Guild Wars 2

I’ve noticed culling a lot more in pve since the recent changes. Before I would only see during large-scale events with lots of players around (the highly farmed Orr events and dragon champ meta-events), but now I’m seeing in with less crowded events and more often during the larger ones.

Just a few minutes ago, I had an interesting fight with an Alpine Skelk in Frostgorge. It would stealth, attack me while still stealthed, but have a noticable delay before reappearing. I don’t recall them having such a delay in their de-stealthing before. I think it might be culling similar to the widescale compaints of thief stealth culling in wvw.

axel hansson.6705:

Avatar.1923:

massive amounts of fractals, or dailies, or whatever is needed for the “gear”.

thats the problem, how fast do you put your treadmill??

lets say a casual player starts the game now.
hes kind of 300-400h behind already.

You can’t really say that either. For a casual player, having the best gear in the game isn’t going to be a focus compared to a hardcore gamer.

But that casual player might be a lot happier (and likely to keep playing) when the best gear isn’t so far out of reach. The idea of having ascended earrings added while you are still working to get your amulet can be rather discouraging. The incremental addition of each ascended gear piece itself is a treadmill.

The player this is ‘best’ for, is the so-called “content locust” that will come back to GW2, rush to get their next piece for their ‘main’(or only char), then wander off to another game till the next ascended piece is out. A player like myself, that has multiple characters and no real “main”, are left with weeks/months(fractals) or months/years(laurels) of work to obtain this gear.

Is driving away a decidated player like me worth it to keep the player that is only here long enough to get a new shiny? I think I’m more likely to spend money in the gemstore…more char slots for more alts to see other personal story branches, for example.

I do like (some of) the individual fractals, but not the overall concept. It’s just repeating the same short dungeons over and over, but slightly harder each time. I might to do them if there were 2-3x more Fractals added to the mix. I’ve done each a couple times, and that’s as much as I want to see of it. The grind and (first step of) treadmill they represent is major deterent for me, as well.

The ascended gear…I’m still in the camp that thinks it is a complete 180 on the originally advertised/hyped selling points of the game. The recent additional method of obtaining the gear (laurels) did nothing but reassure me that ascended items will forever be a ridiculous timesink or FotM grind.

I label FtoM/ascended as a grind because takes repeatedly completing the same few mini-dungeons in order to obtain. I do apply this label to other dungeon gear because it almost completely optional and cosmetic, aside from a few stat combos that are not craftable or available elsewhere. I do not consider ascended gear as ‘optoinal’ because it is absolutely/undeniably better than any other gear.

Because every world will have reset ratings the system will treat the February 1st matchup as the first matchup and will calculate the ratings accordingly. The new ratings will then be calculated normally in the way that you’re already familiar with. We expect several weeks of volatility while the ratings settle down but we believe that it will ultimately yield a more correct result more quickly than letting the current ratings persist. That also means that the coming month or two will be a fantastic time to fight for your world’s place in the rankings!

Additionally, we’re taking advantage of the reset to revisit some of the math behind the ratings. I’ll have more to post on that once we’ve crunched some numbers and made some decisions.

The information on MOS about the new math appears to be wrong. There are changes coming, but comments in the stickied thread indicate that they are to be after the reset.

I hope they do end up changing the calculations for next week, because the current predictions are a nightmare.

Unfortunately, FC (among others) was the victim of a flawed system that had one very huge mistake left open for far too long. Free transfers. Large guilds looking to hop servers for free, had an easier time moving to low tier servers because they weren’t full constantly and didn’t already have a long wvw queues. Of course, this put them into a matchup versus much weaker servers that didn’t have a massive wvw guild presence.

Tiers 7 and 8 were a breeding ground for this kind of disaster, but those trails of destruction go all way up through tiers 4, 5, and 6 as well. Kaineng is continuing to dominate scores in T3 this week, although their opponents are putting up more of a fight than anyone before them.

FC had to endure the beginnings of several bandwagon servers, but with free transfers gone that is coming to an end. With existing rankings, SF would be gone in a week or two, and Henge of Denravi would be bumped down to T8. I don’t think that is a matchup FC would win, but it would be similar to what SF was before they got transfers. FC should hold a solid 2nd place trailing a bit behind HoD, maybe winning out some weeks. I think that is the most even matchup FC has available.

Looking at all of the tiers, this week’s matchups are some of the most balanced we have seen in a long time. There are 3 points of imbalance.
1) Kaineng in T3
2) Ehmry Bay in T5
3) Sorrow’s Furnace in T8

Given just another week or two of the current rankings, a few (most likely good) things should happen.

1)Kaineng will trade places with Fort Aspenwood, putting them in into T2. FA will be in T3 with Maguuma and Dragonbrand. It’s a matchup FA has already won by a decent margin, but it’s far more balanced the current T3 match. Mag, or maybe DB, will likely spend a week dominating T4(my tier) before this happens, but that’s an acceptable casualty on the road to balance.

2) Ehmry Bay will move up to T4 with Yak’s Bend and Crystal Desert, pushing Stormbluff Isle into T5. Again, there may still be some imbalance along the road to this, but EB has proven themselves to be a solid T4 contender just a few weeks ago. YB/CD/EB is a matchup I would love to see happening in 1-2 weeks.

3)Sorrows Furance will move to T7, pushing Henge of Denravi into T8. As I said above, this is the most balanced matchup T8 has any hopes for at the moment. SF will likely continue doing well into T7, but the matchup will be a improvement over the current one. They will end up at the top of T7 or being in T6 with a few more weeks.

We are so close to finally having balance, and resetting it into chaos makes absolutely no sense. The best thing that can happen right now, is to apply the new math to the current matchups/ratings to allow this balance to happen even faster. Maybe even some manual/forced tweaking to ensure T2 Kaineng, T4 Ehmry, and T7 Sorrow’s next week.

With this coming reset, that is gone, and we are back to weeks of domination as high tier servers like DB and Maguuma are pushed down to T8. As of now, next week’s matchup for FC is Devona’s Rest and Isle of Janthir. IoJ lost a huge bit of their population, so I doubt they will be much assistance in stopping DR’s train of destruction from stomping FC into the ground. And once that is over, FC has a chance of meeting Maguuma/Dragonbrand for the next week.

