Guild Wars 2

nekretaal.6485:

Get shadow Abyss instead.

It’s not an option, that’s why I picked a bunch of enameled, electro, and blacklight.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Do be aware, any Living World/Story releases won’t be accessible (and free) if you do not own Heart of Thorns.

If they are offered later (use the same release model as S2), you will have to pay for each episode. Thus, any savings in the cost of HoT may be wasted by the cost of LS.

Good luck.

You just have to log in while the events are going on for them to be unlocked. You just won’t have access to the areas they are taking place in until/unless you purchase HoT, but if you log in during that period you shouldn’t have to buy them separately. A free account could theoretically have all of S3 unlocked while being completely unable to play it due to having no access to the maps it takes place in.

Just as a reminder, buying it now, before release, gets you the veteran appreciation free character slot. If you choose to buy it after release at any time you won’t get that. That’s a $10 value unless you just have no interest in another slot.

Draknar.5748:

The people who have been playing since early release and still haven’t made one is not because they’ve been trying to get one, they’ve been playing normally and still don’t have everything they need, which is their own fault. They are the ones that don’t like to farm, or chose to try and do Mystic Forge for their precursor, or simply wait for a drop, rather than be proactive about it.

I would agree with this, I prefer leveling alts and screwing around doing map completion and story completion on all of them, so my gold reserves stay pretty low. If I got serious about making legendary I could, I’ve just preferred to leave it to chance so far since frankly they mostly look like terrible, oversized joke weapons and the stat swapping is about the only thing I find at all interesting about them.

Wanze.8410:

Again, the benefit of the option is the same, its the odds of the lottery that are different.

And I cant think of any occasion in game where magic find increases your chance to get refined items.

Yes, but the VALUE of that same benefit is worlds apart. On the second point, I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that magic find only benefits drops looted off of monsters. Since the chance of getting a refined is already fairly high, magic find would benefit it the most, making you more likely to get a blue instead of a white item. I freely admit I could be mistaken about how this works though.

Wanze.8410:

Ok, lets take values out of the equation then, also the value to pay for the option.

If the options increase the odds for winning both lotteries ten fold, i would say they are equally beneficial.

You are ignoring the actual chance, as the chance gets smaller, the value of improving it decreases.

In the one case, you increasing your chance 10 fold give you a 100% chance of winning. In the other, your almost no chance of winning just becomes a slightly better almost no chance of winning. Magic find is very valuable for making sure you get at least refined items, valuable for getting more masterworks, slightly valuable for getting more rares, and almost with out value when it comes to exotics and higher.

It’s pretty simple, a 192% increase in an extremely low chance of getting something is still an extremely low chance. So magic find helps your overall profits in the long run, but mainly by increasing your profits from trash drops. The increase is the same for higher rarity items, but when the starting chance is so small the actual change is unlikely to be felt by the player unless you average it out over many thousands of hours of gameplay.

As I said, it all depends on your willingness to grind for it. I’d agree with dom, 3 or 4 months is pretty doable with what for me would be a mind numbing grinding schedule. You won’t really be working towards other stuff, maybe some dungeon achievements if you decide to farm gold that way? Leveling I guess, if you start running dungeons with lower level characters, all that’s also going to cut down on the efficiency of your farm and prolong the time it takes to hit your goal.

Barring lucky drops that is. Don’t get me wrong, after three years, I could crank out a legendary very easily if I got a precursor drop today, probably several of them even, but if I decided I wanted to WORK for it rather than leaving it to chance, it would still require me to farm enough gold to buy the precursor. Say Leaf of Kudzu to make your Kudzu, that’s around 850 gold, at 5-10 gold per hour in the grindy high reward farming areas(dungeons, silverwastes, etc.). That’s going to take some time and effort even for someone like me who has most of the other crafting materials. No matter how you shake it, grind.

Here’s a pretty good, recent gold farming guide:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Mystic-s-Gold-Profiting-Guide/first#post5492328

Good luck!

