Guild Wars 2

The young karka and the skelk in particular drop T6 blood.

However, thanks to the 200% MF buff from the negotiator, as usual I’m getting nothing but junk (the occasional shells) from normal karka and crazed alike.

I haven’t managed to hit any type of DR as yet, unlike the poster above me (translation, The Witch’s Hammer). I decided to go with the coin buff as I can do more with real in-game currency than MF (hopes and dreams).

Again, that animation is the confusion effect which comes from the head.

It’s good to keep your expectations low, because then you won’t be as disappointed when you don’t get one. They ARE a rare drop after all and only the very lucky get anything considered to be ‘good’.

Anet will probably take one look at the results of this poll when it’s published, and go “meh.. so what, we’re gonna keep doing things the way that we want to”. It’s only when their metrics are showing that there’s something wrong (ie. things aren’t getting used/traded, people aren’t visiting areas, doing events, etc.) that they’ll actually sit up and take notice.

It’s just an opinion poll, and you know what they say about opinions…

PS: I don’t believe you asked what we thought about the weapon skins.

Hehe the buff wears off in 23 hours after getting it. o.0

Nah I reckon it has something to do with looting the chest, but I’d like for a dev to qualify this please.

I did several hours in southsun last night and eventually scooped 2 crates towards the end. If DR were going to kick in it should have done it hours before.

Well on Friday night I did the same thing as I was doing last night except with none of the negotiator’s buffs and that’s when I noticed it the first time. So it isn’t related to any other boon or condition. I saw the zerg running from one event to another and we were all emitting these puffs of blue smoke from behind us about once a second so it appears we were all very close to the chest.

Hmm, definitely plausible. I tried this a number of times, both not going closer than I had to to get the chest open, and going right up to the chest. It seems the effect comes from being close to the chest.

I can’t find any other reason why it would happen, other than this supposed glitch.

No it’s definitely not confusion, there’s no conditions in my bar, nor on any of the other people’s that I asked.

Confusion is a different coloured effect, it’s more a purpley colour and always around the head, this is around the chest instead.

Ok I got some views on this but no answers.

Here’s a bit of visual proof.

Pic #1: As my character is moving, a blue puff of (smoke?) emerges. This has nothing to do with the armour, weapon or backpiece.

Pic #2: The same blue smoke puff further away (hard to get a good shot of it)

Pic #3: I’ve outlined in red the types of effects I’m seeing, some others have seen it as well, but not the majority of people yet. “Pink Cotton Candy” for instance, has this same glow when not moving as I do, but due to the small character it’s more visible on that character than it is on me, where you can only just see it under the arms.

Pic #4: A closer look at the same effect on the character next to me shows a multi-coloured glow emitting from the chest.

I noticed this yesterday while zerging the instigators, some people have this kind of multi-coloured aura coming from their chestpieces while others don’t. It’s more visible on the slender-built (human, sylvari) characters. This is while they’re standing still. Moreover, while running, approximately every second, there seems to be puffs of blue smoke from the affected characters.

I haven’t narrowed down a single commonality that would attribute to this; it’s not a boon or a condition, it’s not errant weapon or backpiece particle effects, etc. so I was wondering if anyone had any ideas, or if they’d noticed it as well… perhaps someone from Anet can chime in and tell us what it’s all about.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

no new armor models in the southsun shore story stuff.

Although looking like a crab would be pretty sweet.

The sclerite shell backpiece makes us look kind of like a mursaat, except we don’t get to float. As for that backpiece and the other skins in this story (except for the Fervid Censer)… uhh-gly.

I think I’ll remember it as the second-biggest pile of fail Anet have released. The other one that happened last November has had it’s name uttered so many times in infamy I dare not speak it here again.

It was the selling of a particular event for what, 4 months, spaced out so we were waiting with bated breath for something epic to happen each time, and each time they let us down. “Oh it’s gonna get better in the next episode”… no it didn’t. It was basic, repetitive and rather tedious for very little reward. It wasn’t even very exciting, but the inner charity worker within us all was doing backflips.

It put people into two different zones, an occasional bit of tactical fighting was required to complete a section here or there with Braham and Rox, then the dungeon at the end which would have capped it off nicely if it weren’t the penultimate stage of the story arc. A lot of players were looking for something a bit more tangible/practical than a lame bonfire at the end of it all, and the gratis gauntlets for doing your 5/5 achieves in that story line was a bit ho-hum. Yay we got some more achievement points… for what we still don’t know, but we’re happy we got some achievement points!! I guess if the cool stuff weren’t RNG or gem store based then people would have had a more positive experience from the F&F, like walking away from it without such mixed feelings.

