Guild Wars 2

It’s clear that anyone who buys a new account during this “limited time” will get the promotional item for it. That should hold regardless if you’ve previously purchased it or not.

Hickeroar.9734:

Given the feedback here, I think Anet would have been better off saying “Sorry about that, it won’t happen again” and just making sure it didn’t happen again. Only two months into the game, mistakes are to be expected. It’s not like you can’t get plenty of exotics by running dungeons for a few hours anyway…

I had a full set of exotic weapons/armor/trinkets for my latest toon before I even got him to 80 just from running dungeons every day while leveling.

All this moaning is not necessary.

In hindsight, yes, the whole lost shores things would have been better left undone forever.

The trouble with this one is it’s mistakes following bugs following errors following…

I don’t think any of the “moaning” is from anyone possibly thinking it’s hard to get gear in gw2. There’s so many ways.

But I also think if Arenanet had managed to pull off the consolation gifts, that would have been fine. Or like you said, just issue an apology, refer to their standing policy to never reimburse and leave it go.

To badly bungle a mea culpa peace offering…

I thought the grind in gw2 was supposed to be optional.

Aerwyna.2541:

I dont understand the control part :o I use tab and once my target is selected, I attack it. I may be misunderstanding though. :/

It’s a little hard to follow for me too, but I thought it was referring to how sometimes you can change attunement as an elementalist and it’s no different than changing weapons out of combat. And then other times it turns on your auto-attack and puts you in-combat, when all you really wanted to do was run faster, say.

Very little has changed in GW2 since launch in terms of the game.

Ursan.7846:

RedBaron.6058:

A company that wants to keep its costumers happy and avoids mistakes over mistakes because at the end of the day, 1 incompetent can jeopardize the jobs of all the others in the long run…

You didn’t answer my question. Do you work for a company? What kind of company do you work for? Does your company lay off workers when a small percentage of customers voice their displeasure? I wonder how a company like this manages to retain skilled, experienced workers, since they’ll be firing people all the time.

WoW stalker-much?

It doesn’t matter if it’s a company or a team or whatever. Sometimes you try things that just don’t go well. You can try to patch it and fix it, but sometimes it’s better to just admit defeat and get away from it. Whether it’s the Apple Newton, New Coke, or Waterworld…

Same with Lost Shores. Cut your losses and get out.

Think how much better place this planet would be if Lucas had just stopped with the Phantom Menace…

Find a guild, join it. If it has good people that are helpful, great. Otherwise join another until you get one that’s gonna work for you — i.e. give you people to play with, and people who’ll patiently show you the ropes. My guild has events specifically to help new/learning players, for example.

I think it’s too late to try to save pvp in GW2. Class balance is something you’d wished they’d been working on months ago. But we’re still lacking the basic features, and before you can address balance, you need to fix bugs and get some vision.

Look at Elementalists, they got a seemingly small change, the rules of the game arbitrarily changed vis-a-vis rez timers, and they suddenly went zero to hero. The game isn’t well-developed enough to make appropriate balance changes yet.

I think a good solution would be to put in Hammer skins that look like great axes. The animations are good enough, and that way we could get the look without changing abilities.

Actually the last several times I checked SoRall, it was not “full.” Usually was checking early morning time.

There’s definitely a lot of lessons to be learned from that event.

I think the best lesson for right now is to learn to walk away and cut your losses. November was doomed, they just don’t have the chops to pull things like that off. Can’t even get the damage-control appease-the-masses gesture to work right.

It’d be nice to have bigger groups capability. But there’s so much about 5-man parties that still isn’t working right…. I won’t hold my breath.

It’s so unfortunate, even when they’re belatedly trying to fix their mess, it’s just more of a mess.

I’m still uncertain why I got an extra chest, and neither my fiance or son got an extra. I didn’t send a request for the chest, but I did attempt a failed second instance of the event on my other lvl 80. But I never told ArenaNet I was there or wanted reimbursement. It’s puzzling.

Murphy’s Law on steroids for the entire Lost Shores thing.

It’s such a pathetic sad mess, it makes me feel sympathy to the employees at ArenaNet. I’m sure they really meant well, but that whole thing from start to finish, and now the very late coming damage-control, such a sloppy horrible mess. Slapstick comedy of errors.

I’m terrified when I read their making Jan Feb Mar 2013 even bigger.

I’ve won the event once before, but even then it bugged. It is a hard fight, and very sensitive.