If I was on FC, I would be hoping for no reset and looking forward 1-2 weeks when SF is gone. Because the alternative is spending those 2 weeks in matchups that make SF look like a pack of toddlers.

style.6173:

I do not understand all the QQ from the whiners. Just enjoy the new matchups. It will be fun seeing new servers. In a few weeks, the servers who should be at the top will be there, and the servers who should be at the bottom will be there as well.

It’s not people whining, it’s people that don’t want to see every tier having horribly outmatched servers. Next week’s T1 matchup consists of this week’s #4, 13, and 22. I doubt that anyone on #22 (or even 13) will be having much fun next week. Ehmry is a solid T4 contender, that I can vouch for, but they are going to be destroyed by Blackgate. Sorrow’s Furnace will be lucky to get 10-15 potential points at any given time.

The most mismatched battle this week is nothing compared to the 600k/5k/5k matches we will see after the reset.

Darek.1836:

Wrong.
FC beat pre-transfer SF.
Check and mate.

FC barely won a single matchup, and SF won the next week by a larger margin. And I highly doubt they had a lot of tranfsers the week after coming in second. Bandwagoners would have been more likely to move to FC. To be honest, both of them looked to be good matchups, but pre-transfer SF proved they were quite capable of besting FC.

And this is a forum, not a game of chess.

Detharos.3157:

If it were up to me, server tiers would of been arranged based on surveyed WvW population, timezone coverage and all the like rather than all the alternatives. As well as whether they’d move up or down.

This would actually make a lot of sense, and would have stopped the trainwreck of the bandwagoner low tier servers moving up through the rankings.

I’m glad you find the simple truth of the matter entertaining.

I would love to have the matches you had with versus SF last month over the month of hell we had running the DB, Mag, Kain gauntlet. Having to fight tooth and nail to keep a relevant presence on the maps is what wvw is about.

What did YB have for our last few matchups? Losing absolutely everything we had daily, barely being able to hold our home garrison and EB keep during our peak, and not being able to take back anything for more than 10 minutes before a zerg 3-4x our size takes it right back. There was no other server to vulture off of, because they were doing this to both servers they faced.

And right now, with no reset, we would be facing Maguuma again next week when they get pushed out of T3. This is a cycle that is likely to keep happening with them or DB because they aren’t quite good enough for T3, but they are way too good for T4. Those situations are going to happen, and there isn’t anything to change that. But this is still better than having to deal with the train of domination from all the T1-3 servers getting pushed down to low tiers that so many other servers will have to endure.

For every bit of domination that FC had from Kaineng and Devona’s, Kaineng the same thing to everyone else in their wake. FC is not some lone stepchild left out in the cold, rankings and matchups have been chaotic and quite a few servers have suffered because of it.

Now let’s take look at the demon you’re painting SF to be. They have been pushed down from tier 6, because couldn’t hold their own in that tier. They could not hold their own in T7, either. So they got pushed down to your tier. Their road from T6 to T8 gave them beatings as bad as, if not worse, than what FC has suffered in the past months. They did well enough in T8 to barely secure first place, which appears to have gotten them some server transfers (perhaps even from your server). Now we’ve established that pre-tranfer SF was beaten down by the T7 servers, so the T7 servers are better than pre-tranfer SF. Pre-transfer SF was able to win over FC, so pre-transfer SF was better than FC. This means that T7 servers are better than FC, too (they beat the server that beat you). So if SF were to magically move up to T7 right now, FC would be facing Henge of Denravi, which has already proved they can best SF (before transfers). They are going to give you a beating, though it won’t be as bad as what SF is doing this week.

You claim that you will have to fight SF for another 8 weeks, but given their current score gap and rating, I find that hard to believe. They gained 50 points last week, and are doing a lot better this week, while HoD continues to lose rating. Next week, or the week after, they will overtake Henge of Denravi. You won’t win that fight, but it’s the most even matchup you’re going to get. This reset is just going to delay that even farther.

Detharos.3157:

How is SF gonna be stuck with higher tiers for months? It’s gonna lose by a massive blow out to any real tier 1 or tier 2 server and get bumped FAR down to where it belongs pretty kitten fast. It certainly won’t take “months”. And trust me, I know first hand what a higher tier looks like.

They aren’t going to magically drop 3 tiers a week, especially when all the current T1 servers are going to spread out through the lower tiers. I’d guess a month at the minimum. I was on Henge of Denravi when Titan Alliance left, and it took months to fall through the tiers despite having almost no wvw presence at all.

Think about it. How many good matchups have you had in the last few weeks already?

Exactly none, this week excluded. Our past 4-5 matches have been a lot worse than anything SF has ever done to FC. Just take a look at the last few matches Yak’s Bend was in with Kaineng, Dragonbrand, and Maguuma.

Outside a brief week with SF before ironically, they got a transfer boom, my server hasn’t enjoyed being a major figure in its tier since just before Devona’s Rest got its mass transfer boom. That was what, 3 months ago?

I don’t know what you are even talking about here. There is been one week (this week) where SF has done anything close to dominating FC. Looking all the way back to November, your server hasn’t faced SF at all till January, where you had 2 pretty even matchups with them, and one week (last week) where they had a decent lead. Before that FC faced a couple hard matchups with Kaineng and Devona’s Rest due to thier population surges. Both of those servers were far harder on FC than SF has been.

Sorrow’s had a rougher history than FC. During the week’s when FC dealt with Devona’s population increase, SF was two tiers higher doing even worse.

And you say its better if we have to wait another 2-3? And what about Eredon Terrace. Most of you in higher tiers don’t realize due to the points, but a lot of ET’s score comes from playing vulture while we in general have had to bear the brunt of SF’s wrath. The moment SF is gone and the dormant players come active again, Ferg will likely put them as far under us, as we are to Sorrow’s Furnace. In other words at that time, at their expense instead of ours, Eredon Terrace could possibly have to wait ANOTHER 2-3 months to get more balanced opponents depending on how that would turn out.

You’ve had to deal with SF’s “wrath” for one week (this week). YB had to deal with the wrath of DB, Kain, and Mag for a month. As for ET, if FC actually does dominate them that badly, I doubt any servers from higher tiers will be any better for them. We will likely never have close fights in every tier, it’s just so unlikey to happen when there are servers like ET that just don’t have the wvw population for it.