Sanus.3502:

I see options for PvP/WvW players to get their daily in. I don’t think anyone should be forced outside of a preferred style of play to get the rewards of the day. One of the joys of the “sand-box” style of game is you can find the level of game that suits you …and be rewarded for your effort.

Yet, the activities in the PvP and WvW dailies are not always the preferred activities of people who play those modes either. They routinely have to play a few rounds using a class they don’t particularly like, or get involved in capturing points or killing NPCs instead of roaming, or vice versa. You’re just playing down the fact that dailies in any of the modes often require players to do things they wouldn’t normally do, or necessarily find enjoyable, because you don’t want to play fractals. Well, people have told you the other options, including the very simple one of not completing a daily for that day. There has been a movement asking Anet to change the fractal daily to fractal or dungeon, to open up options for people, and that’s an improvement many of us support. But just removing them because you can’t be bothered to do them or one of the many alternatives is probably not going to happen.

fxaa is blurrier but almost “free” performance wise.
smaa is slower but better quality
they’re both post processing AA methods that are designed to give many of the benefits of traditional multisampling AA without the massive performance hit.

Generally, SMAA is the way to go in my opinion, but it’s really a matter of taste.

Sanus.3502:

but if you are trying to get a daily completion… a double fractal can be crippling.

Not really, you do the one PvE one you can, then jump in EotM or sPvP and knock out the other two in a few minutes.

You just don’t want to step out of your comfort zone long enough to realize just how easy those other daily options are.

It’s an easter egg, and a legend of zelda reference. So, yes, kind of a joke.

One of the guys in my motorcycle riding club is a Brittish expat. I’ve never seen anyone throw the big C word around so casually. That’s one that you only pull out in America if you are hunting for bears with tactical nukes, but apparently it’s not considered NEARLY as offensive over there.

I feel your pain OP, Publisher’s Clearing House and the State Lottery have similarly flagged me for “punishment”, and it’s just not right.

Legendary items are a very long term goal in GW2, many of us who have played since launch have none, and have never seen one of the precursor weapons required to make one drop. They’re the absolute pinnacle of progression in the game, so they’re very difficult to get. 2000 gold is going to take you a LONG time, even if you do nothing but farm Silverwastes, the current loot cave of choice for hours a day. If heavy grinding isn’t really your thing, you may as well write the idea off, barring the happy accident of winning the lottery and looting a precursor.

Also, I believe Lyssa is the patron god of Actors in the Guild Wars setting. So many of the greatest mesmers were entertainers, and very fashion oriented.

Battledoll.1803:

The font (modern San Serif) break my immersion in this supposed medieval world of Tyria.

Man, +1 for you. I’d never really thought about it, but I’d love a font option in game. I’ve got some great fonts I use in my e-book reader, based entirely on early industrial type sets that would be absolutely awesome for the early industrial semi steam punk setting of GW2.

Mostly wings, I didn’t mind the older ones, but the newer black and white ones just are so jarring and huge they jerk me right out of any immersion in the game world. If they gave us a toggle to disable seeing back items, as much as I love some of them, I would turn it on just to never see those ridiculous things again. That, and the stupid unicorn bow. I guess it is supposed to be a joke, but it’s a bad one.

Legacy heavy armor pants are kind of nice, still but flap, but smaller than most.

I’m trying to get hyped up, and I can see how it could be fun, but man that unranked queue is just demoralizing, I don’t think I do too bad for someone just starting out, I can usually stay in the top half of MY team, but I have had maybe two matches total where the enemy team didn’t so clearly outmatch us that it even qualified as a competition. Anyway, thanks for all the comments, I’ll keep plugging away and hopefully my MMR will stabilize and I’ll stop getting fed to the sharks, someday.

All I know is that as someone just trying to get in to PvP, I don’t shudder with revulsion when it chooses courtyard the way I do when Battle of Kyhlo gets chosen. I say that as someone who’s been pretty purely PvE focused since release.

