Pets are also a big problem in the Jade Sea fractal against the boss because they attract fire from the death beam. So not only is the pet dead, but everyone has to wait longer before it targets a player character so they can hit the boss.
It really doesn’t look like ANET thought about pets when they made FOTM.
Also, very bad idea to transmute it, when ascended weapons are introduced legendary weapons will have their stats boosted to be the same as them, if you transmute now it’ll turn it into an exotic and won’t get its stats boosted down the line.
If ANET doesn’t figure out how to boost the stats on transmuted Legendary weapons before they release Ascended weapons, lots of people will be very angry. Even worse, the angry people are the ones who used stuff from the gem store. Especially after explicitly promising that they will boost Legendary stats.
I doubt ANET will be stupid enough to anger the people who are using the store. Especially when one obvious solution is to give everyone a Legendary an Ascended weapon with the same stat combo and a free fine transmutation stone. That would keep their promise.
So if you don’t like the stats on your Legendary, transmute it with stats you do like. All you will lose now is the color of the text.
I see three types of people when talking about makeover kits:
– Those that will never buy one. Ignore them for now.
– Those that will buy one under the current system. For this thread they can also be ignored.
– People who aren’t planning to buy kit but, if given the chance, will experiment with the preview option. Some of them will then decide to buy a kit after seeing what they can make their character look like.
So a preview system would sell more makeover kits. Thus it should be done.
Please justify why you think Legendary weapons should be easier to acquire.
Please justify why this would make a legendary easier to obtain when the hardest part is farm the karma, not a 15 mins event which is 24/7 bugged
I have beaten the Balthazar temple at times when it wasn’t bugged. That was a hard fight. Removing the need to beat him removes the hard fight, thus making it easier.
Grinding up the karma is not hard, it’s just time consuming. Stop confusing “takes a lot of time” with “hard”.
Now if the fight is bugged, that should be fixed. But anything thing beyond that is making things easier.
All that would do is allow a window for market manipulation until everyone has replaced their orders. Then the problem would come back. I’m betting less than 24 hours for it to be back where it was before the reset.
As for returning only some of the items, why should ANET ruin everyone’s trust in the trading post for no gain at all ?
To actually fix this problem, you need to address its cause: People are making items just to level crafting, either to get it high enough for a Legendary weapon, or to power level their characters via crafting. Which means they are perfectly willing to craft at a loss. There are enough of them that anything that requires anything less than max rank to craft will be sold at a loss.
As for max rank stuff, the only difference between people who are crafting is the price they are selling it for. So price competition will narrow any possible profit margin to almost nothing if everyone is rational. Get a few idiots who think things like “If I mine it myself it’s free” and they will drag the prices down even further.
Please justify why you think Legendary weapons should be easier to acquire.
My solution to this is to sell the one you have and buy the one you want. The price difference generally isn’t too great (unless what you want has a rare/popular superior rune/sigil), plus its quick and easy.
I would do that with Ascended rings if ANET let me. But they don’t, so I can’t.
And the RNG obsession doesnt stop there ! Precursors, have been a long time heated debate. But to make it only obtainable through sources based on RNG (Mystic Forge and random drops).
Precursors are at least in a better position than Ascended gear: If the RNG hates you, you can still grind up gold and buy a precursor. Or if you get one you don’t want, you are still guaranteed to like the drop because you can then sell it.
But those guarantees aren’t there with Ascended gear. You are never guaranteed for it to drop for you, so you could go for years without seeing the one you want. And if you get Ascended gear drops you don’t want, they are vendor trash because you can’t trade them.
What about the tools are beinga portal in the end of the handle to transport coins to wherever the enchantment is being maintained from ?
The enchantment is what keeps the tools functional.
It doesn’t make much sense technically. This may be a fantasy game where anything can exist… But I just don’t see it fitting too well
Have a close look at what sickles can’t harvest. Specifically all the things steel can’t harvest. I pick steel because that’s probably what your kitchen implements are all made from, so you can easily compare what your tools can and can’t handle against what GW2 tools fail to handle.
What would you think if your knives would become useless after 50 uses ?
Especially if it didn’t matter what you were cutting.
GW2 tools are already not making any sense. At least coin operated tools would fail to make sense in a way convenient to the players. For them to make sense, they would need to have so many uses that it’s not worth ANET tracking how many times you’ve used it, which would mean ANET needs to adjust other gold sinks/faucets to compensate for the loss of this one.
I’d like to have gathering tools that never run out. I find having to keep replacing them to be an annoyance. To preserve the gold sink aspects of them, I suggest that these permanent tools take coin directly from your inventory every time you swing it.
