Guild Wars 2

You don’t have to listen to his dialogue each attempt. There’s a brazier at the very beginning of the instance you can activate that lets you skip right up to the boss fight.

The chest drops are based on the appearance of the treasure chest, rather than a specific location. Chest appearances do tend to vary based on location, but this is inexact. The Asura chest, for example, can appear in Maguuma zones where Asura live, but it also appears in some Asura labs in other places like Fireheart Rise. So a place like Drydock Scratch might have several different chest graphics as you go through the JP, and thus provide you with more than one ornament.

As for the actual question, yes, you can get the Orrian-style chest later outside of Wintersday, as long as you’ve progressed to the point where you’re starting to get those drops from chests.

I don’t know if anyone actually read the post…

Edge of the Mists will not help you, to earn XP for masteries you need to actually play in the new zones. Participate in the event chains where you can, do adventures (particularly the easy ones like Salvage Pit) daily, and make use of those Experience Boosters you have sitting in your bank from your achievement chests. The new Experience Boosters will give a 50% increase to all experience you earn, not just experience from kills like the old ones. This includes the sizable chunks of XP you get from events and adventures.

You can also proceed onwards through Heart of Thorns zones without advancing the story, just by exploring the map. It won’t necessarily be easy if you don’t have all the masteries required for movement, but someone with only Basic Gliding can still make it all the way to the final zone, Dragon’s Stand, given time and the knowledge of where to go.

That’s far from the only question people should be asking about that. The bigger one is, why don’t Tixx’s toys appear as spawns from those gift boxes anymore? It’s always Skritt now, when it used to be a mix of Skritt or toys.

Sloth and Dominator go by stupidly fast because they don’t scale well and lots of people flock to them, but Jade still isn’t bad, as long as you can fight it in melee. I can take it down solo in around 5-6 minutes.

It just sucks when a dozen people stand up on the top ledges and do dinky ranged auto-attacks, slowing the whole process down.

Thief also has a trait that gives them 10% extra damage for 4 seconds after dodging, and makes that dodge deal damage. With a Mist Mobility Potion you can make use of that trait much more often.

For Karma, either run Ember Bay/Bitterfrost Frontier having bought the maximum Karmic Retribution buffs in those zones and kill as many things as you can, or take part in Wintersday activities using as many Karma buffs as you can get (enrichment, food/utility, snow globe, banner and booster). The donation drive daily will give the biggest return with boosters, but you also get large rewards for the first three completions of Bell Choir and Winter Wonderland, then smaller rewards for each subsequent completion.

As for Bandit Crests, just participate in the Silverwastes meta. You’ll get some for every event you succeed at, and more for winning the Breach and killing the Vinewrath.

Khisanth.2948:

Then there is wurm, dominator and sloth. That is another 9.

The Jade boss and the Karka boss each drop 3 Petrified Wood for the first daily kill as well.

The minis are the same minis that were available from past Wintersdays, and they’re also available from the Wintersday PvP/WvW Reward Tracks. As such, if you want all the rewards, pick the five skins from your five completions this year, and get the minis elsewhere.

They’ve already announced that the map achievements will no longer be temporary. They will become permanent, the ones for Capricorn will return, and they’ll add similar achievements for the existing maps.

perro.2781:

The thing is that I actually need the backpack to craft the next one. So I can’t salvage it because I will lost it :o.

You’re confused about what backpack they’re telling you to salvage.

The Fractal Capacitor backpack should not be salvaged. You need to keep upgrading it to progress through the collection. However, at the completion of your first collection to unlock the second one, you crafted the backpack “Finite Result”, the first step towards the precursor. You need to salvage that to get an item needed to craft “Upper Bound”, the second step towards the precursor. And you’ll also get several Balls of Dark Energy from salvaging it.

So salvage Finite Result. Leave the Fractal Capacitor alone!

What everyone else hasn’t said because it’s obvious to long-time players of Guild Wars 2 is that you don’t need to do content of your level to progress. Your brother might be level 26, but he can still participate in the level 1-15 Wayfarer Foothills zone adjacent to Diessa Plateau and advance himself, and from there move on to the 15-25 zone Snowden Drifts to the west. By the time he’s completed one or both of those zones, he’ll be high enough level for the next Ascalon zone, Fields of Ruin, though he’ll need to travel there via roundabout route through the human city Divinity’s Reach.

