Guild Wars 2

GW1 had an infant cash market. I’m talking about the games that established the core thesis and have done this all before. As soon as people learn how the system works, they’ll stop and think about how much they actually want to spend on a weapon skin that doesn’t have juicy aftereffect visuals. A month or two after the event is also when the Thanksgiving and Christmas events start, where the demand for novel items will wash this chainsword frenzy right down the drain.

As of right now, we don’t even have something like a commemorative celestial, which was a once-in-twelve-years kind of thing.

Dredlockrasta.8269:

Should the skins be hard to get? Yeah, I think so, but I think they should have been a reward from the series of quests throughout the week, and you would only be able to chose 1 skin per character.

The chests in my opinion simply do not get people into the season, or force people to work together, they are simply a moneygrab tactic.

Personally I have used my last 20g I had saved on 25 chests, and I have nothing to show for it, and I have a feeling that the people who post things like “its random, you knew that when you tried it” are the same people who get skins on their first time. Please try going on a 25 chest coldstreak and saying that.

The way it stands right now, these skins are just another way for the rich elite people with tons of gold to hoard more items to sell at a later date for even more gold.

I doubt that anybody is making dependable profit on these items. None of them are game changers right now, and in the history of cosmetic markets, no item that is made available every year becomes hugely expensive on the trading post.

They’re not really trash, anyway. Keys are a much better investment than buying boosters/services with gold if you need to farm. People who opened all these chests are going to have the best magic find runs of their lives if they don’t trade it all away for some cosmetic skins.

The halloween event will repeat next year with presumably the same items offered plus additional content. Arena Net did screw up a few times with exploits that leaked tons of gold out of the system, just like when 55hp monks used to do underworld runs that burned out the economy. When the code is airtight, there will be less need for market manipulation as they can see the currency circulation and demand data better than everyone else. The current price of the rare skins on the market leads me to believe that they’ve already made those calculations beforehand.

Because all the rare event items have no effect on gameplay at all, while the commons are a combination of skins and useful items (you forgot the food recipes, by the way).

Search for “skin” in the black lion trading post. Look at the prices. Over the course of the halloween event, these will drop precipitously. Even now, almost all of these so-called rare skins are less than the price of one craftable exotic weapon. None of them are anywhere near the cost of a legendary precursor, or even the cost in materials of the craftable halloween items.

There are so many people playing this game that even the low drop rate from the chests is enough to saturate the market to reasonable prices. If it was much more, these skins would probably be going for 50 silver each, and then everyone would have them – which would be pretty bad for the investors. They’re not crazy expensive for the most part, and they’re not so inexpensive that people aiming to sell them from the start would feel cheated.

In TF2, a few months before the advent of the Mann-conomy update, there was the engineer update. Like the previous updates, it focused on bringing us new content for the engineer and a few new maps and a game mode to boot.

However, this update came with something nobody had ever seen before – a golden wrench only accessible by crafting throughout the update period. There were only 100 available, so it was extremely rare.

A lot of people complained about it because of its idiotically high rarity, but when the mann-conomy was released we knew its true purpose – to tempt people to craft their entire inventory to pave the way for the demand for purchaseable items later on. It was a cunning strategy that resulted in a lot of broken hearts, but there was really no other way to do it without interfering with the judgment and freedom of the players involved. They even got a “destroy your golden wrench for charity” cause out of it because of the infamous reputation of what was basically a to-scale lottery.

Opening these chests is obviously not profitable – 10-30 gold is small compensation for the number of keys required to purchase a good chance at getting them. What it does do is equalize the economy a little bit as there were obviously people with thousands of gold exerting too much power over the economy, as the sharp spike in gem purchases showed.

It is too hard to make a game where some person can’t figure out a way to beat the economic system, through exploit, botting, or hacks. No matter how well you seal the leaks, the damage has already been done to economic stability, so the only way to reclaim it for the good of more casual players is to put in a money sink. The best part about it: this is a game. You play it for fun, and when you lose all your money and progress, you still have a game that you play for fun. People don’t come and repossess your house. You aren’t forced to go begging on the street. You don’t get your fingers broken in a back room. It is a game designed with easy, noncompetitive progress and abstract rewards as a break from real life where you have to claw your way to the top and failure means spending the rest of your days in suffering.

