Guild Wars 2

+1 vote for a Personal Noxious Pod too.

That said, the other 3 chests are actually a poor deal for using your keys on. The ones in the actual maps give far more rewards (usually in the form of map currency) than the ones in the Home Instance.

I’m… not sure if the OP is joking or not. I found it so incredibly easy to get Airship Oil. (1500+ and rising). On the other hand, Ley-Line Sparks are much more difficult to get, and have far more uses (although the Spring Update did improve this a lot.)

I do agree that in the future, we’ll need some way of converting these mats into usable stuff. I think purchasing additional tabs for the Ley-Matter Energy Converter should do the trick.

This might be tied to characters that have Rank 4 (Noblesse Oblige) of the Pact Commander mastery track. I’ve noticed this “bug” occurring on some occasions, but not on others. It’s unknown if this was meant to be an intended benefit of the mastery.

Kamohoali’i Kotaki III: Carcharias has an annoying (and potentially progress-blocking) bug where the “Sunken Pirate Treasure” item acquired from Sparkfly Fen does not spawn if you have already completed the nearby Heart. A workaround is to bring a low-level character to the area to collect the item, but for anybody who has already map-completed Tyria and have no more free character slots, they could be in for a nasty surprise.

A possible solution for this might be to change the item requirement so you can obtain it from both the underwater chests AND the buried chests on land (which still spawn even if you have already completed the Heart).

I’d like it if we got a chest that allowed us to choose from between a small amount of T6 mats, a small amount of gemstones, or a Lodestone of our choice. I already have over 5k Spirit Shards and not enough things to spend them on. Giving me more would essentially just be trading one wasted currency for another one.

Power creep is more or less inevitable with expansions and new content. ANet needs to make each new gear set (as well as elite specs and/or new skills) slightly more powerful than before otherwise players just go “What’s the point of switching?” and continue to use their old gear/builds. Then they complain that there’s nothing new to do.

I do agree that raids could perhaps be adjusted to be more inclusive, however. I think the biggest factor holding back greater participation is the enrage timer. If that weren’t there, you’d probably get more people willing to try different builds with different gear. Sure, it’d be slower (maybe MUCH slower), but that’s the price you pay for safety. People who are more concerned with speed farming or record setting can go in with optimized builds or smaller teams as they always have. That was the way dungeons worked for years and people seemed pretty content with the setup.

Surprised they didn’t reduce the price for the Major Sigil at the same time. It’s really weird for the Major Sigil to cost 10, but the Superior only costs 5.

Anyway, it’s a good move, but I think they should have added the Freshwater Pearl to the list of potential rewards from completing the VB meta (similar to how Black Diamonds are a reward choice from AB and Maguuma Burls are a choice from DS). Maguuma Lilies should also be added to the TD meta reward list. It makes sense considering that these are the maps where the stat combo that requires them shows up.

Yeah. It seems like the reason why they were removed is because some players figured out how to spawn multiple copies of these chests per instance, increasing their loot gain exponentially. So it’s removed until ANet can close the loophole. Hopefully it’s sooner rather than later.

I voted for the Scoring changes, but I’m a bit concerned about the “Reduce the impact of night capping”. I don’t want it to turn into a situation where if you’re a night player, it means you earn less rewards/WXP or are deemed to be “not as important to the war effort”. Someone’s day is always someone else’s night, and while it’s nice to have a safety net for servers that have a minimal population during off-peak hours, don’t trivialise the efforts of night players as a result of it.

On a personal note, I must admit I don’t get the seemingly widespread dislike for things like Tactivators (although some upgrades, like Cloaking Waters, I do agree needs some tweaking because it’s waaaaay too easy for gankers to kill roamers while under the protection of stealth. Perhaps stealth should fade as soon as you leave the SMC grounds, making it a primarily defensive upgrade) or the Desert Borderlands map, but I’m not a primary WvW player so I shall defer to the experience of those who have played a lot longer than I have.