Agemnon.4608:

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

Options I would pay for.

Particle slider

“Hide all Backpacks/wings” toggle.

The core art in this game is very good, when not obscured by cheesy effects.

“Hide all legendary effects” toggle.

But how would you know if I have an awesome quiver?

It’s a sacrifice, but wouldn’t it be a fair trade to never have to see a pair of those huge, stupid, flappy wings again? Ever. Anywhere.

thisisit.6954:

The fact that you keep stating that you don’t care about anyone elses opinion that doesn’t agree with yours is what I see as toxic. You know if you really find it so distasteful, then maybe you shouldn’t look? No one is forcing you to after all.

But I am forced to see it every time I use the LFG tool. That’s one of the reasons a dedicated selling tab has been mentioned in this thread as a possible solution. I’m sorry if my firm opinion comes across to you as toxic. Should I be disingenuous? Hem and haw and say “well those are all very good points, but…” I could tack the caveat on that I believe my opinion to be correct but would be willing to change it only if a heavenly messenger descends from the sky on wings of light and tells me I’m wrong. Same difference.

You know, I never had any issue whatsoever with people selling runs in GW1, so long as they were actual runs, being run by runners, with running builds, for the purpose of unlocking waypoints. It’s when you get in to selling content rewards that I find it distasteful. I’m perfectly willing to agree to disagree on that point, but that still doesn’t change my opinion.

Ok, I’ll give the Hot Joins a try. It still seems counter intuitive that the big join PvP button lands me in such unbalanced match ups, instead of making sure I’m in games with scrubs like myself. I aspire to someday having a rank finisher that isn’t a bunny or the three year anniversary one, but I’m sure not there yet.

Hi, I’m bad at PvP. Have had this game since release and never played PvP more than a couple times, until recently… I decided, hey, maybe this would be a quick fun way to knock out a daily requirement or two without having to port to some area I already have completed, and maybe if I make myself play it a bit I’ll get to like it since I have been deeply involved in competitive FPS games in the past. So, as a new player(in PvP) is it always random groups of new, mostly low leveled, players getting roflstomped by guild groups? Because this has seriously been my experience with my PvP experiment so far.

I’ve read a few guides and stuff so I’m not running around with a berzerker amulet or anything. I queue up, get in a game, see maybe one or two other level 80 players on my team with me, anywhere from two to four members of my team are usually between level 10 and 45, the other team tells us in unison “GL HF”, all with matching guild tags, and proceeds to grind us in to a fine red paste until they hit the score limit and the pain stops. Routinely a single player on the other team kills three or four of us at a time, all by themselves… Killing Spree, Killing Spree, Killing Spree, over and over.

Is it always like this? Are the mythical “Ranked Matches” that I don’t have access to yet any better? I fully expect some “get gud nub” type replies, but I’m really not sure how that’s supposed to happen with matchmaking like this.

AlliedKhajiit.2794:

Because that’s totally not an extremist’s opinion. “Don’t care about any of your reasons, what you do is kittening distasteful and you’re an awful person for doing it and you should be banned” like wat, you backed up that claim with regurgitated nonsense that can’t coherently make for an argument in any way

At least paraphrase me correctly, I said I don’t care about your opinion, I find it distasteful, and I wish Anet would change their ruling and make it against the rules, then they could ban anyone who attempted to ignore the new rules. I didn’t bother to back up my claim at all in that post. Although in a later post I explained that I think it’s toxic to the community.

P.S. I still do, bye

Pandaman.4758:

imsoenthused.1634:

You don’t have to like my opinion, and no, I don’t really care if it bothers you.

Oh, I’m not offended and I’m not telling you to change your opinion. Like I said, I don’t buy or sell paths, whether you like or dislike path selling is unimportant to me.

I’m simply pointing out that asking for restrictions to be imposed on others’ choices for a reason as shallow and selfish as personal offense is a toxic attitude. That’s a separate issue from your opinion.