Can’t say for Walking On Fire, but Skip Up The Volcano is the achievement for the Chalice of Tears JP. The starting point for it is in the northwest near the vista in the Mursaat fortress. Hopefully that gives you a start!

Then you can find something else to do with your time. If you’ve heard bad things about the expansion, why are you even considering buying it?

It’s not removed, it just won’t show up until you actually do it. Most of the Current Events achievements are hidden like that.

There’s now six maps in Heart of Thorns.

If you’re enjoying your original set of maps, you can stick with that and not shell out the extra money. The only time Heart of Thorns will be severely discounted is right before the launch of the next expansion, so if you bought it then you’d promptly wind up right back where you started, missing out on the newest content that people are playing because you don’t want to pay the price for it.

TheFantasticGuy.7206:

What I was surprised by was the lack of people. Either something is going on with the Mega Server system or there just aren’t as many as I’m use to when Living World content drops.

The people are there. Just bear in mind two things. One, there’s a lot of people who are focused on doing the story instances, so they’re trekking from point A to point B without doing much in between. And two, this zone is a lot bigger than Bloodstone Fen. People are spread out over a greater area, and there’s no one big event like Justiciar Hablion or the Jade Bosses/Unbound Guardian to draw people to it.

On top of that, there’s also the new jumping puzzle which is likely occupying a fair share of people.

The Fractal vendor has a tab where you can trade in multiple lower versions of them into higher-tier versions, and thus be able to stack them.

Why do they need luck? Zok was able to easily get the achievement once he learned the conditions to start the event.

Batelle.1680:

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

^ Why is that, incidentally? Why do some nodes disappear like that?

Because there’s a cap on how many top tier nodes you can harvest on any given map.

It’s not just in a given map, always. In the case of Auric Basin, there’s a limit on how many top-tier nodes you can harvest in a specific area. On the cases where there are three Ancient Saplings right near Eastwatch Waypoint, and you harvest two to see the third vanish, you can then head over to Northwatch or Westwatch where there are also often Ancient Saplings and harvest some there.

Different maps handle it different ways, too. I was in a Malchor’s Leap map last night where there were three Orrian Saplings near the middle of the map all within sight of each other, and I was able to harvest the three of them without issue.

OriOri.8724:

According to GW2efficiency.com right now, 56% of players don’t have even a single legendary item/skin. Only 28% of players have more than 1 legendary skin. Spread that out over all of the different weapon types in the game and legendaries are far and away less common than people like you make them out to be.

Be careful about citing those statistics. The only accounts that are tracked for that are people who take the effort to assign their API to that site. Those people will disproportionately be those who want to show off, or who otherwise care about ‘account value’. Most casual players have no idea the site exists, and wouldn’t care if they did.

There’s no way that 56% of the player base has a Legendary weapon. It’s probably more likely that 56% of the player base doesn’t know what a Legendary weapon even is, or what crafting one entails.

Verdant Brink hides a lot of its nodes, for whatever reason. All those canyons that run through the map, if you glide partway down them you’ll find ledges that often have gathering nodes on them, including potentially Ancient Wood or even Rich Orichalcum. But nobody travels by gliding through canyons when you could be walking on the surface instead, so the nodes go unnoticed.

When you compare it to Auric Basin, where Ancient Wood is put within sight of the main waypoints, it’s a no-brainer to decide where to harvest. It’s possible to load into Eastwatch Waypoint and see three Ancient Wood nodes on your minimap, though if that happens the game will only allow you to harvest two, the third one vanishing immediately after.

Verdant Brink simply isn’t a good map for gathering lumber. Auric Basin, on the other hand, is a very good map for gathering lumber, and there’s usually 7-8 Ancient Wood nodes in the zone within striking distance of the four main meta waypoints. You can complete the lumbering daily in Auric Basin without even needing to touch an Elder Wood tree.

The event for Lore Seeker Zolin to go for the Skelk Regurgitant will not occur until the Teku Nuhoch Meta Event has been completed.

