Guild Wars 2

wikis are in themselves a kind of video game. where editor contiributors and sysops battle each other for supremacy in meeting their own private agendas’ goals.

which is a big part of why you will hear that any wiki, but especially wikipedia, are dubious sources for factual information.

Einlanzer.1627:

dirtyklingon.2918:

the reason for armour being restricted by class is so that in a nut shell, if i see someone wearing heavy armour, i can deduce they are a warrior or a guardian instantly. if i see someone wearing light armour i know they are an ele necro or mesmer instantly.

there’s actually a reason for it, that is about functionality.

this game lacks visual cues above coupled with a poor ui as is. it doesn’t need the ones it does have removed.

Frankly, I don’t really see this as that valid a point. Why exactly should it be necessary that someone’s profession be visually obvious? You can see someone’s class by clicking on them anyway.

because play the game not the ui.

adnit’s perfectly valid, as it’s the basis for having armour have a visual effect at all. rather than simply playing dress up, which is a fringe side effect of the fundamental reasoning for having different armour types, and different armour in general, have different appearances.

the idea being, that being able to have an idea of what kind of character a player has simply by looking at their avatar, is far better than looking at a ui element and spending more time reading text or deciphering an icon.

this paradigm predates gw2 by over a decade now, and is not specific to mmo’s or even online games.

it is not only completely valid, is it the core reason for having those visuals at all.

the price changes correlate to changes in drop rates, which is most visible with the sudden spike in dye drop rate, followed shortly by a patch (with notes saying it) that severely dropped the rate at which dyes, among many other things, drop.

bots have been being mass banned for weeks now. the more bots got banned, the lower prices got, as there was no longer competition at key farming spots on dps, allowing legit players to get more items, which in turn increased availability of items on the TP, which served to drive prices down.

the previous dropping prices did correlate with bot ban waves. the current rise in prices does not, but does dorrelate with the “dye” patch fiasco.

the change is obvious and dramatic.

i suspect there was changes to more than just simple rates, but rather changes to the RNG procedures involved. it seems to be mostly relegated to orr and possibly frost gorge as well, as the rates in lower level zones, even as high as 60-70(such as fire heart rise) remain unchanged.

like beingunderleveled because no events proc and the one that do cannot be completed too.

Jk, i make my guildies come quest with me under the guise of map completion and having fun with alts.

really i just don’t want to feel lonely. or spend more money on gems just to level my alts.

you two are missing my point but inadvertantly proving it.

in gw2 i cannot play “my way” i must do nearly every “option” to progress, adn even then the flow is stunted in a way that’s reminsicent of aion.

as opposed to wow for example, where i very much can play “my way” – i can level exclusively through dungeons, i can wander aimlessly wander aroudn exploring and doing w/e quests come my way in a manner that flows well. i can jump between zones if i wish, i can stick to one zone completing it fully before moving on, i can go from level x to level y that the zone indicates it’s level range without leaving that zone to go to other zones. i can complete 100% of the content for leveling, and i will be rewarded for doing so.

i cannot do some of those things here. i know i must take time out from questing in queensland within an hour of starting to do some thing else, probably some where else(half a world a way most likely) in order to come back to where i left off.

i must do that on an ongoign basis throught out hte leveling process.

i can’t simply play my way, i can’t wander around aimlessly doing w/e hearts and events come my way to my hearts content as long as i want to.

i will(i have done this many many many times since betas started) run into a point, where i must stop what i am doing, what i want to do, and go do something i am less or not interested in.

my ownmethod is typically to go flip camps yaks and sentries in wvw for a couple hours, or to dump gold in to the same crafts over and over again to get over gaps and hump levels.

it’s really not “play your way” it’s play OUR way or the hit the highway.

and it’s extremely and painfully obviosu with in the first hour spent in queensdale. where you WILL hit hte first gap of many after doing the hearts in the shaemoor fields area. the size of this gap varies based on your luck with events proccing, and on my most recent run there, not a single event procced, leaving me at the largest gap for this stage of character progression i’ve seen yet.