An Orichalcum Harvesting Sickle costs 8 copper per harvest. An Orichalcum Logging Axe or Mining Pick costs 4 copper per swing. So those should be the same costs for the coin operated tools. Add in an initial cost to buy these coin operated picks and they will sink more gold than the current ones, though that’s only a tiny difference in the long term.
I’m ignoring the gold sink of waypoints because my tools last long enough that I can wait until I go into a city/WvW for other reasons to replace depleted tools. So my waypointing habits will not change with these.
But at that point you’re basically indexing the entire set of tradable items, so.
If you can index everything, doing anything less just means you risk inaccuracies in your conclusions. So why not index everything ?
My only problem with this boss is that he takes a bit too long to kill, even when you aren’t making any mistakes and he doesn’t decide to chase the lava pourer up the ramp.
Fighting him just isn’t interesting once you know what you’re doing. The other bosses at least require you to switch up what you’re doing.
After another frustrating run of the swamp fractal, I realized something that makes me hate it even more: The options for teamwork are vastly limited and, if one of your wisp runners stumbles, there is nothing anyone can do to help. By stumble I’m including things like:
– Fails to get over a barricade*
– Picks up a wisp early/late.
– Dies to Mossman when they were running without someone to keep aggro off them.
– Get panicked by the number of spiders, hit ~ to switch to their AOE weapon, dropping wisp. Yes, I did this. Shortly afterwards I decided that, since I was getting worse, we should have one of the people who had never done swamp before run a wisp.
It doesn’t help that with 3 wisps and 5 party members that at least one of the runners has to go solo.
*Jumping puzzles are a major “no teamwork” area. When you have a team mate who can’t handle the Rata Sum/Cliffside jumps, all you can really do is res him for another go until he finally succeeds.
Really, the Swamp doesn’t seem like it’s a matter of teamwork. It’s a matter of hoping that the runners don’t screw up because when they do, there is nothing you can do but try again. And again. And again. Until nobody screws up.
Lovely stuff here, thanks Kestrel.
One thing I’m missing: is there the “named” armor theme somewhere? (Devona’s, Zho’s, etc.) All I know is that it’s exotic and only gotten through loot.
For the light named armors I know they all share the same skin as the Seer Armor. The medium and heavy ones probably also share skins.
Before the discussion starts once again: It may happen that a word or part of a word is replaced even though doesn’t have an insulting context.
In this case, we apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.
I’ve seen that happen. In every case it looks like the filter is not going after a forbidden word directly. Instead it’s going after an attempt to bypass the filter.
Going after the forbidden words directly I can understand. Threads get heated, people get angry, then swear without thinking about it. Filtering the accidental swears saves the moderators a lot of work.
What I don’t understand is trying to filter people who are trying to bypass it. As I see it, anyone bypassing the filter is intentionally breaking the forum rules. Even if there weren’t rules against bypassing the filter, the filter itself is still an implicit rule of the forum. Also, if they are determined to bypass the filter, they are going to bypass it.
It seems much better to relax the filter so it only catches accidental swearing while cutting down on false positives. If someone is intentionally bypassing the filter, treat them like you would treat anyone else who breaks the forum rules: Warnings, followed by bans.
Rest assured that you’ll be able to get an ascended berserkers weapon and transmute it onto your legendary-skinned regular exotic.
After grinding up for the Ascended weapon and paying for a transmutation stone in the gem store. While the people who stuck with the default Legendary stats will get to skip all that.
If there is a next tier of stats, this happens again. In effect punishing you because you used an item from the gem store.
A P2P trading window, or a cash on delivery mail system will mean:
– More trade spam.
– More inflation, because it bypasses the trading post gold sink.
– Less volume on the trading post, making it more vulnerable to market manipulation.
– Some expensive items might become only available via P2P trading. Which means you don’t get any reliable information about their value* and you have a major hassle to trade with someone in a separate timezone.
What positives does a trade window add to make up for these serious disadvantages ?
*You just have to take players word at the value. When some people have every incentive to lie and others will just repeat what they heard weeks ago.
Why would you want to convert Karma to Gold anyways? Karma is much, much harder to acquire and you need over 750k Karma (sometimes over 1 Million) to make a Legendary for your character if you do everything from start to finish.
Some people don’t like how flashy Legendary weapons are. They just want the gold for something else.
