Guild Wars 2

I had a new idea. So apparently Ranked is open again, but any matches are actually Unranked instead of Ranked, right? How about we change it so that Ranked matches will all be Capricorn (or Unranked is all Capricorn, either or)? That allows players who want to play only Capricorn to pick a queue that’s just for them, and players who dislike Capricorn or prefer to play the old maps to stick with them. This might be easier code-wise than creating an entirely separate category for Capricorn.

My vote is for 3 more upgrades to the Ley-Matter Converter we can purchase for 250 of the relevant material. Doing so unlocks a tab where you can trade 25 (50? 100?) of the matching material for various goodies, similar to the tabs for Airship Parts, Lumps of Aurilium and Ley Line Crystals.

People actually need to farm Spirit Shards?? O.o I have like almost 7k of the stuff sitting in my wallet just gathering dust. I wish gaining a level gave you a Mystic Coin rather than yet more Spirit Shards.

Lex Lang did good in trying to make his lines sound like Ron Yuan, but I agree that the new Charr Male sounds awfully… cultured? Very smooth and dignified in comparison to the always half-aggressive tone that Ron used.

I’ll no doubt get used to it in time, but yeah, the shift between dialogue and random emotes and combat barks is quite disconcerting.

The way I look at it, a bunker build should be able to hold out against a 1v1 indefinitely (unless the offensive build is based around shutdown), struggle against a 2v1 (but might still manage it if the bunker player is good), and definitely fail against a 3v1.

If a bunker can survive 3v1, it’s too powerful and needs to be nerfed. If it fails instantly against 2v1, it’s slightly too weak. (It needs to be able to hold out for at least 10 – 30s)

6 matches in a row tonight. Failed to get Capricorn all 6 times despite at least 6 out of 10 (often as high as 8 ) players voting for Capricorn each time. A whole night’s playtime wasted. Please do something about this, ANet.

I don’t know about other players, but I’m sick and tired of having 3/4 of the team vote for Capricorn, and then the match selector picks one of the outlier maps like Niflheim or Foefire again. It’s frustrating when you only have a limited amount of time to play PvP each night, and then half (or more) of your matches end up being the same boring old maps when you’re trying to work on the new achievements.

Is it possible to move Capricorn temporarily into its own category like Stronghold so players who want to focus on the new map can do so? Or change the achievements so that we can get them in Custom Arenas? It’s really annoying to have to waste your time playing the old maps when that’s not what you’re here for. (Imagine if you were playing dungeons or Fractals and the path or scale you were going to play gets put to a random vote.)

I have to agree that I’m rather miffed at the constant nerfing and removal of bunker/support builds and tools too. It really is pushing PvP into a mode where it’s “KILL FASTFASTFAST SPAM 5/2/swap/1/1 ENEMYDOWN FASTER!” Most fights in PvP now are over within seconds unless the player is running one of the meta builds like Gyro Engi and Mace/Shield Warrior. There’s hardly any time for proper counterplay or kiting or using terrain to win fights. It’s all down to who can pump out more damage using high burst while their defensive stuff is on cooldown.

There really needs to be more build diversity. The meta is a meta for a reason, and it’s usually not because “X build is fun to play!” It’s because it works REALLY well.

As others have said, you need to give players incentive to fight it out to the end rather than just giving up and “ending it quickly”. And the easiest way to do this is to bring back (and improve) the system from the first Season where if the match was close, you could gain pips even on a loss, while a decent showing (say, 300 – 500) would be enough to cause no pip loss.

I’m disappointed with this change too. I’m honestly curious as to which server apparently has so many people just sitting at the crafting stations that it was honestly blocking players from getting into their Home Borderlands. I’m on a T1 server too (Tarnished Coast), and outside of reset night, there is NEVER a queue for our Home Borderlands. All the action happens in EBG. The other Borderlands tend to be near-empty except for roamers and the odd mini-raid by guilds.

Isn’t that itself indicative of the reason people are playing PvP? For the AP/shinies, and once there’s nothing more to obtain, they leave? That suggests that PvP itself isn’t “fun”, and more attention needs to be given to addressing that if ANet intends on maintaining longevity for the game mode beyond enticing players with shinies.

I think Donari’s stance is the best compromise. I’m fine with letting the Legendary Raid armor have their own unique skin, but I’d like for there to be another avenue for acquiring Legendary armor (perhaps through WvW), similar to how one can acquire a Legendary backpiece via Fractals AND PvP.

