Guild Wars 2

Auvic.5679:

For the record, it’s still rather impressive that GW2 legendaries doesn’t actually require a person to beg their guild to tag along for months on end to complete.

Yeah, sure, you can get items that were legendary for their tier maybe six years ago by yourself. Cool.

That is an excellent point, and it also describes the situation in EQ2. The various legendary/mythical class weapons they introduced over the years required a mix of solo, group, and raid content to acquire. By contrast the system in this game allows one to make that a solo effort, which certainly has its advantages.

Also, we’re up to about 4x now on the price of “fine crafting materials”. I assume the reason the price of orichalcum ore is plummeting is because people are no longer crafting as many exotics to huck into the forge, due to this 4x increase in FCM price.

Personally I’d go for playable Skritt before anything else. I would even withdraw my support for the combat VO toggle option in that case, as the way they talk is 99% of the attraction.

“For great justi…. ooo, SHINY!”

Sign me up.

Zaxares.5419:

ChungHan Ho.5837:

Banning bots/RMT is out of question the right thing to do but the mechanism needs a lot of improvements since many honest players have been wrongfully banned as collateral damage.

There usually will be a few innocents caught up in the sweep, but you can appeal the banning to ANet support who can check their records and unban you if it was an honest mistake.

But most of the time? People who claim to have been banned incorrectly are guilty as sin.

Yeah. We all know that some % of the bots were characters with real names, expensive gear, and guild tags. I grant you some of them were bound to be hacked accounts (don’t buy gold!) but not all of them.

Barfoi.9537:

Indeed. My last gamble this morning looked to cost about 2-3x as much, and it didn’t help matters when the first batch of forges produced no exotics. Luckily, my next batch resulted in Spark, so I’ll suspend my gambling on a good note — well, until prices stabilize.

Grats! Nice roll.

hluill.2790:

I’ve played a few MMOs and I’ve never seen crafting generate reliable profit.

Eve Online. Star Wars Galaxies (original recipe). These are two examples where crafting was/is absolutely profitable. Vastly profitable.

They are also examples of games where crafting is integral and far more complex than the kind of “crafting lite” we have here and in most games. I don’t believe Crafting Lite™ can truly be made into a profitable enterprise. At best you can monitor the dynamic situation and seize the odd opportunity when it comes along. I did manage to make some gold by selling weapons, when I carefully chose which weapons to sell and when to sell them. But I made a lot more money by just selling the materials.

Really, the only reason I have to craft is salvaging the items hoping for ectoplasm, or to throw them into the bottomless pit of chance and sell the exotics. Is that really what they had in mind? The only point of crafting is to supply mystic forge gambling?

In any case, I stand by my statement: if you assemble an item and sell it for less than the value of the materials you assembled it from, you’re doing it wrong. If the item has so little value then you should not have crafted it in the first place. Try to remember that we’re not talking about selling drops here. Don’t bother crafting something that’s worthless. Craft something else, or just sell the materials.

TravisTrout.6803:

Oh, so that’s why fine crafting materials (300+) are suddenly twice as expensive. I should have filled my bank when they went below 20c.

Did I say twice? It’s more like 3×.

The cost of playing your gambling endgame just went through the roof.

Oh, so that’s why fine crafting materials (300+) are suddenly twice as expensive. I should have filled my bank when they went below 20c.

Cyberman Mastermind.6012:

Targetting currently is broken beyond ridiculous. At least that’s how I experience it with my axe throwing ranger.
Quite often there is an enemy right in front of me/my character, and I select “target nearest enemy” and what gets targetted? Not the enemy in front of me, but the one behind that – which is about twice as far away from me.
(And usually not even aggroed.)

Same thing happens often if the enemy is somewhat at the side of me. Apparently “nearest enemy” means “randomly chose an enemy that doesn’t attack you”.

I see this all the time. Pressing Tab will skip right past a target that is in my face and instead it selects a target that’s nowhere near me, not even engaged in combat with me.

castlemanic.3198:

I think the theme of orr is that it’s supposed to be difficult.

