Guild Wars 2

I’d be OK with either system.

It’s a shame you can’t give them to me. I’m completely out of Dragonite and Empyreal now, and I still need 60 and 30 refined versions of each.

You can sometimes get them from Tiny Icy Bags, although it’s up to RNG, of course.

It’s down to your personal choice, but personally I went with a Norn Ranger. Several of the Ranger’s weapon skills (Maul/Swoop on Greatsword, Viper’s Bite on Sword, the Shark/Jellyfish attacks on Spear) all scream “Spirit of the Wild!” attacks, which I thought suited Norns very well.

There are two issues at play here:

1. The Chalice of Rhendak is not a guaranteed drop. Out of the 20 or so times I’ve killed Rhendak so far, I’ve only gotten it about 4 times, which suggests there’s a 20% chance to get it from his chest.

2. I’ve discovered that if you leave a character parked inside Flame Temple Tombs when you log off, it won’t “reset” the mini-dungeon for you the next time you log in. This means that if you killed Rhendak on Monday, looted his chest, then logged off, log back in on Tuesday and kill Rhendak again, you won’t be eligible for the mini-dungeon end chest, because the game thinks that you haven’t left the mini-dungeon at all.

To get around this, log off your character in WvW or Heart of the Mists. When you re-log back in, you can just exit WvW/HotM and be right back at Rhendak, but the game will think that you’ve left the mini-dungeon and reset properly.

Not all the Exotic bags share the same loot tables though, even if they have the same name. There are multiple versions of Deluxe Gear Boxes, for example. I suspect that Crustacea and Arthropoda can only drop from Fallen Adventurer Backpacks that were looted from Champion Karkas (hence why they’re so expensive compared to the other Exotics. Few people bother killing the Champion Karkas on Southsun).

I know that Dulfy says that Crustacea and Arthropda can drop from Slime-Covered Lootboxes, but I don’t know if this is verified or not. I CAN confirm that the karka bows drop from the Fallen Adventurer Backpacks from Champ karkas, because I got Crustacea myself from one of the Backpacks that I looted from the Karka Queen.

Well, the “problem” with the Queensdale Champ train (and other champ trains in general) was two-fold:

1. The Champ bags used to give a lot more raw coin. That was an issue when people could farm upwards of 30+ bags in an hour, each one giving ~10 silver. Multiply that by however many people there are in the zerg and that’s a TON of new gold being generated.

2. It was giving new players the wrong kind of idea of what GW2 was supposed to be about. (Namely, just join a train and run in circles while spamming 1.) There was also a great deal of toxicity whenever a player killed a Champ out of rotation, intentionally or otherwise.

I don’t think introducing Loot bags to all Veterans would cause an issue like the Champ bags. Firstly, Loot bags themselves give miniscule amounts of coin. Their real value lies in the materials they can drop, and this in turn would help boost supply across the board and lower prices so that farming gold becomes less of an imperative.

Because the Champs got downscaled to Elites, dungeons wouldn’t become new Champ trains either, because the non-Exotic bags don’t give anywhere near as much raw coin. They WOULD make it much more worthwhile to farm dungeons for mats of specific tiers though. For example, say you need Cotton. The best place to get Cotton now would be CM, since there are now tons of (downscaled) Veterans in there, each of which drops Bags of Purloined Goods, which can drop Cotton. Champions would drop Masterwork level bags, each of which could also drop Cotton (or other T3 mats).

While I would like to see dungeon completion rewards (the daily bonus chests) be made character specific rather than account wide, I think this wouldn’t be a good idea until some extremely easy dungeon paths got adjusted so they weren’t so easy to complete, else you’d have players basically farming those paths non-stop, like the way people used to run CoF P1 over and over.

Geodes can be traded for Clay Bricks, which are used to make Clay Pots. Clay Pots can be sold on the TP for upwards of 10g, so depending on how cheaply you can purchase the other ingredients, you can make quite a lot of money on those.

Sadly they missed out on a good opportunity for the Tengu to break their isolation when Scarlet attacked Lion’s Arch. If the Tengu had come to the city’s aid, it would have been a great way to introduce them as a new friendly playable race.

Thank you for the update, Lauren. Those two event chains have been bothering us players for months now.

