Guild Wars 2

Does the achievement panel have a built-in hyperlink to Dulfy’s site? I’m just wondering because its used as a development crutch and replacement for any sort of in-game scavenger hunt type aspect or system of clues.

Okay, I apparently commented a month ago skeptical that anything had changed. How wrong, wrong, wrong I have been. I can’t believe people are queuing for fractals with this thing. Masochistic much?

Nice to see there was time to fix one tiny opportunity to avoid killing some trash and also get rid of one of the funniest dungeon paths in between adding yet more champ zerging events to Kessex Hills. I guess the economy-distorting effects of all that CM path 2 speedrun gold couldn’t be ignored forever.

As for elites, is it too much to hope for DAT GUARANTEED GREEN?

+1 to dulfy comment. Remember how last year’s Halloween actually had a scavenger hunt and clues and stuff?

For myself, I actually don’t mind achievements, but there should be something to them. Not “do this mind numbingly easy thing 25 times.” The cooler achievements like “beat this boss without being hit” or even “vomit on the Bloody Prince” at least give you a somewhat interesting objective to do.

Just to add a bit because I thought about it a little more, my serious answer for best pugs has to be back when people were building fractal levels up last winter. Some awesome teams in there, including probably the best thieves I’ve seen in the game.

But even being a bit jaded, I get really nice surprises now and again. Yesterday I joined a “CoE P3 experienced only please.” Well, everyone knows how far “experienced only” gets you – two people had never done any paths of CoE before, one with sub-1000 ap. Total faceplant on Alpha the first time, and I was probably audibly groaning at that point. Then I just said, “Make sure you count out loud, 1, 2, and then dodge, and you’ll be good.”

Then bam. Perfect alpha’s the rest of the time. Picked up destroyer no problem, got everything else. Okay, well lasers were pretty funny but there were two of us who knew the jumps so that was cool. So kudos to you guys last night – nice job.

I don’t really see why people get upset about this stuff. In at least a few situations the mobs are pretty clearly meant to be skipped, making for a fun, frenetic experience and not just a crawl. Twilight arbor comes to mind, Arah too.

A few days ago in HotW 1 there was a bearbow who just refused to accept Ginva’s reflection as a fact of life. Butcher starts spinning, he doubled down with rapid fire shot.

Bearbow: “Arrows flying back in your face just mean you need to shoot them faster.”

Once upon a time there were very legit pugs to be found in CoE because the laser jumping scared the bads away. Now CoE is sort of a 50/50 between very good players with serious builds and utter disasters.

Depends how you like your hammers. If you want a solid weapon with some useful situational utilities, go guard. If you want half your skills to hit the entire screen with group cripples, group knockdowns, and a hugely damaging AOE stun while being mostly invincible, go warr.

Mostly kidding. The above comparison is correct for WvW though.

In NA Eternal Battlegrounds at this moment the three top NA servers BG, JQ, and SoR are having a three way war inside of SM. Three zergs. Epic potential.

But everyone is walking around like zombies because of lag. Such a disappointment.

Stinson.5972

Characters – 80 of every class. Warrior and Necro are WvW traited/geared so not optimal for Arah.

Guard – fairly standard zerk DPS sword focus/staff, although I have pure of voice to help with party conditions. Usually run two shouts and reflect. I’ve used the guard in Arah in my limited experience.

Mesmer – zerk DPS geared, a little undecided on build. I don’t really feel I have the experience to run mesmer in Arah.

Thief – zerk DPS D/D + S/P, usually run the three deceptions on utility (smoke, refuge, blinding powder)

Ele – zerk/knights, might stacking variant of the LH build (ie. do the S/D fury/might stacking rotation, pound with lightning hammer for a bit, stack again and repeat)

Engi – mostly zerk, part condition damage with grenades, focusing on vuln stacking with a little team might from bomb 2 + big bomb, shield 4, turret exploding etc.

Ranger – zerk/knights standard dungeon DPS, spotter + frost.

