hmm how is it worth it?? i mean salvage kit come in 25 stack.. carry 100 only take 4 slot.. plus as you salvage it goes down pretty fast.. before you run out you will surely find an npc to resupply them..
as for function, it cost 3 copper per use, which is almost exactly the same of basic salvage kit per unit price…
hmm confusing…someone please explain, thanks
Its .5 cheaper overall so in the end it pays itself off. (I have used it well over 1000 times) so i saved over 500c so far and it hasn’t even been out over a year. On top of that it takes only 1 slot rather than your 4 slots. Also don’t need to run to a merchant to buy more kits.
yea..but the item is like 60g+.. you save like 0.5 copper per use…. likely will take few years of dedicate usage to cover up the price…
btw.. 1g = 10000 copper.. this kit is 800gem, which is like 65G+ at current price..
65g = 650000 copper / 0.5 (unit saving) = 130,0000
say you salvage 100 per day.. it will take 13000 days or 35 years to cover up the cost.. sure if you salvage 1000 a day it only take 3.5 years.. but can you really salvage 1000 per day??
You are ignoring the fact that these kits save time. Aside from the QoL aspect — you’re wasting time by switching kits every 25 items and going to the merchant to buy the kits; that’s time you could have been making money or having fun.
What value do you assign to your time? It shouldn’t be lower than ~5g/h, and it might be much higher.
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pro – granting swiftness
con – only after killing an enemy + swiftness for a max of 10 secsSugestion to devs – prema swiftness will make this sigil more attractive, maybe someone will actually use it then
I used to run sigil of speed on my engineer when farming in orr. I don’t think it was capped at 10s, but perhaps that changed. It was nice to have swiftness for a minute after killing a bunch of trash.
In a dungeon, I can’t imagine using it. If you need swiftness, someone in the party can easily provide that. But I’d also assume that this topic is in jest.
[snip]
You’re curious about my assertation, and then you write a paragraph that sums it up?Elementalist and Guardian are the two classes whose strength is in their ability to do a bit of everything, thus Celestial, which also does a bit of everything, is marginally useful for them. You’d still be better off specializing though.
The part I’m curious about is the assertion that I’d be better of specializing — in what way? If I was going with dedicated / skilled teams (and was myself equally skilled — I’m usually better than others in PUGs, but that’s a low bar) — then I agree that almost all content can be done faster in pure zerker. But I’m usually in PUGs for fractals & dungeons … I’m not sure I’d be better off more specialized.
(The change to critical damage might make me regret the ascended armor I crafted, though … we’ll see.)
Really? 30 days to craft a set of armor. I’m a pretty active player, but, seriously, 30 days to craft a set of armor. It takes longer to craft a set of celestial armor than it does to craft all the legendary weapons in the game.
If you didn’t know, you need 5 charged crystals per piece of armor.
Celestial armor is dead to me. Sorry, but it is. It is a sad day.
If it makes you feel any better, Celestial armor was dead long before today. It is only marginally useful for two classes, and even for them there are better options. Overall it is the worst armor set in the game, so you aren’t missing anything by skipping it.
I’m curious about this assertion. I play ele and guard, and given their low health pool — celestial armor and zerker trinkets is a good mix IMO with the current critical damage stats.
It’s true that I get slightly less power and precision than I would with Berserker armor, but I get slightly more crit dmg % (this is the “bug” they’re fixing). The extra vitality is helpful because both have low health pools. The other three stats — healing, toughness, and condition damage — aren’t amazingly helpful, but they’re somewhat useful (as guard, I apply constant burning, healing does help a few skills, and most things don’t 1-shot me so toughness helps).
For ascended armor, assuming a mixture of zerker and valkryie armor, I’m trading 182 power for an extra 59 vit + 147 of each of (toughness + healing + condition) + 2% critical damage.
As someone who does occasionally get hit (usually when trying to get others up off the floor), I’m sure the vitality is helpful, and I think the other stats are marginally helpful — enough to justify that reduction in power.
But if the fix to critical damage doesn’t involve buffing other stats, then I’ll agree — without the extra crit dmg, I’d have crafted zerker instead. :-/
I saw a post of someone saying this doesnt work anymore today. Can anyone confirm?
When I first did this long ago, I think the transmutation splitter didn’t make the results soul-bound — it left them account-bound. That is no longer true (if it ever was) — you have to transmute with white or blue to make it account-bound, and then transfer the item via your bank, then split the account-bound item on the character you want to use it (at which point the resulting items will be soul-bound to the second character): http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmutation_Splitter
So I wouldn’t be surprised if someone missed that the transmutation splitter makes it soul-bound to the current character, or if they made some other mistake in the process … if that’s not the issue, I’m curious as to what they’re asserting didn’t work.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Damage
Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
Both with full runes of Ogre Full Zerker is every single item. Jewelery and Infusion.Full Berserker Exotic Great sword swing 96.0099 = 1047 * 3275 * .07 / 2500
Full Berserker Ascended Great sword swing 103.24724 = 1100 * 3353 * .07 / 2500
The total is a 6.8% increase not counting traits or sigils.
For 10,000 Cuts it’s like a 500 hp dif but who is going to stand still for that. So for people with the exact same skill level Ascended should win but evading one hit would negate the damage difference.
You clearly ignored the primary reason Berserker is effective — critical damage. Seriously — this calculation is worthless without that. This has been covered before — but ascended gives a 12-15% increase in direct damage from Exotic to Ascended. Calculations in
(there are other numbers on the second page as well, but they generally agree).
So — 10% or more additional damage, some slight additional armor … it won’t matter if you’re much better than your opponent, but for equally skilled players that’s a big deal.
So the OP wishes that 20 minutes before he fights the wurm, you get a mail saying there is a wurm event with the exact location. When he travels to the said location, he finds an npc which explains everytime about the wurm. How much HP, its attack range, its damage output, its mechanics, the do’s and don’ts etc.
Like everyone already said, gamers today are way too spoiled with games in general. When I was a kid I defeated Ultima & Omega Weapon in FF8, got every Esper in FF3, got a 102% completion on Diddy Kongs Quest, completed the original legend of Zelda with (I think) every heart there is to find, I could go on for a long time.
Games like Demon/Dark Souls are games like how they used to be. Challenging, mysterious and lots to explore.
The problem isn’t the need to learn. The problem is that each person learns at a different point, and their learning hobbles others just trying to complete the event.
I can do my part fine in the Marionette event now; so I do, then I try to teach others. But they mostly won’t be part of the event for me next time (my server can’t do the event when I want to play — not enough people still interested); and fundamentally it feels frustrating and inefficient.
The problem isn’t one where a dialog which you’d have to read would help — most players wouldn’t. The problem is that learning the mechanics may cause the event to fail for everyone, and then everyone is stuck waiting for 2h… rinse and repeat.
If you want rewards, doing Marri pales compared to running 3 dungeons which you could easily do in that time. If you want story, there is none. If you want achievements then you can get the meta simply by participating. If you want to ‘win’ then making things easier doesn’t do that, it simply hands you a meaningless victory.
What’s frustrating about this isn’t failure — it’s the way it forces players to educate other players … but without any way to see direct benefits from that education.
This morning, I journeyed to a random OF before the event, got into line, and did my part. After we finished killing our regulator (40-50s left, we were 1st or 2nd), I looked over onto the next platform and saw someone kiting the champ in a big circle, so it would never hit the mines. Several people said what to do, but the person just kept at it … since they had aggro, no one in their circle could do any damage.