To sum up: I’m guessing the creative department were all out of ideas on this one. I get the feeling that when they try hard to make something they think is gonna be epic, it gets everyone’s hopes up and then we’re kind of unceremoniously booted off that pedestal at the end of it all. Having said that, when they made something like the SAB and took a retro curve on things, I’ve never seen so many happy people wanting to play the game! Have a look back through the SAB section of the forums; it was page after page of joyous people sharing their love for the game and what a marvellous job Anet had finally done – so much so that hundreds of people were asking if it could possibly stay as a permanent thing. It was like OMG…. SO MUCH WIN!! Fantastic skins, a real platformer with great challenges and a feeling of reliving childhood (for us elder gamers). It’s like the minigame we always wanted.

And now they finish off F&F like this, it’s such a let-down in comparison.

Anyway… just my thoughts. [clink]

No cutscene here. And yes this ending to an event is rather anti-climatic. I can’t justify the hours spent in this portion of the game for the outcome, once again battling RNG almost every step of the way for anything decent or bragg-worthy except for those ghastly gauntlets.

This smacks of red herring to me; something they’re doing on the side and this was supposed to placate the masses until that ‘something’ was ready for launch. But I don’t know, I keep hoping that they’re going to have something to match the epicness of SAB and that hope seems to dwindle with the more fail like this that I see. Bring on the second part of SAB, the sooner the better.

Probably because it’s not the easiest experience for people who are lower levels with sub-par gear compared to an accomplished 80 with all the fruit. Dungeons are made to test people even at max level and it’s not surprising that people below 80 aren’t being taken regularly.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

Keys are rarer drops than precursors. Really. It is so ridiculous.

But they do in fact drop.

I’d go along with this. I was lode farming when i got my first one at ~2100 hours logged. I’d hazard that a precursor would stand a better chance at dropping than a key, but I’ve not had one of those drop either.

Ridiculous is a good word, but stupidly rare is more apt. For a white item whose only real purpose is to serve as an aide for alt’s (and maybe get a fused weapon ticket) it’s beyond a joke.

Thanks for the reply, and for the links.

The only thing I can really add to this is that the dev’s will always be oblivious to this flaw because they spend more time working with people in teams on their test-beds than they do in the live MMO, and this is by far not the only flaw to occur because of said behaviour.

I firmly believe they need to spend more time in the game to realise what’s going on first-hand to get accurate accounts of what people are so frustrated about.

I don’t know if anyone else has this issue as well, but I’ve found one of the most annoying things about the gameplay in PvE is the lack of a maintained target. This never happened in GW1 because the target you chose you never lost sight of, the AI made sure of that.

What I mean by a maintained target: the target will either be lost in battle or shift to another random target depending on where the character is facing. Even if I click on the target to maintain it, it’s not guaranteed to hold.

Some of the best examples of this are in meta events. The Shatterer is one, in fact any dragon really, but probably the best one is the Inquest Golem Mark II meta. People will stand right at the base of the target enemy (the golem) and the target won’t maintain for more than about 10 seconds before it’s lost to something else. I’ll be at the base of this target all the time and there will be nothing anywhere closer to me than this target, but for some reason even hitting C (for closest target) won’t always work.

Is there anything effective to prevent this from happening? I’m sure I’m not the only one who has noticed it and there’s probably similar threads around but this is being rather specific.

I started noticing the performance of the client/server going downhill from the dreaded Nov 15th weekend. The karka event was the start of everything on a downward slide for me, it’s like the game reduced it’s performance capabilities by half from just that one event, and never really regained the same flare it had before.

I don’t want to address this from a tech perspective, I’m just giving my own observations as to what happened and when it started. From what I could see, I believe the culling really started taking a massive hit on the performance of the game, and again, only from what I’ve seen, the patches that we’ve had for this have worked around the issue rather than attacking it.

So yes, I fully believe some big-time optimisation is in order for the game, and I think it’s long overdue. My system specs should be well above what the game can dish out, but yet I’m struggling to get 15FPS during a typical dragon fight. I also have an SSD on the way which should help.

