Guild Wars 2

Prysin.8542:

we’ve already had our “showcasing”

next up this friday will be between ele, mesmer, guard and necro.

This Diary was posted today…. August 18, 2014

It specifically says:
“For a more specific preview of our balance changes, please tune in and watch our Ready Up live stream this Friday at 12:00 p.m. PT __ to catch the “Skill Bar,” a new segment that will discuss many upcoming balance changes in detail!”

What info are you operating on that says otherwise?
And why didn’t you link it from the beginning?

Waterfield every 40 30 seconds

That’s it. nothing else

Lol @ dealing actual damage 20% of the time…

messiah.1908:

so the basics are good ? or i need to o bit more glassy and more crit chance?

kitten no, either way it will water ITSELF down. Take the hint, Anet doesn’t want this build to exist. Accept it and move on

Bryzy.2719:

So how much are people willing to bet that when the balance patch goes live other professions are going to QQ like mad about Rangers until they force the devs to nerf or remove the buffs?

Like a jealous sibling on christmas day…. “No if I can’t have it then he can’t either!”

No.
You’re forgetting their number-1 rule for Ranger: They never give it straight up buffing. Everything they change, usually costs us whatever we had left that was workable meaning there’s only ever 1 working build to run at a time.

If Longbow stopped being kitten, 1H sword would be dulled down to Guardian Scepter DPS. If Shortbow was playable in zerg content, Greatsword would take it in the butt. If Ranger was finally able to live up to the condition shedding of its Gw1 predecessor, it would lose all disengages and uptime of Swiftness.

Every Ranger buff is paid for with a pound of flesh b/c they’re STILL not making PvE splits. The single biggest thing everyone cried for that wasn’t specific to the Pet-Mechanic, was PvE effectiveness and they obviously haven’t done that #2 most demanded thing.

That said:
“Along with these improvements, we’ll be updating quite a few weapon skills to improve their base functionality and responsiveness.”
…leaves atleast a shred of hope still for mainhand sword…

Kills???? …Not wonder it seems like they take me longer than they should!

The depth to which skill continually fails to be rewarded on this class, never ceases to amaze me. Even the most trivial of details never fails to escape the overarching black hole of its careless almost malicious design.

/facedesk

Stooperdale.3560:

This is all about PvP players wanting their weapon skill to chase down PvP enemies for them because they want to be skilful with their clicks instead of skilful with their movement. How about the PvP rangers actually master their movement, like every other class, and let everyone have a reliable #1 skill, like every other class.

I see wut u did thar,
i liek it very much

Seraph you’re outnumbered. It’s beyond obvious now. Go find another fight / fishinghole.

Fluffball.8307:

Rangers already have more condi removal options than the other professions to the point we can basically render ourselves completely immune to them

wut

Darox.8069:

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Darox.8069:

I can’t wait for a Guangmaths post

I don’t really need to maths

That’s exactly the meaning of guangmaths

I minmaxed all over the place

Though I also have to ask why the OP wanted Might stacking removed from the equation? That’s literally like saying you want a speed list of cars and trains but no Tires allowed.

Hate to say it… but this forum is specifically for comparing professions to eachother.
If anet didn’t want those comparisons they would have left it at exactly 8 clinically separated forums. Any clashes that develop are not because it’s some cardinal sin to measure Incomparables.. The OP should know better than anyone that incomparables are still a measurement of power just like Mana or Projectile Velocity is and there will always be calculations that can bridge the two. We wouldn’t even HAVE computers to be arguing this on if the mechanics of the real world didn’t allow us to seamlessly converge an archaic analog numbers system directly into perfect parity checking instant calculating digital power.

In layman’s terms: It’s not apples and oranges if all you’re doing with the juice is making the same exact mass produced sweeteners and it’s giving Fat Kids diabetes at the same rate corn syrup does

killahmayne.9518:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Swoop

Why does nobody talk about this skill, kind of hypocritical that people only single out Rush when other classes clearly have the same type but even better mobility skills on lesser cooldown.

Are you being serious here?
Have you ever even tried playing a power spec Ranger in WvW?

As soon as anyone with a real build sees you, it’s like someone rang the Dinner bell.
There’s been atleast a dozen threads about it in the Ranger forum but you probably wouldn’t know that unless you actually played the class a lot.

leman.7682:

I believe there is big amount of work required to make the necro viable in PvE similar;y to the current best professions.
Simple number adjustment isn’t going to work, because, as Swift Paw remarked, this could overpower them in other areas of the game.

