Guild Wars 2

Sir Mad.1092:

Let’s take thieves for instance… You want Swiftness? You have to take Dash. Does that mean that all the thieves who take Bound instead for the extra 10% damage after a dodge, the flat 5k damage AoE (without buffs), and more generally how it turns your dodges into an offensive attack are all “newbies”? I don’t think so. It’s a choice. And since not having speed boosts is a pita, running Signet of Shadows makes sense in that case.

Or you could… you know… swap traits before you engage in combat? Dash allows you to easily maintain perma swiftness, then you can swap to bound before you start a fight.
I assumed OP wanted to reach really decent speed and swap out weapons/skills for it. Of course, if you want to do it the lazy way, you can just slot in a signet, hit autorun and go AFK. But if you want to maximize your movement potential, you’d actually have to press keys and do something, not just rely on passive movement boost.

Executioner axe is indeed usable by only one character, that’s why I keep mine in an acc-bound slot. It’s a pretty big investment, so you have to ask yourself how much you’d use it. I like my dungeon runs fast and getting quickly around the maps (especially HoT maps where there are lots of events going on), so I get a lot out of it.

Me personally I probably wouldn’t use it much, but I think it’d be awesome for machinima makers like Sammpo.

If this becomes a thing, I’d also love to spectate old maps in this way. Like Kessex Hills. That used to be one of the most beatiful maps before the tower of ugliness.

I did this fairly recently without any problem, just like I always used to. Unless it was changed in the last patch (or maybe the one before that), I don’t really know what you’re talking about.

For PvE (not usable in WvW unfortunately) I recommend using executioner axe toy if you can. It’s by far the best option of enhancing your movement and it’s usable by all clases (you have to stay out of combat, which you definitely want anyway).

Otherwise, don’t make the same mistake many newbies do. They think how amazing 25% speed boost signet is and completely waste a utility slot for this useless skill. You want to maintain swiftness, which can be harder on some classes than others, but it gives you 33% speed boost which is much better than any signet can give you.

The most mobile classes IMO are thief, warrior and ele. I won’t really list out every single weapon or utility skill that serves as a gap closer/movement boost, for that you have wiki/hero panel. Chceck out all the weapons and utilities for yourself.

Ranger, guardian, engi and revenant are pretty good. Not top tier, but you’ll be able to reach some decent speed.
Mesmer and necro are pretty bad for movement. Your options for swiftness are limited and there are not a lot of movement skills to take advantage of. You just have to deal with it.

Also, always try to make the best use of blink skills. You can only blink into areas you can reach without jumping (and the game has to recognize them as a playable area), but they sometimes allow you to skip a huge walk. You can aim your blink at the bottom of the floor and you’ll actually blink on top.
Some skills will move you backwards, these should be combined with the “about face” key.

If you ask for a specific profession, I might be able to give you more specific answer, but these should be the general guidelines for all of them.

The 2 skill is messy indeed, but I found this adventure much more fun than many others. Really enjoyed getting gold on this, despite what you said, it’s still way better than stupid RNG farming at shooting gallery or fallen masks.
I like when getting gold actually takes precision and memorization and you don’t have to rely on simply lucking out.

(also, haven’t really checked this out since april 19th but apparently gold is now even more forgiving than it used to be, I’d say there’s plenty of room for error now)

I’ve done map completion 13 times. I just find it fun and do it in the morning when there’s no one to play with.
A long time ago I wanted to suggest to Anet something entirely else – make gifts of exploration tradeable. I’m no economist, so I have no idea how would that affect the market, but it seems like a very logical thing to do.

There are players, like OP, who do lucrative things exclusively, flip the TP and have buttloads of money. But they can’t be bothered to set foot in any other part of the game, especially if it doesn’t seem worth it money-wise.
Then there are players, like me, who do stuff they enjoy, even if it takes a lot of time and gives basically no reward. So far I’ve been only able to afford 2 legendaries (thanks to a LOT of time spent in the game) and have a lot of gifts sitting in my bank, unable to use them.

Why not let these two groups help each other out? Then people, who do map exploration and other stuff, will be able to sell their gifts and perhaps afford more stuff on their own. And people like OP won’t have to do map exploration if they have enough money to buy the gifts.
I’ve been meaning to offer people finalizing legendaries (me using my gifts of mastery) for some monetary compensation, but it’s really hard to trust a stranger, plus it might even be againt the EULA. If Anet were to somehow facilitate this process, it would benefit the whole community IMO since there are two groups of people seeking what the others have.

DutchRiders.2871:

I think you yourself have either never known or forgotten what being a new player in an already established game means. Right now as a new player you have a phlentora of information/tutorials/guides/friends/guildies at your disposal to help you quickly progress. The problem is most new players wont even look at any of these sources ( which is fine) yet they expect to join veterans that are looking for a quick clear. I personally joined a fun guild, read some guides played with friends and cleared dungeons for leveling experience and I started fractals on a lv 60/70 elementalist. At 800 AP I was running Arah just fine. However I started joining meta groups only as I got more experienced and naturally I gained more AP.