you guys will say “go do another zone” or “go do something else[that you maybe aren’t interested in doing]” “go explore (whichy means go farm the pois and vistas in clearly marked unexplored areas of the map careful not to go into a section which overlelves you to such a degree that you are no longer effective in combat”

right now, as expected since BWE1, it is very tough for a new player in gw2. it’s a very hostile experience because of this stunted lack of flow. it’s abd enough for alt players and rerollers wanting to solo. but at least we have guilds and gold already established and a means to farm more gold on our 80s to get over these gaps.

you guys have also change drop rates.

evidence is found in the dye mistake, which was followed up by anothe rmistake in overnerged it, which seems to have overnerfed drop rates of other item types as well.

no reason to lie or decieve or obfuscate this fact. it’s plain as day and obvious as the sky is blue.

it’s not just bots being banned, it’s not just less people farming those spots. bots were being banned en masse before the sudden and rapid rise in prices. the sudden an dmeteroic rise in price doesn’t correlate with those actions.

they do have a 1:1 correlation with the known drop rate changes, which is documented in the dye drop rate “fix” patch notes.

http://www.arena.net/blog/the-golden-rules-of-guild-wars-2

quest/content to exp level flow is very very very stunted in gw2.

despite being sold on the idea that you play your way, it’s very much play anet’s way.

and what does that mean?

you must do 100% map completion(heart’s, poi’s, vistas),
mine every node you come across,
kill every mob you come across,
do every event youc ome across multiple times,
do every zone of every level,
do every single personal story quest,
spend all your money and then buy gems to craft to make up the gaps after doing those things,
and probably also spend time in wvw further making up gaps after the crafting bit.

yes doing all zones for you level range, ping ponging back and forther between them, even extends to starter zones- and that paradigm begins around level 3 or 4.

as well with the lack of population to complete events, let alone proc them at all, you can expect to do even more of the above than what we dealt with in month 1 when the leveling content areas had healthy populations.’

it’s the way the game has been since before BWEs. and unforuntately the game suffers in teh replayability department for it.

no the listed stuff is NOT optional. unless you level completely through wvw and only do any pve at all for bonus exp.

if you were looking for a levelign experience in which you do content as you come across it at your own pace as you wish and simply roamed around exploring the map looking for w/e there is to do and expecting to be at level for it naturally, gw2 is not that game, regardless of the hype. the ship sailed on this in august. there is nothing to argue about here, but people still claim the opposite.

there is no aimless wandering and being at level. simple as that. you must be very concious of where you go when and at what level at ALL times. you must constnatly fill in gaps of pve content with specific activities. you must do everything the game offers to level short of spvp(which gives no wvw/pve exp).

tl;dr – you must do 100% of what the game offers at all times including switchign zones after a half hour to do another zone across the world for a half hour before doing another zone for a half hour before you can continue the first zone. welcome to gw2.

the reason for armour being restricted by class is so that in a nut shell, if i see someone wearing heavy armour, i can deduce they are a warrior or a guardian instantly. if i see someone wearing light armour i know they are an ele necro or mesmer instantly.

there’s actually a reason for it, that is about functionality.

this game lacks visual cues above coupled with a poor ui as is. it doesn’t need the ones it does have removed.

Kaii.5149:

Between 4 and 5s were where unidentified dyes were for quite awhile before they started going down. It’s just back to where it was before.

actually they were at idk what per but 1g~ got you 30. now 30 costs quite a bit more than 1g.

Freohr.7905:

Why was the OP infracted for this? :/

Anyway, sounds good. I’m looking forward to seeing the changes to Ranger.

quoting devs/employees or usign their names on this forum is against the rules. XD

the y accidentally somehow idk how or why they were fidllign with it to begin with, made dye drops super common for a few days.

then they “fixed” it.

and now as of last night unidentified dyes are up to 4s50c

ele is quite good as is afaict. it’s just not a typical fire mage/nuker class as in other games.

try playing the class for what it is, rather than your preconceptions based on wow/eq/wowclones and i think you’ll find the class is very powerful and fun to play.

alternatively there are other classes that have similar feel and style to typical nuker/mage classes in other games. at least far more so than ele.

i would not expect this patch to change them into the stereotpyical wow clone fire mage nuker by any means.

thing people seem to miss that are defendign the current t3 pricing is…

in headstart it was MUCH cheaper… comparable to where t2 pricing is now.

it was only raised a knee jerk reaction to streamers/youtubers/marathon grinders exploiting them, in particular the karma cultural items that at the time could be sold to vendors for a relatively high price.