Here’s how to win at costume brawl: if you’re about to die, ditch your costume and leave. If you don’t have a crown over your head, nobody will follow you. You will slowly regenerate health, at which point you can re-enter the brawl to complete your stack.

If a mad king is obviously exploiting the arena, leave. You can costume brawl anywhere, and the less people there are around an exploitable area, the more people will also leave as there’s less profitablility in it not being a mad melee.

It’s slower than if you paid money, but not impossible.

Orichalcum is 3 silver each. There are 5 nodes in 3 areas, each bearing 3 ores – that’s 1 gold 35 silver. You’ll have 10 gold in 8 days. If you have another level 80 character, you’ll have it in 4 days. If you have 4 level 80 characters, you can make it in 2 days provided you’re willing to spend the time just mining. This is by far the easiest way to earn money, as all you have to do is get a character to level 80 and equip the character with semi-decent gear (Masterwork everything sells for a silver each in auction).

People make the mistake of thinking they’re poor without taking their collectible inventory into account, which probably comprises the bulk of their wealth. If you remember how much you are really worth, then you’ll get even richer as you’ll be comfortable with identifying assets you don’t need and liquidating them where appropriate, which is the first step towards farming for a profit. Good luck.

Stop using the current gold to gem conversion rate when making your calculations. Everyone who thought ahead bought gems with gold before there was a huge demand for them that drove up gem prices. This was when 100 gems went for 25 silver or less.

The price of gems and generally everything halloween related went up because there is a lot of guild wars in-game currency not in circulation. Events like this bring out that currency and inflate the economy a bit because they have the function that ectos used to have in the first game: the money sink required to combat the infinite inflation.

Before you do any investment in this game – especially a real world money investment – do your research. 1000 people opening 1 chest gives as much data as 1 person opening 1000 chests, and if I was that 1 person and didn’t know what my odds were going into the game, I would not be surprised at all if I completely struck out because nobody led me to believe otherwise. Welcome to gambling.

This is being handled in a similar way to how TF2, which pioneered the pay-for-cosmetics design, manages holiday events – give out some easy-to-get achievements and common items (one hat) and put out some ultra rare (1% or less drop rate) unique hat around that event time, the only difference there being that you can’t buy keys with anything but real money.

My only suggestion would be to make it even more like the TF2 holiday event – have black lion chests give an extremely strong – even guaranteed – chance to drop common holiday themed items which while nice will hardly generate a profit, with a very small chance of getting an exceedingly rare and coveted item. Greater rewards for opening chests during this time period would be appreciated because it is generally harder to open chests during this time for any reason due to how the cash shop works.

Please bear in mind that items from these black lion chests are tradeable – if you did not prepare for this event because you did not anticipate wanting an item that suddenly caught your eye, you will still be able to purchase it with gold later on. Now would be a good time to cash in some of those gems, or if you bought black lion chests, well, that’s what magic find is for. Activate a few of those boosters and watch how you can breeze through mobs with crappy gear.

Is the amount of speculation and key buying going to go down for the next holiday (Thanksgiving, probably, according to that secret explorable area nobody knows about yet)? Probably, but do you really want to see more posts about how this one guy spent $2500 looking for a permanent black lion trader? Nobody needs that kind of life ruining profit. Look before you leap, and if you don’t have the revenue to come out with a good return, don’t spin the wheel. Real life will screw you over far harder with less of a safety net than this environment of structured entertainment, so might as well get your practice in. Play responsibly.

Focus is good for spike bosses and shield is good for mob swarm/rezzing.

The problem is that toughness is the guardian’s main gig, and it is the weakest main stat in terms of effectiveness (except for PvE mobs). You can spec for it in PvP but you won’t really be able to capitalize on it like all other classes can on their max trait, because it won’t help you spike, dps, run solo, or survive on cooldown. What it will do is let you enter danger zones for a few seconds to help party members. If you’re doing anything else you have to be aware that all other classes can do it better.

Keep track of how many people tag an enemy. Then either/both:

1. Make the drop rate inversely proportional to the number of tags.

2. Increase the damage contribution requirement necessary for a successful tag.

This harms people who take advantage of using sheer force of numbers to farm events and areas and encourages people to complete events with the minimum necessary number of participants. It will also make doing challenging events with lower numbers of people more rewarding, as those are already good at requiring un-bottable skill.