Making things more intricate, like adding/changing necro’s combo capabilities (wells and their 4 dark and 1 light field, very scarce finishers) would more likely work.

I’m just afraid it may be too difficult to tune necros to fit the dungeon design without changing that design.

You obviously learned to “play around” the limitation by just being a great player. But if there’s probably 1 or 2 things that convinced everyone else (hurf durf warriors & guardians especially) that necros “suck” in PvE and dungeons especially, it was the lack of Stability & heal-based-survival. Too many people just can’t wrap their minds around a class who’s survival comes from Preemptive abilities and debuffing. Though it would also probably help if the Blindness condition itself got a PVE split to behave atleast a little more like its predecessor used to.

J Eberle.9312:

I think there needs to be the dreaded skill split across platforms. Yep I said it.

There’s nothing actually Dreaded about it.

When they finally did it in the first game, it resulted in a huge leap forward in their general Productivity and the size of each content update they were able to deliver. Right now they’re doing it THE HARD WAY and won’t even admit it. I’d even call it chivalrous if I didn’t believe the only reason they’re doing it is to keep the focus squarely on their amazingly unpopular Conquest mode that will never catch on nomatter how many updates they try and Square-Peg around it.

.

As a Ranger main in dungeons, I haven’t been autokicked but I’ve certainly had to beg, plead, and put up “proof of deed” not to be replaced by the first available Warrior/Mes who also might want in if the party is close to full. And this means settling for the mediocre to bad pubs a lot of times. So bad that by the end of them, a lowly Ranger they were tempted to kick is literally carrying half the team and soloing a champion. Got a necro too that I don’t even DARE bring into any dungeons despite it being my “Trump Card” the last time I had to kill Dwayna Priestess Simin in Path 4 Arah.

Point is, they already know how to fix it.
But it’s like the Living Story 1, they only want to do their own special snowflake thing this time instead of using what worked in the first Series. They’re sure that if it goes on long enough, we’ll learn to love it and praise their awesome new specialness (at this rate, that’s been pretty much exactly what’s happening through filtration rather than conversion with so many people leaving for longer and longer periods of time .. and honeslty, if that’s what they want then who are we to question it? It’s a free country afterall)

Harper.4173:

But people are asking for a more “realistic” warrior that is slower- because of heavy armor.
So we’re asking for more “realistic” light and medium armor users that die in 1-2 hits/shots whatever.

Nice try, but they don’t mean heavier as in more Armor, they mean heavier as in a lot more base Vitality and pretty much the most Base-damage of any class regardless of weapon. (along with might stacking plus Traits that just shed Conditions like crazy). And yes Gw1 does apply here b/c they had NO MEANS of combating Hexes yet all that control utility became the thing they’re among the best at resisting now. The devs already had to admit once (with the Mace fiasco) that giving a class that already has every possible other stat advantage in the game CC on top was just going way too far. It has nothing to do with what their armor looks like. And it doesn’t help their case that they’re the master of weapon swap which further enables this crud.

Seriously, if you honestly think that Gw1 and Gw2 don’t have some of the exact same balance mechanics then you clearly never played the first one at a competitive level.

Beldin.5498:

Just ignore Teq and forget totally that he exists ..

done and done.

Worst design revamp I can remember … and I can remember all the way back to the 80’s

Very cool.

We need some out of the box thinking like this to fix Ranger-Sword.
(b/c Anet has yet to admit it’s a mess)

Legendaries are fine.

Ascended is the actual “Best in Slot” gear and right now Silk is astronomical. I can still “farm” T6 mats atleast 2x as reliably as I can farm Cloth Armors at any level. If you’re gonna pick a piece of l33t gear to gripe about, start with the one that’s actually bending the economy towards ridiculous and raising the prices for people who just want to craft lowby gear.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Wow. I almost never use Tab-Targeting. How is it the monsters die, then? Or does ‘Tab-targeting’ not involve pressing Tab to target? I’m confused.

Btw, I mostly use Range weapons, as I main a Ranger.

That’s called Auto-Targeting. The game is literally tab-targeting for you within your FOV-cone and then that targets gets stuck as your active target until you either tab manually, or kill it. It’s also a good way to be a terrible ranger in general who gets kicked from Dungeons and WvW teams. Most good players disabled that annoying “feature” as soon as they noticed it made using the better weapons a real buggeraboo

He saw this thread and Ran away. Good Job

Astral Projections.7320:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

No pictures?