The best I’ve found is to buy level 80 masterwork weapons for karma. Stick them all into the forge, sell whatever comes out.
yeah i know for that way but if you put on exotic stats will it become exotic weapon with a legendary look? And they said that they are going to boost legendary stats…
ANET have said that they will be looking into keeping transmuted Legendary weapons as Legendary, not shifting them to exotics.
As for the stat boost, if that doesn’t come for your transmuted Legendary, complain then.
Here is the tool you’re after. Just take a weapon with the stats you want (you should have grabbed this before you started to focus on your Legendary), then use the Fine Transmutation stone to apply its stats and upgrade to the Legendary.
Blue Horseshoe loves Walnuts
BTW, how the heck can you buy 500,000 of something at 250 per purchase?
Slowly.
Map completion is only needed for Legendary weapons. These are weapons that are cosmetic only. They are meant to be hard work.
I see no reason to make them easier. If you want a Legendary, you need to either form a group to get you access to the tricky POI/Vistas, or you need to keep checking on the state of WvW waiting till the ones you want are available to you.
You only take a sample when you can’t realistically acquire data for everything. ANET can take everything.
As for players, that’s a good question. I’d like to see ANET’s economist put out regular reports on the sats of the GW2 economy, just like CCP’s economist does for Eve Online.
Nice work.
Would it be possible to add where to acquire each armor onto there somehow ?
For those that can be traded on the trading post, telling people which name to look for would be sufficient*. For the rest all you need is a wiki link either to the armor, or the vendor(s) selling it.
*Do any of the tradeable armors have different names on the trading post than you are using ?
ascended items costing 20g+ per item? lol
Have you totaled up the cost of the materials used for producing some of the Ascended back pieces ?
They take 50 ecto each. GW2spidy puts ecto at 36s24c each, meaning 18c12s00c for the lot.
Then 250 of a t6 fine material. Even more expensive for the lot.
20 gold isn’t going to cover material costs. The real question is how much the Vial of Condensed Mists Essence will sell for, because that is the part that’s bind on pickup.
Ascended items close the gap between exotics and Legendary items – from what I can see from the official posts.
Like I said before, I don’t see how it closes the gap. What I see is Ascended gear widening the gap. With the increased material cost, the gap between Ascended and Legendary gear today is wider than the gap between Exotics and Legendary before Lost Shores.
So please stop repeating this line about it closing the gap until you can explain how it closes it.
I made a suggestion thread about this issue. It would probably be best for you to stick your support in that thread.
I’m actually against this idea, at least in the short term… While I do think there’s a role that trading of ascended items could fill in the economy, it’s probably better for it to be available from a few more sources before it becomes tradeable.
Making them tradeable instantly makes them available for almost everyone. The only exceptions being sPvP, or people doing mad things like trying to take the most fall damage in a single hit.
I really can’t think of any way that would make them more accessible to people than making them acquirable for gold. Karma vendors come close, but people who spend a lot of their time not earning karma (eg farming FOTM) will miss out.
To make them acquirable for gold, ANET can either make them tradeable, or make vendors that sell them.
There are probably other flow on effects too… for instance, by making it more rewarding to run those fractal levels with higher chances of dropping (tradable) ascended gear, players are disincentivised (more than they currently are) from running other fractal levels.
Which would mean they start doing other stuff. One complaint against FOTM is how it’s greatly reduced the population doing other things, so this is still a win.
I just think there are a few implications of such a move, and it’s probably better to be careful before doing something like this.
Caution is helpful in situations like this.
That code would help to a point. But what happens when you have rings for all your characters ?
Or you want the same ring on two characters ?
It’s a better idea to just get rid of bind on pickup on RNG loot so you can sell the ring you found, then go buy the ring you want.
I don’t see why Ascended gear would be a “fail” for ANET.
It all comes down to two numbers:
– How many customers has ANET lost with this change ?
– How many customers has ANET gained/kept because of this change that they wouldn’t have otherwise ?
Now I don’t have those numbers, so I can’t say for sure either way, but ANET should be able to approximate them based on the number of refunds, players who stopped playing and other data they have access to.
Ascended gear is just a gap closer between legendaries and exotics,
How exactly is Ascended gear a “gap closer” ?
In terms of time to acquire ?
No. To progress towards an Ascended item you have to stop progressing towards your Legendary until you’ve finished the Ascended. If you just skip the Ascended, you’re still taking more time to make your Legendary because Ascended items pushed up the price of material used in both. Widening the gap.
In terms of stats ?
No. Before Ascended items, Legendary weapons had identical stats to Exotics. After we get Ascended weapons, ANET’s promised to raise Legendary weapons to Ascended stats. So Ascended weapons will widen the stat gap.
