Guild Wars 2

Join a FoTM guild. The game lets you be in 4 guilds for a reason.

Also grinding is the philosophy of Anet. I don’t know if you noticed the 2 million karma grind or the 200g grind or the dungeon token grind, or the precursor grind or the mystic clover grind.

I regularly run people through level 1. It is a fast way to get additional vials by wearing full MF gear, getting 2 other good people (you can pretty easily 3man level 1) and then running through 2 other players to help them learn and level.

Run level 1 in full MF gear and kill everything. don’t skip any mobs. The best ones are the grawl and dredge fractals due to the large number of mobs that spawn. I’ve gotten 3 doing this method in about an hour.

Marduh.4603:

Use Signet of Agility or/and Bountiful thief
Toughness does not save the thief from one shot.

Thanks for this tip. Apparently I completely missed Signet of Agility when considering skills to take. The condition removal is an awesome thing, I was always dying to random conditions.

The extra damage would be nice, but the real use of the skill is the evade.

Blind is only 10% effective on bosses, and 0% effective on AOE’s. Those are the 2 things that actually kill you. I don’t think i’ve even been killed just by normal mobs attacking, they die way before that ever happens.

I don’t understand how anyone could think this is something new and horrible. Have you not been playing the same game I have the past 3 months? MF… RNG luck… PvP Chests… RNG luck… Dungeon tokens, insane grind that even puts wow to shame. DR making everything take 10x longer.

This entire game is built from the ground up on the premise that rng is “fun” and everything should be a grind. I have no idea how some people are just noticing this now after 3 months. If that isn’t what you want in a game then GW2 certainly isn’t for you.

Sinnyil.3648:

Gw2spidy can’t really be used as a source because they don’t pull their numbers every second, or even minute. I believe it’s every hour. Even close to the even t’s plug being pulled you could basically tell when an overflow finished, as multiple of every precursor were posted and purchased, and many dropped by significant amounts as the undercutters warred while the exceptionally rich snapped them up.

It was a solid idea to try to debunk the relatively high percentages being reported, sadly spidy can’t be used as an infallible source in this scenario due to the windows in which it captures its information.

If you know of any site that pulls data more frequently or another method of determining total volume sales, I’d love to see it. I am quite interested in the actual amount that dropped.

For my data I assumed that about 50% of people sold and 50% held on to their precursors for a later time. I think people vastly overestimate the common sense of people who play MMO’s. I have seen absolutely no indication in over 10 years of playing MMO’s that the vast majority of people who got a rare drop would have the market sense to “hold onto it for future profits”. Also the only people likely to keep their precursors are the ones who got the one that they wanted, everyone else would most likely sell theirs and buy the one they wanted, which if I had access to a more real time market site I would be able to better account for.

Plus I never claimed this was a super accurate calculation. In fact I specifically said that this was an order of magnitude calculation. If anyone has any suggestions that aren’t based purely on hearsay on corrections to my orders of magnitude I would greatly appreciated hearing them.

First of all this is not nearly as easy as it seems. You get placed in the emptiest overflow when you log out and log back in, those are the ones that already had the event completed, so no you couldn’t “park” your alts anywhere.

Secondly the loot did NOT scale to your level. Unless your alts were also level 80 then you did not receive any additional exotic items. Low level alts received low level items (I know because I tried, and before you accuse me of exploiting, I logged in an alt and did an hour of the event chain again with some guildies)

So to do this you had to know how to get into the correct overflow AND have a level 80 alt. This is a much smaller problem then the people who DC’d.

The goal of this thread is to discuss builds, traits, gear, etc relevant to high level (10+) fractal of the mists.

Up until this point there hasn’t been a huge need to optimize dmg/defense because everything was fairly simple. Now we have a dungeon that needs to maximize effectiveness of not just yourself but your group as well.