There’s nothing difficult about Orr. It’s very unlikely that you will lose/die while running around, even if you screw up and pull too many mobs. It’s not difficult; it’s just tedious. I would even say nauseating.

The issue this thread wants to address is a major factor contributing to the tedium.

Fixing dodge would help. Fix dodge so that it actually dodges rather than rolling in place, and preferably so that it dodges in the direction indicated by the inputs I make to the game.

BEARR.9132:

Not really, my main account is only level 38 and I’m not complaining about inventory space.. I just want an option to “hide” some of the lower level drops you commonly get, and the trophies that I always accidentally pick up

No, see, you’re doing it wrong. You’re going to be one of those guys who comes here later complaining that the trivial cost of waypoints is somehow bankrupting them.

Pick up everything. Sell everything. There’s no such thing as a drop you don’t want. If it’s worth more than vendor price sell it on the TP, which you can do from anywhere by pressing O. If it’s not worth more than vendor price, sell it to the vendor.

If you don’t do that you are choosing to be broke. You’re only 38 now. Wait until you’re 80 and the armor you want costs you 12g for a set. You’ll wish you’d sold all those vendor trash items (trophies) then.

Mounts just wouldn’t make sense in this game. It’s not like other games where you have to travel across half a continent to get somewhere. We don’t have enormous, sprawling outdoor areas. Such games are obviously designed with mounts in mind. But we don’t have that. We have little nooks that are saturated with instant waypoint teleporters. That is the travel system.

I have to ask: You guys insisting that you “need” mounts, have you even been to Orr yet? You might as well carve up your horse for rations because you won’t be riding it anyway. Saying “find me a zombie in Orr” is like saying “find me a crater on the Moon.” Close your eyes and point in a random direction. Oh look, zombie.

You (some of you, anyway) aren’t even concerned with the facts of the matter. You just want a horse. Or a goat. Or a lobotomized Centaur. Something. Ok, I get that. Mounts are cool — in games where they make sense. This is not such a game.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure we don’t need to be the Defenders of the Plan here because obviously the developers felt the same way. You don’t think they simply forgot to put horses in and accidentally dropped waypoints all over the world, did you?

That class already exists; it just doesn’t exist the way you, personally would like it to be.

I understand, though. Personally I was hoping for a petless Ranger but we got the WoW Hunter implementation. Shrug.

Elementalist is the wizard class in this game. That’s the implementation they went with. And it’s a good one; it just has some problems that need to be addressed.

Who in their right mind doesn’t pick up everything? That’s free money. Why would you not want free money?

Max Lexandre.6279:

I like the voices, makes the battle feels more alive. Take off the “voice effects” from the combat makes it less realistic.

I swear I will never understand people who argue against OPTIONS. You go right ahead and groove on the sound of your character’s voice saying the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Some of us would like the option to disable that.

For great justice, give us the option to turn off combat voices.

Let’s break the problem down.

1) The “windups” that telegraph these attacks are inconsistent both in visual representation and in timing.

You will eventually learn that when the bull rears up he’s about to charge you, and that when the kitten zombie with the shovel gets a purple glow he’s about to knock you down. There’s plenty of time to dodge or block the bull charge, but the shovel window is pretty short. You can still dodge it if you’re on the ball, but…

2) Dodge is flaky.

Often I will find that my character performs the animation without actually dodging. Result: shovel to the face, even though I made all the correct inputs to the game.

3) The animation system doesn’t always return control to the player in a timely manner. Or, there’s a disconnect between the length of the stun/knockdown and the length of the animation associated with it.

Let’s continue from “shovel to the face” from above. You get knocked down. The animation system takes control away, goes through the motions of standing up… and then you stand there doing nothing for a few “blank” frames before you actually regain control of your character. This is a discrepancy between the length of the control event and the length of the animation.

By the time you regain control of your character, the zombie has closed the gap and immediately hits you with the shovel again with his other CC, the stun. Or, even worse, the second zombie in the group executes his own knockdown. Result: this thread.

Statements such as, “There is no need to have diminishing returns on CCs, because there are plenty of options to deal with them” can only be made in the absence of proper analysis. If everything worked correctly then you could say such a thing, but that is not the case.