Probably still looking for the Prom dress.

If it doesn’t have Meat hanging off every skein, I’m calling this whole thing a cruel charrade

bruinen.5706:

Now, I can hear you exclaim “But what if the players who create male characters start demanding bikinis in turn?”…the answer to that I don’t know, although I have seen some outfits that come close to that

That ship sailed when they Added the Paragon class in the first game actually
One of their shouts should have been “FABULOUS!”

cheshirefox.7026:

Anyway, a cosplayer actually replicated the armor used for the opening posters main argument.. not only does it look intimidating, but it’s not skimpy enough to deter an Actual human female from wearing it {and looking absolutely awesome by the way}
<Image attachment/>

I dunno…. I’m having a harrrd time NOT finding her overtly attractive in that…

Vayne.8563:

Tab targeting is an option in Guild Wars 2, not a fact of life. Even if you don’t target something and you fire at it, you’ll hit it with most weapons. There are exceptions like mesmer clones where you have to have a target, but they are just that…exceptions.

You can kill stuff easily without targeting at all. I do it all the time.

calling bs on this. If you shoot anything, most of the time it goes straight into the Dirt because #1, we never got that First-person view mode we were always begging them for, and #2, our characters are always firing about 30 degrees lower than where our cameras are looking to hit anything at range you have to obscure your view with your own character by gimbling the camera into the dirt behind them at a weird upward angle.

nexxe.7081:

Zackie.8923:

my head is swayed towards archeage

Archeage might be good, but their combat system will be tab-targeting, like WoW and other traditional MMOs. After GW2, it’s hard for me to go back to that style of combat.

This one ISN’T tab targeting??? ….you don’t point the Reticle at the guy or more importantly where he’s heading to like UnrealEngine / Tribes / Planetside. There is no interaction at range at all without a target selected. Which is a shame because it could be a much more interesting Skill-test if it was. (and no “hitscan-attacks”, only target prediction)

Speaking of which, the OP might wanna keep an eye on “FireFall” also if he’s okay with Sci-Fi fantasy or “ghost in the shell” character style. I’m pretty mad at them right now TBH b/c they oversimplified what used to be a really deep Movement/Crafting system. But any afictionados of simpler gear systems might enjoy it. It’s a lot less convoluted now than the end-game gear grind in this game. And someone’s bound to be interested by that judging by how many complaints float around here on Gear / crafting hate.

Oh so you want it to be THAT way …. Doh ho ho ho ho
(only if they finally added that epic solo quest line & scavenger hunt for the EXACT precursor you want, otherwise forget it b/c then almost No one would get the exact Legendary they actually wanted and then no one would be happy)

swilkers.5938:

ilr.9675:

If it’s not accurate, it’s because you’re not inputting the IP address EVERY TIME YOU CHANGE ZONES. ….see every zone change now sends you to a different IP/Server even though they’re all supposed to be on one “Megaserver”. I’d explain it in more detail but you’d basically have to be a server admin to get the gist of it

Discalimer: this may not apply to every zone, because a lot of people are too lazy to bother Documenting a lot of the lower zones every single day. I try to mark all of the Softwood nodes and Rich Iron I find in lower zones for example but some days an hour is all I have so I just don’t bother.

I am well aware of the Megaserver and the IP input of the site. The site isn’t being updated with node locations which makes it inaccurate. Don’t assume and speak down to those you have no idea as to what they do or what their background is in.

There was already a disclaimer just for that. You want a personal apology too?

All Ascendeds automatically Account bind correct?
That’s probably a good enough reason not to right there…

SO MUCH +1’s to the OP. This has always bugged me and I never realized it till now.

So many times, when I went “lore exploring” through zones, I’m constantly finding myself saying “NO, —> I <-— made that happen. Not this stupid Kormir clone!!!”. It happens so often I’m starting to think that was EXACTLY the emotion they’re trying to evoke here all the time is to troll the player into yelling at their own Monitor (especially us Gw1 vets).

No little task was ever too Trivial for one of these Mary Sues to steal credit for.
As an Artist who’s had their work stolen/edited and reposted under a new name in obvious places I was obviously going to see it again, I think this is almost directly comparable.

They had so much potential back when they were first announced.