Orrian boxes are the only reliable way to extract the most gold from the most karma investment. Dump in 250 × 4550 karma (a stack of boxes) and you’ll reliably see an easy 4-5g return on investment, mostly on…. junk. Lodestones aren’t as reliable from the boxes because of their small chance drop rate, and ironically nor are any of the potions, even though they’re exotic drops, because of their commonness they’re worth only a few silver on the TP.

The best thing about the orrian boxes is that you’ll get karma back to you in about 4 different forms ranging from a drop (400 karma each) to a swig (3000 karma each) and as it turns out, you won’t lose that much karma on your initial investment; conservatively about 20% when you use all the karma items, again depending on how much karma you spend. So it’s a pretty good way to rinse/repeat karma use if you have nothing else to spend it on from all those events.

I found another program on the SourceForge site called Dual Swap which looked promising; it’s job is to swap individual windows to the other monitor(s) via an interface button <→ but even running windows fullscreen GW2 didn’t want to play ball.. it just stayed in the left screen no matter how many times I tried the shortcut or the interface button. Now I can’t get rid of it because it doesn’t have an uninstall function. >_<

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

What do I need to do to get my GW2 client running on the right screen in glorious 1920×1080 without it switching back over to the left screen? I already tried windowed-fullscreen but that did the same. I also tried dragging out the edges to the extremes of the screen but it keeps snapping back…

I’ll say it again…

I’m running my web browser and stuff on my left screen (where the task bar is atm) and GW2 on the right.

I want to run GW2 in either fullscreen or windowed FS without it snapping back over to the left screen. Right now it won’t stay on the right screen if I do either of these options. I can only run it on the right screen in windowed mode.

I tried moving the task bar over to the right screen, but the same thing happens. GW2 seems to want to be native to the left screen in fullscreen or windowed FS mode no matter what I try. Even switching over screens in the display properties section doesn’t help, the task bar and icons are still on the left screen.

Like I said I’m completely new to this so I need a bit more help please.

I tried that before, both screens are on 1920×1080 and while the game client is on the right side screen, when I hit windowed fullscreen it auto snaps back to the left side screen. I want it to stay on the right side.

I’ve gotten two identical-sized (24") monitors which I’m running on my PC through Crossfired HD7870’s. Bear in mind I’m a total noob to running things on dual-screens so just follow me here.

I chose to make my left screen the main (with the task bar, etc.) and run GW2 off the right. Only problem is I can’t run it in anything better than windowed mode without it snapping back to the left screen and making me alt-tab between screens, completely defeating the purpose of my dual-screen solution.

I tried a search in these forums for my problem but didn’t come up with much that was related. What do I need to do to get my GW2 client running on the right screen in glorious 1920×1080 without it switching back over to the left screen? I already tried windowed-fullscreen but that did the same. I also tried dragging out the edges to the extremes of the screen but it keeps snapping back about 20 pixels from the top and bottom borders of the screen.

Please help.

Elementalist.

I started off GW1 with an ele, and now I continue it for sentiment/legacy. I know that sounds a bit stupid but mastering an ele on this was harder than the original. These guys can fight up close and fight well with devastating damage if they’re geared up right, and without the use of an aggro-bubble (or a compass for that matter), I was very used to fighting from the outer.

I have one of each profession so I’ll gradually find out which is my fave over time.

Nah these are all envelope mails, I have 10 in there (all read) and it’s just not working as intended.

Can we get a dev/red post on this to see what’s going on please?

Still not working.

I thought it might have been someof the green-star mails instead of the envelopes that I hadn’t deleted, it wasn’t that. I have 10 envelopes sitting in my mailbox and I can’t get anymore, but I’m not receiving the hint that the mailbox is full.

Weird.. I’ve had that happen before when I’ve had either 8 or 9 mails in the box, but not all 10. I guess I’ll find out.

In the hint (?) thing in the top row, it says I only have 66% of my Social requirements met. It won’t recognise a full mailbox, even though I have 10/10 mails in there.

Is this a common bug and is there a fix for it?

Reloading.3260:

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

Using exotics is the way to go… think of it this way, you won’t always get an exo back from throwing in rares, but you will always get an exo back from throwing in exo’s. Yes cost is a limiting factor, but if you have 600-700g to throw away in the forge, why not use something that guarantees an exo in return than gambling away rares? It’s only a matter of time before that exo is a pre.

I’d rather not buy a flipped greatsword that was first produced by a bot.

A rare greatsword costs 33.75s to craft, 39s to buy as of yesterday. An exo costs 3.20.90g to craft, 2.48g to buy.