I’ve managed to make it to level 10 using the following setup:

0/30/0/20/20 – taking traits for:

prec->vit
haste on crit
20% dmg

vigor on healing
2 on 10 int

might/fury/swift on steal
20% trick reduction

My armor is vaylk, with superior runes of the Doylak for added health and toughness.
My jewelry is zerker for increased dmg.

I use S/P with a rage/?? sigil and SB with blood sigil

However as I progress further it is becoming apparent I need to focus more on group support and increase my toughness. I’m thinking of switching my jewels in my jewelry to Emerald for more toughness, for starters, but I might make more drastic changes as I progress further.

How far has your thief progressed, and what are you doing to help your group get further? I find Blind + Pistol Whip is great for reducing the damage the group takes.

I’ve been using S/P with a 0/30/0/20/20 build. With vaylk armor and beserker accessories with Runes of the Wurm. This gives me 18k health, and 88% crit dmg which lets you take a few hits while still dealing good dmg.

However upon getting into lvl 10+ fractals I am seriously considering switching to 15/20/0/20/15 to pick up the weakness traits, and switching out my Wurm runes for Doylak ones to get some extra toughness

Zakar.4518:

Your numbers are way off. You just guessed “6” for some random reason, when the number is probably 100+. Several of my guildies stockpiled multiple dusk/dawns because the price spiked down to under 150g within minutes with quite a few others buying their precursor for crafting purposes. Our guild has less than 100 members. I can promise you tons of other people across all servers were doing the same.

I’m not saying it was free precursors for all, but the percentage is certainly over 10x what you speculate, probably way over.

“Several” of your guildies happened to have 400+ g sitting around to buy “multiple” dusks? 6 was a random number to round it out, the actual number I used for the average (35) was assuming 70% of people either bought or kept their precursor. I can adjust this number higher to say an additional 100% of people didn’t sell them which would bring the average up to 40 and give us ~0.3%

But I think it is safer to assume that most people could still not afford the precursors even with the price drop. If people had 100+g just sitting around precursors never would have been such a complaint to begin with.

Leo.6817:

Pulling random numbers out of the air must be fun, even more fun to base all your information on a fan-site giving an average report, but well we all knew this fanboy thread would be made eventually.

Oh and same as above, 4 of my friends and 13 of my guildies all precursors, 0.2% drop chance I’m sure….

If you have better numbers I would love to use them, please provide a source though. All the numbers I took were from reputable sites or from Anet themselves. As I said before I took a very high estimate of the number added to the market (double the number actually on the market right now) in order to account for people who kept them or bought them right away.

Yheazi.8034:

How can you explain then that several guildies got a precursor (the short bow mostly) on that particular event ? Dozens of people participate in my guilds not hundreds or thousands.

because several dozen (36?) out of 300,000 isn’t a large enough sample size to say anything. You are in a lucky guild. My guild of 300 only had 1 person get a precursor.

I almost doubled the amount of precursors actually added to the market to account for people using them for themselves and people who bought them before gw2spidy could take another data point. If you have more accurate numbers and a source for them I would be happy to do the numbers again, but based on what data I could find that is the drop rate.

People seem to think that precursors were being handed out to everyone at this event like candy corn. I’m here to kill that nasty rumor once and for all.

Anet said their highest concurrency is on Sunday at 12 PST (event time). They also said they had over 300,000 players on at their peak concurrency. So if we assume about 300,000 players got to participate in the event throughout the day (lower concurrency then their peak, say only 200,000 but the event ran repeatedly throughout the day allowing more people to participate, was still starting on some overflows as late as 9:00 PM PST) we can figure out the relative drop rate.

