Guild Wars 2

Celtic Lady.3729:

White Hunter.3416:

6. Extreme time requirments, even for good play and good coordinated groups.
They MUST not take more than 2h to complete.

I don’t have any hope for this since we spent 10 hours in Beta fighting 1 boss and still couldn’t take him down.

That,s not the same thing. Taking 10 hours because you are learning and getting better is one thing. It’s a learning curve and if you don’t want that, then you can wait for a guide and follow it to reduce this learning time. The 3 first mini boss can be kill in 20-30min easy, while the boss himself need to be killed in 8min.

What White Hunter was referring too was high hp damage sponge. A boss that take 20min to take down only because he have so much hp/toughness. So far the first boss have 22 millions HP. A high number, but we have 10 person and since day one the power creep is so real, so for now the first boss is ok in that category IMO.

I disagree with your first point. We already did some quick math on that. I may not remember that correctly but.

The boss have 22 millions HP and the timer is 8min. 22 millions/8min/60sec mean the group need to do 45k dps or each member need to do 4.5k dps.

A full buffed meta zerker do between 12 and 20k dps, which is far more than needed. I think that this timer is perfect since if you want to do a record you need to be good to play full zerker. But for most people they gonna need either all have hybrid build with some build in defense, or a mix of zerker and support character. 4.5k dps is very low, so the main focus here is to know the mechanic and to stay alive to do the dps.

Now you could be right if the timer needed us to do like 10k dps. In that case we would all need to have zerker gear and a minimum dps build to achieve that, while some profession could just not cut it. But at 4.5k? It’s just perfect.

At the same time, this make sure that a lazy group don’t take 1 hour to do the boss in full cleric or minstrel for an easy mode kill.

I agree completly with point 2

3) You lose me partially. I don’t want only telegraphed attack where the boss scream at you that he’s gonna attack. Lupi kick is hard to master at first and if you lose attention you gonna have it in the face and I like that. I want the first to drain me physically and psychologically. I want to be proud that I beat him with my friends because I had reflex and was in the zone, not because I remember all the timing. What I don’t want is random attack or attack with no sign to at all to prepare yourself. Those kind of attack don’t have any counter. I’m not dead because I wasn’t good enough, I’m dead because RNG. Which is what they gave us in a lot of fractal (random fear/immobilize, i’m looking at you).

4) Opinion there. For exemple, I love the Vale mechanic. You need to pay attention. The position are random true, but if you pay attention you will know when to move. As long as RNG won’t make appear all the spot far from everybody or all on one side, I’m ok with it and I find it fun. For mai trin, the only thing that I dislike is when she suddenly teleport on the other side of the map on nobody while the electric AoE is cast. The goal here is to put your team in a position so if she teleport, she teleport still in the Electric AoE. If she can teleport randomly, it’s a bad design because you can’t counter it. But i think that it’s a bug.

5) Of course there will be bugs and of course nobody want them. I guess we gonna have to live with reality. The big thing is not if there will be bugs or not, but will they have staff to fix those bug with a quick enough response.

No problem here either. I did it on two characters, my friend did it on two characters and 6 of my guildmates did it while I was there. At least 30 people of my guild did it and I never hear of any problem.

The only problem is when you remove infusion from a ring and then want to attune them. I don’t know if it’s only a problem with rings that add 2 +5 before the +1 infusion was in the game or it’s for all ring that had infusion on them, but one of them can’t be attuned. They just don’t show up in the mystic forge. I don’t know if the problem was fixed since, but you can only used a new infused ring and all will work perfectly. It can be annoying if you don’t have much pristine or spare rings.

We’ll have to see. Too many variable.

1) Speed to kill a boss? At first, it won’t be good gold reward of course. Because we gonna test thing out, wipe and learn. But when our strategy are fine tune, how much time we’ll need to kill them? By that time, we probably gonna be at 2 gold per boss. From what I know, people were doing the first 3 mini-boss in 25-30min and 8min of Enrage timer on the first true boss. How much can we cut down on that. Can it be done in 30min? So we can get around 4 gold per hour. 20min? So we can get 8gold/hour. 6-8 gold per hours is pretty decent since we gonna have more reward after that. It’s seem reasonable IF the remaining reward are decent.

2) How many boss there is in total? We gonna get 3 Wings, so at least 3 boss. But the beta Anet talk about the first encounter, not the first wing. Will there be more than 1 boss per wing? 2? 3? Bosses? At 3 bosses per wing, that mean we gonna be able to get 18 gold from raid per week. Not that much to be honest.

3) What is the droprate of these other reward. If we are talking about pre-hot fractal here, meaning around 1 good drop each 4 boss (Ascended Armor, Asc. Weapon or unique reward). Now it start to look good because each time 1 boss is killed, you gonna have 2-3 person in the group with a good drop. People will link these in the chat, and this gonna boost the moral of everybody, even if you didn’t drop anything at that particular kill.

4) What are those unique reward and what is the variety. Will these miniature be account bound or not? Account bound is great because it give them a prestige value. But at the same time if you get the same mini twice you are screwed. Will there be a way to change those reward? If they are tradeable in the TP, then they lost their prestige value, but if you get several of them or one that you dislike you can exchange them. We know about minis and the unique infusion, but what are the other reward? Will the mini be cool? For now the first boss is nice to fight, but I wouldn’t want a mini out of it. If the only good unique reward is the ghost aura infusion, it’s not enough imo.

5) I wasn’t able to play the beta raid. I don’t know if 3 mini boss before the first true boss gave reward. If they don’t, maybe it’s because of the beta. Will they give small reward each? That adds up if they do.