What gap do Ascended items close ?
A dungeon finder might reduce gear checks. Imagine a dungeon finder that only lets you specify which dungeon path and FOTM difficulty. I see two scenarios happening:
– There are too many people who don’t meet their standards. Currently they can save tune by stating the gear requirement their LFG message. But the dungeon finder will keep spiting out people who fail the check, and the people trying to make the check will have no choice but to see how much time they are wasting.
– There are lots of people who meet the check. Again the gear checkers are forced to waste time only to find it doesn’t help.
In both cases, they may eventually decide that checks waste too much time and either stop using the dungeon finder, or they will decided that the FOTM difficulty check is good enough and stop imposing further checks.
Heh , you would be right , if Anet had not already said intend to add vertical progression to this game , and there is NO promise asc gear will be top also. They can add better ones later , so said their devs.
So for your and mine sadness , Anet already went down WoW path.
So like said above , go repeat FotM 200 times OP , that is what Anet got for the hardcores and it does give better stats gear.
I wouldn’t say that ANET has gone down the WoW path yet. From the AMA I think that ANET is still trying to please everyone while Blizzard knows who they are targeting WoW at.
I can also predict what Blizzard will do with future WoW content: They will make more of the same. I can’t predict which way ANET will go, they have said the grind is too much right now, but the amount of grind should have been obvious to anyone who saw the recipes. So I simply can’t say if ANET will aim for casuals, hardcore, or drift along trying to please both until that fails as people shift to a game they prefer.
The promised rebalancing of the grind for Ascended gear might help settle things. So I’ve got some hope that ANET will take GW2 in the direction I hope, I just don’t see it being a quick process.
Go read the “take risks” section. For all I know Ascended gear is one of those risks that ANET took, it failed, and now ANET are trying to recover from it without shaking off more customers with another sudden shift in direction.
why does the word b a c k l i t become backitten?
kind of hard to talk about the virtues of a backitten keyboard….
Remove the k and it should become obvious.
I think the problem is that the filter is trying to catch people who are intentionally bypassing it. For example, it ignores spaces because some people type like t h i s in order to swear despite it, so my thread gets hit as a false positive. Thing is every word a word filter is suppressing is a word that is clearly not allowed on the forum, even if the forum rules say nothing. However the rules here do mention the filter:
Do not circumvent the word filter. The Support Forum, like the game, is filtered for appropriate language. Any attempt to circumvent this filter will not be tolerated including the use of “creative spelling” or of forum names or signatures that contain a word that is censored by the prohibited words filter.
Typing the filtered word might be an accident bought on by anger, frustration, etc. Mispelling the word shows the poster intentionally breaking forum rules. So the correct response to such posters isn’t to try and have the filter catch them, at the expense of getting legitimate posts caught by mistake. No, the correct response is to have the moderators come down on these people like they would come down on anyone else intentionally breaking the rules.
Maybe GW2 just isn’t a game for you.
it needs to find a way to appeal to every kind of gamer.
Problem is, a lot of the desires of one group directly contradict another. Try to compromise and ANET will just end up driving away both. Take gear treadmills as an example, some people like them and want long paths they can never finish, others don’t want them at all. The obvious compromise of a short treadmill means you have one too short for the players who like them and too long for the players who don’t.
Picking a niche and sticking to it is a much better way to ensure success. Especially if there aren’t any competitors in that niche, as it means the players who really like the niche know they have nowhere else to go, so will be a lot more forgiving of mistakes than they would be if there were competitors.
This feature already exists. See the up and down arrows next to my name? When there is another staff post in a thread, the arrow will not be grayed out and will be clickable. You can use the arrows to navigate to the next and previous staff posts within a thread.
Pity is doesn’t work because direct linking to posts is bugged. As I’ve said about this before:
That is only a consequence of the real problem: The forum doesn’t know what page of a thread a post is actually on. Go to any thread that has a second parge. Go to the last post on the first page. Open the direct link to that post in a new tab/window. It will go for page 2.
The longer the thread, the worse the problem. The most extreme is the Ascended items threadnaught, where posts on page 222 try to open page page 243.
I suspect that the function which determines which page a post is on thinks there are less posts per page than there actually are. A simple typo, or maybe a case where the number was changed but the coder forgot to update both variables.
But also a hint of bad coding practices. It shows that the posts per page number is stored in two separate variables. Since it’s always going to be the same for all code that needs it, it should be stored in a single variable that all the relevant code can access.
I’m still waiting for someone from ANET to acknowledge that this problem exists.
