Guild Wars 2

Avatara.1042:

Soft like the NSW origin team.

Someone’s an Australian Queenslander.

But yeah, the reason why it takes 4 logs as compared to 3 was because in the early days of GW2, there was far too much oversupply of Soft Wood Logs, leading ANet to tweak the recipe to make them more valuable. With the introduction of Ascended Weapons, this is no longer the case, but ANet hasn’t gone back and fixed the recipe yet.

CryxTryx.9208:

I dunno, I have 6 stacks of 250 sitting in the bank now because I have to keep emptying. Granted this is from mostly repeats of zone one, and doing the Tribulation modes.

Sure the Trib modes take a long time, but each Trib chests gives you over 250 baubles.

Yeah, but I’ll be getting all 5 of my characters through W2 and buying all of the upgrades for each of them. So that’s a LOT of baubles.

I’m not insane enough to do Infantile/Tribulation Mode on all of them though. XD That honor will go to my Asura with his Distinction in Applied Jumping degree.

I’ve yet to really try out World 2 yet (aside from some exploratory poking around in Rapids), but I just want to say thank you to Josh for being as responsive and open with us as he has been. It’s obvious you put a lot of love and attention into SAB (and were perhaps a little overly defensive of it at the start, as evidenced by some of your snarkier early responses ), and I want you to know that all of us who love SAB appreciate your efforts and enthusiasm in wanting to make it as fun an experience for us. Knowledge that you’ve taken note of places where the difficulty is harder than intended to be and are planning on fixing them soon goes a long way.

One thing I really like is the suggestion to travel back to your last checkpoint by paying a small bauble fee; would really help when we’re stuck in locations we can’t get out of due to bugs or an enemy knocking us into an illegal spot. Might I suggest tying this to the Flute item? Say, playing a specific tune will cost you 5 Baubles and bring you back to the last checkpoint? If you have no baubles, it warps you back there anyway. I don’t think this will be a large issue as players either:

a) are saving up baubles to buy Bubbles/items, and thus won’t be in situations where they’re on 0 baubles

b) having no baubles restricts your combat options with regards to bombs/slingshots, which is a handicap when facing more difficult enemies.

Ooof… I’ve been looking for information about how expensive the W2 items are, and now I know. O.o Guess my characters will be doing daily runs through W1 to pad out their baubles before heading into W2.

I am an ardent supporter of people having the opportunity to obtain skins at a time of their choosing as long as they do the content, so yes, supported.

@Vince: No, I’m pretty sure you have to open the chest, Vince. I ran W1Z1 TM yesterday and I didn’t get the coin till I opened the chest.

So protip: MAKE SURE YOU LOOT THE GLORIOUS CHEST FIRST!

I do agree that the countdown to the next zone could have been increased though. Maybe 30 seconds.

A bit disappointed by the removal of Obsidian Shards from Moto’s stock, but I imagine it (along with the nerfs to karma gain) was designed to make Karma a more valuable resource (as opposed to people who had millions of Karma and nothing to spend it on).

Still, as someone who isn’t too keen on the SAB skins (I love their look, but they don’t match my character aesthetics) and isn’t a mini-collector, I would prefer it if Obsidian Shards came back to Moto so I have something to spend my Baubles on.

Elbegast, I have to agree with most of the others posting here. It DOES sound like you’re being needlessly pedantic about the Playhouse/SAB. While it does sound like those areas are intended to be group content, they are NOT group content. As someone who solo’ed the Playhouse and SAB, I can assure you that those zones were designed to be completed solo; the “Recommended Group Size: 5” is just a holdover from the dungeon template that the devs built the instances from.

So just ignore what the message box says and go in and try out SAB. Trust me, you do NOT need to group up to complete it.

So, the Salvage-o-Matic is supposed to have a 20% chance to salvage upgrades, according to its item description. I always presumed it worked as intended as prior to the Sep 3rd patch, I only ever salvaged whites with it.

However, now that I’m salvaging Fines and Masterworks for their Essences, I’ve noticed that even though I’ve salvaged close to 100 Masterworks by now, I have not ever salvaged a single upgrade (rune/sigil) from them. It seems a stretch that a 20% chance could not have procced in that time.