Can I also point you in the direction of the Dobbs event in Timberline Falls, Riagan’s event in Bloodtide Coast, and the one in Cursed Shore that are needed for the collections? They should have their own threads in the Bugs forum already, so this is just a heads-up.

Oh! And the Devouring the Brand meta-event in Iron Marches is frequently bugged too, which blocks players from acquiring a trait.

Yeah. I’ve been waiting for a patch to reset the servers to base unbugged status, but by the time I got home from work, Dobbs was already bugged. >.< It’s insane how quickly/often his event bugs out, and I haven’t been able to see it in action enough to get an idea of what causes the bug.

Sadly, by the time I got home from work yesterday, Dobbs was bugged again. >.< Back to waiting for another patch to reset the servers.

The Sigil recipe was supposedly added back during the 9/9 Feature pack, but it seems it was bugged and the recipes either weren’t dropping, or they weren’t tradable.

Both of you are just arguing over definitions, really. :P You’re both intelligent people; I’m sure you can see the point the other is trying to make.

At the end of the day, yes, ANet could drive cloth prices down by vastly increasing supply, but their lack of action on this front shows that they like having Ascended armor be as difficult as it is to obtain. (Most likely because it gives players a long-term goal to work for, as well as providing a good gold sink by way of all the Silk being traded.)

Is that a good long-term decision as far as player satisfaction is concerned? That’s a bit more murky. I, personally, think it won’t hurt the game’s lifespan and economy very much to help ease cloth prices a bit, and it could have a big payoff in the form of increased player happiness, but it seems that ANet believes that keeping the status quo is better for the game’s long-term viability.

Not my style (just as the Wintersday, Sclerite, Lovestruck, Leyline and many, many other sets were not my style), but I think players who were after a “wind” motif for their characters will be very, very happy, so good for them.

^ Be nice. :P This increased communication is exactly why Gaile got shifted to her new role. Don’t be snarky when this is exactly what we asked for.

PvP is srs bsns.

Cynz.9437:

sitting in skyhammer right now 3v5
one guy decided to not even bother so it is actually 2v5

When it gets like that, that’s when I feel that Autobalance Wars are justified.

I do wish they’d bring back 8v8, yes. It’s too zergy for official competitions, but it also promoted a much more freewheeling PvP style. Newbies are more likely to just hop in since unless one team has like, all rank 60+ and the other has <20’s, your sheer numbers will likely make up for any inexperience or lack of skill.

Team imbalances also have less of an effect; a 4v5 means that the understrength team is down in strength by about 20%. In contrast, a 7v8 is down in strength by less than 10%, which means that the understrength team could still win if they have good players to carry them.

Yeah, leaving the Hero’s story open-ended would be the best solution. My personal headcanon?

1. My Ascalonian Warrior and Canthan Assassin get married and settle down in Kryta, where Queen Salma bestows a noble title upon them for their help during the War in Kryta. My GW2 Mesmer is a descendant of the pair, and still holds her noble title.

2. My Ascalonian Necromancer becomes even more reclusive and solitary. He eventually heads to Elona to study under Palawa Joko to further his knowledge of undeath. (He also operated as a secret spy for my Paragon. See below.) Eventually he leaves Joko’s service once he had learned enough to undertake the Lich transformation himself. His current whereabouts are unknown.

3. My Ascalonian Monk returns to Ascalon and does her best to ease the pain and suffering of its citizens. She eventually travels to Ebonhawke with Gwen and Keiran, continuing her ministering to its people. She dies there of old age and is buried in the cemetery along with her friends and Nicholas/Yakkington.

4. My Elonian Paragon returns to Istan and becomes the new leader of the Sunspears for a time. He eventually retires with honor and glory, and dies before Palawa Joko made his move to conquer Elona. (I allow myself a little hubris and RP it as Joko being afraid to launch his war while my Paragon was still alive to fight him. )

You could just start a LFG and do the dungeons normally if you don’t want to buy them. I start my own groups all the time. Usually they fill within 5 mins.

It would be nice to have more uses for Badges of Honor, but I don’t think converting them to dungeon tokens is the right move.

They’re not my style (I prefer my weapons to look like actual weapons), but I’m glad that Wind fans finally have a weapon set they can use, as opposed to the usual fire/ice ones.

I really like the change that allows us to see projected profit by hovering over the price. Good job, ANet!

