Guild Wars 2

I play Support Guardian and it involves a lot more than that but since a lot of it is all shouts and channeling along with Traits (such as passive buffs being extended to all allies in range) … it has the distinct appearance of not being as active unless it’s brown-pants time and you had to pop the elite Tome of Healspam. And since that’s the only time you can wet-nurse hurt players back to full health, the rest of the time you have to rely on much more subtle things like Protection & Regen.

It’s not our job to be in the Front line either.. we sacrifice way too much potential Vitality to get our +Heal Stats …. which often have the sometimes unwanted side effect of being attached to gear with a high +Toughness rating that makes us more prone to taking Aggro off the Shield guardian if we get too close to certain mobs.

I can’t possibly take all of the mystery out of it. All I can really boil it down to, is if your front line and midline are actively avoiding damage but you’re still not regaining health or getting speed buffs & stability when you need it…. THEN you can assume that your Support guardian is actually just an inferior Berserker geared Ele in disguise.

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Fortunately, this game allows players to ping their Gear so you can just ask them to prove that they’re Spec’d for it.

Not sure if this helps… but I’ve noticed I’ll get Charged Cores almost everytime I do a COE explorable. They can be forged into lodestones for 24s. ….speaking of which, I think allowing Elonian Wines to drop from champions would really help take some of the disparity out the pricing & supply of all Lodestones. I hope they consider that when they change the Drop-tables this november.

• 1 week later & They’re still over 2 silver ea (1 node = 5 usually = 10s)

I hit a Lot of nodes on the East shores of sorrow’s… (what they dub the “Steamspur Mtns” but is actually the old disputed Asuran/Orrian coast from GW1 and part of the Droknar’s area. What I found is still very disheartening. Roughly 35 Tarragon & 20 Peppercorn, after checking every single Node from LA’s Door to Sparkfly Swamps and beyond (not 1 single Vanilla in Sparkfly by the way…) and only 5 nodes out of the 40+ that I checked gave Vanilla and only in Mt Maelstrom. Which in itself was an outlier also because I narrowed those 5 nodes down to a possible group of 8 nodes that only ever spawn in 2.5 tiny little sections north of Mt Maelstrom and the actual drop rate for those 8 possible nodes is still far less than 62.5%

I prepared this image to show where these nodes are:
http://home.comcast.net/~ill_er/GW/SW_van-nodes.jpg

If someone has found any in Sparkfly that can provide Vanilla, please post or PM their location. I’d really appreciate it. While it was nice to have so much Tarragon on hand to make Bread for my guild’s 60’s who wanted to do CM (the only practical use for it) … we’ve moved past that and there’s just nothing else to make with it

I’m beginning to think the only thing that will fix this issue, is either a LOT MORE herb nodes being added, or if they added a Forge recipe that let us combine 25 leeks, 25 green onions, 25 peppercorns, & 100 mushrooms into 75-125 (random scope) Vanilla.

/m WTB tinfoil hat and chair that spins, 5g or B/O!

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(side note: TY TY TY for finally addressing this mystery!)

Haha, that’s terrific. …a little dark though, could use some Photoshop gamma love…

Is there any concept art of these guys? We’ve always wanted One for the Wiki Articles b/c they are very important figures in the Lore (we don’t even have a decent Screenshot yet!)

Suggestion specifically for the Dungeon world-builders (which I’ve used in Valve maps & Starcraft maps for doors that are prone to this behavior): Put in an override switch near all these doors which tells the Server to re-check all of the boolean handlers responsible for opening the door. …or just one that resets all of the Variables to their original state and then reprocesses them (but put a cooldown time on these switches so there’s no chance a party can Spam it to try and break something or exploit the system).

Oh right the Grubs… I forgot about that RNG element too. When you’re just standing there wailing on him in the cluster it’s not an Issue. But right when he hits 80% hp or whatever it becomes an issue as he forces your group to scatter…. & then more grubs seem to spawn and also scatter randomly and he in turn will randomly Teleport to a random party member or elsewhere and if there’s a couple grubs left there (b/c it’s impossible to teamspike them all in that chaos)… he’ll snag those up and get free Empowerment instantly.