I will help new players/guildies/friends out when I feel like it but at certain times I simply don’t feel like helping a newbie out. Thats not elitism, I simply believe progression as a player depends on the individual, it is not limited by what some call elitism.

+ one million to this. Absolutely agreed on every point. When I started seriously playing GW2, it was about a year into the game and I took advantage of every guide out there. Yes, it was very time consuming, but I didn’t cause anyone a headache by underpreparing. If I have taken my time and learnt all the stuff beforehand, why couldn’t others?
Now obviously, if you open up your own lfg saying “everyone welcome” or something similar, it’s perfectly fine. But if a total newbie joins my lfg where I specifically ask for experienced people with meta builds, I won’t hesitate to kick that person. Being a new guy in a game is nothing to be ashamed of, but trying to leech others against their will and attempting to circumvent lfg requirements is just wrong and those people deserve to be kicked.

I’d appreciate a short quest for those who own Belinda’s GS skin to upgrade it to the one infused with her spirit.

Seera.5916:

I’m a horrible jumping puzzle players. While I have completed this jumping puzzle without the usage of a mesmer portal, it took me way longer than 15 seconds to do it the first time and I still can’t do it that long.

Because a few of the jumps are difficult ones for those of us who are jumping impaired.

Yeah, it probably took me longer too when I did it for the first time. Once you get to know where to go, it becomes much quicker. Also, some of the jumps might feel hard to you because you don’t have swiftness. Some classes have easier access to it than others, but generally you will have much easier time doing JPs with some kind of movement speed boost. Make sure to try it out and I think you’ll do just fine.
Also, +1 to everyone who at least tries to complete the JP and only uses portal as last resort. I’m sure after a bit of trying you’ll master it and make yourself feel proud.

Zenith.7301:

…
Fallen Masks, Shooting Gallery, the Beetles, Floor Is Lava and Golem are probably going to take people more than a day or two to get gold on.

I agree that some of these adventures might be harder and take more time especially when someone lacks the required skill (or has terrible lag). The thing is, you don’t need any of these goldmedals to achieve maximum 166 mastery tank, let alone maxing out only ley-line gliding and nothing else. There’s a huge leeway for anyone who wants to do his masteries even if he’s a very casual player. I see no problem in that.

As for the WvW players, you’re gonna need to get used to this. I mean I’m not complaining I don’t instantly have all the WvW abilities. You need to be invested in that game mode and grind for a little bit in order to achieve that. It’s the same for PvE. If you want to have masteries (and they will be obviously required for HoT content), you’ll need to spend some time doing the maps. Just because you didn’t even try and immediately go QQ on forums, doesn’t mean you’re not gonna enjoy the maps. Give it a shot and show some flexibility. If you come across a particular issue, I’m sure everyone in this subforum will be more than willing to give you a hand. If you don’t even try, you have absolutely no right to complain.

Today while doing Under New Management I overheard an argument in chat. Someone was saying “not everyone is good at jumping” to respond to why he’s not doing it on his own and instead waits around for portal. Seriously I couldn’t believe was I saw. That jumping puzzle takes 15 seconds and there’s barely any jumping involved.
Now if someone comes to the JP ready to do it but he sees a portal, I think it’s completely fine to use it. But if someone is physically unable (or doesn’t even try) to finish it, they don’t deserve the reward.

At the very least I think Anet should differentiate between people who actually do the JP vs those who just get ported and do nothing. Maybe make a new achievement cathegory, give a special title or give better reward for doing it legit. I don’t think it’s okay that someone gets equally rewarded for pressing “F” as I do for several minutes of very precise jumps and movement.

This is an outrage! How dare you require people to actually play the game Anet? Remove masteries, remove gearing, remove leveling. Just allow everyone to instantly finish any type of content they want without any prior preparation.

Seriously though, I have to ask. Those of you making stupid complaints… are you complaining for yourselves or just assume others would have a problem with it and speak for them? Because everybody and their mom has 166 at this point without even trying. I’d love to see a single person doing raids successfully (i.e. not leeching others) who doesn’t have (or cannot get) Ley-Line Gliding.

And if you’re for some reason unable to finish even the easiest silver medals on adventures, you’re not welcome to raids. You’ll only drag everyone down and they’ll kick you out very soon anyway. So don’t bother. Save up 400g and pay for it like all those TP-flippin AP hunters.

There are very few titles that have value in my opinion.
The closest one for me would probably be “The Blazing Light”, which I have on most of my characters. Unfortunately you could cheeze Liadri at some point and kill her with lifesteal, but most people with that title show off at least some degree of skill. What I like the most about Queen’s Gauntlet is that nobody could help you, you had to do everything on your own.
Some other titles (like the raid ones) are harder and definitely take more skill to achieve if you do them the intended way, but unfortunately people have been able to buy runs or get carried through and so these titles have lost value as well. There is basically no title at all in GW2 that says anything about your individual skill, everything is possible to buy if you have enough gold.
If I’m ever able to get some prestigious GW1 titles, I would probably wear those. Just like anything else they can be cheezed or bought, but I just like them.