And how is it, you get 1-2 months of imbalanced matchups for servers like yours? Even if you end up with one single server on your level and one weak server, the sheer free points benefiting both from the nonfactor would send your servers up to the higher tiers in very little time at all. Tier 4+ servers will for the most part probably be back there in 3 weeks as far as I see it, not withstanding the fact that Arena Net intends to implement new algorithms to the system, likely to help this situation.

I get 1-2 months of imbalance because it has already happened with Maguuma, Dragonbrand, and Kaineng’s popluation surge. With the reset, Maguuma and Dragonbrand will be below Yak’s bend again, along with Sea of Sorrows, Jade Quarry, Fort Aspenwood, Tarnished Coast, and Santcum of Rall. Every one of those servers will have to pass us (and Sorrow’s Furnace) by to return to their tier. Sure, we won’t have to face all of them, but there are going to be weeks of domination far beyond anything FC would see from SF.

You are far too worried about SF. Take a look at FC’s predicted matchup for next week. Good luck fighting Dragonbrand’s 24/7 full queue. They are going to do the same thing Kaineng did to FC back in December.

Please take a look at the actual history of matchups, because it’s nowhere near the picture you are trying to paint.
http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#history

Edit:
And looking at YB’s matchups for next week….
With the reset we will be in T2 against Blackgate and Darkhaven, which will almost certainly end up with a 450k+ point difference, with YB and DH having barely anything.

Without a reset, YB would likely be against Maguuma for another week, along with Ehmry Bay. Neither of us stand a chance against what bandwagoners turned Mag into. That would be a bad week, but I much prefer that to the onslaught that the reset will subject us to for the next several weeks.

Coming from someone that does wvw quite a bit…

When I see people complaining about the other servers camping the JP, my thought is “good, they are wasting 20+ players on a pointless JP”. That’s a 20 player advantage we have on the battlefied, and we’re not about to give that up for the sake of devoting 20 people to clearing them out. Let them waste time camping, while we cap their towers.

This would all be fixed by removing the badges from the chest. Don’t want to have to wvw to get your legendary? Well, I don’t want to have to farm/grind pve to get all the materials and gold for a precursor. You can get every thing you want without wvw when we can get everything we want without pve.

And as for the people doing the camping…thank you for wasting your server’s queue slots on a pointless activity. I still think it’s a rather pathetic thing to do (fish in a barrel, ya’ know), but your efforts in making our fight easier are much appreciated.

Detharos.3157:

You people in the higher tiers have become selfish. I wouldn’t be surprised if half of those complaining are such servers, that received mass transfers and damaged the ratings of the lower tiers as you moved up. You look to paid transfers as if it alone were a solution to all the WvW and fail to consider the periods of population movement damaged the system as a whole. It’s therefore necessary to fix not only the core problem, (free transfers), but the outlying problems it also created as it continued unanswered (Busted ratings, etc.).

Yes things would of end up balanced eventually AFTER MONTHS MORE. And for the people who have been waiting 3+ months already for a relatively balanced matchup, and are forced to wait months more under a system of broken ratings, you’d ask them to “Wait some months more plox!” so that you can enjoy a good match at their expense? Just awesome people, just awesome.

So what you’re saying is that Sorrow’s Furnace should have to spend the next couple months falling down through 6-7 tiers so your server can have a better matchup? I’m not sure if you should be calling everyone else selfish.

Let’s say there is no reset and SF just moves up to the next tier. How is FC going to do against Henge or Darkhaven? Servers dropping down to a lower tier commonly do extremely well there. That matchup could prove to be far worse for FC than SF ever has been. There are far more imbalanced matchups than FC vs SF. Yak’s Bend dealt with far worse for the last month.

Take a look at tiers 2-5 for the last month. There have been a lot of matches with scores like 500k/50k/50k, which makes FC vs SF look pretty even. I see in the history that FC had a couple weeks like this versus Kaineng when their bandwagoning started. Kaining, Dragonbrand, and Maguuma are finally in a proper tier, now you want to subject everyone else to another 1-2 months of that so you can have a good matchup next week?

I don’t see how anyone with at least average comprehension skills can look at the current matchups versus next week’s predicted matchups, and think this is an improvement in any way. It’s not going to ever get much better than it is right now, and resetting it is just going to ruin that balance for another 1-2 months. The #1 server next week is this week’s #22. Moving from the last tier to the top of the rankings is going to be a nightmare for Sorrow’s Furnace. SF, along with Ehmry Bay, gets to have a week of getting destroyed by Kaineng. Then they get to look forward to weeks of facing the other 20 servers that belong in higher tiers as they fall back down to T7-8.

My server, Yak’s Bend, has been dealing with Dragonbrand and Maguuma since late December, as they bounced around in tiers, and had one week against Kaineng. These 3 bandwagon servers are now above us, with a chance that one of them might get pushed down to face us from time to time. With the reset, we have to run that guantlet again, as well as having to face other current T1-3 servers. The last month hurt morale quite a bit for us, but this week has been a great(and fairly balanced) matchup. I don’t want to think about what another month of horrible mismatches is going to cause.

I’m the last person to jump on the myriad of gemstore conspiricy theories, but there has to be some motivation outside of actually helping the wvw tier balance. Are they trying to see how many people will pay to leave their server when they completely ruin the wvw matchups?

Hsinimod.5784:

In GW2, you get nothing. Often. You take a gamble and get rewarded with a poor RNG that favors spending money on the gem store to buy gold. It is designed to make customers into ‘whales’ and then to harpoon those whales for all the blubber they are worth.

They would probably sell more Black Lion Salvage Kits if they doubled the chance to salvage a “rarer material” (100% for BLSK and 50% for Master Salvage), but reduced the chance to get more than one ecto by 50%. Statistically speaking, the number of ecto per item salvaged would not change.

Or better yet, swap the functions of the Black Lion and Mystic kits. And change the Mystic Forge Stone (gemstore item) requirement for Mystic to one of the skillpoint purchased items. For a gemstore that is supposed to “convenience” items only, that BLSK is a lot better than anything you can get ingame.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I did notice a few times when all of us dodged and mid-dodge animation, we get pulled (even had the evade message show up and still got pulled).