The problem ANet has here is two-fold:

1. You can’t make people wait unreasonably long queue times for a match. People will get bored and quit.

2. You can’t put people into matches against foes who statistically will just stomp them into the dirt. People will get frustrated and ragequit.

What is needed is a way to allow players to agree to face potentially higher-tier teams, but with incentives for their choice. This should be an opt-in system where you can check an option that says “Allow me to be matched against higher tiers/divisions”. If you are placed in such a match, you will lose no pips for a loss, and may even win pips if you performed decently enough. (And this should be more lenient than it was in the previous season. If you’re in a team of Rubies versus all Diamonds, just getting to 200-500 should be sufficient for a 1 pip reward. Making it to 400-500 would be 2 or even 3 pips.)

Ask the Commander if the lane can slow DPS to delay it to the third defense phase. When I’m commanding, if no lane is in dire need of help, I’m happy to oblige.

The way I see it, there are two main points of contention when it comes to Scribing costs:

1. The cost to level Scribe is disproportionately expensive when compared to other crafting professions. As others have mentioned, you need to be either an exceedingly rich player, or have the support of an entire guild to fund the various guild upgrades and materials necessary to get Scribe to 400.

2. The cost to craft WvW upgrades and (especially) decorations is astoundingly high, often for not very much return. As someone above pointed out, when it costs 300g to craft a simple (and ugly) chair, something is seriously broken. If you’re intending to use Halls as a gold sink, aim for quantity, not quality. Make decorations very cheap, then let players go wild just crafting and filling their hall with hundreds of various items.

The four main bottlenecks that I can see are:

- Resonating Slivers
- Brown Pigment
- Coarse Sand
- Flax/Linseed Oil

At the bare minimum, the amount of materials needed for each of these needs to be looked at. Otherwise, I basically agree with the bulk of Merris’ post when it comes to preferred changes to Scribing costs:

Paper – Reduce the amount of planks required to craft 1 paper from 5 to 3, or maybe even 1. On its own the wood cost isn’t that terrible, but the demand is also causing conflict with people who are going for Legendaries, where an extreme amount of Spiritwood is causing demand bottlenecks.

Sandpaper – Reduce amount of sand needed to craft those by 5x times, as Merris suggests. This is a big requirement for decoration crafters, since every single decoration needs a Finishing Kit, which needs sandpaper. Alternatively, introduce a new way to acquire Coarse Sand, by giving us the ability to salvage Lumps of Ambrite into Coarse Sand (perhaps 2 or 3 per Ambrite?). Ambrite is currently languishing at vendor prices on the TP, and this would help boost demand. As an additional bonus, Ambrite is only obtainable via the maps Dry Top and Silverwastes, so this would mean players still need to visit those maps.

Linseed Oil – Reduce costs by 3x times (1 instead of 3, 2 instead of 6 etc). While Linseed Oil isn’t as bad as the other materials thanks to the easy access to the Flax farm in Verdant Brink, this will also help ease the pressure for smaller guilds trying to build upgrades and that need tons of Empty Kegs.

Resonating Slivers – I believe the drop rates are fine as they are now, but reduce the slivers used in the various bags of powder from 3 to 1. I don’t want to kill their value completely so that players who do guild missions that aren’t interested in Scribing can still sell them for some extra cash, but I believe that the average Scribe should be able to farm the majority of what he needs without needing to turn to the TP.

Ink – Either reduce the amount of pigments needed from 10 to 3 or even 1. Alternatively, reduce the requirements to 5, and overhaul the pigment system so that higher dye pigments do not need to use lower pigments as a baseline. You’ll notice that all the higher dye pigments are around acceptable prices while the lower one goes, the most costly they get.

Did they up the number of chak in the corridor? My main problem with getting anywhere near Gold last time was getting the chak to bunch up properly so I could nuke them all with the missiles or the one-two punch. Will have to give this adventure another try.

^ I actually do like that idea. Sending a private message to anyone who doesn’t have you on their Friends list/whitelist COSTS you money.