Unfortunately, no. You might be able to appeal to Support if the recipe in question is exceedingly rare/exclusive (for example, if you used the Ogre Sharpening Stone recipe on the wrong character, and you can only get said recipe once per account), but apart from that, your only recourse is to level up the missing crafting discipline.

Ehh, bringing realism into a game is a real catch-22 situation. You’d have players demanding that Warriors/Guardians should move at half the speed of medium/light armor wearers, for one thing.

I’m happy to just let people wear what they want, and have every class/race balanced for game purposes, and just handwave the logical inconsistencies.

Gaile Gray.6029:

According to Colin Johanson, Guild Wars 2 Game Director, Super Adventure Box will be back in the future. We don’t have a timeframe for the return of the SAB, but we will be bringing back this popular content.

I know you would like more details, more info, a date, etc., but that’s not available right now. I hope the above comment reassures you, though, because at the core, the important answer is that yes, SAB will be back in the future.

-happy dance while playing Sunny Glade music-

Datamining has indicated we’ll be getting new content (mostly in new gem store items and a potential new festival token), although that doesn’t rule out old stuff coming back. Recent trends have shown that ANet has now embraced the approach of releasing old content (probably because they’ve seen they’re still big sellers).

Hmm, so it looks like we’re getting a new collectible type for Halloween 2014. Wonder if they’re doing away with the old tokens, or if new rewards are going to be introduced.

Yeah, I’m baffled too. Why was this removed? O.o I mean, I never even used the tonic anyway, but what harm was it doing? The only reason I can think of is that some players have found a way to use it to exploit a dungeon, but ANet obviously don’t want to share knowledge of what that exploit is.

I wouldn’t buy/wear them myself, but I always support more cosmetic options for players, so /signed.

Deliberately failing an event to farm it over and over though, is something that ANet obviously frowns on. It’s not illegal, and I certainly wouldn’t report players for it as long as they’re not griefing (as per the examples you laid out), but you can bet that they’ll take steps to stop it if it gets brought to their attention.

I used to buy high level cloth items and salvage them for Silk, but competition for them is getting really, really fierce now. As such, I’ve resorted to just buying a stack of Silk each day and paying for it by selling my other materials that I gather. (I have a surplus of metal and wood thanks to my Mass Gathering playstyle.)

The karma method is another good one, but I’m currently low on karma after spending a ton of it completing the T3 Cultural weapon collections.

I’m OK with the party leader being unable to be kicked UNLESS it’s a unanimous decision by all 4 other party members. (And sellers can just bring a buddy to avoid this happening.)

Pretty sure that the Story mode dungeons are open to you once you reach the appropriate level. You don’t need to be at the right stage in your Personal Story to enter them.

Introduce new titles, such as “<dungeon> Vanquisher”. If you vanquish all the dungeon paths, you get a “Dungeon Conqueror” title and a unique character icon similar to “Been There, Done That”. I guarantee you’d have a lot more people going for vanquishing after that.

Also, gold income from farming places like Orr is treated differently because the majority of your income comes from mats. That’s not generating new gold; you are merely getting gold from other players who are buying your goods. Dungeon gold rewards create new gold out of thin air. That’s why they need to be monitored more closely.

That said, I DO agree with you that dungeons could use a bit of a balance pass. People don’t bother clearing the mobs in dungeons (and thus miss out on potential loot, mats and bags) because the majority of mobs are Elites and are a pain to deal with. Perhaps ANet can look at scaling down most of these enemies to Veterans, and most of the Champions to Elites (except for named foes, which always remain Champion or higher). Legendary foes in a dungeon (like Kholer) also get bumped down to Champion status unless they are particularly noteworthy foes from a lore or gameplay perspective. The boss at the end of dungeons is always a Legendary foe.

Next, to buff the loot from foes, Veterans now always drop a Loot Bag appropriate for their race/type, plus possible additional loot. Elites will always drop a non-Exotic Champ bag, plus possible additional loot. (These changes apply to the open world too.) Most experienced dungeon players will now be able to speed-massacre these mobs for a lot more loot, making it more profitable to kill everything rather than skip everything.

Finally, players can still “skip” dungeon events (I’m talking about bonus events as well as main events like fighting Kholer) if they really want to, but if they complete all of the dungeon’s events, they get a bonus daily chest containing 1+ Rares (with a chance for it to be an Exotic), coin and tokens. This chest is given out once per path per account per day.