My guild had one run where this happened to all of us. I remember seeing two evade messages from the pull wires, but I still got pulled in. I have no idea if the double evade notice was a bug, or if he had actually fired two (possibly three, as two were evaded) projectiles at me. This could also explain instances of aegis not working, as it only blocks a single hit.

Aside from unusual/buggy behavior like this, Kholer is a great boss. He is very capable of wiping an unprepared/unaware group, but you have multiple options to deal with him. Much better than other boss fights where running out of endurance/energy means practically unavoidable death.

Shiren.9532

I have trouble dodging him when I can’t see him due to the overwhelming particle effects. It’s a general problem I have with dungeons. A lot of boss tells are really hard to see because of guardian fire, mesmer spells, elementalist spells etc.

This is a big problem in a lot of dungeon fights. Kholer’s size makes it quite a bit easier to see his skill use, but bosses that are normal size human/sylvari can be difficult to see, and asurans completely vanish in the effects. Playing as a melee guardian in the non-boss fights with 5+ enemies is very blinding, as well. It can be difficult to keep track of where my own target is even standing, and watching for attacks incoming from other enemies is just not happening.

I’m not going to change anything about the way I play because of people like this. If I see someone fighting with a mob that I otherwise had no intentions to kill, I’m going to go about my business. If they seem to be having trouble with the mob, or their fight is directly in my path, I’ll get involved and help. I feel like a lazy bum if I just run right through the fight like it wasn’t happening.

If they happen to be working on their dodge daily, and politely inform me of this, I’ll gladly let them continue unless the mob they have chosen is required for something in my gameplay (heart, event, etc). They can get the dodge daily done with any other mob. I’m not going to go out of my way because someone decided to use the mobs I need to kill for their daily. The same applies for the res/healer daily. Their desire to let mobs kill an NPC is not going to interfer with my need to kill the mob.

Now, if they decide to be rude like the person the OP encountered, I’m very likely to stick around to keep “helping” them kill everything.

I’ve not done AC since the update, but my guild has had issues with Kholer before with dodges/blocks not working. There was one incident where the pulled the entire party despite standing in a Feeback and with at least 3 having Aegis. I had used either Retreat or my active Virtue right before he did the wind-up, and my guildmate put feedback up at the same time. Even through our unintended redundant blocks, his skill still worked.

Dodgeing seems a bit off in general. I’ve lost count of how many I’ve been hit while clearly in the middle of the dodge animation. It’s most apparent with attacks that knockback/push/pull because you can actually see the dodge animation get interrupted. It’s not just a damage number popping up, where you can’t quite be certain you dodged in time.

Yak’s Bend spent the last month repeatedly dealing with two bandwagon servers, Maguuma and Dragonbrand, as they worked their way up above us in ranks. We had a single week versus Kaineng, as well. Now, if the current predictions hold, Maguuma and Dragonbrand will be back below Yak’s, with us being moved up to T2.

First off, Yak’s does not currently belong in T2. We can hold our own quite well in T4, maybe in T3 as well, but not against a 24/7 full zerg server like Kaineng. Finally getting a somewhat balanced matchup (not 250k point differences) and doing well does not mean we belong in T2.

This also means that we have to run the “gauntlet” of Drabonbrand, Kaineng, and Maguuma…for a second time. That means that very few from Yak’s will bother doing wvw weeks while those three pass up through the ranks. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to play like that, being outnumbered 24/7. End result will likely be YB ending up in a lower tier than we should, and causing imbalance there

Sarethor.7625:

Columba.9730:

This should have been dealt with before launch.

It’s easy to hand-wave that position, but given how broad the hardware range this game is designed to support it’s utterly unrealistic to think you can comprehend all permutations without massive volume data. It’s further complicated by other engine/graphics changes which are happening concurrently and independent of the culling system.

I’m not rationalizing the current state of affairs – it’s bizarre and very frustrating.

My points are around this: They are aware of the problems and working diligently. Be realistic and have some patience. Nothing Anet have done should let you believe they don’t care or this issue will last.

This issue, along with plenty of others(some have been fixed), have been a problem since launch. I understand the complexity of the game, and the problem, but this isn’t a problem effecting certain hardware or low-end machines, it effects everyone. This is not an issue that should have been present at release.

Now we have an update which is supposed to help the problem. Not completely fix it, but improve the situation. The changes were supposedly tested with good result. Now comes patch day, and it’s the opposite. I’m not sure how this “improvement” was tested, or with how many players, but itcertainly was not done properly or accurately. Testing in any environment resembling an actual wvw match in-progress, or even a large-scale pve event, should have immediately showed the changes to be competely counter-productive.

I have no doubt that Anet wants to fix this and cares about the problem. My doubts are in the ability/manpower(devoted to this task) to actually implement a fix and properly test it before releasing it to the live game. This update had several bugs that were immediatley obvious, yet somehow were not found in testing.

maddoctor.2738:

CeNedro.7560:

As long there will be not smth like ‘outdated Content’(-> need good sidekick and rewarding low level zones) and no Gear & Level Grind for max Stats, then I don’t mind. Although it gets more likely to get screwed up with a stat increase…

Given how laurels work (everywhere, no matter the level) they CAN keep old content relevant no matter how many levels they add.

I could go complete my daily in Queensdale, but why would I? It’s best to just complete them where ever you happen to be going normally, unless you need more kill variety (Orr lacks variety), a zone with underwater combat, etc.

No.

I don’t want all of my characters to suddenly not be max level any more. I have enough to deal with knowing that all of my “max” gear is slowly becoming outdated by a new tier. Although not slowly enough to actually replace it unless I want to grind Fractals, which I have no plans of doing.

I would like my original intentions of having more than one character of some professions to remain feasible. With a new character build taking up to 16 inventory slots, this is a tempting method for enjoying multiple builds in a single profession.

If I wanted progression via numbers going up, I would have been playing other MMOs for the last decade. And in the end, numbers are all that changes. You get 10% stronger, so do the enemies added with new content. The only “advantage” in this type of progression is going back to lower level zones to “roflstomp” everythng in site, but GW2’s scaling system removes that ability, making power progession beyond the current maximum completley pointless.