What’s the experience of other users of the Salvage-o-Matic? Have you managed to salvage runes/sigils out from Masterworks with it? Or is my suspicion correct and the Salvage-o-Matic is bugged and not able to salvage upgrades?

There is apparently a Flute you can buy from a shop in World 2, although I’m not sure if it’s a SAB-only item or whether you can still play it in the “real world”.

@Boonprot: You can put spoiler content inside spoiler tags to avoid spoiling it for others.

I think ANet could have improved the invasions by making it so that any Molten/Aetherblade/Twisted mob kill advances the bar, rather than tying it to event completion. This means that people who prefer to farm Champs during events, or after the event is over, can do so because that would reduce the bar and progress the invasion anyway, so those who want to complete the invasion don’t have to beg the farmers to devote more attention to the Twisted portals.

Eleri Tezhme.3048:

I’ll be perfectly happy if I can end up tikkitytiking around as a plastic spider again. I am easily amused.

Do you giggle like a kid too when you dodge backwards and it goes “tikkatikkatikka”? XD

Drakkon.4782:

Indeed. Perhaps some sort of quickening draught to increase alacrity. I really doubt that they are competent enough to actually PILOT a golem, even if we were so inclined to make one large enough for them to get in. What a large and unwieldy thing that would be. I think it would be so slow as to actually induce drag on their already lackluster sloth.

Nonsense! There is no problem that cannot be solved by throwing an even BIGGER Golem at it. One day I’ll get funding for my VOLT-R0N project to unite all golems across Tyria into one super-golem. It’ll be unstoppable! Unstoppable, I tell you!

September does seem to be a kind of “breather month” in that it has SAB (which is permanent content, although it departs and returns periodically) and Tequatl Rising (which presumably is permanent content, since I can’t imagine ANet reverting his rewards/achievements back to the old way after the end of September). If this is true, I’m definitely glad for the break from the breakneck pace that the Living Story has been taking the last few months.

On the whole though, I agree with everyone else in this thread. I’d prefer it if updates got scaled back to once a month, and went at the pace similar to what Flame & Frost originally went on. It gives people time to play at their own pace, do dungeons/fractals, create alts, play WvW, or even just to take a break for a while. The new release schedule is getting players to log in more frequently, but are the players doing so happily? Or is it a case of them doing so grudgingly because they know if they don’t they’ll miss out?

^ I find the thought of a Charr named “Vatlaaw Fierceshot” wielding the Dreamer and leaving golden horseshoes in his wake to be utterly hilarious. XD

Nooooo, my Schnookums!

What I’m particularly interested to know is if salvaging Ectos gives a higher chance for rarer Essences than blues/greens.

Sentinel’s is Vitality major, Power and Toughness minor.

Eh? Have Sentinel’s inscriptions/insignia really crashed? Looking at guildwarstrade still has them selling for about 6g (inscriptions) and 18g (insignia). These are the Ori/Gossamer versions. Unless that site is outdated?

I managed to earn nearly 200g during the months of July and August. And I’m neither a TP player OR a hardcore farmer. That’s pretty incredible when I think about it. O.o

So salvaging Ectos gives you Crystalline Dust AND Essences? Not one or the other? That’s good to know. I still don’t foresee myself salvaging Ectos until I’m done with crafting, but it’s nice that they didn’t throw a wrench in the ecto supply chain.

Good thing I’ve been saving my BLSK’s purely for use on Exotics!

Tom Gore.4035:

Well for wood and metal, the ascended recipes will take care of excess mats pretty well.

And the same will happen to cloth and leather once Ascended armor comes out too.

Yeah, I was quite disappointed that the original weapons/backpack from SAB 1 didn’t come back (and I already have the skins I wanted, so it’s not due to any desire to get them again). Still, there’s hope that they could be brought back for a re-release; it happened with the Fused/Sclerite/Dragon’s Jade skins, after all.

Would also like to know what’s going on here. Put it in spoiler text for the benefit of those who want to find things out themselves.

