Guild Wars 2

I’m having trouble looting the Hollow Saurian Bone for Astralaria collection 4. I’ve killed numerous raptors and things on the list of saurians but no luck. Is there one particular spot or creatures that drop this more often?

I’ve been saying this for a while now, but I really feel Anet needs to come out with a lord faren speedo skin (or outfit, where it’s just the speedo), and a kasmeer’s bikini skin (or outfit).

I don’t want to look like Lord Faren or Kasmeer, but I do want the speedo (So when I say ‘outfit’ here, I mean all it is, is your character wearing the speedo or bikini, you don’t actually take on the appearance of Lord Faren or Kasmeer as well). Or at least a set of invisible armor (now that we have an invisible boots skin). My male engineer would suit having no top on, he’s sick of all the trenchcoats.

I was finally able to get a win yesterday. Was extremely close though :-/ I still stand by the -5% health for all 4 Legendary Chak suggestion. It shouldn’t be harder than the final map, but still hard enough to be a challenge of coordination and team work.

I have a small team working with me, but we are working on a few different things. Specifically: issues with current legendary weapons, new legendary weapons, and festivals (that’s a topic for another day).

The priority for current legendary crafting bugs is as follows:

Fix blockers as soon as I’m made aware of them. Anything that halts your progress is unacceptable and I’ll do everything I can to get it fixed ASAP.

Fix issues that encourage toxic play or interactions. No collectible should be gated behind failed events, or mechanics that make you upset that another player is playing a specific way. Unfortunately these things take longer to fix and test around the fixes (don’t want to break something else on accident), so the turn around will be slower

Fix the smaller things. Things like icons, text (unless it is very misleading, then it gets addressed sooner), and minor inconsistencies. We will get to things when possible, it may just take a while. Something to remember, every minute spent on one bug is a minute not spent somewhere else.

If you see something, say something. We actively read the official forums and reddit posts. My QA partner Evan Zynda is all over things on reddit. We want to know what’s wrong with our content, so please let us know.

New legendary weapons! The good news: yes, we are working on them. The bad news: no, I cannot tell you any more about them. Sorry, some things just need to be a secret.

Communication: I’m not a very social-media-focused person, and to be honest, have a lot of stuff to do, but I’m going to try my best to be communicative and up-front with you all. There are things I won’t be able to talk about, and things I won’t have the knowledge or authority to talk about, but I will do my best to not hide things from you.

Alright, I think that’s about everything I wanted to cover as far as legendary collections.

I’m so in love with Matt Pennebaker right now. This is the best news I’ve heard all year! ok, this, and the astralaria sheets of aurillium fix. And thank you Gaile for getting these things brought to attention :P And Evan Zynda for scouting ideas and the like on Reddit

Edit: Still waiting on a quick fix for failing events on purpose for items needed for collections >_< not happy. Shouldn’t be that hard to simply put said bosses away from temple events and have them like hero challenges where they remain non-aggressive until you interact with them. I’m so tired of having to wait for constant fixes for these legendary collections. I don’t think I’ll ever go for another legendary after all this BS.

Edit 2: A very helpful player pm’ed me and invited me to a contested map where I was able to finally get the items I needed. I paid him 10g for his help, because of how long I’ve been waiting and how much he helped me. But players shouldn’t have to resort to all this stuff. It’s not good, and I don’t think I’ll ever be going for another legendary after all this hassle. I just hope that the new guys on the scene can clean up all the mess for future people going for legendaries, because i’m so over all this bugged collection drama.

As much as I love legendaries, I’ve always felt they could do with some improvements. So today I decided to do a bit of photoshopping, and came up with an idea that myself and many others have suggested, for Astralaria and the Temporal Rift skill that the Revenant uses. Many of us expected the rift to be changed from a red and black rift to a starry/celestial themed rift, but I was majorly disappointed to find out it wasn’t the case. So at the bottom of this post is a rough idea of how awesome it would be if it were changed to reflect its legendary status.

Now to my points:

Legendary weapons should change the special effects on most (if not all) of your skills. I mean, how cool would it be to have a fire elementalist produce rainbow meteor showers with the Bifrost? Huge rainbow asteroid looking things crashing down on your opponents. Right now, it feels a bit strange that most of your skills aren’t even changed when wielding a LEGENDARY. It just doesn’t make any sense

Legendary weapons should allow you to sigil-swap on demand. By this, I mean, you could offer your legendary weapon a sigil to ‘consume’, and once consumed, it will be permanently unlocked on that legendary weapon. This way, you can swap out your sigils at any time for the ultimate convenience. Maybe Anet could go a bit further and also add infusion swapping to this if they really wanted to?

Also, just as a side note, since there are 2 slots for sigils, if you wanted all the sigils unlocked on both slots, it would make sense to require 2 of each sigil to unlock them on both slots. I don’t know. Anet could decide on that.

Add in Legendary dye collections. Similar to how the 2nd generation precursors are crafted, this would be pretty much identical. Say you wanted your armor to have a bit of that Astralaria/celestial sparkle to it. The first step would be to actually own Astralaria, to unlock that specific legendary dye collection. Anet could decide on what other items are needed to make the dye, but certainly a few legendary gifts in there would make sense.

Add the option to disable legendary effects of weapons. Some players don’t like the effects of them. I myself do, but some don’t, and options are always a good thing.

