Guild Wars 2

haviz.1340:

plasmacutter.2709:

Tired of double-standards.

Tired of our core mechanic being broken by turning blind into interrupt++ for mesmer only
I’m insulted by the introduction of a global cooldown for mesmer only
Tired of damage scaling inversely with number of targets b/c of illusion fragility for mesmer only

??

Blind works like that for every class. If you blind someone during his animation he’ll miss.

Elementalists got gcd since ever. And its 1s, not 0.25s

So if you blind a necro during summon flesh golem it will ‘miss’, thus putting flesh golem on cd and negating all subsequent damage?

are you THICK man? the threads showing how blind is interrupt++ instead of just stopping one attack have been done in every relevant forum at least 4 times.

This patch has made clear ANet’s utter lack of interest or commitment in the mesmer profession.
When faced with an obvious damage calculation bug causing mind wrack to do 100% more damage, they nerfed our might stacking instead and instituted a global cooldown for mesmer only

I’m shelving my mesmer for good.

I don’t pvp with it at all and almost never saw any shimmering bodies in pve until the might stacking change allowed me to actually gasp loot a few bodies in dynamic events instead of just chests.

I’m done. I’m hanging it up and continuing with my ele – which does more damage in CLERICS GEAR AT 73 THAN MY MESMER DOES IN RAMPAGERS AT 80, after which I’ll probably do guardian or engineer.

Tired of double-standards.

Tired of our core mechanic being broken by turning blind into interrupt++ for mesmer only
I’m insulted by the introduction of a global cooldown for mesmer only
Tired of damage scaling inversely with number of targets b/c of illusion fragility for mesmer only

Anyone see a pattern here?

I’m shelving my mesmer for good.

I don’t pvp with it at all and almost never saw any shimmering bodies in pve.

the might stacks provided an engaging playstyle and brought those shimmering bodies so I could actually gasp loot more than just chests.

I’m done. I’m hanging it up and continuing with my ele, after which I’ll probably do guardian or engineer.

dreztina.4820:

I never had this problem at all, then for a couple days it happened to me nonstop, and now it isn’t happening at all again. I have no idea what causes it, but trying to play with this bug is kitten near impossible. It seems like a small thing, but it really kittens you up.

lag?

Iehova.9518:

I just hope precursors stealthily become account bound so the people who hoard precursors for no other reason than to manipulate the market get screwed.

I absolutely LOVE this idea

It would totally bone gold farmers and tp players who get a kick out of the misery of the vast majority of the playerbase.

ANET PLEASE DO THIS!

Rayya.2591:

the skill is called 100 blades – it has 3.25 seconds cast time and is imobile, Moreever is casted on an npc with vulnerability up. Warrior has 23 sacks of might , arround 4300-4500 p attack. In order to cast 100 B on an player at full potential , you must find an player without condition removal , stunbreaker , invulnerability / mobility skills. and 2 guardians to buff you with might ^^. good luck on that
compared with backstab , 0.25 cast time -12.000 you can cast also 5 heartseekers in that time and 3 normal hits ^^ , and move meantime.
I do not complain about thief, but do not make ridiculous comparations

Forgot to mention you can see the big hulking guy (or the teenie-weenie asura) with huge weapons coming at you and prepare for the obvious wrecking ball.

Very different than the infamous “dead and stomped before culling is done” backstab-from-stealth combo.

This needs to be fixed.

People should be punished for being stupid. They should not be punished for failing to be psychic.

After it’s fixed, they need to fix non-dagger-mainhand thief weapon combos to make them equally but differently powerful and viable.

I don’t think it’s unimaginative at all.

It’s a weapon, weapons are designed to perform a function.

This one sets traps and uses a long ranged piercing attack to lure target crowds through a pathway of death.

The ar-15 rifle is “boring” too, but equally elegant in its operation and function.

If they made the clone death traits also trigger from shattering, then a shatter/condition hybrid build using rampagers would be insanely good.

scepter 1 should be replaced with winds of chaos, scepter 2 should be changed to grant aegis for 3 seconds and spawn a clone at the target – and be on 4 second cooldown.

There, scepter fixed and properly established as a condition bunkering weapon.

Foss.4830:

Asum.4960:

Foss.4830:

I know about the trait but literally. Full health every time he came out. 50% up to full in what? how long does CND last? 3? 4 seconds? That seems like an outrageous amount of healing.

Pretty much every class can pull that off, most of them are even way more effective (dps and control) wise doing so as a Thief.

Good luck fighting a leeching Wellomancer or a Bunker Guardian if you already have problems with a Thief.

K ive fought alot of stuff out in WvW. Ive been playing since launch. Ive never encountered someone that heals that much. I really dont think your understanding me when I say full health everytime he stealthed. There is no class in the game (obviously besides thieves) that can match that amount of healing in such a short period of time. SUSTAINED healing. He probably could have gone on like that untill we were all dead. the only thing that saved us was a zerg coming up behind us.

