Guild Wars 2

Just gonna add one more post for support. I am one of the lucky ones who has most of the fractal skins they like (all gotten before the Fractured patch), so it won’t affect me much. But like many others, I feel Anet could have implemented a (pristine) relic price on them and add it to the merchant in the fractals entry area.

Even if it’s a randomly set high price, it might give people the feeling that doing fractals is actually contributing to something. After I hit lvl 50, it didn’t take long for me to just lose interest. I like most fractals (which is the only reason to do them), but time invested far outweighs the rewards. Having that couple of relics or that one pristine relic added to your savings towards that one skin you want, will make a difference, albeit a small one.

I’m interested in learning to fluently do Arah, please. Would very much appreciate an invite.
Thank you in advance^^

The content is by no means only doable by hardcore players. I completed it on my necro (condi specs) and guardian, the two toons I play most, and I for one am not a hardcore player (don’t own a legendary or even any of the t3 cultural armors). If I were to try on my mesmer, who I hardly play, I would have problems, because I don’t know the class’ skills and traits as well.

OP already mentioned he beat it on his ranger, so I don’t see a problem with it. If the content should be designed so I can beat it on all my lvl 80 characters without learning to play them somewhat properly, it wouldn’t feel right either.

The achievements are harder, but it’s good they give you an incentive to group up to do those. Story should be solo-able and it really is in this state.

I have pugged nearly all of my fractal runs and I’m inclined to suggest mesmer from the classes you mentioned. Thief doesn’t have a particular up or down side, I think. Ranger is often said to be “good if you know how to play one, but few know how to play it”, so pugs don’t always welcome a ranger with open arms. And even though it pains me to say it, as I consider my Necro my main, Necros have little to contribute to the group.

Ele is good as well, but if you don’t enjoy playing them, you shouldn’t. It’s a game and you should enjoy your time online (although that’s not always a given when pugging^^)

I did a lvl 49 fractal the other day for the first time in weeks, and of course we roll Mai Trin as boss fractal.
We ‘only’ needed 3 tries, but this was because we had one mesmer staying afar and luring the pistol shot to himself, while I was on my guardian having aggro 90% of the time. I know the theoretic mechanics, but I find it hard to pinpoint her tells and miss a couple once in a while myself.

I found the fight ok for lvl 49; people should have a minimal understanding of all the fractals by then, and the level of difficulty will make the majority of players better at it after it’s out for a longer while. But if Mai and Horrik’s damage numbers barely change on lvl 10+ or 20+ (which some posts make it seem out to be), then there is something seriously wrong and it should be fixed.

Also, they shouldn’t be making level 50 “play perfect or you’re dead” level (not only restricted to Mai Trin). I was under the impression they are going to release higher level fractals in the future, reaching up to 80. If level 50 is near non-forgiving, then what’s left to do on the later levels? Increase HP of foes and make it all last even longer? If I’m mistaken and level 50 is the ultimate cap, I retract my words, though.

Farmed my last 250 tickets today: 1 monocle (heavy), 2 toxic spore skins, 1 recipe

Post patch total: 3000+ chances opened: 2 heavy monocles, 3 toxic spore skins, 1 recipe, 5 favors of the pavilion.

I like hotjoin as it is… I do my 3 daily games to get my daily achievements, and sometimes switch teams to get at least 2 wins out of 3 games (for working towards the 200wins on certain profession achievements). The small amount of money, rank and reward track progression seems limited enough; I’m not getting rich doing my daily pvp.

The changes that you suggest concerning team switching, will push players like me to just go soloQ. If I can’t switch teams to farm my wins (that don’t even contribute to a title I could show to others to feign “skill”), I might as well go for the better rewards in rated games and risk ruining people’s fun there because I might make them lose.

I completely understand how switching teams is frowned upon and I’m not proud that I do it, but anyone remotely competitive can make a team to go to TeamQ or if you don’t like people switching teams there is SoloQ. For what it’s worth, I’m usually the first to volunteer to an auto-balance to give others their chance to enter the winning team as well.