I have a dream that one day, Anet will add a title that is challenging to get and cannot be bought from other people. Something like Queen’s Gauntlet, except a bit harder and free of any exploitable bugs.

I feel really sorry for Anet since they clearly had good intentions, but honestly they should discuss changes like this more with the community or put up a poll or something. I was perfectly happy with how things were and thus I said nothing. If I however knew what was coming and that Anet wanted to change it, I would shout, cry and scream how stupid it is to change it up and that they absolutely should keep it the way it is. Or at least give us an option to choose.

Now I’m slowly starting to get used to the new system (I hate it, but what can I do….), so maybe by the time they get to change it again I will like it this way.
So in conclusion I’d like to ask Anet… whatever you choose to do, stick with it!!!! Seriously, nothing is worse than having someone get used to a system and then changing it quickly. I can get used to anything, but it takes time and feels extremely painful if I’m forced to do it again and again with every patch. I’d rather take a poorly implemented system/UI that I’m used to over a completely new one that might be slightly better (but probably isn’t).

Thanks everyone, so it’s basically what I thought.
Also I’d like to clear up that by speedrun I mean a fast daily run for loot and reward, not a record run attempt. Obviously you can skip Kholer (and apparently should for P1 and P3 for better time) but you will miss out on loot. Those extra 5 seconds are perfectly fine for me to lose if we get a chest for it. What’s not okay for me to lose is time waiting for Kholer to come around a corner.

I’ve been wondering about this for a long time and I hope some of the more experienced members of the dungeon community can give me an answer.
To this day, even the coordinated speedruning groups seem to be LoS pulling Kholer behind a pillar (there are 2 common spots that I know of, both of them pretty much the same timewise).
What is the benefit of pulling Kholer over just fighting him on spot? I mean the elites will probably just die to AoE/cleave instantly and the DPS gain from whirlwind attacking against the wall cannot possibly make up for the time it takes him to come to the group.
The fact that even regular experienced dungeon runners still pull him suggests there’s some mechanic that makes the fight in the open longer/more painful, but personally I can’t see one.

Thanks everyone in advance for your insight.

I’ve brought this issue up a few weeks ago but no one bothered to respond, I figued I was the only one concerned with it.
I really hate the fact that any XP I get goes into trash can. If I instead stop playing the game and play it later, I will get more and better reward because I will have new mastery tracks to fill. The game design is actively discouraging me from playing.

What I wish is that the XP is stored and used later for masteries that come out. Not for new regions/expansions obviously, only masteries associated with old content. If we spend thousands of hours doing same stuff, we shouldn’t really be forced to play it again. I don’t ask for any other form of reward, all I want is not to be forced to do that brainless-soul-draining-time-consuming-boring-as-hell CoF P1 farming.

Active players always were, still are and forever will be treated as a sack of crap… Makes me sad.

Most dungeons can be technically completed solo, but they will always be (regardless of how many party members you have) scaled to 5 people. If you are a really good player (it might also help to learn some tricks from videos of other people soloing), you might actually finish some paths solo, but for a new guy I would definitely recommend to find a party. I also highly suggest to let other people know if you’re doing a particular dungeon for your first time, sometimes people expect to go through smoothly without much or any explanation. Look for “everyone welcome” parties or make one yourslef and you should be good to go.
Also as stated above, map chat is specific to the exact map copy you’re located in. Don’t worry though, most maps are usually quite populated and you will get an answer shortly after posting any reasonable question in map chat. If you’re looking for a more “lively” chat, it’s usually the cities (Lion’s Arch,…) because people there generally have nothing else to do but chat.

They will add it, but it will be a PvP reward. Maybe you’ll be also able to actually get it from fractals, but getting it from PvP will be easier and faster. :P

This issue concerns me quite a bit, so I’d like to suggest to Anet some ways how it could be handled.
Currently, mastery XP (as well as mastery points) are split into two separate regions. Central Tyria and the Heart of Maguuma. Both of them are count, acquired and spent separately. It’s pretty clear that in the future, perhaps once the new expansion is released, Anet intends to introduce new regions that will, again, have complete separate masteries and related currencies.

What really bothers me about the current system is that any experience you acquire after you maxed out your masteries, basically goes into trash can. You don’t even get spirit shards after reaching a particular threshold, everything is lost.
To make matters worse, new masteries are going to be introduced for current regions (so far we’ve seen it once after the release of raid wing 2, more are expected to come) and they will require you to get that XP all over again. This basically disincentivizes you to play the game at all, because part of what you’ve achieved gets completely scrapped and the game will force you to play old content over and over again every time new mastery gets released.