According to GW2Spidy: http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185
The amount of dusks available for sale jumped from about 10 to 24 due to the event. Lets say that an additional 6 people bought dusk since it dropped in price giving us about 30 supply, which is 20 added to the market due to the event.
We can look at other precursors (Zap: http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185) and see a similar trend, 10 to 40 in zap’s case. So overall we get an average of about 35 (high estimate, most only added about 20) precursors of each type were added into the market. There are 20 different precursors (only 10 of which are actually worth any money but we won’t worry about that here)

so 20*35 = 700 total precursor drops (within an order of magnitude)

700/300,000*100% = ~0.2% drop chance

which is about the same chance you have from the MF

So no, you did not miss a free precursor candy handout. Only a very small number of players got one, you just heard about it a lot because they were all concentrated in one area at one time with lots of people around that heard what happened.

Tammuz.7361:

UnrepentantProcrastinator.7420:

Rengaru.4730:

Tammuz.7361:

Seems legit to me, if they had intended it to be once per account they would have made the chest lootable only once per account (like dailys, DR in dungeons, DR in events etc)

“If they had intended me not to rob this place they would have put a better lock on the door.”

or in Guild Wars 2:

“If they had intended me not to buy thousands of 42 Karma weapons they would have put a higher price tag on them”

It was probably an oversight on the developers part.
Exploiting such an oversight would be called… well… exploiting.

We need to wait for an official statement though.

It’s a pretty huge oversight considering they must’ve known overflows would be in use for the event. And for all events until they upgrade their sever systems.

Again, I just assumed this was intended since they:

A) made chests lootable only once per char, did not link to account like last event 2 weeks ago
B) went to the trouble of making the 20slot box and earing account bound but unique (which suggests to me they INTENDED) for peope to get them on multiple characters. But didnt want people loading up 1 main character with these.

I think what they need to admit is they misplaced a decimal point somewhere in the code for the precursor chance and THAT is what is leading to all these problems.

I’m not sure what makes you think the decimal point was missplaced. They said their highest concurrency is on Sunday at 12 PST (event time). They also said they had over 300,000 players on at their peak concurrency. So if we assume about 300,000 players got to participate in the event throughout the day we can figure out the relative drop rate.

According to GW2Spidy: http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185

The amount of dusks available for sale jumped from about 10 to 24 due to the event. Lets say that an additional 6 people bought dusk since it dropped in price giving us about 30 supply, which is 20 added to the market due to the event.

We can look at a couple other precursors (Zap: http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29185) and see a similar trend, 10 to 40 in zap’s case. So overall we get an average of about 35 precursors of each type were added into the market. There are 20 different precursors (only 10 of which are actually worth any money)

so 20*35 = 700 total precursor drops (within an order of magnitude)

700/300,000*100% = ~0.2% drop chance

which is about the same chance you have from the MF

This is a great idea! in fact we should do this with everything. I mean I can only play 3 hours max a day. Everyone who plays more then that should have all their gains and profits removed because I didn’t get the same chance to get those gains and profits!

Also anyone who has gotten lucky with the MF and gotten a precursor that way should be stripped of all their gold and it should be given to the people who didn’t try at all for making a precursor.

Ramelie.6950:

Thank you Arenanet for a great gaming weekend topped by a great time at the last event last night (for me in the UK). It was so much fun to play with so many other players all rushing around trying to help each other and complete the event. Even if you died that was always someone to ressurect you almost instantly. Certainly there was a lot of friendly appreciative chat after the ancient Karka was defeated.

I hope that Arenanet realise that 95% of the people had a great time it is just the 5% moaners that dominate the forums.

Thanks very much

Ramélie

I agree with this 100%

My overflow of whatever the max number of people in an overflow is (200?) ALL had a great time. There was literally only 2 people that complained at all, and once we got to the final event and then the loot chest they weren’t complaining they did a complete 180 and said they had a lot of fun.

Jiminy.8340:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

This is why most MMO’s do 1 boring content update every 6 months. When they try to do something fun and exciting a small group of people just have to go and ruin it for everyone.

By small, you mean most of the rest of the world barring the USA, Canada and Mexico?