OriOri.8724:

I don’t know if I want to have a laurel exchange for them. I would rather have a way we can work for them, such as a reward track specifically for legendary crafting that yields mystic coins. Only repeatable a certain number of times (I think a good limit is once per unlocked, 1st tier legendary collection).

They’ve already stated they intend to add more rewards to the end of the Gift of Battle reward track that are suitable for Legendary crafting. Presumably, this means Mystic Clovers, as right now it doesn’t drop any. I don’t think it would be the end of the world if they added on, say, five Mystic Coins to the end of that reward track. Toss the WvW community a bone.

Djinn.9245:

My comment above is only about how the NEW Legendary crafting is more expensive than the original Legendary crafting method. I would definitely not ask why the new crafting was cheaper – I believe it should be cheaper since the result can’t be sold.

On first reading the post, I assumed you were talking about the new system of Legendary crafting as a whole, and not specifically the four new Legendary weapons that can only be crafted.

So why are they more expensive? Presumably a prestige thing. The old Legendary weapons have existed for a long time, they see how many players have them, so maybe they thought “Lets make the new ones a bit more exclusive”.

There were some adjustments made, too. Chuka and Champawat, the only Legendary weapon to not be released as part of the initial huge set of Gen1 and Gen2 crafting quests, scaled back greatly on the amount of Spiritwood needed and spread it out more evenly among the tiers of progression. They saw the initial feedback and took it into account when moving forward. Unfortunately, the rest are on hold now…

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

I did try with tripwire, but found that I couldn’t land it 100% of the time.

Tripwire should be easy to land, especially if you’re already bringing Fist Flurry and thus will be beating on it in melee. Don’t place it in advance and hope the Vinetooth runs over it during its dash. Just drop Tripwire right underneath it when it’s stopped while you’re in melee and the breakbar is up, and it will activate immediately.

Good luck!

Djinn.9245:

What I don’t understand is why they made the new Legendary crafting process so expensive. When we first heard about it, I assumed that the Legendary weapon you got from the new process would be the same as what you got from the original process. But the Legendary from a crafted Precursor is account bound. So why did they make it
MORE expensive than the original Legendary crafting? An unbound Legendary should be more expensive because you can profit from it.

You can sell Legendaries from crafted Precursors, as long as they’re 1st generation. The Heart of Thorns Legendaries are all account bound and can only be crafted, period.

As for the cost, the Legendary Journey wasn’t intended to make them cheaper, it was intended to provide an alternative to RNG or the Trading Post for acquiring Precursors. The new steps are ways that you can incrementally progress towards your Precursor, by crafting some things every day, performing a scavenger hunt, or (similar to how you got the old ones) just by buying things as you need them. Some people prefer having a solid sequence to work through to be guaranteed a Precursor at the end, rather than having to depend on the Mystic Forge or needing to save up hundreds of gold to click a button. It’s certainly helped me make more Legendary weapons!

Leather is now more valuable than cloth, if that affects your decision making. That said, Mesmer still offers the potential of Sword, Staff and Greatsword, three weapons that are generally expensive.

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

I ran staff and d/p, using skills scorp wire, distracting daggers, fist flurry, and basilisk venom on elite. Any suggestions?

I actually do have suggestions, yeah. Distracting Daggers should be swapped out for Tripwire, which will hit the breakbar much harder and take a total shorter time than Distracting Daggers does. Make sure you position your Basilisk Venom well, of course, activating it when there are as many other things near you as you can. On my kills I didn’t bring Scorpion Wire, using Bandit’s Defense instead to help with the rest of the fight, and there was still enough CC. I haven’t done research, but assuming there’s not many players present, bringing Impairing Daggers might actually be better for the breakbar than Scorpion Wire, with the combination it gives of Slow and Immobilize. Those two conditions can drain a breakbar pretty fast and aren’t too common, so it wouldn’t be like Chill or Cripple that would probably already be applied anyway.