Experience – I pugged paths 1+3 without too much issue after watching the videos, and I’d like the others for dungeon master although the other paths are fun and I wouldn’t mind repeating them with a strong group. I’ve run every other dungeon in the game, including speedruns in CoE back when charged lodes were at 4g lol. Also have done up through fractal 48 with guard.

All in all, would love to find some solid-dungeon minded folks. Also I’m a good listener and I certainly don’t know Arah so I’m very happy to listen!

Server – NA Sanctum of Rall. Most play between 11pm-2am EST

OP you can also add to your dungeon income with tokens, but not with salvaging rares for ectos. If you purchase the exotic weapons (offhands, as they are cheapest) that have stat combinations that can’t be crafted – soldier from AC, etc. – you have a chance of getting an exotic inscription back, usually for about half of the salvages. These inscriptions can sell between 4-5 gold, and you get globs of dark matter as well that are used in ascended crafting. I found that even with the randomness I was getting better money out of inscriptions than ectos.

If you’re running ranger mostly in PVE, run sword/horn in one set and sword/axe in the other, switching to horn to fire off #5 and then switching back. Still get the aesthetics of Frostfang and DPS of sword, plus projectile blocking with axe 5.

To illustrate by example (from yesterday)

Guy makes a normal LFG, just says “be experienced,” not gearcheck or anything else. We get the group going, we start the dungeon and kill some mobs. Guy says, “Run DPS if you can.” Guard in the group says, “I’m running a support build.” Guy immediately leaves, kicking all of us because he opened.

I’m fine if people want to run a certain kind of group but it should be advertised that way. Don’t collect random people, then tell them do something they may not be able to do – like, you know, summon a full zerker set and change their traits on command – and immediately rage out when they don’t. If you don’t want random people don’t join random groups. It’s not hard.

1. New level 80 zones with interesting dynamic event chains. Zones that have a sense of danger to add to the thrill of exploration. And while I would prefer that they be in the shiverpeaks, I would settle for NO MORE RISEN and NO MORE ORR!

2. Roleplay, customization elements. Housing would be one, although others too.

3. More elaborate commander functionality in WvW. Let commanders organize players into squads within the game and put waypoints on the map to direct people. Make commanding a battle less like leading a herd and more like moving chess pieces across a board.

Happy to see a great game get exposure. It’s a shame though that it couldn’t be in a more credible publication.

Signed in to say thank you as well. Am enjoying Halloween update and running all over Tyria with 80s of every class. There are things I would change if I were game-development god, but GW2 is easily the best thing going in MMO’s right now.

Bring on WvW Season 1!

I really enjoy my ranger in dungeons – nice spotter/frost spirit buffs and great damage with birds + sword. (Seriously, throw down sic ‘em, rampage, and warhorn five and type “RANGER BEAST MODE” in party chat – it’s great fun.) You get the hang of sword after a while, and you can keep GS on swap if you get injured/need more reliable dodge. I can keep the pets alive in most encounters if I switch them out.

As for WvW, well, I don’t play as one but I think they at least have great survivability; they aren’t dangerous enough to bother targeting them with my wells.

The preview mentions “special crafting items needed for Halloween weapons” being tradeable for candy corn. I took that to meant he weapons are craftable and not BLC-related. I guess they could put the recipes in BLC’s or something, but that doesn’t seem likely.

I’ve been on DB since the beginning (completely random, just what I happened to pick) and am considering transferring in anticipation of the leagues. I’m not a super avid WvW’er, but I ’ve played enough to know why people hate DB – the months and months of NA players waking up every morning to find entire maps turned overnight and enormous zergs (at one point!) during primetime. Wagonbrand and all that, I understand.