6) How much of those Magnetite shards will we get? And what will they allow us to buy. Again, linked to point number 4. If the only awesome reward is the ghost aura infusion, the raid won’t have a long life. Will we be able to buy ascended armor/weapon with that currency?

7) The Legendary Armor. For me fractal is less fun than is used to be. But I’m a completionist so I want those golden fractal skin and legendary back item. So I’m gonna do fractal until I have those and it’s enough motivation for me. I have fun going after those and I’ll will have fun going after the Legendary Armor. If it’s good. We’ll see. I have big doudt for legendary armor to begin with. Eventually, you’ll see a lot of people with the same armor, and the fact that you can’t swap runes like stats is annoying. They can still suprise me, but I have my doubt.

So many thing can go right or wrong. We don’t have enough info yet.

So basically you are saying. I don’t know how to make gold anymore so there is no way to make gold? I agree that the dungeon nerf what a bad move, but it doesn’t mean that there is no way to make gold.

1) Dungeon can still reward you around 4 to 8 gold per hours depending on your group/path. The nerf wasn’t that bad, but the psychological impact was huge, because they nerfed the obvious big number.

2) Why silverwaste would be nerfed? It’s pretty much as the same place it was, they didn’t nerf it in the xpac, they didn’t nerf it in the last year. There is no indication of them nerfing it. Dungeon reward nerf was to limit the amount of strait gold injected in the economy. Silverwaste doesn’t inject that kind of gold. I’m not saying they won’t nerf it, but they seem to be pretty ok with the current state of that map.

3) With all these new material in high demand, you can make a lot of gold in the new maps. It will even more once we can craft the new legendary.

4) With the xp a good thing to get, old map like Cursed Shore are now more alive than ever. True you will do more gold per hours in Silverwaste, but Cursed Shore isn’t too far behind. while giving you a lot of xp and IMO, it’s a lot of fun.

5) People have a hard time to see it, but fractal give you a good amount of money too. Yep, ascended box were nerf, but that doesn’t change the fact that you can get a good amount of gold per hour there if you know how and have the mastery.

That’s only a few on top of my head and for now i’m focusing more on doing new achievement on new maps. I’m sure over time more and more stop will be well known.

Avectius.3271:

“Hey, guys. We released Heart of Thorns. Heard about it? Don’t worry, we nerfed a variety of things, including Fractals, Silverwastes, Dungeons, thus partially rendering bits of the core content useless, to make sure you buy Heart of Thorns, because gold farms and other things are more effective there, now. What’s that over there? Buy Heart of Thorns to unlock it.”

“Hey, guys. Remember Guild Boons and other features that had always been in the core content? We don’t. We remember Heart of Thorns. Buy it”

I completely agree with fractals and guild buffs and imo, your post should be about that, because after you lost me.

- Silverwaste? What happen there? What did they nerfed in it? Prices changed yes, so you get less gold for the Tier 5 you get, you also get less from salvaging gear, but you also get around 3-5 gold of coarse sand per hours. It is a little bit more or a little bit less profitable, I’m not sure, but it’s very close to what it used to be. Now shovel are needed in guild hall, but the droprate seem to had been buffed.

- Dungeon. Yup, the reward nerf wasn’t great. But some people need to stop talking like dungeon are a waste of time now. With gold, loots and tokens, you usually get around 1,2 and 1,5 worth of gold at the end of a path. 1,7-2 gold for AC. Since most of them take 10-15min to complete, they usually yield you a profit between 4 and 8 gold per hours. It’s less than the 7-12 gold per hours we used to have, but it’s not that bad either. They nerfed it like idiot, not balancing properly the length/difficulty of the dungeon better, but that doesn’t mean that someone doing dungeon can’t have a good reward out of it. True, right now it’s hard to play dungeon because not that many people are doing them. But we just got an expansion, people wanna play the new content. But I already start to see LFM in my guild chat and over time, I bet that a lot more people gonna want to get back to dungeon a little.

- Precursor Crafting. What did you expect? That they will be easy and not really any effort? It’s another way to get precursor, not a easier way.

- Legendary Back Item. It’s a new feature. Of course you gonna need HoT for that. Like I said first, i agree with you about guild buff and fractals. They were part of the core game, they nerfed it and placed them behind the expansion. But that’s not the same thing as placing new thing behind HoT. That’s the whole point of the expansion. To give us new things. If they put everything new part of the core game, then nobody buy the expansion and they don’t get back their investment in manpower to create the expansion. As for the price? It’s a freaking legendary. What did you except? To spend 2 copper on it? I don’t think anyone is at the third collection yet so we don’t really know what will be the precise recipe. We don’t what we will need after the 3rd collection. Do we need to craft finite, upper and unbound and put them in the mystic forge at the end? I have no idea. What I agree with, it that the nerf for ascended box was stupid from Anet. At the moment we might need more ascended, they nerf it even if they said that fractal was one of their main focus in PvE. Personally, i want more ways to get ascended armor/weapons, not less. I don’t want easier way, I just want diversity.

- I don’t get this complain about account bound item? Can you give exemple of that. Do you talk about the item they changed to account bound later? I think it’s a nice thing to put some stuff account bound. Especially for legendary crafting. It give value to different content and spread people around the world instead of regrouping them into the 5-6 best place to make gold/rewards. What the point of having 20 overflow on Silverewaste, while so many maps are completely deserted. Now if they do that to push people into a bad designed map or content, it’s one thing. But for now, VB and AB are awesome with some very good content and I heard a lot of good thing about the last map.