So this still wasn’t fixed with the latest patch? Urrggh…

EDIT: Actually, the Wiki suggests that this bug HAS been fixed. At work so I can’t test it myself, but you can test it out easily at the diving goggles in LA.

According to RubiBayer, this bug should be fixed now.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Minions-suddenly-die-moving-between-areas/first#post4456936

Thanks, Rubi! Finally I can go back to using my minions again.

Most of my ideas have already been covered by others here, but just to reiterate what I’d like to see most:

1. Guild Halls should be a “Home away from LA”. It should offer all the amenities that LA offers (e.g. crafting, banking, trading, guild banks), purchased by a combination of Merits, crafting materials and gold. For example, a Guild Hall might start out as a near-empty plot of land in the Mists. To get trading NPCs in, you first need to build a Trading Post, which requires a number of different types of wood planks and metal ingots, after which you hire one (or more) NPCs to stand in it with with Merits and gold.

It allows players to contribute to their guild and see visible, tangible benefits grow and develop as a result of their work.

2. Guild Halls should be aesthetically diverse. Some ideas might be racial (an Asuran guild hall, a Human guild hall, a Kodan guild hall etc.), or landscape-based. I’m OK with only having a few options initially available and then more options being released down the line, as long as all purchased upgrades transfer from one guild hall to the newer one. Guild halls could serve as hubs for gathering, parties and roleplays if there is enough variety among them.

3. Guild Halls might also give permanent benefits to guild members. For example, building a Shrine to Bear in a Norn guild hall could grant a permanent +5% Vitality boost to all guild members representing that guild (only applicable in PvE, of course).

4. Guild Halls might also have small amounts of nodes available for harvesting. We could even tie this in to the Living Story, resulting in a guild hall that reflects the Living World as time goes on. For example, if the Tower of Nightmares content is brought back for LS1, we might be able to obtain a Toxic Seedling as loot from the final battle with the Toxic Hybrid. This can then be taken to the Guild Hall and planted (with some more construction), resulting in a permanent Toxic Seedling node that guildies can visit and harvest from every day. (Drops 1 Toxic Spore, with a rare chance for 10.)

5. Guild Halls should open the potential for GvG down the line, of course, but we’ll leave that for a future CDI.

Yeah, I’m with Labjax here. There’s still lapses and gaps here and there, but on the whole they’re making a serious effort to be better about communicating with us, which I appreciate greatly. (Especially you, Gaile. It’s great to have you back on board. )

Yes, we can’t always get answers to the specific questions we have, but that’s not always the fault of the frontline staff. Sometimes they just haven’t seen it (they can’t be everywhere, after all), and sometimes it’s because they legitimately don’t know the answer. (It’s still being discussed by design teams, or they can’t get a hold of the person who’s in charge of fixing the bug because they were at lunch or off sick and they’re the type who never replies to their e-mails. If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know the type of person I’m talking about.)

Sigil of Energy is extremely good in PvP and WvW (if you do solo roaming), but it’s honestly unnecessary in most PvE content.

urieldhynne.2743:

Zaxares.5419:

I think that introducing Transmutation Charges for Badges of Honor would be a neat way to introduce demand for them and potentially improve WvW numbers.

EoTM

True enough. Then again, I’d also support base WvW turning into a Red vs Blue vs Green system to filter out stuff like server imbalances. I get the idea of server pride, but it’s not that important to me.

No, Champion Bags need to stay. Before their introduction, hardly anybody bothered fighting Champs at all. The pitiful event completion reward was hardly worth the time and energy. Not only that, but they are also a large source of the Fine/Masterwork gear people salvage for things like Silk, as well as a moderate supply of things like Cores and Lodestones. Cutting off the Champion Bag source would drive prices for those sky-high again.

What really needs to be addressed is why people feel the need to farm in the first place, and usually, that’s because it’s the quickest and easiest path to getting what they want. (Farm for gold, use that gold to buy the stuff I can’t get.) To reduce the need for gold, you need to increase the supply. So crank up drop rates for everything. Make it so that Veterans always drop a loot bag appropriate to their type. Elites always drop a non-Exotic Champ bag plus guaranteed Fine crafting materials. Champions are now fairly rare, but they always drop an Exotic Champion bag plus a guaranteed Rare crafting material appropriate to their level and type. (Kill a level 80 Champion Spark or Dust Mite, you always get a Charged Lodestone. Watch how fast prices will tumble.)

