Guild Wars 2

Dear Anet,

My wish for Christmas/St Nikolas/Hanukkah/Thanksgiving/Yule all combined (no need to make me any other gifts until next Summer) is that you let us kill Scarlet this year and be done with her.

I do not want to see Scarlet again and would love to be rid of her “big secrets” that are none. Can we move on to some interesting lore? (or said otherwise: move on to ANY lore at all? Cause the story with Scarlet is soooo awfully thin that we cannot really call it lore tbh).

Thanks in advance.

Zel

Indeed, the mix of open-world and instances is quite well done; and the sense of fighting your way through with others and going up through challenges is really nice. And unlocking the levels through the robots, so you do not need to do everything in one sitting is also very friendly (though I did all in one sitting cause it was so much fun).

From the perspective of the game mechanics, the rewards, and the way the achievements are handled I would agree that this is quite a success and a really strong LS update.

Too bad the Scarlet story progresses at the speed of a snail stuck in molasses.

Zel

As has been said above, crafted exotic Celestial armor stands out as requiring a particularly long time to make. It is an “anomaly” or an exception to the standard crafting. But it is in no way the only anomaly: e.g. Soldier gear or Settler gear also do not follow the same crafting/procurement procedure as Berserker, Knight, Carrion, etc.

Anet has made the decision that certain stats combination on armor is harder/different to get. In terms of game mechanics, we can try to ponder why that is, but your guess is as good as mine. Or maybe we can decide that it makes no sense and advocate towards Anet for this to be changed. If they had no particular reason to do so they might go back on it. But maybe they have a good reason.

For crafted Celestial gear, we have at least a lore explanation for it. The technique and science around making it is linked to the Azurites, who were only very briefly present in our part of the world. Maybe they can make it faster and better than we can (maybe not?), but we only learned recently from them how to do it and we are not yet as fast and efficient at making Celestial/Azurite gear as we are at making the one common in our region. Or maybe it is just extremely hard to make for everyone.

If you are desperate to get a full set of Celestials for sPvP the lore explanation offers very little solace to you. But if all you are about is PVE, really who cares? It’s not like PVE in this game is hard and requires insane amounts of min-maxing.

It’s because the Azurites have come and gone people. The world does not wait for you. Those who were around then could do a lot of trading with those guys, learned recipes and plans from them and could stock up on crystals. Their memory remain, but they are back traveling the skies.

No, just no.

Have you ever seen a NPC come back from the downed state? In PvP or WvW – where other players make the environment dynamic, downed-class abilities might mix up things, and Conditions applied before on the “attacker” might have a role – the downed state adds a bit of uncertainty.

But in PVE it is just a gimmick that slows the pace of the game.

Oh look! And yesterday they released really nice looking armor skins that you can get… for gems! And what a surprise they work particularly well on female human models.

Now I need to play the game to grind my mats for ascended stats on my armor, but I need to pay the game to get nice skins (or transmutation stones).

Stop speculating, go play and complete your meta and once you have found out come back here to tell us.

Tarmac.5143:

@Zelu – Thanks for that information. How do people guage what is better dps – can you have an add-on or something that shows your dps or is it simply by timing how long it takes to kill a mob?

Unfortunately there is no authorized add-on for DPS recount that I am aware of.

Some theory-crafting is occasionally taking place on these forums based on the raw damage figures presented in the tool-tips of weapons, then extrapolating those an o constructed fight setting. The GW2 Wiki also has a page on damage calculation.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_Wiki:Damage_calculation

I guess a rough method could be indeed to solo the same Veteran over and over again (e.g. WvW guard or some other Veteran with a fast spawn time) and see how “well”/fast you can kill it. But if all you want is just to as’sess one weapon against another you can follow the logic laid out in the post below:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Ranger-Weapon-DPS-Calculations/first

Greatsword 2 was buffed since then so figures are likely a bit different now, but Sword is very likely still #1 in pure auto-attack DPS.