4 rare = 1.35g
4 exo = 12.83.60g (and guaranteed exo return).

I usually get an exo from rares every 5-6 attempts.

5×1.35g= 6.75g for 5 rare gs attempts.

It’s nearly half the price to use rare greatswords. Having said that, I’ve put another 1400 rare gs and 60 exos + exo returns through today with no precursor. Now I’ve got 0 mats and maybe 1g across my account. Was fun for a little while, might come back when they figure out how to distribute loot and fix pve culling. You know, put the massively multiplayer in mmo.

I like the theoretical nature of your calculations. However my experiences (and I’m sure plenty of other’s too) are quite a bit different. Working from averages doesn’t work in the real world. I’ve quite often had runs of 20-25 x4 rares thrown in and only rares in return. I’ve found I have to be exceptionally lucky to grab an exo in return for 4 rares in the forge.

As it is, I’m usually getting an exo every 10-12 tries which for me is still the non-viable way of doing things. Having said that, I still can’t feel right about RNG or rewarding someone else’s phenomenal luck with xxx gold because it’s not what they wanted and we have to pay through the nose for it based on demand and a severe under-supply of these ridiculously hard-to-come-by weapons.

P.S. If you’re going to bother to delete a post, delete where its quoted too. Though the incompetence doesn’t really surprise me.

I’m hoping this wasn’t directed at me, but since you were quoting me I have to guess that it wasn’t aimed at anyone else. :|

Using exotics is the way to go… think of it this way, you won’t always get an exo back from throwing in rares, but you will always get an exo back from throwing in exo’s. Yes cost is a limiting factor, but if you have 600-700g to throw away in the forge, why not use something that guarantees an exo in return than gambling away rares? It’s only a matter of time before that exo is a pre.

I got my achieve for Zone 2 yesterday according to the dulfy guide; basically all you really need to do is spot all the baubles inside the hidden areas by moving the camera around and it should be good.

Mine was done first time round, same with Zone 1. Zone 3 I’ll be attempting tomorrow by myself, wish me luck.

Indeed, we had no warning and for the sake of the people who don’t appreciate said mechanics of the game in the above posts, this isn’t really a fair option.

Yes the Continue Coins used to be in the 3rd tab down and used to only cost 25 baubles, now they’re 1 bauble bubble (250 baubles to trade for one). I think they added stuff in the 2nd tab like obby shards, etc. but they also are missing an arrow in the main text, so one of the dialogue(?) options has gone from that menu.

Tanek thankyou very much for the link, you made my day.

I just had a look at Moto’s vendor lists in Rata Sum and some things have changed.

Whatever has been done was definitely a subtle change without requiring and update.

No I didn’t!! Link me up!

In the meantime can we please get a Dev response on this issue?

Tanek.5983:

Uh oh. Wonder if someone decided to wreck it with an exploit. I hope not.

edit: Unless the world-spawn chests were just an April 1 thing and were turned off along with the character select midi music. That is a possibility.

That should have gone hours ago then, if that were the case. I’m glad I got a movie of that music though, that was epic. However if they were to deactivate the super mystery boxes (as being an April 1st thing) then they let it go well past it’s deadline.

They were there one minute and gone the next, like someone pulled the plug on them.

Confirmed, there’s not one anywhere in the places I’ve been, and I know where quite a few are on the Tyrian map.

It’s like they’ve just been pulled off the map.

Dante.1508:

Sorta off topic

But my Engi cannot hit jormag or his ice wall with 1200 traited Rifle but my ranger with short bow in the same spot can hit both easily, it also claims 1200 range?

Is Engi bugged..

Even more OT, Claw of Jormag has several parts where it appears to be either bugged or inconsistent at least. For instance I can throw fireballs at twice the speed of a bazooka [Fire Missile] for the same damage as that pact weapon skill and no recharge time. Plus I can use Arcane Blast every 15 seconds and hit for the same amount again. The only problem is at this event, event though it’s by default, #1 skill has to be manually spammed. Auto-attack for some reason is disabled there, and I still can’t figure out why. Perhaps it’s the range, I don’t know. The range of the Fire Missile is 2000 if I’m not mistaken, and the Fireball is only 1200.

Elementalists have always had one, a utility called Arcane Blast. 1500 range and guaranteed crit. It’s a winner.