While I thought there might have been something to this on the first day the thread, my actual experience ingame since has changed that. I’ve been getting ecto at about the same rate as before, I just had a bad day or two.

And I’ve seen nothing to indicate the price is going up due to Monday’s (Jan 28) update. Prices actually went up the week before this update, and are currently less than 1 silver higher than last Saturday.

If this is DR tied to only the dragon meta events, I have no idea how I’ve not triggered it yet. For the past couple days I’ve barely done anything other than dragon events. Standing around in those area chatting in map/guild or with the game minimized 20+ minutes before the spawn windows, or waiting out Claw’s 75 minute window. There must be at least some outside factor to it. Has anyone not getting chests also noticed any amount of DR in other rewards (even a slight drop, as DR should work on a degrading scale)

lisamee.2408:

When you kill an exploding risen (plague carriers) the chest does not appear for a long time after the corpse has disappeared.

Are you sure this is only happening with these limited mobs? There have been other reports of an overall reduction in loot, and this could be the cause if chests are not appearing till the corpses are gone.

I’ve noticed the same thing in the past few days, but I’m not ready say that something must have changed. It’s still in the range of just being some bad luck.

Edit:
Also worth noting that the difference I’ve seen has been with Master/Mystic kits. Black Lion kits have not given me any unusual results.

Chase.8415:

mrstealth.6701:

Chase.8415:

They’re not bugged, it’s used for culling issues in PvE. Before you would have a ton of lootable corpses on the ground that caused framerate lag over a simple common drop.

Now when the game detects that there is too much corpses, it converts all of the bodies into chests. It does not matter if they are uncommon or greater.

If this is true, then why do patch notes not state so? The notes clearly state that chests spawn for loot uncommon or higher, and that lesser rarities remain on the bodies. If it was related to culling, we would also be seeing them everywhere during large events (Orr temples and dragons), but I just did the Claw of Jormag with a large group, and no such chests. Culling of players and enemy corpses was still very apparent, however.

There are a lot of things in the game not stated in the patch notes.

This might be true, but the patch notes explicitly state how these chests should function, and they are certainly not functioning in that manner, hence them being bugged.

My use of MF has been limited to a set of cheap (green) jewelry on a single character, along with food, banner, and boosts (just the free ones the game has given me). I’m not wasting any more space than that on the silly concept. Even with all of this “doubling” my MF chances, the only thing that ever felt it it might have changed was the number of fine materials dropping. Certainly not twice as many green/masterwork items, and rare/golds would take hours of farming to ever notice the difference it the rates did actually double.

To me, MF is just a useless farming stat, and a waste of space. I don’t have any desire to stand at the end of a tunnel dropping AoEs on an enemy spawn location, so I doubt it would do me any good, anyway. The only noticable effect someone not mass-farming is going to notice is the huge lack of attributes/stats that actually matter in gameplay.

Chase.8415:

They’re not bugged, it’s used for culling issues in PvE. Before you would have a ton of lootable corpses on the ground that caused framerate lag over a simple common drop.

Now when the game detects that there is too much corpses, it converts all of the bodies into chests. It does not matter if they are uncommon or greater.

If this is true, then why do patch notes not state so? The notes clearly state that chests spawn for loot uncommon or higher, and that lesser rarities remain on the bodies. If it was related to culling, we would also be seeing them everywhere during large events (Orr temples and dragons), but I just did the Claw of Jormag with a large group, and no such chests. Culling of players and enemy corpses was still very apparent, however.

I’ve only noticed one or two of these, possibly because I’ve primarily played on my guardian since the update. The chests are likely spawning inside the enemies body, and getting looted by just tapping F on top of the pile of dead things. Of the ones I did notice, there have been no rare items, only blues.

Also worth pointing out the patch note’s reference to these being for loot that is “uncommon” or higher in quality doesn’t make any sense.. GW2 does not have “uncommon” as a loot rarity type, but I assume it’s referring to masterwork/green as this is how mini packs and inventory bags refer to greens.

Healing isn’t the only thing missing. 5 of the 8 craftable (fine to exotic quality) jewelry stats are not avialable in Ascended gear. Only Berserker and Explorer exist. Where are Valkerie, Knight, and Carrion?

Across my 6 level 80 characters, the only available ascended replacement jewelry is 1 amulet and 2 rings for a single character. If ascended earrings are added with the same stats available, I would have the option of replacing those for 2 other characters. In total, only 7 out of 30 pieces worn by these 6 characters would have ascended options.

Finding a different suitable jewelry stat would likely involve either replacing the armor as well to get a desirable stat distribution, or completely rebuilding all gear/traits/skills.

I only do dungeons with guildies/friends, so this has not been an issue…so could someone enlighten me as to what going in first/creating the instance yourself changes?

I’m rarely the leader of a party, but I can always initate a kickvote. And I’ve been the last person in a dungeon many times. Usually after completion, but a few times when we abandoned the run due to someone having to leave.

Somewhat related to this topic…
A guildmate pointed out that the Valkyrie stat(power/vital/crit damage) is “missing” from the ascended jewelry available. I looked through and noticed that Knight’s(toughness/power/precision) seems to be missing as well.

I use those two stats on jewelry for several characters, so there is quite literally no ascended jewelry option for those characters. I would have to change builds, or attempt to work in the same stat bonuses with different stat sets, either of which would most likely require replacing all gear.

Nice to know that that some players/buids get to upgrade, while others are just tossed aside.

edit:
Just noticed that Carrion(condition damage/power/vital) is missing, too. So there goes 2 more characters that can’t get ascended jewelry. I think I have 2 characters that can keep their current stat sets and get a partial set of ascended jewelry. Those 2 currently have partial sets of berserker jewelry.

You do realize that when you take a player that only made it to level 10 into a level 40 fractal, they only get level 10 loot/rewards. The also only gain Fractal progress of 1 level.

There is no problem, stop acting like there is.

DocHolliday.5921:

I definitely agree with the rest of your post though. Well, except for the time investment in horizontal progression with Exotics. I still think that takes way too much time/resources. It’s just not in the spirit of GW, at all.