Sunday at 12 PST is Prime time for most of Europe. The only time zone where it was very inconvenient was in Asia and Australia, which as much as you may not like it is a small minority of players.

This is why most MMO’s do 1 boring content update every 6 months. When they try to do something fun and exciting a small group of people just have to go and ruin it for everyone.

They announced this event 3 weeks in advance. They sent out emails, forum posts, facebook posts, twitter updates, etc.

If you didn’t attend the event it is your own fault not Anet’s. If it really meant that much to you then you would have planned it into your schedule. 3 weeks is more then enough time notice to plan these things. Most important events in real life don’t even get 3 weeks notice.

Yes the end chest got good items. You know why? Because you same people who come and complain about everything spent the last 3 weeks since Halloween talking about how the event rewards suck and you got nothing worthwhile. Well guess what, Anet listened to you and gave good rewards to everyone, now you are complaining that the rewards were too good and you want other people to have crappy rewards and only YOU want the good reward.

Finally, there is no possible way to give EVERYONE the same good reward. You know why? Because if everyone got 2 named exotic weapons those weapons would be completely useless, they wouldn’t even sell for the amount they salvaged for precisely because EVERYONE would have one. The ONLY way to make something valuable is by making it a rare drop that only a few people get, that’s how the market works. Heck even if they straight up gave everyone 100g in the chest, that wouldn’t make anyone any richer, it would just increase the price of everything on the market. What you people are proposing as “solutions” would destroy the economy, make everyone have a crappy reward and you’d all come right back here to complain some more.

Iarkrad.8415:

Quick Mouse.7635:

You can play the first few levels of Fotm without any ascended gear. No one is precluded from playing fotm. Once you get to the higher levels it will become necessary, but by then you get so much loot in fotm it doesnt rly matter.

Try PUGing fractals with a char lower then 80. I havn’t seen a MMO community this hostile since Runescape.

you are trying to pug an elite level 80 dungeon designed to challenge organized groups with a low level?

As for the OP:

1. Ascended gear drops in the chests in level 10+ so you don’t need to buy anything. In fact the drops are Bind on Acquire so you can’t even buy them.
2. Agony is avoidable, if you are good enough to get to agony levels you can probably avoid it.

Arkard.3970:

It would be a nice gesture given the incredible debacle this has become.

I think debacle is a little strong… The event is over now and there are less then 1000 people complaining about having issues. Considering there was probably upwards of 100,000 people doing this event I think it went pretty well overall.

I mean I hope they are able to compensate the people who got DC’d and couldn’t loot their chest, but It seems to be an issue that effected only a relatively small amount of people.

The only part of the event I didn’t find enjoyable was the second reinforcement stage. It was just too long.

I didn’t have any lag at all in my overflow. Like 0, I had my graphics set to the lowest possible and was getting about 20fps.

Unfortunately I didn’t see this thread until now. It seems many of you probably could have gotten your chest if you got back into your original overflow. What it seems like happened to many people was that they DC’d in the last event then when they came back they assumed the event was over and they missed the chest, but this probably isn’t what happened to you.

What actually happened was that when you logged back in you got placed into an overflow where the event was already done because it had a lower population. The event was most likely still going in the overflow you got disconnected from. If you were in a group when you DC’d you could have right clicked on a party members name to rejoin the correct overflow and get your reward. Or if you knew someone who was in the same overflow as you they could have invited you and then you could have done the same thing.

It seems the majority of you missed the chest because you went to the wrong overflow, not because of just DC’ing.

LazerEagle.7209:

Caradryan.1795:

I know a lot of people are feeling indignant at the moment. There are a lot of people who slogged through the event in its entirety, only to watch other people on their server get the precursor that they wanted.

The thing is, Anet didn’t tie any of us down in a chair and force us to play through the whole event. Each one of us who did the thing chose, out of our own free will, to finish the event chain and go through the thing. We can blame everything from advertisements of the Lost Shore events to bad luck to whatever, but in the end, we were the one who did the whole thing through. If nothing else, the process – if you think about it – was fairly remarkable. It did tell a fairly reasonable story, after all.