Tying rewards to personal reward points somehow might be interesting though, I do support that. In hotjoin I tend to try to boost my personal score, while in the rare instances (in the past) that I did soloQ I couldn’t do that, since standing on a lone point with 2 people is counter-productive.
So in hotjoin it might be nice to tie rewards to personal score, because people are doing their own thing anyways; while I don’t see it working in rated games where going for personal score might be counter productive for the team.

Anyways, now you also have the two cents feedback from a casual hotjoin scrub for what it’s worth^^

TL;DR Keep switching teams possible in hotjoin as it will further worsen the state of soloQ. Tying personal score to the rewards in hotjoin is a nice idea, but not in rated games.

I used my rabid condi necro, especially the aoe blinds are awesome to get rid of the clones.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRUQNArYWjc0UUbPNW2wfjCiBRqSTW7X0BOsgqiA-TxBBwAw0HA4EA8T9nvK/i8AAYt/galgkCwMpRA-e

Opened another 350 chances: 1 favor of the pavillion
(at least my friend who doesn’t do BB or gauntlet was happy to receive it to combine with her bazaar favor, so I guess it’s not a complete waste of time… I keep telling myself that ^^)

It depends: do you want your money right now? Or are you patient to wait a couple of months?
Most people who really want the recipe will be buying it while the event is active. Later on, if the recipe is not made available through other means, it will more than likely rise in price over time. But you’ll have to compete with “investors” that are buying now to sell later, so it might take a bit before yours sells.

When you play the market, you’ll have to be willing to take risks. Which is why I’m bad at it, so don’t take my advise blindly^^

Post patch: about 1000 tokens (give or take 100):
- 2 favors of the pavilion
- 1 heavy monocle

I had unstable internet in the past and I didn’t queue up for “serious” pvp back then because it wouldn’t benefit anyone. Accidents like blackouts or emergencies happen and I have nothing but understanding for that. But if you know chances are high that you get disconnected during a game, then why would you join in the first place? To go back to the board-games analogy: I never started a game of Risk (never was an avid monopoly fan), when I knew I had to leave within the next 20 minutes.

I have not played many rated arena games in GW2 and these days I don’t even bother anymore; the most deciding reason being 4v5 matches. It’s so frustrating to the losing team, it’s not even funny and being on the side with 5 people is boring as well.

I don’t know how dishonorable works, but if it’s one 72h debuff per left game, and you get banned from games when you have 3 stacks, then that’s certainly not a bad way to go about it. Otherwise I feel a 24 hour ban for 3 strikes is enough. But then each strike would last indefinitely and each arena ban should increase with 24h each time you get 3 strikes.

For PvP, I feel all the info that you can change in the “PvP Build” UI, should be put in the template (weapons, sigils, rune, amulet, traits, skills…). Any weapon used in a build that you load, should be created in the character’s inventory as a standard common model that is soulbound and unsellable.

For PvE, however, I don’t think sigils, runes, weapons, armor, skills are needed to be set in the template. In gw, skills had to be put into the template because there were so many of them, and the time consuming part of a build wasn’t the attributes, but the skill selection. In gw2 people won’t go to the template UI to change one or two utility skills, and people won’t load a template to switch their weapon or armor in between fractal levels or dungeon bosses. It’s traits that take the most time to reorganize.

Imho, you can put a load/save template button in the traits section of the UI and be done with it. For PvP, you already have a “PvP Build” UI where you can put your template button.

Now, for appearance, in the wardrobe, I would also love some sort of save/load mechanic for skins/dyes. I occasionally find myself, like many other I assume, tinkering around with different skins and different dye combinations, when I’m feeling bored. If we could save/load these skin/dye combos, that would be awesome. This would then be implemented in the wardrobe section of the bank, where we are able to preview all the skins, even the ones we haven’t unlocked yet. But this is more for fashionistas and people who play dressup in the wardrobe… I would really like it, but it’s not as important as build/trait templates.

