Guild Wars 2

Yes, I’d like to see more armor pieces for the Toxic armor set get added. I’d even be willing to accept an outfit version, but I’d MUCH prefer a mix-and-match capability.

Wanze.8410:

Well, first of all, only flippable items are worth creating a bot for. Then you also need to identify a market, that has a high enough velocity, supply and demand to make it worthwhile. I have no idea how hard/easy it is to set up a bot and how timeconsuming it is but i would think the majority of items listed on the tp wouldnt warrant circumstances that make botting bids on them profitable.

I think the bigger issue would be that markets in GW2 fluctuate often enough that what may be a profitable market one day might be a loss-maker the next. The bot could be scripted to perform trading actions that minimize or stop losses, of course, but then is the work worth the limited funds you get back?

The wings were likely removed because we have backpieces in GW2, and they would cause clipping with worn backpieces (and stuff like Engineer Kits).

Don’t get me wrong; I miss the wings too, but I can understand why it was done.

But it would be really, REALLY nice if the Halloween 2014 special meta-skin was a pair of black wings backpiece. Hint hint, ANet!

Astralporing.1957:

I sincerely doubt that gold coming from dungeons is even close to the one generated by casuals (from events, or by simply vendoring all their loot).
Yes, it may seen a lot, for an individual person, but remember that for each player running a dungeon there are hundreds if not thousands that are doing something else.
(and also that gold coming from selling your loot on TP doesn’t count).

Yes, after I logged off yesterday I thought some more about it and realised that I’m likely wrong. 5 people running AC all paths would generate a raw 22.5 gold into the economy, but that’s likely dwarfed by the amount of gold generated from, say, Karka Queen, who gives out 4 Champ Bags (each of which has an average of 3 – 5 silver) to maybe 50+ players, plus event completion. And that’s just one World Boss. I think the biggest source of new coin in the game most likely comes from Champ Bags across the entire game.

The Dobbs event does, actually. The merchant at the end sells the Ancient Stone Summit Spike needed for Treasure Hunter.

The Devouring the Brand isn’t linked to a collection, but it IS needed to unlock a trait, and it’s unfair to force players to have to buy it because the event they need to complete is bugged 99% of the time.

I don’t really see the issue.

1. Asura are mammals, and they do have mammary glands. However, there’s nothing saying that they have breasts like humans do. For all we know, their nipples are located near their crotch like cows and deer. (Would make bedroom romps with an Asura interesting, wouldn’t it?) If that’s the case, then there would be no reason at all for female Asura to cover their chests, outside of practical/protective reasons.

2. There’s been no official confirmation of how many teats female Charr have, although they obviously don’t have prominent breasts. Logically though, I’d say a female Charr would only have one or two teats, since Charr only give birth to one or two cubs at a time. Cats having as many as six teats only happens because they give birth to litters; if a species has small numbers of offspring, there would be no evolutionary reason to have excessive nipples.

I also hope that the devs look into the Dobbs event in Timberline Falls and the Devouring the Brand meta-event in Iron Marches while they’re at it. Those events also almost always seem to be bugged.

Not at all, unless the guild name/tag is derogatory, pornographic or otherwise offensive. I’ve seen LGBT guilds, Christian guilds, furry guilds etc.

To me, it’s “you’ve done the dungeon at least once before and know what’s coming”. I’m actually perfectly happy to take newbies; the only difference is that with newbies I just have to explain what we’re doing (and sometimes why) before the different sections of a dungeon. If the newbies are actually halfway competent with decent gear, it actually doesn’t take much longer than the typical experienced PUG run.

Another candidate is the Mini Toxic Hybrid, whose constant grunting is kind of annoying.

Except that way back during the Battle for LA aftermath, a dev (I forget who) did actually tell us that the merchants for the Heirlooms and belongings would be disappearing at the conclusion of the Living Story and to use them all now while we still could.

There was also another dev who told us to “hang onto” the Blade Shards, because there would be additional uses for them. (That additional use turned out to be a rather lackluster merchant, but they were technically right.)

So odds are quite likely that Heirlooms and Belongings have no further use. That said, I do think that it wouldn’t do any harm to have a single merchant, similar to Sonders the Seller, continue to sit in LA and continue to accept these tokens.

Grats. It’s a beautiful weapon.

Too bad we can’t just beat up harpies until they drop their sword.

I might be mixing that figure up with the cost for an Ascended weapon or perhaps a medium/heavy set of Ascended armor. I saw it on a thread in the Crafting forum months ago.

Map completion rewards can actually be pretty nice nowadays, thanks to the increased prices of Rares, Exotics and crafting materials. (Just got 40 Linen Scraps from mapping Dredgehaunt? SCORE!)