Anet even acknowledged the problem and publicly stated (around the release of HoT) that farming CoF P1 for experience is perfectly okay and that they’re aware that players spent thousands of hours in central Tyria and shouldn’t be forced to do old content again. Basically they allowed us to burst through the masteries in central Tyria quickly and without so much pain.
I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy old content. Actually I still do map exploration in Tyria, daily dungeons and FotM, some event chains and other stuff. But I hate the fact that if I was to ignore these things now and do them later instead, I would get much more reward than just doing them now, when I feel like it. The game is actively discouraging me from doing what I want, when I want.

So how do I propose this problem could be solved? Introduce experience tanks. If at any point players receives experience, that cannot be used to progress his masteries, it will instead go into a virtual tank, where it will be stored for later use. When that player is able to spend that XP (like when new masteries are introduced), he will simply transfer that experience from the tank into the mastery. Of course every region would have its own separate tank, so Tyrian XP wouldn’t get mixed up with that from Maguuma or some potential new expansion-related region. This way players are still gonna have to get every XP point for masteries from new content and can’t just skip it, but they will have much less pain getting mastery XP for old content they’ve played for thousands of hours. No XP is gonna get wasted, it will all serve some use in the future.

For all the new guys who think this decision doesn’t make sense, you’re not getting the whole picture.
A few months back, when Anet announced that the new expansion comes with base game for free, big kittenstorm hit the forums and people complained. A lot. Most of them were unhappy with the price and thought the expansion should be sold separately and be cheaper. The storm was so big that for the first time I’ve seen Anet come out publicly and explain their thinking, justify their decision and come to a compromise (giving veteran players a free char slot). This settled the conflict for the most part.
Nevertheless, old players showed that they’re unhappy when others get for free what they had to pay for. It is reasonable? Maybe. Not gonna judge that, I’m just saying what happened. Think of it whatever you want.
From the very beginning all living world was designed just as a temporary thing. It was around for 2 weeks, then new stuff came. I’m glad Anet does that, most developers don’t even bother to push the story any further. At some point during development, they came to the decision it would be cool if players could replay past events. It took them an incredible amount of effort, but finally story journal was introduced. And who owned the game by that time, could log in every 2 weeks to get a record in his journal and could replay it any time.
From new guy’s perspective, this may seem unfair. But you should know that it’s way more than we had originally when the game came out. Anet went a long way to allow players this. What you ask for is another step further. Maybe, if a lot of players want it, Anet may allow all players to replay all the story at any time, but it will take more effort.
Also, if you’re a story focused person, keep in mind that all that stuff is the past. Forming Pact, Zhaitan, Destiny’s Edge 2.0, Scarlet, all that stuff has already happened and being able to replay some of it is only an added bonus. If you buy the expansion, you’re able to experience what’s happening in the game now. And if you enjoy the story so much that you just cannot miss some replayable past events, it’s only right that you give developers some money as a token of appreciation. That will allow them to keep working on the story and pump out steady stream of new and amazing content.

Berserker Berserker.

As far as I know, no collection requires gold medal from any adventure, they take silver at most, which you can comfortably get even with horrible lag. The only adventure where silver used to take some effort was shooting gallery, but it’s pretty fine now.

I agree that some gold medals can still be fairly challenging even after the nerf, especially if you compare them with stuff like salvage pit or drone race. But then again, gold medals aren’t required for anything, they’re just for fun and competition.

If you for some reason have trouble getting silver medals, you’re doing something wrong. Maybe take a look at some guide, you’ll see what you’re supposed to do and have much easier time. Silver takes practically no effort at all.

For PvE (both open world and instanced), I prefer to carry an Executioner Axe Toy in my Shared Inventory Slot. It offers a great mobility skill on a short cooldown. It’s only usable out of combat, but you’re trying to avoid getting into combat anyway since it diminishes your speed. Remember you can also swap weapons out of combat, so you can rotate between using mobility skills on your weapons (thief, ele and warrior all have pretty good options for that). That combined with the suggestions above allows me to move at a reasonable pace even with slower classes.
Managing your inventory and quickly rotating skills might not be easy at first and takes some getting used to, but it’s well worth it and becomes super-easy after you do it for a while. I highly suggest to have a close look at all your weapon skills (for all weapons available to your class) and see which of them might be useful to you. Carry them around all the time and practice swapping them on fly.

Edit: If you wanna see some usage of these things in practice, you can watch YT videos with dungeon record run attempts. Since people need to move really quickly to the next boss, they try to take advantage of every mobility option their class has. An example that comes to my mind is a pretty good usage of ele’s mobility skills in this video. Do note that the same methods are available everywhere, not just in dungeons. Hope it helps.

//reaction to a deleted post :/
I don’t think it’s necessarily antisocial. Smaller group of people (like 10-20) who know each other, know others’ builds and are well coordinated feels more social to me than running in a 50-man blob where no one is aware of the environment and just spams skills mindlessly.
But yeah, you’re probably right that these changes can have a huge impact and should be done carefully. That’s why I don’t list the specifics, just the general idea.
I haven’t spent a lot of time on these forums, but it seems to be that Anet has been quite receptive to WvW suggestions lately (they’ve even made a poll), so if you had any specific suggestions in mind, I wouldn’t hesitate to post them.