Now the downside to this? Nothing will be really “rare” anymore, so you can expect players who want exclusivity to complain. Loudly. I’d be happy playing a game where I could get whatever appearance I want fairly easily, but would that make the majority of the playerbase happy? That’s the question ANet needs to consider.

Exactly. I’m patiently waiting for the prices of some of the other Exotics to fall. Tons and tons of players do the other world bosses every day; stuff like Eternal Ice and Breath of Kralkatorrik are bound to fall back to their pre-patch levels, particularly since Ascended trinkets exist and are relatively easy to get. It’s likely that the only people buying these will be people who are after the Collection.

Rhendak’s Signet prices are falling as people have learned simply to park alts at him and farm him multiple times a day. Sam and Commissar’s Manifesto prices are staying high for the moment as their events are frequently bugged, but hopefully ANet will fix these soon and supply will start flowing again.

Well, you see, most RPers consider it a major faux pas to RP your character as THE actual main character for the story. We can’t ALL be the Hero of Shaemoor, the Slayer of Issomir, the Pact Commander, friend to Tybalt/Sieran/Forgal etc. etc. So we generally make up our own backgrounds for our characters that have nothing to do at all with the game’s main plot, or in-game activities. They may have side tie-ins to events in the game or in history (for example, my Human Mesmer is a descendant of my GW1 Warrior and Assassin, who were part of Queen Salma’s supporters when she led the revolution against the White Mantle. They were awarded a noble title as reward, which is how my Mesmer is a noble in the GW2 setting), but they almost never take center stage.

The small golem forms you transform into using tonics CAN jump; it’s just the Siege Golems that can’t.

TheFool.4589:

BUT it is , in the end, a fair PvP grounds.

PvP IS allowed in there, of course. But often, the people who fight in Obsidian Sanctum fight dirty. They use pulls to just yank enemy players off high places to fall to their deaths, from spots where it’s next to impossible for them to fight back, such as the well, at the platform just before the dark chamber, and at the arena. You can’t fight back against that unless you have numbers on your side (which, again, if you call for help from your server, most WvW’ers will decline because it’s a JP, and they HATE doing JP’s).

That said, going back to your original suggestion, I think it could be a good idea to make Obsidian Sanctum more worthwhile by having control of it grant a bonus to your server. The trouble there is, you’d need to do a lot of tweaking and balancing to make it work, because otherwise the server with the highest population would just assign people to camp there and use those choke points to prevent enemy servers from ever capturing it. And at the end of the day, I think that the number of people who like doing JP’s AND PvP at the same time just isn’t high enough for ANet to warrant spending the development time on it.

Don’t expect to have them drop like rain, but back when I used to farm Dry Top seriously, I got about 5 Charged Lodestones from Dust Mites (both from farming the event, and from killing random Dust Mites in the map) over a period of about 2 weeks. I also got several Onyx Lodestones.

I still don’t get enough Dragonite from WvW, even via EotM.

T raw.4658:

Wow you went with golf and tennis…how about football? In hockey they actually get into fist fights OMG mind blown!!!

Here’s a question for ya. Is Tiger Woods an upstanding citizen?

No.

Trash talking is a part of any REAL sport. Look at Charles Barkley and what he did through his career. Harassment is one thing but typical jawing back and forth is fine.

So I respectively wish to have my game remain a real game.

Thank you

Pfft. If you want to go down that route, I could claim that football and hockey aren’t REAL sports. “Oh, they’re just poorly disguised excuses for low-brow, unintelligent people who want to see blood and violence, the same sort of audience that went to see Roman gladiatorial fights. Or public executions.”

Now, is Tiger Woods an upstanding citizen? No. But I DID respect him as a sportsman, where his conduct has always been exemplary. There was a reason why I didn’t use Mike Tyson as an example either; he’s not what I would consider a good sportsman. To give him credit though, he’s made an effort to clean up his act in later years, and I respect him for that.

EDIT: @Brunners: Whoops! Yeah, I did mean Rory McIlroy. I don’t know how I came up with James in my head. >.<