Give players the option to keep the special effects of legendary weapons ON even when stowed. I hate it when, for example, I’m using Juggernaut, and as soon as I stow it, the metallic effect on my armor disappears. I also noticed on a youtube video, when Astralaria is stowed, it looks really plain and boring (you don’t see twilight’s space-like effects disappear when it’s stowed, so why should this be any different with Astralaria?). There was one time my character went all glitchy and my Juggernaut’s effects remained even when it was stowed (see 2nd picture attached), however it only lasted a few seconds (as I suspected, hence why I took the picture A.S.A.P).

There are probably more ideas out there that I can’t think of right now, but those are just a few that come to mind. Please leave your thoughts and write those ideas down for Anet too!

Guild Insignia Recipe not available anywhere. Tried the armorsmith npc, tried the guild armorer in the guild initiative’s office in Lions Arch, tried the guild armorer in guild hall. None of them sell it. So either I’m looking in the wrong place and there hasn’t been good communication as to its exact location, or it’s still not available at all.

Unless I’m missing something, I have tried the guild armorer in the guild initiative’s office in Lions Arch, as well as the guild armorer in a guild I’m in that’s level 25. Neither of these vendors have them available, and I’ve even checked the Armorsmith npc to see if they’re selling it in the recipe tab. Nothing. Not there.

Please fix it

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I came in here expecting an unreasonable change, but a 5% reduction to max HP wouldn’t be too bad. At least on SCAR lane.

I run chak gerent regularly. Sometimes the lane I command succeeds. Sometimes the event succeeds. But each failure is on the margin: you’d be amazed how frequent it is that it requires one more nodule to emerge the gerent, or how SCAR lane needed 1% more damage. Those are the only two parts that fail.

The words “organized” are nigh meaningless. The only thing they imply is that someone has been trying to taxi others in for awhile. The hardest part about the event is getting everybody on the same page. If you do that,, I’m fairly confident the event will succeed. But boy is that hard. The average pug is insufferable in the strangest of ways:

1)They’ll only taxi in 5 minutes before the event begins then go AFK
2) They’ll refuse to listen to explanations then complain that they don’t know what to do.
3)They’ll fight you on the strategy and purposefully CC the boss because “it makes them vulnerable”.
4)They’ll run around in circles because they aren’t sure what their squad is supposed to do, no matter how much you explain.
5)They’ll join the event in masterwork gear and no masteries.
6)They’ll refuse to join squads, speak up if they have questions, or cooperate.
7) They’ll run around in full knight gear with all defensive specializations because “HoT is hard”.
8)They don’t understand what soft CC is.
9)They don’t have WPs on the map so they’ll just lie there dead.
10) A blast finisher? What’s that?
11) They’ll ignore that there’s a meta going on and try to do hero points on the same map.
12) They’ll complain about explanations and proudly boast in Map Chat that they are turning off Map Chat.
13) They’ll only try the event once and never again, ensuring that there’s a steady stream of completely new people and no experienced players.
14) They don’t have the attention span to start events early to get full rewards, then complain that rewards suck.
15) They’ll refuse to eat food, even if you put a feast right in their face.
16)They’ll join random squads and refuse to spread out.
17)They’ll enter the map expecting to be carried, no matter how many times the event has failed.
18)Dodge? What does that do?

And so on. Its like herding cats. I think the high success of guild runs is because a guild is mostly full of people on the same page. To that end, I’m not sure the event is overtuned as much as it is the community is not competent enough to do it yet.

Yeah I think all the points you mentioned are valid. For as much as there are those times when you CAN get everyone on the same page, there’s still many, many times that, despite all the team work and prep, the attempt fails by the very slimmest of margins. I think a reduction of 5% max health from all 4 Legendary Chak would go a very long way.

Anet, why is it that the Tangled Depths Meta is harder than the final map with a DRAGON?

Perhaps Chak should be attempting world domination because right now, they’re doing a pretty good job at making us fail every single TD Meta.

I’ve now been in over 30 attempts, most of which claimed to be ‘organised’, but ALL failed. I’ve been in multiple DS Metas, and succeeded in them. This should be the other way around.

Whoever it was that decided the health pools of the 4 Legendary Chak needs to be fired in my opinion. The 3rd map should NOT be harder than the last.

Solution:

Decrease legendary Chak Gerent health by 5-10%.

Now you can link me all the vials of salt and say how much I just need to try more, or that we asked for hard content and what’s my problem – hard content is what RAIDS is for, not this map’s meta. Furthermore, I will simply ignore any illogical/troll comments. 30 attempts, mostly ‘organised’ that have failed, says I have tried, and tried, and tried again, I haven’t just joined ‘pug’ groups, and there is seriously something wrong with this. A little decrease in Chak health is all I’m asking Anet.

Right now, Chak are more powerful than Elder Dragons.

Poobah.6254:

I haven’t but I’m sure at least one person out there would have spent (very expensive) the materials to craft the Quartz Vial / Obsidian Magma Container / Mists Imbued Jar multiple times assuming they need to collect the items to make multiple ingots, will those people be getting some sorts of refund?

I’m struggling just trying to get the 3 vials of condensed mists essence :-/ lol

One of them breaks down into 3 vials

Oo nice, didn’t know that! I’ve only really done a few fractals already (4 and 10 specifically, for the collection), so not sure when the globs start dropping but I guess I’ll have to do a lot more fractals :-/ thanks for the info!

Lunacy Solacio.6514:

Zaoda.1653:

Yay thanks Gaile! And thanks for the communication.