With any luck, as a Mordrem target, the Vinetooth Prime can give you Branch Bash as a steal skill. Use that for even more CC. If you get it on Steal, save it for the CC phase and avoid Stealing again. If you don’t get it, Steal again as soon as you can to try to get it instead. And if you’re really lucky, you can have Branch Bash prepared for the breakbar phase, and be able to Steal another one while you activate the first, to get a double bash.

Basilisk Venom is the single most important thing you can do in the fight. It will melt the break bar if you can share it well, and in a low-man situation it and everything else you can do might be enough all on its own.

As for Vinetooth being doable with three people, it’s inherently going to have an issue with that few people because the major fight mechanic involves one player being automatically downed. With five or six people, the extra players should be able to have enough break bar potential to compensate. With three, the two remaining players might not. Break bars don’t scale below five players, so three players (with one getting downed) will have a harder time than five players (with one getting downed). But it’s still doable.

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

I’m sorry but this is a bit ridiculous. It’s a Vinetooth, not Matthias. I shouldn’t feel like I have to bring a specific character to get it done. The game should not assume that everyone has multiple characters they can bring to the fight.

To answer your question, I have tried on warrior, necro, rev, dd, dh, druid, and temp. Should I gear up a full vipers condi engi and learn how to play engi to attempt Vinetooth Prime? It just doesn’t work if only 3 or 4 of us are using hard CCs.

You say you answered my question, but you didn’t. I asked exactly what CC skills you’re bringing. Having done a couple of low-man Vinetooth Primes using my Daredevil and breaking the bar every time, I can speak to that from experience. So what skills did you equip on your Daredevil?

Astralporing.1957:

Not every pod drops ore.

Since the April patch, and maybe even the January one, every pod drops at least one Crystalline Ore.

JaddynnStarr.5201:

@Malediktus Hmmm your going to have to share the location of the extra pods with me then. by my count you have 30 with all the camps, end reward areas have an additional 15-20 with 5-7 random across the map. thats around 50-55 on average. Where are you finding the additional 30+ pods at?

There are six camps to conquer on the way, two on each path, giving 36 pods there. There are going to be 4-5 pods just naturally along the way on each path as well, and usually a pod underneath each Blighting Tower as well. After finishing the map, the four reward areas with champion/legendary bosses get pods, with 5-7 in the Spider and Mushroom areas, and around 10-15 in the Wyvern and Saurian areas. With the extra post-meta time given, you can get over 80 pods, though the Saurian area in particular can be a pain to harvest them from.

I rarely see people go to the Wyvern area, located east of the end of the northern path’s meta. The pods there are very easy to find and harvest without being attacked. It often pops up a Rich Orichalcum Node as well when the meta ends.

lcpdragonslayer.7895:

I have been doing this everyday and failing everyday because even with ccs on skills 7, 8, 9 and 0

What specific CCs are you using on those bars? If they’re soft CC skills, it’s not going to be enough.

If your character doesn’t have many crowd control options, you might want to bring a different class to the fight. Thief can slot a lot of CC in utilities/elite, for example, while Revenant’s Staff 5 is a superior option to bring as well.

MoarChaos.8320:

Where are you getting 500 from? It’s the same as any legendary except the gifts are different. You still only need 250 mystic coins. I’ve made the Nevermore.

You do need extra ones. The old Gift of Fortune only required 77 Mystic Clovers, to go with the Gift of Might, Gift of Magic and 250 Ectos. The new Mystic Tribute cuts the Ectos out (they move elsewhere in the recipe), requiring Gifts of Condensed Might/Magic, 77 Mystic Clovers and 250 Mystic Coins.

The Mystic Coins in old Legendaries were only needed for the Clovers. Now, you still need the same amount of Clovers, but also 250 Mystic Coins on top of that. If you got your Clovers from PvP/WvW/Login rewards, then that explains why you only needed 250 Mystic Coins, but you would have needed 0 Mystic Coins for an old Legendary.