I prepared specifically for it last time I fought him and it still wasn’t a fluid transition but I was able finish those grubs which made tank-kiting him for 10 minutes straight possible (yes I had his undivided Aggro for that long, it was exhausting). IMO: We just lucked out that time in keeping those 9hour (isn’t that a bit long & unnecessary?) Empowerment stacks off him.

Here’s a good thread created just the other day that could help you:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/LFG-Consistent-Dungeon-Runs-HoTw-Arah/first#post581365

The people running that, which I’ve teamed with, haven’t failed it yet (well we got door-bugged, but they did beat it the hardest parts)

The only thing that confuses me, are these people who are not good at “Running” (in my case, I wrote the GUIDE on doing the Droknar’s Forge run along with several others, so I get to claim expert’s credibility on the topic) yet insist on running past Mobs when they don’t even change their Utils & Weapons skills for the Running. …Then they usually get Crippled or KD’d when we could have just killed those mobs in half the time it took them to repeatedly WP & die again next time they had to respawn.

Yes, in my group’s case, it was impossible to keep her alive b/c there’s no safe place for her to be standing where the Fire ring won’t reach her before she’s so close to him that the white “Homing Fireballs” won’t either.

Yesterday while sitting in Lion’s Arch watching chat I saw:

“LFM, MK (mad king runs), Level 80’s only!”

…just shook my head. Is this really what Anet intended with the way they have damage scaling set up? People aren’t dumb, they can see with their own eyes that a level 80 with an Exotic weapon does like 2-3x the DPS of a level 10. It’s even more obvious in WvW. It really doesn’t fit their big “There is no End-Game to rush towards!” Mantra

Happened to me too… I checked the forums a day beforehand and only saw people having issues on Path4 so we assumed we could still try this path. NOPE.

Can Anet Track everyone who made it this far, and reimburse us for this if we have proof we beat it? ….I seem to recall being reimbursed Tokens during that Diminishing Returns bug a few weeks ago even though I didn’t /bug report most of them. I DID /bug this in-game though so hopefully they’ll catch it there? (if this hadn’t taken 4 hours just to get to this gate, I wouldn’t even be posting here…. but it did and that’s a huge time investment by anyone’s standards).

My party did do it…I don’t know why anyone here is assuming that I failed it or they failed it just b/c I pointed out a bunch of bugs or irregularities in ANet’s own design philosophies with the Encounter. No, I didn’t carry them… rather I learned a Lot in a very short amount of time which I think was even better than simply waltzing through the encounter on “skill” alone. As I said, it’s not actually the “hardest” dungeon encounter nor do I see it as needing the most skill or teamwork. I simply see it as contradicting Anet’s long held design principles.

The one at the end of the Howling King is what really gets my Hackles up… b/c there isn’t even an Easter egg … it just seems to come to an abrupt and unfinished end. The farthest you can get apparently (without the Teleport Gun trick) is up on the rock ledge in the back end up it. There’s a hole in the Rockface there but since the slope of the ledge angles up too abruptly, you can’t even get near that opening. And I’m pretty sure the only thing behind it is a long drop down into an unfinished pool of water with no exit route.

@ Buff & Zef… I followed you both in contacts tab and intend to join you both for a few runs. Mainly because you are both stating in very unforgiving and undiplomatic terms that my skill level is too far below yours to appreciate the mechanics of this fight. I could try to include examples from other games that require even more skill. But I think direct interaction is the simplest way to settle this, don’t you? Keep in mind I’ve done this only once and tried to keep an open mind about it, AND I was usually the last or second to last member to die among my more experienced party… (so don’t worry about me jinxing your chances).