Darth Llama.9217:

Guardian Of Tyria.6397:

So the timer is now comparable to other boss events, but can we make the actual event comparable to other boss events and not something that can have the “boss” be zerg steamrolled in less than 15 seconds? It’s not even fun.

Last week, there was a Wurm event on my server (Blackgate) where the Wurm died so fast the event never actually triggered and there was no chest. The Wurm was literally dead before it even spawned in all the way.

The Maw is only slightly better, I did the Maw earlier today and he was dead in about 10-12 seconds. As it is, I stopped doing the very last pre event where you destroy the 3 portals because if you’re too far away from the boss, you can’t get back in time to get in a hit before he dies. Both these ‘bosses’ need a serious buff.

I believe you’re both forgetting that these are meta world boss events held inside starter areas of the Tyrian map. Same with the fire elemental at Thaumanova. Of course they’re gonna drop like a lead balloon with so many L80’s on them at once, all for the sake of the loot. The fire ele is actually probably the hardest one of those examples to get to drop, the others are soft by comparison. Even with the appropriate level scaling in effect, we do a heap more damage than if the bosses were expecting starter characters.

I thought the boss events like this were supposed to be appropriately scaled to the number of people participating in them? My question is, are the bosses in these starter areas expecting L80’s to thump the crap out of them?

Sorry to dig up an oldie, but this still exists and needs a fix. The blast radius extends another 1/4 of the red circle which isn’t very fair for people in the ice chamber of Thaumanova trying to infuse a Matrix Cube Key. They have to be both very quick and very lucky to get past the last one without falling to death, without having inherent stability attributes/traits.

I bought 10 unid’s from the laurel vendor and got Abyss and Midnight Fire out of those 10. Two of the best looking dyes in the game, and with my rotten luck that’s saying something.

The math – well it’s just better than 20% chance of hitting a rare from an unid dye. Still, better than 0.2%. It’s the same with chance of rares in the mystic toilet, toss 4 in and 20% chance of getting an exo. What is it with this game’s RNG and 20% figure.. coincidence? o.0

Top: Crafting in Hoelbrak. “Got a problem?”

Bottom: Armour in Midnight Fire, Blood and Ancient Silver. Coldsnap scepter and Ghastly Dagger.

Kojiden.8405:

I’m setting my expectations low after the january and february updates concerning the living story.

Right there with you. Getting psyched and being excited about something after what has been done so far is rather hard to fathom. I believe at best it’s hope being tempered with a big dash of disappointment. I don’t believe it’s something to get very excited about, and there’s no better teller of this tale than GW2’s (short) history. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than excited and let down (again).

Edit: I only read the first post in this thread, but just realised that myself and Rising Dusk.2408 have virtually the same opinions on this, and it’s no real surprise why.

Himei.5379:

sostronk.8167:

Not like the Karka event though. I put over 30 hours into the event and missed out on the chest because in my timezone the “finale” was a Monday morning whilst I was at work.

Yeah, I was pretty upset at that myself. Just like you, I was at work like many were (or sleeping). If it was announced that a chest of that importance was given, I think many would have went into work late, left work early or skip work altogether.

I was in the same boat as you guys over that weekend, having invested similar time for the other quests, bugged as they were. Regardless it wouldn’t have mattered. That event was aimed squarely at one timezone alone and if you couldn’t stay online with Anet’s servers (which a lot couldn’t), then it was highly unlikely that you would be getting back on again, no matter where in the world you were.

The timezone they aimed to shoot for was their “highest concurrency” ie. west coast of USA, but obviously this didn’t work either because the servers, no matter how well they were upgraded, just could not support the highest concurrency of players. The mass culling and eventual booting of players was enough to rile anyone up. Imagine the number of people that would have gone through the roof if they knew that they stood a VERY good chance of a precursor from the end chest. Highest concurrency or not, I reckon the servers would have crashed.

Two words: Trading Post

Make sure you don your Armani suit so you can fit in with all the other power-brokers.

That’s if you even have to use lodes to craft it.

Wise gambler’s credo: only ever gamble what you can afford to lose.

Agreed that there’s nothing legendary about buying a precursor or a whole legendary from the trading post… Anet made a very big mistake allowing them to be obatined that way, and in the process made them rather un-Legendary.

Indeed. Anet seems to love dishing out titles so I thought if there was another to be gotten here it would be at the end of this hunt, like they did in the first part. I really couldn’t care less about another title, I’ve got what I need to display from GW1.