That what me and my friends came up with for pve.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vJAQNAsfTnMdAtkidfA2eAElillA7IAsAmZKZhQXT492+bLuA-TRCBQBOU9nsZBR1U+5sTBwW2Pwf6DAwDAQDHBA1oEkUAwssC-e

You get 100% condition duration with both bleed and burn. Here what we tested and our conclusions. We started with Bezerker and Arms trait lines.

1) Sword/Torch and Bow are the two best weapons set we could come up with.

2) If you gonna camp one or the other Sword/Torch is usually better than Bow. Bow F2 give a better burst of burning, but Sword/Torch can keep a decent burning while keeping high amount of bleed. Also traits give you more condition damage while using a torch.

3) Smash Brawler vs Last Blaze : Last blaze gonna give you a perma 1.4 burning, while Flaming Flurry give you 8 stack of burning for 4sec. Even with the long cast time, it’s gonna be one of your main dps skill and reducing it’s cooldown will be important. Not counting the more you can pass in bezerker mode the better it is. Adrenaline won’t really be a problem here.

4) Opportunist + Deep Strike or Berzerker’s Fuy + Deep Strike :

First of all Berzerker’s Fury adrenaline is worth nothing. While in beserker mode adrenaline isn’t a problem, the first time you go into berserker you use headbutt and the second time you gonna wait after the CD, not the adrenaline. So here the focus is on the fury production to keep up Deep Strike. Berzerker’s fury will give you 50% uptime when there is trash to kill, but almost nothing against boss. You should start a fight with pin down for a very long 6 bleed so the immobilize will give you a 10sec of fury to start your burst with Opportunist, which will be better when there is no trash to kill.

5) Discipline or Tactics : Tactics give you a better dps on your bow and Empowered for better direct damage. But Discipline give you so much Adrenaline (it’s the reason the adrenaline of Bereserker’s Fury is not worth it). But it also reduce cooldown on your brust skills (including your primal skill). Smash Brawler + Versatile Power give you almost a 50% less CD of your Flaming Furry. Fast Hand allow you two things. You only need 1 sigil of geomancy on your bow and can take another sigil your main weapon set and it also allow you to stay less time on your bow for a burst. I think that Discipline is a better option, but better testing would be necessary.

6) Rune of the Nighmare vs of the Beserker. Nightmare will allow you to reach 100% condi duration on both Bleed and Burn, while you gonna reach 95% with beserker rune and sigil of malice. In the end, Nightmare will have an advantage in condition dps, while beserker will have an advantage in direct damage. What choice will be the best total dps? It would need better testing. I took nightmare because the build was mostly for high level fractal where condition is so important.

7) Sigil of Accuracy? I’m not sure about this one. But with Fast hand I only need 1 sigil of Geomancy. Already at 100% condi duration for bleed and buring I don’t need a condition duration sigil. This leave us with Sigil of bursting and something else for the second sigil. Accuracy seemed the best option, but I could be wrong.

I’m waiting for Anet to fix Viper gear to make some testing in PvE and make some fine tuning. I’m sure me and my friend did some mistake here so what do you think would be better?

It’s easier than ever to level up in fractal. People used to run level 50, 40, maybe 30, 20. Now low level are so much easier with a decent reward that most people will want to run some of them. And they are so easy, that you can easily carry someone new without really noticing. We brought a guildmate with no AR up to level 30 the other day without much difference. You shouldn’t have much problem to be accepted in low level these day even if you are new.

So IMO, focus on low level Recommended + 2 other low level. You don’t need any AR until you reach level 20.

Draknar.5748:

Serophous.9085:

We need a “Zone” Category for the LFG.

With the new maps looking to organize, holidays, Teq, and even Silverwastes and Dry Top, its a REALLL PAIN to find the right group when you are scrolling down so far to find the right one before it fills up.

Please can we get this category section added?

Have you tried creating your own group for specifically what you want? You complain that the groups fill up faster than you can scroll, so surely you must have considered creating your own group, which would then fill up quickly as well…

If you want to find a for exemple a good Auric Bassin map. You want to join people that taxi in.

Yes you can create a group that ask for a good Auric Bassin map, but almost nobody go through the LFG to taxi people in. Unless you are lucky you may wait for a bit with this method.

And it doesn’t change the fact that Open World need some organization.

At Least Magguma and Central Tyria category.

NaotsuguLH.8915:

I main my guardian, but I find it hard to believe condi guard would be viable in PvE considering the only condi it really has is Burning. I mean, sure it has blind and immobilize, but, condi damage doesn’t affect those.

Well, it still have decent direct damage with Sinister. That direct damage + burning damage equal to a good amount of DPS. It’s not as good as a zerker guardian in term of dps, but really not far from it.

(24 sec for dps chart)

If you compare their dps between 30 and 60sec

DH Guardian Zerker : 17-16.5k dps
Core Guardian GS Mace/Torch Zerker : 16-15k dps
Condi Core Guardian : 14-15k dps

The DH Guardian kind of screw up the situation. Pre-Hot condi guardian was very near the meta. As the meta change to DH the gap is wider, but we still don’t know the numbers for DH condi. Still. 14-15k dps is pretty good.

Well you can buy Matrix at 23-24 silver right now on the TP. You can sell a ring a almost 5 silvers. So 105 silvers (salvage kit + sell the ring) / 23.5 (buying price of matrix) = 4.46

So as long as salvaging a ring will give you a average of more than 4.46, it will be worth salvaging them. Which is definitively not the case of uninfused ring, but totally the case for infused rings.

