Guild Wars 2

They’re not to my tastes, but I’m sure there are people who love their look. Let these people be happy with the Chaos weapons; there will be more choices again down the line.

They said “changes to the ways you collect and trade items”. I’m wondering if this might be alternative ways of acquiring rare skins like the Black Lion weapons (for example, maybe Sclerite weapons become craftable in the same way that Ambrite weapons are, using Karka Shells and Settler inscriptions instead).

I’m also hoping that dungeon runes are no longer soulbound/account bound, and that Order/Badges items can now be salvaged or at least Forgeable.

I also hope that it means r500 Chef and Jeweler is coming, but none of the text suggests it’s in this patch, unfortunately.

I like Commander tags becoming account bound. I’m actually going to get one now for the rare occasion when I need to help direct people on the map. I do agree that 300g per colour seems a bit steep though.

People who pay 300g for a base Commander tag should also be given the choice to pick which colour they want their tag to be. Seems like a fair trade-off for those who got their tag much more cheaply.

Not to mention that by that point, Obsidian armor was so commonplace that it was hardly a prestigious armor set anymore.

My advice? Forget about prestige. Get armor because YOU like the look of it. Don’t get armor just because it’s expensive, and especially don’t get armor hoping that other players will be impressed by it. Trust me, 99% of players don’t give a skritt what you’re wearing; they’re all too busy hoping others will be impressed by what THEY’RE wearing.

Basically, any incoming condition stacks override existing stacks of the condition on the World Boss. This means that for easily applied conditions such as Bleeding, chances are your stacks will be overriden almost instantly as soon as you apply them. It’s not that Bleeding/Poison/Burning etc. don’t affect World Bosses; it’s just that YOUR contribution for those conditions will likely only last for a tick or two at most. (Conditions like Torment or Confusion are much more rarely applied, which is why you see them lasting longer. Incidentally, this is a handy trick for characters who struggle to get credit at World Bosses. Since those conditions are rarer and last longer, you can improve your chances at getting credit by inflicting those conditions as you won’t be competing with other players.)

This limit means that having excessive amounts of characters who specialise in condition damage is pointless at World Bosses. It’s a flaw that condi users have been complaining about since Day 1.

So THAT’S the reason behind all the requests for Blix taxi’s I’ve seen lately. (Haven’t really been to Orr yet.)

Support, mainly. I’m traited so that I remove conditions from my allies whenever I swap to Water, so if I see the party is being crushed under condis, I swap, throw up Healing Rain, then drop skill #2 and then swap back to Fire/Earth.

Chilling Ground is also extremely useful against melee foes in that you just drop it, then kite the enemy around inside the circle while they rack up long durations of Chilled.

It’s my perfectionist streak talking, but I refuse to let any of my characters do Explorable mode until they’ve finished Story mode first.

Yeah, one time I decided to see what happens if you don’t plug the vents with boulders. Turns out that the steam vents later never shut off if you do that.

I have to admit though, I laughed at the thought of setting up 5 Superior Arrow Carts in SE Story and just raining down death on all the assembled dredge listening to Shukov’s speech. XD

Aleth.9630:

And fireballs are a non-issue if you have one of the four: mesmer/guard/thief/ele.

Really? I could have sworn that his fireballs were not reflectable. I’ll have to try that out again sometime.

The compromise would be achievements are locked during the first run, but once the first run is done, achievements are unlocked account-wide. You don’t need to do the LS on an individual character in order to use that character to get the achievements if it turns out one is better suited to the task than another.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

To tame a dragon minion, you must purify it. Bloodstones do not do this, as they can be corrupted by the Elder Dragons as we see in Arah’s Seer path.

Furthermore, dragon minions don’t grow into dragons.

Bloodstones/Bloodstone Dust, no. But we DO feed the vine lots of other materials that could be interpreted as purifying, such as the Sacred Glacial Water, the Maguuma Healing Water, the Chaos Orb (freedom to choose one’s own path?) etc.

It’s just a theory for now, but I really do think that dragon minions could have the potential to evolve into dragon champions and eventually into Elder Dragons, given the fullness of time. It’s how Tequatl mysteriously became stronger after Zhaitan’s death, and if Tequatl were ever completely destroyed, Zhaitan’s power would just pass onto another of his champions, or if one can’t be found, then the next strongest of his minions.

We needed the Asura at the Summit. No if’s or but’s about it. I know it really sucks, Taimi, but if you made the WRD once, you can make it again. Plus, you can be sure I’ll be spreading the word that it was you who originally invented it, not Phlunt, even if he is holding it in trust for you.