So everyone’s enjoying the fall, which is fine. For myself, it’s not that I mind losing as long as there are good fights to be had (not that the past few weeks of being spawn camped at 2:30 in the afternoon by no-lifers on the big three is much fun). It’s more that the environment in DB WvW has gotten really toxic. No one likes to lose, and no one likes losing because strong guilds bail on you. I get all that. But there’s way too much negativity for the experience to be fun. Map chat (and not just in WvW, Lion’s Arch too) used to be where people would say they needed more people or whatever; it’s turned into a non-stop whine fest. People don’t even really want to play together anymore, and it’s a crummy cycle – fewer people want to play, we get rolled more, less fun for all.

So all in all, still deciding between finding a place in T1 or picking a different server in T2.

Strange that the discussion has turned into a warrior vs. guardian hate-fest when the situation in which the two are being compared – the hypothetical constant 25 might, 100% fury scenario – more or less requires the services of an ele or mesmer to achieve.

As to OP’s question why I play anything besides a guardian – and I have a warrior and a guard (who I gladly run in fractal 48) and five other 80s besides – it’s because dungeons are about overall team DPS and I prefer to actually contribute to that by playing warrior or ele rather than spend an hour in every dungeon path telling my team about how much damage I could do with my sword auto if only they provided me with 25 stacks of might and constant fury, which no pug outside of CoE does. When bearbow rangers and PVT mace guards show up in the lfg, I want my banners and FGJ, not aegis’s and protections that are not really needed in 90% of dungeon content.

I would really like legendaries to work in the same way achievement point skins do. You would see them more commonly (although any sizable event or walk around Lion’s Arch you will see dozens of legendaries anyway) but I don’t think people would make fewer of them just because they were account bound. I mean, does anyone actually make two of the same legendary so they can have them on more than one character at the same time?

I don’t know about elitism, but having beaten the path already I would be fairly hesitant to run with a full zerk group unless they were very, very good at it. (I was running zerk but my party was not.) There are a few parts where a high DPS group would speed things up but you’d be taking a risk.

Finished it a little while ago. (PuG group from LFG tool, although not exactly average as I think the average AP in there was 8000+) I think oozes could be tuned a little bit but all in all it’s a mechanically rich dungeon. (The dev comment said to pre-damage the elementals and then kill quickly when you are pulling the oozes, which feels a little gamey and probably just suggests the elementals should have less health.)

I liked Slick and Spark and the platform room. Clockheart seems to have a bug that teleports/sticks people sometimes. All in all that’s an okay fight, though not very PuG friendly because of the fact that once someone goes down there’s basically no way to revive with three or four gears spinning on top of them.

Once people learn it, the clear times will drop a lot. Although experience suggests unless it can be shaved down to 20 mins or so people will choose to run the simpler dungeons. But you can’t please everyone.

Conditions are not necessarily harmless if you’re not in a situation where you burn bosses down in seconds. The only place where PuG’s ever did that was in CoF p1 groups, which is kind of moot now. I’ve seen people go down to burning in SE, poison in TA, and immobilize/cripple type conditions can wreck parties in skipping situations. I have run with warriors who don’t bring a condition removal – if they are not good at timing their heals it can go very badly.

Good point about dual wielding, and there isn’t a great trait to slot in there otherwise. I’d still maintain that with totally random groups – have you used the LFG tool, lololol? – that being able to team condi-remove, blast finisher, help swiftness through skipping trash mobs, etc. is a reasonable trade for less DPS yourself. I only bring it up because I see far too many people – of all classes, not just warriors – consider nothing but themselves and don’t think about their role in a team. Guards with no condition removal who never pop virtues, ele’s who don’t stack any might, etc.

You’re right also that the Empower Allies tier change will certainly shake up any recommendations for the best dungeon builds. It was bound to happen – the equivalent of almost another full banner’s worth of support on a Tier 1 passive trait while still being compatible with the highest DPS build never made sense. And I don’t like shout heals – too much DPS loss, the shouts themselves aren’t great, and you can’t really heal a bad party through an encounter anyway – so I don’t really care if shout traits are buffed. I expect OP will have plenty of theories to read come October 15.