I remember everyone day-dreaming about them. ….thinking “hey, this is going to be a team/zerg focused game, so they’ll HAVE to give every class Team Utility, right??? Imagine all the useful things we could steal!” … meanwhile like 2/3’s of the arguments up to then were always “Warrior and Guardian is all anyone will want on their teams b/c best Support EVAR”. But we really thought for a little while there maybe Anet would be different and NOT make the same mistakes every other company made EVAR.

Oh, and Ranger somehow got kitten on too even though they USED to be very viable offense support in the first game when mixed with Rits & Gons.

.

Nope, instead they just gave thieves super trolly annoying Stealth-stomp and called it a day. ….sigh….

torukmakto.3412:

there’s 3 things I’ve read a lot about the Ranger on Forums:
1) when played right, Rangers is very good and dangerous
2) Ranger has little room for error unlike other profession
3) Ranger are not bad, just a lot of Bad player play Rangers

Even for really good players… the bugs make you do incredibly stupid things like hurl yourself off cliffs after a Launched enemy. My teammates used to specifically do this to me and then laugh b/c they knew my attack rotations were complicated by a lower frame rate meaning I’d be locked in the attack cycle for a whole second or more.

Most of the weapons and traits are like that come to think of it. But especially the Pet. It’s really so bad that good Ranger players aren’t actually “Playing the Game”, they’re playing this Mini-game of “work-around-the-bullCrap” while everyone else gets to play the real deal. Even though I regularly got compliments on mine … it felt pretty hollow b/c I knew I wasn’t a good “player”, I was just being a good Debugger.

Ulion.5476:

Wvw is not suppose to be balance. Uplevel vs full ascended, guard stack, 3 bl buffs. Spvp is were you go for a mostly balance fight. This does not happen in wvw.

hate to admit this guy’s right, but I mean … Anet LITERALLY has said this before.

That whole philosophy keeps me from playing WvW as often as I thought I would before Beta. But it is the way it is for a reason. Maybe if there were actually some fun modes to play in Structured, it wouldn’t seem so bad as there would be alternatives to DubVee. (hence why I go play other games when I want to tryhard-PvP)

Ya don’t “heal” other people in this game. It’s such a small unnoticeable impact.

Wethospu.6437:

Also, cloth armor should give 0 armor so I can one-shot everything.

This isn’t planet earth, it’s Tyria. Did you even read the Lore around Orr? Magic_ literally IS armor. Magic was how they moved 10x their own weight and infused monk robes against the deadliest PHYSICAL attack the Mursaat ever concocted. I also seem to recall Warrior having a shout that gave more armor than Armor gave.

I also want to point out that nomatter how much hemming and hawwing they do, the votes are clearly against them. Warriors in Gw1 had to choose between constant rush/33% or sustain. They didn’t get both plus IAS (DPS equiv here would be might) like they do in GW2. …okay they did for 1 season but, …P-rage got nerfed pretty quick by most standards.

Serraphin Storm.2369:

Do what rangers do best adapt, Then master this weapon.

More than enough of us “Mastered” the weapon already. Don’t you tell us Lrn 2 Play. Get that trash out of here. This is bad programming. Lrn 2 Program. Ya like that? Do you even know advanced Client-Server C++?? No? So let’s not go there.

rabidsmiles.5926:

Of course discussing all of this seems pretty pointless. We have to wait to see if they were actually serious about that CDI or if it was just to placate the community into shutting up for a while /sigh

In GuildWars, our “CDI” or whatever you wanted to call it took place on the Wiki and to a lesser degree in Guru. It was ATLEAST 6 months to 8 months before any of them went live and they really weren’t all new mechanics. But I do however remember and could probably even find the exact conversation where we complained about Pets in Hardmore on there and Linsey did something about them finally. Well I shouldn’t say “we”, I think Auron was the tipping point on that whole deal

It took Eles like a year and a half to get buffed for Hardmore, lol

snow.8097:

dat wall of text…here is mine

It’s really not though… this forum just squeezes everything the hell together in a tiny little column.

….I’d first like to see that one idea requoted from the CDI, what the Dev was offering instead of just disabling the pet. I can’t remember for sure but it was either something about making it work like a “Form” or a Spirit or something.

Currently I don’t have the patience to wait on them so I got around the mess sort of by always having Guard on my bar (mainly b/c I’m GM’d for NatureMagic) instead of running Sig of Hunt like every other unimaginative ranger I see in PvE does. It probably doesn’t sound like much, but in Dungeons it makes a huge difference just being able to tell the darn thing to go take a time out in the corner while you do stuff like Airblast the rockets back in C.M. or stack with everyone else in all the right places.