Since Anet seems to take suggestions regarding WvW, I’d like to share something that’s been in my mind for a long time.
I have to admit I’m not super frequent WvW player, but I find it really enjoyable and care for this gamemode, so I hope you’ll hear me out anyway.

In the past whenever I went into WvW, 80% of the time I’ve found ourselves to be outnumbered by the enemies, usually by quite a lot (like 20 vs 50), thus losing most zerg encounters. This is perhaps the biggest reason why I felt really discouraged from playing WvW. I felt completely powerless, most matches were lost before they even started. By the nature of the game, bigger zerg was in a huge advantage and usually claimed victory.
To make this even more discouraging, in those 20% cases when we’re close with the numbers, we’d win pretty much every time. As long as enemies outnumbered us by only a little amount, we’d destroy them every time without fail.
Because of that, the game always felt really unfair to me. Maybe it’s just observation bias, but I have strong feeling that our server was way better in terms of quality in those encounters, but often we lacked the necessary quantity. I wish the game would be based more on individual skill rather than overpowering your enemy by sheer numbers.
I’m not a game designer, so I don’t really know how to achieve this, but I’d be super grateful if Anet could bring smaller groups to be on-par with larger zergs to give them a fair chance. If I knew I have a chance to beat the enemy and the matches are decided by how well people play, I’d be more encouraged to do WvW and stop feeling punished for something I have no control of.

They aren’t supposed to have breakbar since they never had defiance in the first place. I’m assuming when Anet was changing defiance, every champion-rank mob in the game received breakbar and no one even bothered to chceck for exceptions like Ralena and Vassar. Everyone at this point accepted that Anet is never gonna do anything related to dungeons (anything that would require them to actually do something besides changing a value), but I still find it quite sad that among tens of devs working on so many changes and balance to PvE not a single person bothered to have a quick look (a few minutes of 1 person’s time) at old content or heck even remember that there used to be something in the game called Ascalonian Catacombs.
To be honest, AC story is full of bugs and stupid oversights, not just this. Yes, I’m talking about the chains that are supposed to disable the traps. Sigh. Also I remember the burrow at Kasha bugging out weirdly.
I felt really embarrased when I brought a friend (pretty long time ago, most of these bugs have been ingored for months and probably will be forever) into the first dungeon in the game and had to admit how little Anet cares about fixing super-evident major bugs. A new person comes to the game, tries out AC after reaching lvl 30 and sees what? Game full of bugs, which he eventually learns were ignored for a long time and everyone’s lost hope of devs at least fixing the really obvious ones. GG Anet, way to keep new players interested in your game.

FYI, this is the real reason why the general interest in running dungeons is so low. It was never about the rewards (at least not entirely). Dungeons used to be the best part of the game IMO, but completely ignoring them and leaving major bugs untouched has resulted in the majority of players loosing interest.

So in conclusion, I have absolutely no hopes of Anet fixing this and removing breakbar from the lovers. Your best bet is to burst them down quickly if you can. If you cannot, a safer way (a bit longer though) is to use the doors in the corridor leading to Kasha to separate them.

The game always had a lot of rewards, take PvP as an example. Ability to obtain dungeon (PvE) skins by playing a completely different format, let alone getting some gold and possibly black lion keys along the way plus getting unique skins and rewards unobtainable anywhere else. You could also get a substantial amount of materials (and, in turn, money) by doing repetitive dull activities like SW CF.

The way I see it, latest patch just increased rewards for doing stuff I like, so that they’re now on par with other activities. All the time I knew full well that dungeons/fotm don’t reward players nearly as much as doing CF and dungeon skins can be farmed fastest not in dungeons, but in PvP. I chose to play what I like nevertheless, because I play the game to have fun.
Now I don’t have to choose between fun and reward, I get them both in one format. Given by how many players are satisfied with the current game’s state, I can tell I’m not the only one. In fact, all those fun times we’ve had with friends doing crazy stuff in dungeons (and making a little bit of money here and there) are coming back again and I’m really glad.
I think Anet did good. All rewards are finally well-tuned and everyone can enjoy their favorite part of the game without being unfairly denied of the rewards, even WvWers (who quite frankly were in even worse shape than us PvEers before the patch).

I don’t really wanna complain since there used to be nothing and currently we at least have a little something. I’m grateful for that.
But yeah, if there’s any chance of bringing up the reward track progress speed even remotely to PvP, I would love that. I was never really a huge fan of PvP or WvW and spent only little time there, but since the introduction of reward tracks into WvW, I find myself wanting to spend a lot more time there. Only a bit disappointed that all rewards come so infrequently and I only ever see the bar go up by very little. Maybe I’m doing things wrong (I often don’t manage to tag any reasonable amount of enemies), but since others also complain about the speed, I guess this is a global issue.