No I was definitely not in the Path of the Projectiles nor was there any Red Circles back behind me that would indicate projectiles were coming in “above me”. The red circles were a good 20ft to my Left while I was running to the Right. I was zoomed way out infact and watched them veer mid-course right at….and then hit me. Several others also did this, and ALMOST hit me. I’m still not entirely sure why those ones missed when they were making a b-line for me but I think that’s part of the problem here. People think they’re seeing one thing, when a few other things that don’t have a rational explanation are happening instead

Some observations that contradict what a few people are saying here about it being a “good fight”:

• It’s not actually difficult, it’s Very…. Random. and a bit Buggy…*
  —-> 25% of the time, those snot bolts hit way, way way outside the red circles. And if 2 hit you at the same time, enjoy your 2 minute walk back from the WP….
  —-? Every now and then 1 will home in like a missile and hit you nomatter what you’re doing.
  —-> Watching the Boss and looking for Cues doesn’t help either since everytime he was facing me with a big animation, he’d switch targets at the last millisecond and nail someone else in my Party.
  —->Again, some of the green projectiles, whatever we want to call them, some of them leave no time to react and his massive HP pool guarantees that you’re going to roll Snake-eyes several times during the fight and be downed by them through no fault of your own.

— The super happy fun time Puke Bubbles that trap players, don’t seem like they have any kind of Cool-Down timer and he stacked 2 on me in rapid succession when my “Stand your Ground” was down.

• I even tried to tank it with Renewing Focus but that didn’t even come close to saving my butt
• This also is a mechanic that discourages most classes that don’t have Blinks or their own Stability boons. And he just plain moves too fast so He’s GOING to get in range to drop this instantly on whoever he has aggro on even if they’re kiting with Swiftness.

— Can’t melee him even if you’re a Bawz @ melee dancin… which is a great way to make a really long & random fight, not-FUN for lots of people who like variety in their RPG’ing.

—The entire encounter really contradicts the entire point of forming a Team and trying to use teamwork. If you get anywhere near another player during 80% of the fight, you endanger them as well, and you endanger yourself if they’re downed. If a player is downed far enough away from Lupi, often the best thing you can do for them is not to go near them.

• I really can’t stress this point enough … it’s not a teamwork fight. It’s an everyone for themselves casino where your best chances are to stay far away from him and anyone else on your team. Even Subject Alpha’s mechanics are a lot less random than this and a bit more forgiving which is just silly…
• B/c of this, for an above average PUG who can do every other Dungeon without issue, this fight can take 10 minutes, or a whole hour, depending on RNG basically. Perhaps that’s why some people think it’s so unique?? It has that element of gambling compulsion?

• sidenote:
  ++ I did have some luck reflecting or stopping some of the snot rockets with a wall summon but you still have to assume they’re coming in at like a 45 degree angle not to be clobbered by them

I’m still available for these. Would prefer a leader who has strong communication skills. I’m very patient, & very experienced in the midline Support role with tons of Gw1 Hardmode runs completed over the years. Quick reflexes & precise aim also. I main Guardian /w Heal & spirit specs.

My evening playing hours are generally 6 PST – 12 PST but I can be on anytime for prescheduled teams

vespers.1759:

…because you effectively bypassed all the hard enemies is a little rich.

Key issue right here. Let’s not Fixate too much on CM, but I do it all the time without dying and it comes down to simply running past certain broken encounters where even the non-Elite mobs for some reason can 1-shot a Toughness-Stacked Protect-Booned Guardian who had no issues at all tanking real Bosses.

Gimmicks aren’t the solution to this. The A.I. & scripting potential in dungeons simply isn’t being lived up to. Mobs are given artificially overpowered running speed, attack damage, and immunity to certain CC effects but they’re also dumb as rocks with the same level of awareness which allows content bypassers to trivialize overly difficult content that stops a lot of puggers dead in their tracks. A better middle ground is possible but it won’t happen if everyone spends all their time arguing in “Lrn 2 Play” instead of trying to be more creative.

So please. Stop polluting threads like these with justifications built on exploits and Class choice. It didn’t help in Gw1, and it won’t help here. All it does is slow the entire process down.

I agree strongly, the GhostEater & Subject Alpha especially could learn a lot from this encounter (and have Alpha’s overall hitpoint pool reduced significantly as a biproduct).

Granted, jump puzzles greatly annoy players with Male-Norn & Charr characters but there were lots of other elements here that could be accentuated to make the above boss fights more dramatic, more thematic, and most of all, more cooperative.

Has anyone else noticed similar bizarre occurrences in CM exp lately?

I understand that the Devs are all extremely busy with other things the next couple days so I’ll use this for a Research thread in the mean time … (and try to get Video of it if it happens again).