Bunkers are a pain but they never kill me because I can actually see them and CC them appropriately to interrupt/negate the majority of their skills.

My D/D ele packs clerics gear and can pop to water and heal 80% hp in 4 seconds without casting active spells. The gear is a mix of greens and blues. In exotics I imagine the recovery rate would be pretty insane.

if it’s P/D then cloak & dagger is being used to stealth and that requires melee. ranged is your counter to that bunker.

The fact remains that, even if the combo is on cooldown, you have access to a combo that:

1 – the target cannot see coming – at all – (this is to contrast with quickness + 100B)

2 – will reliably kill or put unto death’s door anything but a 100% pure bunker build in approximately 1 second (if caught unaware without boons up, it will also kill 100% pure bunker eles because of their low base hp)

This approaches the absolute ceiling of human reaction time, and is absurdly unfair, especially coupled with the many “get out of being squished free cards” thieves get.

Mesmers you can see coming, and can only do this because of a bug causing +100% mind wrack damage.

Warriors you can see coming, and once the one-trick is gone they can’t escape.

Thieves do have many weaknesses when not doing this, they have serious mechanic issues and weapon and weapon set viability issues due to ill-advised nerfs and design choices in specific sets, but THIS combo needs to go.

Either a hard-block needs to be put in place to prevent the mug-c&d-steal-backstab combo, or the damage of one or more of these needs to be toned down significantly.

NOBODY has a right to an IWIN button, even on a long cooldown, if you want instakills the FPS world is that way

oellph.9450:

My first 80 was a thief but I currently spend most of my time playing my 80 Guardian and I have to say I’ve seen the problem from the other side. Many times our group was getting harassed by a lone thief who was just uncatchable. He wasn’t able to kill anyone but it was frustrating not being able to lay some consistent damage down before he disappeared again.

I really want to see the thief be a viable class which isn’t nerfed to obscurity but something needs changing, if only culling.

Someone who is hit by aoe in stealth should receive some kind of penalty.

Not necessarily knocking them out of stealth, but perhaps cripple, which if hit again would turn into root.

This would prevent the behavior you’re discussing with minimal pve impact.

ANET: Please listen to this person, heck.. hire him

ASP.8093:

I play a thief in WvW and PvE.

In WvW, I think the complaints about thieves largely stem from players having a difficult time interacting with thieves, due to overlong stealth and super-quick spikes.

1. Culling. Every time a stealthed thief attacks me, I get hit 3-4 times before I can actually see him. I know this isn’t intentional because NPCs see you instantly after the first attack lands. I always shadowstep away when Backstabbed, because there’s no way I can make up Backstab and several other free hits. I understand that WvW culling is a big issue in general, but it’s especially annoying when it impacts you repeatedly in the same fight with thieves.
2. Contesting camps while stealthed. There are counter-strategies, but it’s still an annoying process. All the same reasons you can’t do this in SPvP should apply to WvW as well.
3. Big super-fast spikes. Lots of players complain about these. The overall damage itself is actually fine, in my view, but the spike compression — not damage! — that you get from C&D->Steal->Backstab is a bit much. My impression is that the problem isn’t that Backstab does a lot of damage, it’s that you get C&D and Mug and Sigil of Air all hitting at the same time, then Backstab almost immediately afterward. I think the best fix is turning the Backstab combo into more of a clear two-part spike, with a greater delay between the initial C&D burst and the Backstab follow-up, thereby giving players a chance to dodge, block, &c. My preferred solution would be adding an aftercast to C&D rather than tweaking damage numbers.

More generally, I think the game has a problem with quickness. We’ve seen both thief and ranger nerfed because they had abilities that were alright by themselves but over-the-top ridiculous with quickness. Seems like every ability is potentially problematic with quickness, which points to quickness itself needing some scrutiny.

DesertRose.2031:

Many other games, including GW1, have shown that playing against a character that appears right next to you out of nowhere and outright kills you or at least heavily damages you is not fun.
So what needs to be changed is the high burst damage some Thief builds can dish out off the cuff. An inelegant way of doing this is do simply decrease the damage and Initiative cost, a more elegant way would be to give high-burst skills some requirements they need to fulfill first to unfold their full potential.

An example of such a change is to reduce the base damage of Backstab and give it a damage bonus for every stack of Bleed on the target. Then the Thief or one of his teammates has to apply those stacks of Bleed first and then could spike the target down.

At the same time such a change would improve the Thief in PvE because it’s easier to set those combos up. E.g. a player character with 25 stacks of Bleed is in most cases as good as dead so a Backstab with ridiculous amount of damage won’t be gamebreaking, but against a PvE champion who easily survives several minutes with so many stacks of Bleed it would be a huge damage boost.