Similar stuff has been around here before, even John Smith himself commented on it back then. He said this is not a big deal at all, most people don’t even realize how quickly the ecto market goes through different orders. Tens of thousands of ectos can appear or be gone in a matter of hours. There’s absolutely no way how anyone can manipulate price of items that common, the market will find equilibrium very shortly.
So before you start to come up with conspiracy theories and point out crazy sinister activities behind the curtains of TP, just think about how little one person is within the whole picture. No one is trying to manipulate the TP, this stuff comes completely naturally. Even if someone tried to, there’s no way to maintain it for longer than a few hours. It was said long time ago, ecto market moves very quickly and thousands of items are basically nothing.

Stiofan.6720:

All the best pvp builds require HoT that makes it kinda p2w tbh.

Not quite. I’m not really into PvP, but from what I’ve heard some people made it into legendary divisions with a free account, which means no elite specializations.
Yes, in general elite specs are stronger than the base class. Anet never denied it, they always meant elite specs to be superior to regular ones (guess why they’re called elite). From what I’ve understood, future elite specs should be on par with the current ones, so there’ll be no more power creep once you’ve got at least the first GW2 expansion and one elite spec unlocked. If anything, you can call it buy to win, because after you get HoT, none of the future elite specs should overshadow your current one. Definitely not pay to win.

Also, we don’t even know whether OP was talking about PvP, it’s kind of bold to just assume that. While the power creep is present in PvE just as much as in PvP, it’s not nearly as apparent and there are still ways how to play efficiently with your base class (even metabattle still lists non-HoT builds for PvE).

Horrorscope.7632:

When I last played in 2012 I believe, I found dungeon difficulty unapproachable for standard players, difficulty ramped up so much higher vs what we were playing in the open world.

Coming back in 2016, somewhere along the line nerf to dungeons or boon to players I don’ t know, but the content to me seems much more balanced than back then making it now approachable for a std player.(…)

Well AFAIK back in the early days of dungeons, many things got nerfed to make easy to get into by less experienced players. I wasn’t playing back then, but apparently many mobs who are currently elite/veteran rank used to be champions/legendary plus their overall difficulty has been toned down.
Also, with HoT and the introduction of elite specializations, players received a significant buff, effectively making all old content absurdly trivial.
Nevertheless even with dungeons being easy now, they still have a lot to offer in terms of improving our playstyle. Finishing dungeons is easy now, but trying to finish them in the most efficient way is what taught a lot of players how to handle their class properly. Speed runs and record runs still offer a level of challenge and trying to push the bar might help players discover better ways to play their class.

@Nightstormer.8526
I believe many of what you say is true, but from the little I know about you I can tell you’re definitely not an average GW2 player. I have a friend much like you who got into the game pretty recently and had no experience with dungeons whatsoever when raids came out. But he is a fast learner, he doesn’t copy meta builds mindlessly, but rather think about the game and do stuff for a reason. In these very rare cases I can see people doing just fine in raids without prior experience with endgame PvE, but there are only very few players like this. The majority of GW2’s population has to learn from experience and mistakes and only is able to learn at a slow pace. Getting into something as complex as raids can be difficult, dungeons are pretty simple to start with and offer huge room for improvement as long as you’re interested in becoming a better player and shaving off every single second from your run that you possibly can.

+1 million to what Nike said. Seriously, that is one of the most on-point reviews of the game’s current PvE state I’ve seen in a long time. Hopefully something’s gonna get done about this.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

Tarasicodissa.7084:

I feel really sorry for everyone who gets so frustrated just because other people can get things. If you care about prestige, you have chosen wrong game, my friend.

This is true, but the tribulation skins were introduced in September 2013, and have maintained their prestige all the way up until that dev post on page one of this thread.

That set was one tiny part of the game that catered to people who wanted prestige items. It even had colour variants for casual players, so no one was missing out. Now it has been devalued to the level of everything else because for some reason ANet decided that they were going to give the okay to an exploit rather than either stay quiet or officially denounce it.

Yeah, I agree. Just as a side note, I also do care about prestige myself. What’s currently in the game is clearly an unintended behavior and should get fixed whenever it’s possible. Unfortunately, the harm is done already and not much can be done about it (besides trying to hotfix it), so people will do themselves a great favor if they just deal with it (or possibly even take advantage of it while they can).

If you care a lot about prestige, your best chance might be to convince Anet to bring back Queen’s Gauntlet (and drop in some related skins, achievements or titles). As far as I remember, this was the ONLY part of the game (except SAB trib mode as mentioned above) where no one could interfere (any form of help from party members was completely blocked) and you had to pull your weight and earn every achievement by yourself.