“But there are people who logged in during the final phrase and got all the loots! omg unfair!”

Yes. But there are just as many people who logged on RIGHT as the event ended. Or people who couldn’t make the event at all. Or people whose overflows got glitched and got nothing at all. What about them?

“But that other guy got the [insert item here!]”

Yes, but to everyone else, they’re all the “other guys.” That is just how RNG works, and if nothing else, it’s a testament to the power of social psychology. Furthermore, we had no way of knowing what was going to be in those chests. They could’ve been all greens and blues and whites for all we knew. Shouldn’t we be at least a little grateful that we got stuff out of it at all?

I think it’s very easy for us to be pointing fingers. But we can just as easily take a step back, take a deep breath, and go outside or do something else. The event’s done. It wasn’t perfect, but you did it. What has happened happened. Are you seriously going to let someone else’s good fortunes be a roadblock for your own happiness?

Think about what motivates you to play, or what motivates you to participate. I think we have a tendency to awfulize too much.

They didn’t force us to play, you are correct. But what they DID do was give some people precursors and not others. That is inexcusable. Those are worth SO MUCH money. What makes the next person to me any more rightful to have it than me? I know it’s a random chance and such, but really? There shouldn’t be precursors in there if they’re not giving them to everybody. My loot was complete garbage, and some people got upwards of 300 gold for doing the exact same thing as me.

you do realize if they gave them to EVERYONE like you are suggesting then they would be completely useless right? they wouldn’t even be as valuable as the salvage you got for them at that point.

The entire reason they are valuable is because NOT everyone got them and only very few people actually did.

However since this number of people was still significantly more then before the supply went way up causing the price to plummet. This means for the first time since launch precursors are actually affordable. So instead of feeling sorry for yourself, get out there, sell all the loot you have in your bank and in your collections tab, heck even the armor off your back if you need to and buy yourself a precursor or 2.

In my overflow with about the 500 people that were there every one of them was praising the event to high heaven.

But of course all those people are actually playing the game right now. The 20-30 people that will respond to this post are the ones who got DC’d or missed the event and they will go with option 3.

You didn’t even need to switch servers, just needed a lvl 80 alt.

Umm a lighthouse exploded, changed forever.

A cavern was opened up, changed forever.

Not to mention a new dungeon and a whole new zone.

It never ceases to amaze me how people can complain about the massive amount of content they just received for completely free! This content update was bigger then most sub based MMO content patches

They aren’t inherently more valuable then other exotics. In fact there are much harder to make exotics in the game. People just valued them because of the word “Legendary” They are a random drop from the chest. You should be happy, they are dropping in price so that more people can afford them. That is what everyone wanted isn’t it?

I assume the ring is an rng drop. The only thing guaranteed out of the chest is supposed to be the fractal relics. Everything other then that is a random roll that gives increasing chance for better items as you get to higher levels.

You can also repeat levels as often as you like. So you can go back and do level 10 over and over until the ring drops for you. This kind of loot system is pretty common in MMO’s.

edit also if it’s true that is doesn’t have an infusion slot then you can just keep going. the extra 10 stat points really aren’t going to make or break anyone.

Kain Do Urden.7213:

I won’t repeat what all other people say before me… DC in the middle of the dungeon (that happens to me frequently, since i’m in Orange WiFi (french top suck*rs internet providers)). But the best was “surprise, you can’t get back, just take your finger and stick it right in your…”…

Something you MUST tell me…. In Guild Wars (the first one), you (arenanet) implemented a system of “second chance” for coming back where you were, in the instance you, in the area you were, and with the team you were, after a disconnect (with the magic screen “you were disconnected, do you want to reconnect ?”).
That was great, and so usefull !