Now if someone don’t like the rng of salvaging infused rings, that ok. For someone doing a lot of fractal, i also get a lot of glob, vial and shard of condensed stuff. It will probably worth it to infuse rings to salvage them. As long as you have enough vial at least. It won’t be worth it if you need to break glob into vial, i’m pretty sure. Or if you think you may need to infuse rings later.

Texas Jack.6852:

WvW and other missions are locked. When you are under Guild level 10, the only thing listed in the easy category is PvP conquest. That’s what we are seeing.

They change each week. At level 1, a guild will have 1 easy, 1 medium and 1 hard mission randomly. As you get higher you gonna unlock more slot for more of each. For now you can only do 1 easy mission each week. It will be random, so you never know if it will be PvE, PvP or WvW. You can select a specific mode, but then you gonna have a penalty of 10% and you won’t gonna have more number of missions.

These numbers are not worth much sorry.

1) What are the builds? How can we give any credits to this ranking without knowing the build. If you use a terrible build one profession, how can we know? Did you use the right sigil, runes, weapons?

2) You only used condition damage, which is pretty useless. For exemple, guardian is pretty low, but do a lot of direct damage too. Same with Engineer. On the other end, a Scepter Elementalist will have very low direct damage so even if you put him high on the condition damage list, his overall dps will be pretty low.

3) It’s not because you are difficulty to perform the engineer rotation that it will be the same for everybody. What is casual for you? Maybe on the scale you are a terrible engineer, maybe you are just normal, maybe you are decent. We don’t know, so your numbers are only good for you.

4) Ranger is the second best Condition build for PvE right now. Why did you put it so low? You probably didn’t use the right rotation. Did you made sure to swap weapons before using bonfire? Quick Draw is really important for that skill. Did you use the right build? These numbers are questionable. You really really need more transparency about your numbers. Video or at least builds are a must.

Manasa Devi.7958:

You need tons of data. Averages of how many infused rings pop up (not a lot in my experience so far) and averages of how those particular rings break down. The sheer amount of data it takes makes it, as I said before, hard to take into account. Verging on the impossible to arrive at any kind of useful number at this moment in time anyway.

Another thing that makes it hard to take into account, is that the amount of rings someone gets depends wholly on his playstyle. Someone doing no more fractal runs than it takes to get all daily chests will end up with a far better rings per encryption ratio than someone doing more fractals than necessary to get daily chests. That’s because the rings only drop from those daily chests as far as I’m aware. Doing more fractals on a given day will give you guaranteed extra encryptions with zero chance of extra infused rings.

Wow calm down man. What are you talking about. Personnally, I had a lot of infused rings in my bank from fractal pre-hot. So I have for me and everybody that have a lot of rings, each keys cost me 9 silvers.

If you don’t have rings, then you can buy matrix on the market and each keys cost you 12 silvers.

That’s all. I never tried to do the math on how many rings you get and all that kitten. Simple. You have rings = 9 silver per keys. You don’t = 12 silvers per keys.

When I talk about getting more numbers was to differentiate between uninfused and infused rings. So we know exactly what is the return in matrix from both and know if uninfused are worth salvaging or not and what is the exact return for infused rings only.

phys.7689:

if salvage is an average of 5.6, and each attemp cost 1 gold, each key costs 17.8 silver.
raw gold return according to the 1000 box guy was 16.7 silver
this means
paying 1 to 2 silver per salvage for 2.3 teir 5 mats (which most are currently under 50 copper) and 2 agony infusions

1) 5.6 Matrix (not keys) which mean 11 keys (because you can exchange 1 matrix for 2 keys) 1 gold / 11 = 9 silvers.

2) The 1000 box guy had a return of 262 gold for 1000 box after tp tax.
264 gold / 1000 = 26.2 Silvers not 16.7 silver like you said. And when you check the list of item he get, I end up more around 280-285 gold total for it’s 1000 box, not 262. So it’s more around 28.5 Silvers per box.

Pretty much all easy guild mission can be done with 3 peoples. You can take a camp and hold it for WvW, you can do trek and rush with ease. I don’t know if you can get bounty, challenge or puzzle in the easy slot. Those might by impossible with only 3 members.

NaotsuguLH.8915:

So, and I’m sorry for this, but I’ve pretty much been avoiding most topics on this. Are you recommending Viper strictly for condi heavy classes (i.e. Necro, maybe Warrior), or are you trying to say that Viper overall is the best stat for any class that has condi (i.e. Guardians have burns). What classes are you recommending Viper for?

I may run Viper on my condi mes, but I don’t know if condi mes would be any good in PvE.
Edit: Maybe even condi Warrior if condi Warrior is viable in PvE.

Viper is always better than sinister for any condition build as long as you don’t burst the 100% condition duration limit. That limit exclude condition duration from trait for specific weapons like Chemical Rounds.

Condi Mesmer isn’t particular good in PvE. Warrior condi is better than Mesmer, but it still less good than a direct damage warrior. I don’t know if Bezerker elite spec might change that, but I doudt it.

Right now. The only 3 profession that are worth it in condition build are Engineer, Ranger and to a lesser extend guardian. This may change over the next couple of weeks as people test thing out with the new spec.

I wouldn’t change my gear if I were you. Here some other solution.