The ability to ping your template is a double-edged sword. You can help friends/guildies or whoever with their build very easily by just a click of a button. But it will bring more gear/build-checks as well. Back in gw, I have seen people trying to help random pugs with bad/weird builds (just pointing to some key skills that they should bring and fill the rest how they want), and I have also seen people being kicked on the spot.

That’s my two cents I guess. I’m just happy I’ll be able to have any templates at all in the future. It was one of the best things that were introduced into gw, and I really miss it in gw2.

I only had 650 lying aside… got 2 favors, rest tokens. So I guess I’m lucky lol.

My main dungeon character is my guardian and I always pug. I have a question for you guys with way more experience than me.

Doesn’t HotW p1 end boss reflect projectiles? I always use staff when going into ranged. I try to stay melee as long as I can, but I always pug and the boss takes too long for me to not make mistakes and stay melee the entire fight.
I always kind of took for granted that the scepter projectiles are reflected in different directions and can hit my party members (at least the animations make it seem like that). I want to avoid that.

Anyway, I have been wondering this for a while. If I go ranged on HotW p1 boss, do I use staff or scepter?
Or if you can give me a way to stay in melee easier, regardless of it being a long fight with pugs, I’d love to be enlightened^^

You can buy them from the TP, I think. They are indeed the more expensive non-account bound, rare variant, but they’re still obtainable, so no need to put them in the festival vendor.

Those used to drop from the end chest in Sanctum Sprint, don’t know if they still do.

Skeleton farming on halloween for party title and easy experience for legendary survivor title come to mind.
Also snowball fight outside eotn.

As said in the op: you could farm certain consumables that counted to titles and/or were just useful consumables ingame: candycorn, eggs, cupcakes, apples… I used them all and farmed them while they were available. And I did have fun with that. Plus, people that didn’t need them could sell them off to others.

With the dragon bash festival in gw2 I also farmed the event to get the easy to get, yet useful, consumables. I think they should put more lvl 80 useful consumables in with events. They will be cheap to get during the event, but later their price will rise; leveling the price with the crafted consumables again.

I would change my tokens for food consumables or alternative sharpening stones/oils/crysrals right now, if they were available.

And it would add a bit of meaning to grinding the events, other than achievement points.

It took me about 75 tickets last year to just defeat her, after trying different classes and builds. This year it took me a bit over 100 tickets to get 8 orbs.
Lots of people who are more skilled get it faster, others like me just have to be patient and wait for that perfect run where everything goes just right.

Best tip I can give is to use a profession you’re used to playing. A friend of mine got 8 orbs last year on her thief and gave a youtube link, stating that it was absolutely the only build she could do it with. I tried it, didn’t get it to work well, went back to my trusted condi necro and eventually got it done.

For players with limited skills, such as myself, patience is key. If you find yourself raging after 5 tries, you might want to reconsider if you really want the achievements that bad. In the end games are to have fun.

Also, it’s not because some people can’t muster the patience to learn the fight through trial and error, that the fight needs to be nerfed.

If they will give away these items so soon after the original release like this, they might as well add a permanent “living story vendor” and just add new rewards as soon as the new content is released.
If you don’t have to do the content later to get it, why do you need to do it in the firstplace?

Don’t have a strong feeling for or against re-releasing content as I don’t care what other people obtain, but this way is a bit weird. Make them living story chapter related, or permanent, I don’t like this in-between stuff. I want to know if I should grind out stuff because it’s temporary or wait to get it later without needing to do all the achievement grinding.

If there is a fail chance, I know I won’t be paying money to start the event.

Ode to my favorite storymode:

Once slaves, now roam free;
Nonetheless their butts got kicked;
Forgeman gives thumbs up.