What, IN THE HELL, has changed between this and Guild Wars 2 ????…. Dungeon are instance , right ?? So was the entire Guild Wars game !
What make you come with a complete fail system of being kicked of dungeon since you already know in Guild Wars 1 how to make someone disconnected came back to the instance this person was ?…

I can’t understand.. Having a successfull system in the previous game, and replacing it with complete idiot one…

Thank you anyway for ruining the possibility of fun of this dungeon…
“Arenanet : we rules at making great stuff, but we rules even more to ruined it due to fail design ><…”

sigh

Most likely ( I don’t work at Anet so I can’t say for certain) the reason is that the developed an entirely new engine for this game over the last one with entirely new software. Which means any system that they had in place for GW1 they need to redevelop for GW2 using the new software and the new engine. Many of them are probably in active development but they are starting from scratch, they can’t just port it over unfortunately.

It is annoying at the moment, hopefully they have a fix for this soon.

Neodaystar.4279:

mcwurth.2081:

yes you can do this seperately from the other phases i do suggest however to go to the new map and explore it (waypoints mostly) for easy traveling.

Thank you for the wonder info. See, I didn’t even know about that ship icon on the map and with the npc taking you to the island. I just asked my guild mates and none of them had any idea or clue about it.

<strong> I wish that in the future, for holiday events and new things, there would be more directions and notices – Like with the system messages saying the server is shutting down. In this case it could be a system message saying: “A mysterious sailor is taking people abroad on some island get away” or something like that to get people to check it out. </strong>

Well they do have that box in the top right hand corner of the screen, and I think it says something pretty similar to that. However if you don’t know to look on your map for the ship icon you are still unlikely to find it. Best bet is almost to just ask in map chat in LA, once you get past the occasional troll you will almost always get the information you are looking for.

It takes 9 ectos just to make those 3 amulets. Plus a bunch of ori. All in all about 2g per amulet for a total of 6g.

2000 comms/50 comms = 40 rares *18s(average value of a rare since using a mystic salvage kit doesn’t always yield an ecto) = 7.2g

So if it did work it would be slightly profitable, but apparently it doesn’t. Haven’t tried it myself though.

With the greatly increased drop chance for lodestones and the fact that they drop commonly out of the chests in Fractals it is not surprising that the price is going down fast.

I know in the first 200 hours of farming Orr I got exactly 0 lodestone drops. In the past 2 weeks however (and about 40 hours) I have received 6 lodestone drops

Nobody.4395:

powerful blood the new ancient bones?? discuss

Pretty much. There was an event in the bottom corner of the map where Skelk swarmed the island en mass. I got 5 Powerful Blood and 15 T5 blood in the 10 minute event.

It was my understanding from the patch notes that higher level fractals were supposed to give better rewards. Is there some sort of scale on this? like lvl 1-10 is Tier 1 rewards, 11-20 T2 and so on?

Because so far from lvl 1-7 my group has noticed no change at all in the rewards. In fact from lvl 5-7 no one in the entire group received a single rare item, while they seemed to drop in abundance in the lower level fractals.

The patch notes were a little vague so I don’t know if this is a bug, or if the loot increase is in steps that we haven’t reached yet.

I 4 man pugged up to level 5, then we decided it would go faster so we got a 5th and went up to level 7 with no problems. I honestly can’t even fathom failing at level 1.

There is a smaller island in the bottom right corner that has this quest where skelk’s swarm the island while you collect boxes. The skelk’s drop T5 and T6 blood in abundance. During the 10 minute event I found 3g worth of blood.

Also under the island (it is raised there is a beach under it) there are constantly spawns of skelk’s that also drop the blood in abundance. If you are looking for a good place to farm loot i’d try there.

BurnedToast.3781:

The ones I have a problem with are the vet egg layers.

Makes condition builds even MORE useless? check (transfers conditions)

Condition damage is the only thing the vets are vulnerable to. They take full condition dmg but greatly reduced normal damage. Condition specs are the best for taking them down.