this move was not well thought out, and happened over night entirely in reaction to those rampant exploiters.

so basically if you marathon grinded the game to 80 in the first few days, you’d had had the gold to buy yoruself a set of the t3 skins easily. but if you played at a reasonable pace, looking forward to obtaining those reasonably priced skins in due time, you missed out.

on borlis pass with less than 20 people by mystic forge it is quite bad.

when you first run there for the first several seconds the area looks empty after you stop completely and wait for players to load.

then as i stand there with maybe 5-10 players on screen, i watch as players appear and vanish as they run by, often appearing while running from behind me, but appearing well in front of me, then vanishing a few seconds later less than 15 m away from my toon.

as well too often in wvw i am in battles with enemies who are not mesmers or thieves with neither of those in their group vanishing and appearing over and over through out the battle. i mean i’m talking like eles and guardians and engis doing this here.

i’d say if nothing else it’s very cool that instead of doing a controlled interview that says little more than the pr line to some random blog or youtuber shill dressed up as journalism…

someone from the company actually go in game and engaged players themselves directly.

also i’ll note that raids are not right for gw2. raids are over done as is, and few of the games that keep going with the endgame raid model of eq/wow/wowclones do a decent job of it.

there certainly does need to be more content/areas/stuff for level 80s to engage themselves with, as opposed to day after day in orr or spending so much time in wvw that they burn themselves out completely.

as well there should be more cosmetic type items, like the cultural gear, but unlike the t3 gear, should be at a reasonable obtainable price. the t3 itself needs to go back to headstart level pricing- which teh change was an obvious knee jerk reaction to early youtuber/streamer/etc marathoners exploiting and such, and not really well thought out.

but there needs to be more skins for each armour type to choose from. and i’d even suggest that they change from tyhe current transmutation system to something that encourages us to get as many different outfits as we wish- because as is you get a skin for the stat set(s) you want and bam any other looks beyond that you are pretty much destorying the ability to wear the looks you already obtained, or grinding stat sets you already have just to have them to paste the looks you want onto.

i’d love to get a full wardrobe of different outfits to wear overtop my set- i’d grind them all out over time(casually). but right now there’s no point because it would destroy my current looks or involve duplicating stat sets.

there does not be more open world content to grind all this out in too. orr is such a anti climax after dealing with zombies for too much of the leveling process already. it’s like “hey you know those zombies you’ve been fighting since level 20? well here they are for the next 300 hours too, but now with high frequency long lasting cc and high spawn rates in a high density spawn formation” there’s a lot of cool mobs/species that get underused in this game as is.

Selo.1250:

dirtyklingon.2918:

please don’t post xfire numbers. even though i think it’s obvious population has diminished greatly, xfire is best left to be joke cliches of mmorpg.com and kotaku( i mean that those two sites are a joke because of things like citing xfire numbers, among many, many other things)

Thats exactly what the SWToR fanboys said.
I dont use xfire myself, but its a good indication

last time i checked according to xfire wow is dead too

i think the reality is, that few people actually use xfire, and those that try it often don’t find it that useful.

about the only gaming social platform with useful numbers is steam, and it only applies to steam works games.

i’m getting really tired of this.

every session i seem to spend more time juggling groups and coordinating map points of people than i do actually directing battles and strategizing.

my guild had 4 groups last night, 3 of which with 3 people each in them, so that we wouldn’t have someone alone. we started with 2 groups.

there’s really no call for this kitten in a game that sells itself on “play the game not the ui” because quite frankly i’ve never played the ui more than i am now in gw2. more like fight than play really.

it makes me not want to do wvw at all quite frankly, because the amount of time and effort spent solely on doing what should not be an issue whatsoever.

and no, commander book is not the answer. it does not address this issue in any shape form or function. it’s is 110% purely for herding pugs.

when they “fixed” dye drop rates, they definitely went “overboard”

idk what was the change that made dyes drop so much in teh first place. i would guess they did a + vs an intended -.

anyways pretty obvious that the drop rate of a wide range of things has gone crazy. probably worse than the DR thing, which i seem to be on perma DR but only in cursed shore on a toon i’ve hardly been to cursed shore at all on.

i’m almost starting to think AR’s strat is to log in later on reset nights and wait till we(bp) wear ourselves down/get too drunk to keep going. lol.