Hi Tarmac,

For good Ranger builds you might be better off looking in the “Ranger” sub-section of the forums, but since it is the section about helping players, let me try to help here as well! ;-)

First off, so you know, Longbow for Rangers is not a DPS weapon, but a crowd-control weapon (knockbacks + cripple). Its auto-attack does very very bad DPS in the confined spaces of dungeons and all your good group abilities require you to be close to your party members. So forget the Longbow for Dungeons! (and probably for PVE questing too).

The current approach to dungeon running at the moment (if you use LFG) will require you to do a lot of stacking and meleeing, so running melee weapons is not a constraint but even a “requirement” by the meta. Since the highest DPS weapon for Rangers is the Sword (one-handed) it is also a good thing for you.

If the fight requires a lot of avoidance/dodging (like Alpha in Crucible of Eternity or Kohler in Ascalonian Catacombs) you might want to run Sword/Dagger, otherwise you can safely run Sword/Warhorn. You can also simply equip one Sword in your main hand and use weapons swapping to alternate between Sword/Dagger and Sword/Warhorn during the fight, so you cycle your off-hand while waiting on their CDs. For fights with lots of AoE and small adds you could run Sword/Warhorn along with Sword/Axe. But remember to keep swapping between weapons during fight to maximise uptime of all your big CDs and procc Fury (see below).

In terms of skills and traits, go for those that not only help you but all your group: definitely take the “Spotter” trait; also consider going for Frost Spirit to contribute to your group’s DPS. Use Healing Spring where your group stacks or on the boss to help yourself and team mates; you can also blast the spring yourself with your Warhorn 5 for extra AoE healing. Quickening Zephyr is a nice skill to break stuns/fears and give yourself a short DPS boost.

In terms of Trait lines I personally run 30/20/20/0/0.

That build gives you a strong basis of DPS with the Power, Precision and Crit dmg it gives you. It also encourages you to swap weapons during the fight to gain Fury/Swiftness from Skirmishing, which is good with the weapon combo I mentioned above. You can grab “Off-hand training” for a higher uptime of Warhorn 5 (Fury!) and more frequent Calls of the Wild (a very high DPS burst from Warhorn 4).

Always try to have at least 5 in Wilderness Survival for Natural Vigor as it will save your life in many situations and learn to Dodge. “Dead-DPS is no-DPS”

I run with mostly Berserker stats armor, weapons and trinkets, but use a Soldier chest and shoulders (Power/Toughness/Vitality), one Cavalier trinket and one Knight Trinket. The extra bit of Toughness/Vitality does not take too much off your DPS, but definitely increases your survivability in some dungeon fights.

Cheers,
Zel

Ah! Funny… When I entered my 1 clover recipe data some days ago I was thinking that some people might get it wrong and do what you just described…

SRG.3607:

Something like the Wi Flag :
http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag
(a bug corrected years after the game release, affecting players all that time, and players were saying all the time “yes there’s something weird about that”)

Okay, this is quite interesting. And it makes me cautious/paranoid a bit.

That being said the likelihood of “marked accounts” being an urban myth fueled by disgruntled outliers (after all the game has not been out so long) still seems more likely.

The notion that the game designers would include an account-specific variable in the formula determining the quality of your drops is baffling, to say the least. It nicely reeks of urban myth and statistical ignorance at the same time.

What it would actually mean is that someone, at some point, consciously decided to write an extra variable in the code. For example, instead of simply rolling a die and adding your MF rating + possible rating based on the rarity/difficulty of what you killed, it also adds some secret quantity, linked to your account to determine the quality of your loot.

Why would Anet do that? They have no incentive to do so.

If something does NOT get included, it can be because someone forgot it. But if something extra is added, it means you made the effort to add it. And if it costs effort, you need to have a reason to do it.

It sounds to me like the perfect urban myth, something players on a bad luck streak tell themselves to bring some subjective rationality to their fate as a statistical outlier.