Edit: Nvm just saw sheets of aurillium thing.

I’d also like to ask about the Vial of Condensed Mists Essence. I know we need 3 for one of the components, I think it’s the Imbued Mists Jar. Is there any way to make this less RNG based? I’ve been trying to get these vials for 2 days now and no luck. Would it be possible to make these purchasable for like 200-500 fractal relics? Or are they needed in other things, hence keeping the RNG element aspect to it?

getting those to drop was always a pain. In my personal experience since fractal was originally released, you are far more likely to get shards instead, but you can ‘break’ *globs down into vials.

Yeah, apart from the sheets of aurillium thing (which has been fixed now – yay!), trying to get these vials is my next annoying hurdle. Not sure how long it’s going to take but it’s frustrating it’s all RNG based I don’t mind working my behind off, knowing I can eventually get the vials I need, but because it’s RNG, there’s no certainty or end-goal as to when I’ll be able to get all 3 I need.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Players on the legendary journey for Astralaria III will encounter a bug involving Meteorite Ingots. Currently the recipe only provides 1 ingot, where it is intended to provide 25. We plan to fix that recipe bug as soon as we can.

If you craft only 1 Ingot before the recipe fix, all is not lost. After the recipe fix, you may speak with Grandmaster Craftsman Hobbs in Lion’s Arch and choose the conversation option “I have misplaced a vital component for crafting my Legendary.” For a small amount of Karma, you will be able to purchase Meteorite Ingots in stacks of 5. Only 25 are required for this collection.

We wanted to let you know about this before all you legendary crafters run into the issue and as we said, we’ll get this corrected as soon as we can.

Yay thanks Gaile! And thanks for the communication.

Edit: Nvm just saw sheets of aurillium thing.

I’d also like to ask about the Vial of Condensed Mists Essence. I know we need 3 for one of the components, I think it’s the Imbued Mists Jar. Is there any way to make this less RNG based? I’ve been trying to get these vials for 2 days now and no luck. Would it be possible to make these purchasable for like 200-500 fractal relics? Or are they needed in other things, hence keeping the RNG element aspect to it?

Devildoc.6721:

seems like the time gating is much worse on the axe than either the staff or pistol. People have the staff and pistol now, but nobody has the axe.

Yeah Anet hasn’t fixed the issue yet where people can buy sheets of aurillium, required for one of the items in collection III, until then, we’re all waiting to progress :-/

mexay.3902:

harrison fang.1874:

btw the rest of the ingots must be purchased somewhere after you make the first as you can never get another ultrahot sphere

How so?

Ah. I didn’t think of that. Forgot you could only get the item once in a collection. That’s interesting then. Maybe we can purchase the Mists imbued jars (and the various other components required to collect items from bosses to make more ingots), from the legendary npc vendors in Lions Arch after we’ve made 1 ingot? I’m hoping that’s the case.

Right now, while waiting for the blue moon that is the fix for the sheets of aurillium, I’m working on getting the 3 Vials of Condensed Mists Essence required for making one of the final components in the 3rd collection, however, and someone please correct me if I’m wrong here, you need 11 meteorite ingots – which I think may require the Mists Imbued Jar that needs 3 Vials of Condensed Mists Essence to make, so wouldn’t that technically mean you need not just 1 jar, but 11 more jars?, so 36 Vials of Condensed Mists Essence in total???

Please tell me I’m wrong.

The 275 Meteorite Ore is do-able. I’m up to around 100 ores by just having my alts camped at the orichalcum node in Southsun Cove, but it’s the vials of condensed mists essence that is just near-impossible to get, considering it’s all RNG based. If they were buyable for, say, 200 fractal relics, then at least it wouldn’t be such a nightmare. But right now, I don’t think I have the patience to solo farm mobs in fractals for months on end, if not years.

Eulolia.2467:

Arlee.7038:

Because if you know about a bug fixing it is easy right? -_-

They fixed a lot of bugs in the first couple of weeks after launch. Then they just seemed to give up.

I’m starting to think maybe they just all quietly went on holiday and thought no one would notice?

Gaile Gray.6029:

HwaRyun.1807:

It seems kind of silly to let people speculate and get their hopes up about the fractal changes dropping today when you guys knew it was never part of the plan. A simple “It won’t be the coming with the December 1st patch” would have done.

To be clear, speculation isn’t something we can control, nor will we bounce into every thread that contains a speculative comment to try address it. We did not announce, and never planned for, a drop on December 1st. If you are disappointed, I really am sorry to hear that. I’m familiar with speculation — we had a lot of it as we prepared to release Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Guil… well, you follow my drift. It’s part of the nature of our sharing info about upcoming games, features, or improvements, that someone will speculate a date and that the date — even while never stated by us — may come to be seen as “obvious” or even “official.”

In this case, we wanted to share the news that good things are coming, but as in other cases, a date was not tied to that info.

I just checked with Production, and everything is on track to see the introduction of fractal changes later this month.

Vissarion.6509:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hey all,

I know that some of you were thinking that we’d be releasing updates to fractals today, but that was not the plan. There’s still a lot of stuff coming in December — this is, after all, only the 1st of the month -- so hold tight and you’ll see the fractal changes soon!

thank you for the communication, at least it was a bit quick (better late than ever).

But the frustration from many of us waiting for a fix to the rewards is over 9000!!!!!!

I understand and sympathize. I like what’s coming, but I do know it’s difficult to wait!