I sent a whisper to them (too late for it to do any good), explaining this — and based on their response, I’m willing to believe that person will do a better job next time. But the rest of us wasted our time (our lane failed to cut a chain) for this one person’s education … and next time it’ll be someone else. You only need a failure rate of 10-20% per platform to make the whole event fail.
Other than waiting, there’s no way to try again (as there was with the Karka Queen), so you can be sure it’ll be a different group next time — there’s no way to choose the people you do it with. (I’m told my server has success around reset, but I can’t play then due to family and work; if I go when I can play, it’s already doomed to failure, since there too few people.)
So I’m stuck with random overflows. If I was willing to camp out longer, there’s a better chance I’d be in a full (or nearly full) overflow … but I play the game to have fun, and sitting around in a map waiting for an event is not what I consider fun.
I like the mechanics — but the event requires too many people; and while the mechanics should be within reach of most players, it’s frustrating to educate them a few at a time, and then rinse and repeat again 2h later.
You’ve been releasing some of the best and most enjoyable raid content in any MMO I’ve seen. Truly challenging content that requires lots of preparation and learning, while at the same time requiring a MASSIVE amount of people all to be coordinated perfectly. I was in the group that got server first on SOR downing Teq, and it was one of the most memorable moments in my entire gaming history. Downing the Marionette for the first time was just as exciting, and I know downing the Wurms will be amazing too. I’m loving it, as are many many other players.
That being said….allow groups and guilds to form their own private overflows where random people can’t get in and ruin entire guilds from doing content together. Add in that feature and your open raid content will be absolutely PERFECT!
You do realize that your request at the end would be to make this non-open raid content, right?
I understand that your intent is to defend ANet because you’ve enjoyed these encounters, but your suggestion indicates that you agree with the premise of the other thread (“Face it devs, open raid content doesn’t work!”) — this content would be better if it wasn’t open world raid content.
Personally, I wish ANet had more respect for players’ time; I play to have fun, and I don’t want a reward for a poor effort — but I do expect the game not to waste my time. The developers seem happy with solutions which involve wasting players’ time.
I have never really understood “issues” like these.
I have yet to use dulfy or other sites a single time, and yet I have completed the meta events for every single Living Story, so clearly it is fully possible to do so.
If you have completed the meta events for every LS, then I would guess that you play a lot, and you probably start when the events are first released. When the events are new, everyone is learning, and people are very helpful. When the events are a week old, and a new player comes and tries to learn on the spot, they’re likely to receive a lot more hostility — because their mistakes (while learning) will slow everyone else down or make the event fail, and because the people who know the mechanics are sick of explaining.
If the events didn’t have short timers whose expiration causes failure (partial or complete, depending on the context), this wouldn’t be so bad; similarly if retries were possible after failure.
I’ve done the Marionette 5-10 times. I like the fight, and now can generally manage my part of breaking the chain so long as there’s at least one other clueful person to help DPS the champ. All the attempts I’ve been on have failed, though I knew most would fail before I started due to numbers, and just did them for the daily.
The main issue is that todays gamers seems to be under the illusion that they should guided through every single step of the way rather than figure it out themselves.
Back in the days before the internet (or at least before it was not widespread) people still managed to complete games (which were often much harder than todays games for that matter) without having someone tell them exactly what to do.
Those games didn’t impose a delay of 2h between attempts(!), and your failures while learning didn’t slow others down. I know everyone likes to talk about how things were better in the day, but you’re comparing apples and oranges, and have created a strawman; the issue isn’t that it requires us to learn new things, is that the game itself doesn’t have a good mechanism for figuring out what those things are; instead, the developers are leaning on the community, with mixed results.
Anyway — I wouldn’t mind some failures to learn new skills. But the timer approach is lame, and the 2h delay is lamer. It’s sad, ‘cause I like think the Marionette event is fun, but I’ll get sick of it if it always fails for reasons outside of my control (I refuse to camp out in a map for an hour before it to be sure of having a space). And it’ll be gone soon anyway; I won’t participate in gear-check events like the new wurm boss, so … <sigh> <shrug>
No server/guild has defeated the Wurm yet AFAIK.
Nearly 72 hrs after release…
Everyone at ArenaNet is giving themselves pats on the backs and breaking out the champagne. Job well done…
Is it just me who finds it very, very funny that Wurms in Tyria are far more harder then Dragons?
I promised myself that I’d take a break if ANet released more open-world content which is designed to fail most of the time, without some way to retry. I’m fine with failing due to poor execution (I loved how Tequatl sends a killing wave if you screw up a defense phase) — but failing because of a timer is lame.
I don’t think there’s anything impressive or commendable about releasing content which has taken >3 days because players can’t DPS fast enough to beat the timer. Especially for a game which was originally intended not to have a gear grind.
Clearly there are people who like this. Time will tell if they’re the majority or not.
But if I do take a break, I figure I can find something which is both more satisfying and more fun than content like this. Writing software is often frustrating, but no more than this — and it’s also fun and far more satisfying than proving your server or guild can DPS harder.
Same here with entire set :S
The trasmutation to white => using esctractor still working?
Yes — well, not extractor, but transmutation splitter (not sure about extractor, I don’t have one but I don’t think it’d work here — you want to split the transmutation, not extract an upgrade). You can also transmute to blue.
(It’s embarrassing, but I know because I crafted a duplicate ascended armor piece, and then equipped it. The armor is expensive enough that it seemed worth transmute + transmute splitter, given that I do have another char who can use it …)
I still stand by there is a cap, its called self control.
This certainly works on an individual level. I stopped chasing APs (though I’m still in the top 1k in NA, my rank is falling, and in time I’m sure I’ll fall off the end). But it doesn’t address the fact that game design which rewards tedious and easy tasks is bad design. I became interested in GuildWars1 because of their professed avoidance of grind (yes, there was some, but less core to rewards); GW2 has been more disappointing in that respect.
I don’t play games as another chance to exercise self-control (which is a horrible analogy, btw — you get more self-control by establishing good habits, not by resisting temptation); I play them to have fun. Having to guard against psychological manipulation makes the game less fun.
I’ve decided to see my rank in the AP leaderboards more as a mark of shame than as something to be proud of; that makes it pretty easy to ignore. I don’t care about people “catching up”; I do think the game would be better if it capped out AP rewards for tedious tasks — I like the suggestion of giving a daily meta, and rewarding that when you hit it — but 0 AP for each individual task.
I don’t care too much, since I’ve pretty much got myself to ignore this other than getting laurels — but it would be better game design.
(And there are other ways you can catch up — e.g. dungeon explorer, if you’re willing to grind dungeons… you can get probably grind at least 5AP/h as long as you’ve got a group willing to grind with you.)
people who can’t see that are in denial of their gaming problem. If people are unhappy about the grind, they need to ask themselves, why do they do it? If they are honest with themselves they will see the problem is not a game.
Well, yes — it’s our choice to play the game. But a game which is toxic to some players is not a game I want to support, and it’s fair to argue that this encourages bad behavior. I’d note that there are possible pro-social results from dailies as well — encouraging participation reduces the degree to which parts of the game are uninhabited wastelands by getting players to revisit for area-based events and the like. I think rewarding behavior like that is good design.
If a cap was imposed on people that are above 15k yet not anyone below. Would that be acceptable?
I’m not enthusiastic about encouraging this behavior in those with fewer than 15k APs either, so I’d say … “meh”. It is an improvement — but only a marginal one, since it’d only affect a small fraction of the population. I wouldn’t argue against it, but it doesn’t really address what I consider to be poor design.