Loot in GW2 is RNG, so by laws of probabilities there will be some people who overall are lucky and get more rare drops and some others who are unlucky and get comparatively less rare drops. But most of the people will be in the middle, getting neither a lot of rare drops, not little rare drops. (and by the laws of great numbers, the more you play the more likely you are to find yourself in the middle and not as an outlier)

And because of the limited rationality of human beings and biased perceptions, we will always tend to make mountains of our bad luck and overstate the luck of others. “The grass is always greener…” So some people who actually are in the middle might think they are getting the short end of the stick and have an unlucky account.

There are not marked accounts. If you think otherwise, I suggest you start reading whale.to regularly. You will surely get a blast.

I think two very important points are being made here, one by Vol and one by Obtena/ezd.

1) Magic Find gives you better odds at getting a rare every time the game “rolls a die” for your loot, meaning that getting lots of rares and exotics is not solely a matter of how high your MF, but also how many mobs/champs you kill

That’s why Vol says “better kill 100 mobs in one hour with low MF, than kill only 20 with high MF”. It makes statistical sense, particularly as we are talking of low probabilities.

Taking crude figures: if your base hypothetical chance of getting a rare is 1% and you kill 100 mobs in a day, you get 100 imaginary “roll of die”. 99% of which will give blues and greens. 1 of them will give you a rare. If your MF is 100%, your chance climbed to 2%, so you would get possibly 2 rares. If during that same day you had killed 300 mobs, you would get either 3 rares (with basic MF) or 6 rares (with 100% MF).

What would you rather do? Kill 300 mobs with 0% MF (netting you 3 rares) or Kill 100 mobs with 100% MF (netting you 2 rares)? Depending on your play-style and time available the answer might vary.

The above is obviously made with crude figures but the logic is important: more kills = more chances at rare/exotics ; and much more kills with low MF might be more profitable than few kills with high MF.

2) Very quickly you will hit decreasing returns on investment when salvaging loot for luck

As ezd explains: at some point the oh so small gain of luck that you will gain from salvaging that green will not likely bring you back the value you lost by not vendoring it.

It is hard to calculate that value very precisely, but at some point you are better off selling your greens to a vendor rather than salvaging them. Why? Because GW3 will be out before the increase of luck you just got will give you back the 1 silver and x coppers you just lost.

In view of the steep increase in luck-cost once you get around 150% MF it seems definitely recommended to stop salvaging then at the latest and start selling. I would not be surprised if it happened much earlier though. If you want to be conservative and prioritize guaranteed today’s gains against tomorrow’s hypothetical gains you might want to stop MUCH earlier.

I will probably stop at 100% MF. It sounds like a “doubling” of chances to get good stuff (though who knows for sure what the exact formula looks like) and getting there is not too hard so even if I made losses in the grand scheme of things, they will be small compared to other things (e.g. Mystic Forge gambling).

Zel

That:

Brother Grimm.5176:

Ok folks, these are the TOP tier of weapons (sans the Legendary which isn’t directly crafted). They SHOULD involve some expense and effort to generate compared to the lower tiers.

Plus:

If you run Dire Longbow on a Ranger there is a bigger problem you need to address! :-)

aRTy.8951:

Zelu.1692:

Based on data available so far the 10-unit recipe seems to have a slightly better yield-rate than the 1-unit recipe.

The results are very close, that is a usual variation with such data. Judging from the data, I see no reason to believe that the yield-rates are actually different (in the game code).

You’re probably right. The disparity was larger some weeks ago, but the gap is closing as more data is coming in (I hadn’t re-checked the figures before posting).

If you want the full statistics (and discussions around it) for Mystic Clover recipes, check below:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Clover/Drop_rate

Based on data available so far the 10-unit recipe seems to have a slightly better yield-rate than the 1-unit recipe.

