Guild Wars 2

Please say this is so.

My guild’s Mesmer Focus-Pull Engineer knock back team is just waiting to enter games, all select Skyhammer and then get free wins 50% of the time because our team is balanced with Skyhammer cheese in mind and the other team isn’t allowed to swap their classes.

And that’s in addition to all the free wins that we’ll get because anet destroyed solo Q for no reason, forcing solo Q players to solo Q into team matches.

We’re working on a variant for courtyard too. In theory any opposing team comp that isn’t totally geared for 5v5 fights (like they have a roamer on their team) will get Rekt.

Gemstore items like BL keys belong in the gemstore, and there are too many unidentified dyes in the game today.

It will take me a long time to get Ambrite collector with pvp (I’m halfway theough, after pvp got me dungeoneer), so I don’t need a new track just yet. I’m actually happy with the rewards for now.

I would like to see a pvp track that is unlocked by other pvp tracks, and I would like too see the previous pvp only skins get reintroduced in some manner.

We are likely to get a wintersday track, hopefully the rewards are better than the Halloween track.

Tezcatlipoca.4965:

Maybe I was hoping for more, but not expecting! My question was, if it is normal to not get anything in 25 chests? And if yes, is it due to the fact that Arena net can’t oversaturate the market with things they would normally sell, because there are so many key farmer?

Is it so weird to see a connection between the two?

How many scraps did you get? Scrap drop rate is about .3, so I think you got about 6-7 scraps…

If you hold only the keys until the 16th, you will likely get 65 Wintersday boxes in addition to whatever else….

Ensign.2189:

The peak time to sell has passed – it’s been downhill since they hit their peak a few months ago, as people are less willing to crack them to ‘have it now’ instead of waiting a couple more weeks for them to be re-introduced. You can sell some now, for sure, and still get decent money for them, but I doubt you’re going to get a huge premium on them over what you’d get after the christmas patch hits.

The best time to sell at this point would be on the day the patch .

I can’t disagree with this post more.

First the price spike a couple of months ago was driven by a bunch of flippers who wanted to cash in on the minipet announcement.

They bought up Wintersday gifts stock, made a post on reddit about how the Wintersday mini was still available from gifts, and tried to sell to suckers.

Now is the right time to sell. There are individuals who will open up thousands of gifts day one to get drop loot data so that they can profit $$ before the community gets an idea of how to price the boxes. Even now they are buying up old socks and ugly sweaters.

After all, On day one, all leftover socks and sweaters from last year get converted to gifts and there’s a huge glut of new supply.

Today’s buy orders are better than the sell orders that you will get on day one.

On the other hand, under certain conditions (detailed above) the price of gifts could subsequently tick up.

Try to sell them before extra supply at the start of winters day tanks the price down to below 2s/box.

Beyond that, it’s more complicated. I think boxes will be much rarer this year than last year.

Last year, the achievements didn’t force you to do much of the content. (Year one you had to replay everything a ton of times). Also last year a lot of the open world boxes were gone. In other words, there weren’t all that many ways to acquire boxes.

(And this year’s Silverwastes content that may be running simultaneous to Wintersday likely won’t contribute many gifts, because mordrem don’t drop loot.)

However, none of that mattered last year once anet allowed PvPers to exchange a year and a half worth of Glory (that previously mostly sat unused) into winters day boxes. Everybody who pvped dropped dozens of stacks of boxes.

With this years winters day content likely a total rerun of last year (see Halloween), and no glory exchange, Wintersday boxes could be scarcer than people think.

Of course, even scarcity doesn’t matter if the boxes aren’t updated with more interesting loot.

Look at the loot table of last years gifts: mostly garbage. (Please keep in mind that the super expensive Sigils of Generousity didnt drop from regular wintersday gifts, but from the personalized gifts). Dumping more worthless altruism recipes doesn’t cut it. The snowflake market is still saturated. If the only new things are account bound ghost dogs, or separately purchasable minis, why bother.

Anet promised China that they would get all of the stuff that we got. This might be an opportunity for them to deliver. There are items like Keeper’s Recipes (5-80 gold each) that are overdue for a reintroduction. And there will probably be new items and a holiday themed collection. Some of them might be nice!

It may be a good idea to hold onto the boxes and open, or even buy more boxes if the following assumptions are true:

1. Winterday turns out to be a total rerun of last year, including low ish gift drops.
2. Wintersday loot is updated.

I think there was a BL keys discount.