Speaking of fractal changes, could you please add a way of buying Vial of Condensed Mists Essence from fractal npc vendors? I spent all day yesterday attempting to farm mobs by myself with no luck. I am willing to put the effort in to getting these vials, but I certainly don’t plan on spending months on end just trying to obtain however many I will need for the final few parts of Astralaria Collection III.

corwen.5798:

The REALLY annoying thing is, that Anet’s Devs won’t even bother on giving an update “we’re working on it” or anything. As far as we know, they don’t even know that something’s wrong.

Oh they know about it, I reported it in game AND I’ve been venting on the forums. Trust me, they know.

People have been saying this time and time again, but Anet are not the best at communication, yet there’s still the odd special flower that logs onto the forums and says ‘oh but they’re doing such a wonderful job and they communicate all the time’. Yeah… don’t know which planet those people are on but I live on planet Reality, and the communication between Anet and the players is virtually NON EXISTENT.

I mean, how hard is it to admit ‘actually Astralaria collection 4 hasn’t even been finalized and we were so embarrassed that, instead, we deceived players by making one of the items near impossible to get, or in the case of Sheets of Aurillium, bugged, so that no one could progress the 3rd collection until we had finalized collection 4 – same with Nevermore. We are so sorry, but we just want to let people know where we are at, and these will definitely be available by the -day here- of -month here-, -year here-‘. There Anet, I’ve done the work for you, you just need to fill in the blanks.

Gaab.4257:

I’m a bit speechless. Why on earth was this necessary? How can someone come up with such an idea on what’s the most important and urgent to fix in WvW? Did REALLY someone think this is a positive change?

A while back when Anet said they were going to make them soulbound I told them it was a really stupid idea, but they’ve finally done it and gone ahead with it anyway >_<

I wouldn’t recommend GW2 to others with the way it is right now. Maybe if things change. Maybe if WvW gets some attention. Maybe if proofs of heroics aren’t soulbound. Maybe if we get some decent updates. Maybe if Anet get onto fixing all the legendary collection bugs. Maybe… but until then, nope, don’t recommend it.

While I’m certainly not a fan of them, and my tickets are definitely safe from being spent this time, it’s nice that there are less flashy/simple skins which I do think is needed every now and then.

Really disappointed about this. Guess Astralaria won’t be available for at least another week (because we know Anet won’t do hot fixes for these sorts of things because that would be helpful).

Yep. There goes at least another week of them ignoring the legendary collections. Was really disappointed waking up to not see any fixes for this in the patch notes. >_<

There was no reason for Anet to do this for WvW, other than make it more of a nightmare for WvW’ers. It’s just another slap in the face for us.

Also, with no fix on the HoT legendary collections that I would have assumed would be fixed today, I guess that means another whole week of waiting and hoping they’re doing something about it. Where is Anet? It feels like they’re on holiday.

And for those saying it should have been like this, no it shouldn’t. This is like telling players to earn their tomes of knowledge on that new alt of yours, or else it cannot be used on them. If Anet wanted to really annoy everyone, they would have done this for PvP too, but they won’t because PvP is clearly more popular to them than PvE or WvW (just look at the amount of updates they get in comparison).

dank.3680:

90% of the game has been converted to account bound. But for some reason, only WvW players need everything soulbound (the ones with many alts who NEED accnt bound stuff)..

I have useless WvW rank points stacking up being worthless since I’m maxed.. Now more items in my inventory that can stack and be useless yay.

Why don’t you add a few more things for me to click too because having to click through 3 chains of items from every chest I get isn’t enough fun.

Exactly. We definitely need some way of spending extra rank points too.

Ashadow.6874:

Most of the time I get to play GW2, I WvW. It was nice to be able to use the ACCOUNT BOUND chests to help level Specilizations on my other characters, so that when I did get time to PvE I could play them.

Alot of WvW Guilds have certain setups when they run and people play specific classes 95% of the time they WvW. Which means now when you WvW we are forced to rack up tons of Proofs of Heroics on one character and are being punished for WvW’ing with organized WvW Guilds.

Thank you Anet for dropping the ball and forcing Account Bound items to become Soulbound (the Chests of the Mists).

Thank you for once again punishing the WvW Community just because you felt like it.

Yeah when they were account bound it actually gave us the freedom to use them on whichever alt we wanted, and encouraged people to play WvW.

I couldn’t be more disappointed with Anet by today’s changes. And if that wasn’t bad enough, not even a fix for all the HoT legendary collection items. Things just get worse and worse :-/

I told Anet it was a really dumb idea, but they went ahead with it anyway, and now they’ll face the onslaught of people’s rage (yet again). If WvW wasn’t unloved as it already is, you go ahead and nerf it some more… I only have 4 words for this whole thing…

Big Mistake. Big. HUGE.

Please stop nerfing WvW. In fact, the best thing you can do right now is just not touch it (maybe add in new rewards though because, well, when was the last time it got additional rewards? Oh that’s right, WvW seasons that were TEMPORARY CONTENT). The new borderlands are a ghost town, chests of the mists now being soulbound, is there anything else you want to ruin?

Not sure if mentioned, but here’s a few I notice in EOTM:

After capturing towers and keeps, sometimes some of the npc’s are still enemy npc’s and haven’t been ‘converted’ as such, to ally npc’s after capture.

If you are too close to a wall when it’s taken down (via catapult or whatever brought down said wall), you can become stuck inside the wall. Happens with gates occasionally too.