That said, I’m sorely disappointed we didn’t see Phlunt trip on his robes on his way to the Omphalos Chamber. :P

“Golden land” → Elona, Land of the Golden Sun → Elona confirmed!

Maybe it’s a nod to real life “sinkholes” that trap and kill many animals in desert regions?

One of my pet theories is that by entering Omadd’s machine, WE have become corrupted by Mordremoth. (Or at least, we’ve established some kind of mental link with Mordremoth just as Scarlet did.) We’re not as affected by it due to being non-plant/protected by the Dream as Scarlet was, but Mordremoth is still very much aware of what we’re planning and doing due to this link. As such, once Mordremoth knew about the Summit we were planning, it decided to send the Shadow of the Dragon in an attempt to kill all the world leaders at once.

WE are the “traitor” that should rot.

It’s a teeny bit overly complicated for a scavenger hunt prestige item, I think, but overall I do like Mawdrey and the general approach to crafting it.

@Shadowmoon: No, there’s been a new bug introduced recently where the hammer simply disappears if the person carrying it gets downed. (It may be due to a latency issue where they were moving in a direction that would have sent them off the edge, even though they stopped before then. This results in the game losing track of where the hammer was when the player got downed, and it just vanishes as a result.) Having the entire party wipe then respawn does not respawn the hammer correctly at the last check point. I’ve seen it happen myself.

You’ve still got to CC them from the front to flip them over though, just FYI. Was rather annoying using my CC’s on the beetles, only for them to turn at the last second and get “Invulnerable” on my screen.

Yeah, I think the clues strongly suggest that Anise is not who she appears to be. She might indeed be Livia in disguise. Although, she’s certainly advanced a long way in Mesmer magic if she is.

Lorewise, I agree that being able to trade 1000 Badges of Honor for a Mists Stone would be a logical alternative than trading 5 Pristine Relics. ANet obviously is trying to use Mawdrey as a hook to encourage more people to do Fractals, and I don’t begrudge them that. You can get the Pristine Relics (and Agony Resistance) you need just by running Fractals at Level 1 a few times, and it’s actually easier than most dungeons.

But I do always support having multiple routes for players to achieve something, and so I support the OP’s idea on that basis.

Back on the original topic, Anise is simply being a prudent political player. Yes, it’s good to trust your allies, but you should always have independent verification. As Ronald Reagan once said, “Trust, but verify.” This is why the US had spies in Germany and elsewhere (and I’m 100% certain other countries are doing exactly the same thing.)

They may be your allies now, but you can’t rely on them being your allies forever.

I’ve noticed them spawn up near Serenity Temple as well. They seem to lock onto a specific character and spawn near them, then chase them around. I’m unsure if this is a new mechanic added to the Brand, or whether it’s specific to characters that have completed Dragon’s Reach P1.

I agree. Locking the achievements until the story has been completed once is just a thinly-disguised attempt to increase replayability in a fake manner. At the VERY least, once the achievements have been unlocked on your account, any character should be able to complete them. Each individual character should not have to complete the story themselves before they become eligible.

I didn’t really mind them tying old open world content into the Living Story, but having bugged/broken events that prevented progress was inexcusable, I agree. Mistakes happen, but each one is a case where things could have been done better, and should be avoided if at all possible in the future.

LostBalloon has it right, people! We must nurture and reform our little tentacle backpacks, so that when the time of the final confrontation occurs, all of them will merge together to form Tentacle Omega Prime and it will become our ally against Mordremoth!

Tachenon.5270:

Didn’t one of the devs make SAB in his spare time? Is he still with Anet?

You’re thinking of Josh Foreman. He did originally make SAB W1 mostly as a side project, but after its extremely popular reception, I believe he got a larger team to work on W2. He is definitely still employed at ANet and has worked on several LS releases since then; the Marionette battle was designed by him, for example.

This fight was pretty tricky when I first attempted it (died once, downed a bunch of times but managed to rally), but on my subsequent playthroughs, now that I knew what to expect it went a lot more smoothly.

The key thing seems to be whether or not you have a ranged weapon. Seriously, it’s SO much easier ranged than it is melee. You can position yourself in one of the more isolated corners of the chamber, and then slowly pick off the Tendrils and the Mordrem mobs one by one. Hustle over to the Dragon, burn him down to the next phase, repeat.

I have to admit, my suspicions are falling on Caithe here too. It was either Caithe or Anise, but Anise does genuinely seem to want to keep Jennah safe, so I doubt she’d have risked getting Jennah into harm’s way by allowing her to attend the summit if she knew Mordremoth was going to attack.