For those who claim its not about catching up. They should not have a problem with this. They could go on their merry way since it would have nothing to do with board position and it would not have an impact on them. Why people keep denying its not about board position when it clearly is for the majority is beyond me.
Even though I have been hateful, I genuinely feel bad for those who feel they must keep grinding. Again, if they capped it. It would be fine with me and not change the way I play. I just wished people would be honest about why they want a cap. Most want a cap because they are tired of the grind. If those near their scores are capped they would not feel compelled to grind more to maintain. I feel this is why they lose so much support from the community.
I’m not convinced that grinding dailies is actually the best way to catch up, esp not for the slowest couple of them — but I’d prefer to find some way to give new players possible parity with those who’ve been play all along. Separating AP scores for daily, LS, and core game might work.
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Congrats on learning how to use wikipedia. It’s not an assumption, JS has posted that he considers the TP to be part of the game. “Playing” the TP is therefore encouraged by the system they have in place. If they wanted the most efficient system possible there would be no TP, just a series of vendors that buy and sell items for fixed prices.
Having venders buy and sell items for fixed prices is unrelated to any of the proposals here.
To be clear — even in an efficient market, you can make money by anticipating where the market will go (e.g. buying items which are cheap because of oversupply during an event, with the expectation that they’ll become scarce later). This form of playing the market is clearly encouraged, and is a better way to make money anyway IMO.
I’m not going to debate the dubious merits of the proposed bid increments because I don’t feel it’s worth consideration. The source of the complaint is sour grapes over being unable to always get the best deal possible because one has to share the TP with other players. It’s the downside to a market run by the players, you can set whatever buy/sell price you want for an item, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to accept it.
If you’re not actually going to discuss the proposal, how about just ignoring the thread, instead of raising strawmen and non sequitor arguments?
AFAICT the argument for this isn’t based on sour grapes about having to share the TP — but rather on the fact that it’s tedious to be overbid repeatedly by trivial amounts. If you respond in kind, you’ll probably get a better deal than if you overbid by some fixed percentage each time, but it will require more time to figure out the price point at which point others stop overbidding. I’d rather just figure out that — sometimes others’ price point is over mine, and that’s fine too — in that case I leave in a low bid and see if it fills.
I would rather have the price converge faster towards what people are actually willing to pay, and I think a minimum increment would encourage that.
It’s not a big deal for me — when I do bother with this, convergence is still fast enough if I increase my bid at 2% each time, and paying an extra 1% is pretty minor — but I don’t think it is better in any theoretical sense with the lack of minimum bid increments.
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JS has already demonstrated that he has access to far more information about how the TP is used, has the expertise to interpret the data, and has a willingness to step in when things are not going according to plan and make changes. The fact that the TP has gone on for over a year without a major overhaul indicates that it is, in fact, working as intended.
This fallacy is appeal to authority — except it’s worse, you’re just assuming that because no action has been taken then the person who is an authority is happy with the status quo. None of your message was actually a response to the arguments for a minimum bid increment; the closest you came was saying that you’re happy with the status quo, and so are many other players. (I will grant that, with the caveat that some of those who are happy with the status quo would be happier with the proposed change.)
If you’d ever been responsible for a production system, you’d understand that there are always improvements to make — but it takes time to make each one (especially if you want to limit bugs), and you work through them in something like priority order (priority, or (benefit / cost), or some combination).
I agree that obviously this hasn’t been a priority; that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good change.
The point is that the people with the copper increments aren’t really bidding more. They’re just butting in line. Why people can’t grasp this concept is beyond me, though I’d imagine a lot of the people objecting are in fact the ones that do little but stand around the TP all day…
Whether the minimum increment is 1c, 1s, 1g or 1%, there are people who will always top your bid by the minimum amount they can. It won’t stop the frustrations, in fact it will cause more frustrations because now instead of rebidding 2c higher you have to rebid 2g higher. Then another 2g when the same bidder tops you again, and again…
If you really want to spend more money needlessly, just buy the lowest sell offer instead. What you are really arguing against is the fact that when you place an offer you have to wait for someone to sell it to you, and this delay gives someone else a chance to get in line ahead of you. The amount of the overbid is irrelevant, it will happen no matter what the minimum increment happens to be.
That is why there are sell offers, the item is already held by the TP and ready for immediate purchase. Otherwise, you bid the maximum you are willing to pay and wait for someone to accept the price.
You missed the point. The claim is that minimum bid increments would cause the price to approach an efficient one (no significant profit to be made in the market) faster — this means that indeed, there is back-and-forth bidding, then indeed you will see the price rise faster. But it doesn’t rise forever — when it rises high enough, one or the other buy will stop outbidding the other.
Lack of a minimum bid increment means that this process is never likely to complete — if you increase by 0.0001% (1c / 1g), with occasional resets from people selling to the high buy offer, then you may never see the “efficient” equilibrium, where most of the profit is gone.
An efficient equilibrium would mean that flippers make less by increasing the bid price.
Personally — when I’m buying something, I’ll generally go over the current high bid by more than 1c — usually 1-10%, depending on the item (occasionally more). I do sometimes get overbid by 1c; then we repeat (with smaller increases on my part, usually about 1%) until the other person gives up. I’d be happy if there were fewer steps involved, and a minimum increase would accomplish that.
I checked the prices yesterday, in game. Considering I mostly need the lodestones, I did some calculations.
I need Corrupted Lodestones. Those are between 68.5 and 73.5 silvers to buy (highest buy offer and lowest sell offer).
You can craft those lodestones using Corrupted Cores. Those are between 6.50 and 6.90. Let’s say you buy two of those at 6.50 (for a total of 13 silver).
You also need a Pile of Crystaline Dust. Which is between 15.70 and 15.80. (total 28.70 silver). The third ingredient is 1/3 skill point, which I won’t put a price on (3 crystals for 1 SP, and you need 1 crystal).That means a Lodestone will cost you 28.70 silver + 1 laurel. A laurel is now worth 68.50 – 28.70 = 39.80 silver.
On average, a T6 material will net you between 15 and 30 silver (exluding taxes!). But, the biggest problem for me, it depends on luck. If you’re lucky, you get the more expensive T6 material and a laurel would be worth more than when you would get the binding agents and buy the stuff off the TP. But if you’re unlucky, or, even more importantly, if you have the cores and dust already, it’s more profitable to buy the agents.
At least, if you want Corrupted Lodestones. I also need Glacial ones, and it’s most certainly not more profitable there! (those are between 17 and 20 silver to buy…)
IIRC, for T5->T6 conversions, the binding material just replaces Elonian wine — so it is only worth ~26s if you use laurels for binding materials. For T1->T2 conversions and the like, it makes the process less tedious and a little cheaper as it allows you to do larger batches and with fewer bottles of Elonian wine.
For Infinite Light, I did a lot of core -> lodestone conversions (cores were ~65-70s, lodestones were 2-2.1g, so for the 200 or so which I bought, that was ~400g for lodestones versus ~310g (for cores + dust + Elonian wine) plus 200 skill points).
Material promotion is one of the ways to establish a gold equivalence value for skill points.
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Risk/reward the base of any game
Totally unbalanced here……The issue is the inflation caused by FALSE scarcity created by flippers.
They balance and nerf anything in the rest of te game not respecting their view of risk/reward….
So a lvl 80 FOTM player get slapped in the face while a TP flipper get each patch more rewards via rumors and patchnotes before release….
Go have a look at the price of linen, cotton, silk and gossamer right now.