For those who say that Legendary armor doesn’t offer any advantages over Ascended, you’re forgetting one thing: the stat switching. By equipping yourself with Legendary armor, you are essentially future proofing yourself against the need to upgrade to new stats in the future as more expansions are released. Oh, the Paladin’s set introduced with the Elonian expansion is now meta? Switch my Legendary armor over to Paladin’s, maybe put in new runes. Boom. Done. No need to do whatever crazy grinding/collecting is needed to get it, and I can start enjoying the new stats immediately.

THAT’S the only reason why I want Legendary armor. Not for skins or for showing off (because I couldn’t care less about those. Unless the Legendary armor skins are truly mind-blowing and happen to suit my chosen aesthetics for my characters, I fully intend on reskinning my Legendary armor back to the same skins I’ve worn for the last 2 years), but for convenience and the freedom from having to worry about needing to upgrade my gear in the future.

Eagelseye.6312:

Ranked is a team format and should be played in premades. Those who don’t want to face premades, should better go and play Unranked or PvE and farm loots. For the sake of a team game mode, stop creating such stupid threads.

If the League achievements were attainable in Unranked mode as well, then I would support this.

The bottom line is that the vast majority of people currently playing PvP Ranked are only there for the achievements/AP and to get The Ascension. (If you don’t believe me, see how popular structured PvP is once the League is over and progress can no longer be made.) ANet knows this, which is why they created the achievements/skins in the first place in an attempt to get more people into PvP. Therefore, any attempt to make the skins or AP more exclusive is likely to backfire and make those players leave again, resulting in PvP once more becoming the neglected stepchild of GW2 where it’s just a tiny group of people wondering why their queue times are so high and nobody seems to be playing. And for their part, ANet will have a much harder time justifying why they should be spending developer time and resources on making new content for a game mode that only a small percentage of people are playing. (Don’t think it can’t happen. Look at the backflip on HoT Legendaries.)

If people are dead set on having a PvP stream that’s only for “serious PvP’ers”, that’s fine. The same way that solo queuers don’t want to be matched up against premades, I can appreciate the desire to only play with people who are committed enough to want to put in the effort to strategize, finetune their builds and communicate with each other. But be careful what you wish for when you talk about making things more exclusive or kicking the “baddies” out. You might find yourself in an even worse state of PvP.

The Mark of Death trophy gets removed from your inventory when you kill the Executioner. If that was the first time you killed her, you also get an Exotic accessory with the same icon as a reward from the achievement.

I have heard that it’s possible to get additional copies of the Mark of Death from killing bandit champions (or perhaps from another source, I haven’t gotten one myself), so if you have another one in your inventory, that’s likely where it came from.

How about adding additional tabs to the Ley-Energy Converter that allow you to trade in Airship Oil/Auric Dust/Ley-Line Sparks for a variety of things similar to the map currencies?

While I’m generally not against female Charr and Asura having a different armor look from their male counterparts, I agree that the boobplate for them just looks bizarrely out of place. (Particularly on female Asura. It kinda makes me feel like I’m looking at a little girl wearing a bra. REALLY icky. >.>)

XGhoul has it. If the PvP player base was a lot bigger, it might be a good move, but with current player numbers, I suspect all that your changes would do would be to drive out all the “casual” and “bad” players who are largely there for the AP and shinies. (For proof, you just have to look at what happens to PvP when a season finishes and you can’t progress the achievements anymore.) And then you’d be left with a ghost town in Ranked where you have 45+ min queue times, only to face the same few people over and over. (In fact, to hear people at Legendary tell it, this is ALREADY what they face.)

Yeah, the “win 1 match, lose 1 match, repeat ad infinitum” experience is getting really, really tedious. Some days it feels like I’m Sisyphus just rolling the boulder up the hill, only to be right back where I started. It doesn’t pass the “fun test”, ANet.

So I just finished a match in which I got disconnected, reconnected, played on with my team to a win, and then get slapped with a 1 pip loss for “Desertion”. This seriously needs addressing. If I’m going to get punished for a disconnect that isn’t even my fault, what’s the point of me returning and helping my team to a win? They lose nothing if a teammate “deserts”, so it’s not like they’d be hindered if I never bothered to show back up.

I thought ANet’s system was supposed to be able to detect the difference between disconnects and willful desertions (they held off on updating the system for so long at the start of the year because they were still “tweaking it”), so this event today has really left a sour taste in my mouth.

ANet needs to bring back the system whereby even if your team loses, you may still gain pips depending on your performance. A 250-500 loss should be enough to result in a “no pip loss”, while an extremely close match like 450-500 might grant 2 pips even to the losing team.