Now try it with altruistic healing and 4 party members

There is currently no “easy mode” for guardian. Mesmers can portal around in WvW and divert aggro in PvE, Rangers farm PvE with pet builds, Engineers can kite with turret farms, thieves spike, Elementalists can just AoE at range forever, necros are tanks, and of course Warriors do everything well without trying. The most powerful guardian skills are reserved for team builds and are nerfed accordingly to prevent the class from becoming too powerful. Therefore, you won’t really be good at anything without teammates, and your performance will be somewhat out of your control due to the fact that you’re interacting more with your team and fixing their mistakes than capitalizing on the mistakes of your enemy.

You can spike, you can solo, you can tank, you can DPS, you can condition, and you can crowd control, but you can do none of that as well as the other specialized classes because your main asset is support.

If you have friends or competent people to run with, guardian can be great fun and somewhat stress free. If you do not, you will have to put in your A game 100% of the time because there is no fallback if you’re the best person on your team. You’re powerless without them, no matter how bad they are. There is no fallback you can do if everyone is having a bad day – either go on an alt or log off.

As far as playing skills go, while everyone else has to use their reflexes to dodge attacks, guardians have to use their reflexes to activate blocking skills. If you like parrying then tary it out.

Screw practicality. Asura already look funny, go the full mile and make them hilarious with obviously impractical and unwieldly weapon sizes. I want them to lose their footing when they finish a combo and be lifted off the ground when they go for a forward strike.

Get a weapon with a really solid autoattack and fight hard-hitting bosses and challenging groups. Combat becomes less of predetermined combo chains than a game of “here’s 8 emergency buttons, now watch the enemy and stay in range”

You can afford to have low crit chance if you make up for it with armor/food and/or PvP or WvW with tome of wrath and use 4-1-1-1-1. Nobody will be prepared for the spike and you’ll basically be 3 arrow carts.

However, this will prevent you from running point as you need a few seconds of peace to reliably pull it off. Beryl rings and “hostile zone” skills like purging flames or a symbol would be great for this, but you’d be back at support 90% of the time.

15000 health and 2250 (debatable) armor and 25% crit chance is good enough for any dungeon, so if you don’t want to think about it too hard, stay above those and you’ll be well rounded.

Mace torch is a good blend if you’re struggling for heals yet still want to do the DPS. You can forsake a lot of defense if you use the mace (I personally think Mace-Shield is overkill and actually disruptive to the regen cycle) and put points into Zeal to beef up your symbol and Radiance to beef up the “fire marks for death” gig and crits, since the mace allows you to walk in a group with crap stats and survive. It’s a good magic find weapon in higher level areas and is an anti-boss weapon for sure. You might even want to reconsider bringing a greatsword to orr just so you can get more mileage out of your counter uppercut, which hits surprisingly hard.

Don’t worry about it. As soon as Blackgate’s players and guilds discover that being a strong presence on the losing end of WvW is more profitable (for reference, many of the better players earn 50 badges a night just by trimming out the zerg with defensive builds) they’ll move out of the high population servers. There is no benefit to spending a lot of money on blueprints and upgrades when you have a lot of people – most blackgate vs. matchups have been with superior numbers, which means when blackgate totally decimates a group, they get less XP and badges overall, while every matchup that ends favorable for the other two teams reaps great rewards. Also, blackgate is not guaranteed karma rewards during primetime as latecomers arrive at a full map with only a little supply camp turnover.

If a team wins by such a huge margin, the only players that see the benefit are the PvE group, and 150,000 points at the end of the week only gives you, at most, a 15-18% buff in 2-4 areas – which is usually unneeded for PvE. Everyone who stuck with Blackgate WvW for the week got shafted on progress, especially the oceanic guilds who seem to be operating at a net loss.

This will become more evident as time goes on and people see the advantage of predicting enemy movement and pre-building more siege. Arrow carts and ballistas will become much more valuable and frequently used to a losing team for profit motive rather than strategy because they can actually blow up a fair number of bodies. I predict that 3rd placers or far off 2nd placers will learn this method of play very quickly:

1. Get a headcount and scout for the likelihood of capturing a tower, keep, garrison, or castle..

2. If numbers are sufficient, zerg up on the capture point.

3. If numbers are not sufficient, populate currently defended areas with siege and cycle supply camps. Show no presence at fortified targets.