I agree with Ascended gear being way too much grind/time for multiple builds (or even one). Exotics are fine for a single-build situation, but they could use some toning down to make multiple build testing viable. You can’t really test a build properly using green/masterwork gear, and trying with rare/yellow jewelry seems like a waste of ecto to me. Rare jewelry just slows down progress on getting exotics by eating up ecto. But the time/cost of exotics should be improved by the new higher drop rates on t6 fine mats, so there is some good progress in that respect.

I pretty much agree with DocHolliday, but there is one bit of misinformation there. Ascended (or gear in general) isn’t an issue in sPvP because you don’t use your PvE gear there. The gear for sPvP is completely separate, and is all exotic currently. It’s also all freely available (stat-wise). It’s still an issue in wvw, and any future game modes that don’t segregate to use the sPvP gear system.

It’s more than an issue of “if you don’t like it, don’t play it”. I do like it, or at least I did. Bugs aside, the game was fine at release, but that is not-so-slowly changing. Repeated bad decisions are turning away a lot of the fanbase of the previous game, in an attempt to lure in the fans of other MMOs with an appetite for content that Anet (or any other dev) will never be able to appease. You’ll keep them till they have their new gear, while everyone else leaves becaues the entire treadmill pace is being set by these players. Once they have their gear, what happens? Add more gear to get them back for another couple months, while ensuring the rest of us never come back?

As a self-admitted altaholic, this essentially destroys my desire to continue this style of playing. The joke that is the laurel rewards reaffirms Anet’s decision that Fractals is the only viable means of getting ascended gear. And even getting it through Fractals is (aside from RNG luck) a 160 day “adventure” just to get rings (10 days worth of dailies x 2 rings x 8 professions), which is a complete slap in the face to the ideas of ‘no gear grind’ and alts being an encouraged endgame/playstyle. This number triples for those of us that thought getting Ascended gear outside of Fractals was going to be an actual option. Jokes on us, and it’s not a very funny one.

Before Nov 16th, my intentions were to have multiple characters of at least some professions. A way to have multiple builds without filling a character’s inventory with 3 full sets of gear, and giving more race/gender options for armor styles (I consider myself somewhat of an ‘armor collector’). I had hoped that after acknowledging the ridiculous grind of Ascended gear back in Nov, Anet would make this a viable option again. After this update, I see that Anet has no intentions of making max/‘best in slot’ gear accessible for even a single character, let alone someone enjoys playing all 8 of them. It is extremely discouraging to know that by the time I could get the current Ascended gear pieces for 1-2 characters, the next set of pieces (earrings, I assume) will already be added. It’s a treadmill that is going to be leaving people behind for months, or even years for us altaholics.

I really don’t want to do Fractals every day, or much at all honestly. I’ve done about 30 of them, and while there a several I do like, there are also several that I hope to never see again for various reasons. I certainly don’t want to them daily for the next 160 days in order to get rings for my current characters.

While I’m no hardcore dungeon runner, I do like the other dungeons. The rewards are nice, mostly optional (some stats need to be added to crafting/karma vendors), and you can get a full set of armor in about 20 runs. This can be reduced down to 7 days (each path once before DR starts reducing rewards, if I recall right) if you want to focus on it. If I’m not doing speed runs (which I/my guild do not), this is 10-20 hours of gameplay for an armor look/style. Even if it did take the 10-30 days per piece of ascended gear, it would only matter for the stats not available in crafting. There is a huge difference in having gear available with 7-20 days’ effort that has a unique style or fits a more niche stat distribution, and having gear that takes many months to get for a “required” boost in stats. While it’s true that nothing is really “required”, game balance can be expected to be based off of max/best gear, which is currently Ascended gear.

This being said, I have no intentions of chasing the carrot Anet has decided to dangle in front of me. I will not be supporting their decisions to add this first step onto the gear treadmill. I suggest those of you that feel the same way about ascended gear do the same. Let their precious metrics show them all of the out-geared alts that are left behind, sitting under the balance curve of new content and outclassed in wvw.

I do enjoy the gameplay GW2 has, and I do not plan on leaving…yet. Although recent changes have greatly discouraged my previuos intentions of contintuing as a long-term player.

nethykins.7986:

I always find Kholer’s pre-pull effect (where he winds his hand back and it glows) a little hard to read when you’ve got lots of effects hitting him, as well as melee classes, and the same aura colour for most of guardian’s attacks.

For me, this is really the only thing making many of the dungeon bosses hard. I think Kholer is one of the easier to dodge because of his size. Bosses that are human-sized, or smaller, are a lot more of a problem. Add in the fact that dungeons tend to be dark areas that highlight the effects even more, and they can easily leave you completely blind to what the target is doing. It’s a shame that the dodging mechanic is completely trashed so often because of the insanely overstated effects.

It would be nice to have a graphics option that greatly tones down the skill effects without effecting other graphic quality. Disabling post-processing and lowering the shader settings help, but reducing the overall image quality of the game isn’t really an acceptable solution.

Coldtart.4785:

In what universe are highly telegraphed cc’s annoying

They are most annoying when the mob you aren’t fighting does it. That mob that respawns (or runs back from chasing another player) 10 ft from the three mobs you are already fighting. Then you get to have fun with the three more mobs standing on the other side of that one.

Or when no matter how obvious it is, you can’t dodge it because you’ve already had to dodge twice from two other mobs trying to pull you. The entire “it’s easy to dodge/learn to dodge” argument doesn’t really work when dealing with more than 1-2 enemies.

I don’t really understand the players praising Orr for being a challenge. I’ve not found it to be a challenge at all, outside of a few areas. Those areas are usually ones with insane density/respawn rates, or skillpoints (or the only path to a SP) guarded by tightly packed in veteran mobs, or even champions in several places. The only “challenge” offered for most is the fact that a solo player is unlikely to be capable of out-killing the respawn rates in a fight that involves a (or commonly mulitple) veteran mob. Fighting the same mobs for 10 minutes to progress 50ft up a hill is not a challenge, nor is it fun in my opinion.

The overall mob density in Orr just makes the entire area tedious to play in, which is why see players running by with a train of angry risen more often than you see someone actually killing the risen. This does happen elsewhere, but it’s the standard in Orr. This is probably because other areas have enemies semi-organized (bandits hanging around camps, etc), while Orr just has risen standing around or roaming aimlessly in every corner of the map.