The Issue:
At a few chokepoints in CM exp, are these very large groups that are only partially Elites. Most of the other mobs are standard/Minion tier so they’re supposed to just “melt” in most AoE stacks from 5 players and they usually do. At 2/3’s of the way through both Path1 & Path3 (after we countersniped the snipers on the Scaffolding) I noticed the minion tier trash mobs in the huge group under that scaffolding appeared to be 1-hitting me through both Protection & Aegis. (some may also have walked right through my Wards too).

And I’m the group’s “Tank”, I have no issues taking up to 3 direct hits from Subject Alpha and other Legenedaries and 5 direct hits from Seamus (thank goodness for saffron bread!). The only 2 things in any Dungeon that should be 1-hitting me is the Champion Icebrood Wolf (with its instant charge attack that you basically have to be psychic to avoid), and a Champion Scavenger’s lunge which you have enough time to go make coffee, read the paper, and hit the can before it goes off.

After somehow getting a crazy pull against this group that allowed us to kill even the Elite Thug, there was 1 Catpurse “minion” left all by her lonesome back at the Scaffolding which gave me a chance to test my theory…. and sure enough, she; a lowly Non-Elite trash mob…. 1 shotted me with an attack that had No charge-up.

And lastly, I’d like to add… that if the Elite “Thug” is granting all these other trash mobs Stability so they can just walk right through Solid wards and ignore CC… then that needs to be fixed pronto. I’ll agree with other people who thought this route was too easy just a week ago, I agreed too. But there’s other ways to make it challenging. This current “meta” doesn’t leave any room for reaction time & real skill, it’s like you just grit your teeth and hope they die before you do? …if I enjoyed the RNG controlling everything I’d be playing a different MMO with stat-based random blocking chance instead.

Thank You.

I have a REALLY good hunch that some of the Mobs in CM have bugged attacks right now.

PS: don’t tell any of my Guildmates this… we run Butler every single day, often without any Wipes… and I’m their “Tank” for it (even though I have a stupid Monk-wanna-be Healer-spec instead and half my gear is still Yellow). They actually think they’re still doing the EASIEST explorable right now, Heh.

I prefer tougher Dungeons too, infact I used to do DOA runs just because they were the only thing that really made my monk “Work for it” even tho I had ZERO interest in the Rewards. …I’ve been doing that in this game now in every COE path even tho none of the Reward gear pieces have Stats that fit any of my Builds.

But No, I haven’t seen a single Arah EXP form in all the time I’ve been playing with very capable Guildies, Nor have I seen a single PuG group even appear to be forming in LA for it…. and I’m on CD which is super crowded and always very Busy in the Evenings (and there’s really not many COF’s forming on here either, our whole playerbase is a bit above average and does more TAs/HWs/SEs/COEs than CoFs).

Vanilla and Vanilla flavoring substitutes both come from trees in the form of either a Bark resin, or Vines growing up the saplings. A few people reported getting beans off certain trees in some extremely rare cases: means they’ve been added. But again, the disparity between drops rates is so astronomical still that we should ask Anet to investigate if the drop rates are bugged. And if they’re not bugged, we need them to reveal what the exact drop rate is… If it’s below 7.5% then we have a serious problem here.

Can I still reply to this? Logged in for only this one thread so I hope I can…

Out of curiosity, how many feel that a 100% free market would be a good idea?

I worry that this is a very dangerous question that is only going to attract conditioned responses based on an intentionally obfuscated reality. And not one that Anet created, heavens no. In some ways the GW2 economy is more transparent than our real economy. But I see no way for most people to answer this question while fully understanding all the repercussions of what it implies.

Look, pure unadulterated Capitalism is GOOD. But that’s not the reality we’re in. What we’re dealing with both in Reality and Games, are very heavily manipulated Economies because our real economy IS a video game (where “botting” is also running rampant) as well and that exacerbates the problem because no one has a clean uncorrupted model to base their idealisms off of.