The idea behind upgrading was to remedy the issue of people’s already existing exotic gear being made worthless. And also a hassle if you put expensive upgrades into it already.
Expensive upgrades that you can’t use in Ascended gear. Ascended gear only takes infusions, while all other gear can’t use them. There are no upgrades that go into both.
Upgrading has problems. Better to just have a vendor sell the items directly. The more people ANET wants the vendor to satisfy, the more likely it is to use a common currency (gold/karma) than tokens.
Or just remove the bind on pickup nonsense and let people use the trading post to get the Ascended items and/or ingredients to make them.
According to Anet, some items in the Fractals use skins that are exclusive to items bought for karma. Anet is very careful to make sure that things that are available for karma only remain karma only.
How can they be considered karma only if they can be obtained without spending karma ?
I will also point out that the screenshot was taken in Dredgehaunt Cliffs, just outside Sorrow’s Embrace. Is it more likely he picked it up in SE, or that he picked it up in FOTM and went there before taking the screenshot ?
When you transmute something, it no longer qualifies as an ingredient for specific Mystic Forge recipes. Which means that if you get a base backpiece. (Say the Endless quiver), use a transmutation stone to change the skin, then decide you want to upgrade to the version with built in agony resistance, then you can’t use your transmuted one. Instead, you have to get a new Endless quiver.
So anyone who uses a transmutation stone is punished for doing so by being told they need to grind more than someone who doesn’t just to get to the same stats.
The more you use transmutation stones, the more likely you are to run out of the free ones and buy them from the store. Which means that people being punished are more likely to be paying ANET money than the people who aren’t.
the gap they bridged was TIME people… TIME…
Its to give us something to go for along the road to legendarys.
How does it bridge the gap when you take longer using their Ascended ‘bridge’ than you would if you just skipped straight to Legendary ?
Don’t bridges make it faster to travel from one side of their span to the other than it would be if you don’t use the bridge ?
the gap they bridged was TIME people… TIME…
Its to give us something to go for along the road to legendarys.
Except that “going for” ascended gear leeches time, effort, and resources that you could be putting toward actually getting that legendary.
If you’;re willing to put the time for a legendary go for a legendary rather then ascended gear!
Except that, because Ascended gear uses some ingredients that Legendary weapons use (eg ecto), the price of those mats has gone up. So the path is longer even for people who skip Ascended items.
At this point I’m starting to think that the Ascended weapons will require you to spend more buying their ingredients than it costs to buy Legendary ingredients. So the only difference will be how you acquire the untradeable ingredients.
Player driven, unfortunately. Players have to buy gems, and then sell them. Anet don’t actually sell gold.
Allegedly player driven. Sure, the shifts do make sense if it was player driven. But the truth is that we have no idea how ANET’s pricing algorithm works. It might not be working as intended.
Warrior: Flaming sticks make decent weapons
Guardian: Scythe. To show that their dervish ancestry.
Thief: Torch. So they can see what they are doing in the dark.
Ranger: Hammer. Because Bunny thumper
Engineer: Mace. Because one handed hammers are good for nails.
Necromancer: Scythe. Should be obvious.
Elementalist: Harpoon gun. To reduce subtlety.
Mesmer: Warhorn. Let them sing.
there’s a website for gw2 players who are LFG
www.gw2lfg.com
When players are expected to use a third party solution to a problem, it means that the problem has gotten so bad that players have stopped waiting for the developers to fix it.
You cannot upgrade it. Transmuted items cant be used for fixed recipes in the mystic forge.
Ah, so ANET is punishing players who buy transmutation stones.
The filters work fine.
Tell me how I can filter the trading post to show all heavy armor, but not to show any light or medium armor.
No. I don’t want some lazy loser wearing my gear just because he sold some gems…
Go to a dungeon, earn your gear…
Would you have any objection if these vendors were karma only ?
I don’t know if it’s already been said or not, but maybe have different time zones divided across Tyria, so it’s half and half
You haven’t seen how little of the planet we have access to.
How often have you seen “it will ruin the community” as a reason against an otherwise good idea ?
I’ve seen it a lot. Then I see a game where that change has been made, and the community remains. Sometimes it’s even been improved because people can now talk in channels that used to be filled with spam that the change renders obsolete.
This suggestion is slightly different, since it at least tries to justify how the community will be ruined. Unfortunately it just shows why people don’t try to justify “it will ruin the community” because people have poked holes in the argument.
Fractal runs get you shards slower. However, they don’t require opening up the Temple of Balthazar to get them.
Has ANET ever explained this unique mechanic anywhere ?