Zel

Maybe Anet is just trolling and they added the codes to the skins that lost in the internal design competition they organized. The real ascended gear will look awesome and they are currently laughing at us for falling in their trap.

(if only…)

Weird… I must but a rare sight for the PUG dungeon groups I join.

I always trait to Spotter and swap to Frost Spirit when joining dungs (it just makes good sense, really). I either run Moa (when extra healing is needed) or Felines (for the Vulnerability and Bleeds). When the group will do a lot of stacking I also swap to my AoE heal (nice also with the blast finisher from Horn), so all benefit from it.

I don’t think I ever used a bow in a dungeon… Axe auto for bloom cleaning in TA is nice; Greatsword auto on CoE Alpha (extra evade to supplement my dodges); otherwise sword auto in burn phases when dodge is not really needed (Kohler, Spider, behind the Nightmare Tree). And ofc, as much as possible Horn to grant Fury to the team and Call of the Wild to burst when stacks of Might and Fury align.

I suspect a lot of people sigh silently when they see me join the dungeon with a Ranger, but I do not think I ever got kicked right off the bat.

The thing is indeed the stupid pet standing in AoE (pets are fully useless on Alpha in CoE), or the pet F2 key not replying, And having now maxed out my Guardian and tried its different builds, I see I can easily get better DPS and utility output out of the Guardian.

So I suspect the hate comes partially from a lot of player not bothering to make their Ranger useful in a dungeon (i.e. it’s hard to play a Warrior badly, it’s very easy to play a Ranger badly) and thus giving it a bad rep. And then also from the fact that classes are not very well balanced, so experienced players know that even a good player will have a harder time making their Ranger contribute as much as a War/Guar/Mesmer.

Zel

Hi Zergdaeva,

My understanding is that the Tequatl boss achievements (and its meta “Tequatl the Sunless”) are there to stay beyond boss week. The “Above the Waves” achievement where you jump 10 times over the wave will still be there for you to do.

It is the “Boss Week” meta achievements that will be archived, but jumping 10 times over the wave does not grant you progress towards the “Boss Week” achievement.

Cheers,
Zel

Lothirieth.3408:

Vol.5241:

Except that there are very few exclusive guilds that can maintain +80 members at one point to just do Teq.

The dedicated Tequatl killing guilds are the ones that are doing this.

Yes, exactly. And those are the ones I meant in my initial post.

Vol, please note: I am not criticizing those guilds for hogging mains or creating overflows. I am out there doing it with them and having a blast killing Tequatl. I am just trying to reinforce the point that an instanced version of the fight (maybe with a chain of open-world events for a large group leading to it) might have been better.

But if Anet manages what you said (below), I would be all for it (I am just dubious of them finding a way to do it):

Vol.5241:

Teq can be a great, long-lasting meta event if anet finds a way to overcome queues while keeping it open world (…)

Manuhell.2759:

The game itself gives you no instruments to coordinate, though – being it in open world.
And it all returns to what i said above – if they wanted it to be a guild event, they should have designed it as one to begin with. A private instance – not unlike the empty overflows used by guilds – where you can eventually kick afk people and troll, and you choose when to begin said instance instead of waiting for hours plus a variable spawn window (something that by itself brings people to wait afk there).

I completely agree.

In the end, the tricks one needs to kill Tequatl show exactly that: guilds are either hogging some server’s main or creating and controlling their own overflow to be able to attempt the kill. So in essence they are tricking the game to do this in an instance with selected players. So it is really not “open world” content.

But I have killed him a couple of times now and will probably do so again tonight. And I am happy at hard(er) content within GW2, particularly as nearly all of PVE is horribly rollface. It just feels wrong to have to somehow manipulate the game to get an “instance” and then wait an hour or more for the boss to finally show up…

Introducing the possibility of slight vertical progression through more ascended gear (or stronger infusions) does not mean that VP is necessary for players.