Haven’t played it since it changed, but I’m glad they removed the clowncar. It was nothing more than a useless timesink.
If the other changes also make the other parts faster, then even better.
Dredge wasn’t necessarily hard, but way way too long.
Thanks for finally changing it.

49; two people got an ascended armour chest. Didn’t ask about rings.
My personal reward level was 44 and got nothing.

Even though I get annoyed by hosts leaving, there’s not much you can do about it. If you could just have someone (or pay someone) to open up lvl 50 or whatever you want, then have them leave and take someone else without any kind of penalty, that would also be a flawed system.

Hello. Decided to go with my necro in TA, my ranger in CoF and my Warrior in CM.

I only really put effort in my warrior, trying some different armor piece combos. But my necro has gotten some good comments ingame nonetheless, so I took her over my mesmer. My asura thief is on hold for the moment in plain crafted armor that doesn’t suite her well, so I went with my ranger who I decided to use the molten gauntlets on, which for me fit with the headpiece and the hounds of balthazar backpiece. Hope there will be more people in the next days to give me more armor combo ideas, particularly for female asura thieves ^^

PS: two shots of my warrior to show a neutral shot, and I just liked the shot of her stretching her arms while yawning.
PPS: sorry about the poor image quality… I play on an older laptop, so it’s not topnotch gfx.

In original gw, I could watch recent top gvg or ha fights, and I actually did that from time to time. It was entertaining to watch gvg back then.
I watched some of the tournament of legends, but I was bored to death. Because of that I didn’t even stick around for the finals. Not having linebacking (because you don’t have back/front line), specified splits (because all you do is split up your team in gw2), timed kills (just after respawn timer) etc., makes it all quite dull to watch. After a game or 2-3 you’ve seen it and have enough.

If you have to secure viewers with precursor and gem giveaways on Twitch/Twitter, there is something wrong with your pvp matches, especially if you ever aimed to be an “eSport”.

But I’m just an unranked casual, what do I know.

Internet tough guys… best not to be too hard // on them, they are probably bullied (or worse) IRL themselves anyways. Be nice, apologize for being bad and wish them a nice day.

Edit: omg, can’t even use hard and the word on in succession, it gets filtered… lol

If you want to play wvw, why not go to proper wvw? Eotm is not world against world, it’s color vs color, which means no team-feeling whatsoever, and this leads to no-one giving a kitten about who wins.
If people don’t care who wins, then it’s just a matter of how to get the best rewards, which is karma-trains.
When someone organizes a group to defend, even though the vast majority of their color doesn’t agree on that course of action, they are trolling (in my humble opinion).
A guild that organizes themselves in eotm to beat a bunch of uplevels and in the process feel awesome about their skillz, should look in the mirror and think about why they aren’t in proper wvw, actually doing something meaningful for their world (again, imho).

I’ve only visited eotm a limited number of times, because I can only stand karma training for an hour at most, before getting bored of it. So it’s not that I am absolutely in favor of karmatrains. But taking eotm as a serious wvw (or pvp, whatever) format seems ridiculous to me.

That’s my opinion on the matter and when there are people thinking differently on the map, when I am there as well… stopping my level up train in the process… I just go do something else that I’ll probably enjoy better anyways. No need to start drama about a game.

I get to do it yet again? Hurray! …

Same here, I did Arah story after the update and I didn’t get the unlock message pop up… I do hope I don’t have to do it yet again.

Belgium, reporting in. (same error code)

Sceinna.3561:

Belgium, same thing here.

“Telenet” anyone?

Yep, using Telenet as well; and Internet got cut off for maybe 15mins yesterday night. This is the first time since that disconnect that I’m trying to log on.

Same error code here, from Belgium as well.

On the servers I play, usually there is an “understanding” of not attacking one another… more like: “we both wanna get this puzzle done and don’t wanna waste time fighting for 1 lousy kill”.