I don’t understand the problem.

If you travel somewhere to walk around and look at the trees, then the 4s amounts to your vacation travel expenses. If you travel somewhere to play the game and do some content, then your travel expenses are negated by vendoring whatever blue & green garbage you get, plus coin drops, plus event rewards.

Problem does not seem to exist in reality.

I wish I knew why sometimes I have the reply/quote button and sometimes I see only the “permalink” button. Anyway…

“Why would you want to pay 3g for an ugly weapon when all you need to do is 6-7 paths in 1 dungeon over a couple of days to get a good looking weapon ?”

Answer: Transmutation for stats. The look you want may not come with the stats you want.

Kinglette.4906:

I smell a troll

The OP makes statements that are contrary to how the game works so it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion. For example:

bombastinator.8965:

Tried that. For days. The areas ae 2/3s bots and they make the spawns so bad it’s pretty close to suicide to try.

This statement has no meaning. It does not accurately reflect any aspect of how the game works.

The original premise of the thread is also fundamentally flawed, to put it kindly. There are 5 ori nodes in Cursed Shore, 5 in Malchor’s Leap, and 2 in Frostgorge. Orichalcum ore has a 100% drop rate; you have only to locate the nodes, which you can harvest every day. The locations change when the server resets, as for a patch.

Further, I cannot find a logical basis for the OP’s claim that he is “stuck” with level 65 gear as a level 80 character. Both the assembled items and the components required to make them are readily available. The OP’s claim is so far from reality that it, too, is without meaning.

We must conclude that he is simply having a go at us, and so it would be best to leave this thread to rot.

Two problems.

First you have people who think they’re making money any time they exchange an item for coin, who either don’t know or don’t care that they actually lost money because the materials were more valuable than the item. A subset of these people believe that supply & demand is a mystical force in the universe that is beyond our control and that they must sell at a loss. We need people thinking like OPEC and not like crystal-clutching mystic hippies, but that won’t happen.

Second, some of the components are also used for Mystic Slot Machine “crafting”, and so those items will find their own price level that has nothing to do with regular crafting or the items it produces. It was a mistake to share the items across both kinds of crafting but it’s too late to do anything about that.

A keybind (default: unbound) for toggling that would do the trick.

I would also like for dodge to actually dodge and not just roll me in place without dodging as it sometimes does.

My motto is “No chest? No champ”.

The problem is that while many events are fun to do once, quite a lot of them simply aren’t worth repeating. On my server, and I expect this to be the case on others, people have identified the events that produce the greatest chance for decent rewards and so naturally those events are preferred over others.

The events that people prefer are those that a) end with a big chest, b) feature multiple waves of mobs (read: many loot drops), or c) both. C is ideal, but either A or B will do. Quite a lot of events simply don’t offer any combination of those desired features, so those events go ignored.

On my server the hot spot is Cursed Shore, which makes perfect sense. Plinx is probably the most well-escorted figure in escorting history.

+1

In the vast, swirling sea of particles and flashes it is often difficult to see things like red circles and the flash that telegraphs a powerful attack, not to mention my mouse cursor.

Note to would-be responders that this is not a performance issue. My framerate is fine. The issue is simply that information I want to see is often hidden by effects that I do not need to see.

The automatic downleveling is one of the smartest things I’ve ever seen done in an MMO. It’s right up there with instanced resource nodes.

I can help a lowbie buddy without destroying the zone like an angry god. In the process I can still gain a little xp (which means skill points for me) because the mobs aren’t “grayed out”. On top of that, some of the loot drops will even be for my own level. Note that I do not want all loot drops to be for my own level, because a) that would be far too easy to farm, and b) sometimes I want drops from that level, like bags of crafting goodies.

This aspect of the game works so well that I don’t understand the purpose of the OP’s suggestion. I suggest we simply move along, as there’s nothing to see here.

Jericho.5940:

Infinite Light….charged lodestone…..

perfect, but does that really work as a light source?

Eh, before you go charging off to craft this you might want to read all the threads about charged lodestones. Keep in mind you need 250 to craft this sword, and right now they’re selling for 2.65g each.