Which might not be so bad if you are into the Wintersday weapons (likely to return if some new snow themed weapon doesn’t arrive), plus Chests during Wintersday may give out gifts as an extra bonus.

What WvW needs most is new maps. Even a fresh coat of paint on old maps would be Ok.

Anyway, 1. Easy things that don’t require much developer resource to do is:

Bring Back the Match Threads!

Roe.3679:

If everyone continues to queue up alone then nothing will change. The idea of premades 5 mans vs pugs is not going to happen as its matching teams with teams. Allegedly. Plus, this type of thing already happens in teamQ now, but it should fix that.

So if you soloQ, just keep playing solo. Won’t change much.

Of course premades vs pugs is going to happen.

The pvp community is small, so you are going to q up with your premade, wait 2 minutes, and then get matched up with whatever pugs are Quequeing.

All that’s going to happen is you will drive the solo Q players out, and ruin team Q.

Also, unless they change the achievements, play is just compete without rewards. Same game mode, just no rewards. Who wants that?

So disappointed that these are account bound.

They probably will not ever be meta due to the expense of leveling crafting, the expensive recipe, and the expensive cost of crafting. Plus Platinum Doubloons, wtf?

What a waste. If anything the recipe should be account bound and the output sellable (which would make the SW a desirable area for a long time).

Was anybody else hoping that these would be the long awaited bloodstone/empyreal/dark matter sink?

It wolnt be that. Thats Compete.

Play is for people who want all of the trappings of an organized match (including the pre match long wait and leaver penalties), but don’t want achievement credit for a match victory.

Solo Q is getting removed. We like Solo Q, so the thread is valid.

There just aren’t enough players in team Q to avoid the organized team vs pug scenario. Good matchmaking would only help if there were a lot more players. And even if getting rolled by an organized team happens every 5 matches instead of every three, that still sucks.

This thread mourns the loss of Solo Q.

Solo Q is by far the most popular ranked Pvp format that we have right now before the patch. It is a was to test your mettle by yourself without having to get rolled by organized teams every few matches. It would be even more popular without Skyhammer.

Pvp is being overhauled into “practice, play, and compete.”

Practice == hot join
Compete == Team Q

“Play” seems to be totally pointless.

Who is going to use this mode if hot join still exists? Not casuals, they still have hot join. Not hardcores, they have team Q. Not PvE or achievement farmers, their title tracks need ranked wins. This mode is unrated, which means that it will be rife with rage quitters and/or griefers.

I appreciate the need for players to have friendly matches, but that is what custom arenas are for. I appreciate the desire for some people to want to test builds, but that is what hot join is for. If hot join is broken, hot join should be fixed. Casuals will seek out the most casual mode.

There exists a perfectly good alternative to hot join and Team Q. It’s called solo Q. The griefers get buried on the leader board where they can’t grief. Players can test their mettle without the problems of organizing or getting rolled unorganized. It’s dying only to be replaced by a poorly thought out clone of team Q.

RIP Solo Q, you didn’t have to die so young.

I got 500 crests in about 2.5 hours last night (maybe less), and I wasn’t even trying to farm crests.

I was hopping maps, trying to get into maps where the breach was close so I could get in the new maze (I got in three times). After using the Extractor to try and complete the collection, I turned the parts in to the crypto guy and found out that hearts are worth 100 crests each!

I don’t think it will be too grindy to get to 2k crests.

OFC, it now looks like we may have to farm up to 10k crests, but with new updates to keep he zone fresh coming for a while, I don’t think it will be that bad.

Skoigoth.9238:

Oh look! Somebody summed up the situation very accurately.

Now I have even less incentive to replay the LS on any of my alt characters. Great! More time to grind for crests! T_T

This relatively short Living story awards a BL key. It’s a pretty sweet reward.

Did you read the complaining thread that was on the top of the forums here last week and as recently as yesterday.

Basically the guy was complaining about how the bandit crest rewards in the zone were useless so the zone would die.

I tried to tell him…

… But this is why we can’t have nice things…

Tl;dr.

Anet changed things because that’s what the community asked for.

This was super easy in a group.

As you are new, both ranger and necromancer are good/great classes to play.

Both are intuitive and easy to control, easy to master, the necromancer is tanky and the ranger can spike somebody down quickly from range.

At high levels, the necromancer doesn’t have enough mobility, but this is not your concern until you get to high levels. The ranger is better on maps that are big and flat and less good on maps with lots of line of sight issues.

Tl;DR

Both are great choices.

I would love to see anet put a pvE world boss in EoTM to make good use of the wasted space where the Aetherblades and troll are.