.

Ultimately though, I know what’s going to happen. Anet’s gonna cave to the Legolas wannabes and just make the pet a straight up trade-off for ranged damage with some other weird mechanic and then we’ll be right back to DAOC 1.0 in WvW where everyone hated Archers with a passion. The n00bs will blot out the sun even though it still won’t stack might & put out the same DPS as Sword/Greatsword. Glad I’m done doing Dungeons so I won’t have to see them in there again when that day comes.

Obtena.7952:

I’m not vague and I don’t need to define the content I’m talking about
<snip>
The argument Siralus made isn’t about customer satisfaction

just contradicted your own flimsy apologetics again…. “Customer” satisfaction is trending down and has been ever since conerns were raised that too much of the content is focused on GemShop marketing. You don’t get to argue against that and then in the same breath say it’s all about economics. Sorry. NcSoft itself disagrees with you

Maybe you need to be clearer as well on who you consider to be customers? …those of us who only bought the Box are no longer Customers to you??

Do Devs even have Sticky’ing power?

\….that sounds kinda offcolor, plus there’s already a couple stickies

Enus.2781:

I knew I would get some irrelevant posts, the forums are good at that.

Excuse me for playing the game for only playing for 7 months and thief being the only character I have, how dare I try to expand my horizons?

It’s not irrelevant if I guessed with uncanny accuracy what your primary situation was

That said… being a thief, if you can’t make Ranger shortbow work for ya then you’re a very strange thief indeed…. Just make sure your offhands are some kind of Melee combo for additional Closers, Evades, or outright disengages b/c once 2 opponents realize at the same time that there’s a Power ranger close by, the blood will already in the water and your only hope is running or hiding behind an overprotective guardian.

(I would only know this btw from having played way too much WvW on said Power Ranger … just didn’t want to admit it b/c it’s such a self-defeating proposition and it’s never a good idea to tell people you are a masochist … Dubois is 98.8% accurate in calling it Hard Mode)

Soilder.3607:

Yes, it is deliberate and anet has stated so before.

You have to realize that the swords ability to stay on target is insane. And in my opinion it outweighs its minor effect on evading.

#1, I don’t believe you. Sauce, nao
#2, insane WHERE??? … Structured PvP only? most of the people who rolled rangers, never wanted to PvP in the first place. Why do they have to suffer for an advantage that only exists in one tiny little niche mode of the game?

so you could basically have 4 pets with this then for atleast 5 minutes…. 2 from this, 1 from the Ogre Whistles (outside the fire shaman event) and 1 from the Elemental Dust? (fireheart rise)… or can only 1 extra pet be active at a time?

I didn’t put any real effort into farming Raptors (never did that in GW1 either, too gimmicky & unchallenging … and the little ones are just too cute IMO, I’d rather go all out postalgenocide on Quaggans than these harmless little guys). …but I did notice that even in a single sweep through once in and back again while doing some Logging, that the poultry drops were actually quite consistent or atleast TWICE what I tend to see when full out farming most Cloth-giving drops.

If there’s actually a problem here, I’d say that it’s because the Demand is artificially high and Anet needs to do something about Condition spam in WvW (one look at Melandru’s Superior Rune confirms this) or making actual poultry farms a Capturable resource in the Borderlands….

Astralporing.1957:

And yes, pre-release statements of the developers strongly suggested that grinding for best stat gear will not be a problem i will run into GW2.

To add to this, it wasn’t merely implied but actually Stated in digests & comments on Guru that have since been removed from both Sources having changed “Formats”.
…(such press releases are now kept only to “https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/” …. and most of them are now very reluctant to ever promise anything b/c Anet got burned so bad by their own Manifesto promotion of the game … meanwhile stuff on Guru was purged when Curse acquired it or just impossible to find/read due to the weird storage optimization there)

I don’t wanna say Bait and Switch … but I don’t have to because literally a million other players already have at this point I even understand why it turned out this way, because during the ramp up to Beta there was basically only GW1 fans as the “early adopters” who they were relying on to help promote the game and allowing for any doubts about it being just another Korean Grindmill would have been too demoralizing to the community at the time. They had to go into specifics about it around the time they started mentioning that gear itself would have more of an impact on your actual Skill effects than the Gw1 “Attribute system” previously had.

hahahaha …. not the most constructive thread, but enjoyable none the less

If it’s not accurate, it’s because you’re not inputting the IP address EVERY TIME YOU CHANGE ZONES. ….see every zone change now sends you to a different IP/Server even though they’re all supposed to be on one “Megaserver”. I’d explain it in more detail but you’d basically have to be a server admin to get the gist of it

Discalimer: this may not apply to every zone, because a lot of people are too lazy to bother Documenting a lot of the lower zones every single day. I try to mark all of the Softwood nodes and Rich Iron I find in lower zones for example but some days an hour is all I have so I just don’t bother.