1)GS M/F with a Zeal/Radiance/Virtue build will give you more resistance. If you really want to play Dragon Hunter, there still other option.
2) You can like Indure said, use M/F with the dragon hunter, but you won’t have the Blind or F1 that Radiance give you.
3) In Virtue you can take Absolute resolution instead of Supreme Justice. It’s a lost in dps, but still small since you are mostly direct damage and not condition. It will give you a emergency condition removal and a higher hp regen.
4) Omnomberry Pie or Ghost is a pretty decent food that will give you a bit more hp regen while still boosting your dps a bit.
5) You could swap Zeal for Valor and use Smite Condition and Renewed Focus for more selfs heals, but that will cripply your dps by a good margin. I don’t really recommend that tbh.

Manasa Devi.7958:

I’ve had as much as 15 and as little as 2 matrices from them. Hard to take them into account when estimating profit potential.

No it’s not. You use the average. We are talking about rings. A lot of person have a LOT of them in their banks. And we continue to gain them. If someone doesn’t have enough of them accumulated then he can still buy matrix on the TP.

For uninfused rings, you are right. My numbers didn’t took that into account since when I salvaged my rings I salvaged everything without checke if they were infused or not. I guess that over the next couple of week we’ll have more raw numbers to get better average.

phys.7689:

if you dont buy the keys, you build up extra boxes, if you salvage for keys, you lose money sometimes.

Salvaging won’t make you lose money. Ok ya if you salvage one or two it might. But on average each ring salvaged will give you 5.6 Matrix, which is around 11 keys. If you don’t have any salvaging to do? Buy Matrix on the tp and your key will cost you 12 silver instead of 20.

Yasi.9065:

Sorry to burst your bubble.

Before dungeon nerf, I made 20g each evening in about 2-3 hours.

Now I get around 10g doing the fractals for the same amount of time.

Before dungeon nerf I had the option of doing dungeons and fractals.

Now I only can do fractals and get even less because dailies are already done.

But hey, at least I now got enough ascended recipes to fill up my bank space again.

Or you’re not bursting any bubble. I never said that the Fractal was equal in gold per hours to the old dungeon. Remember that they said that they wanted to give that gold reward to fractal and raids. We’ll see what raid will give us. My point is that people are spreading lies like fractal make you lose gold now, or that the gold reward is worst than it used to be. The gold reward from fractal is higher than old fractal.

It’s still a stupid system and Fractal isn’t as repeatable as dungeon were. At best we gonna do 11 fractals for between 1.5 hours and 3 hours depending on level/groups. More than that and you don’t have any more daily. Dungeons, you could do 5-8 hours of different paths each with their daily and with a better reward per hour.

IndigoSundown.5419:

So straight coin rewards have been replaced with a coin sink for keys to open RNG boxes, and if one gets lucky, one profits. Or, one sells these boxes, which is another coin sink. I can’t say I’m too surprised.

Whatever you open or sell the box. Each of them on average will give you between 19 and 22 silver of profit.

You should try to get enough Viper to get your burning and/or bleed to 100% or near it and use sinister after that. But to be honest, it’s not a big deal. We are talking here about min-maxing. You still do decent dps with full sinister.

For a ranger, you can reach 75% Burning duration. So ideally, you would want 25% from Viper or 375 expertise. Your bleed would only be 40%+25% =65%, but more Viper would be wasted because of your burning.

A full armor and weapon of viper would give you 309 or that 375 expertise, which is good enough IMO.

Ensign.2189:

Thaddeus.4891:

I checked the numbers and they don’t fit.

He also has 105 unused keys sitting there being valued at 0. If you know those are coming in at roughly 1 every 10 boxes, then you only buy 450 matrices per 1000 boxes, not 500, saving you roughly a silver and change per box; it would have made the OP another 13 gold or so, raising the value of the box higher.

I’m on board with the fractal boxes feeling really unsatisfying, but the money is there – the accounting is just pretty convoluted.

Exactly. And if you have rings to salvage those matrix would cost you even less. If you are doing dailies, you get keys, matrix and ring to salvage to drop even further the cost of keys. I will personally, won’t have to buy matrix for a very long time.

But ya, the reward system is garbage even if the gold is there.

It did end up in fractal, but it an awkward, weird and unintuitive system.

Even someone without HoT get at least 3 encryption box per fractal without county the daily and each box can give you 19-22 silver of profit, meaning that 3 fractal (which is faster than an old 50) will give you at minimum 1.7-2 gold. Of course there is rng in the trophies you get so some might be more profitable, but on average you get more gold than we used to. It’s just that it’s hard to see it and a lot of person still buy key directly which is the biggest NO NO ever. That’s the best way to kill your reward.

From what we know, we get approx 28.5 silvers of profit (after tp tax) from box these days (this change since Tier 5 and Agony +1 change price over times). It cost 9 silver per key if you salvage ascended rings and 12 silver per key if you buy matrix on the TP. My conclusion is that it,s worth to open the box if you have rings to salvage and want more +1 to get higher AR. Otherwise, you are better to sell them.

The new reward system is unintuitive, but the gold reward is there. Sell or open the box, they still give you 20-22 silver of profit each on average (not counting zoija recipe). Even from someone without HoT, doing 3 fractal will give you 9 box for around 1.7 to 2 gold of profit. And that’s not counting what you receive from the daily in a time shorter to do than a level 50 used to take. So yep, it’s weird, it feel less rewarding, but we do get more gold for our time in fractal with the new system.