As an AP hunter, I really like the maguuma wastes track. Pvp is more fun than Dry Top.

OP…

Easy answer is to bring focus.

Earth 4 == reflect
Earth 5 == invuln
Air 4 == Area of effect block
Air 5 == knockdown
Water 5 == area of effect daze

You can set it up so that they are unable to hurt you most of the time. It is ezmode. Swirling winds even protects the whole point.

GOSU.9574:

I like that a lot. Clever idea.

Still waiting on my Lara Croft original spelunking outfit. :/

The Lara Croft outfit is the endless Khaki tonic.

This is a serious suggestion:

(1) take the money that you were going to spend on your idea and instead create a new character

(2) Equip it with bags (optional)

(3) park it in rata sum.

Bingo, your home node is mined in 1 minute. (all of the rata sum nodes are close to the entrance and next to each other).

BONUS

Remember those bags from above? You now have a character with a clean inventory with 80 storage slots that you can use to flip on the TP without having to worry about cluttering your main’s inventory.

Go to LA, take the portal to WvW.

Bingo, now WvW is account unlocked.

Behellagh.1468:

I sell numerous items every night at the end of my play session and I haven’t run into this because I don’t try to sell all of them in 20 SECONDS!!! It’s probably because I don’t sell to high bidder and I take a moment to set the price that will be more profitable than highest seller but will likely sell in 12-15 hours.

I’m betting you all think instant coffee and microwaved meals are too slow.

I run into this problem pretty much every time I want to sell dungeon trash loot on the TP.

Go to gnash blade mode, select the loot bag and then one click takes you to the sell screen. It’s efficient and fast, almost as fast as the old TP.

I suspect that the game just can’t handle the transactions.

This behavior in prices is normal. It happened both years and happened again Wintersday both years.

All of these Candy Corn items take precious inventory space and demand is actually lower than it was during Halloween for the various tonics.

The foods depend on magic find which is only useful in like two zones.

The only sinks for candy corn and the rare items are the gobbler, the once a day maize recipe, and 20 slot bags/minipet.

The trick or treat bags lose a lot of their value not that the skritt either don’t drop or are worthless.

If you hold onto your Halloween stuff it’ll probably regain its value and maybe even give you a small profit by September, but most people are selling and wouldn’t be. Buying.

I prefer Silverwastes to Dry top in terms of rewards.

(1) Getting the Luminescent armor requires all three armors, One from the story and then 2 more from either 1000 badges or replaying the story.

That’s quite a grind. So you’ve got a big sink for your badges. Doubtless the same system will be in place for the rest of the armor, so you will need a ton of badges.

I’m also fairly certain more badges stuff is coming: Ascended stuff with sinister stats is yet to come.

(2) The chest rewards are the same, the difference is that the SW chests are always up and the Dry top chests are more expensive. I’ll take always up cheaper chests, thank you.

(3) I suspect that the Mordrem extractor will be a RNG nightmare for finishing up collections as more armor pieces are added. I hope you got your stuff already..

(4) Ok, OP doesn’t like champ bags. I however, like them compared to the alternative: having to constantly go back to town and sell stuff. I also appreciate the ascended drops.

(5) Remember how small Dry top was when it was released? Well just wait for the rest of the zone. The area with the big flower seen in the personal story has jet to be released for example.

(6) Converting badges to materials is profitable. So, what’s the complaint?

(2)

Add a World boss to Edge of the Mists.

Put the boss in the unused space where the Aetherblades are (and/or under where the trolls are).

Have it spawn at a set time in the match.

Edge of the mists is already PvPvE and this would make it really fun without annoying the “pure” WvW’ers.

I am in Borliss Pass

We were ranked 15th before the last season.

We suffered blowout losses in every match in the season (one was a 2nd place where the winning server had more points than the other two servers combined)

We have suffered blowout losses every week since

Our largest guild “Borliss savers” transferred off the server, along with all of our skill group guilds and EU coverage which used to be the strength of the server. We are down to two regularly playing guilds basically.

In a rational world we should have dropped tier weeks ago. Instead we are facing crystal desert this week. They are highly ranked enough, that our rating should be too strong to drop a tier even after another blowout loss. Basically, it’s Maguuma all again for us: the quality of our competition inflates our rating to a point where we can’t drop to our proper level.

How many lving story updates are left?

If this map is like Dry Top, then it is only 33% unlocked….

Plus the Luminesent Armorset Grind looks a lot like it will be just as time consuming as the Dry top weapons grind (18 pieces and 48 achievement points vs 16 weapons and 50 achievement points).