Did you by any chance take the Shortcut Worm in W1Z2? Because if you did, it actually bypasses one of the locations needed for Baby’s Super Adventure.

I’d like to know this too. I’m curious as to whether the ratio of 6/50 (or was it 6/100?) of testers who beat Liadri carried over into the wider playerbase.

LadyRhonwyn.2501:

Zaxares.5419:

(which I agree is an exploit, but one that I think could be easily fixed by matching rewards to your character’s TRUE level. So even if you created a fresh level 2, ran him to Southsun and did a dungeon there while upscaled to 80, he still only gets the rewards for a level 2 character)

No, that wouldn’t be fair… I did SAB with my lvl2 warrior. She’s from January, so I didn’t create her specifically for SAB. But she happened to be the one in Rata Sum (as permanent station at the moment) when SAB came out in April. I also did it on several other mule characters who are (still) waiting for playing time while I others. (oh, and she’s still lvl2…)

But you do have level 80 characters, yes? It would be a simple matter to just switch to one of them when doing SAB.

Scaling rewards is already present in some parts of the game anyway. For example, if you do any activity on a low level character, the items that the reward box grants you at the end are scaled to your level, meaning that it’s far less profitable to do them on low levels than it is for level 80’s.

1. No idea, but presumably they will still be valid to be fair to the people who spent gold+sprockets buying them.

2. Anthony Orden has confirmed that the Gauntlet achievements will still be completable when the Gauntlet returns. He did not confirm directly whether the mini would still be available, although logically it should.

Sorry to hear that, Ravencroft. :/ Still, if you can be patient, I’m sure the tools will make yet another return at some point in the future. They are remarkably good sellers for ANet, so why turn down more opportunities for profit from new players/new alts?

I personally doubt that saved boxes will drop Ascended materials. Nevertheless, there’s no harm in holding onto them till the patch tomorrow.

Whenever there’s a daily involving the Gauntlet champion, I take my MM necro into there and do Halmi, Doobroosh and Tyre in ~5 mins for a nice 52 silver. Since the Gauntlet is going to be returning content, I’m keeping my tickets in the bank for when it does.

Besides, I still need to get the 8 orbs Liadri achievement sometime.

Tom Gore.4035:

I bought a bunch of them when you could get them at 14c. Now they sell for 24c and going up…

Well, well… So they have. Might be time to unload about a thousand or so of them before prices go back down.

Hehe, I actually found that exact same miner a few days ago, Hyperion. I reported it as a dialogue bug; hopefully you did too.

Honestly I doubt there’s going to be any serious lore behind it, any more than there’s lore behind changes like making the Fire Elemental in Thaumanova Reactor not so deadly to fight.

I’m thinking that the included ectos in the Luck Essences salvage ratio so that people breaking down Ectos for Dust get a little something extra for their troubles. It should also help to regulate the Crystalline Dust market a little better by encouraging people to salvage Ectos instead of just hoarding them up too.

Hope to see Ascended jewelry craftable with r500 too. Especially if it keeps the trend from Ascended weapons and have an upgrade slot AND an infusion slot. This ought to be fair, considering the cost involved in crafting Ascended gear and the fact it’s fairly easy to obtain non-customisable Ascended rings from Fractals/Laurels/guild commendations.

It’s a case of “if I put in 8 times the work, why can’t I be eligible for 8x the reward?”. Barring situations where people create and delete characters purely to farm rewards (which I agree is an exploit, but one that I think could be easily fixed by matching rewards to your character’s TRUE level. So even if you created a fresh level 2, ran him to Southsun and did a dungeon there while upscaled to 80, he still only gets the rewards for a level 2 character), I don’t see why if somebody did the Daily 8 times in a day, if they legitimately put in the time and effort to get it, they shouldn’t get the Daily rewards 8 times too.

Personally speaking though, I’m rather glad that the rewards are once per account. Frees up more time to do the rest of my GW2 content, which have been sadly neglected since the Living Story started. XD

SoPP.7034:

^ It is a form of prestige, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. While I’m happy that others now can access the content and get the achievements, there should be recognition for those of us there first.