Can get stuck inside Burning Oil when it’s being built

Access to repair the middle Badlands bridge (from the keep side) is impossible to get to

Sometimes scorps (siege devourers) can become stuck in the south Badlands keep bridge when being repaired, or destroyed.

You can become stuck inside the gigantic pillars/walls (in the middle of the Badlands keep) if you’re fighting the champion and one of his turrets pushes you back into the wall (happens when turrets get destroyed – they knock you back).

Rhea Ravenseeker.7105:

Despite the clear and overwhelming evidence that this is a complete mess, NOT A SINGLE POST from anet for over a month. Have they all been fired or are they out partying spending the money we paid for HoT?

I am fully aware that stuff happens, but the worst sin that any business can commit is to ignore your customers.

Communicate please.

Completely agree. I’m frustrated with the lack of communication. Any ETA on a fix for all these precursor collection bugs or are we just going to have to continue posting about it until the next blue moon comes around? We all noticed the dev post in a thread about gold selling, so clearly that is more important than all these bugs affecting EVERYONE. >_<

Ok I’ll keep trying thanks on about my 200th now

About 350 kills (in total) later… >_<

Something is happening at Arenanet. Seems like a big lack of employees.

I agree. Definitely a lack of staff, especially in the bug fixing department.

Would be nice to get an update on all the current legendary collection items that are bugged and when the next blue moon is coming for a fix on them :-/

I’ve killed at least 150 grawl near the Tail of the Star God point of interest in Blazeridge Steppes, and still haven’t received it. Am I just extremely unlucky or is this item bugged? I’ve killed a lot less creatures getting the items from collections before, so this is just really odd (and ridiculous).

Also apparently ‘Sheets of Aurillium’ is bugged

Doctor Faustus.6372:

Two things. What exactly is expensive in tier 3? I am in tier 3 too, got everything but the Aurillium thing completed and it was not expensive by all means…

And Chak Gerent is quite easy – Join a Guild that does worldbosses or go to some community teamspeak…

Sorry I was thinking of the all the costs from Collection 2 but seeing how many things needed to be done in Collection 3 I got mixed up. Collection 3 isn’t very costly at all, just more traveling and time-gated stuff (charged quartz, and only so many orichalcum nodes available for the meteorite ores). I’ll edit my post.

As for Chak Gerent, I’ve tried finding guilds that will do Chak but don’t know 1) which guilds are doing it, 2) if they’ll allow non-guild-members to attempt Chak with them, and 3) when they’re doing it, as i’m usually a different time zone than most players.

Edit: And is it just me or does some of the items needed just not make ANY sense as to what it would be used for in making Astralaria?

I could understand clockwork mechanisms and watchwork sprockets being required (haven’t heard of any collection from Astralaria that requires them though), and I can understand things like meteorite ore (because, well, space and all that…), but what’s searching chests in dry top (Primeval Runescroll) have anything to do with a space-like, time/mechanism themed legendary? Or obtaining 1000 bandit crests? Or going to the Chamber of Ministers in Divinity’s Reach and entering on the keyboard “/ponder”? I know the whole mechanism/globe things above Divinity’s Reach makes perfect sense with Astralaria, but simply going to one spot and using an emote just seems a bit effortless and meaningless. It would have been cooler to have some sort of jumping puzzle in Divinity’s Reach that leads you up to that area with the globes, but at the same time, gives you an amazing view of the stars. I don’t know, just my 2 cents.

I think it would be cooler if we had to do some sort of constellation mapping, and visit various areas around the world and get the right angle or picture to progress. I don’t know, it just seems very odd. Rushed, even.

I’m on the 3rd collection of Astralaria too but my god this is just a nightmare… the amount of time-gated things and items to collect never seems to end – I don’t think H.O.P.E. and Nevermore requires even half the amount of things that Astralaria does.

Right now it feels like one big grind, rather than a ‘journey’. It also seems more of a ‘get this to make that to make this to make that’ thing. Sort of like item INCEPTION. An item within an item within an item.

Collection 1 was more of a time-gate issue (Zinn’s Study Guide). Collection 2 was more of a money sink, and Collection 3 is a lot of boss killing and time-gated mats like Charged Quartz and Meteorite Ore (there are only so many orichalcum ore nodes that can be mined in a day). I hate to think what Collection 4 is going to be like.

Edit: Oh and one of the requirements of Collection 3? Kill Chak Gerent. Yeah, good luck with that. I’ve been playing HoT since day 1 and still haven’t found a LFG for it that has won it. I know there are guilds that have, but I just haven’t been lucky enough to be in a map that has succeeded. (source: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ley-Line_Bezoar)

People aren’t understanding the point I’m trying to make… I’m not entitled, I’m more than willing to work hard for the new legendary, but old legendaries didn’t have these ridiculous time-gates… (there should be no waiting game for making legendaries)

Uuuurgh nevermind. No one gets it. Forget it. Jeez. Won’t be returning to this thread because I feel like I’m banging my head against a brick wall trying to get the point across about time-gates.

Old legendaries from memory though didn’t have a 2 month time-gate (or anywhere near it). That is my point. Sure you could work towards old legendaries and take a year to afford the mats for it, but I’m talking about time-gates, things that, despite you having all your ingredients, requires you to wait a ridiculous amount of time for absolutely no reason at all.