The most important question is with whom will you be playing. If you are playing within an organized, predictable group – like a consistent set of guild people – you should be maxing your own DPS and leaving most support to guards, just throwing down a banner and FGJ now and then. The build for that is 30/0/0/10/30, the axe/mace build people have been linking.

If, however, you are not playing with a predictable group – you are just PuG’ing dungeons, or playing with a casual guild not running min/max builds – then the all-out DPS builds will leave you doing more damage but your party overall doing less. 30/0/0/20/20 makes more sense there. You lose 10% crit damage and 15% crit chance (plus access to fast hands, making it slower to switch to GS for 100b) by taking the 10 points out of discipline and putting them in tactics. In exchange you get:

- Teamwide condition removal/conversion on two separate skills. If you don’t have a guard in the group, or you do but the guard is dumb (not uncommon) this is tremendous.
- A freed up utility slot for a second banner. If your group has no dedicated condition remover, you are stuck with shake it off for everything except immobilize and cripple (assuming you are running with warhorn.) With warhorn condition removal, you can safely run both banner of discipline and strength yourself, plus For Great Justice.
- A little bit of boon conversion if your party is taking a lot of conditions, though this is nothing special overall because most of the boons you get aren’t great.

Party condition removal plus two banners instead of one for your average PuG group with sub-optimal builds, in my experience, gets you more speed than doing a little more critting yourself. (Though the people calling the drop “terrible” are exaggerating – the difference will be large only in groups where you always have high might stacks and perma-fury, which is to say not in PuG’s.)

I wouldn’t say any is best in terms of “carrying” because “carrying” is likely to fail most of the time and I would avoid trying. In terms of making dungeons with random groups go faster, I’ve found ele’s and warriors seem to add the most in terms of team damage, which if the group is minimally able to avoid damage is the major variable in determining dungeon speed.

Warriors are good for fairly obvious reasons – banners, FGJ, the empower allies trait, their own high dps, their ability to stay up in a fight even when they mess up. Ele’s who stack might and fury in between bouts of lightning hammer to spam blind and high DPS also tend to add a lot to a group’s overall DPS if you are not running a warrior heavy group who will have fury up all the time. With scepter dagger you can stack a minute or so of fury at the beginning of the fight and then pound away with your hammer if you want. Ele’s can also condi remove nicely with cleansing wave.

I have also had luck with – believe it or not – engineers. Their biggest downside is the collective groan they will elicit from bad groups. But they actually can bring a lot to a group. You can get up around 20 stacks of vuln pretty easily with grenades, which is huge if you don’t have other people stacking it. (And pug’s don’t stack vuln.) You can also stack area might on your group pretty easily with engineer, using some combination of the fire field on bomb two, the bomb toolbelt, turret detonation, and so forth. Engi’s can also condi remove pretty well. You have to hit a lot more keys than with the ele, but playing engineers is supposed to be fun, not simple.

Thieves get a shout out from me too. A lot of dungeons involve a lot of skipping, and thieves make it oh so easy. Running CM with a thief is easier, as is getting a bad party to the end of AC. If you think you might want to fractal, they are also a good choice because of their ability to stealth parts of the dredge (if you pug 48’s you will likely die many, many times on dredge without a thief) and snowblind fractals, as well as providing a backup projectile barrier. (Which people always forget!)

I haven’t noticed much of a difference, but I admit if I have only a limited amount of time and it looks like there will be a problem from the outset – not the in the middle, I don’t mean raging, I mean the sub-500 ap, kitten-talking signet warrs that people have been complaining about through the whole thread – I leave. I take a look at the general composition and make a judgment call. It takes them one minute to find someone else – less with the tool – and everyone is better off for it. If you aren’t in the mood to run with people who might be bad, don’t get into it. You all sound like you play enough to have a sense from the outset what will go well and what won’t.