I’ve just spent the last 2 hours trying to complete the Buried Insight storyline, only to get disconnected again and again, sometimes right before completing the blasted instance. And each time it happens, I get kicked right back to the start and have to do everything all over again. This is intolerable for longer story steps. (I hear that Hearts and Minds is even longer, and I shudder at the thought of having to put up with this for that story as well.)

It’s not my internet connection either, because that’s still working fine. I also I took a break in between to go to DR, do my daily trading and harvest all my stuff, and not once did I get any lag spikes or disconnects while doing it.

There has to be something that can be done to give players a safeguard in case they get disconnected from an instance, perhaps keeping it open for 5 – 10 mins before it closes.

Sanctum Scramble is tough, but fair. It actually has a fairly generous time limit for getting Gold, and it’s a lot easier now that ANet tweaked the way gliders work so they’re less dependent on lag. If you watch some of the Gold run videos, you’ll spot several “shortcuts” where gliding + the Egg Bearer skills can shoot you across large distances.

But yeah, some of the adventures really do need a balance pass. They are either too tightly tuned with regards to time (Floor is Lava, Fungus Among Us) or rely on really annoying RNG (Shooting Gallery, Fallen Masks), or just outright impossible to achieve (Haywire Punch-o-matic).

But as mentioned, I bet a lot of the complaints would disappear if the collections got bumped down to Bronze, and the Mastery points shifted down from Silver/Gold to Bronze/Silver. The people who really want to master a particular adventure for bragging rights can do so via the Leaderboard; maybe even give them a free daily Rare or some gold every day they retain the 1st spot.

Airship Parts are probably the hardest of the 3 to get, but yeah, Aurilium and Ley-Line Crystals can be acquired fairly easily by doing a single event cycle from start to finish. (Typically I end up with about 500 currency by doing that in AB and TD. For VB it’s more like 100 – 200.)

Unfortunately the current stance from ANet is that dungeons are dead and buried. The closest you’ll get to new dungeons will be the raids. Which would be fine on its own, but I dislike how the raids are so strict in their requirements for completion that it pretty much restricts the kinds of builds, team compositions and in some cases even professions you can bring to them. (Thieves need not apply for Spirit Vale, for example.)

Fowidner.6930:

Plx Anet give me something like a Key Chain and a bag/storage for Tonics (I have 30 slots in bank full of tonics….)

I’ve recently thought that it would be a great idea if Unlimited Tonics got their own tab under Hero as well (similar to the Wardrobe, Finishers and Miniatures). You just open the tab, select which tonic you’d like to apply to yourself, and voila.

There also aren’t a lot of mobs that drop Luminescent Dust in particular. The biggest sources of Dust as direct drops come from Branded and Ghosts, neither of which spawn at levels that drop T4 Dust. You can get plenty of Radiant Dust (T3) from Blazeridge Steppes, but there aren’t as many Branded in Iron Marches, and few players hang around that area since there aren’t many events to keep players there.

mauried.5608:

A question that never gets asked, and its relevant to all games that have gold sellers and some form of trading system is where do Gold Sellers get the gold they sell from?
And the answer of course is that they get it from all the other players in the game who buy goods from the TP.
So , all the games players are bankrolling the gold sellers, albeit unintentionally.

They get it via two main ways:

1. Through botting. All those bots running the Wintersday JP, for example? It’s safe to say a fair number of them were probably farming the gifts to sell for gold. The same goes for all those underground harvesting bots you see from time to time in the open world.

2. The far more insidious way is that they outright steal the gold from hacked accounts. Every player who has their account hacked instantly has everything of value on it stripped and sold, with the gold then immediately passed on to a buyer or funneled to a secondary account before ANet discovers the breach and locks down the account.

That’s why my earlier post was wondering if gold sellers have been using proxy items on the TP to pass their ill-gotten gains to other accounts or buyers. I always thought it was a bit risky, due to stuff like the OP’s story happening (obviously the gold seller made a mistake and bought the wrong item), but perhaps it’s not quite as risky as we might think, and we need to keep an eye on very niche items with unusually high prices.