This simple zerg minded method will prevent unnecessary deaths and ruin the winning team’s bottom line – they will lose profit by defending and will constantly overcommit to supply camp capture. If they do attack the remaining fortresses, they will be met with harsh resistance (due to the lack of other places for the lower team to defend) and will profit the defenders a great deal before capturing the keep, which at best would be a rare event.

TL;DR: If you don’t have a lot of WvW territory or population, you should not ever be committing to a massive field battle. Go for the least defended keep, and don’t attack any other emplacement except to send small teams for supply. If they bring their zerg, bug out if it’s too big and attack somewhere else to deny them loot, but always pick one at a time. Most importantly, concentrate siege and upgrades: if you own a lot of the map but know they’re going to retake it once they get on, overcommit to your most important structure and leave only a measly 1000 karma for them for the other ones. Not even a 100 person group can stand up to 15 arrow carts and ballistae.

Condition damage is good for dungeons where you can’t melee very much and need to tap virtue of justice, slam with a powerful attack, and bug out of there. It’s not so great for ones where you are actually supposed to stand in front of the boss.

How are you using Mace/Shield on a condition spec?

Learn to switch running and fighting builds.

Regardless of equipment, guardians need renewed focus, contemplation of purity, a weapon with crowd control/damage mitigation, and optionally Save Yourselves or a meditation for solo escape. When you’re targeted, pop Save Yourselves or the meditation and use the weapon skill, then pop contemplation of purity, and if they still manage to stunlock you, quickly pop all your virtues and hit renewed focus after they enter the combo chain that’s supposed to down you – those three seconds will eat up their attack and all their best stuff will be on cooldown. Mix it up depending on the circumstance, but learn that once they stun you, the heavy hitting combo always follows, so use one or the other block or dodge.

After you meet the group, switch to whatever, but unless you are a meditation guardian, be exceedingly mindful of whether everyone’s retreating or not since you actually have the worst chances in escaping zerg. No cloak, no clones, no super fast buffed HP form that does anything but help your long gone friends.

Staff is an exceedingly good weapon because it’s basically a 20 foot greatsword and should be treated as such. It insta-hits at range and has piercing, so you should be spamming it when running after a mob because you can tag people just out of melee even if they’re avoiding projectiles and you can hit downed people without looking at them.

Learn to fight at 25% HP because that’s where toughness and regen come in. People will start using their finisher attacks on you at that HP level and there’s so many ways you can mitigate that damage and render them powerless that it’s pretty much the only way you can get actual kills instead of assists. Wait for someone to get kitteny and try to down you and watch them reduced to plinking you when you’re back up at full health and stunlocking them to oblivion.

If you spend a lot of time in the downed state, try being a spirit weapon guardian. Hammer and Shield will prevent people from dunking you as well as providing an obscene amount of downed damage independent of your status, and if they last long enough, you’ll probably be able to rally off them.

Also you can send spirit weapons in to harrass ground level siege weapons and retreating enemies at collossal range. This is situational and independent of your trait status so you don’t even need to spec for its eventuality. If you see a siege weapon that you can only spend 1 second attacking before you have to retreat, call your spirit weapons in, tag the weapon, then bug out of there while it’s still a target. Spirit weapons are basically unkillable so it’s safe damage on your part.

No, the damage is scaled with level and power, and it’s capped.

Guardian is basically the only class that knows what it’s doing in a huge melee skirmish like a keep invasion or defense. If you want to tag, you can’t do better than putting out a few spirit weapons and spamming staff 1. Every other skill and trait the guardian has is best used in all out wars where it’s impossible to single someone out, which is why all guardian buffs and conditions are AoE. As long as you don’t go running off by yourself and tag using one of these methods, you’ll do fine offensively.

You’d take a non-heal warrior for the DPS to get through the dungeon faster, or a warrior with just enough heal power to take care of himself.

If you are having trouble keeping up dodges, then as a warrior, you should switch to your rifle and spend some time ranged before getting back in there. Maybe look around for recognizable healing skills or just wait for your own cooldown.