I never said anything about punishing people, unless Anet changed the rules, which I think they should do. Then, yes, people who didn’t follow them should be banned.

At no point did I say people should be banned because path selling offended me. I said it offended me and that I wish Anet would make it against the rules.

So to clarify, you want ANet to force people to play the game how you want them to play because it offends you despite having no impact on your gameplay, and if they don’t then they should be punished. Split hairs aside, that still toxic.

You can climb off your high horse though, Anet isn’t going to change their stance any time soon. Or don’t, whatever. You’ll still think what you do, and I’ll still think what I do, either way.

No, no, I think I’ll stay on my high horse. It wouldn’t be fair if you were the only one on a horse, after all.

I feel like this got kind of combative, mainly because I used some hyperbole in my first post, because I found it amusing. I am not some rabid, anti-selling fanatic. I do it would have been healthier if Anet had just said, “No, it’s not allowed” from the beginning, and I would be happy if they changed their stance now. It’s just my personal opinion, yes, I can deal with other people feeling differently about it.

Can agree that having a separate tab for selling runs would clear up some of the LFG clutter and make it less glaringly visible for the minority of us who find the practice distasteful? Or maybe that’s me being toxic, again.

I honestly despise anything even remotely resembling player housing. If it did exist, I would ignore it completely unless they made it so rewarding that I felt I had to pay attention to it. Then I would do it, and hate it, and hate the designers for implementing it.

Pandaman.4758:

I’ve never bought or sold paths, but this is…

You’re just openly saying you don’t care what other people have to say, you just want people banned because you’re offended. You want to punish other people in the community because they don’t conform to your ideal of gaming, of how they choose to spend their time and money.

If there’s anything toxic about path selling, it’s attitudes like yours.

You don’t have to like my opinion, and no, I don’t really care if it bothers you. I never said anything about punishing people, unless Anet changed the rules, which I think they should do. Then, yes, people who didn’t follow them should be banned.

At no point did I say people should be banned because path selling offended me. I said it offended me and that I wish Anet would make it against the rules.

You can climb off your high horse though, Anet isn’t going to change their stance any time soon. Or don’t, whatever. You’ll still think what you do, and I’ll still think what I do, either way.

Welcome to Fashion Wars 2. We like horizontal progression in these parts. Some of us are still kind of tiffed that they added an ascended tier of gear. If you are looking for vertical progression, there are probably a hundred other MMOs that will suit you better.

I think that assuming none of them would help with out compensation if such compensation was clearly against the rules is incorrect.

I don’t like the community effect to be honest. I think it discourages being kind and helpful for the sake of being kind and helpful. You get somebody asking for help with something, and so instead of “Sure, let’s go do it.” you get some people saying “offer?” “how much?” etc. as if the idea of helping another player without some kind of compensation is terrible. I think it has toxic repercussions for the entire community, and that disallowing it would benefit the community as a result.

I freely admit that is just my opinion, but I think there is some logic behind it.

I find it distasteful in the extreme, but arena.net hasn’t declared it verboten, so this is what we get. Personally, I wish they’d make an official statement forbidding it, an then actively ban anyone who tried to do it. Of course, the kind of people who buy and sell these services are hugely offended about anyone who feels this way. They always immediately start screaming “How are they hurting you?” “shouldn’t they be paid for their skill?” etc. I could care less about their arguments though, it’s just tacky and sad, exploitative on the sellers side and pathetic on the buyers. At the very least if Anet banned it they’d have to make shady backroom deals on 3rd party forums and such, and you wouldn’t see it in the LFG tool anymore, and that would be much better. They could hang out in the dark alleys of the internet making shady, shameful deals all they want, always fearful that their dirty secret would come out and their account would be properly banned.

SAB minis are the only reason I’d like a mini pet audio slider, those things are nasty annoying, like finger nails on a chalkboard. I also swear the only people who use them have to be like Quarktastic and just want to drive people insane.