But if you’re not after 100% map completion or a Legendary, why are you even bothering to map complete in the first place? The map completion rewards are really just a bone thrown to players who like mapping as an activity on its own. (And to be honest, we’d probably 100% map Tyria anyway, even if there wasn’t any reward for it. I 100% mapped Tyria and Cantha in GW1 back before the Cartographer titles were introduced, just because I liked unfogging the map.)

I heard that it costs about 168g on average to craft a full set of Ascended light armor. You save a little in that Quartz is a lot cheaper to acquire than T6 mats, but you’re looking at a minimum of 30 days to craft it due to the time-gating on the Charged Quartz.

Pirate King Drrikk’ttikk for Captain’s Council!

I once saw a guy named “Donald McRonald” who, yes, was the spitting image of a certain famous clown.

And yes, he did send me a Cheeseburger and Fries when I asked him about it. XD

The other annoying part of that is if you’re in a T1 server where you tend to get locked into having the same colour week after week after week, making it just about impossible to reach certain POIs or Vistas.

I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I only bought my tag because it might come in handy for guild missions or when I need to show a newbie in PvE where to go on the map. I don’t like public speaking, so I’d be useless as a WvW Commander.

I pronounce it as NIFF-fl-hell (although I think it’s actually KNEE-fl-hell) and KIE-lo as well.

They were 30% off a couple of weekends ago. That was the latest offering.

@Weindrasi: You actually have it the other way around. The PC has gathered proof that a noble has been secretly selling out information about Seraph patrols to the centaurs, allowing them to ambush and capture/kill Seraph. The PC, along with Logan Thackeray and Countess Anise, finally succeed in calling a trial, but the noble invokes an ancient Krytan right to “trial by combat” (which the presiding judge, Minister Caudecus, agrees suspiciously quickly to).

As for that particular Heart, yeah, I felt it was a bit iffy, but the prisoners there are Charr criminals who have essentially been sentenced to “hard labour” as punishment. It’s not very different from typical medieval societies who have punishments like being condemned to row in the galleys, or to get locked in the stocks while people throw all kinds of (potentially lethal) stuff at them.

Yeah. I finished my Beaded Weapon collection long ago (even before the Collection was introduced), but buying up 1425 Sun Beads was NOT fun. They really need to add a “Sun Beads in Bulk” item similar to how they added one for Obsidian.

Berk.8561:

Zaxares.5419:

Is 30+ players really considered too few??

Given that they seem to have set the cap at 100 or more and seem to like world boss events where the world boss melts in a minute or two, perhaps 30+ really is too few for ANet.

See, that’s the baffling part. From the time I spent with TTS getting map overflows to spawn, we know that a map’s “soft cap” is about 120 people, meaning that new players coming into the map get redirected to a new overflow. It’s hard capped around 150 people (when you can’t even taxi new people in anymore), although I admit this was prior to the update that “made it easier for guilds to bring their members into a map”.

30+ players may not be a full map, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a map that’s just about empty (I’d think a map with <5 players would be a good candidate for closure).

RNG is RNG. I’ve had Fractals/dungeon runs where I didn’t even have a Rare to show for it, but on the other hand, just last weekend I had an insanely lucky Fractals run where I ended up with 4 Exotics, 2 Globs of Mist Essence, a Fractal Spoon and an Ascended Ring at the end.

Besides, I don’t know if you realise it, but if you run dungeons every day for the gold reward to buy materials, you’re actually contributing to the problem. Dungeons are probably the biggest gold faucet in GW2 right now, and every player that farms gold to buy mats instead of farming their own supply is only driving prices for those mats even higher.

I use Drakes and Devourers as pets. They’re tanky enough that for most Champions you can just let them aggro onto the pet and swap them out whenever they get low on health. Use Longbow and kite the Champ during cooldowns if necessary.

Wurms are extremely easy Champs to solo if you fight from range. With a little experience you can sidestep the Wurm’s ranged attacks every time.

The Champs that I usually can’t solo are the ones that summon powerful additional help, like the Champ Risen Pirate in Bloodtide Coast and the Krait Witch in Mount Maelstrom. Getting mobbed by several Veterans or suicide mobs while trying to avoid the hard-hitting Champ is too much.

The three things I desperately want fixed for Necromancer:

1. Please fix the minion pathing AI. I’m so tired of having to stop and wait for my minions to catch up before engaging enemies.

2. There is a recent new bug where if you go down, all your minions die as well. This needs to be fixed. (If it was intentional, then other pet classes like Engi turrets, Mesmer illusions and Ranger pets also need to die when the caster goes down.)

3. This is a more general bug. Fix the 6th rune bonus on several runes so they activate properly on transformation elites. I have the Rune of the Mad King on one armor set and it really bothers me how I basically can’t get any use out of it unless I use Flesh Golem as my elite.