I feel really sorry for everyone who gets so frustrated just because other people can get things. If you care about prestige, you have chosen wrong game, my friend. GW2 has been long known as one of the most casual MMOs out there. The most hardcore PvE content available (raids) is being completed by half the intended amount of people (5 instead of 10) in about a month since its release. Spots in these successful kills can be easily sold or given away to friends. There’s nothing remotely hard or prestige in this game, everything can be completed by everyone (and the devs intentionally design the game this way).
If you want to brag about your amazing accomplishments, do so in a game that was designed for it. GW2 was designed for people to have casual fun and not be pressed too much by the environment.
Also, by playing with someone for a few minutes, you can easily tell how skilled and devoted to the game that person is. Even though you won’t be able to tell in LA, by actually doing content with people you see whether they earned their prestige stuff (storm wizard weapons, eternal title, dungeon skins, amount of LI,…) or whether they got them in some cheezy way. And that is what matters. You have the skill and noone is gonna take that away from you. This is why prestigeous guilds accept people based on their performance at any given moment, not based on some long ago earned achievement or skin.

Yeah, this is probably not happening. But I’d love to see new SAB worlds in the future. I’ve bought some SAB related stuff from the gemstore and would gladly buy more if I knew that money would go into some further SAB development. One of the most enjoyable parts of GW2 for me.

Edit: Dunno when LS3 comes out, but if there’s any chance of new SAB worlds coming up, it’s probably on april some next year. Anet said they only intend to bring back SAB once a year.

Today I sold an SAB instance and the people were all really nice and there were no issues. Personally I think selling services is perfectly okay, it’s been a part of the game for a long time (like selling dungeons, JPs, LS achievements,…), it was even approved by Anet.

Yes I do agree that this diminishes the value of these acc-bound skins (and the aura) and allows players who wouldn’t normally be able to do it to obtain them. But honestly the problem is not as big as you’re making it out to be.

First, not all the people who buy services are noobs who can’t play the game. Sometimes they are actually pretty skilled players who’ve been hoarding a lot of gold over the years and just buy stuff they cannot be bothered to learn (even though they could do it if they wanted).

Second, you underestimate the amount of gold people have to pay to get all the skins. If they want both auras, it means they have to buy each zone of both worlds 16 times, which amounts to roughly 400g. Sure it’s not too hard to get this money, but don’t forget it also does take some effort. Do you spend 40 hours doing SAB or do you spend 40 hours doing some other activity and just buy the tokens? Doesn’t make much difference to me.

Third, you have to look at it from the other side. This aspect of the game enriches gameplay and allows more skilled players to make money in an interesting way. If someone is so good that he can run trib mode in a very short time and sell it 40 times a day, he sure deserves that gold.

Also, trib mode isn’t really all that hard. I’m sure most people who buy it were just afraid of even trying it because they’ve heard how crazy it is. In reality, if they took a few minutes to look it up and try it, they would realise it doesn’t take some crazy skill and would hate themselves for buying it since most people can finish it with some patience. I watched my friends who aren’t good at jumping doing trib mode. Yes they’ve struggled and it took them quite a bit of time, but eventually everyone finished every zone. It’s not hard.

All of this would be easily solved if you were to have a reserved spot on the map for 1 minute after DC’ing so that you can log back in. Too much to ask I guess.

Loop.8106:

I just opened 9 Veteran chests I’ve saved up. They resulted in 4 fractal skins. Buff too much? 4 ascended chests from 9 Champion chests along with a gold fractal hammer.

So you opened 9 chests and now are drawing conclusions about the droprate?
Here’s a little piece of math homework for ya. Try to figure out the difference between getting 4 skins from 9 chests and getting 4000 skins from 9000 chests. The answer may surprise you.

Clearly I’m not the only one who finds this Anet’s habit of creating crazy grindquests a very bad decision. A lot of people are getting mad about the 10k requirement and they’re absolutely right.
Don’t get me wrong. Difficult and challenging quests are fine. Dropping an item into the game that’s intended for only 1% of the players to get is fine too. What I personally have problem with, is the way how this is handled. Anet usually takes the cheezy approach and makes getting the item challenging to get by artificially setting absurd requirements rather than making it challenging by clever design.
‘How do we make this new fancy item exclusive?’
‘I know, let’s have it require 250 vials of powerful blood, 250 giant eyes, 250 charged lodestones,…’
This is not challenging nor fun!
In my opinion, a good example of fun grind for exclusive items was the luminescent armor collection. It wasn’t particularly difficult (so the set isn’t really all that exclusive), but it was designed so that is still takes a set amount of time player has to invest. It didn’t act as a huge artificial gold sink, but rather a scavenger hunt with lots of fun things to do and cool places to visit. The new legendary collections (both weapons and fractal backpiece) are kind of similar even though they still eat quite a bit of money.
I want more quests like this. Instead of setting an absurdly high price on items, give them to players after going through a long and difficult journey. If you make the quests difficult enough, you can still have an exclusive item that doesn’t cost you a single copper. Perhaps you could have players battle Liadri to progress that journey? Or get through a reasonably challenging JP (winter wonderland was a very good choice IMO, mad king’s clocktower would be another good example).
Throwing 250s of items around doesn’t make things challenging, it only makes them boring and repetitive. Everyone is able to get some amount of gold, it’s just not everyone can be bothered to spend so much time doing brainless repetitive activity. If you want exclusivity (and trust me, I want that too), make things actually difficult by creating fun and complex challenge.