Braxxis.7062:

It’s not from getting attacked.

False.

You think you might remember one time when it happened to you under different circumstances. That’s fine. But your anecdote in no way empowers you to declare that everyone else’s experience is wrong. You certainly can get a ruined resource when you are attacked at just the right time, whether or not there are other circumstances under which it can occur.

These items are used to craft potions (artificer). Powerful Potion of Undead Slaying: +10% damage to undead, -10% damage from undead, +10% xp from kills, duration 1hr.

Potion buffs coexist with food buffs so you can have both going. Unlike food buffs however, potion buffs go away if you zone or get splatted.

Exploding Acorn.3754:

Azelroth.6801:

Well it’s crazy when you think about it because 100 charged lodestones now cost more than a precursor and it’s only a SUB-SUB COMPONENT lol!

Even worse when my goal is to make Infinite Light which cost 250 lodestones, 2 down 248 to go. If you’re on SoS and see a mesmer grinding away at the sparks with my name I’m not a bot, just someone forced into a huge grind since there aren’t many alternatives to getting the necessary lodestones.

That was also my plan until I realized that current price * 250 = lol for a bloody exotic. I was up to 8 stones after much mind-numbing farming, then I decided to call it quits and cash out.

As the others have said, this isn’t about the tool and it’s not a bug. If you’re in combat — specifically in my experience if you have a state on you or if you take a hit at the moment you harvest — then the resource can come up as ruined. So clear away or lose the aggro before you harvest and this won’t happen.

I can’t believe someone even posted this. Scroll the camera to whatever zoom level makes you happy but please keep your hands off of my camera controls.

You’re correct about needing control of Zephyrs but you’re wrong about only getting Charged stones from Cursed Shore. They also come from Malchor’s Leap; the Sparks at Zephyrs and in the ruins to the south drop them.

ChairGraveyard.2967:

I think they need to lower the drop rate on Charged Lodestones, as 3g each is obviously much too low. They need to be 5-10g each, or more, and have a drop rate about 1/10000th of what it currently is.

Charged Lodestones aren’t desirable unless they’re rare, we don’t need everything to be super common because then no one would be able to show off their cool rare Lodestones.

+1 if you managed to type all that without cracking up.

Mounts are great; just not for this game. There is no area between waypoints large enough to benefit from mounted travel.

Can you imagine trying to ride a horse through Orr? You’d get dismounted for combat every three meters anyway so you might as well just walk.

No, that’s a terrible idea. Once you switch the acquisition of a component over to EZ-mode you open the door for demands to do likewise for the others. Make the stones available in exchange for tokens and next people will demand that clovers and precursors and everything else get the same treatment. Guaranteed.

My issue with the stones is their use in exotic recipes. Or more specifically, the number required. For example, given the rarity of charged stones it’s patently absurd that an “ordinary” exotic should require 250.

The bots of course are a much wider issue, and one that is detrimental to the game and its players across the board. They must be dealt with.

Off topic – Of course you can do that. It’s entirely up to you to decide if the words you choose need to make sense in context. I can only show you the door. You’re the one who has to walk through it and embrace the English language.

YumCHA.8706:

What good is a title if it provides no benefit? What good is a title if the only distinguishable factor to differentiate each title is just the name it provides? Pride? Vanity?

Yes, and yes; exactly like everything else in this game.

Why bother grinding dungeon tokens to acquire a set of armor when you can just craft or buy a set with exactly the same stats? Why use rare and expensive dyes to color it? And why would anyone go down the long, painful path of obtaining a legendary weapon when you can craft or buy an exotic weapon with exactly the same stats?

This entire game is about style, and pride, and vanity.

Titles are their own reward. Just like armor sets, just like dyes, just like weapons, titles are another way to say, “Look at me. I decided a particular goal or bit of style was important to me and this is the visual representation of my success.”

That’s all titles are and that’s all they need to be; just another bit of customizable visual representation. This is my character, this is how it looks, this is where it’s been, this is what I’ve done with it.