hardly saw either of you guys on AR map until late in the evening, and up until then we had a huge chunk of the overall wvw pie. now blue has half the pie lol.

i’ll note i did want a more nukery/mage like class to play in this game, and i found both warrior(rifle) and mesmer fit that bill wayyyyyyyyyyy better than ele.

ele is a very cool class. but i see so many people try to put it’s square peg into the round hole of typical “mage” classes. it’s really not much like your typical mmo mage at all.

i played almost all of beta as an ele, and i didn’t find the game very dificult. i found ele to be a solid class, as long as you didn’t treat it like a typical fire or frost mage from other games.

my retail ele alt kills way faster than my beta ele. idk how people can believe it’s been nerfed. it’s crazy how much less effort i have to put into the toon in retail now than back in beta. i could spend several minutes kiting veteran mobs around, and now they’re down quicker than any other class i play now.

anyways i think playing ele well has a lot to do with attitiude and willingness to adapt. if you try to play it like a wow/warhammer/aion/rift/wowclone fire mage, you are gonna have a bad time.

please don’t post xfire numbers. even though i think it’s obvious population has diminished greatly, xfire is best left to be joke cliches of mmorpg.com and kotaku( i mean that those two sites are a joke because of things like citing xfire numbers, among many, many other things)

@OP i’ve been askign myself this question myself.

the way anet has acted about alot of this, in particular seems to be polar opposite of this post:

http://www.arena.net/blog/the-golden-rules-of-guild-wars-2

Respect the player

We respect you—as a player, as a human being. This game we’re making may end up competing with your real life. It might fight for your free time alongside your friends, your family, your work, and whatever else you might be doing. Because of that, we want to give you a meaningful experience, not one that is a vapid waste of your time. Whatever your reasons for spending time in Tyria, we don’t want to waste it by doing stuff that isn’t fun.

That’s why we make our content epic. That’s why we have giant nightmare demons to fight, global allegiances to form, immense keeps to siege, and giant catapults to fire. Tyria is a place that will foster relationships with new friends, and provide you a rich experience to share with old ones. It’s our version of a playground on the grandest of scales.

Finally, we are building an online world, but we are always careful to leave space for its most important element, the one we designers would like to step out of the spotlight for: its heroes—you.

Purpose: To keep us honest.

deciet through lack of being upfront is not respectful. is it not honest. what happened to the anet that made that blog post?

content to level flow is already stunted enough.

and with rising mat prices thanks mainly to people mass playing the market + dev market manipulation, crafting as a viable alternative to getting over one’s personal hump level range is getting kinda rough.

mmo’s are not games that are meant for YOU to be able to do 100% of the content at level with a single character. they are meant to have replayability, and gw2 is already lacking in that department for several reasons ranging from too much of the total leveling journey relying on personal story exp and current lack of DEs proccing due to diminishing population(as projected since beta by MANY of us).

this is not kotor or nwn. you are meant to have an abundance of content. you are meant to have to choose between doing content overleveled on asingle toon, or spread across multiple toons. that’s a basic part of mmo’s. and it’s been far too lacking as is in the current generation of mmo games.

some nic estrategic play from BPA on AR map while i was on. i guess as i was logging in AR started to come in force. and the guys mentioned later GoM was in full effect and they both seemed to focus on us on AR map and then GoM vanished.

still debating to upload the video footage i got, which isn’t much to begin with. tonight was less about epic battles for HoM and more about just strategic plays and stuff like that.

i felt bad for whoever upgraded garrison for us, becuase i think he was up past getting the waypoint, and it was far from being completed when we got over run by about 40 ARs(which is in the video).

it’s in options.

it’s called simple party ui iirc.

TBQH… sounds like you deserved the kick. you expected them to carry you while you sat there afk.

if anything they should’ve reported you imho.

treahearne reminds me of the joy i had as a kid when TNG ditched wesley crusher.

i thought LA was empty for a minute as i ran around.

then i stopped by the MF and people slowly started appearing.

people are appearing and disappearing all around me, and i can’t see anyone outside of 15 feet in front of my toon whatsoever.

this is hilariously bad. what the dealyo?

should i fraps this as a keep sake? i don’t think i’ve seen something like this so bad since TES daggerfall in the 90s.

Kodiack.2783:

It’s all relative man.