None of this means there’s really a problem, though. The coins are out there, and it’s probably more advantageous as a whole to have wealthy players inconvenienced by needing to buy extra Mystic Coins at a high price, while poor players get an extra login reward that has actual value for them to sell on the Trading Post and get more gold for other things. Lifting up the poor is more important than placating the rich, especially given the 15% fee that’s coming out of every TP transaction to combat inflation.

creepyXtina.2560:

There are pretty much only 2 ways to get them:
Daily log in reward: 20 coins per month
Fractal Daily Chests: 1-2 (if lucky)

You left out the Ley Line Anomaly event that happens every two hours. It has a Mystic Coin as a guaranteed daily drop on completion. By doing that every day, you can double your Mystic Coin gathering.

If you want them for a Legendary weapon, you also have the option of choosing Legendary Crafting Materials as your monthly login reward, for the 7 Mystic Clovers it gives. You can also acquire more Mystic Clovers by completing PvP and WvW Reward Tracks, and thus reduce your need for Mystic Coins.

Beyond that, making gold is easier now than it’s ever been, with T4 Fractals spoon-feeding liquid gold to you, Auric Basin multi-looting shoveling Ectoplasm into your inventory, and even your simple Daily Achievement completion giving you two gold straight-up. You can take some of that extra gold income and buy extra Mystic Coins you need. If you take the two gold you get from finishing your Daily and use it to buy two Mystic Coins each day, now you’re getting more Mystic Coins than you used to back when you got one from each Daily you finished (and they were worth under a silver).

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I suppose. Seems a bit of overkill to use a L40 Scroll on a key farmer. /shrug

You use that scroll when you want to do a Super Key Farm and farm both the level 10 and level 30 keys at the same time. It’s twice the keys for twice the disappointment profit!

Brisban Wildlands also doesn’t have a jumping puzzle. It was the only original map that lacked one, besides the non-Lion’s Arch cities.

Randulf.7614:

There is at least one in Tangled Depths too involving some mushrooms. I fell off at the final jump much to my immense pleasure………

There are two jumping puzzles in Tangled Depths. The mushroom JP you mentioned right at the Mushroom Queen Hero Point, and another well-hidden one off one of the underwater passages underneath the map. That hidden JP doesn’t have a treasure chest at the end, but you earn a secret achievement if you /dance once you make it to the final room. And things happen.

Amaimon.7823:

When i farm VB or AB i get tons of tokens, but Ive yet to discover a reliable source for leyline crystals. Events dont give them

The post-meta events give leyline crystals. By that I mean, when one of the four meta event areas finishes its event chain, there will be followup random/repeating events that will directly reward currency instead of the Chak Acid that the meta events will give. So help Zildi’s Revive-O-Tron, aid the ogres in taming bats, kill the Champion Mushroom Emperor, and other similar things for crystals.

Bloodstone Fen lets you get Ascended Viper trinkets without raiding. For weapons and armour, you can get recipes to craft them in Auric Basin, both exotic and Ascended tiers.

I was definitely abusing the Venomshare Basilisk! It’s not as strong as pre-patch Venomshare Basilisk, but now I can do it without weakening myself by taking Shadow Arts. You can see the breakbar explode when you get 4 or 5 people Venomshared.

For soloing the Matriarch, Impact Strike is more useful for being able to deliver two CC attacks instead of one. Using that in combination with Tripwire, Fist Flurry/Palm Strike and the often-stolen Branch Bash is more than enough to break the bar of the Matriarch when you’re alone. The biggest threat in that fight is actually when the adds start to appear at half health, since those little ones do even more damage than their mother.

Khisanth.2948:

There are many vinetooth events around AB. Prime requires doing the pylons to get it to spawn. Usually the people pushing the pylons will go for VP as well so it is generally unlikely to even get an attempt at soloing it.

I actually got to do another low-man run on it a couple of days ago. There was a small group of players doing Eastwatch events, and I popped up to help with the last one. When the Vinetooth Prime ran off into its cave, everyone just stood around without saying anything. I finally went with my party member and entered the cave, confident that as a thief I could teleport away from the insta-down attack it would lead off with, which I did. The other handful of players followed us in to fight, and once again even with just six people, it was an easy battle, we broke every bar after that first one.

Definitely a better fight with less people, as long as some of those people know how to use CC. Very much like the Wyvern Matriarch in VB, where when enough camps are lost that I can solo it, I can bring it down much faster than when there’s 40+ people who don’t know the fight mechanics.