Obtena.7952:

I can assure you … your implication that Anet isn’t funding GW2 development with gemstore sales is obtuse to more than just myself. If you aren’t aware of all the content that has been released on a very consistent and frequent basis over the last 2 years, then I think obtuse really was the correct description. How can you even be qualified to ask such a question when the continued development of the game is actually one of it’s strong selling points?

Their Sales numbers trended downward in Nc’s own quarterly reports and keep going that direction. That’s how we know they’re not meeting those “selling points”. The most often cited reason from player feedback is lack of meaningful content. You failed to define which content you were talking about. Siralius’ defined it much more thoroughly without using such intentional vagueness. Qualifications indeed….

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You brought up a business related question, I gave you a business answer.

No you’re just arguing because you’re bored and in doing so are looking for arguments with people who weren’t even talking to you originally. You put words in my mouth and wouldn’t apologize for doing so because you are so much more interested in “tactics” and little else. Well sample some of your own medicine Sir, minus the interested part. The history and patterns Anet have followed on this issue are no longer up for debate.
H.A.N.D.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

ilr.9675:

For most of GW1’s life, the only way to get the best looking Skins was to farm the same dungeons or unlock them in PvP. Then sometime after EotN was released, all of the Outfits that didn’t ship with the Chapters/Expansion and were instead themed “Festival outfits”, (but COULD be worn in combat too), started coming only from the Cash Shop.

That was the turning point I think… and anyone who spent a few minutes in L.A. or Spamadan noticed pretty quickly just how many “social butterflies” would keep on buying those Aesthetics.

I’m not sure I like EITHER SYSTEM. Granted I did get my favorite looking bow of all time (Silverwing/Kinslayer) from one of those dungeons. But I do stand with the OP in questioning why there doesn’t seem to be any variety at all here in the source of new Aesthetics? Furthermore, why is there no Player-Studio or “Design an Armor-Set” contest? …there should be one of those every year. Anet was famous for its “Design a X” contests.

The reason behind the skin issue is a business one. By offering unique skins that can only be purchased with Gems, you give incentive to players to spend real money. It makes no sense, business-wise, to “not” offer exclusive content in their microtransaction store. If you could get all the best stuff from in-game content, then there’s no reason to spend additional money in the Gem Store.

That doesn’t address the point one bit. You only constructed a Strawman instead. No where did I say there shouldn’t be any Shop-Exclusives. What I pointed out is that after a certain point even in the first game, they became the ONLY new aesthetics being added. Therefore every single new set (or 95% of them currently in Gw2’s case) are only available in the Shop. If you wish to discuss Gold-2-Gem conversion however, please choose another thread. Not going to be having that discussion with you here.

Shadowbane.7109:

Sad Swordfish.9743:

It’s the most majestic and beautiful weapon ever created

:/

+1

For most of GW1’s life, the only way to get the best looking Skins was to farm the same dungeons or unlock them in PvP. Then sometime after EotN was released, all of the Outfits that didn’t ship with the Chapters/Expansion and were instead themed “Festival outfits”, (but COULD be worn in combat too), started coming only from the Cash Shop.

That was the turning point I think… and anyone who spent a few minutes in L.A. or Spamadan noticed pretty quickly just how many “social butterflies” would keep on buying those Aesthetics.

I’m not sure I like EITHER SYSTEM. Granted I did get my favorite looking bow of all time (Silverwing/Kinslayer) from one of those dungeons. But I do stand with the OP in questioning why there doesn’t seem to be any variety at all here in the source of new Aesthetics? Furthermore, why is there no Player-Studio or “Design an Armor-Set” contest? …there should be one of those every year. Anet was famous for its “Design a X” contests.

I’m confused, what the OP originally described sounded more like “Warehousing” than instant-trading & Speculating. Can someone clarify?