What REALLY made me suspicious of Caithe though, was something I spotted during the first fight. As most of us know, Caithe seems to vanish mysteriously before the end of the fight. She is seen battling the Mordrem with the rest of us, but during one of my playthroughs, I saw her disappear in not the usual thief’s stealth animation, but in the black vine tangle that appears beneath you when you’re hit by the Mordrem Lifeleecher’s vine attack. The kicker? You do not fight any Lifeleechers during the entire first fight, so there should be no vines anywhere.

So what does that mean? Perhaps “Caithe’s secret” is that she’s been corrupted by Mordremoth somehow and is, in fact, his sleeper agent in the Grove. Or perhaps Caithe was simply captured by Mordremoth during this attack (which would explain why she’s nowhere to be found after the attack) and she will now show up as an enemy the next time we meet.

I should add the caveat that I’ve only spotted the strange departure once. I’ve been trying to keep a close eye on Caithe on all my subsequent playthroughs, but it’s really tricky since I can’t pinpoint the trigger that makes her disappear, and there’s usually a lot of NPCs blocking the view.

Oops. Meant to write the Permanent Hairstylist Contract. So that wasn’t what you got either?

So out of 1000 chests, you only got 1 Name Change contract? Wow. XD Just goes to show how incredibly rare it is.

Still, congrats on your effort and on all that loot!

By the way, what is that item with the arena logo on it? The one to the right of the Transmutation Charges.

Canonically, I’d say that Abaddon was killed by Ascalon’s Chosen (Devona, Mhenlo, Cynn, Aidan and Eve) and the primary Nightfall heroes (Koss, Melonni, Dunkoro, Tahlkora, Zhed and General Morgahn. I’d also add Jurah to that list because he seems like the kind of guy who would definitely take a role in this. Margrid, Goren and Norgu seem more like secondary supporters).

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

I believe that’s called “taunting” and/or “baiting” like the little invul corner outside gate of north camp. I’ve baited entire roaming groups into attacking me there not realizing it’s invul and wiping them one by one by leaving the invul spot so they see damage and running back to it. Sometimes, when it’s 1v8 and there’s no way you’re going to stop them from taking the camp, it’s fun to have a little payback. Especially if the person(s) are too dumb to realize at least after the first dead guy that I’m popping into the invul zone.

Sometimes it’s also a tactical maneuver. I’ve done the whole “run to my little Invuln corner” a few times too when I’ve tried to cap the SW camp by myself and then suddenly a honking huge zerg rolls in. I ran back to the corner and just /sat, ignoring the taunts and emotes the zerg threw my way. The way I saw it, the more time I made them spend sitting there taunting me is less time they spend doing other stuff, allowing my server (or even the other server) opportunity to cause trouble elsewhere.

Brewergamer.8357:

Oh please be an elimination deathmatch game type!

Oooh, that’s actually a neat idea! I’m envisioning something like a Royal Rumble-style free for all where new combatants get introduced every minute, to a max of 6 people in the arena at any one time.

Trying to corner a market in GW2 usually doesn’t end well for the manipulator. JS has said he’s seen many, many players attempt to do this and fail miserably due to underestimating the sheer size and velocity of the market, even for high-end luxury goods.

Filaha.1678:

Which sounds like they had more problems than merely an untaxed P2P trade system.

From what I heard, it appears that Blizzard apparently expected a lot of players to use the Blacksmith to forge items (with the Blacksmith being the game’s primary gold sink), but as it turned out, players simply skipped him and used the abundant drops available from the AH instead, negating the gold sink.

I also would wonder about the relative amount of gold able to be farmed by something simple like a bot, since the bot could probably not reliably run dungeons.

In the early days of GW2 the bots used to be mainly farm bots that harvested nodes non-stop and just sold them on the TP to buy prices. They depressed mat prices for a long, long time doing this. These days you don’t really see farm bots anymore, but I have still seen the odd kill bots in quieter zones. I don’t know whether they’re selling their loot on the TP or just vendoring it all, but I’m inclined to think it’s the former, because you could get lucky, get a Precursor and sell that immediately for a sell price in the hundreds of gold.

Of course, a lot of times the gold farmers get their gold simply by hacking into accounts and stealing everything they find.

Also, are those unique Dusks or unique traders? I’d imagine not unique Dusks, because there’s only 27 on the TP right now. That’d be a lot of hoarding if 50+ unique Dusks were being traded with only 27 currently available.