That said. The numbers from KINGS seem to indicate that we do get less Ascended boxes and Fractal Skins now than we used to.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18IHVJao5j85KOp6lBTOgO8qs4VYD3Xty-jKPZo8o-Q4/pubhtml

If you buy key directly from the golem and lost money opening the box, you only have yourself to blame. NEVER BUY KEY DIRECTLY.

shion.2084:

Ok that attachement is sorta funny. Would be funnier if it wasn’t so applicable to me, but I can appreciate the humour objectively

Just some quick advice. To help your reward in Fractal.

1) Never buy key directly from the vendor. Use Matrix to buy key instead. You can buy them from the TP or get them in reward and each of them can be exchange for 2 keys. I don’t know if you can buy ascended salvage kit wihtout HoT. If you can then you can salvage your rings and get matrix to exchange for keys. If you buy them directly, each key will cost 20 Silver, if you buy matrix on the TP each key will cost you around 12 silver and if you can salvage rings then it will only cost 9 silver each.

2) Doing only one fractal is shooting you in the foot. You are suppose to do a daily with 3 fractals in the same range. 1-20, 21-50 or 51-100. You also have recommended daily which is only 1 specific fractal.

3) Openning your box should give you on average 28,5 silvers. Do the math depending if your keys cost you 9 or 12 silvers. You also get some matrix and keys with daily and by opening box. It maybe more profiting for you to simply sell the box on the TP. They usually sell between 20 and 25 silvers.

TBH, the reward is there. If you do it the right way, you can get a good amount of loot from fractal. But it’s unintuitive and hide some of the reward between mastery.

Notsoperky.2348:

Again, it doesn’t help those asking for help in Auric on HP points (or even in Verdant), as asking those people on that screenie for help when they are busy doing those events usually gets the same reply ‘sorry doing bosses/events/fill in blank’.

To be honest I and most of my friend never answer question in map chat. With guild chat, TS and actually playing the game my attention is pretty occupied already. Even in the guild chat, there could several minutes if not hours during which I don’t read it. And I bet it’s the same for the majority of players. Each time i go in VB I tag up and 5-10 person follow me for a chain of event. With 5 chain of event, 5 adventures and map completion, that pretty much what you could except. There is bit of stuff to do all over the map in VB so people are spread out more.

I checked the numbers and they don’t fit.

You can sell all the tier 5 for 20.23 Gold, giving you 17.19 gold in profit

The +1 Agony can sell for 117.75 gold, giving you a profit of 100 gold.

The 167 gold is sold directly to the npc so it’s still 167 gold in profit.

That give you a total of 284 gold and not 262 gold. And that’s not counting the Breather recipes which can vary a lot. For 1000 encryption you got 28 breather, which should give you around 1-2 gold if you are not lucky and get a Zoija Recipe. Which mean the total should be 285 Gold at worst, after TP tax. This change a bit the numbers.

This mean that you gonna have on average 28.5 Silver from each box.

If you have rings to salvage, each key should cost you 9 Silvers. If you buy matrix on tp, it will be 12 silvers per key. Counting the fact that you should get 1 key back each 10 box on average that mean that.

If you have rings to salvage, you should then sell box only if you can sell them at more than 24 silvers.

If you need to buy matrix from TP, then you should sell them if you can sell them at more than 21 Silvers each. Since the price right now, is around 25 silver, in theory it’s a good thing to sell box, but it’s near the line.

It’s also good to notice that, if you want to increase your AR to 150, you gonna need 3584 +1 Agony Infusions. Until you have all of those, it’s better to open box than to sell box and buy +1 on the TP.

IMO. As long as you need the +1 Agony Infusion and you can salvage rings. You should open your boxes, not sell them. If you don’t need the +1 Agony Infusion and don’t have any ring left to salvage, then you should sell them for now.

doddbox.8153:

I don’t recall anyone actually getting fired, fairly sure they just got shafted onto living story/ faptals and other content we didn’t want

Robert Hrouda say hello. He was the main content developper for dungeons and they are dead since he was laid off.

Tiger.3925:

Fractals almost the same as dungeons=i was doing my daily scales as allways but now the gold i get is 0 and the crap i get is more hight).I speak with a friend of my and he told me i need mastery’s to get something worth) funny yea ? well no because the crap you get is asking you to pay to open it,the salvage kits are expensive,because we dont get that gold what we got long time ago when we complet 4 fractals

You should calm down and try to understand how they work first. I don’t have numbers for the drop yet to give, but for the salvaging you are completely wrong.

Each gold you spend in salvage kit, will return you enough matrices to buy for more than 2 gold in Encryption Keys (not counting the relics you save).

You don’t need mastery to get something worth. The only reward mastery give you is a second recommended daily to get Page faster for the Legendary Back Item. Even if you have zero mastery in fractal you can still do your 3 dailys (1-20 / 21-50 / 51-100) and 1 or the 2 recommended daily. So you are wrong again there.

The only point I still need to get a good picture of is the total rewards. They are all over the place, drops, boxes and daily. So it’s hard to get a good view how much worth it is.

I disagree partially. The amount of material is fine. No reason for a smaller guild to need less amount of them.

But still see two major problem. First is Favor vs Influence. You used to get influence by playing the game with your guildmate, whatever that content was. You like to do dungeon, you get influence. You like PvP, you get influence. You like WvW you get influence. Now Favor only come from Guild Missions, so do guild missions or you are screw. Personally, it doesn’t affect me because I have a 500 members guild and I like guild missions. But It’s not the case for everybody. Guild Merit from guild missions and influence from everywhere was a far better system. They just had to gave us some meaningful stuff to buy with these kitten merits.