Hammer 5 is an escape skill. If you use it, dodge out and then they dodge out too, run back in. If you use it and miss, stay in there. It’s as good as sanctuary for melee classes.

Trikittenistos.3046:

if u like WvW, asura racial utility “pain inverter” (if i remember the name correctly)
works perfectly with tanky guardian (and warrior secondly).
u can make a great retaliation-oriented build as an asura.

Even more so now that greatsword can’t up retaliation forever

defensive one is great if you are a revive build: another free shield in case the 3 you get in your guardian classes aren’t enough

That’s why I want there to be armor that downlevels you past the area cap in exchange for higher level loot. That fixes the problem of PvE not being challenging and not being worthwhile in lower level areas simultaneously.

The current system is fine if your keep is under attack. There is always something to be built or repaired, so you’ll have to make trips to the supply depot, where you can check on the health of the dolyaks both ways and get credit if someone’s trying to disrupt the supply line where you need it.

If your keep is not under attack and there was an incentive to defend dolyaks, you’d have much more frequent stalemates because it would be harder for the enemy to whittle down its supply while their main force is somewhere else doing a more group-intensive thing.

They want to do whatever they can to nerf guardians until they can actually quash their sPvP, at which point they’ll apply long awaited buffs so they end up on the same playing field as everyone else.

whatever/whatever/whatever/whatever/20, and do wall of reflection (if ranged) or hallowed ground (if melee) and tome of courage forever

All dungeon bosses where you don’t have to dodge 100% of the time have a predictable “okay, I’m going to do normal attacks where you can treat me like a regular enemy, oh wait, super ranged attack / stun and super melee attack where if you don’t dodge I kill you” and wall of reflection or hallowed ground grants your team a reprieve. Stand your ground of course works better, but if you don’t want to trait into honor for some insane reason hallowed ground is enough.

If you do trait into honor, please note that you will probably never be able to use the res skills when you actually need them because dungeon bosses have this annoying tendency to auto-kill downed players.

You do not need more than 15k health on a guardian, especially if you take any kind of condition removal – put all the rest in toughness if you want survivability and get used to fighting at 25% health (where a lot of emergency traits activate, the difference here from other classes being that you don’t necessarily have to retreat from battle at this level)

Try running with spirit weapons (but don’t take wrathful spirits) and just doing binding blades → symbol of wrath → pull → sword command + whirling blades at same time → leap of faith for the blind you need to get out of there and heal up after your dodge escape with an emergency shout. You should be able to do some version of that fairly frequently, but without going 30 in either honor or valor, standing for any period of time in the middle of a mob is a no-no. Get out of there, put up a staff wall or shield barrier, and buy time with ranged till your spirit weapons/shouts/meditations recharge. Contemplation of purity alone is a sufficient get-out-of-jail-free card for any PvE or PvP situation.

As was said before, the zeal trait line is for people that want to use spirit weapon sometimes. If you need more rescue skills and can’t / won’t do spirit weapons, it’s helpful to have at least 20 zeal just so you always have that option in case a situation calls for them, like when you have to fight a same-level opponent ranged and still want to get tags / put out DPS.

Virtues are interactive. Take 15 in radiance and be amazed at how much button pressing you have to do to get the most out of it.

Guardians have long delays on their attack chains as a gift to them because their real value is looking out for enemy movements. While every other class has to dodge, guardians can specifically mitigate damage while still going on with their attack if they time their saves correctly. That’s why they don’t have big skill bar combos – no guardian skill should be spammed except for the autoattack because all your attention should be on anticipating and blocking enemy moves. Every skill after 1 has utility as an escape skill and should be reserved for opportune moments detected by your battle sense.

A guardian is like background music – when he’s good, you can’t remember that he’s there but he enhances the overall experience. When he’s bad, you will notice his failure or absence very readily.

The most powerful guardian skills other than wall of reflection really require training with guardians to recognize, and though most give you a passive buff whether you’re paying attention or not, there are some extremely powerful skills that you would do well to watch out for if you want to make the most of your guardian friends.

Everyone should at least familiarize themselves with guardians because they leak buffs whether they want to or not, and you’ll be a lot more powerful if you know how and when to take full advantage of their support.