I like most of the ideas. I’d like to see the functionality from immersive combat mode added to the core game so I don’t have to use a 3rd party program to play anymore.

It’s all pretty simple user interface and control stuff, but it makes the game so much more enjoyable and dynamic feeling that I think if it ever stopped working I’d probably quit playing altogether.

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

I would advise against buying the first guild wars 1 just basing it off GW2, you will be sorely disappointed.

in GW2? I know I was. It took me years to learn to appreciate GW2 for it’s own sake and stop comparing it to the best game ever made just because they shared the same name and setting.

I’ve never understood the point in censoring a forum for adults. Makes much more sense to make it an option that’s on by default and let us turn it off if we want, but that’s just my opinion. I guess a lot of the perceived anger level has to do with your experiences in real life. I’ve been known to throw some foul language around, but that’s pretty common in the communities I’m part of in real life. They don’t tend to hold much malice for me, just emphasis. But I hang around with a bunch of motorcycle obsessed war vets and weirdos all day. It’s going to be different for someone like a white collar Mormon suburbanite who grew up thinking heck and darn were “serious business”.

1. All the features from Immersive Combat Mode added as options to the core game so I don’t have to use a third party program to play the game.

2. The ability to save, load, and share builds.

3. Fill out the elite skills so everyone has something useful to use in that slot. Possibly consider rebalancing the racial elites and such to bring them closer to the effectiveness of class elites. I know they’re not supposed to be as good, but right now they’re just silly and useless. Even just unlocking the elite slot so that it could optionally equip another utility skill would be an improvement. Increased build diversity is a good thing.

Missy.7356:

Since you seem to be a font of knowledge and I dont have time to go through 17 pages, have they said when we would be getting the missing blooms from 1st day? Since last I heard was at the end of event, and its ended and I still dont have my day 1 awards.

You heard wrong? They very clearly communicated that those rewards would be going out, eventually, and that the NPC vendor was sticking around for a while. At no time did they say you’d be getting them immediately after the event.

There is already the personal assistant overlay, the immersive combat mode addon, and a few others. What exactly are you looking for?

thehipone.6812:

-That the entire Heart of Thorns story is some ham-fisted social commentary on racism using Sylvari to mimic current events

Sylvari Lives Matter!

I’d imagine, as not only the devourers, but also the source of magic in Tyria, it’s not so much that the dragons only rise up where we are, although for meta game reasons that’s obviously the fact, but from a lore standpoint it’s just that civilization as a whole tends to rise up around these sources of power. So no matter where the dragons went to sleep, when they wake up again they’re pretty much bound to be surrounded by civilizations that owe their existance, at least in part, to the power that the dragons have been slowly seeping out in to the world.

I’d say there’s almost certainly a sleeping dragon beneath Cantha for instance, and that Kunnavang was one of it’s hatchlings, much like Glint and Kralkatorrik.

Basically, dragons don’t rise up because people are there, but instead people are there because dragons are.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

You don’t get luck from rares, so it’s not a part of the salvaging for luck part of this thread. Those are handled differently from the 1-2silver greens and blues.

Really? I guess I do so much salvaging at one time I never noticed. Good to know. I suppose in that case, yes, I’d just sell them, but I still don’t see how a luck eater or more recipes wold hurt anything, as the daily ones would still stack up over time. Or, heck, just the luck from salvaging every piece of light armor for the more expensive mats.

I’m a special snowflake! Oh no, now he’s a special snowflake too, now I’m less special… Sad Panda.

luck eater or more recipes would be good. I read some comment above that said just sell your items instead of salvaging, but that works out pretty badly if you want to maximize income, as you need to salvage rares for ectos unless they’re very high value, so you either choose to make less gold, or more gold plus luck that you can’t use. Anyway, having another option to use up excess luck does nothing to hurt people who haven’t maxed it out yet, and would be very cool for those people who have put in the time.