So with all that in mind we have an excellent case for making titles just as visible as every other part of the nameplate; or more to the point, just as visible as every other aspect of you distinct visual presence. You also have the basis for understanding why titles should never come with stats. If a legendary weapon doesn’t give you better stats, why on Earth would a title?

“To be honest if bots are farming them at least that means theyre coming into the economy. "

To quote my man Arnold Rimmer, “Wrong, wrong. Absolutely brimming over with wrongability.”

Think harder. The people behind the bots are gold sellers. Gold sellers deal in game currency. They farm for it, they sell it to people.

They also manipulate the markets of the games they infect for their own purposes. What purposes, you ask? To drive up demand for their product and thus increase sales.

Do not think for an instant that they will dump a thousand of the stones onto the TP and thus lower the going rate. Instead they will make efforts to drive the prices up.

PS People need to stop using “to be honest” as a prefix for every random thought they might wish to express.

+1 Titles should be just as prominent as that groovy sword on your back or your expensive taste in dye. It’s all cosmetic, so why isn’t a title you earned just as visible as any other cosmetic aspect of your character?

No stats for titles. It doesn’t matter how slight the bonuses are; if they exist then they will become mandatory in some contexts as the other posters have mentioned.

However, I wouldn’t mind seeing them become more prominent on the nameplate. It is a badge after all. The reason we put trophies in glass cases is so that other people will see them, as we bask in the vanity of it all.

So as of today, on Yak’s Bend there’s a group of bots running around on their little path and farming the Sparks south of Zephyrs in Malchor’s Leap.

It’s already tricky to get the charged lodestones the sparks drop because 1) it’s a very rare drop and 2) the sparks only exist when we control Zephyrs.

Now on top of that we have to compete with groups of bots? No. Maybe you’re content to let them set up shop in out-of-the-way places but this is too much. Stop ignoring the rampant (and obvious) bot problem.

Well the bots are farming them as of today. At this moment on my server, Yak’s Bend, there’s a bot group on a path where the Sparks spawn south of Zephyrs. Bad news for all.

akamon.2769:

for charged lodestones, you have to farm like crazy. the current lodestone drop rates are pretty darn low. correct me if i am wrong, charged lodestones can be dropped from chests in Crucible of Eternity. as well as from the corresponding high-level elementals (i assume sparks? don’t quote me though)

Confirmed; you do indeed get them from Sparks. When the Cathedral of Zephyrs in Malchor’s Leap is uncontested you’ll find sparks at the Cathedral, in the ruins south of there, and in northern Cursed Shore. But if Zephyrs goes contested all groups will vanish, to be replaced by Risen. This is a problem because…

…the drop rate is downright depressing. I’ve been farming them for a while and I’ve managed to accumulate seven stones. On average I’d say I get one for every 90 minutes of continuous, life-sucking farming.

I was planning to make this sword for my warrior but I thought the recipe called for only (only? lol) 100. 250 is absurd considering it’s just a model, so I think I’ll just cash in on my stones instead. It is awfully darn pretty, though.

But when someone links it in chat, it is purple.

They come from elementals (Sparks and Air Elementals) that spawn in Malchor’s Leap and Cursed Shore when the Cathedral of Zephyrs (in Malchor) is uncontested. If people don’t defend the cathedral and it goes contested again, the elementals are replaced by other mobs. The Sparks in northern Cursed Shores are linked; you must keep Zephyr’s if you want to keep the Sparks around.

So the problem is not just the absurdly low drop rate; the issue is compounded by the fact that the mobs are only up for a few hours each day. I have a grand total of 5 lodestones at the moment. Ugh.

I’m not certain if the Earth elementals that spawn near the Sparks (behind them by the mountains) are also linked to control of the cathedral.

I agree this new control brings a reduction in usability rather than an improvement. The slider makes it tricky to land on a target number, and the need to press enter when typing a number directly seems unnecessary.

What were you trying to fix with this change?

spencerharrison.8136:

To the posters insulting people who bought keys and expected an item:

We aren’t talking about the US economy or housing market. We’re talking about a stupid video game where people want to run around with a pumpkin rifle. Based on colorful advertising and good faith, a lot of people paid some money with the understanding that doing so would give them a “chance” at those items.