I heard someplace, Crystal Desert perhaps it was, had the temple open yesterday.

Submit a support ticket

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/

HeeHee.5208:

I got ‘Dawn’, which can get me 240 gold now, compared with 98 gold I have made from playing GW2 since release, sooo excited! xD

Congrats, that’s a great drop!

I don’t know why, but I got a chest. I thought we had to submit a ticket (which I didn’t). Mine had a couple medium rares, exotics were heavy shoulders with a nice rune, and a carrion-style longbow.

Ryuujin.8236:

Kromica.2831:

jazzllanna.1278:

Wow. I didn’t get to go but I would have liked to see the event more than a chest— You realize how you sound here?

The chest was the only good part of the entire 3 day event

I do hope Arenanet doesn’t take messages like this too seriously. People joke that MMos devolve into skinner boxes but to hear some people they literally want a skinner box.

Push button, recieve treat. Any pretense be kitten :p

It actually was that bad. Invisible mobs, painfully unimaginative material like multiple half-hour-long clear-the-trash sessions, horrible lag, can’t get with your party members… Take everything don’t like about GW2, that was the event.

Hopefully they’ll stick to what their strengths are for future events — particularly doing really good small group instances, cuz that’s what they did well in GW1, too.

jamasont.4653:

mulch.2586:

Sylosi.6503:

roguenub.1409:

Same with this game and every other MMO game you’ve played, you get everything and you’ll have nothing left to do. You’ll get bored, and find something else to do.

Spoken like a true PvE hamster, I couldn’t care less about ‘getting stuff’, I actually play a game because I enjoy the gameplay.

If you actually enjoy the gameplay, then go for it. Cuz those 100 stat points you might have earned on all 3 pieces, given the over 10,000 stat points on your character, over 3/4 of which are not from gear, they aren’t going to affect your gameplay.

The real trouble is GW2 as a game doesn’t have all that good of gameplay.

If people actually liked it, weren’t plagued by bugs, felt like they had content they wanted to play for itself, professions working in balance, we could accept that there’s a tier above exotic.

I hear this moronic reasoning all the time. Sure it won’t affect anything now but what about when its a full set of ascended? And you know they will they’ve said its going to happen.

I’m not a moron. Got the test results to prove it.

When there’s a full set of ascended, there’ll supposedly be a bunch of ways to get it, hopefully some of which appeal to all playstyles.

Currently there’s not much difference between rare and exotic.

If ascended continues to be a small notch like the first 2 pieces, it’ll play the same.

I don’t know dragon’s nest – not knowing the game, the video doesn’t make it look very nuanced.

I like gw2 pvp, and wish it’d gotten off to a better start. There’s some limitations, particularly that it’s all the 3-node capture. I really like the equal gear principle, and have been impressed with how large the differences in performance are, despite an “equal playing field.” (not sayin it’s equal between professions, but everyone has access to the same character choices).

In terms of wvw, I’ve been surprised how good Planetside 2 is, which is full-time 3 faction open world warfare on 3 continents… have done some massive battles and it performs extremely well.

Honestly, I’ve kept an alt or two parked at dragons. There’s the timer website noted above, but also my guildmates will say “Tequatl just spawned,” and it’s an easy 6-item chest, plus the event itself, to log over to harvest. I don’t think I ever got anything I actually equipped from a dragon, but the vendor is always happy to buy those greens and blues, and I’ve definitely got ectos and other fine sellables.

Torva Messor.1452:

mulch.2586:

I’m confident a good team in pvp would roflstomp an average fully-geared team, even if they came in rares (if that were possible).

Since you know so much about these things, would you care to explain to me what would happen if two equally skilled teams faced off against each other, one wearing full exotic gear and the other wearing full ascended gear?

I’m reasonably confident the team wearing the better gear would win, but feel free to disagree.

Well, all we have at this point are teams with identical gear/lvls/traits and very different player skill levels. If you’ve done any tournaments, you’ve seen the 500-125 scores that tend to happen, and looking at the ranks of the people, a team with lvl 20s on it basically always lop-sided clobbers any team with 1-9s on it.

The division between players with identical gears is so large. I believe a team of good players could go without runes and still win handily over lesser-skilled. I’ve not seen that experiment done.