He said unique traders, but don’t mistake the current TP supply for the true supply of an item. At any moment, there are potentially tons of a good being sold immediately to buy or sell orders. These transactions go unnoticed by websites like gw2spidy or gw2tp, which is why those websites are not the complete picture for the trading velocity of any item.

Furthermore, the experience of multiple traders on the forums has shown that there is usually a vast “hidden supply” of any item lurking in player’s inventories. Rule of thumb is that whatever supply you see available on the TP, assume that there is at least 10 times that amount being kept in player banks, by players who are actively hoarding, keeping it just because “I might need it one day”, or simply tossed it in there and forgot about it.

Well, it wasn’t necessarily to be able to make them tradeable, but purchasable from a vendor for gold, in the manner of Cultural armour, potentially for equivalent values. One could still choose to farm the tokens for free, or they could spend the gold, removing it from the economy. There are a few armour sets which I would love to get from dungeons, but haven’t the drive to farm the dungeons for them (more out of lack of reliable partners).

Mmm, but could you not simply buy those armors from another player who loves doing dungeons then? It would satisfy your demand for easier access to armor, as well as further incentivizing that player to keep doing what he loves. In essence, making previously account bound skins tradable means that players could profit from their “skill”. For instance, I love JP’s and loved doing SAB, but the SAB skins are a bit too 8-bit for my tastes, and I’d love to sell them if I could. Likewise, I’m sure there are fashionistas or collectors who want to acquire the skins, but don’t like doing SAB.

Oh, I wasn’t making the suggestion of necessarily making the ticket skins purchasable by gold, but possibly instead of solely making new weapon skins earnable with tickets, how about some gold sink ones too?

They already are though, in that you can buy the weapon skins on the TP. Again, this would let players who like gambling on keys the ability to feel like they’ve gotten a windfall, while at the same time letting players who want the skins, but don’t like gambling on chests, a means of acquiring them. And in using the TP, both players pay out taxes and help keep the economy healthy.

Then allow me to rephrase more accurately. While I cannot simply create the gold, I can pull gold which has been removed from circulation back into circulation, partially negating what is, presumably, an otherwise effective gold sink.

As Behellagh says, the currency exchange is a partial sink. The exchange rate between gold and gems is not equal; if you bought 100 gems with gold, then sold those 100 gems back immediately, you’d actually lose out on ~27% of your money. (This was done so that players could not game the exchange and essentially earn free money by trading between currencies.) The exchange still is a gold sink, just a more subtle one.

Yes, that happens when I can freshly introduce into the game 1,000+ gold a week simply by clicking “Confirm” on the “buy gems” page and then converting those gems.

Actually, no, the gold you get from selling gems on the exchange isn’t freshly created. It comes from gold that was farmed in-game by other players. No new gold is actually being created. Likewise, players buying gems with gold aren’t actually supporting ANet financially either; the vast majority of the gems on the TP were originally bought by someone with real money. (I say the vast majority because it is possible to get free gems through AP chests, but this is like a drop in the ocean.)

Filaha.1678:

Are you sure? I’m going to take this point to bring up something which, I think, people need to bear in mind here. Namely, correlation does not imply causation.

I don’t doubt that lack of a tax probably could aid a poor economy in a game, but is that the only reason?

Could not the method of acquisition of items have contributed? For example, the RNG chance and cost of even attempting to get a precursor from the MF results in a lower supply both due to RNG and because less people will even attempt it, but make it a decent random drop off any champion in the world and the rarity would reliably drop because more people will have more chances at it. Is there anything similar in D3? Granted, I haven’t played the series since D2, but back then, you could achieve anything by simply farming the right monster as long as it took.

I’ll grant that it may not have been the ONLY reason (another major factor being gold farming bots), but most analyses by game designers have all accepted the primary cause of D3’s runaway hyperinflation to be the lack of an adequate, omnipresent gold sink. GW2 has gold farming bots too, and I must assume that Blizzard is as strict on cracking down on bots as ANet is, so why did the two economies end up so different?

I only played D3 during the beta and quit after deciding it wasn’t to my taste, so I can’t
speculate on the structure of rare drops in that game, but game-wide, there are actually more Precursors being generated each day than people tend to think. John Smith once posted data that said that within a 24 hour period, 50+ Dusks were traded, at almost the same ratio of unique buyers and sellers too. I’m sure you’ve seen a marked increase in the number of people using Legendaries in game too.