Necromancers do have some trouble building good synergy with organised dungeon groups, but as some others have said, unless you’re joining a “speedclear/meta” group, most groups will not care as long as you’re level 80/are experienced and have decent gear. I’ve never been kicked from any dungeon or Fractal group on my Necromancer (even though I only use MM!)

Ahhh, so THAT’S why sometimes I don’t see my “Area Healing” notification go off when using Arcane Brilliance in Healing Rain/Geyser.

Yeah, it’s because I’m not going for a Legendary that I have so many of them. Still, I’m keeping them in reserve in case ANet does release new Legendaries one day.

Pretty sure it doesn’t, but I can’t confirm it.

I run a hybrid condi-minionmancer that usually wrecks turret engineers (provided my minions don’t bug out and just stand there). They just can’t handle the combination of direct damage from my minions AND the multiple conditions I keep applying to them. Between vampiric healing and death shroud, I can usually outlast the engineer.

On the other hand, if my minions bug out and they catch me before I’ve had a chance to build up life force then they can usually kill me if they have enough CC’s built in.

That’s what I do with them whenever Daily Laurel Vendor comes up. I buy 20 Heavy Crafting Bags. But it comes up rarely enough that between getting 1 Laurel every day and the Monthly, I’m still slowly accumulating Laurels.

Mystic.5934:

As you might appreciate, I buy dozens of BLSK whenever they are discounted

I’m kinda wishing that I’d bought a few back when they were on sale. I’ve still got 3 spare BLSK’s left, but I’m burning through them remarkably fast nowadays thanks to doing more dungeons to complete the various Collections.

Sometimes it’s cases where people right-clicked on a name in chat to send them a mail, intending to give it to a friend or guildie, but they clicked on the wrong one.

One time I got a mail from a stranger with about 20 various T6 mats inside. Luckily for them, I was nice and mailed it back saying they sent it to the wrong person.

Nah, not supported. I think we get enough laurels as is.

Got 632 sitting in my bank right now, and that’s after I already bought 5 Ascended amulets and the Karmic infusions to go in them.

nopoet.2960:

After 300% luck should decay. Let people go beyond it they want but you’ll have grind harder to stay beyond 300%.

No no no!

No no no!

No no no!

Decaying mechanics is a poison in MMOs that should be avoided at all costs.

If you don’t mind doing PvP, it’s much better to do the Maguuma Wastes reward track for the Ambrite weapons. You get a guaranteed Fossil at the end of the track, and you also should get just enough Geodes and Ambrite during the track to craft a weapon (or close enough that you can buy the shortfall/farm a little to make up the difference).

We had a similar incident to this on the weekend doing a Guild Bounty. We were in Diessa Plateau hunting Short-Fuse Felix. It was us and another guild, and there must have been at least 30+ players there. Yet surprisingly, we all got the prompt that there are “too few players” on the map.

Is 30+ players really considered too few??

@Jerus: That could work, but I really don’t need yet another token currency cluttering up my bank. >.> I still think that making a Fractal Weapon Box available for a (large?) amount of Pristine Relics would be the most elegant solution.

Fixing the post bug.

Tsk. Full Nomad’s with Mercy runes is the meta now.

Me neither. The only thing I need left are the Foxfire Clusters, and I refuse to buy them at their current prices. However, I’m patient. I’m up to 59 now just from casually harvesting T5/6 wood nodes. I know I’ll get it eventually.

Basically, the key here seems to be that if you leave your character parked inside Rhendak’s dungeon after killing him when you log it, the game seems to think that your character never left and doesn’t refresh the completion credit. To get around this, head to either WvW or PvP and log out there.

Also, if you are farming Rhendak’s Signet, keep in mind that I think only level 80 characters are eligible to even get it as a drop. Lower level characters will only get gear appropriate to their level.

In order to be able to salvage inscriptions/insignias, the item must meet the following criteria:

1. It MUST be Exotic. Rares or lower quality items will never drop inscriptions/insignia.

2. The item in question must be of a stat type whose inscription/insignia that can’t be crafted normally. This includes the following:

- Soldier
- Cavalier
- Shaman
- Rabid
- Dire
- Magi

3. The item you’re salvaging from must not, itself, be a crafted item. For example, if you got a Dire Ceremonial Dagger as a drop, you have a chance (my experience says it’s about 50%) to get back the inscription if you salvage it. However, if you bought a Dire Pearl Dagger (which some other player crafted using a salvaged inscription) and then tried to re-salvage the inscription from it, you have a 0% chance of success.

