many of the “training” raid groups are more generous.

You can also, of course, simply start your own group with whatever requirements you want.

It’s true that you might have trouble getting into some of the existing groups, but that in no way prevents you from participating in raiding on your own terms.

MikeHalsey.7382:

They’re missing out on a lot of revenue by not including an API for this. There’s a ton of stuff I would have bought if I’d known it’d been on sale. I don’t always have the time to logon every day just to see what’s going cheap :-)

The post directly above yours shows a tool that uses the API for gem store item availability. It’s newly added, but …