Just dodge to the side. Don’t run straight at them. They turn very slowly if at all when they are doing that initial blast attack. Or reflect it, I know at least half the classes have a reflect. It is a new zone, you might need different utilities from what you are used to from Orr.

Cerise.9045:

There’s a supply of less than 20k of the T6 materials needed for ascended backpacks and infusions on the trading post.

That means only 40 out of the 2 million+ people who play the game will be able to craft the backpack and the infusion.

That’s 0.002% of the player base.

No gear disparity? Yeah right.

that’s 20k at any given time. Not 20k total. That 20k is bought and restocked like 1000x a day. There is a constant flow in and out. if you don’t believe me just try it. Buy a few and then sell them at the current price. Also take note of how many are currently available at that price because yours will be added to the end of that list. typically there are about 600 at a given price and if you add one to that it usually sells within 10 minutes…

using those rough numbers that means 1 is bought every second, yet the total supply stays roughly constant all the time.

I’ve found that the more warriors you have in the group the better. They have the best armor in the game, the best HP in the game and the highest dmg in the game. A warrior can stand toe to toe with a boss that will kill a thief in 1-2 hits and the warrior does 2-3x as much damage as well.

Guardian’s provide the best healing and buffing potential so if you can get 1 of them in the mix as well you are golden.

well technically 300 since you need to complete 3 fractals before the difficulty rises. But Yes.

rickets.1386:

There is an unconfirmed rumor that your difficulty level gets reset once a week. So you get to lvl 10 difficulty week 1 and then it resets and you have to start at 1 again. This would solve your issue.

That would totally destroy the entire concept of this dungeon. The whole point is that it is ENDLESS and that you can progress further and further as you increase in skill.

A 1 week reset is in no way shape or form endless, and it means almost no one will make it past level 10 or so because there are plenty of skilled players who just don’t have the time to play that much.

There is really NO reason at ALL to run MF gear in Fractals since it doesn’t effect chest drops and that’s where 99% of your loot comes from. In other dungeons I suppose it is somewhat helpful for drops, but not at the expense of completing the dungeon in a timely manner.

I agree, a big thank you to Anet! this dungeon has single handedly revived my interest in the game back to where it was 2 months ago!

Are people really having that much trouble? I got a group of random people together last night. In the first fractal of the first level a guy had to quit which left us with just 4 people… we then proceeded to go straight to level 5 with almost no problems. The mechanics are fairly simple, though quite enjoyable.

I will say though, if you are on the fire dumping boss and you have a ranger, let his pet die, it is more trouble then it’s worth. Also if you have a mesmer make sure he/she is the one on the buckets as the illusions greatly slow down progress since he stops to attack them.

Was it a ring/amulet/earring? Those are always Soulbound when they are drops.

Also certain exotics are as well to keep them rare so you can’t just buy them. Most however are not. I got 3 exotics from chests in fractal last night and they were all sellable.

The Easiest way is to make sure you have a class with stability and quickness and a skill to purge crippled. That person should take the furthest wisp. Also make sure you memorize the path to and from the wisp and make sure you know how to get there.

The maze part is the trickiest, once you figure out the right routes you should be able to finish with time to spare.

I don’t see the one you are referring to. Here are the recipes as well as the stats for the ones that are known:

http://dulfy.net/2012/11/17/gw2-new-ascended-backpieces-and-infusion-recipes/

UnrepentantProcrastinator.7420:

Unless you die in an environmental hazard that the built-in system fails to teleport you out of.

If that happens your group just has to wipe and everyone comes back. Falling and environmental deaths don’t damage your gear so there is nothing lost by wiping.

Also you can usually rez from a few feet away so many times it is possible to rez from right next to the hazard.

If you fall off a cliff you spawn back downed at the last check point. If this didn’t occur then that is indeed a bug and should be reported.