If our (Anvil Rock) 15 man team + golem in tow was able to break your will. Think what you’ll face in higher tiers? 40 man and 5 golems?

Sure you’ll be moving to a bigger server that will have more folks to defend, but so will the enemy.

Take a note from ANV , they moved to IoJ because they too were tired of doing all the prime time work only to have it washed away over night.

Look at them now, in teir 2 getting spanked.

Have fun wherever you end up.

-K

i’m sure this has less to do with anything AR has done, and more to do with long time ongoing stuff within borlis pass itself.

@OP

i play on borlis pass too. and after overflows in LA over the halloween event, we are now hitting all times low population levels.

still somehow manage to get rated as high though.

it’s not just lower level zones. it’s orr/cursed shore too.

several guilds took the week off en masse for some reason, others are leaving. idk that that’s it though, i just finished leveling my 2nd 80 last week, and all the zones(all of them because you know you have to do 100% of the hearts in 100% o fhte zones + crafting + wvw to level alts now due to no events proccing and those that do being largely incompleteable). were naerly dead except those ones that were tied into halloween, and only during halloween.

my guildies and i have been focusing on alts lately, and we just run around in groups power leveling each other(in so far as leveling in a guild group can be called that).

arah and grenth have been failing all this past week even when guild groups are doing them for some reason blamed on not enough pugs. i guess. only people you see in cursed shore are the 40 or so people farming plinx.

i didn’t say my server was dead bro.

i said it’s hilarious that’s it’s rated as “high”.

i’ve been through most of the zones in teh game multiple times in the past month btw. you kinda have to do that now that there isn’t enough pop to proc events, let alone complete them. on top of crafting.

it’s not qq. it’s just simply stating the reality of the matter.

teh wvw set is the worst grind in the game.

which is made worse if like me/some of us, no matter how many kills you get/loot bags from player kills/claiming npc’s/etc you get very low rate of badges.

i guess some people get a lot of badges(compared to me). but i get so few once my toons hit 80, i’ve come to consider to stop saving mine and just spend them on siege instead, since teh gear stat spread isn’t a huge priority for me, and at the current rate of badge drops i am getting, guidl wars 3 will be out and old before i can afford even a single piece of wvw gear.

sorry to see you go razzer, but quite honestly i can’t blame you.

you put in a very good fight in an never ending uphill battle to get BP doing great things.

i wish i could say i had done my best to help you, and maybe at one time i was putting alot of time and effort into that goal of organizing and uniting BP, and saw that effort ignored in favour of certain people’s egos(who were not in our alliance or weren’t 100% with us). but we all know i let my bitterness and disliek of the whining get the better of me… though i refuse to take the credit for this week’s silliness. that was well beyond me calling out whiners as i have done on borlis since headstart.

anyways gg to you and your crew. it was a pleasure playign with you guys, and my guys will miss your prowess and leadership on the battlefield.

to the server that FIST lands on- hakato is a solid strategist and competent leader. he is worth listening to and working with. his guys are great players, both in and out of wvw.

Sprawl.3891:

I’m level 22 doing starter zones and getting level 1-4 items from jump puzzles, champion bosses, etc. I thought you were supposed to get items equal to your actual level..

that was advertised well before BWEs began. by the time gw2 was in public betas, that had long since been removed.

as it is even in wvw i often get much lower level items than my character level. which is the one place that is supposed to be still true.

Max Lexandre.6279:

bojangles.6912:

Max Lexandre.6279:

I belive alot of people stop playing already, but they are replaced, if there wasn’t alot of people who stoped playing then with the new players coming every day the servers would be all crashed.

What I feel it changed in the game I feel a bit alone, even with alot of people arround me, but they just passing by.

Replaced by who? LMAO that’s why their box sales haven’t grown much since after a month of launch and sorry but there is no way new people come close the number of people who stopped playing. Servers are dead. I would say over half. I am on a heavily populated server and see no one. Made a new toon to see if even anyone was in the starter zone and it was empty.