Ideally there should be a Team Queue and Solo Queue, and never the two shall meet. But I imagine ANet can’t do this because:

1. What happens if you get 4 people teaming up? Who’s going to fill the last slot?

2. As most of you know, the people teaming up for PvP is far, FAR smaller than the people just yolo-queuing. Splitting the queues will thus most likely result in a great increase in the queue time for people in Team Queue, when you take into consideration things like division and MMR.

The solution to this is to add a new opt-in option called “Allow me to be matched with Team Queues.” As a reward for opting to be included in Team Queue match-ups even if you’re Solo Queuing, even if your team loses, you don’t lose any pips. Furthermore, if your team includes randoms, if your team did decently enough (say, a 300 – 500 match when your team was a 3-man + 2 pugs vs a 5-man), you may even gain pips on a loss.

That should sufficiently incentivize players to tick the option and thus still allow Team Queues to function, while also preventing people who don’t want to see any premades at all from ever being included in such matches.

If I could give you my Spirit Shards, I would. I have almost 6000 Spirit Shards in my wallet, getting more every day, and have almost nothing to spend them on except for the rare T6 mat upgrade.

Yes, this skill is annoyingly latency sensitive. I had to abandon half of my attempts at Gold due to Cap Hop either:

1. Hopping in one place – no forward movement

2. Houston, we have NO liftoff – after hopping forward, the 2nd skill does not become available. This happens primarily just after the second checkpoint, where many players hop across the large gap to bypass jumping along the branches, and also at the penultimate checkpoint, where players jump across to the final checkpoint.

I did finally get Gold after maybe about 20 attempts (although bearing in mind I’d done at least 50+ attempts in the old days and only ever managed Silver), but I think this adventure could do with maybe another 5 seconds of time to give a bit more leeway to us players who are stuck with mid-high latency.

While I already have the Thwart the Inquest achieve (got it on the first day), I agree that it’s way too hard to get this achievement now. Either the energy needs to disappear after a player picks it up (not recommended due to player competition), or the golems need to be toned down. Trying to stop an Elite Velocitas Golem from getting away is downright impossible thanks to their upscaled level and break bar.

I think a fair compromise would be the following:

1. Inquest guards can scale up as normal for the event. Instead of just hanging around their collector, they actively charge towards the Champ Ley Elemental and attempt to kill players around it.

2. All golems only spawn at basic tier and do not scale up in level.

There’s an easy solution for this. If/when Chef 500 is released, some of these expensive foods get redesigned to be 450 or 500 rank foods, and are buffed to become quad-stat foods. Considering how few people seem to run food/consumable buffs even in dungeons or fractals, I honestly think it’s not going to have much of an effect on balance.

The #1 rule when it comes to gambling, people. “NEVER bet more than you would be willing to lose.”

As you’ve heard, you can win big, but you can also LOSE big. I completed this for the achievement (by betting one at a time whenever I had an overflow Ecto stack), and I ended up slightly ahead, then called it quits there. Don’t rely on Ecto gambling as a way of earning income, because it will certainly come back to bite you in the kitten when you least expect it.

Yeah, Sprockets are actually much cheaper than commensurate materials used to create Exotic gear. Heck, they’re even cheaper than Elder Wood these days!

If the textures are a weird pink and purple combination, or if everything looks like it has a plaid pattern, it is either a clash with your graphic driver software (in which case update your drivers), or corrupted textures (in which case run a -repair build for your gw2.dat file).

Yes, I have both The Ascension and Ad Infinitum and neither are counting. Apparently it’s not retroactive. Log it as a bug. I’m sure ANet will fix it in time.

EDIT: Scratch that. Mine just counted after I equipped Ad Infinitum (I share it between my characters for Fractals). If you have either backpack and your achievement didn’t go up, try equipping it on a character. An in-between patch before the OP and my post might have fixed it.

I voted for “The Unbroken”. Eternity’s Guard just didn’t resonate with me and considering our heroes deal with all manner of issues that aren’t necessarily Dragon-related, I don’t want our image to be presented as being solely Dragon-obsessed.

I have a question for the devs though. Why isn’t Canach invited to this group? >:(

Thanks for the info, guys. I’m going to skip going out of my way to buy keys then.

I voted for “The Unbroken”. Eternity’s Guard just didn’t resonate with me and I think that the biconics handle enough non-dragon issues to not have a name that deals specifically with dragons all the time.