You’ll see a huge downward spiraling curve. People that acted on “rumors” lost their gold bigtime today. You really have to qualify that “risk/reward” statement, for one because there is no risk when doing PvE/WvW, only reward.Second, you are not “forced” to do the TP minigame. No one is. Scores of people acquired multiple legendaries without it. You started with the “speedclearer” comparison, I’ll finish it: speedclearers play content that gets them the most gold in the least amount of time. Even if it means doing one dungeon path all night skipping any mob that can be skipped, glitching through a dungeon in the most effective (read: exploitative) way. I did not want to participate in that, so I chose a “speed path” that fitted my playstyle better. I’m very glad I did, because it means I can enjoy content for what it is without stating on an official forum that by selling my items on the TP I am being “slapped in the face” – or other superlatives that are completely out of context and which – thus far – are devoid of any argument to back it up.
I’ll stop here: I wanted to help you formulate a good argument, because I actually believe there is some merit in it, yet all this has turned into is a rant against profiteering persons in the sky that make you a “victim” rather than a participant of the same system.
I don’t think it’s obviously bad that people make lots of money on the trading post.
The argument I’d make is that people flipping goods are — if they try to control the supply — harming the market by distorting supply and demand. They may fail to control the price, if additional supply becomes available — when that happens, they lose money. But in general, the best that can be said of them is that they maximize the degree to which the TP functions as a gold sink.
Part of the problem is that in the real world, if the price rises people just make (mine, etc) more of the item in demand. In a game like this, that option is not always available, or depends on the rules of the game … e.g. there is a constant supply of precursors, but depending on the percentage which come from normal drops versus the mystic forge, it may not be elastic with demand; and for things like permanent hairstyle contract or permanent mystic forge conduit — the item may not be possible to make.
OTOH — those who establish buy/sell ranges which give them profit are providing liquidity — I think this benefits everyone. I wish that the TP made it easier to be a market maker … there’d be less profit in it if more people did it, but it’d be less annoying than having to constantly update your buy/sell orders (I don’t have the patience to do it anymore).
lol I’m not gonna buy up any item. I’m merely gonna list an item for an exuberant price.
So if I list a Potato at 3000g, it’ll cost me 450G in fees :P
Then 6 months from now, when young Jimmy asks, “Dad, why is a potato more expensive than a legendary?”
The answer will be:
“It’s just a troll, son. A rich troll that mocks us all!”
How could you get the math wrong here?? For one, it’d only cost you 150g to list. If it sells, you’ll pay another 300g … but you’d get the balance, 2550g. (Unless you mean you’d list 3 at 3k gold?)
If you really want to show off waste, you’d have to list for more than 10k gold. :-)
(ISTR that there were some legendaries listed around that price just after legendaries were first crafted. I wonder if any sold.)
when trade between 2 legit accounts he just could send it with mail – for free
Well there is an auto-ban system for gold trading in mail, but I agree there are cheaper and more sleuthy ways of circumventing it – just trade gold in a private guild bank.
Somehow I’ve managed to send lots of gold and items between my two accounts without being banned. Maybe just lucky, but a fair bit of stuff (hundreds of gold, a full set of 1st edition minis, etc). Perhaps there’s an algorithm that figured out that they were exchanging other items first (low-level stuff to help the second account level up, etc). Using the TP for this seems very inefficient.
I’ve also given away a legendary. Perhaps that generated human review, but it certainly didn’t trigger a ban. OTOH, there was some discussion (mail & pm) before I mailed it, so that may have helped if there was manual review.
It indicates an increase in disposable income and an increase in desire for something at the Gem Shop. Both need to be present for the exchange rate to spike as much as it does.
While this is a possible scenario (my point), it is also possible that there are just fewer gems available for sale for gold. If the latter scenario is true, then the exchange rate should move like the sell and buy sides balanced.
Economics theory proposes a demand curve, which holds that there will be some demand even at high prices. There is also a supply curve, meaning more supply will be available at higher prices; the shapes of those curves are determined by factors external to the market itself.
A big increase in the gold : gem ratio strongly suggests there has been inflation
It suggests no such thing.
What really bothered me is that Ensign omitted part of what I wrote — the quote makes it look like I was arguing a position I’m not — I don’t claim prima facie evidence of inflation from the exchange alone, but rather in the context of a market:
A big increase in the gold : gem ratio strongly suggests there has been inflation — unless you also have a big reduction in the volume of the gold<->gems exchange market. AFAIK the latter information isn’t public.
“strongly” overstates the case, but there is an argument for my position there which I expanded in a followup.
You have disagreed, without any argument or evidence; you’re not likely to convince anyone that way, and it sounds childish. (I have more respect for the rebuttal above, where I was being loose with the term inflation.) You also left out the alternate explanation — unless the volume of transactions has gone down; here I was arguing that the demand curve has shifted due to increased “income” (more gold available):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Link_with_inflation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curveFor the record, I don’t think inflation is bad — I think it’s a necessary feature of a healthy economy. (And I personally benefited from the increased gems:gold ratio — I’ve never bought gems via gold … I value my time too much, though you couldn’t tell based on how much time I spend on this game.)
I just think it’s misleading to assert that a change in one exchange rate is emphatically not inflation. It’s not inaccurate, but it is misleading.
You appear to be confused. The person making a completely unsupported assertion without any argument or evidence is you. Not only are you not likely to convince anyone with that tactic, anyone with even a basic grasp of the concept understands why Ensign’s response was sufficient.
It may make you feel better about yourself, but asserting that I presented no arguments is bizarre when you then spend time responding to them.
TL;DR of my main argument: an increase in this exchange rate is not inflation, but it suggests inflation iff volume hasn’t changed; and I can’t make an assertion about volume.
The argument about the demand curve should be obvious based on first principles.
I don’t really agree with the OP … I just think that the dismissals miss the point.
To actually talk about inflation, we would have to agree on a bucket of goods to track. Would you agree that the materials to make legendary weapons qualifies? After sampling from gw2spidy, I’m not sure it’d prove me right, but I am curious and had intended to write code against their API anyway.
An increase in the Gold:Gem conversion rate implies exactly one thing, a increase in the demand for gems relative to the demand for gold. Can such behavior occur while inflation is occurring? Yes. Can such behavior occur while inflation is not occurring? Absolutely. In fact, we can often expect to see this behavior when inflation is not occurring. The change in Gold:Gems exchange is approximately equal at implying inflation as the count of deer I saw on my drive home from work today versus yesterday. That is to say there’s absolutely nothing which can be inferred.
This is where I think what you’re saying is not inaccurate, but it is misleading. There is clearly a relationship between these:
- the ease at which one acquires gold in-game
- the amount of gold players are willing to spend buying gems
That relationship only affects the demand side, a potential mechanism for causality is obvious, and we can make a coherent/testable hypothesis about this.
Without data to support it, the hypothesis proves nothing, but it’s different from the deer you saw.
So I was browsing just for the giggles, and I stumbled upon this.
Guess there’s still one left out there. Can we maybe (please?) get a confirmation whether this is a flip or not? :O
I think you’re misreading — the lowest offer to sell a perm hairstyle contract is above the highest offer to buy eternity — but below the lowest offer to sell eternity. Looking at the history, the last sell offer was 2200g … the buy offer is 1800g, and has been 1600-1800g for a while. The 2200g sell offer some weeks ago might have been flipped — but that doesn’t seem like a lot of profit for a fair bit of risk. (15% of 3300 → 485g -- so at most 615g profit — and the whole amount is tied up, with some risk that the item will be re-introduced.)
Eternity is more expensive than the perm hairstyle contract — but not much more expensive.
Inflation (more gold available to players)
Inflation is not what you think it is.