Someone did the research on all the time-gates for the new Legendary, Astralaria, and it isn’t pretty:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3u9p9c/astralaria_and_the_timegates/

For those unaware, basically starting from scratch, it will take you a minimum of 87 days (62 if you buy your deldrimor) to complete it. As the poster ‘Giggos’ on GW2Reddit puts it, “Not because they lack skill or don’t put in enough effort, but because someone decided to add, in my opinion, a sick amount of timegating”.

Anet, I understand you want to make things difficult for these new HoT legendaries, I get that, and that’s fine, but adding all these time-gates doesn’t make it any more difficult, it just makes it a downright nuisance. Please stop adding all these time-gates – it literally adds nothing but frustration for someone working towards a legendary when they know it’s going to take at least 62 days of pointless waiting.

Furthermore, if all the points ‘Mexay’ wrote on the GW2Reddit thread is correct, then I’m stopping this Astralaria collection cold and no longer going for it.

Misguided.5139:

Lahmia.2193:

No changes need to be map to the structure of Tangled Depths. It’s by far the most interesting map to explore, with so many hidden places. It just takes getting used to and those that complain aren’t giving it a chance.

Agreed with this. Once you get used to it (and Nuhoch wallows helps a lot), this map is really fun. Each of the four lanes has a unique little story, which I like. The biggest map annoyance (and this applied to all of them) is that if you don’t know the events well, it can be a royal pain to tell if they are above or below you.

By the way, there already are unique skins for Pods/caches/etc. Duffy has a list of them:
http://dulfy.net/2015/11/08/gw2-hot-weapons-armor-and-backpieces-guide/

I like some of the unique skins, but the crystallized supply caches (as far as I know, I could be wrong?) don’t give any unique skins, like the lightward’s battle staff (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lightward%27s_Battlestaff) that you can get from airship cargo in Verdant Brink. Which is a bit odd.

You’d think that the various keys/chests/cargo/caches would offer unique rewards tied to their regions, along with perhaps themed skins of those creatures or areas, but some offer much greater rewards than others (in this case, airship cargo’s can reward you with an item that’s worth over 450g, whereas the crystallized supply caches don’t offer anything even remotely near that value).

Edit: Apparently Ebb and Flow can drop from the caches, so nvm then :-P I’ve never seen any drop from them, I guess they’re just really, really rare.

xarallei.4279:

Zaoda.1653:

So for the past few days I’ve been trying to get the achievements for the TD Meta for my final few mastery points that I need to get to make the gift of insights, but this place is literally a ghost town.

Just today I waited 20 minutes and only myself and ONE other person turned up for the Meta. WTF!? I feel like I’m in Guild Wars 1 all over again, where, because there aren’t many (if any) updates for it anymore (or in this case, not enough frequent events), no one is there, and when no one is there, YOU CAN’T DO A SINGLE THING.

So right now I’m really frustrated because these are the final few achievements I need for my final few mastery points, and there’s not a single thing I can do to suddenly make this place popular.

Maybe raids is to blame and everyone has flocked there, but my money is on the fact that the TD Meta is so hard. So hard that you need a very popular, well organised GUILD team to actually get it done. Unlike Auric Basin Meta, where the place isn’t such a nightmare to navigate, and is easier to succeed in (been in 5 successful tarir city takeovers so far).

Heck, I don’t even see any TD Meta ORG lfg’s. Trust me, I’ve looked. THEY AIN’T THERE.

So Anet, is Tangled Depths going to be another wasteland where people simply cannot get their achievements because it’s so hard to navigate, and succeed in the Meta?

Something seriously needs to be done about this.

20 minutes? That’s nothing most people who do organized TD are on the map for an hour or even two hours before the event actually starts. Mainly to try to have enough time to taxi in their people to the map. Not sure you’ll find any successful TD only 20 minutes before the event. It is a pain in the kitten to be honest. And even if it’s organized it sometimes fails. I’m trying to get the hivemaster collection, it’s going to take forever…

The 20 minutes thing was just 1 example of 1 day – there were other days I waited for hours and the same thing happened – very few people turned up for the Meta and I just gave up in the end. If it wasn’t the lack of players for the Meta, it was trying to navigate that map. At least with Verdant Brink you know an area is either above or below, so it’s not that hard, and with Auric Basin, if you can’t get to a specific area, it’s usually tied to some event or you can get there via gliding/updrafts, and Dragon’s Stand is nice because it doesn’t have so many layers, but Tangled Depths is like a maze in comparison to all of these places. I still get lost despite being there multiple times. I’ve had to resort to using the nuhoch wallows a lot because I simply can’t figure out how to get out of those caves and all those entrances and exits making me go around in circles.

In terms of trying to find an organised group for this, I’ve seen maybe 1 or 2 claim to be organised, but both failed miserably. I’m still waiting for some miracle to happen and for the TD Meta to become easier so that one day I’ll maybe/might be able to also get that ‘Plains of Golghein’ Strongbox that requires a successful Chak Gerent kill. It isn’t looking too promising though at this rate :-/

Doam.8305:

LFR option in LFG window

Can’t believe I forgot that, and it’s so annoying seeing the multiple LFR’s in the LFG interface. I agree, it seriously needs a separate tab for it. Edited it into my main post.

I’m using that 62 or 64 something a rather client – not making much difference tbh. Please fix your servers or whatever it is, my internet is fine.