And I’m not against helping. If I have time and I’m in the mood, I’m happy to help people out. A lot of the most rewarding dungeon experiences come about that way. The first time I ran SE, it was with two of the nicest guys you could ever want to meet. They explained everything and were super awesome. Probably one of my top three experiences in the game.

But if I’ve had a stressful day and want to chill, I’m not going to put myself in the situation where I want to scream at bear rangers or tell people not to stand in the fire. I’m gonna get my LH ele and faceroll with axe/mace warriors. It’s better for everyone. Gauge how you’re feeling, and if it’s going to stress you to guard/heal bad groups through new paths, save that for another day.

Alternately, if you’re after gold and don’t want frustration, park seven alts in Orr and chain farm ancient wood. No noobs to slow you down, just those infernal shouts of, “DEATH, GOOD!”

I thought it odd that they added a new path rather than updating TA as it was, though TA is overall one of the better designed dungeons. So I’m happy to have a new dungeon.

We asked for more permanent stuff and I think they’re getting the message. A small, carefully designed update that I can play again and again in the future is better than something that is flashy but over in two weeks. Plus, many of the post-release dungeons have been very good. I welcome something that isn’t either zerging or running around a field picking up randomly scattered objects while alt-tabbing dulfy.net because there are absolutely no clues as to how to find the things otherwise.

I agree with people that things are a little light on the skins/backpieces side. I don’t think a lot of people will want those weapons. But I expect this is attributable to gearing up for Halloween. Mad King was awesome fun last year and it will take a lot of work to top it.

I think with the addition of the boxes and dragonite and such the loot is actually decent given the effort, it’s just that everything in the game pales in comparison to champ farming so it makes the loot seem bad.

Leveling in GW is a great experience. You venture from place to place doing quests, making discoveries, and finding yourself helping out at all sorts of little events along the way. You may intend to just go get a heart quest done, and find half an hour later that you’ve fought off marauding dredge and wrangled lost cattle. And you’ll be happy you did. It’s a great thing when a play experience doesn’t wind up the way you thought it might.

At 80, though, this stops. While recent releases have done much to bring variety to the kinds of activities that are desirable – killing world bosses, running temples, killing world bosses, even gathering ori and ancient wood recently, among others – end game winds up looking a lot more like a schedule than like play.

Take champion hunting, for example. It’s a great idea, running around with a group, killing kitten monsters, and scoring epic loot. Except champs spawn in the exact same places every time, every six minutes, and so people just run a farming train from champ to champ. The farm-ability of champs in turn makes it imperative that loot not be epic – champ chests are cool but not all that rewarding because Anet knows it is possible to ride the Frostgorge train and get dozens of chests per hour.

Imagine instead that extremely powerful champs of all different kinds spawned randomly anywhere in all the level 80 maps and moved around, and spawned far less often, spreading destruction and mauling NPC’s as they went. Imagine that big zergs spread out all over the zone, combing through it in hopes of finding one (sort of like the guild bounty mission). And when people found one, it would be a big deal, and they would summon people from around the map to bring it down. And the battle would be capped with a chest of good stuff, not just another RNG box that you hope maybe contains a powerful blood and maybe a 1/1000 chance at a cool skin.

Another possibility is to add the possibility of champion spawns randomly after certain minor map events. In Malchor’s Leap, for example, almost no one bothers to do the troop escort events. But what if there was a random chance that, once a patrol reached its destination, a total kitten Risen champ would show up to attack them. That would provide incentive to do events that are already in the game but currently ignored because they don’t give a chest.

Or take the world bosses as another example. Rather than have Jormag’s lieutenant appear at regular intervals in the same spot every time, why not have him appear irregularly – maybe only once every few days – and in any of the Shiverpeak zones, bringing havoc with him, culminating in an epic battle with epic loot. That’s a lot more interesting than scheduling your daily Jormag appointment.

The now random invasions actually look a little like this proposal. I think that spirit of, “okay, I’m gonna log in today and not know what to expect” could inform other elements of the game that have become too routine.