However, now that it’s a zergfest where spawncamping can get you many kills (well, more than usual in the JP) in a short amount of time, you can’t blame people for doing just that. I was lucky I got in close after reset and it was only a handful of people that were actually doing the puzzle.

The season is long and people will leave after a while when their achievements are done. Just wait it out or go in during off-peak hours.

I agree that the best solution is to just make legendary weapons exempt from this system. I don’t own a legendary myself, so I’m not saying this for personal reasons. Actually, it’s not even because of this problem of people with dual legendaries, but in general being able to use your legendary skin on all your characters will make it less special. So yeah, just keep legendary weapons out of the wardrobe, and make them account-bound instead of soulbound, that way people can still put them on a character that they think looks better with it.

I don’t think, however, that double legendary owners should be “payed back”, if this system is implemented. Other changes in the past have also negated lots of time and effort of some players without compensating for it.

In general I’m happy with the changes they’re gonna make, though.

Thanks for this thread. Now I know not to go afk or alt-tab on my ranger or necro when I have minnions up…. I too was honestly not aware this is considered botting.

I wasn’t satisfied with this ending. The fight with the hologram was fun though.
But walking up to someone who is already down and staking her to death, leaves a bad taste in my mouth, personally.

I liked the Guild Wars Beyond chapter in Cantha (WoC), where we as ‘heroes’ get confronted with the reality that we also rob people from their lives and question if “in the name of justice” is enough to justify all our deeds.

I just felt that Ceara, who became the corrupted Scarlet, is also a victim in this and at least we as ‘heroes’ should have considered maybe thinking of a possible way to cure her from it, and maybe learn more about the threat that’s now upon us.

Yeah, my main character is in the Priori, so I don’t always like the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach^^

Wasn’t having any problems getting loot yesterday. Today I log in, killed all 3 knights in a party, no loot to be found. So frustrating.

Nice naming sense… I’d rate all of them perfectly fitting the Sylvari, 9.5/10.
The only one I’d give an 8 is your ranger; for some personal brain weirdness on my part the -or at the end of the name doesn’t sit right with me. Your necromancer’s name I like the most.

My Necromancer sylvari is called Kurozakura Ze. Ze being added to all my characters, so people in guild know how to remember me, as I like to level/play my alts.

Kuro meaning black and sakura meaning cherry blossoms in Japanese. Black for the necro theme; cherry blossoms have something beautiful yet sorrowful in them how they shatter in the wind. My necro also sees death as something that has beauty in it’s sorrow.

PS: I saw the name “Orang Utan Claus” for a guardian in this thread. It reminded me of Klaus in gw: factions, who choses to sacrifice his mortal life and become a Juggernaught – a plantlike guardian of the echovalt forest. Not sure if it was intended, but I think it’s pretty awesome nonetheless^^

I play casual fractals, pugged up to 40, never kicked a class for the sake of the class. If you see you do your part in the group, then that’s enough for pugging. From what I’ve seen, the biggest hindrance is players that don’t know what to do and/or keep dying. So I’d say play as you like.

That said, even though I never had problems leveling fotm 30+ on my necro, I did switch to mainly using guardian for fractals… it never hurts to have another character geared up and ready to go, so you can switch when you already have another ranger, need a thief for stealth or a guardian for support, or just feel like playing another class.

On a side note, I’m not very experienced on my ranger, but I like might from jungle stalkers and regen from fern hounds. Also when stacking, horn skill 5 and drake’s tailswipe are blast finishers to aoe heal in your healing spring’s water field and stack might if there’s any fire fields about, which is also something to consider in certain situations.

A bug I encountered was having to wait for snowflakes while the ones behind me were disappearing, 2 jumps before the candy platforms I had no snowflakes to jump on and the one I was on disappeared.
For the rest I didn’t really encounter many bugs… Maybe one more: if you don’t jump, but walk into the last present to complete the puzzle, my character walks “laggy” as if sticking to the floor. This I fix by suicide jumping and resetting to start.