Since ascended gear doesn’t exist for pvp yet, if ever, and only ring and back exist in pve, the hypothetical question is only speculative. So far the power difference for those 2 is so small, you’re getting less than half a percent of damage difference for them, so not enough to swing the differences you see in actual pvp, where often enough the score differential is 3-400%

Sylosi.6503:

mulch.2586:

Sylosi.6503:

Ahlen.7591:

If someone is beating you because of the couple of stat points ascended gear has, it’s not the gear.

Perhaps you should re-read the post, because you clearly didn’t comprehend it.

The statement rings true, regardless of the posts preceding it.

It’s readily apparent in spvp where we all have the same access to the exact same gear, yet ranked players annihilate newbies. And in pve, the differences are so small as to be imperceptible.

Only if you can’t read English, where did I say I lose due to ascended gear, I ‘ll give you a clue I didn’t, it would also be something of a miracle given I have played the game for about 30 mins since the Nov 15th patch and not in WvW.

As I said it is not currently mandatory (see if you can work out how that relates), but eventually it will be when they add the other slots / higher tiers of infusion.

Don’t be so rude. I read just fine. How ’bout you?

Note I wrote “regardless of the posts preceding it.”

It’s not about what you said, but what’s true in the game, something that’s known by anyone who does pvp. I’m confident a good team in pvp would roflstomp an average fully-geared team, even if they came in rares (if that were possible).

The real eye-opener to me in GW2 is that if you’re playing well, you’re never doing one thing.

Healer tank dps is all at once, even in the same ability. My guardian swings a weapon, doing damage — on crit, nearby allies gain might, giving boons heals me. So in 1 swing I do all the functions of tank/heal/support/dps.

If you want to be a healer, you’re just as limited as the glass-cannon types who think of themselves as dps. That’s fine by yourself, cuz let’s face it – GW2 is the easiest solo mmo ever. But in a group, you need to do all the roles, all the time.

I do feel less heroic than, say, in Rift. But I think that’s more the design of GW2, that we’re supposed to be soldiers, no one important, all just part of the squad. (hence we’re not even the starring role of our story-line)

Sylosi.6503:

Ahlen.7591:

If someone is beating you because of the couple of stat points ascended gear has, it’s not the gear.

Perhaps you should re-read the post, because you clearly didn’t comprehend it.

The statement rings true, regardless of the posts preceding it.

It’s readily apparent in spvp where we all have the same access to the exact same gear, yet ranked players annihilate newbies. And in pve, the differences are so small as to be imperceptible.

Some games it’s easier to look good than others. A level 12 Tera character looks more exotic than anything you can get in GW2, cuz it has that kind of style.

I feel like with GW2 with all 3 of my main characters, I go through the choices and don’t find many that appeal to me.

Maybe it’s a grass-is-greener thing, but playing a human male, I feel like the females at least look kind of ok in comparison, at least not as bulky. But honestly the reason I only have 1/4 female characters is their art didn’t appeal to me.

If females had an option for a Mord Sith outfit, I would quickly get it and buy a sex-change for my guy.

I could see it going that way. The mists thing is an odd gimmick, and you really should only need to go there if you’re messing with your gear or spec.

Make a post about it in suggestions. (obviously don’t need to make a thread cuz they moved it for you)

Lazarus.1083:

Gele.2048:

So take from the first dungeon items and DO evry dungeon and evry quest and evrything in the game whit that gear horisental that was teh reason why i was not playing now im ENJOYING !!!!

So you bought a game with horizontal progression as one of it’s main characteristics/selling points even though you wanted a vertical progression experience????

Followed the game even back in 2011. Maybe it’s unselective hearing, but I’d heard about expansions, raising the cap, diff tiers of gear even back then. Once I learned what ascended gear was about, it fits in which what I heard back then.

It is different from what we had in GW, but then again almost everything is different, play-style races world professions abilities gear levels instances BLTP etcetera.

You mean for tournaments?

cuz the queue for “battlegrounds” is instant, and you do get sent back to wherever you were when you leave.

The part that baffles me is why we have that 2+ minutes before each game after you’ve joined to wander the map. Cuz it’s really unlikely anyone’s come to a tournament without already knowing the map.

Sylosi.6503:

roguenub.1409:

Same with this game and every other MMO game you’ve played, you get everything and you’ll have nothing left to do. You’ll get bored, and find something else to do.

Spoken like a true PvE hamster, I couldn’t care less about ‘getting stuff’, I actually play a game because I enjoy the gameplay.

If you actually enjoy the gameplay, then go for it. Cuz those 100 stat points you might have earned on all 3 pieces, given the over 10,000 stat points on your character, over 3/4 of which are not from gear, they aren’t going to affect your gameplay.