I’m not sure if I would call AoE overpowered or not, but there are some skills that do a considerable amount of damage. What bothers me is this huge concern over AoE damage, but no mention of the fact that warriors and thieves have an absolutely insane amount of damage output. Is a 15k Backstab or 20k(+) Killshot really what Anet wants to be happening? If you add up the total of 5 AoE hits (when you actually have 5 targets to hit), how many of those are going to equal 20k, or even 15k?

For ele, the dagger offhand skills are some of the most powerful AoE abilities. Excluding highly conditional +damage traits (hp under 33%/knocked down), Churning Earth tops the list hitting light armor (test golem in the Mists) for around 7.4k. Next highest on the D/D set is Fire Grab at 4.5k (with +10% fire attune and 5% damage to burning foes traits). A few more skills are able to hit 2.2-2.5k, which is still well under Backstab/Killshot damage with all 5 targets totaled.

Churning Earth is by far the worst “offender”, but is it really an offender at all? CE has a 30 second cooldown, compared to a thief only having to wait out a 3 second revealed buff before getting a 2nd backstab, completely negating any damage advantage CE has, excluding the easily removed bleeding DoT. The thief can already have it out-damaged with 2 Backstabs during the 3 second channeling of CE. Aside from using Lightning Flash to teleport during the channel (I do think this should be changed), CE is extremely noticable and very easily dodged. Even using the teleport, the ele is still 900 distance or less, doing a very obvious channel animation with a distinct sound. A stealthed thief is not easily dodged, especially in a large scale fight or when the stealthing method is not Cloak and Dagger on the target. I do not see any way that CE can be considered overpowered without Backstab being overpowered as well.

There are always people trying to apply the “just dodge” or “learn to dodge” statements to this, but the same applies to AoE damage, too. AoE is actually easier to dodge because you get a red warning circle, or have the ability to move out of a DoT AoE area after the first pulse. But a Killshot from a warrior that is part of a 25-player group is not practical to dodge. You can’t watch every single player in that group to dodge it, and it’s likely to come from a player that’s not even in your current view.

And to make a decision like this, while at the same time stating that they want to discourage zerging in WvW is completely ridiculous. I’m appalled that they can be so out of touch with reality to think that nerfing the best counter to a zerg will somehow help reduce zergs. If you want zergs gone, increase AoE damage and remove the 5 target limit. Nerfing AoE to prevent zergs would be about as smart as increasing drop rates and making enemies die in one hit to reduce farming…it should be obvious that it will have the exact opposite effect.

laokoko.7403:

I’m quite confused how people profit from the recipe.

The recipe require 1 ecto, some mithril, and 1 pristine snowball.

But as far as I’m aware of, when you salvage, on average you’ll get less than 1 ecto back. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhUFMgIGLNDMdGtsQmZNcnoxd1lYV2ludU5FMjJhWnc#gid=1.

So how do people even profit from the recipe?

Going by this thread, a lot of people didn’t profit from it. Some actually lost money trying this a smaller number of times, yet were still banned. It would definitely require some luck in salvaging. I didn’t use this snowflake ring salvaging at all, but my luck with salvaging ecto is all over the place. Some days everything gives me 3, others I can’t seem to get more than 1 out of every 5 salvages. Someone having a good day with snowflake rings could have made a nice profit.

Oglaf.1074:

Are you honestly comparing the two? Really? Now I’m starting to doubt the “willfully” part of my above post…

Yes, I am comparing the two (three) because the are the exact same mechanic fuctioning in the exact same way. The only difference is that the snowflake recipe was more efficient at it, largely because they were being sold on the TP for a low price. This stopped being true when the prices of snowflakes and mithril went up. Players should expect special, limited time, recipes that are part of a special event to be special themselves. Looking at previous events in GW2 (and at 7 years of events in GW1), holiday events have usually been very profitible due to the special items added along with them.

Looking back at the Karka event, Anet literally flooded us with precursors and named exotic weapons. And many players were able to repeat this event to get more, which was not intended to happen. The same thing happened in this event with ecto, but it was apparently “unintended”, so everyone that did it is now an evil exploiter. How are we supposed to know this was not intended?

Oglaf.1074:

Stop being willfully ignorant. You know kitten well that being able to turn 1 Ectoplasm Orb into multiple through Salvaging is not how Salvaging is supposed to work.

It is not meant to multiply Ectoplasm Orbs, for obvious reasons.

There are recipes that require no ecto to craft, but can be salvaged and return ecto. There is one example listed in the first post of this thread. The same applies to any rare weapon or armor that is high enought level to salvage into ecto.

If I craft a rare level 80 ring (the 3 rare gems for this take 1 ecto each to make), and salvage it getting back 1 gem (equal to 1 ecto+other mats) and 3 globs of ecto, I have created 4 ecto out of a recipe that requires 3 ecto.

Can I get a confirmation on whether the above is actually possible? I don’t recall whether or not I’ve actually gotten a gem plus 3 ecto back before. Just 1-2 ecto and a single gem. Looking for any case where the total combined number of gems and ectos salvaged is above 3 (or 5 for exotic jewelry)

Oglaf.1074:

mrstealth.6701:

Anet also states that they take a hard stance against exploiters. So, if this is really an exploit, why are only some of the “exploiters” banned?

Because only a few were actually banned; the worst offenders.

They didn’t do it ten times.

They didn’t do it a hundred times.

They did it thousands of times.

The below is for the purpose of making a point I do not believe this to be an actual exploit. /disclaimer

This recipe was supposedly not “intended” to be used to return a higher number of ecto.

Anet considers using this recipe (or anything else in the game) in some way they did not “intend” as an exploit.

Whether you did it 1 time or 1000 times, you were using it in a manner Anet did not “intend”. This, according to Anet’s own definition, makes you an exploiter.

It should also be stated that (in an above post that will likely be removed) some players banned for this did not do this hundreds or thousands of time. People were banned that had actually lost money doing this.

Kiserai.3957:

TWMagimay.9057:

If you take the 3 italic lines and combine them…you tell me xD

That sounds too tinfoil-hatty to me. I think miscommunication or mistaken assumptions are much more plausible.