I was just about to win in a PvP arena too… bye bye to my rewards.

warbignime.4610:

So you want nerf difficult and interesting content to boring mindless spammy regular maps. What a great idea.

Thanks for the sarcasm, but that’s not really helpful to the thread – if you think my points my invalid, then please back up your comments with reasons, but don’t speak on my behalf and claim that I want to nerf everything and say I find it all boring when it’s quite the opposite. I actually find a lot of the HoT content interesting, I just see a lot of things that need improvements to make it MORE interesting or at least playable (no one can kill Chak Gerent with 2 players).

Let’s make a list of things we’d like to see change in the HoT maps. I’ll start off a few:

- Stop resetting our map participation % when we leave a map, even for the shortest time. I just literally went to my guild hall for 20 seconds to withdraw some bloodstone dust to feed to Herta because I forgot to do it yesterday, in time before reset, and I came back to Tangled Depths with 0% participation. There goes 150%… all because I wanted to withdraw something from my bank. Wow.

- Have all HoT Meta’s happen every hour. This will encourage players to get familiar with them and be able to practice without having to wait so long.

- Decrease the difficulty of the Chak Gerent Meta. While I understand it’s important to keep some sort of struggle with Meta’s, this is just downright hard. You shouldn’t have to get an organised guild with teamspeak in order to do this. I’ve seen many randoms come together from nowhere and succeed in the Auric Basin Meta – why should this be any different? Also, as it is right now, and as another player said in one of my other threads, this is harder than the Dragon’s Stand Meta! That is seriously messed up. As another person said, perhaps Chak should strive for world domination, because right now they seem to be more powerful than Elder Dragon’s themselves.

- Increase the rewards from crystallized supply caches in Tangled Depths. Apart from the Ley Line Sparks, there really isn’t much reward going for these. Perhaps add some unique skins (like with the Lightward’s Battlestaff from Airship Cargo in Verdant Brink).

- Increase the rewards from the normal Exalted Chests. Right now, people know that it’s only worth it to open your keys on the ‘Greater’ and ‘Grand’ chests. So why bother with the lesser chests? There’s no incentive to open them. Perhaps like with the crystallized supply caches suggestion above, add in some unique skins that can be dropped from any of the Exalted Chests, but obviously have a better chance from the better chests.

- Increase the amount of noxious pods in Dragon’s Stand – without having to have a successful meta in order to get to a decent amount of them. Right now I still have over 36 unused machetes – what’s the point of having an abundance of machete’s, with very few pods to use them on?

- Redo the Tangled Depths maps. Right now it’s just a nightmare to navigate. Many people agree, and I’ve seen it mentioned countless times in map chat that they just hate this place in general and can’t wait to get out of it.

- Ditch the time gate on Zinn’s Study Guide. There’s no point to it, and it’s just a nuisance having to keep an alt there to buy one item at a time, every day. The fact that it’s only open after a series of events makes it even more annoying to get to.

- Make night-time areas in Verdant Brink more accessible during the day time. Perhaps add a few more updrafts that can take you up to those really high, hard to reach places. The only benefits to night-time VB are the unique bosses and events, which is nice, and I get that, but for those trying to get map completion and have to wait till night-time to remember which areas they suddenly have to go to and get out of the way before day time hits, isn’t fun at all.

- Nuhoch Alchemy is useless. You remove chak goop when you dodge already anyway without this mastery, so why is there a mastery for it? Makes no sense. What I suggest is make it so that chak goop no longer affects you (or damages you), and also add maybe a +3% damage bonus and +3% defence against chak. Now THAT would be deserving of 12 mastery points.

Exalted Gathering mastery is a bit average for something that requires 3,302,000 experience. So you have a chance to mine auric slivers… Woopty doo. Perhaps add black diamonds, evergreen slivers, mordrem slivers, agate orbs, moonstone orbs, maguuma burls, leaf fossils and ebony orbs to it, then this mastery will be worthwhile.

- Make adventures available 24/7. No one likes to wait for these to become available after certain events have been completed. To make sure events aren’t deserted though, perhaps add some sort of incentive in doing them – be it unique rewards, better xp, more currency from completing them (airship parts/lumps of aurillium/ley line crystals), karma… whatever it takes to make people want to do them.

- Stop randomizing the path of the fallen masks adventure. No wonder people can’t even get silver for this – there’s an RNG factor that plays a role where each attempt can be VERY different to the previous one. So if you’re trying to go for silver (or heaven forbid, gold), good luck to you, because you won’t be able to practice and get used to a pattern, because it’s not 100% the same all the time. Anet, you don’t randomize the path of Bugs in the Branches, or Tendril Torchers (thank goodness), and many other adventures, so why should this be any different? Why make this SO difficult for everyone? As it is I just finally managed to get silver with only 7 seconds to spare – I don’t know how on earth people manage to get gold in this but I know I’m not even going to bother trying.

- A ‘Raids’ tab in the LFG (Looking For Group) interface. Currently, there’s way too many LFR’s spamming up the ‘Open World Content’ tab. It’s quite distracting to be honest, it takes away from all the other different LFG’s in this particular tab, and I don’t understand why Raids doesn’t already have its own section when things like fractals, wvw, pvp and personal story have their own separate sections, for example.

There are probably more, but when I remember others I’ll add to the list. Feel free to add yours.