I gave several examples of potential gold sinks earlier in the thread which would potentially be used by a significant enough number of people without causing excessive amounts of hassle. (Heck, if they put dungeon skins up for the same price as cultural sets so I didn’t have to farm the dungeons themselves, they’d remove a good thousand gold from me alone the first day). In addition to that, introducing new armors or skins but not overpricing them in gold could go a good distance too. BLTicket skins have an increased rarity not only caused by the RNG but because less people will hunt for them due to the RNG. But would they not remove a fair amount of gold if, instead of putting them for tickets, they put a new set of weapons out for a specific gold price? If a current skin goes for 100G on the TP, that would remove 15G from one person. But if that same skin was offered to all for 20G or 30G? More people could buy it, at a greater gold-removing rate. It makes it more convenient for the players to obtain, and is more effective as a gold sink than the taxes on the skins. Is there any problem with that which doesn’t revolve around hurting Anet’s bottom line by removing key purchases?

I’m actually partially with you on this. I’ve always advocated for a completely free market in GW2, being able to buy and sell ANYTHING. So your suggestion for being able to buy/sell dungeon weapons and armor on the TP? I’d totally support that.

As for making BLTC weapons and armor skins directly purchasable, I’d like this too, but I think it’s probably safe to say that ANet has looked at the numbers, and this current system is far more profitable than offering them for direct sale at lower prices to capture wider market share. This reflects what we know from other games with microtransactions. Zynga once revealed that of the millions of players who play Farmville, only 5% of these actually spent any money on the cash shop. But this 5% ended up paying them millions of dollars. It’s likely that the players who spent lots of money on Black Lion keys probably dump hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on them at a time. I’m not sure if ANet selling the skins for $5 or $10 each could make up for the income by these players. The current system must be working, and working well, otherwise why would so many companies be going for these “whales” now?

Bear in mind that I, personally, don’t quite like this system either. It feels vaguely predatory to me, preying on players who are more susceptible to impulsive purchases or gambling urges. But at the end of the day, ANet IS a business. They will do what will make them the most money.

The Chickenado is the only mini so far that seriously tempted me to buy it. XD

Oh yeah, they did. XD I had 10 spare stacks of Blade Shards after making one Spinal Blades backpiece. Other players had even more than me.

^ That. If they do want to seriously lower cloth prices, they’d need to increase cloth supply overall as a holistic measure. Something like “all cloth scraps obtained from salvage are now increased by 50%”. That would increase supply across the board.

Of course, what that might end up doing is more players go “Hey, I think I can afford Ascended armor now!” and keep prices the same due to increased demand.

BUT the flip side of that is that it would now seem easier for a player to “farm” his own supply, so I think it would be a good move overall.

Rather than that, I’d prefer it if there was a simple check that sees if the character you’re trying to learn the recipe on qualifies for the recipe, and it pops up a warning window if you’re not.

“You are not high enough level in Armorsmithing to use this recipe! Are you sure you want to learn it on this character?”

That’s why I’ve always supported Tequatl and the Triple Wurm scaling a bit better for lower numbers of players, so success is not so dependent on having the majority (if not all) the players in a map participating.

I reached level 80 back in the level 15 – 25 zones. :P I’m still working on:

1. 100% map completion. (Currently my characters have just finished Sparkfly Fen.)
2. 100% dungeon completion. (Currently up to SE.)
3. Dabbling in WvW and sPvP
4. Getting to r500 in all Crafting disciplines (across my 5 characters)
5. Doing the Living Story
6. Slowly saving up to craft Ascended gear for all my 5 characters
7. I also have a wishlist of some expensive skins I want, but I’ll get them once everything else is done.
8. Oh, and I STILL haven’t finished the Personal Story.

I’m currently refining all of mine as a way of getting from 450 – 475 in Ascended crafting. I have 5 characters I’ll eventually outfit all in Ascended gear, so I’ll need a lot of Ascended mats. It’s a good thing I didn’t delete any since they were introduced.

5 times. I have 5 “main” characters.

The thing you have to take note of is that there are actually more than one type of “Gilded Coffer” or “Fallen Adventurer Backpack” etc. They have the same name and icon, but their drop tables are distinctly different. For example, the karka-themed bows drop from Fallen Adventurer Backpacks, but ONLY from the Backpacks that you get from killing Karka. Opening a Fallen Adventurer Backpack you got from killing a Champion Spider would never get you one of the karka-bows.

I’m not sure what kind of Gilded Coffers drop Genesis, but anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that it only comes from ones dropped by Icebrood/Sons of Svanir.

Signet of Rage tops all.

It certainly did give me the final nudge necessary to buy the Zephyrite Rescue Pack.