I’m disappointed that Canach isn’t included as part of the group though. I feel he’s earned a place with us. (Granted, I think he’s too much of a lone wolf to really enjoy working with a group for long.)

At least the Bank NPC now has a cooldown (if a short one) on her click dialogue. Back in the old days of LA, there wasn’t a cooldown at all. So there was this non-stop chattering Charr Banker who would go:

“The legion calls.”
“Yes?”
“What?”
“What?”
“What?”
“The legion calls.”

AND IT NEVER STOPPED.

If it’s Blade Shards those farmers are after, I sure wish those were tradable. I have close to 3 stacks in my bank now that I have absolutely no use for. :/

My suggestion would be to allow players to directly salvage the karma items we can purchase from Heart vendors. They would offer a quick, reliable way to obtain items of a specific level, even if your character is already level 80, and it would further give value to a currency that otherwise does not see much use. With the changes to Fractals, you also get quite a lot of karma per day if you do all the dailies, and since it’s a content stream that ANet seems quite eager to push, it would have the added benefit of further incentivizing Fractals runs.

One thing I have noticed is that if I run the race solo (but with another guild who is running it), I will never receive the rewards even if I activate my own guild’s Rush before I start participating. The Rush itself is completed (15/15), but despite the timer (for both the in-map event as well as the guild mission time limit) finishing, I still will not receive the rewards.

I have no issues when I run the race with the rest of my guild, which leads me to suspect that there is a minimum number of guildmates that must participate in the mission, but exactly what this requirement is is never stated in the mission description.

ANet have said that LS3 will make it easier to get other trinkets with the new stats.

That said, I fully +1 the suggestion to have r500 Jeweler sooner rather than later.

Agreed that Blighted Eir is the toughest part of the entire mission (assuming you don’t take the Blighted Pale Tree route). If your party doesn’t have enough DPS to burst Garm down fast enough, an alternative (but much slower) strategy is to instead ignore Garm altogether and just kite him around while everybody ranges Eir. You will need to keep moving AND make sure that everybody has good condi removal and/or access to Resistance, because if you get crippled Eir’s burning will absolutely murder you in seconds. (You can, of course, also turn this to your advantage with condi transferral skills or sigils.)

The Adrenal Mushrooms mastery is an immense help for this achievement. Take full advantage of it to recharge your long cooldown skills. A Warrior, for example, should bring Berzerker Stance (immensely long-lasting Resistance) for a panic button, and Battle Standard for rezzing teammates who get downed. Once used, use the Adrenal Mushroom to recharge them for the next emergency.

Ah yes, the infamous Shroom of Doom. And Aramil has your answer; trying to jump directly onto the tilted shroom itself is a trap. The correct route is to jump onto the STEM of that mushroom, and then jumping from that onto to the cap. Just be careful not to overshoot the stem jump.

The only way to make people stop farming completely is to remove the need for gold. And that means making it so darn easy to get whatever you might need in the game that trading is essentially meaningless. Unfortunately, that also means that things like luxury or prestige items need to go. By level 80, everybody has access to full Ascended gear. Players get a Legendary weapon for free on their character’s birthdays. Stuff like that.

Now, I wouldn’t mind playing in a game like that, because I frankly couldn’t give a skritt about prestige or item rarity. I acquire skins and items based on whether I like how it looks. How expensive or rare it is makes absolutely no difference to me. (For instance, I recently completed The Ascension, and the very first thing I did was to instantly reskin it to the same backpack skin that I’ve been using for 2 years now. I got it purely because I wanted the changeable stats. Whether or not anybody else knows I’m wearing a Legendary backpack is not my concern.)

But I also know that I’m very much an oddity among players. Most people crave being able to stand out from the crowd, to be able to brag, or show off their wealth and status. So ANet won’t be able to go down this route; it would be game suicide. While I do feel that the current means to acquire various materials are more onerous than they need to be, any solutions they might take would have to be baby steps.

That said, would it really be so bad to allow us to salvage items from Heart karma merchants directly? If you do Fractals or WvW frequently, you’re likely to be drowning in far more karma than you need. Letting us salvage those Heart items directly would give us a far more quicker and efficient means of generating low level mats, and it’s not like stuff like Minor Sigils or Runes have had any trade value for years now. I’m pretty certain 99.9% of players who get those just insta-merch them for 16 copper. If concern over open world maps getting abandoned is an issue, then bump up the karma rewards for events by several times, turning them into an alternative means of getting karma for players who don’t like Fractals or WvW.

