I think Event Scaling seems to be doing an okay job when you go from soloing an event to doing it with a couple of others to there being 5 or so there but the events seem to have an upper cap point where they no longer get any more difficult and any more players over that cap tends to quickly turn the event into a trivial event.
I don’t mind relatively easy events, especially when I am going from A to B and I like to jump on events in transit to my destination. However, I love really hard events if I just want to go somewhere for something that is a challenge.
I think a suggestion would be an event grading system. Green for easy events, Yellow for difficult events and Red for insanely hard challenges, with rewards geared to the difficulty of the event, both in terms of it’s grading and it’s scaled level.
I can solo a lot of events on my own but some are inherently difficult and I can’t solo, they are meant to scale down but there are just too many mobs at the lowest point, others are trivially easy even when there are a whole bunch of people afk in the vicinity.
Green should be events that you can solo and when you see the event notification you can automatically see if it is something you are a reasonable chance of doing just, then you have your Yellow events which are suited for small groups of people with scaling built in to it to allow for a few more or less. Red would be more common in higher level zones but I would have one Red DE area at least in each zone.
Currently we have the mega zergs running between events and they just can’t handle the number of people that push into it and there is no way it can be designed to be doable solo or with a small number of people and provide a challenge to a small army that wade through. If you expect the army then you are at least half a chance of making it a challenge.
I think it would be nice if people could easily determine what kind of encounters they were looking for and where they can go find them and have suitable challenges around depending on the number of people around. At present it is a bit of Russian roulette if you stumble into an event that is doable or not depending on who is around.
A problem I find is that bringing downed players up is critical to the success of DEs, especially the ones where the mobs can flatten a dozen people at a time. Yet, as soon as you go to revive someone you are pretty much guaranteed to lose gold participation. In one event I revived something like 20 people and got bronze. If we just go for the damage these events wont complete successfully.
I don’t like that you need to farm ungodly amounts of these fine materials when you can come by the other resources just exploring through the game.
I was getting a few of these when i was farming the normal scales in frostgorge. I also like the zone a whole lot better than any zone infested wall-to-wall with risen, as their AI is either really buggy or intentionally obnoxious.
I levelled 2 of my characters to 400 cooking and I knew it would get changed, could have bought a lot of materials but didn’t really care, doing cooking on a third character the normal way, ie discovering things and it is not that difficult. There are some recipes you can still produce a lot of easily enough.
You can craft Berserker (Power + Precision + Critical Damage) Bows, Horns, Harpoon Guns and Torches as a Huntsman which a Ranger can use. Berserker is ideal for Longbow use.
Carrion (Power, Vitality, Condition Damage) is probably best for Short-bow or builds which favour conditions. Precision and Crit Damage is worthless for condition builds as conditions never crit.
You can make exotic versions at 400 crafting and you can also make legendary items with some obnoxious level of farming and use of the mystic forge.
Huntsman is good for a Ranger. Also, getting access to Wood and Metal is easy. You will need to farm your buns off if you want to do Leather working, because leather (and cloth for Tailoring) is stupidly ridiculously hard to find in quantity and most people just buy stuff to salvage, which inflates the cost of items.
On the flip side, some of your leather items will have a lot more value and will tend to move more frequently than weapons because most people salvage any leather and cloth armour they find/make to make the process less obnoxious.
Realistically, you could probably buy the best rare and exotic items you wanted if you devoted all your time to just sell the raw materials and just buy the finished good you were after. I don’t think crafting is worth the journey unless you have a burning desire for a legendary item. If I was to buy the raw materials for an exotic item, it would be roughly the cost of the finished product.
(edited by Vim.7318)
I wish my level 80 bags would strop dropping useless cooking ingredients I can get from level 1 mobs.
what would be the point of the trading post if you could efficiently farm everything you need?
try “trading” for what you need instead of farming it all?
It gets very expensive to just buy things all the time, unless you are plowing gems for cash.
I got my huntsman to 400 (avoiding making bows due to leather requirement) and my leatherworking is sub 100 and I have pushed 3 characters through lowbie zones. It is ridiculous and it is why leather/cloth armour is so expensive compared to metal armour.
I am not sure if it exists or not but I tend to rotate and farm a number of different of things, it also lets me expand the amount of node resources and events i stumble across as well. I get bored if I am one spot for too long.
I haven’t seen the recipe anywhere yet.