Ardid.7203:

I killed it solo(ish) a time ago. I was bored and just spent like… 30 mins kiting and curing myself while sloooooooooowly taking away its life. It was… not very wise, and really inneficient.

From time to time, a few other players appeared and helped me for a few minutes, but nobody actually was interested in losing so much time, so I the end I was alone when I landed the last blow.

I don’t think you’re thinking of the same Vinetooth. Vinetooth Prime has a ten minute timer, as mentioned, but it also has an attack where it targets a single player, chases and downs them no matter how they defend, and needs to have its breakbar broken to avoid killing the downed player outright. If you’re fighting it alone, congratulations, you’re the target for that attack and will get downed.

It is possible for the downed player to escape the fatal attack using a downed teleport skill, which Mesmers do have access to, but that doesn’t help you pick yourself back up. Theoretically, you could also double-Signet of Humility with Continuum Split in the brief time you have before it downs you to break its bar. It’s far more likely, though, that you’re just thinking of another Vinetooth.

ilovepankake.2906:

could you nerf the boss in order to be possible to kill him with 20 ppl because each time I try, I have 20 or less ppl with me

I killed Vinetooth Prime with five people a couple of days ago. The number of people you have doesn’t matter much, and can actually hamper you if there’s too many people who don’t know what they’re doing. A small group that brings a lot of stun/CC skills is going to outperform a large group that just auto-attacks.

Are you slotting yourself with every stun you have available to you before the fight? Are you playing as a class that has exceptional break-bar destroying potential? If not, consider doing that before the fight, and not calling in the entire map to “help”. Unless the entire map brings stuns as well, they’re going to be a hindrance, scaling up the breakbar and making it impossible for the few people who know what they’re doing to actually succeed at the fight.

There’s actually a third hidden achievement as well, to use the unlockable Glider skill 5 into one of the currents used for Ley Line Gliding.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Yeah I meant that; I already have 10+1 and now we can buy three more for a total of 14. I was wondering if that’s intended or just a mess-up that we’re not able to buy 5 more and if it’s not if there’s any particular reason we can only buy 3 now.

You can buy three more as it’s meant to be a tie-in with their new Unbreakable Tools Pack. “Buy the set of three unbreakable gathering tools, and put them in the three new Shared Inventory Slots we’re offering! Yay!”

That’s all.

cephiroth.6182:

Your first source for official info – generic fansites.

Yeah, that’s called marketing. You may or may not be familiar with the term. Arenanet lets the fan sites get the info first to post, and in exchange those fan sites devote more coverage to the game than they would otherwise and thus draw in more players.

Silmar Alech.4305:

I made a video from two runs and here are a few pictures extracted from it without UI. The Anomaly has flowers in it while it runs away!

The flowers aren’t actually part of the Anomaly. They’re a visual effect from the Legendary Longbow Kudzu, which someone is apparently shooting at it.

I’m usually taking the fight to spawning Mordrem when I’m defending a camp on my own or with a pair of players. This sometimes means I’m darting back to the camp after dealing with one group to take care of another group that spawned on the opposite side. In those cases, the Mordrem Grunts and Wolves will be stupidly meleeing the barricades if they weren’t already engaged by some of the NPC defenders.

When the fighting is actually inside the camp, of course the Mordrem are going to focus on the players dealing damage to them, but when there’s fewer players around and the fighting is more mobile, the barricades/walls can certainly occupy Mordrem attention. And as I said, the Vine Tendrils will happily waste their projectile attacks on the walls as long as no players have dealt damage to them to draw their attention.

Nova.7261:

Also something seems off for even with full stacks of bloodlust, my damage is still weaker then other players.

What weapon(s) are you using? You said S/A in your first post. Is that Scepter or Staff? Axe? A Staff and Axe weapon swap?

If you’re in Berserker gear as a Necromancer/Reaper, you want your primary weapon to be either Dagger or Greatsword. Axe can be used as a ranged backup, but you primarily want to get in close and brawl. Do that and you’ll start seeing better damage numbers. Of course, you’re also going to have to learn enemy tells to be able to survive in melee, but at least you have a super-forgiving health bar and Reaper Shroud to help out.