- Key takeaways -
1. More randomness in level 80 encounters
2. Fewer but more rewarding level 80 encounters
3. Continue to stress players working together, such as by searching through maps for champs and then calling other players to help
4. Incentives to do more minor content that is already in the game – running around zones just playing the game, essentially.

In theory, it is better. The game offers a ton of really interesting possibilities – combos, all the kinds of status effects and boons – for really subtle roles and interesting party interactions. But the thing is, the PVE content in the game is incredibly basic and doesn’t really require that you engage in any of that interesting interaction. For the most part, it barely requires that you think of what your party is doing at all.

Without the trinity and with the simplicity of enemy design, you really only have one PVE imperative – DPS. And while you can work together to get good DPS – for example, elementalists and engineers working their combo fields and blast finishers together to get lots of might and fury stacks – that just speeds things up. The game doesn’t require that you do them to win, and you can get very high DPS by just sticking four warriors in front of something and having them wail away.

It’s a shame really, because whenever I play a trinity game now I feel like, “Wow, this is dumb,” but GW2 just doesn’t capitalize on its possibilities.

darkdomino.9578:

“timegating”

Haha… I’ve heard it all now.

Anet has repeatedly said that they will ALWAYS reward players for increased time investment.

Simply put… Your rewards for logging on once a week for 3 hours can’t equal the rewards of someone who plays for 3 hours every day. They just can’t. Even if you want those two “play styles” to be equal, they’re not. They never will be.

Anet wants people to play their game. Crazy notion. Nobody says you have to grind, you know. There is nothing that says you HAVE to do anything in this game.

The irony is that if GW2 catered to every ultra casual player that can’t play the game for more than a few hours a week, they’d get flak from everyone. Now people are giving them flak for rewarding people who invest more time in-game… Where does it stop??

Let’s just send everyone the best items in the game for nothing then. No work, no time investment…. Everyone gets everything right off the bat. Doesn’t matter if you play for 2 hours or 200 hours… Absolutely ridiculous. I am at a loss for words.

Did you even read the OP? I didn’t say equal rewards for three hours once per week vs. three hours per day. I said that if one person played seven hours on Saturday, they should have equal chance at rewards vs. someone playing one hour per day for seven days. Seven hours should equal seven hours, that’s all.

People should be rewarded equally for equal hours of play. Some people have more time to play at certain times of the week. Currently, if someone logs in every day for a week and runs AC 1 every day, he gets the 1.5 gold chest seven times. A person logging in only on Saturday, were he to run AC 1 seven times also, would only get one chest even though he ran the path just as many times. All I’m saying is there is no reason to insist people log in every day if they play just as much.

Geez, actually read the OP before firing off hyperbolic statements like “Let’s just send everyone the best items in the game.”

Oh, I totally agree that there are monetary reasons for some of the gating, especially the living story. I think the idea there is to introduce new rewards and create a crazy grind to get them – so they can say they’re not forcing anyone to buy anything to get the content – in the hopes that people with more money than time will just buy gems or whatever to get the new stuff. For that reason, I don’t expect the temp content train to stop. (Or the absurd practice of making the things 1 ticket for two weeks and then an astonishing 5 tickets – which is dozens of keys – after that.)

And I also get what you’re saying about wanting to get high login numbers. Totally makes sense. I just think especially something like the new crafting is gonna turn off a lot of players who might potentially spend money on the game if allowed to play in a way that suits them. If you can only log in two days a week, ascended crafting will take an obscenely long time. (Indeed it will for all players, if they’re gearing more than one toon.) Between that and the way dungeon rewards work now, there aren’t a lot of ways to progress much playing only on weekends, even if you play a lot of hours on those weekends.