I’ll concede that adding money to the money supply isn’t inflation. I added that parenthetical because I was using the term colloquially, but I should have just said increased money supply. That said, standard economics theory typically assumes that the monetary exchange equation applies, and increasing the money supply (without other changes like making more goods available) will cause commodity prices to increase.
I’ll stand by my assertion that unless the volume of transactions went down, increased gold:gem prices are evidence of inflation due to increased money supply.
A big increase in the gold : gem ratio strongly suggests there has been inflation
It suggests no such thing.
You have disagreed, without any argument or evidence; you’re not likely to convince anyone that way, and it sounds childish. (I have more respect for the rebuttal above, where I was being loose with the term inflation.) You also left out the alternate explanation — unless the volume of transactions has gone down; here I was arguing that the demand curve has shifted due to increased “income” (more gold available):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply#Link_with_inflation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curve
For the record, I don’t think inflation is bad — I think it’s a necessary feature of a healthy economy. (And I personally benefited from the increased gems:gold ratio — I’ve never bought gems via gold … I value my time too much, though you couldn’t tell based on how much time I spend on this game.)
I just think it’s misleading to assert that a change in one exchange rate is emphatically not inflation. It’s not inaccurate, but it is misleading.
Except the exchange rate is controlled to some degree by ANet.
ANet controls the goods and price levels of everything in the gem store, the gold generation rates in game, and the production functions of every item in game. That’s more than enough levers to pull to put the exchange rate wherever they want it to b. It’s not a question of whether they can interfere, but whether interfering would do anything good for the game.
I don’t think using these levers is quite as easy as you make it sound, but otherwise I agree with the above.
Clearly the exchange rate is going to get hammered as new rewards continue to be released primarily through the gem store while in-game gold rewards languish. The question is at what point this breaks down, since players are increasingly farming to buy gems to get the new rewards while the players throwing cash at gold to buy (old) rewards should only continue to diminish.
These comments above are purely personal opinion, and hardly qualify as an explanation for changes in the gems:gold exchange rate.
In-game gold rewards languish and new rewards are primarily released through the gem store? At this point (after various account/char unlocks) — I’m mostly disinterested in everything in the gem store … if I were to buy gems again, it’d mostly be to sell for gold to reduce grinding. (I guess I could get another couple of char slots, but there’s nothing else I can see buying via the gem store.)
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The gold to gem rate on the exchange is not a measure of inflation. If you consider how the exchange works and interacts with players you’ll realize that it’s a great measure of only one thing…
While technically true, this is also at best incomplete. Inflation (more gold available to players) will affect the demand curve for gems via gold (i.e. how many gems will be bought via gold at any given price). Increasing the gold : gems ratio will probably make more gems available (people like me, disinterested in farming) — that’s a dampening effect for inflation in the cost of gems, but it’s complicated by other factors (e.g. I’m less happy with where the game is going now, and so I’m spending much less RM).
A big increase in the gold : gem ratio strongly suggests there has been inflation — unless you also have a big reduction in the volume of the gold<→gems exchange market. AFAIK the latter information isn’t public.
So I’ve seen a lot of really bad math, outrageous claims and all sorts of speculation concerning ascended gear and how much it increases your damage. I decided enough is enough, it is time to put the rumors to rest and show the actual numbers.
This is a quote from your first message in this thread. I had interpreted it as meaning that ascended equipment doesn’t give a big advantage over other gear, i.e. that the ascended tier doesn’t move GW2 towards vertical progression, where you have to keep updating your gear to be able to keep up. (The people arguing this are the people arguing that you can do everything in PvE in rare gear. I assume they mean to exclude Tequatl, though.)
The biggest problem I see here (in PvE) is that zerkers are gaining a 17% increase in damage while condition users are only gaining 5%, with other mixes of gear gaining somewhere between those numbers.
Here it sounds like you’re arguing that the biggest problem is that ascended armor makes condition builds even less viable compared with zerker for PvE. Unfortunately, that is an argument I tend to agree with.
IMO — even if it’s only 5%, that is a big deal for WvW. Superior numbers will out-weigh this for overall victory, but in WvW I do some 1v1s — and if you lose those, it makes it harder to carry out small-group operations.
The weapons alone are a ~5% increase for direct damage builds. Weapon damage is a big deal for direct damage builds, so it has a much larger impact on said builds versus condition builds.
Could at least put in some effort before making a thread like this.
This thread is about the increase in condition damage. Weapon damage has absolutely 0 impact on condition damage so i’m not sure why you are suggesting I include it. I’m unclear on what additional “effort” you think I should have put in.
And a 5% increase in my direct damage is not a 5% increase in my overall dps.
Looking at scepter auto-attack for necro:
skill multiplier = 0.35
Since condition spec gear contains no power I will have the base 916 power in both exotic and ascended. Weapon damage is 940-1060 for ascended and 895-1010 for exotic.
averages to: 1000 and 952.5 respectively. We’ll use 2600 as standard armor rating
916*.35*1000/2600= 123 dmg
916*.35*952.5/2600= 117.5 dmgIt has a .5 second cast but it is a chain and has a delay. the 3 attack chain takes 3 seconds to execute fully. so it adds 123 dps and 117.5dps respectively to the overall dps.
So my original calculation becomes 5.2% overall change if I account for weapon damage. I can add in the changes to crit damage if you REALLY want, but the change will be another 0.1% at most.
As i’ve stated before and will state again, this calculation is for condition damage, if you want zerker stat changes you’ll have to look elsewhere. But any statement that gives a blanket x% increase is just crap, because differences are huge between specs. Condition users get one of the lowest changes in %’s.
Even if it only increases your DPS by 5%, it also increases your durability — making it easier to spend all your time up and doing damage. Any assertion that ascended gear doesn’t make the game easier due to such synergies is … deliberately obtuse.
And at this point, for PvE, crit dmg clearly important, and the benefit there from ascended is likely > 10%. I’m happy to group with one person doing condition damage — but the rest should be doing direct damage or DPS + support. (I’m more the latter, as I play guard and ele.)
The weapons alone are a ~5% increase for direct damage builds. Weapon damage is a big deal for direct damage builds, so it has a much larger impact on said builds versus condition builds.
Could at least put in some effort before making a thread like this.
The weapons itself do not add 5% damage to direct damage builds. Ascended weapons are 5% more damage than exotic, but that does not add 5% more damage, Weapon damage is X% of the total damage someone can put out, Ascended is adding 5% to that X%, which does not equal to 5% more damage overall.
The formulas aren’t that hard — direct damage includes a product of the derivative of 3 stats:
direct_dmg =~ (1-crit_rate)attack_power + (crit_rate(1.5+crit dmg)*attack_power)
Now — individual ascended pieces don’t raise each of those by 5%. But trinkets have a disproportionate boost (for crit dmg, 6% — 44% vs 38%), and increasing each part by 4% gives a total increase which is certainly larger than 4% (the left side — which may be much smaller anyway — decreases by 4%, and the right side increases by ~12% (1.04^3)).
[formula edited to include non-crit dmg]
Increasing DPS has a disproportionate effect for mobs which have a healing mechanic or a timer, because the mobs were presumably balanced at the previous values. Alternately, if you don’t go pure zerker — other attributes also have some synergies in fights (e.g. vitality + healing is much better than either alone).
I have ascended gear on a number of my chars; I don’t really mind that much of the content is easier now, but that statement is certainly true. Personally — I’m hoping that ANet finds ways to include challenge which doesn’t lock out players who aren’t interested in difficult content. (I.e. something like GW1’s Hard Mode for instances — though fractals comes close to this, and now I’m going through progression for fractals … time permitting.)