After all, if not for those that played it and enjoyed it originally, it wouldn’t have enjoyed the support and success it did, and the subsequent motivation to bring it back because of that popularity.

Some recognition for that would be nice.

I can see where you’re coming from, but I still disagree with it. (And this is speaking as someone who got Distinction in Applied Jumping when the SAB first came out too.)

To my mind, the fact that SAB is coming back is reward in itself for those of us who sang its praises and wanted it to come back, bigger and better. Those of us who got the title the first time had the benefit of 4 – 5 months to wear our “Distinction” title, when no one else had it. The way I see it, it’s not much different to the people who had the unlimited tools when they first came out, fielding questions from newbies who said “Woah, how does your pick have fire?!” Now the tools are available again, but we still had our “headstart”. It’s now time for the newer players or those who missed out the first time to have their go.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I wonder just how nasty the first area of SAB will be in Tribulation Mode. It’s basically just a wide open flat piece of grass land. My guess: Lava starts rising, forcing you to hurry. Spikes appear anywhere you would normally step. And maybe not even checkpoints are safe.

I fully expect there to be one checkpoint where an enemy pops up or falls from the sky and knocks the player off juuuuuust as they’re about to reach it. XD

Or perhaps one checkpoint that’s completely fake and just kills players that step on it.

Dan.8709:

He could say IHHHHHHHHH BOYYYYYY EYYYYYY BOYYYYY from time to time.

I vote that if the Mini Shopkeeper is out, whenever you level up, the SAB zone completion music plays and he does his little YAAAAAAH BOYYYYY! routine for about 10 seconds.

^ I echo Crius’s advice. While no one knows for sure, the safest course of action is to buy up the Sprockets (they’re pretty cheap now) you need and grab all the recipes from the Pavilion vendors before it closes.

That said, the Pavilion has been stated to be returning content, and I’m pretty confident the vendors (and recipes) will be available again when the Pavilion and Gauntlet come back.

Tarnished Coast. Only had time to make one attempt last night. Got Bloodtide Coast. Map failed to complete all the events in time due to a mixture of events bugging and over-huge zerg collisions.

Still, I’m not that upset as I’ve beaten Scarlet before, and 1 AP doesn’t matter too much to me.

/fistbump @ Danikat

I know the feeling. I did manage to beat Liadri, but I passed on the Light Up the Darkness achievement this time around, since I barely scraped past Liadri with my sub-par gear. I’ll wait till the Gauntlet returns before attempting it again, but yeah, it’s a very satisfying feeling seeing your skills gradually improve each time you challenge Liadri.

I vote for “March of the Legions”. XD

To the people complaining that the rewards for fighting Tequatl is likely to be insufficient if he’s too hard, if the revamped Dragon encounters instead gave guaranteed EXOTICS instead of Rares, would you consider it worth the effort?

It’s also possible that ANet may simply decide to have a “cut-off” point and say that new races like the Tengu have a completely new Personal Story that doesn’t link to the 5 original races at all. For example (and this is all just speculation), say that the Tengu become playable with a Canthan expansion. Their Personal Story mainly revolves around them returning to Cantha to deal with the Empire after it’s revealed that the Emperor has fallen under the sway of one of the Elder Dragons and is marshalling his armies for a massive invasion of Tyria.

Older characters can come and join in this Personal Story, but the Tengu can’t go back and do the Personal Story from vanilla GW2, because their introduction is considered to have occurred canonically after the defeat of Zhaitan. (Of course, there’s nothing stopping Tengu characters from exploring the open world or doing doing dungeons.)

Lopez.7369:

You don’t need anywhere close to that many mats.

What he said. Even with 8 level 80’s, you still don’t need anywhere near that amount of Ectos or other mats to make a couple of Ascended weapons for each. :P

As with all things RNG, the safest way is just to save gold and buy it off the TP. On the bright side, I don’t think the F&F dyes will ever reach the prices they commanded prior to the Anniversary Sale ever again, because now the investors know that it’s possible for previously exclusive items to return, making the investments much more risky.