The second problem and it’s a big one is that we lost so much of our guild. No more buff, no more banners, pitiful guild missions, etc. It’s the fractal reset all over again. It’s worst for small guild that worked so hard to get all their stuff, to get a big portion taken away from them. Not counting guild that didn’t buy the expansion that now can’t regain what they lost. I’m all for not giving new stuff to people without the expansion, but no need to remove core content and putting it in the expansion.

Pandabro.8743:

Say I only have 20 minutes to log on one day and I want to do all the adventures that I have done gold for. If half or more of those adventures are locked my entire plan is out the window as I just straight up don’t have time to sit around waiting for event after event.

Then you should realize that MMO is not the kind of game for you at that moment. Each time of game have different length of play period and 20min isn’t for MMO.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Luclinraider.2317:

What happened to good MMO players back in EQ1 days where the fact that it took 6 months of playing 6 hours a day to get one weapon was a good thing..

I’m sorry, but I have a full time job that I work 40+ hours a week that pays me, so I can take care of those things called bills. And the playing the game is [not] it. I’m so tired of everyone thinking that they should play games like they are jobs.

Yup, like the vast majority of other players. What you think that you are talking to a bunch of 12 years old in summer vacation? Almost everybody is working to play bills.

Nobody is thinking that they should play game like they are jobs. There is a spectrum of difficulty between I have everything right aways with no effort and everything take ages to grind. Both of these extreme are bad, but it’s hard to get the right balance, because that balance depend on each individual.

For me player 2-3 hours per day after work is nothing because I don’t have kids and I have fun with my friend who play with me. Someone else might have problem with that because they got 3 kids and can only see their friend on the week end for example. Anet CAN’T please everybody. They will always be people that won’t be satisfied because it’s too easy or too long for them. The only thing anet can do is to split in the middle and create easier thing for more casual, while still creating harder stuff for more hardcore players.

It’s not a perfect system, but we doesn’t live in a perfect world so.

Multiplicatively

I’m with Dakheus for the long run, but i would go futher. Make them another set of armor/weapons with the exact same look, but like level 1. Not a good idea for new players with low transmutation charge. But any vet will have almost infinite of those so. Next time he is online, bring him in a fractal or one of the last map of HoT. It probably gonna take some time before he find the reason why his damage was so bad all this time.

You can also do the same with his amulet in PvP. If he play a marauder character, just give him a condition damage amulet. My friend did that mistake by his own and we still tease him one year later

Give him a mini with annoying sound and boost his effect sound to the max. Super Assassin would be the best, but it’s account bound. Mini Ho-Ho-Tron is a good choice and it doesn’t cost much.

I’m a fanboy of anet and gw2. But even me need to be honest here. This expansion gave us a lot of good stuff, but a lot of very bad stuff too.

Life Teofa said, they took away part of the core game and put it behind HoT as if it was new content. As much as the new 4 maps are fantastic IMO.

- Legendary Crafting is complete garbage and not worth the 2 years delay for the 2nd generation of legendary.

- Outside of the new maps, there is pretty much zero new content. Fractal were nerfed to the ground and they only added more scale. Worst, they added even more power creep into them that the game already had.

- Guild were completely butchered. It look so much like the fractal reset to 30. We worked hard enough to unlock our buff and the guild missions were a fun guild event even if they were old. This week was a nightmare for me as an officer. We lost all our buff, can’t craft the items we had access too and guild missions was a complete nightmare this week. Anet can scew up a new content, it happen, but no reason to destroy our current content.

This doesn’t mean that the expansion is a complete garbage. I have a ton of fun with the masteries, the glider is SO MUCH FUN. The new maps are so cool. The expedition was hard to lead, but with more than 100 people it was a success. I’m a collection kitten and I’ll have enough to keep me occupied for a long time. But removing/nerfing/putting behing gate old content is one of the worst decision Anet did in a long time.

zombyturtle.5980:

Anyway my point was the crafting was never intended to cost notably less than the grind method, as inferred in the vid i linked, just provide a more engaging method of getting the precursor while eliminating the RNG element.

But that’s a mistake. It should take around the same amount of time, but not cost around the same amount.

While crafting you have a lot of stuff to do other than the gold. You need to do think like dance at certain place, do event, unlock masteries, etc. Those thing cost time even if they don’t cost gold.

If the cost in gold is the same between crafting and TP, then there is no reason to craft it since it will take you more time to craft than it will take to get the gold and buy it.

Divinity.3641:

The two hours we spent only gave us 3 hero points !

How did you do that? Each hero challenge in the new map give you 10 points. You probably accumulate 30 hero points, not 3.

I also have 0 fractal weapons unlocked in the achievement, despite having several of them in my bank and more in the wardrobe.

mtpelion.4562:

Your options are:
1. Sell unneeded ascended items to vendor for +coins
2. Salvage unneeded ascended items for Legendary crafting for -coin -relics

Seems pretty reasonable to me. You’re only salvaging if you are working on a Legendary and those are SUPPOSED to be expensive.

We know. It’s not a big deal in the end. We gonna salvage what we need to get the legendary, keep a small amount of rings that could be usefull and sell the rest.

But the point is that some of us kept hundreds of rings waiting for the salvage with no information about it just in case and now we get kind of a slap in the face since we could have simply sell 90% of our rings. We were expecting to get online with the expansion and salvage all of those rings.

It’s on us for expecting for something more from Anet.

Laraley.7695:

Azure Prower.8701:

100 cobs is too easy and unfair? Get out. That’s like 400 gold.