My pets look like they work. I wish we could get them to auto-cast their F2 ability, for some like the Arctodus it is fairly lackluster so don’t care if it uses it on cooldown. I’d actually prefer to have control of it’s defy pain.
For PvP/WvW I use a Jungle Spider as main pet and Brown Bear as the second pet. Spider spits at range and can immobilize and poison and the special is a 2sec stun on the next attack. Bear is used to tank stuff and it’s special is an AE condition removal.
For PvE I use the Arctodus on land and Armor Fish in the water.
Conditions blow.
Focus on power/precision and crit with enough toughness to taste for pvp, the damage will be significantly higher and you will also do good damage in death shroud and blazing damage in lich form.
Conditions just do not scale very well, bleeds only take 5% of condition damage stat and poison 10% and people can remove them before they do remotely close to their full damage.
I personally like the spectral utilities and focus on traits which boost life blast, extend duration of spectral abilities and lower cooldown. Axe is your best weapon for direct damage. You can stack on a mountain of vulnerability on an opponent which really boosts your damage.
The problem is it seems you are focusing on a condition build. Necromancer condition builds are terribad. They got kittened hard after BWE1.
Firstly, conditions don’t crit, so they are innately kittened compared to direct damage.
Secondly, according to the official wiki, bleeds only take 5% of your condition damage stat, poison only 10% and they aren’t exactly generous with that stat.
Direct attacks benefit from your weapon damage and power, and can crit inflicting 150%+ prowess + item bonus damage on a crit. However, this damage is mitigated, condition damage is not.
Direct Damage/Crit route also boosts the effectiveness of Death Shroud and Lich Form damage, substantially.
Problem is there is no real balance and scaling is out of whack, conditions are very powerful at low levels, scale poorly and get weaker by the level.
This is problematic for Necromancer because for direct damage you have Power in the Spite tree, Precision (crit chance) in Curses and Prowess (crit damage) in Soul Reaping.
I prefer to use axe/focus and go 30 in Spite (II, VI and XI for Axe Training) and 20 in both Curses (V, X) and Soul Reaping (IV, VI), although for spvp more toughness helps.
You get Might and Fury when going into Death Shroud and the primary attack causes vulnerability.
Vulnerability is a big part of the benefit of the direct damage build, you can massively boost your damage with vulnerability.
My preferred utilities are Consume Conditions, Spectral Armor, Spectral Wall, Spectral Grasp and Lich Form. Always use the staff as the secondary weapon, setup the marks and switch to the axe.
I have a level 80 ranger, if you setup to do direct damage you will do more damage than the ranger, you will hit like a wet noodle with a condition build. On a longbow you pretty much only have rapid fire as the only decent damaging attack. Yeah, it hits hard but that is about it. The main advantage ranger has is Skirmishing has both Precision and Prowess. On the flip side the ranger traits are woefully bad, other than the longbow one.
I am not sure if it is a bug with the mob AI or if it is intended but at times I am fighting Risen be it a storyline quest or a zone full of Risen and I will have Risen mobs come from everywhere and agro on me irrespective if I have done any damage to them or not and they will ignore other players, my pet (ranger) or npc.
If they always did it then I would lean towards it being something intentional but it is just now and then when it happens and they will swarm all over me and I am forced to just run around in circles until other players/npcs/pets kill them. I know there is a boss which has the focus target ability which behaves similarly but this is happening on mobs which have no special abilities, at least not labelled and most of the time they do not behave like this.
If it was consistent behaviour it is something you could plan around, but I don’t think any class is really built to have so many mobs mindlessly chase you around, if i stand still then I will get one shot by the wave of mobs.
Generally standing behind my pet with mob(s) in front of my pet with me backing off is good enough to get mobs off of me almost always, except Risen when they are in psycho mode. If they always behaved that way then you can build to help survive it but it is extremely inefficient to build a survival build/gear for the infrequent times that it happens.
It just feels annoying/un-fun scenario, when I can I just run far enough until I drop all agro but it is not always possible/desirable depending on the environment and situation.
I think the Black Lion Trading Company has been investing in derivatives, we are facing the Guild Wars Financial Crisis (GWFC)! :P
It ate my money as well. I went to buy some totems to craft some items and at first i hit the button and nothing happened, so i tried a few times and in the end it managed to register every time i hit the button and took the money each time but only once, the first time, did it actually refund the money, the next 6 or 7 it did not. Nothing appears on the transaction history of bought items.