Plus a lot of people think that one of the the next updates in the zone might have a world boss. (If that happens then the zone will never be truly dead).

Something similar to the Maguuma wastes reward track is probably coming as soon as the whole map is opened by the end of the season.

Any chance they can be added to previous achieves? The shadow fight for example?

I got 3 wool, 1 wool, and 1 cotton the first time I mined mine.

I suspected that I was really lucky.

Anet hates farmers. Between Diminishing returns, and a philosophy of mobs not dropping loot, Magic fnd does seem to be pretty useless.

Except in Orr, Harathi hinterlands, & maybe Southsun Cove.

But please continue to evangelize Magic Find. I listed my Strawberry Ghosts at 40 copper and stand to make quite a return if they ever sell.

I bought about 2 dozen stacks of various consumables at 2-10 copper, and relisted them at 30-60 copper.

Some already sold. I think I broke even already and if any more sell I’ll have a decent % return.

The plastic spider tonic was a hit with role players. I think I whiffed on trying to gauge ppl on halloween tonics (the endless tonic is cheap).

I guess I’ll go on the forums and evangelize Magic find, and the rest could sell. (but at 5s/stack who really cares)

Staff is probably the most common weapon.

Pretty much everybody has it as their offhand because it’s the only weapon with range. It also gives the best damage in death shroud.

It’s also an awful weapon.

As for lvl 19 OP, use Axe or Scepter until you are confident playing in melee range, then use dagger most of the time, swapping to staff only when you need range or a condition clear.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

Norjena.5172:

Necromancer dps is bottom tier.

I remember that thread a few months back that showed that necros had comparable single target DPS to warriors. Has much changed since then?

That was based on theory crafting.

It assumed that you were dagger/war horn with all minion utilities and that you got all of the war horn 5 procs to hit your target.

In other words, garbage numbers.

In the real world, you don’t have 100% minion uptime, probably didn’t even take the minions ecause you need other utility, can’t get close to all of the warhorn hits to proc, have to face tank all damage and Cc, and have to stop and heal yourself.

Oh and most of your damage is single target.

If you got the achievement points under the old system, you still have those points and you still can get the points for account binding the pets.

If you get the pets now, you can earn just as many points as under the old system.

I don’t see a problem.

The only issue is envy towards players who got their minipet AP under the old system and then got it again by accound binding their Minipets. However, the people complaining who got the AP under the old system but sold their Minipets before they accound bound the Minipets (and have to buy the minis again to double their AP), they at least got gold for their minis.

So… Put the old minipet achievement track into the retired section?

Sell Sell Sell.

Once the new patch new shiny is out, nobody will care about the old patch new shiny.

I also suspect that the skritt lottery tickets were propping up the prices of bags.

There is a lot of inventory to clear before the consumables are worth more than they are now, there’s more than a year’s worth of inventory.

New bags will be farmed ll year with maize balm, and demand for bags will not spike up until next September.

Here’s the basic problem.

While the concept of weak villagers running away from strong courtiers is good, the game starts the villagers out with too much of a disadvantage.

While one player starts as a courtier, if the game is not full (and no games are all full at the start), all additional players hot joining into the match will start as courtiers.

If the Courtiers have 4 players 30 seconds in, the game is over before it starts.

I am not in favor of neerfing courtiers or giving players additional abilities to run and hide, but I don’t want to see normal hot joiners screwing up the game balance for everybody.

What ought to happen, is the villagers should get a minute to complete events before anybody gets turned into a courtier. This allows the villagers to build up defenses before the courtiers start coming, and takes 1 minute away from the courtiers race against the clock (& it also allows players to join the game without screwing up the balance in the first minute).

Last year was very different. The event died after 3 days.

Probably 15x as many materials got released this year. For perspective, there was enough candy corn + candy corn cobs to make 158 cobs on the market. This year, individual players may have made a significant fraction of that.

Time to buy now or time to sell now?

The CC Gobbler provides a sink for candy, but the Home nodes and Maize balms allow more candy to enter the market. Raffle tickets from bags are worthless after the raffle. Minipets will likely be rereleased.

I think he’s saying that the people who clicked so many bags were using tools to help them click.

But, just buying bags and then selling everything proved to be almost break even, which means that players who had money and wanted to open a lot of bags, could have opened as many as they wanted.

In 2012 there was an Emissary who looked just like the mad king who spawned in the hut on top of the hill.