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I´m not asking for a build, it´s a simple question.
In your opinion, if I have 35% crit chance how much crit damage should I have and why?
Or if I want to use 65-68% critical damage, at how many crit chance should I play?
Just want to understand if i´m wasting too many points in precision or crit chance or if these stats are ok
As advice — I would aim for 50-60% crit rate without fury. With a good group, you’ll get fury and perhaps some add’l precision, putting you near the limit. Given on-proc effects for crit rate, it’s probably worth it to do this — though the math for pure dps will generally give the largest marginal reward for increasing the stat which is lower. E.g. assuming 3% crit rate =~ 5% crit dmg:
from 0% crit dmg 35% crit rate:
1.175 -> 1.19 crit rate or 1.1925 crit dmg (crit dmg is better)
from 50% crit dmg 35% crit rate:
1.35 -> 1.38 crit rate or 1.3675 crit dmg (crit rate is better)
from 70% crit dmg 35% crit rate:
1.42 -> 1.456 crit rate or 1.4375 crit dmg (crit rate is better)
from 30% crit dmg and 60% crit rate:
1.48 -> 1.504 crit rate or 1.51 crit dmg (crit dmg is better)
(this seems like it’d be fun to create a calculator … but I’d guess that there’s one somewhere if you search).
Even when crit dmg is better, it’s only marginally better until you get to a much higher crit rate.
And of course, there are some things which can’t be crit’ed, meaning only power would benefit you for those.
(edit: lol, “as” + “5%” => kitten)
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It was never going to live up to gw1, it’s just what it is. I have my Legendary, but more, I’ve met people through getting it. Not much left to do now. Took me so long to get to level 20 in gw1 and I was so chuffed, took me about a month to get lvl 80 in gw2. Doesn’t matter but I don’t think the genius behind gw1 is in gw2. xx
Took you so long to get to 20…. in which game? If you’re going straight prophecies sure, playing it in order. It can take you some time, I suppose. In factions and nightfall it took me 4 hours to max a character to 20, and that was taking my time.
It took me a lot longer than 4h to get to level 20 w/ Night Fall — or at least it felt that way for the first characters I played. Once EotN offered level 10 chars the chance to do boxing, then it was really fast to level to 20. But especially for my first character … Elona’s quests/rewards level seemed to require getting to mainland (Kourna) before you got to level 20. It’s been a while, but I don’t recall going through all those primary quests (+ secondary quests, since I did a bunch of them) as being very fast.
He’s not after a maximized build (because the answer is just zerkers for that).
If I understand correctly, he’s asking for a build where he gets equal damage increases by balancing between crit damage and chance.
You won’t be wasting stat points in crit damage because you damage increases regardless …. but you won’t be getting equivalent damage increases between crit damage and chance until you reach about 50-60% crit chance.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Your not really going to get many left over gear slots if you target that crit chance anyways. Maybe it will be a more relevant question once we get ascended gear.
The problem with this question (as phrased here) is that it depends on the exchange rate between % crit dmg and % crit rate — which is not constant across equipment or across traits.
At 50% crit rate and 50% crit dmg, when you crit you do 2.0 dmg, and you do this 50% of the time — so your average dmg is 1.5 (== 2.0 * .5 + .5). If you increase precision by 64, you increase crit rate by 3%, and the new average damage multiplier is 1.53 (== 2.0 * .53 + .47). If you increase critical damage by 5% (the ratio for 1h weapons), then you only increase the average damage multiplier to 1.525 (== 2.05 * .5 + .5).
Now — let’s assume 90% crit rate and 90% crit damage — average of 2.26 (== 2.4 * .9 + .1). Increase crit rate by 3% and you get 2.302 (2.4 * .93 + .07); increase crit damage by 5% and you get 2.305 (2.45 * .9 + .1). Somewhere between those, the curve crosses … but you may have other sources of precision and critical damage.
If the ratio is 1:13 or worse for crit dmg, precision is often better — or approximately as good. If the ratio is 1:5 (what you get for trinkets), then crit damage is probably better. If you’re really aiming to optimize this, you have to consider the ratio on a per-item basis:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature#Comparison_of_numeric_vs._percentage_attributes
I think it’s fine. The only downfall is the loot. I think they should of made it more rewarding, especially for players that are able to defeat the boss. Teq was or is unique compared to other bosses around the game. It took more than a 8 player group and auto attack. I would love to see some of the other bosses change to that.
I couldn’t disagree more about loot. If the event isn’t fun, increasing loot doesn’t make it more fun — it just means you’ve added extrinsic rewards to compensate for the fact that the gameplay isn’t something you enjoy.
That’s exactly the wrong tack.
The event should be changed so that it doesn’t require camping in Sparkfly Fen waiting for the spawn. It would also be nice if it wasn’t a gear/DPS check — mandatory gear treadmills are lame. The things which actually make Tequatl hard aren’t things which are fun to overcome.
The mechanics are kinda fun, at least for a while.
My home world has killed him only 7 times; not surprisingly, I didn’t see any of those. (It’d be impossible for most people to do so, due to the map limit). I’ve beaten him a couple of times w/ TTS (when invited by someone in TTS, since they wanted more bodies in the map).
When it comes to spvp at least, where you can just roll up any class/build on the fly, if your goal is to be effective you really shouldn’t play a Guardian as anything but a center point bunker. Other classes do all the other roles better and its not just Warrior. For example as a roamer and dps there are multiple classes that do it better then Guards. I perosnally just feel its bad class design that has a class do one role at a 10 and then all there other roles at about a 6. Ideally every class would do a couple of things at a 10 level and then all other things at about an 8 level. This is all just theorectical using a 1-10 scale with 1 being the worst and 10 the best. I would be happy if they would just change the fury duration on meds to 5 or 7 seconds and give us some more swiftness. Not really asking for much.
When I played sPvP, I played a meditation guard — scepter/focus, sword/torch. It has decent spikes, decent condition removal, and at least decent sustained damage; and I could take most of the people I played against (all classes) in 1v1. True, I melted quickly once done with defensive skills in 1v{2,3} … but I was often the top scorer or second for soloq.
Not saying I’m great at it, or that guard is the best class for this — most of the people I faced may have just been worse than me — but I find found the spikes from the above pretty good, along with mobility from sword 2 and one of the meditations. And since meditations are all instant now, I’d have a bit more flexibility with my build … (either keep the old trait for constant fury, or look at other trees).
I did play with a few people who thought that the only role guard can play is bunker — but they generally really sucked (i.e. couldn’t 1v1 or bunker or … anything that I saw).
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Is there a way to tell if the Cathedral of Glorious Victory is uncontested in other servers? I am trying to buy some shards but in my server its NEVER uncontested anymore. If anyone reads this, let me know if your server is uncontested. I would greatly appreciate it!!!
http://us.gw2stuff.com/en/events/us
http://us.gw2stuff.com/en/events/eu
Look for a dark blue circle — right now it looks like only TC has it open in the US — and no servers have it open in the EU.
Losers? What if im rich and have cash to waste? The loser is
The guy who stays in the basement and farm champs for
15 hours a day .If you have cash to waste I suggest donating it to a charity or good cause, such as the Humane Society or Christmas time toy drives for underprivileged children. I realize that the gem store helps pay for new content in GW2, but dropping several hundred dollars on a single virtual item that you’ll eventually get bored with and move on from is ridiculous when you consider the good that money could do elsewhere.
I give a fair bit to charity — much more than I’ve spent on GW2 (which was quite a lot, btw). But this is a false dichotomy, and it’s not always clear that more money to charity produces better results.