The real trouble is GW2 as a game doesn’t have all that good of gameplay.

If people actually liked it, weren’t plagued by bugs, felt like they had content they wanted to play for itself, professions working in balance, we could accept that there’s a tier above exotic.

Given how many times ANet’s glitchy game has blocked me from a reward, or given me 20 tokens on the first run of a path in a day, or just plain forced my party to restart, grats on your loot, but I think it’s major bs, too.

If you never reimburse, you should never reimburse. Cuz now I wanna pony, too.

Rukia.4802:

HyDraLiNsK.2470:

Yeah, OP is right.

Just like I don’t own a tv, because if I spent money on the best tv in a year it would be obsolete.

Same with computers. I don’t own one because if I spend money on it something better will come out.

Or a car. Why spend money on a new car when next year there will be a better one?

Or cell phones. I bought an iphone 4 and then a few months later the 4s came out making mine obsolete…

brilliant observation, friend.

I really don’t get how people can justify using real life examples and compare to a video game lol … I’ll never take that seriously.

Lettuce be cereal, OP has a point. Eventually a full set of ascended gear will exist, making exotics inferior stat-wise and that will affect the balance of the game.

So what? So we’ll replace the gear we’re wearing now? Just like we replaced our previous gear with this set, and the gear before that, and the gear before that…

I’m just baffled by how this one step is at all an issue, given how many thousands of times I’ve upgraded gear in MMOs.

The only difference here is that gear has such a small influence on your character’s performance, and the increments between gear levels are so small… you could likely never see an upgrade in GW2 that will noticably affect your performance.

There are so many reasons not to like GW2, but ascended gear isn’t one of them.

5 power 5 pre on a ring. less than 1/2 of one percent increase to damage. Less than a quarter of your characters stats come from gear, this is tiny. And it’s only one step.

Quit the game because wvw is a kitten-box full of buggy nuggets, and not nearly as good as PS2.
Quit the game because you’re tired of waiting for promised features to show up.
Quit the game because your parties keep getting DCed or glitched in fractals and dungeons.
Quit the game because they still aren’t ready for spvp to launch, and the format is too constrained and unbalanced.
Quit the game because it’s not fun, has no endgame, is shallow, nothing left for you to do, all your friends left for Planetside 2, …

So many good reasons not to play GW2.

But don’t quit the game because of a very small tier of gear that’s one step beyond all the other tiers. One small step is not a treadmill. :p

tigirius.9014:

I’m no pvper but This does seem to be the biggest concern for pvpers is that they DID exactly the opposite that they claimed for PVP when it comes to WvW where the Ascended gear is concerned. It does give those in ascended gear an advantage over those who do not, however argumentative people might be about the higher percent, it’s still a higher percent of stats so it would give them the edge to survive longer, stronger attacks. Especially when added with the new stats coming to legendaries.

So in a way they not only gave people an unfair advantage in dungeons but also in WvW pvp with the coming of this new armor types.

If they do right by our complaints about it. It will be available as sets from pve karma vendors, or it will be available and relatively easily farmable for pve recipe crafting vendors, or it will be available as RNG drops from vets champs, or they will make it available as pvp armor sets via the pvp currency if they want to keep the balance going in this game and make it truly horizontal.

So I fully expect at least two of those things, pvp and pve to happen at some point or they really will be losing lots more players over this problem.

“unfair advantage” that was earned … how is this unfair?

Look at the actual gear — +5 Power, + 5 Precision +3% mf over the corresponding exotic. That’s less than 1/5 of a percent more damage. In wvw, which isn’t even very gear-dependent, this really doesn’t matter (yet). Maybe at some point it will, but the O.P.‘s point, that skill and build and the player’s approach will matter far more than what’s being worn.

Best example, go join a spvp tournament. There everyone has exactly the same gear. Watch any newb get curb-stomped mercilessly.

Katai.6240:

Baron of Winters.5697:

Katai.6240:

But the vertical progression only affects one part of the game, FotM. Those who care about getting to deeper areas of FotM can have their vertical progression to get armor with higher agony resistance. Everyone else couldn’t care less. How does ascended gear affect anyone doing anything outside of FotM in a meaningful way? All you’re doing is upgrading your armor to get more agony resistance.