I’ve managed to find, by myself, 12 of the 20 ‘ancient holographic professors’ in Rata Novus for this achievement (and succeed by mainly guessing the answers), but I can’t for the life of me find the other 8. I looked on Dulfy, and there wasn’t a guide for it, I looked on the GW2 Wikipedia but that wasn’t helpful because there were no pictures of any of their locations, and half the answers on the wikipedia were unhelpful because the professors asked completely different questions to those listed on the wiki and I had to just guess them (usually wrongly), and wait a while to re-do them. I also looked on YouTube, and there was no guide for it either. It seems no one has a guide for this achievement :-/

But either way I can’t find the last 8 and I’ve searched all over the place :-( is there any guide out there on it that I’m somehow missing?

Boysenberry.1869:

The solution is for Anet to up the rewards and modify the difficulty so that it is on par with the other 3 Meta events. It is silly that killing an Elder Dragon is extremely easy and yet killing some large Chak is very difficult. Maybe the Chak should strive for world domination. They are obviously the most powerful species in the world.

Ha ha, exactly! You know something is wrong when the final map’s meta is actually easier than the previous map’s meta.

Ceesa.1350:

I feel like TD’s reputation killed it more thoroughly than anything else. It started off like a lot of other metas did at first: the first few days were full of failures, and then someone figured out how to do it, but it was hard. Now, can you tell me that isn’t the same description that raids got? Of course you can’t.

But the main reason why TD is deserted is because the rewards don’t justify the effort. I’ve never tried TD’s meta before for two reasons: first, only one of my characters has actually gotten to TD, and second, VB and AB are a lot more fun, the maps are easier to get around in, and the metas are easier. If people had stuck to playing TD’s meta, I’m sure they would have figured it out, or at least gotten it to the point of pre-condi changes silverwastes, where vw would fail occasionally, but was still quite doable.

I’m going to start hanging out there more just because I’m slowly wrapping up my exploration of VB and AB with my other characters, and hopefully it’ll slowly become more populated as more casual players start getting to that zone. But with raids to distract the hardcore crowd, I don’t see TD coming back strong any time soon.

I agree.

I think the Tangled Depths maps are extremely frustrating to navigate. I remember the first day I got there I ended up going around in circles (I’m not kidding) and ultimately dying from the mobs following me because I couldn’t figure out how to get out of one of the caves. I even followed the icons on the maps, but there was no such ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’ actually there. Very misleading.

Also, like you say, the Auric Basin meta is easier, and also more people have that area unlocked. Anyone it seems, can tag up and start an organised map. Not so much with Tangled Depths.

Tangled Depths is way emptier, the maps are difficult to navigate, there’s less people that have access to the area, the events are spaced too far out from each other, the rewards are crud (still haven’t seen any good items from the crystallized supply caches either). Why would anyone bother with this place?

At least Verdant Brink has plenty of frequent events
At least Auric Basin is easier to navigate and the Meta is do-able
At least Dragon’s Stand gives good xp and is successful on occasion
At least Tangled Depths… Oh wait, nope, nothing good I can say about this one.

This needs some serious help, Anet

I’m not surprised you can’t get the legendary armor when they said you could. They’ve done the same with the new HoT legendaries. Say they’re available to craft right from the 17th of November. Well that’s a lie. The collections were FULL of bugs (which is forgivable, I mean you can’t get every bug under control in the game), but what WAS intended was the 12 day time-gate on the Astralaria Collection (and unless you had a crystal ball or psychic powers knowing you had to complete the Zinn Study Guide achievement, how else are we supposed to know?). So in actual reality, you simply couldn’t make the legendaries on the 17th.

Same with legendary armor it seems (Why am I not surprised?)

This whole situation reminds me of Mawdrey, and how many (including me) was so excited about crafting it, then you see these time-gated things and realize in reality that Mawdrey wasn’t actually craftable for a lengthy period of time. Nevermind the fact the rest of the components for Mawdrey were to be released in future Living Story episodes. So much for being able to craft it from day 1.

It’s just all lies. From now on when Anet say something will be available to make on day 1, I simply cannot trust their word on that now.

Edit: And the whole ‘being able to make the new legendaries on the 17th’ was from one of the recent POI’s talking about the HoT legendaries. In reality, sure you can START the collection/s, but be prepared to come across bugs and time gated things which prevent you from actually being able to MAKE them on the 17th of November.

So for the past few days I’ve been trying to get the achievements for the TD Meta for my final few mastery points that I need to get to make the gift of insights, but this place is literally a ghost town.

Just today I waited 20 minutes and only myself and ONE other person turned up for the Meta. WTF!? I feel like I’m in Guild Wars 1 all over again, where, because there aren’t many (if any) updates for it anymore (or in this case, not enough frequent events), no one is there, and when no one is there, YOU CAN’T DO A SINGLE THING.

So right now I’m really frustrated because these are the final few achievements I need for my final few mastery points, and there’s not a single thing I can do to suddenly make this place popular.

Maybe raids is to blame and everyone has flocked there, but my money is on the fact that the TD Meta is so hard. So hard that you need a very popular, well organised GUILD team to actually get it done. Unlike Auric Basin Meta, where the place isn’t such a nightmare to navigate, and is easier to succeed in (been in 5 successful tarir city takeovers so far).

Heck, I don’t even see any TD Meta ORG lfg’s. Trust me, I’ve looked. THEY AIN’T THERE.

So Anet, is Tangled Depths going to be another wasteland where people simply cannot get their achievements because it’s so hard to navigate, and succeed in the Meta?

Something seriously needs to be done about this.