Well, you ARE headbutting the enemy that much harder.

Anyway, considering the mechanics of Headbutt is such that the player is expected to either have Stability up or a stunbreak when using the skill, it’s probably a minor issue at best.

I’m on the fence about this. On the one hand, I can understand ANet’s reasoning for it. They don’t want botted gold to leak into the economy and thus slowly but surely cause inflation. On a moral level, there’s also the “people shouldn’t profit from the proceeds of crime, even if they were unaware”.

On the other hand, as others have said we have no control over who buys our items, or sells items to us. It’s hardly our fault whether the person who buys our goods turns out to be a gold seller, or an ANet dev. The second issue is that the source of the gold, while objectionable, is functionally no different from other sources of in-game gold (that is, it was spawned into existence from nothing). There are ways in the game now to instantly spawn hundreds of gold (e.g. Ecto gambling) that far exceed the speed at which gold farmers typically make it.

So, while I’m ultimately leaning a little more towards the second position, in the end I’m glad this isn’t a call I have to make.

The bigger issue at hand, which people seem to have ignored so far, is what was that gold seller doing buying those arcane slivers in the first place? Was it simply a mistake and they were intending to buy something else (and if so, what?) Or was it a clever scheme to try and get gold to a buyer without ANet noticing? (And in which case, we now know that ANet can also track gold transactions via the TP, even though buyer and seller are hidden from each other.)

If the latter, how many other times has this gone on? How many other rare, but highly expensive, items on the TP are being secretly used by gold sellers to launder their illegal gold? (And a side concern of that, does that mean that the supply of some rare goods are being deleted from the economy because the gold sellers buy it up, only to get their accounts banned and those items thus deleted?)

As mentioned before, from what we’ve seen of the Charr in-game, the Charr don’t place much emphasis on relationships or parentings. Cubs are shipped off to a fahrar once they’re old enough, and then parents often have little to nothing to do with their kids after that. With that in mind, I think that the Legions ultimately don’t care who a Charr socializes with or rubs genitals with as long as it doesn’t interfere with their duties, the same way a Charr who drinks to excess might be disciplined for showing up drunk to their post, but another Charr who just has a couple drinks each night after work isn’t.

I would need to observe their behaviour in person to be sure, but those characters (even the weirdly named ones) might be throwaway characters that people are just getting through the HoT story in order to farm the various rewards that are given out as part of the story.

I’m up to a little over 4k drinks purely through farming all the various Wintersday achieves for the AP. Over the rest of the year I’ll continue to slowly advance it by opening my HI gifts and buying drinks if prices fall. If not, I’ll just finish it next Wintersday. As a collection, it’s going to be open forever.

I’m up to a little over 4k drinks purely through farming all the various Wintersday achieves for the AP. Over the rest of the year I’ll continue to slowly advance it by opening my HI gifts and buying drinks if prices fall. If not, I’ll just finish it next Wintersday. As a collection, it’s going to be open forever.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Year of Ascention Part IV: League Elite
Cross 4 league division thresholds during a PvP season.

A season is only 8 weeks. Based on the wording set forth you need to do all 4 during a single active season. Which means…Amber to Diamond.

However, Hugh said that achievements don’t reset.

So…that clashes a bit with the wording for the achievement itself. So… we’ll see?

I’m only a sapphire currently, so I have League Recruit (cross 1 threshold) done, and have half of League Veteran (cross 2 thresholds) done. I probably won’t make it to ruby this season (just not enough play time). If I don’t, we’ll see if that progress carries forward or not. If it does, it makes League Elite a heck of a lot easier.

It is a bit vague, yeah, but I’m inclined to think that progress towards that actually carries across separate seasons, because the achievement doesn’t state that it all has to be done within a SINGLE season, unlike the Primordial Legend achievement.