About that you may be aware that everybody is farming Orr, that’s why most other maps are quite empty.

as i stated earlier, on borlis pass, which is listed as “high”, orr is mostly empty.

there’s around 30 people at plinx, and that.is.it.

we can’t even finish grenth or arah chains anymore.

out side of dungeons and wvw/spvp you really don’t need dodge at all though.

it’s quicker to get skill points from exp at 80 than it is below that in my experience.

wvw varies alot. farming events in orr is boring, but if your server still does arah and grenth chains, those are very fast exp when they happen.

skill points, as are the skill point purchasble MF mats, are character bound on pick up.

so doing an alt will not help you at all.

on a side note: i wish skill point challenges reset say every week or two weeks so we could do them again. woudl additionally add something to fight over in wvw.

game was never harder in beta. they actually added dodging to mob ai at one point.

and ofc like bwe2 or 3 when gtoaes acted as a kind of fear/body block against mobs pathing to you, making them instead run away from your or stand out side of the gtaoe.

was never any harder in beta than it is now though. bugged dungeons beign slowly fixed aside.

i got little more than porous bones in teh two shelter’s gate events i did mostly solo/3 other people there through out those two runs who also all died then left.

i had done no other combat that day or session, and hadn’t done combat at all in about 24 hours.

last visit to orr at the maggot spot netted me 8 dyes, several greens, one yellow, and many blues in 2 maggot chains and then the captain. that was just prior to the dye rate fix.

day after the fix? i was helping a guildie level and got plenty of drops of all quality levels for the level of the zone we were in. this is in bloodtide coast and lornar’s pass.

dps also affects getting drops at all. if you don’t do enough dps on mobs you tag, you won’t get even sparkly corpses.

in my case, i do vast majority of the damage, even soloing most mobs in the events i’m doing, first combat of the session/day at all, and getting just mostly porous bones.

i think now i get better profits power levelign guildies’ alts in lower level zones simply because i get stuff other than just grey trash.

but yeah the grouped up = better/mor edrops thing has been known since headstart. i thought it was due to competition in zerged events.

but it’s evident to me that even when soloing events and doing 100% of the dmg to mobs aside from npc guards, if you are ungrouped you can just expect little mroe than porous bones.

since ive’ headed back to orr with my 2nd 80 since retiring my old 80 a bout a month ago after weeks of farming orr…

i mostly just get porous bones now even if i am soloing/duoing events.

forget plinx zergs, they did something to drop rates since i was here last and it’s obnoxiously obvious.

update on borlis pass, which is listed as “high” on the world list…

there is pretty much no one in cursed shore except a zerg of about 20-30 people at plinx. we can’t even complete grenth or arah events anymore. the other 2 orr zones have been empty since forever.

it lists borlis pass as high.

all the proof i need to know that they’ve lowered the threshholds on the population ratings.

i should note i rebind a and d to strafe left and right in every game, and i’ve turned off double tap to dodge as well.

Xaaz.8472:

lunawisp.2378:

Xaaz.8472:

Most of the folks in this thread simply want Orr to be less annoying so they can farm with ease and faster. It’s pathetic really.

This is just another case of people whining to whine.

One man’s “whine” is another man’s legitimate concern.

In your very first paragraph you admitted that it’s “annoying”. Annoyance is NOT a good idea in a game. It just drives people away. Annoying does not equate to challenging much less fun.

No, read it again. I never said it was annoying. I said that’s what all the people in here are saying. I find it very enjoyable.

No, it’s not a legitimate concern. People asking for things to be dumbed down so they can farm in peace or finish their legendaries in day vs. months is nothing more than a whine.

The exact same people are the ones that would quit and cry there is nothing to do if Orr was just another easy random zone. I’ve seen it in every game. People cry something is too hard, it gets nerfed, they get their items, they cry it’s too easy, and eventually quit.

It’s a typical cycle for an MMO, and I, for one, hope it stops here.

>implying orr is dificult challenging or hard in any way whatsoever.

i use it for a number of reasons, mainyl quality of life and not having to rehome my hand to wasd/esdf etc.

i’v ebeen using n50/n52/n52te/nostromo for over 10 years now in every game i’ve played during.

my set up is basically

12w34
5asd6
7890

dpad up – jump
down – voice push to talk
left – use/loot
right – weapon swap

space button – frap toggle record
alt thumb button – dodge

if you’re wondering why i don’t have the f skills bound, i did have them bound via modifier keys in teh gw2 client keybind list, but unfortunately gw2’s modifier key functionality is broken, so i had to disable this. i simply spec my toons around it now.