Actually the vast majority of PVE encounters (dungeon paths or world bosses) are so casual that you do not need any gear progression to beat them. And the challenge currently posed by the Tequatl encounter is not based on gear, but on the difficulty of organising properly 80+ people to do the right thing at the right moment.

In other words: the current state of the game does not require us to do any VP. You can do everything (quite well) in Exotics.

And thus GW2 remains different (better imo) from other MMOs, because it does not invalidate your current gear every six months.

Getting a full set of exotics + one or two ascended amulets/accessories is extremely easy and grind-less. I started playing three months ago and it took me about three weeks to level my first character to 80 (without trying hard or playing a lot as I have a full-time job). I could get a couple of ascended pieces for that character, as well as full exotic within another week — thanks to a bit of guild rushes/challenges and the laurels I got along the way.

So now I can focus on lore, content, exploring slowly the zones, doing the Living Story of the week if it strikes my fancy (or not), etc. Getting a Legendary or Ascended weapon would add only so very little to my ability of doing PVE content. I might do it as a way to keep myself busy, but the game does not require it from me. It is a nice change of pace, after two years of exhausting progression raiding on another MMO…

For those willing to kill Tequatl and ready to put in the time to actually do it, here is a short guide on how to give yourself the best chance:

1 – Look on those Forums for a guild doing organised kills
2 – Depending on the guild, they will either organise their kill in an Overflow they control and will taxi people there; or they will all guest on the main of a low-pop server – find out from them which
3 – BEFORE you get to the kill zone (overflow or main) where the kill will take place, make sure to repair and to buy food, sharp stones and potions of undead-killing
4 – Once you get to the kill zone (overflow or main) do NOT leave the zone NOR relog. For good measures make sure to walk and not use Asura waypoints within the zone, so you STAY in the zone. You want to avoid leaving the zone and being put into another overflow.
4 – Get on TeamSpeak (or similar) with your guild and listen to the instructions (when you are assigned to groups, roles, etc.)
5 – Once Tequatl spawns follow the instructions of commanders and give your best.

NOTE: You need to get to the kill zone well ahead of Tequatl spawning. Organising such a large group efficiently takes at least 30-45 minutes (taxying people to zones, putting people in group, explaining basic tacts, etc.). So make sure you got time ahead of you.

Hope this helps.

Zel

Alternatively, if what we are striving for is realism, after 15 mins there could be a hard enrage mechanism:

1 – Tequatl does some über-attack that kills all players currently in Sparkfly Fen.
2 – This zone-wide wipe triggers a worldwide debuff on all players: “Tequatl succeeded in taking over Sparkfly Fen and destroyed all life within. Morale on Tyria is low.” (everybody in every zone gets -5% debuff to dmg)

Now that might be motivation enough to defeat him when he rises. :-)

This wonderful item is hard to beat for convenience: when you are farming Orr, Scarlet events or doing fractals/dungeons, you will never run out of salvage kits and it only takes one bag slot. So no problem anymore of your bags getting full and the vendor being too far away. And with the increased need to salvage (for luck score boosts) it is a really welcome tool.

If you convert gold to gems to buy it, no, it will never be a good financial investment: even the most optimistic calculations show it will take years for you to recoup the investment, but if you want maximum convenience and do not mind buying it with real money (i.e. flashing the credit card for gems) it is certainly worth it for the significant increase in gamelife-quality.

(and in the large scheme of things: the 7.50 EUR I paid are much less than the monthly subscription to other MMOs out there, but this item will last me as long as I am playing GW2)

Let me add my voice to the chorus: same error message (42:6:3:2151) and can’t login… Hope it’s fixed soon.

I would like to second the suggestions above that storing gold in the bank should be reintroduced.

The wallet has many advantages, but having all my gold pooled like this in my bags make it harder to save money for big projects. Since the bank is shared anyway this is no problem: I could have gold either in the bank (stored away safely and protected from my spending sprees) or in my wallet and shared “in the common pocket” of my characters. It is at the same time convenient AND conducive to saving. :-)