And even then, you’d be better off doing the PvP reward tracks. It’s faster and gives more loot! :P

Galandil.9641:

Zaxares.5419:

Hmm, I only just reached Ruby division and have yet to advance any tiers. Can you elaborate how the system works currently?

Check the next part.

If you’re ruby, you have completed the League Recruit in Part I and League Veteran in Part II, even if you didn’t finish yet all Part I.

In that case I’m a bit confused by what he was trying to say. Yes, it’s possible to start working on other achievements in the later Parts despite not having completed previous Parts (and in fact I actually handicapped myself a bit by deliberately not completing Part I in case it locked out all the profession achieves, since I wanted to farm them all for the AP), but how does that affect my proposal?

I can guarantee you, as someone who writes instructional documentation for a living, that even if ANet provided all of this information in-game, people would still be too lazy to go read it. :P

A lot of what you mentioned actually IS taught to the player via those lesson tips that pop up whenever you gain a level. Of course, if the player is, as you say, simply grabbing their rewards and closing the window without reading any of them, they’re not learning this information.

It’s probably due to design decisions that were relevant back in the day, but are now obsolete. They were probably trying to prevent people just buying up cheap Rares (so to speak) and tossing them into the Forge to get Exotics or maybe even Precursors. Of course, now that Rares drop like rain from meta-events and can be crafted extremely cheaply, plus coupled with the fact that Exotics are now regarded as being level 80 baseline with the proliferation of Ascended gear, this is no longer necessary. However, nobody’s been assigned to go back and correct these decisions.

Just like how Soft Wood Logs were stuck at 4 refinement for the longest time at a period when Soft Wood was bottoming out, but after the introduction of Ascended gear nobody bothered to go back and fix it.

Hmm, I only just reached Ruby division and have yet to advance any tiers. Can you elaborate how the system works currently?

With the upcoming changes to how divisions will work, I’d say there might actually be more cause for concern for casual PvP’ers trying to get the Legendary backpack. If divisions become harder to work through in order for it to better reflect a player’s skill, then it’s more likely that players may end up being “stuck” in Emerald or Sapphire.

One way to get around that would be to change the requirement from divisions crossed to tiers crossed. For example, instead of crossing 3 divisions for Part III, you instead need to cross 15 tiers, which roughly corresponds to 3 divisions from Amber up to early Ruby. What’s more, because you can still gain progress towards the achievement even though you end up on a losing streak (because then you drop down a tier and gain credit again when you manage to get back on a winning streak) there’s less frustration and anger at “bad matchmaking” since attaining higher divisions simply becomes a symbol of status rather than a goal that must be achieved for the Legendary.

And for those who are saying this will result in people throwing matches in order to drop tiers to farm it, this is already happening anyway with people deliberately trying to tank their MMR. What’s more, there is still the achievement that requires you to win a certain number of matches, so deliberately losing matches would mean you’d be falling behind on that achievement.

Mango Pie isn’t even necessary. Use Peach Pies. They cost a measly 2 copper, and will also do the job.

spoj.9672:

This is also an issue with fractal skins. Can we have some way of trading/salvaging these as well?

This. I thought prior to HoT release ANet announced that there would be a way to convert duplicate Fractal skins to other skins (not the Gold weapons). I still have several duplicates from drops that I’m unwilling to throw away in case they change this.

While I would absolutely love to see the racial skills get buffed up so that they are on par with normal skills (perhaps we could get an additional skill bar above our utility slots purely for racial skills, with 3 slots), the obvious trend is that they are likely going to be removed at some point in the future. For starters, Revenants can’t even use racial skills, so if they got any better you can imagine Revenant players would be howling in outrage at this “discrimination”. Wooden Potatos also mentioned in one of his videos about how certain racial skills are being used in the raid, and I think ANet doesn’t want to see a situation develop where you get posts like “LF Chronomancer for Gors. Must be Human”. (Even though I think that’s really not much better than things like “LF more DPS for VG. No Thieves!”)

This Heart did tug at the heartstrings. Especially the slow, walk of sadness the baby dolyak does when it’s been captured and is going off to its grim future as an eventual steak.