I may be over the top a bit, but I think there is something suspicious about the timeframes Anet took in reacting to this. It was allowed to continue for days, then after the fact there is finally dev posts saying that they consider this an exploit. I refuse to believe it took them 3-4 days to notice these threads.

Anet also states that they take a hard stance against exploiters. So, if this is really an exploit, why are only some of the “exploiters” banned?

And then we have Anet’s very loose definition of an exploit. Something that gives an “unfair advantage” or that players use in some fashion that’s not how Anet “intended”. That’s great, but there are two huge pieces of information missing. We don’t know at what point an advantage is considered “unfair”, and we have no way of knowing how the game mechanic/recipe/etc is “intended” to function unless they tell us. People asked if this was intended, and it was blatantly ignored until it was over.

As for being unfair, there are a lot of people that think the Godskull weapons were abused in an unfair fashion to craft precursors, people complained that others using overflow servers to repeat the “one-time” Ancient Karka event (which was dropping named exotics and precursors) was unfair. I don’t think the Godskull crafting was worthy of bans, but it’s comparable to the current snowflake/salvage incident, in terms of whether it was working “as intended” or providing an “unfair” advantage. The Karka event repeating was much more obviously used in an unintended manner, as the event was cleary advertised as being intended as one-time only. Yet, as far as I know, no one was banned for either of these incidents.

evo.8640:

mrstealth.6701:

You are trying to compare someone buying up an item which has a total supply of about 5 to an item with supply in the thousands, that just had that supply greatly increased.

It’s easy to fully control the supply of Twilight (assume you have the funds) because there is very little supply. I would expect people that can do this to buy them out, and relist them to make a profit.

The comparison only goes as far as people willingly wasting money. Because they can as it no longer holds value to them.

Seeing as how the recipe from this topic didn’t actually drop tens of thousands of ectos into the market from thin air (no matter how much Anet / white knights would say), of course then, I wouldn’t expect the TP barons to be buying like mad.

However, if the market had been impacted by the creation of ectos enmasse through it’s more than possible that thousands of blind orders would have filled by TP barons in a buy race.

Especially if that race has 50 or so people in it, all clicking “buy” with 250 remaining in the box with every press. Even more so when only a matter of a few thousand ectos separate from the 30s price point up to 1g price point. When I mentioned 1.2g initially I was being a bit extreme. In reality, 40s would have been realistic, but my response to the fake story still remains that prices during the event remained lower than 29s the entire time. And also never went lower than 24s.

There was never a huge flood that prompted mass purchased from those who could and would buy them.

So the whole discussion is really moot, since it started over a false story.

If their actions are being dictated by the price of ecto, then they still value money as well. If they didn’t care about money, they would simply buy up all the ecto, no matter the price.

Looking at what actually happened…the price ecto of dropped sharply the day the event started. Not a huge change, but a very sharp change in the month’s overall price curve. Sell orders count went down a good bit, likey from people buying the ecto to supply their initial crafting batches or from speculators hoping the new recipes would increase demand. This apparent buying spree (number of listed sell orders dropping) was before the price drop of ecto.

Shortly after, a huge number of buy orders were filled, the number of buy orders quickly dropped by around 30,000. This was also before the ecto price dropped. Since the price had not dropped yet, I will assume that the majority of those buy orders were filled with the new influx of ecto. Some may have been delisted by a buyer aware of the sitation and hoping to relist at a lower buy price later, but I’d bet most were from order actually being filled.

The number of buy and sell orders quickly returned to their previous numbers, as the price of ecto continued to drop. The number of sell orders went up drastically in the week after this, peaking on the 28th at over 66,000, more than 2x its previous highest of just under 28,000. This peak was well after the ecto prices had went back up to a midpoint between the pre-event price and the price-crash low.

This points to the fact that there was a large increase in the supply of ecto, that lead to a rapid price crash, and many people rushing to fill buy orders. Had traders rushed to spam the buy button, there would have been a decrease in the number of sell orders listed after the price drop. The only dips in sell order listings came before the price dropped, and again after it had already gone back up and leveled off..

evo.8640:

Absolutely they are. Look at the person who re-listed Twilight 5 times. He/she wasted well over 2000 gold doing that.

You are trying to compare someone buying up an item which has a total supply of about 5 to an item with supply in the thousands, that just had that supply greatly increased.

It’s easy to fully control the supply of Twilight (assume you have the funds) because there is very little supply. I would expect people that can do this to buy them out, and relist them to make a profit.

Valmarius.4150:

If people flood the market with cheap ectos…yes, rich players will possibly buy as many cheap ectos as they can, but -accidently- going from ectos at 25 silver to 1 gold? You’re saying prices would rise because the richest players are unobservant/lazy enough to buy stacks of items at 4x the price they mean to? Really?

I…think not. Seriously. No.

Yeah, that is just not going to happen. Ever. There is no way that adding a large amount of supply is going to cause prices to go up, it will make them go down. When the “TP barons” buy up all the cheap ectos, they are going to relist them all 1c below the current cheapest ecto for sale in order to turn a quick profit.

[qoute]It’s already happened once when ectos were going for 12-14s steadily. And over a period of just a day shot up to 38s-39s for a couple of weeks. This was almost 2 months ago, and there were far less people holding onto thousands of gold then, than there is now.[/quote]

Two months ago was about the time that Fractals and Ascended gear were added (Nov 16). That price increase was because Ascended gear takes a large amount of ecto to craft, and a lot of players wanted this gear. The demand for ecto and T6 mats went up, a lot.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Besides moving away, another work-around is to [F12] your character and restart it — you’ll be back at the vista and out of combat. (Don’t do this in WvW, since you are liable to respawn defeated and with broken armor — that’s the new penalty for quitting during combat.)

I think I did this once for the vista in question. I know it was one of the krait tower vistas, at least.

Strifey.7215:

I’m calling BS unless he exaggerated the 4 hours.
Could I see someone making 4k gold over the course of the 4 days if they got in immediatly after the patch? yes.
Could I see them getting it only 4 hours? pretty much impossible.

Yeah, I know he didn’t get that much that fast from only using this recipe. Everyone that did this would have made that amount of this were the case. Probably someone that already had a lot of money and was playing the high-end market. I don’t doubt that doing this assisted him, but it was not that effective at doing it.