A Proposal for Catering to the Weekend Warrior

The issue:

Time gating has been a part of the game for some time, at least since the introduction of dailies and daily fractal chests. Recent updates, the upcoming one included, have seen this trend intensified. Crafting materials required to craft ascended gear will be available once daily. Perhaps more crucially, the recent dungeon change turned off the old CoF 1 gold spigot, runnable more or less infinitely whenever one had the time, and changed to a system in which gold is more portioned out over time – daily runs of the quick paths of CoE, AC, SE, and so forth.

Guild Wars has players of many kinds, many older ones with professional and family commitments. Such players want to make a time commitment to the game, but not necessarily on a daily schedule. Some, owing to work and family schedules, can play a lot on weekends – not incidentally the times of highest player concurrency – but not necessarily at all during the week.

This issue was more easily dismissed when the only daily things of any importance were the dailies themselves, which offer relatively modest rewards and took mere minutes to complete. Dungeon runs – now a major source of income for many players – cannot be completed so quickly. There are other ways to make gold of course – the whack-a-mole of Cursed Shore and Frostgorge farming, for example, which we all know will be nerfed before long – but I think most people if given the choice would prefer to do a variety of activities to earn rewards.

The proposal:

Acknowledging the some people would do away with time gating, dungeon DR, and the like altogether, I propose something less radical. Guild Wars should change from daily dungeon resets to weekly ones, changing on Wednesdays. In other words, everyone gets seven runs of a path per week before no longer getting the reward chest. If people want to do one a day, that’s fine. If people want to run CoF1 seven times in a row on Saturday, because that’s when they have the time, that’s fine too.

Same for crafting. Instead of being able to craft one crystal thingy per day, players should be able to craft seven per week.

The payoff:

The game can only benefit from accommodating many types of players. Older players can bring maturity and poise to the community, which benefits everyone. For Anet, it allows the game to cater to a crowd that the WoW’s of the world, with their hardcore players and raid schedules, scare away as one grows older and family and work commitments increase. In more mercenary terms, that means more people willing to spend money on various content and more sustainability down the line. Guild Wars was sold as that kind of game – don’t make the mistake of turning it into something where people feel they need to log in every day or they’re missing out on opportunities to earn rewards and progress.

Please give this some consideration.

tldr: A lot of people only have time to play on the weekends, so there should be weekly resets of dungeons and the like rather than daily ones.

I thought it odd that Ascalon was at 1.5 and CM was just the one. I don’t really think Ascalon is harder/longer than CM.

So OP believes a small group of people who contribute little of social value and gain power influence solely by moving money around have an outsized influence on the political process? Sounds familiar.

At least the worst they can do is elect Ellen Kiel, rather than compel the Captain’s Council to extend them no-interest loans of gold to cover their speculating in those terrible condos in Bloodtide Coast. Just say no to mortgage bundles secured by properties where risen live, kids.

In the Hunger Games at least, the point of having clusters of supplies was to get participants to attack each and encourage conflict. I think it’s a legit way to keep the matches at a manageable length.

Karka ganking is seriously annoying though.

As to the points, I think you can get the meta without survival if you run fractals and dungeons and go over and do 20 events in Diessa plateau.

Still easier than voting in Florida.

+1 to Karka hate. I like the minigame overall, and I even like the idea of the traps set by the ghosts, if nothing else then so the dead folks have something to do. But the karka are cheap. It’s annoying to plan, and have a strategy, and stash up a good supply of rations and play with caution and… yeah, you just got ganked by a karka. That said, as far as I can tell there isn’t much of a reward for winning. And it’s fun as minis go.

This might be a dumb question, but isn’t this essentially already do-able if you don’t start the fractal? I’ve never done this, but I’ve seen other people switch in other people. Like:

1. Start in lvl38 fractal with character with personal lvl 40.
2. Swap in different character with lower level because you need a guard/warr/whatever for that specific fractal.
3. Bring in level 40 character for jade maw as if nothing happened.

Or does that not actually work? Like i said I’ve never done it myself.

I run CoE quite a bit. A couple of times in the last few days I’ve had groups that, without saying anything beforehand, just blow by the little risen dudes on the stairs after avoiding the champion by standing in the alcove.