No, there’s plenty of documented evidence showing that ascended gear has higher base stats than exotic. Further, the Q&A on reddit revealed that there will be more tiers within the infusions, and there’s no reason to believe those higher-tier infusions won’t have base stat numbers too… so you can feel like a hamster in a wheel chaisng those too.

I am aware of that, but you have to remember that Ascended gears basically have Runes baked into them. I mean, compare Yakkington’s Ring vs Exotic Ring with Jewel is a difference of 5 power, 5 precision, and 3% magic find.

I mean, how much is the total stat difference? After taking Rune bonuses and special effects into account?

Right, the 5 power/pre, considering your prob’ly at 2700 or more power, that amounts to a 0.2% increase in damage and 0.25% increase in crit. So if everyone had that upgrade, we could have shaved a second or two off the 2.5 hr Lost Shores event. :p

A treadmill on which you only take one step… is this still a treadmill, or just a rubber rug?

Smoothy.1085:

Thx alot! though it would still be better if ArenaNet made them account bound so we can stack them better in bank

Yes, of course. My understanding is they were made soulbound because of some exploit (duplication?), and it was easier to make them soulbound than to fix the buggy code (recurring theme in gw2).

You can stack them in the bank, but you first need to transfer them all to the same character.

Gear matters very little in gw2, less than a quarter of your game-relevant stats come from gear.

A full suit of exotic is about half the points you get from traits, and as noted in the top post, the strength of a build is in how it all comes together, not raw precision and power.

People who’ve played other games get misled, cuz we’ve been trained that increasing gear level matters so much in many mmos. Not here.

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

Also, I felt the Lost Shores content was pretty lackluster.

What I like is that it’s not all doom-n-gloom, the way Orr is. But it’s not an alternate to Orr.

The islands were just left the way they were after the special event. Somehow we failed to actually repel the karkas. Somehow game developers made a zone with almost nothing in it, not even zone-completion. No temples, only a couple poorly designed events. You’re better off going to Frostgorge.

To me, it’s not game-quitting sort of issue. But neither is the island a reason to play.

PowerCat.5738:

Press the switch weapon button on the keyboard. ` for me. (left of 1)

Then anyone can pick it up from the ground and then “put back into inventory” (skill 5 I think?)

You just gave someone the blueprint!

Right, and then log back in on your desired character and have your buddy pass them back to you. It’s cumbersome, but works around the soulbound aspects.

I’d like something along those lines. Or along different lines, too, whatever.

What I’d hoped before launch was that the legendary weapons would be more like Epic quests in Everquest, where you did a long, difficult series of in-game accomplishments, almost none of which required tradeable items, but ended up getting you deep into parts of the lore and the world. The result was an item that was actually connected to the game world (unlike, say a unicorn bow in a world with no unicorns) and your profession.

Whereas most of the difficulty for legendary items in GW2 involves things you can get off the TP. The fact that most of it can be obtained via paypal makes me not want to do it, cuz why not just paypal it, but I don’t want a paypal weapon, ya know?

Orders would be a good avenue to getting legendary type things that feel more connected and more heroic. It could just as well be race-based, or city-based, but with Orders they’d only have to do 3 of ’em.

My son read a review (I think it was by Pokket, but when I googled I didn’t find it) of GW2 by someone who’d bought gems-gold and leveled fast with crafting. It’s certainly an endorsed play style. And if you’re a journalist who needs to see endgame quickly for a review, it makes sense to hurry it up, so you can get on to writing the next article.

Similarly, if you look at time in RL vs in-game, a small amount of $$ on gems gets you plenty of gold, and in this game you can buy end-game gear (unlike most other games I’ve played where top gear wasn’t tradable). It’s certainly not the only way to get it, but it is part of the rule-set and design.

The premise that buying gear (with gold/karma/tokens/badges) is a bad prospect because it may in some day be replaced — I find that concept baffling.

Get gear, wear it, salvage/sell it… that cycle worked fine 1-79, and it keeps on working fine at 80.

You know the number of times I’ve been left with no reward from a dungeon glitch is so high, I think it’s really unfair to reimburse people for this event when others of us should have many hundreds more dungeon tokens and chest rewards that we’ve lost out on due to ArenaNet bugs.

Nycthemeron.7690:

We have all seen the amazing “pop in/chop the tree/pop out” botters. The only purpose behind this is to farm mats to sell. This rapidly devalues in-game currency and keeps material prices artificially low.

devalueing in-game currency and keeping material prices artificially low are inconsistent with each other.

From what I see in game, mats prices have not been kept low.