I hope I’m not the only one who feels that quests would be more fun if they didn’t eat crazy amounts of gold and materials but rather require some actual involvement in the game.

Sublimatio.6981:

Zenith.7301:

Make sure your group also holds crystals when doing the trick by the ledge or the jade maw can wipe you with its revenge beam at 1% and reset the fight.

if necro has 100% ds and hp, he can facetank it xd

Do you by any chance mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bA7_J6hQaE ?
I definitely wouldn’t try that one.

Anet probably gets extra money from mouse manufacturing companies for putting in achievements like this. No skill involved, no thinking, just breaking your mouse. I like most of the achievements, but some of them just make me wonder who the hell could possibly come up with such a terrible idea…

Mostly it’s about the instability. You’re simply doing the fractals with least punishing instabilities, which happen to be multiples of 10.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IHVJao5j85KOp6lBTOgO8qs4VYD3Xty-jKPZo8o-Q4/pubhtml

This has probably been mentioned a thousand times, but I too find the druid extremely useless and not having any place in PvE whatsoever. A well timed block from a guardian does way way more than all the healing in the world from all the druids. If you want to support your group defensively, that’s great, but you’ll still do much more with blinds, soft CC and blocks. In the rare cases you need healing because of unavoidable damage, as mentioned above, water fields should suffice perfectly.
Anet can try as hard as they can to artificially shift the PvE meta, but unless they completely remake the game from scratch, the principles are already so deeply rooted in the game, that I don’t see it changing in any way.

The way we usually do it is to have the two heavies (war+guard) run in first to aggro the elementals and bring them as close to the gate as possible. Then kill them simultaneously and have others run in and start to guide the oozes. They are usually through before elementals can respawn. When something doesn’t go right, you can save the situation with a reflect/projectile block/blind.

As for Aetherpath as a whole, the achievements are definitely bugged, but the path itself is pretty much free of any major bugs as far as I can tell. At least when I did it recently everything was working nicely.

Kitty.1502:

ArenaNet stopped supporting Dungeons with new content 3 years ago.
…

I don’t even need new content, I’d be perfectly happy if they at least fixed major bugs in the first dungeon in the game new players ever encounter. Traps can’t be disabled with chains. Waypoints don’t activate after the appropriate event is triggered. Burrows keep spawning gravelings minutes after they’ve been destroyed. And when my friends ask “why doesn’t Anet simply fix these things?”, all I can give them is just “I wish I knew”…
For me it doesn’t matter. But these things turn new players off. And I feel really ashamed when I bring them into the game stating how wonderful it is (because I still frankly believe that) and then I am forced to admit how Anet doesn’t give a kitten about instanced PvE – the most interesting part of the game.

Taku.6352:

Asura ranger with technobabble can do 6 second daze and after druid comes out any ranger can do 6s AoE daze on 5 second cooldown.

You can make it 8 sec with mesmer runes! Another 6 sec CC would be war with “fear me!” and 100% condi duration. But yeah, IB still dominates because you can pull that CC off without sacrificing much dps through crazy gear choices.

Rikimaru.7890:

While penalty’s would work like this:
- each player getting downed is -10 points
- each player death -100
- a full wipe -1000

Only thing this will do is create more hostility between players in pug runs that you so desire to get rid of. Do you really want to be penalized for someone else’s mistakes? People will be much more selective with their LFG’s and even a little sign of subpar play will result in a kick. Completely against the original idea of GW2.

Why do people want to fight the meta so hard? There will ALWAYS be a single best strategy. No matter whether it be 5 DPS players, 5 healers, 5 tanks or a mixture of them. If you really want to play well and contribute to your group’s success, you will adopt the optimal strategy. In this game, at it’s current state, it happens to be a group of 5 DPS players using active defenses to sustain themselves. What is so wrong about it? Why do people see problems where they aren’t? If Anet decides to completely rework their game to create a whole new meta, people will still have the problem of not being adaptive or smart enough to play efficiently. And forums will be full of rants how healers/tanks/[insert random playstyle here] are so OP and how the game needs a complete rework again so that meta changes again.
Problem is not with the game. It’s just that people prevent themselves from playing well because they – for some reason – dislike the meta. Because of that, you’ll never fix the issue by changing the game’s mechanics, you’ll fix it by having people think rationally. I know, I know… too much to ask.

Miku Lawrence.6329:

I kittening called it on that reddit video repost about people using icebows in Edge of the Mists, “See, when it gets applied in Player versus Player things get fixed fast”.

Yup, Quickfoot Katana pointed that out to me above. I though it was related to PvE lol. Silly me.
We should really hide our stuff from PvP (or WvW) players so that they can’t ruin it for us by using it.

I don’t get this. I don’t really PvP ever, but as far as I know, cantrips have been the meta. I haven’t seen icebow in PvP ever. Does that mean Anet acknowledges this game has PvE? :O
Btw… Dragon’s Tooth being ground targeted doesn’t really help me at all. If anything, I had trouble aiming Comet when prestacking. That one should be ground targeted.