If you are afraid of not soloing well or having nothing to do at range, take 20 zeal and 20 radiance and go spirit weapon guardian. That basically transforms you into a hard hitting ranged and PvE character, though you won’t have the classic invincibility that goes with the honor and valor traits.

15 radiance also gives you an assassin’s promise verson of virtue of justice, which basically makes you the best at fighting large mobs. If you want to go crazy fighting mobs but want to fight boss battles methodically and skillfully, guardian is for you.

UW and FoW were also terribly boring for all the classes involved in the trifecta who could not do anything else. They had to be cookie cutter and spam the same cycle of skills over and over, with the only reprieve being the objective variety of the missions, where some had you defending rather than just killing.

Since the importance of certain builds are downplayed now, I would like to see more of events that transform a character into a certain role, like how boulders are suddenly an overpowered weapon now. It was a joke in GW1, but because of the separated skill bar and character independence, any character can afford to give up their customary role to perform the task associated with an event.

Illiander.8049:

kaffaljidhma.1496:

not everyone can learn scripting, so unfair advantage

False. Anyone can learn scripting. It’s no more an unfair advantage than allowing people with fancy mice to rebind their controls to the myriad of buttons they can access easily, rather than having to go through contorted hand motions. It’s actually less of an advantage, as it requires no extra outlay of cash to use, just your brain.

Also, how long do you really think it will be before there’s a site where you can go and download good stable scripts? I’d give it a month on the outside, probably less than a week. So if you don’t want to put the time in to learn, you will always be able to get something decent.

MMOs cannot give the go-ahead on 3rd party solutions.

Probably a better thread

Make dynamic events reward bonus karma if they haven’t been completed recently, like the exp bonus. This will be dependent on the event respawn rate, so for instance it will never apply to Jormag.

not everyone can learn scripting, so unfair advantage.

However, I would like my spirit weapons not to disengage every time I turn my back

Or just put 10 into virtues for retaliatory subconscious – all spike chip classes will try to pin you down before whirling on you, so if you have enough health you can stand there and take it instead of stun breaking.

Yeah it’s the cost of like 2 armor repair

1. is an escape move. Use it when you’re overwhelmed, then jump out. Or use it as a poor man’s sanctuary.

Look up some crithammer builds and also try speccing into honor. Take some traits that buff retaliation and then try it again – this time with a lot of frontline friends that will be wailing on your target right beside you.

Guardians can’t tank because they can’t reliably draw aggro when it counts. Sure, they can survive longer, but what’s the benefit if they can’t take hits for other guys?

I like your dynamic difficulty idea. Anything dynamic is good. The boss does not have to be awsomely powerful but perhaps just has an ability that’s hard to bot against, like knockdown or confusion.

Guild Wars used to ban bots in one swift showy stroke, but they either haven’t done that yet here or might be doing it more quietly. From what I gather, they have to personally observe offenses before a ban, so of course there would be a huge service backlog.

If the death penalty didn’t exist there’d be no incentive to revive.

HtFde.3856:

Well … the tier 6 rare mats do not drop well in Orr without any boost in MF – ast least that is my experience. So if you run around in Orr with your level being reduced … how would you rate your survivability?

Don’t run around in Orr. With this idea, you can run around basically anyplace and have tier 6 rares drop, especially if you’re fighting in areas that aren’t already farmed to oblivion. You won’t need to downlevel as much (or at all) in Orr or Cursed Shore because the dynamic events and enemies are already at level 80 and the loot is already at the highest possible scale, so making it just a bit harder for yourself is enough to increase drop rate if you really don’t want to venture into other areas.

Imagine if instead of people huddling around the same Jormag runs all the high level players are off frantically searching for the less popular dynamic events and dungeons all around the map that people are struggling with. Suddenly, we don’t have a problem of 1000 people spamming a single high yield boss and nobody at all doing a time consuming fetch quest.

In addition, dungeon parties will be a lot more successful because you can immediately tell when someone is wearing magic find gear – and in certain cases they may not even be allowed to go in the dungeon due to the level cap. If they switch in the dungeon everyone will know it, so it will additionally provide a deterrent there.

Also contemplation of purity gives it where it counts