This is actually very interesting, because I’ve recently noticed that on my Mesmer, she’s gathering mats faster than my other characters. I wasn’t able to pin down what was the cause, but this post has made me think it might be linked to Malicious Sorcery. Tomorrow when I harvest my HI stuff I’ll deactivate the trait and see if it makes any difference.

Hmmm… Idea. What if, once players have maxed their Mastery bar and can’t obtain any more, every time they gain a “level”, they instead receive 1 Mystic Coin? If there are fears about this possibly generating too much supply, ANet could cap it at, say, 5 extra Coins a day. (Exact amount open to tweaking.)

The best use for the Karmic Converter is as a source of discounted Obsidian Shards every day. Of course, if you run a lot of Dry Top or Silverwastes, Obsidian isn’t really going to be a problem.

Aside from that, it occasionally offers some nice rewards for karma, like T6 mats, Lodestones, Bags of Jewels or WvW items. They don’t turn up that often, but it’s a nice bonus when they do.

^ Basically this. As I mentioned in my above post, I imagine players with good pings will find it fairly straightforward to get Silver or even Gold, while those of us with bad pings thanks to distance or just crummy internet infrastructure where we live will struggle like hell.

That said, I will agree that Silver is now obtainable on all the adventures with a bit of practice. Furthermore, ANet did reduce the requirements for the Elite Spec weapons from Silver to Bronze, so unless you’re a completionist or diehard AP hunter like me, you can probably forego Gold on all adventures. All I’m asking is that ANet be more accommodating with Gold rankings for those of us who labor under handicaps for these adventures.

Mystic Coins do drop very rarely from Master tier Fractal reward chests, but it’s a drop in the ocean when compared to the demand.

I think ANet will probably have to look at increasing supply of various things across the board in the months to come. The 2g daily bonus reward was no doubt a welcome relief for many casual players, but without an increase in supply to keep pace with demand, all it will ultimately create is inflation. Several of the items I’m watching have gone up by 50% or more in the last month, although most “common” items like basic mats and ectos have remained fairly stable (although they still went up by about 10 – 20%).

I mainly just want it to complete the “collection”. I expect it’s more for the players who just pick a Machete every day from their Ley-Matter Converter and can then just use it in their HI without going to Dragon’s Stand.

Wait for World 3. Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when I can upgrade my Asura to a Masters or Doctorate in Applied Jumping.

As stated above, by salvaging Ectos. You can acquire a lot of Rares by doing a world boss train, the Silverwastes meta, or any of the new HoT metas.

I don’t particularly approve of AFK farming, but the ones that really raise my ire are the ones that camp out at event spawns and thus scale it up (sometimes majorly so) and making it far more difficult for the genuine players.

One good example is in Dry Top. There’s usually a bunch of AFK farmers sitting in the middle of the plain where the Inquest and Zephyrites compete for crystals. By doing this, they are usually able to get some credit for the following 3 events:

1. Collect crystals for the Zephyrites
2. Escort Haze
3. Kill the Champion Dust Twister, if it happens to wander over in their direction

They not only get loot for this (including the chance for Onyx and Charged Lodestones from Dust Mites), but also Geodes (which I imagine is what they’re really after). But again, depending on how many of them there are, they can end up scaling the mobs in this area by 3 or 4 levels and into Veterans or Elites, making it much harder for the real players to deal with them.

I finally got Gold on this adventure after about 2.5 hours of trying. Even with the increased time limit, it was still an incredibly difficult adventure. (I finished it with just half a second to spare!)

The problem with this adventure, just like with Haywire Punch-o-Matic, is that your performance is highly dependent on your ping. (Shooting Gallery was also affected by this to some extent, but the very generous time extension of 30s more than made up for it.) I was encountering constant problems with things like your character failing to launch when picking up spores or landing on mushrooms, or your glider not closing in time (causing you to miss pinpoint landings used by many of the Gold routes). Another frequent cause of frustration was how I constantly seem to take damage from landing, something which the Gold videos almost never seem to do. (I believe this is because, due to lag, the game thinks your character has been “in the air” for a longer period of time and thus the fall damage kicks in.) This results in me being put in combat slowdown a lot more often, slowing me even further.

Furthermore, there is usually a split-second delay between your key presses and your character kicking the fruit. Over 25 fruits, it all adds up to a significant loss of time.

So, yes, getting Gold IS attainable now even for folks like me on crummy pings, but it’s a lot of frustration and repeated attempts before you’ll make it. My advice to ANet is to increase the time limit for this adventure (and Haywire) by an additional 5 – 10 seconds to make it more fair for us overseas players.