It takes two or three AoE’s to kill all of them. I’ve never seen a party wipe on them. And like the destroyer crablings in P3, the little guys spew loot at you. You can get a stack of like ten heavy moldy bags for two seconds of work.

Plus, when skipping the silver enemies after them, you wind up fighting them stacked in a corner, which the fury/mighted axe-spinning risen just love.

Spend two seconds. Get loot. That’s why you’re there.

If you take out the second weapon drop, what will rangers use in dungeons?

mickers.2715:

personally im against this change in its current form, maybe im just weird but i have a lot of fun doing speed clears. Arenanet needs to stop nerfing every farming spot in the game and reward players who can play more than 2 hours a day. Usually when im in uni on week days i don’t play but on weekends i play for a good 10 hours. All this DR and nerfing to spots makes it hard for me to enjoy my time when i get on.

I also dont want to be rewarded for using excel spread sheets and websites to play the tradepost.

Im also interested to see how this will affect the ecto/molten lodestone market.

I think a lot of people find themselves in this situation. I like the change overall because I don’t think spamming the same easy thing over and over and over should be rewarded most highly. But people have lives. What Anet should do is have the same DR but reset it weekly rather than daily, so if you only played on weekends you could run CoF 1 seven times before DR hit you.

Actually worried that some of the currently pug-able dungeons will cease to be so when the CoF baddie train arrives. I can see it now:

“No, jump OVER the lasers guys.’
“Okay, you count 1, then 2, then dodge.”
“No, I already explained what 1-4 means.”

And then the inevitable parade of guardian blaming, calling on the mesmers to use skills constantly as if they have no cooldowns, complaining that they weren’t rezzed instantly, etc. But it’s a good change over all.

Meet people halfway and play your ele in non-gearcheck groups. Run a 30 fire build with whatever else you want – lightning hammer is a great choice – and take the trait that grants fury on fire blasts. Scepter/dagger or sceptre/focus, and even dagger/dagger to a lesser extent give 4-6 fire blasts, granting your group ten seconds each, or about a minute of fury off of one rotation. Between that and the might stacks you will contribute seriously to DPS on your team, especially if you also roll out the lightning hammer.

There are more efficient ways to get fury/might with other class combinations – this is why ele is not considered part of the trinity – but if you run non-trinity groups and don’t know what the composition of the group will be it’s a great choice; you’ll add to everyone’s DPS and provide other support too. (With evasive arcana you can just shift into water while using hammer and roll around to heal people/remove conditions.)

Also, if you want away from the mes/war groups don’t do CoF. CoE with good groups can net less spectacular but still strong returns, and there tends to be more variety in the groups running it.

But yeah, don’t bring the ranger.

This is definitely one of the most fun updates. I had a blast getting the sky crystals; I think that part was extremely well designed. I used dulphy for the last five or so, but for the majority I just looked around carefully and thought a little bit. The placement was logical, and the ways of getting them were tricky without being arbitrary or absurd.

The kite baskets were pretty fun too, as I hadn’t done all the jumping puzzles where they are. (I have the good fortune of a very peaceful obsidian sanctum; I understand why people get annoyed about that.) And the catcher pieces are pretty beautiful, so I guess the next thing is to figure out how to get a ticket for one of those.

Good job, Anet. So, why is this not PERMANENT?

I have to sit for the bar exam in 20 days. kitten it, Anet, give the releases a rest for like three weeks.

I don’t play a thief, but I play a lot of dungeons and they are generally a welcome sight:

Stealthing party through trash in CM and AC
Stealthing the fire on snowblind fractal, or the doors/bombs on the dredge fractal
Can substitute one for a warr for CoE/CoF dps
Shadow refuge is a life saver when res-ing in fractals

Other classes can do some of that too, but I don’t think thieves are in a bad position, especially relative t some others.

Bro, you don’t run fractals when you’re in a bad mood.