Let me keep this short and brutal…
The Reality is Gems are like the Fed Interest rate, they NEED to go up in value. When we engage in selective protectionism there, we only end up hurting average people who’s only crime was building their savings responsibly; therefore, irresponsibility is being rewarded. Governing bodies, be they Designers or Regulators, need to stop crutching on this type of variable to attempt to control inflation because it’s just not effective. Inflation can only go up until it crashes back down again after reality has sunk in. Let it do its own thing for now until a better response to inflation that (directly tackles disparity) is made possible. Worry about the Manipulators instead and don’t try to fight them with fire. Peel back the obfuscation & give honest players more water buckets so they can do the fighting. (improve transparency!)

Thank You.

3.2 Silver and still rising…

I Farm coriander regularly. I can easily get 50 of them in a 6 hour shift when the nodes spawn properly. Vanilla, however, I could not get more than 15 of them in that same time frame. Arenanet needs to investigate this issue closer as it’s starting to affect my Guildmates from City of Heroes who are the most casual players I know. Something is indeed buggy or just not right here.

I’m curious if there’s been any thought given to implementing some Streak-breaker code to prevent these sorts of rampant bad-rolls—→that resemble D.R. so much….

I’ve experienced them as well when I attempted to salvage a bunch of Rares all in 1 sitting. And normal players don’t care about the science behind R.N.G’s and how they can resemble the most Malicious systems possible. All they they walk away with is the Perception of that Malice as being intended. And if a couple checks and balances could fix that perception… wouldn’t that be better for sustaining the long term population of the game VS. the risk of a bunch of rage-quits? ….the Hottest topic going on right now about crafting, is the R.N.G. factor for legendaries and overwhelming running commentary I’ve seen is that people just don’t trust RNG’s. Nor should they, since the science of RNG’s themselves dictates that massive amounts of disparity can result from sample sizes smaller than the 1000’s. So, Is that really fair to people who will never have 1000’s of stacks of anything? I don’t think I’m the only one, I seem to recall Mr. Smith also saying something about minimizing disparity where possible….

…Just curious if anyone here has beaten that Subject Alpha boss in the Teleporter route explorable of COE, without exploiting constant Stability buff + split-second immunity** dodging? My team really tried to beat him with several BalanceWay tactics and ordinary corpse-rolling from the WP that’s 2 minutes away but it just seemed impossible so I made everyone run stability instead so we couldn’t be crystalled (I didn’t even die once… but it felt so gimmicky).

• * – (the AoE’s he summons every 3 seconds basically cover the entire quadrant you’re standing in so it’s a lot easier to just time your dodge to “evade” the AoE instead of actually trying to get OUTSIDE of the red circles in time).

Hello. I haven’t been able to even access the forums since launch so plz forgive me for not posting sooner on this bug issue.

I seem to be one of those individuals being unfairly hit with DR on dungeons as if my “personal Timer” on them never fully resets because I have yet to get the full 60 tokens from the dungeons I’ve done since this patch. My party was definitely not “speed clearing” them either b/c other members of the party got the full 60.

Even worse… due to this Patch I think; when we killed the Howling King yesterday, the Dungeon didn’t even complete. No silver, no Tokens… just the red Quest Text reading “Find the Patriarch”. We did everything in perfect order so this is definitely an example of something getting broken when trying to fix something else.

I’ll be patient with the first issue because I’m not even doing these dungeons for the tokens. But the second issue is really a lot uglier in my opinion… please don’t risk destabilizing the game again just to deal with Speed-Clear Farmers, Anet.

I couldn’t log in at all… Even though I was logged in fine during all Beta Events (infact that might be the main reason why I couldnt) … I had been waiting a whole week to get help with a 502 gateway problem that eventually resolve to the error code: “Error 42: Module 9000, line 3927, Err Timeout.” … I don’t think THEY know the exact reason either but a tech finally sent me 3 things other people tried that sorta worked for them and one of them was focused on Cookies.

When I saw that, (atleast with FireFox which had this issue one time before on another site), I knew all I had to do was run the Profile Manage (“Firefox.EXE” -P) and start a new session under a new profile to get in.

The reason for this is probably to do with some SQL cookie scripts that CAN’T be cleared out (b/c I and other users have TRIED) meanwhile they (Anet’s webcoders) don’t have a “Handler” in their scripts to negotiate the older cookies & user data FOR US so it just gets stuck in a loop or something. And I don’t think DNS flushing would matter either, it’s definitely a scipting/Userdata issue.