Try playing against Tanky builds.
Was that for me? I can generally wear down tanky builds — takes longer, but guardian sword w/ crits has pretty good sustained DPS. The ones I sometimes have trouble with are hybrids who can do decent damage while running away (usually necro, engineer, mesmer, ranger).
I don’t use my guard in WvW, much … but in WvW, the question is really how you contribute to your zerg’s effectiveness. I’d use a staff in WvW (staff 2-5 all have some utility, and staff 1 lets you tag fairly effectively), as well as scepter/focus (blast finishers are nice, scepter 2 is good for taking out siege, scepter 3 is good for stopping runners). I think you could make it work with other weapons as well, but melee against a zerg doesn’t work well unless your zerg is pushing.
When I play sPvP, I use a meditations guard — scepter/focus, sword/torch. I have two gap-closers (meditation, sword 2); I can generally take out ranged classes with some combination of the above. I can spike fairly well with scepter 3 → scepter 2 → focus 5 → {swap to sword} torch 4 → meditation or sword 2 → {f1 if available} sword 3 or sword 1 while following if they want to kite. It’s true that ranged classes like to kite, and for them I have to follow to keep up melee damage or swap back to scepter -- but most die before this is an issue.
This may be that I’m mostly playing people who are worse than me — I’ve played some rangers and mesmers who give me a good run for my money — but even there I’ve almost always won some of the 1v1 fights.
If you look at the 1y (all data) view on gw2spidy, you can see that the increase last month was an anomaly. Most of the history has the prices around where they are now. They spiked up on the announcement that set 1 minis wouldn’t be sold anymore; though I think that shouldn’t have affected exotics (you’re always getting them by combining, and the set 1 versions are still in the MF drop tables) AFAICT it did.
Decreasing prices is actually good for the average player, even if it’s not good for you — more people can have the item in question. I can understand being unhappy if you bought when prices were high, but here your loss is someone else’s gain. Sorry.
On the flip side, I get sick of people thinking that we should treat a game as work. I have enough work with work. A game should be fun; one which encourages boring repetitive tasks to get rewards has fallen into what I consider bad design.
“Work” in this context actually means “effort”.
You are supposed to invest effort in the game activities. If you get stuff with no effort, it won’t be fun at all. If gathering is too repetitive for your taste, you can gather some of the mats you need and buy the rest.
If effort includes some skill, or some activity which let me practice skills — then I’m happy with it. I’m fine with the idea of differentiating rewards based on something in-game.
OTOH — that “something” should not be willingness to repeat mind-numbingly boring, repetitive tasks, day-after-day. I don’t think that game design fosters a community that’s worth joining.
Let me put it another way — if this was work, the first thing I’d do is automate away the tedious parts, so I could spend “effort” on the interesting parts. Rewarding players for doing tedious operations which don’t involve practicing skills is (IMO) bad design. Maybe you like it; I don’t.
GW2 achievements are a mixed bag. Some encourage users to try new things, or revisit areas they haven’t seen in a while, or join with others in activities. I don’t mind these.
And node farming isn’t so bad once you find a map where the nodes are close to waypoints. And FGS nodes reset in ~5h (though you’re still limited per char/map), so this can be done fairly efficiently if you cycle through chars twice per day. For now, I’m satisfied with trying to make this efficient, and spending only a little time on this.
But saying that it should require effort is different from saying that this is the right way to require effort; and I find it absurd to hear that defense offered by apologists for bad design. The complaints I’ve seen are about the specific “efforts” required (tedious or uninteresting) and the amount of effort required for BiS gear. (I haven’t really complained about the latter, but I do understand the complaints. I don’t think ANet can pretend that BiS gear is available to casual players.)
Moving nodes keeps the game from being a farm run. God forbid you have to find the expensive crafting materials that you’re just going to flip on the TP after you run all your alts. Sorry for the jaded tone but I’m sick of hearing everyone whine about having to work for stuff.
On the flip side, I get sick of people thinking that we should treat a game as work. I have enough work with work. A game should be fun; one which encourages boring repetitive tasks to get rewards has fallen into what I consider bad design.
You may think that being willing to grind through this makes you more deserving … I don’t think there’s anything admirable about enduring grinding. (Which means I consider my AP score (>12k) more of an embarrassment than anything else. Not enough to quit yet, though; I guess there are still things I find fun or satisfying.)
I’m OK with node changes on server reset — keeps things more interesting. I don’t think it stops bots in the slightest, but there are sites which limit the tedious part of running around the map (and yes, I’ve occasionally updated gw2nodes.com), and I kind of like that form of community.
Paying $600+ USD for a virtual item that instantly becomes valueless the moment you leave/stop playing/servers shut down in Guild Wars 2.
I don’t call that winning.
I call that a bad investment.
If you’re willing to throw away money that easily. Give it to me. I assure it will be better spent.
You don’t seem to understand that spending time is (in terms of economic output) similar to spending money — time spent playing could also have been spent doing something which earns you money (or which saves money you would otherwise have spent).
Time and money spent on the game is spent for entertainment. If the game shuts down, all you had to show for your time and money is the entertainment value you gained — just like going to see a performance.
$600 may seem like a lot to you — but then ask yourself: how many hours do you spend on the game? Amortize the cost over that, and compare to what you spend on other kinds of entertainment.
I’m unhappy with where Anet seems to be going (I think they’re using the wrong metrics), so I’ve stopped spending money — but when I had fewer complaints, I was fine spending money on the game; I didn’t consider it an investment, I considered it entertainment (expensive compared to some kinds of entertainment, cheap compared to other kinds).
I wouldn’t regret that money spent (the total was substantially more than $600, though mostly for upgrades to chars/accounts) even if I do stop playing or the game shuts down. I spent that while I was being entertained; there are things I’m very unhappy with now, but the game has been fun.
Thing is it really isnt.
I vehemently disagree. I’ve had nowhere near the same amount of fun in build making as I have in GW1, and certainly not the same amount of interesting and meaningful options. There’s also no longer the emphasis on class differentiation: There’s no longer a “jump” in playstyle between classes that was as interesting as warriors to monks.
As such, GW2 is one of the most straightforward and basic games I’ve played.
I’ve played all 8 classes in GW2; they feel very different to me.. There are many things I’m unhappy with about GW2 (especially: I think the designers are falling into the trap of encouraging participation via extrinsic rewards — loot — rather than focusing on making the content actually fun to play).
I’m not entirely happy with the class system — I did have more fun playing with builds in GW1.
But the play style for heavy / medium / light classes feels very different. Guard and Warrior feel somewhat similar, but Guardian has utilities which are rather different from Warriors’ — and I like using those + magic weapons, so the way I play these two is not the same.
All the rest are so obviously different … ele with attunement swapping, mesmer with clones, ranger with spirits & pets, thief with stealth, engineer with kits, necro with death shroud and minions …
There are common threads in how fields and finishers work — you just get a different set of each for each class — but managing your class-specific skills plenty to differentiate.
Because I certainly think gear grinds and temporary content – and other things – are absolutely harmful. Of course, I also know that some people enjoy kittenroaches…
This I agree with.
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1. Those guides depend on trading post prices for their formulas and crafting advise. They assume you’re going to buy everything needed from the trading post. There are cheaper ways to go about it
2) I believe the only things we can craft are Lump of Mithrillium, Deldrimor Steel Ingot, Glob of Elder Spirit Residue, Spiritwood Plank, Spool of Thick Elonian Cord and Elonian Leather Square. Is this correct? And with the once a day requirement won’t this be slow?