If a name isn’t caught by the filter when it’s first created, the only time ANet will look at names is if somebody reports it. So yes, it must mean that at some point down the line, somebody looked at “Digital Midget” and “Deranged Killer” and found them offensive.

The first I can understand, because the word midget is sometimes considered derogatory by people suffering from the condition. I can’t see why the second would be offensive, unless there’s some combination of letters in there that inadvertently means something offensive in another language. (For example, “Sega” is actually a crude word in a European language, Italian I think.)

But in any case, Inculpatus above is correct. You need to contact Support and hash it out with them if you think there’s been a mistake. There have been cases of names being wrongfully flagged as being offensive, after all.

Jewels (such as Exquisite Ruby Jewels) or Universal Upgrades (such as Crests) can slot into backpieces.

However, bear in mind that the upgrades must fit the level of the backpiece. The crafted backpieces top out at level 78, meaning that Exotic Jewels can’t be slotted into them (they have a level 80 requirement). You can, however, put Orbs or Crests into them.

I’d like to see the Hammer be made dodgable and perhaps an increase in safety railings for the map. I’m generally OK with the breakable floors (it makes me consider my positioning, and there’s a fair number of skills where there’s a tell before the pull), but I think perhaps increasing the time before the floor breaks to 3 seconds instead of 2 might help give players a chance to get away before falling to their deaths. (Meaning that players who want to kill others using the floors will need either Immobilize or Stun to lock the enemy in place after using a Push/Pull skill, or deliberately breaking the floor first before maneuvering the enemy around for a CC. Both methods increase the skill level needed to get off a fall kill.)

My solution: If you pick “Random Team” when you join a match, you get a special buff that DOUBLES the rewards at the end of the match (capped at the winner’s normal reward). This means that if you picked a random team, and your team ended up losing, you’d still get the same rewards as if you’d lucked out onto the winning team anyway. This has the following benefits:

1. There is no incentive to hop teams. You’d get the same reward staying on your random original team as you would switching to the winning team. This discourages Autobalance Wars.

2. Because rewards are calculated based on the length of time someone is in the match, it encourages people to join the match at once instead of watching until it becomes clear which team is superior. This discourages waiting in Spectate and should thus help solve the issue of 4v5.

These changes means it’s most profitable to instantly hit “Random Team” the moment a match starts, and then see it out to the end, win or lose.

Now, to ensure that winning still has some meaning, if you pick Random and lose, it won’t give you credit towards the appropriate achievements (Genius, Phantom etc.) Also, to incentivise people to move up to Solo/Team Queue when they get experienced enough, I propose increasing the rewards of the two modes to 3x Hotjoin rewards (for Solo) and 5x Hotjoin rewards (for Team). The maximum daily gold reward limits for Solo and Team Queues remain the same. Note that the Random Team buff only applies to Hotjoin; it does not appear in Solo or Team Queue.

So all this should mean that Hotjoin remains a casual, “lite-PvP” mode that anyone can join and slowly work on PvP ranks and reward tracks. But if you want to earn your ranks/tracks faster, as well as gain renown and leaderboard ranks, you’ll need to move up to Solo/Team Queue.

This is a multi-faceted problem, with several base issues at play, but at heart, I think this is the core reason: the 4v5’s and team swapping is happening because people don’t want to be stuck on the losing team. Not only is it not fun to get stomped on, but you also get less rewards.

Now, there’s two main ways you can fix this. You can either punish the offending behaviour, or you remove the reason why people want to join the winning team in the first place.

Punishing the offending behaviour can work to some extent, but bear in mind that introducing things like Dishonorable for forcing Autobalance or stopping people from waiting in Spectate may not actually solve the problem. I suspect that all it will do is result in more people simply ragequitting the moment they see that their team is losing (which then, of course, either leads to Autobalance anyway, or a steamrolling effect where every single member of the enemy team quits too because “why bother?” I see this all the time in competitive FPS games).

And if you slap Dishonorable onto Hotjoin too, well, then you may as well simply get rid of Hotjoin altogether. It would be indistinguishable from Solo Queue, and why would people bother playing Hotjoin then when Solo Queue offers much bigger rewards for essentially the same work? Do you REALLY want all the newbies and IPHIW players in Solo/Team Queue?

Getting rid of rewards altogether is also a big no-no. No matter how you feel about it, the undeniable evidence was that PvP became a LOT more popular after reward tracks were introduced. And the PvP scene NEEDS to have this huge influx of players if it is to survive in the long term. You can’t have any PvP scene solely consisting of a few well-known teams playing each other over and over. Viewers will get bored watching it, and the teams themselves will likely get burnt out (or get bored and move on to other games). It’s crucial that you have new blood that can step up when that happens, or the entire game mode will stagnate and die.

So my solution? I’ll post it in the next post.