So horrible. Totally comparable to buying 1.5 MILLION bags which each are worth 5s and opening them. You get some of the money back but it’s still way more than 400g.

You were unlucky. The Droprate for that mini is 1 / 200 000 bags. Each bags cost 5 silver and should get you back between 4 and 4.5 silver each.

It’s still around 1-2k gold (highly dependent on luck) compare to the current 400 gold. To be fair, it should have been around 250 Cobs.

The three new legendary are not yet in the game. They will come with raid in 2 weeks approx.

Xstein.2187:

Rough Sharpening Stone-10% exp from kills
Weak potion of Centaur Slaying-10% exp from kills
Bowl of Candy Corn Custard-15% from kills
Experience infusion (with the ascended amulet)-20% exp from kills
total = 55% from kills

Lunar New Year Fireworks-10% exp from all sources
Guild Exp Banner-5% exp
Experience Booster-50% exp in all game types (from all sources)
total experience for all sources-65%

As far as I am aware, you can use all these experience sources at the same time.

I don’t know if the Improved Experience booster can still be crafted. Before, we could put 5 xp booster (50%) in the mystic forge with other stuff and get the improved version (100%). But that was before the new xp booster.

You forgot the celebratory bonus of 100% from Birthday or Celebratory booster.

The guild Karma and Experience ou Heroic Banner give you 10% instead of the 5% from the simple Guild Experience banner.

There is a guild bonus of 5% xp from kill. The bonus is guild wide and last for 24 hours.

Bowl of Candy Corn Ice Cream give you 15% experience from every source, but cost 7 silver instead of a couple of cooper for food that give you 15% xp from kills.

Achievement also give you permanent account wide experience boost.

- Tome of Knowledge is the fastest way if you have them.
- Crafting to 400 give you around 7 levels, while crafting to 500 give you 10 levels. It’s never worth getting to 500 just for leveling. But getting to 400 isn’t bad. Cooking will cost you 3-4 gold for 7 levels, artificer and jeweler will cost you 10-12 gold, while the remaining profession will cost you between 21 and 26 gold.
- Mad King Labyrinth is the best way to gain xp while playing.
- EOTM is the best permanent way to gain xp while playing.
- Dungeon is really efficient, while giving you good amount of gold, but it have restriction that EotM don’t.

Those are to my knowledge the best ways to get xp fast.

Silvercyclone.1462:

I might add that just because a small amount of players can solo content doesn’t mean everyone can. There are players who have lives and can only spend maybe an hour on the game a day or every couple of days.

Cool cool. So everybody that can do something you don’t have no lives? This insults is getting old in 2015. The vast majority of players have family, jobs and friends. It’s not because someone prefer to put their time into one aspect of the game and get good that they need to spend thousands of hours into it. Dungeon are three years old for god sake. A lot of players can solo or duo them, they just never tried it.

Those are the two I use.

dxtory : It’s one of the best IMO for in-game recording. You lose almost no fps while using it. The only problem is that he doesn’t allow you to record your desktop, only gameplay.

Fraps : It’s a good program, but it have some issue for lost of FPS for some people. I mostly use it for desktop recording.

Whatever you chose, make sure you have a good speed on your hard drive. Often people have problem recording because of that. I have a new SSD so it’s a bit OP. Just a good quality hard drive should do the trick.

Few people will (and I include myself) post just talk about how happy there are. And this kind of post usually don’t get many responds. The forum is mostly about discussion and debate and it’s a lot more fun and easier to do that in a thread about a negative opinion. What can you debate when someone talk about how they are happy about a feature. It’s a lot more entertaining to debate someone that seem extremist in their view of a feature. It’s just human nature.

For the same reason nobody call a TV station to tell them how good their show was. It’s always some angry minority that call in outrage about something.

Aidenwolf.5964:

TheLastNobody.8319:

Nerf burning to 12%,, buff bleeding to 8%, buff torment to 10% when moving.

Nerfing burning is a no no. It’s not burning that’s the issue it’s the application of the condition namely by guardians as elementalists were just dealt with.

I agree, making some minor change to some profession that can stack too much burn is by far a better solution. The problem isn’t accross all profession and skill, but just specific one.

For bleeding, I don’t know. I like the fact that bleeding and burning feel different. Bleed can stack a lot faster, but does less damage. Simply increasing the damage of bleeding will narrow this difference. I would much rather they increase a bit the duration of bleeding so you can stack more of them. Usually, burning do around 3 times the damage of bleeding per stack, so you should be able to stack around 3 times more bleeding than burning, but it’s not really the case right now.

Confusion is fine IMO. Torment can use a little buff in term of damage. But once all of that is done, condition will probably be too much powerful. At that point, they should all be nerf a little to keep condition as a whole in line with direct damage.

Pax did a great answer there.

People usually have the same armor for Dungeon/Fractal, which is usually full dps

But for WvW, it’s always never a good idea to have the same armor. It’s not the end of the world, but you always gonna miss something. Either the armor stats shouldn’t be the same or the rune shouldn’t be the same. It usually also change depending if you are in a zerg or if you are roaming.

For Raids, we don’t know. We only did the first encounter, so maybe we’ll want to use a totally different armor set later in the raid or maybe zerker will stay the best option.

What out for unsalvageable armor. It’s ok if you gonna put a cheap rune, but it will be frustrating if you put a expensive one and you can’t recover it when you change armor later.

If you start a new character with HoT you will start in the old maps with a level 1 and all new maps from HoT are level 80. You don’t need to do any content or story of the old games except what you will need to do to get to level 80 and to reach physically the jungle on the map.