Completely incorrect. You can only craft those items after you reach level 500, and we still can’t craft those leather based items. At least, weaponsmith and artificer can’t. I haven’t finished Huntsman yet.
3) Many people in these threads mentioned the diminishing returns making this indefeasible past a point though some people say they made it all the way from 450 to 470. About how many of these would we need to craft to get to a good stopping point (460,465, 470 whichever is feasable)? I want to try to calculate how much this stage will cost me and how many days I will have to wait with the time gating.
From 400 to 425 you craft ancient logs to planks and Ori ore to ingots. One stack of each material should be enough to reach level 425 if you’re using maximum crafting boosters.
From 425 to 450 you have to “discover” around 8 or 9 exotic weapons from the craft you are leveling (also using maximum crafting boosters). Artificer can also discover a number of potions. It’s also possible here to discover rare level gear but the crafting xp isn’t all that good.
From 450 to 475 you can craft all your bloodstone stuff, dragonite and empyreal stuff. That stuff turns white at 475 and you get no more crafting xp from crafting them.
From 475 to 500 you’ll have to “discover” around 12 exotic weapons, or a lot of rares, or for artificing, potions.
After 500 you can start to craft Lump of Mithrillium, Deldrimor Steel Ingot, Glob of Elder Spirit Residue, Spiritwood Plank and they weapons that use those materials.
This is mostly wrong please delete.
Care to explain what’s wrong? I would like to know, not trolling. Thank you.
The last part (after 500) is certainly wrong — you can craft ascended mats at 450. E.g. see:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lump_of_Mithrillium
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Deldrimor_Steel_Ingot
— you can craft both of those at 450. You can’t craft a lot (unless this is your second crafting discipline and you’ve stored up Lump of Mithrillium etc), since the former is account-bound and the latter requires the former — but you can get some of the path from 450 to 475 with them.
You can’t use Deldrimor Steel Ingots further until level 500.
I think the estimates about numbers of exotics are approximately correct. And if you’re short only a little at the end it’s cheaper to discover a few rare recipes (the base experience is 0, but you do get the discovery rewards, and for level-80 rares this isn’t too bad).
If you go necro, I’d recommend taking a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKcDOIgEGLU — I played around with that build, and it is fun.
But I prefer guard. Great support skills, you can trait for good DPS, and even full glass cannon, it’s not as squishy as my poor ele; it’ll be less squishy than necro. (Also, runes of the traveler fix what I used to find most frustrating — they give a passive 25% speed buff.) I prefer my ele for WvW, but guard is fun in PvE and PvP. OTOH, I think the same can be said of necro.
Last I tried this, you could make a weapon or piece of armor account bound by transmuting with something white or blue (choose the white/blue stats) — this makes the item account bound. You can then get the original item (now account-bound) back with a transmutation splitter.
bloodstone, dragonite, and empyreal aren’t time-gated — they’re the ones you can store up to make the 450 → 500 part less expensive. I think I focused on these through around 460-465, but this depends how much you’ve stored and how quickly you want to get through it. (I used a crafting booster, so at some point waiting would make it more expensive if i let that expire … though I have enough from dailies/etc that I probably won’t use them all up.)
gw2crafts.net has a guide for 400→500, but it doesn’t assume use of these materials (which may or may not be available for your second pass through).
Before all you had to do was run up to his foot and afk auto attack. No mechanics, no threat of death, nothing. He’s a giant dragon, he shouldn’t be less threatening than a champion bandit. Sounds like the only reason you thought he was interesting before was because he visually looked cool (something that stayed the same).
As you have already said you can join a guild dedicated to killing Tequatl or just guest on to a server that has him on farm during the daily reset (I know TC kills him/has a good attempt at killing him during the daily reset encounter).
Just because less people fight him does not indicate that he is in a worse state. He is currently designed to be a boss fight that requires more coordination than the other meta-bosses. If people don’t want to deal with him they have plenty of alternative bosses they can fight. If people do want to fight him they can easily do so with a little effort (join a Teq slaying guild). The only major problems with the encounter imo are over-reliance on turret controllers, how the first 25% is the hardest push, and most importantly, the lack of in-game tools used to form large parties.
Regardless, the difficulty of the encounter itself isn’t a problem and I can’t wait until more of these meta-bosses actually become some-what challenging (not saying all meta-bosses should be as hard as Teq, but all the dragons should be at least).
The things that make Tequatl difficult aren’t actually fun to overcome. (The mechanics of the fight are fun. I like the jump pads, and the events in the middle to protect the asuran tech. I found his wave-of-death when we failed the defense event appropriate and amusing. But these aren’t the things that make it difficult.)
The things that make Tequatl difficult are:
(1) gear check: the timer means this is a gear/build check; someone freshly to 65 is not going to contribute the same as an 80 with ascended gear, and this will show; this is why you have to camp in a map with a group which is ready, geared, and spec’ed appropriately.
(2) spawn window: sitting in sparkfly fen waiting for Tequatl to spawn for 1h is not my idea of fun.
I’ve done Tequatl a few times now with TTS — twice successfully (one one other time when they hadn’t finished organization the overflow before it spawned). I’d find it fun for a while — even with failures — if it didn’t involve camping out in the map to have a decent chance of success.
You can make up for non-BiS gear somewhat with fire ele powder … but that only helps if you get him into the burn phase soon enough, and if everyone (or almost everyone uses it). And this is still in line with it being a gear check.
GW1/GW2 are the only MMOs I’ve played (well, since the days of MUDs). I hadn’t understood why people dislike the gear-check aspect of WoW, since I’ve never played WoW. Tequatl taught me.
I will not use the stupid forge for precursors. I’ve watched my brother and a couple of others throw hundreds of gold worth of exotics for jack kitten.
RNG is RNG.
I’ve seen people burn through 800g of exos and end up with trash. I’ve seen someone drop 200g and get 3 precursors.
I’ve been playing for a year, and I’ve never gotten a thing. One of our new members got a Dusk drop from a guild mission, a week after turning 80.
RNG is RNG.
I personally think Precursors should have an (extremely lengthy and difficult) alternate method of being acquired besides insert 4 exos into mystic toilet, flush, repeat.
I am familiar with the statistics, and aware that humans do a bad job estimating the likelihood of rare occurrences. And of course, those who get good drops — or are frustrated with their poor luck — are more likely to be loud about it, so there’s significant selection bias here in the forums and in the game.
But on the converse side, saying that it’s an RNG doesn’t actually prove that it produces an even distribution. (Even if it did, it’d produce results we consider unfair — but there’s no guarantee that it’s even fair in a mathematical sense.)
I actually got two precursors from the MF (after throwing far more than the cost of them on the TP in the form of thousands of rares and hundreds of exotics). Oddly, both were after I’d mostly given up — not when I was throwing in 50 a day, but when I randomly threw in a few later.
The process has lead me to hate the Mystic Forge as a way to get precursors — for the same reason that I dislike the lottery (that also means I refuse to buy the precursor I actually wanted from the TP). I could afford to pay cash → gems → gold → precursor pretty easily … but that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Diablo III’s Hell dificulty requires a loooooooooooonnnnnggg grind for you to even have a slight chance.
This is the only one that I’ve played of the games you mentioned — but I think you mean Inferno difficulty. IIRC Hell wasn’t that hard … I lost interest while doing Inferno (in Act II IIRC). I understand that grind can also be a hard requirement, rather than merely encouraged … but I would prefer to play games that don’t encourage grind (you can’t stop players who like it, but you don’t have to entice them).