It would be nice to see him back, maybe alternating spawns with a thorne clone.

I think that boss was removed because, in 2012, the main way to get loot was from chests and people were killing the boss and then swapping instances. Chests have been fixed since then so bring him back.

Bring Back matchup threads!

About this time last year, anet gave an interview where they said they had two big teams working.

One was the Living story team

The other turned out to be the Chinese release/feature pack.

I don’t think you should expect a proper expansion anytime soon, or ever unless the game does really well in China.

Bloodyhell.8760:

I don’t agree on the idea necro is so bad in pve. If you mean anything else than dungeon, they’re pretty good.

About dungeon, the only problem with necros is dps. if it would be increased, it would be great. But no real review of the class seems necessary to me.
Just some soft burst to put its dps in the same line of others.

Nah they are pretty bad.

Think about “tagging enemies,” doing enough damage to get loot. In a zerg event.

Staff Marks don’t do enough damage by themselves to tag an enemy unless their conditions hit for several seconds, Wells are on long cool downs, Daggers require you to travel to right on top of the mob (and absorb the CC from the mob first), and DS 4 needs to hit a few times to tag.

Other than dagger, there is no autoattack cleave.

The puts the class definitively worse than thieves, guardians, and engineers.

And that the class’ strength.

Remember that you’ve still got to face tank hits and CC, no group utility, no reflects, and bad land speed.

EDIT

The problem with Necromancer DPS in dungeons is no reflects. Classes with reflects do light years more damage than classes without reflects. Other than that, the DPS is actually ok/not the problem. And the dagger cleave buff helps a lot in the typical “stacking” encounter. The problem with necromancers in dungeons has really to do with no group utility/nothing unique that the Necomancer can do better than another class.

I’m getting pretty close to capping out dailies and realistic permanent achievements.

I don’t need the radiant armor set right away, but I’m going to miss getting the big chests every month or so. When you get all of the trophies in a PS2 game, what motivates you to keep playing, or do you just put it down?

After a year and a half of never being on my skillbar, I’m finally using Epidemic again in the Halloween Labyrinth.

Epidemic, according to old forum threads is “So OP,” and “a force multiplyer of potentially unlimited power.”. However I don’t use it very often, and I don’t see it used very often.

See, in open world PvE, in order to get any use from the skill you need to have:

(1) A mob with a lot of hit points, enough hit points that a lot of conditions and Zerg auto attacks don’t kill it faster than the long casting cost for epidemic (which goes on full cool down if the skill fails because the target is dead).

(2) the mob has to be surrounded by enemies, and the enemies need to have a lot of hit points. (in order to tag a mob for loot, the spread conditions may need to tick several times). It’s not enough for your epidemic merely to spread to other enemies, but the conditions need to tick long enough to tag.

Orr mobs or Centaurs don’t have enough hit points to qualify, mobs in the rest of the game aren’t packed closely enough together to qualify. Fortunately, the beefy labyrinth mobs do qualify.

Dungeon bosses typically don’t have adds, which means that the skill sits useless.

Even in situations where the skill is theoretically useful (the charr fractal), the number of ideal uses pops up so infrequently, that you are better off taking another skill.

The way WvW is played today, with tight Zerg groups, it looks like the skill could have its uses, but, the skill is outclassed in every way by the condition removals that are everywhere.

Pvp, the problem is that the necromancer doesn’t have mobility and as a result isn’t part of team fights. Also, enemy positioning can render the skill useless. Also, the necromancer is pigeonholed into taking stun breaks because of no stability, leaps, or stun breaks on weapons.

The real problem with Epidemic, is that most of the time the skill just doesn’t do anything.

The skill has literally no effect on the target. “Save Yourselves,” isn’t just a group condition clear, it also gives the shouter a lot of buffs, but Epidemic does nothing.

I would prefer that the skill did something, anything, to the target (weak damage and poison?) in order for this skill to see time on my bar. If the skill needed to be weakened to accommodate this (self condition, or limits on the numbers of conditions spread that’d be ok).

What do you guys think?

Do the buffs from the Gobbler stack in effect or duration with booster buffs?

If I have a gemstore armor buff, will the gobbler either add to it in effect or make it last longer before expiring? What about magic find? If I get magic find from a bonfire, will this make the MF las longer or increase my total MF?

Sell the balm. Less than one week left to use it while the instance is available.

I tried to use it in the open world and encountered kill stealers.

The only thing propping up bag prices is their value as raffle tickets for the Grinning Shield/Greatsaw. After the raffle is over, their value is gone.