We definitely needed another thread on this topic.

If you’re frustrated, take time away. You can always check back into GW2, and with the very low power curve, it’ll be much easier than any other MMO to “catch up.”

Right now there’s Planetside 2 that has large-scale WvWvW battles with no culling issues. And it’s free to play. And lots of other fun games out there — ’tis the season!

Horrorscope.7632:

TakaEagle.9486:

I understand this but why would people base their “mains” on PvE, when presumably PvE will only lead to the ultimate goal: getting the armor needed to pvp in WvW?

Probably because for most the ultimate goal is only PvE based and not WvWvW. But even if WvWvW was the goal, people would assume Anet has the game/classes balanced properly for PvP when the time comes.

Well WvW is really not very good in GW2. But the gear isn’t hard to get and wvw isn’t very gear-oriented (unless you count siege). Certainly no reason to pve for armor if you’d rather wvw.

Post launch, you have to see the game is intended for pve. wvw has only had things taken out of game for it, and pvp is still not quite ready for launch.

Gehenna.3625:

I think the discussion is about the wrong element. Anet have their security measures and they will improve them as they go along. Hackers at the same time improve their methods also. It’s a constant battle.

What concerns me, in general, is not the actual security of a game, but what a game company does for its customers when something goes wrong.

I think it’s fair to ask people to participate in security as in the article that was linked, but I don’t think it’s good customer service to lay the responsibility and blame simply with the customer as well as the consequences. And this is where I think Anet has its shortcomings. I already got my account hacked in GW1 once and as people who have had it happen here, there is ZERO assistance in recovering your account beyond what the hackers decided to leave you with…usually naked characters.

This is the real issue to me. And having found out this is still the case for GW2 (even though they said they were looking into this for GW2), I have another reason not to want to pick up this game. GW1 is still the only time I got an account hacked. It never happened before nor since.

Regardless of whose fault it was…there was just not support and everything I collected over years was gone and Anet couldn’t help. That is just an experience I wish on no one. Anet in any case has no tools to help with this if it does happen, whether it was your fault or not.

This is a big difference in attitude between east Asian game companies versus NA games. ArenaNet of course could easily re-equip a stripped character, but they choose not to. It was the same with other NCSoft games.

GMs for NCSoft games are minimally-supportive, and really just there to keep the rules. My experience was similar with other Asian company games. Even stuff that’s patently the game’s fault, they won’t fix, as policy.

Whereas a Blizzard or Trion or other American game has a different view of GMing, that it’s about customer support. If you approach GW2 support with an expectation of service, you’ll be disappointed.

Even with a very defensive set-up, my guard has better kill-speed than my ranger.

And nothing can match a warrior for kill-speed.

Both are strong professions, and heavy armor looks pretty good. A common misconception is that armor value is a lot more for heavy. Unlike most fantasy games, here the diff between tiers is about 10%.

I think you can drop them and have someone else pick up. So they’re not mail-able, but kind of tradeable. (or did that get removed?)

MaideN.3284:

you guys left out the most important or should i say the easiest! way to get rares and exotics. complete all the lands from level 40 and more. you get rares from level 40-50 lands and exotics from 70-80 lands. and you can make a lot of money with that. you usually get 2 rare/exotic types, 1 random gem store consumable, 40x craft mats, and a cash prize for completing a land.

and it doesn’t take that long to do it

Right, but it’s unlikely to be gear you want to wear at 80, ime. But builds wealth, both the reward and in the doing the top 4 maps complete.

scabies.3246:

mulch.2586:

Someone I know who just got to 80 for the first time went and got a full exotic armor set (the Lyssa temple one). With that and some dungeon weapons, the only thing to craft or buy was jewelry.

If you’ve done the daily achieves and a couple monthlies, you’ll have surplus karma.

Note that if money is tight, there’s not actually much difference between rare (yellow) and exotic. In fact, you’ll likely find each upgrade underwhelming, cuz it’ll still take about the same number of attacks to kill the mobs.

Yes, that this guy says. Despite what many people might say, there is not much difference between rare and exotics. Don’t worry about wearing only rares for a while until you have enough Karma or gold or luck to get exotics, just don’t make it a permanent thing. Upgrading is great, but a temporary solution might be needed.

It’s of course impossible to tell the future, but if you’d obtained a full set of rare gear a few weeks ago, it would have nearly tripled in value when you salvage it today.

(my point being that rare gear sells for just about equal to its salvage value)