Too true. Rewarding more for being less helpful seems counter to the whole cooperative nature of the game. They should have just stuck with map wide rewards for everyone who participated based on the number of events completed over all rather than individual participation stacks, maybe with a multiplier or bonus for silver and gold participation.

/signed
I’ve thought this would be a great filter option for a while now. Pretty basic but very useful. A textbook example of what a “quality of life” change actually is.

I’d love to get the skins that I, due entirely to my own kitten iness, missed out on the first time. (I never really cared much about skins until the wardrobe came along). Unfortunately, the grind required to even unlock one of them is rather hard for anyone who isn’t willing to no-life the game while surviving on caffeine and ramon noodles like a college student three days before finals. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m a 33 year old adult who loves your game, but I have work to do, a horse ranch to take care of, a social life and motorcycle riding club, etc. There are demands on my time that make farming an event like this pretty unrealistic for me, and I’m fairly sure lots of us. I’d need 900 points to get the rewards I’m interested in. I missed a day because I was waiting for the broken rewards to get patched, today I couldn’t play more than a few minutes without crashing out of the instances. I’m looking at, realistically, getting maybe 60-100 points by the time this event is over. Even if I did get the points, I’m always gold poor, because I’d rather level alts than farm SW, so I probably wouldn’t be able to afford them anyway unless I broke down and converted gems to gold(something I’m not likely to do after just giving you $50 of my recreational budget to pre-order the expansion). If that’s cool by you arena.net, then ok, I guess that’s what you had in mind and I’ll live with it. But if you are making events with people like me in mind too, then you need to seriously rethink how it was put together. Here’s my suggestions.

First, I’ll budget time to play an event if you give me time to do so. If it’s going to take a serious time investment to get even one of the “high tier” rewards, then give me a couple of weeks to work on it. I’ll gladly move my schedule around and invest in a 6 or so hour marathon on one of my days off, but I need some notice to arrange these things. If I can’t get the rewards by putting in an hour or two every day with maybe one long session on a day off they might as well not exist.

Second, I’m always leveling an alt, and as I have mentioned, my playtime can be limited. Don’t punish me by making my character advancement go away to play an event. It should be at least as rewarding XP wise as doing map completion. Don’t ask me to choose between real, measurable character advancement and an event, unless that event is so extremely rewarding that it compensates entirely for that loss of advancement. I’m trying to get a few more characters to level 80 before HoT hits, and the rewards for doing so are thin enough that I’m broke all the time doing it. Now you want me to spend 30 minutes of every hour in an event that costs me gold to jump around WPs and doesn’t contribute to leveling at all? Not cool.

Third, we have enough gold sinks, I realize people actively farming gold don’t see these 10 gold costs as anything much, but I’m sitting at 7 gold on my account right now, and that’s mainly because I’ve been farming AP by completing explorer and jumping puzzle achievements on one of my level 80s the last few days. The 40 gold I would need to buy all four skins available in this event is almost more gold than I’ve ever had at one time on my account(assuming I could actually get enough blossoms). I love doing map completion, leveling alts, helping new players, following random event chains, etc. None of these things are hugely rewarding in any way but enjoyment and satisfaction on my part. Consider new players and players like me when designing these events, because those gold costs basically shut me out. Requiring gold for things I can work on long term is one thing, but requiring it for a limited time event is just a kick in the teeth. The cost of using WPs to follow the event around is a serious consideration for me, much less the 10 gold you’ve tacked on to the blossom requirement just because you could. I suppose I could just sell all my materials, but I do still dream about some day having some ascended or legendary gear. And for new players they don’t even have that option.

Selling paths is skeezy business, I’m all for anything that makes it more inconvenient and annoying. Them’s the breaks.

Absconditus.6804:

Even some of the harder content can be done with heroes.

You can change that to practically all, once you get them properly skilled and equipped. One of the main reasons the game is still very playable even with the population being lower these days.

I wouldn’t have minded one cute quaggan winner, if one of the others had been a flayed quaggan…