That “chance” is being proven to be aggressively small. Different people came into this with different expectations, but I do think its safe to say that the cost of keys, coupled with the tiny percent chance of a skin, equates to a more cynical policy than fans of Anet anticipated.

Fair enough. Lesson learned. Personal responsibility also means licking your wounds and moving on. Those that feel they got misled, will be less likely to give Anet cash like that on impulse.

In my opinion, that’s bad business for Anet, and less fun for the players who weren’t so lucky. It didn’t have to be that way, and I don’t think there is ANY harm in lambasting Anet for this mess. They can, and should do better by their players.

Well said.

There was nothing, not a scrap of info in the advertising and blogging leading up to this event, that told people the chance of getting a holiday item would be so dreadfully low. If people are using up scores of keys and coming up blank, they have every right to feel angry and even deceived.

I personally haven’t given them a cent apart from the box price and never will, because the game is so obviously a Korean-style RNG money sponge and I won’t reward anyone for that. It was masterfully done; I have to give them that. The early game really does deliver some cool new ideas about how these games could (and maybe even should) work. It’s not until you get to the end that you realize what the game really is.

That’s why I’m puzzled over this holiday key fiasco. It’s such a blatant money grab, which is at odds with the much more subtle way they normally reach for your wallet.

People who have played MMOs for a long time know what it looks like when holiday events are actually about fun holiday times. If there are cool appearance items to be had then they are obtained by doing quest chains and such. This… is not that. This is a shameless grab for your wallet. It is too blatant to be anything else.

Some will disagree. Some will argue just because they like to. I care not. The rest of you will know better than to give Anet a single cent more in the future. Do not reward their behavior. Make your feelings known by denying them what they want from you.

The class does have issues, but most of what the OP wrote is his own issue. Yes it’s annoying to see “obstructed” for no good reason. Yes, it’s annoying that pet AI is just this side of kitten and has great difficulty attacking anything that moves — which is everything in PVP. For PVE I would also add that my pet couldn’t hold aggro if I glued it to his paw.

But if you’re getting hit by anything other than another ranged player, you’re doing it wrong. Longbow & shortbow. Or, your weapon is “the bow” and you have 10 skills. However you want to look at it. If a bow ranger ever gets killed by a melee player, it happened because you were in the wrong place and doing the wrong thing. Swords and knives can only hurt you if for some reason you take your ranged class into melee range. Why on Earth would you do that?

It’s been said that all level 80 exotics are considered equal for this purpose. I don’t have the thread handy but the gist of the response was that “Sharpie, Sword of the Darned” and a crafted 80 exotic are seen equally by the Mystic Slot Machine.

Note that “Sharpie, Sword of the Darned” is not a real item.

Poplik.8697:

Hey, is it just me or is it… unwise to craft rare jewelery? Seeing as it needs ectoplasm anyway I might as well craft exotic?

Am I missing something? Sure it needs orbs but they are easily craftable from lower level tier gems.

There is absolutely no point in crafting the rare pieces requiring 3 orbs & ecto when the exotic only needs 5. Orbs can be transmogrified from lower level gems, and Orichalcum is a 100% drop rate once you locate the current position of the nodes in Malchor’s, Cursed Shore and Frostgorge.

Anyone who tells you the 3&3 rare versions are worth making are probably the same people selling items for < material value yet believe they are still making money.

Extremely cool of you to put this together, thank you.

teviko.6049:

@Travis

I think you fail to realize something. It’s not supply and demand, its all about demand.

No. It’s much more accurate to say that blissfully unaware sellers often fall for the absurdly low buy price; here “absurdly” is defined as “below the value of the materials”. I don’t care how hard someone wishes I will sell something for 1g when its materials are worth 1.50g; it’s not going to happen. Ever.

Unfortunately, not everyone realizes the mistake they’re making when they do sell for that price and so we all suffer.

So in a way you are sort of right, in that people who think the buy price always represents fair value and/or don’t consider material value are driving the market — driving it straight into the gutter, and taking us all along for the ride.

I have. And I will also continue to discuss the matter and compare notes with others who are experiencing this problem here in the forum.