Try doing the wintersday related achievement in the Daily Achievements (I think today was hitting 5 people with a snowball). Those should count towards the meta.

It may be not very social and probably won’t even be considered in Guild Wars 2, but I found the hero system in Guild Wars a lot of fun. Acquiring skills and weapons, and optionally cooler looking armor for your heroes was very rewarding. I remember building different teams for different character (my paragon, for example, used all paragon heroes and an orders necro, while my assassin used Miku as assassin hero with dual casting elementalists). I first encountered this team building in Baldur’s Gate, where you could gather different npc’s with different classes and alignments to join your party and then level them up and chose their skills.

Although I understand it’s not very social, you could limit use of heroes to the regular dungeon instances (the ones you need for Dungeon Master). You could use the personal story and your character’s “alignment” (that noble-aggressive… thing that you can have your character evolve in) be a factor in unlocking certain npc’s to join you. These can be put in your home instance and also give you certain daily quests you can help with, when player homes or home instances get an upgrade.

I dunno, I’m an avid pugger; patient and never one to curse out others, but I really enjoy gathering npc’s and setting them up to my inefficient-yet-gets-the-job-done liking.

This could contribute to vertical growth as you get more companions as you go through your personal story. As well as horizontal, as you set out on quests to gather their different armor/weapon sets and/or skills after completing the story.

Just my 2 cents.

Haven’t gotten said drop, but I’m having fun with Toypocalyps, the jump puzzle and ringing the bells. After opening a couple stacks of presents (which I didn’t pay for, but got by having fun doing the minigames) I got both backpiece recipes. And to top it off I got a nice unbreakable bell I could sell for a bit of gold.
Wintersday is still my favorite GW holiday.

The AR infusion will replace the one that is already on the ring. You’ll have to make a +6 or above to get any improvement over the +5 that’s already in place.

I have a bunch of glory boosters, because I didn’t care about cosmetics and saved the boosts for when I might do… will those boosters be replaced with something else or just be useless? Not demanding anything here, just asking.

Salvagable with same kind of table like exotic rings. Though slight higher chance of getting ecto/dark matter and higher chance of getting ori over mithril. Chance of getting vials/globs/shards of mist essence.

Able to put 4 in the forge for a random non infused ring.

I don’t see how a change like that would be unbalanced.

I like the ‘new’ boss fights… though they require more attention and pugs tend to screw up. But in my personal experience pugs have already gotten better at it. The first day I got the molten bosses and we wiped 6-7 times. Even now in a bad team that frustrates me, it takes only 3-4 times. I only got Mai Trin a couple times and we never fully wiped, although there are always people failing the cannon barrage. It just takes long if people wander about in random directions and fail to make her vulnerable. Practice makes perfect, I guess.

I’ve always pugged and patience is part of the pugging game^^

I don’t think people play fractals for the money or they would be doing something else. Dredge has so much opposition, because it’s so tedious/boring and needlessly time-consuming. People do fractals for fractal skins or just for fun, I think. And in that light a not enjoyable fractal like dredge needs a tweak, there’s not really a way around that.

If they have time to fix the pressure buttons and adjust the terrain, then I think they are also able to just unlock the doors so you don’t need the buttons anymore and reduce the respawns on the clawncar to 3 spawns or something. Even that would show their good intent.

Just my two cents… I am only fotm lvl 35 at the moment, so don’t take me too serious on the subject of fractals balancing.

Dying on the buttons made life a little easier, I am surprised Anet thought this was something that needed attention asap. and be fixed. On the other hand we can still blink through the cage or get on top to drop down into the cage… This does not compute with me; I am genuinely confused about this.

About the hordes of respawning trash mobs and the clowncar… I’m not even gonna go there.

I am a casual fractal player, only went to 30+ fotm 4 times since the release and got dredge 3 times as third fractal. Two of those times people just quit after a while, because it just takes way too long. I am already contemplating to sticking to 20+ until I get my shield and then call it quits.