But how’s that really any different from those tigers or wolves just massacring helpless rabbits? Or us killing hostile mobs that attack us because they’re trying to eat us? Either way, something’s going to be dead at the end of the day.

Adryn can be beaten fairly easily by just running in circles around him while cleaving or dropping DoT effects like bombs. He fires his mega-damaging vortex at a location where you were a split second ago. If you keep moving, his attack will thus always miss.

You could also try fighting him on a platform with a different elevation, since I believe (but have not tested) his vortex attack fires in a straight horizontal line and does not move up or down.

Somebody mentioned the fall damage reduction traits. That was something I hadn’t considered should gliders go full access for everywhere. On the one hand, they might need to stay so players who don’t have access to HoT can still make certain otherwise deadly jumps, but on the other hand, if they’re dumped it might also give us access to new traits which could greatly shake up or improve build diversity.

Correct. There’s a hidden flag on your character(s) that’s set the moment you pick which Rare Order backpack you receive from Prisoners of the Dragon. Henceforth, that particular character can only make progress and acquire items for the backpacks linked to that Order. (So, for example, if your character finished PotD and selected the Rare Vigil pack, that character will unlock progress towards the Exotic Vigil pack. He cannot be used to progress the Exotic Priory or Whispers pack.)

I wish they’d bring the Minstrel amulet back. I miss that so much on my bunker classes.

The problem with that approach is that you won’t be very happy if you happen to be in that 20% of outliers who repeat an event dozens of times and the item you need never drops. Just like those poor kittens who did Vinewrath 50+ times trying to get a Carapace Chest Box and never got it. Meanwhile your guildie who doesn’t even want the kitten thing gets it 3 times in a row and just salvages it for Ectos.

Word of advice to developers: If something is only acquired through RNG, then you MUST make it tradable to keep things fair for all players.

Yep, those are actually new achievements, not reset ones.

This adventure and several others (such as Fungus Among Us) have too finely tuned a time limit. As you noted, it is extremely unfair to players in regions like Oceanic who grapple with a permanent 200+ ms ping, because mushrooms may not fire when you jump on them, gliders open a split second too late etc. ANet really needs to do a balance pass for these adventures.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

This is debatable. The thing with City of Heroes was that it wasn’t always split. That came down to the most infamous update in CoH history: Issue 6. When this split happened, the PVP community that existed hated it and left, and the PVE community remained forever reluctant to set foot into PVP, due to how different everything was. The end result was that, without a dedicated PVP community driving the game, its popularity severely plummeted.

I don’t know. I think the primary reason PvE-exclusive players never set foot into PvP is because they just do not like PvP. I know several people in my guild and on my Friends list who, despite being excellent PvE players, absolutely refuse to do PvP.

In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s more efficient to farm certain rewards via reward tracks (and that certain rewards can’t be obtained anywhere else), I wouldn’t be in PvP either. I actually do not like it all that much, and if ANet ever made it easier/faster to get what I wanted via PvE one day, it’s “Goodbye PvP!” that very second.

I’m impressed by the details on it, but it’s still not really to my taste. I thus continue the wait for a Legendary I actually like enough to make. To each their own though!

I probably don’t know enough about matchmaking systems to comment, but I do feel that greater weight should be put on player skill rather than divisions when forming teams. I’m currently at the upper end of Sapphire division, and I can guarantee you that were the divisions based on skill, I totally should not be there. I’m an Emerald player, at best.

The thing is, because you can ascend divisions purely through luck or teaming up with a much better player, divisions aren’t a true indication of skill. There are thus people in Sapphire, or maybe even Ruby and Diamond, which shouldn’t really be there.

It’s not really balanced. Some of the profession’s special skills are WAY more powerful than others.

@shadow: It’s a special item needed for the Incinerator I collection.

@OP: It’s just RNG. I got the others fairly easily, but the Zinc ore drop took me loads and loads of copper farming before I got it.