Or you could remove the ability to stealth prior to initial opener without seriously gimping yourself.

sylvari t3, they’re like shards of glass

Dodge on thieves seems to be bugged, and I think it’s due to the “shadowy dodge” built into this profession.

Specifically, the actual effect of the dodge seems to lag the animation by about 1/2 it’s duration, so you only evade if the attack connects on the second half of the animation.

The duration of the evasion is still the same, but the actual evasion itself comes in half-a-beat late, so you end up taking full damage in the beginning of the animation, and you could end up evading well after the animation.

Examples:

you see an attack incoming on a thief, you hit dodge, if the attack hits you within the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the animation, you will take full damage.

On any other profession without the fancy shadowy dodge animation, this would count as evaded.

specifically tested this on those rapid-attacking wasps in queensdale, and evade is much easier to come-by on a rapid-reaction basis on every other profession.

I spoke to other thieves in my guild and they note the same thing and that they had to adapt to it, but given the limited effective range of a thief’s max damage output, it’s vitally important that the effectiveness of dodge be the same as it is for other professions.

Heliox.8632:

Dailies reset at 4pm PST, not 24hrs since you ran it.

I ran the 3 paths back to back yesterday and got 60 tokens first path I did today.

This is still inconsistent behavior.

Thank you for clarifying, however.

Has anyone run into this bug?

I ran AC 3 paths yesterday and got the expected 180 tokens.

Today, around the same time, I ran them again. (path 2, then 1, then thought I’d do 3):

path 2 I received the intended 60 tokens.

Path 1 I received only 20 (!)

I obviously did not stick around for path 3

I’ve recently started a habit of running AC exp 3 paths for the tokens on my ele (with the hope of having a full set of PVT by the time I reach 80), but I’ve run into a nasty bug.

Yesterday, I rand all 3 paths, got 180 tokens

Today, around the same time, I ran the first path, got 60, the second path, got 20, and decided this was the time to drop my group.

WTH is going on here? Why I am being hit so hard for a path I did 24 hours ago?

Rainzar.6905:

this game needs more wall-street crashes imo, then bad traders can jump from their offices into the streets of lion’s arch.

That would require sudden, unannounced patches in which mining nodes appear full of precursors.

5s and dropping. looking at the listings scales are still being dropped in 500+ unit listings.

I think the bots are still quite active.

cznrhubarb.5946:

Avatara.1042:

Lingering Elements: Excellent. Makes the already ridiculous Elemental Attunement skill even better!

Lingering Elements does nothing to Elemental Attunement. It is actually really bad

Yeah, when I originally read the skill I assumed it meant for elemental attunement as well. It didn’t seem like it was affecting it though, so I actually dropped from 15 to 10 points in Arcana on my build a while ago.

At least I know I wasn’t being crazy, now that other people are confirming there is something fishy with this trait.

It really should extend arcane fury at least by 5 seconds. 2 seconds of fury is REALLY short and pretty much useless without something extending it. Even boon duration runes stacked to high heaven won’t add much to a 2 second boon.

Sea Of Sorrows is excellent if you play evening to late night pacific.

I originally was thinking about camping my way into TC, but after reading around these forums decided to give SoS a shot and was not disappointed.

Within my first hour there I had done 3 temples in orr (this was well over 2 weeks after the infamous “LFG FOTM” patch) – yes, they routinely raid temples there.

Recommendation:

Wait until 4:30 AM on christmas eve, or newyers eve, and try tarnished coast. If that doesn’t work, wait until 4:30 AM wed after xmas break.

The servers DO bump off the full list around that time (pacific)

BEWARE: Tarnished Coast is a very high demand server.

I realize Anet must have done something to increase the cap or filtered it out or something, since the other week they all went from Full to Very High.

However, now they’re filling up again and I can’t get on the server my husband and Guild transferred to (which is Tarnished Coast). Neither can my sister-in-law.

Are these servers stuck at Full? Every time I look, it never moves from Full. Any Tarnished Coast members know what times I should be aiming for to camp the World Select screen?

sffrrrom:

Some important notes: anything that’s not in heavy armor will feel squishy (especially clothies) until lvl 30 to lvl 35, after that every profession can be a tank (i’ve seen necro tanks and elementalist tanks, and play a mesmer tank)

Frotee.2634:

For starters, I’d say a necro works better than a mesmer or ele, if simply because of the fact that the latter two are rather squishy. Having a more durable character is much more forgiving in the beginning, when you are still learning your way around the game.

Mesmer is like a combination of a necro and a thief.

They have reasonably high hp and can be made personally tough through their builds, but when played and traited for maximum clone generation and projectile reflect, they can avoid being hit 90% of the time.

I had a build that was 10/20/0/30/5 (with sword/focus, greatsword) on my mesmer and was able to kite melee (or crowds of melee) and make them hit my clones all the time instead of me, AND shut down 75% of all incoming ranged attacks. I could set up that reflective wall in ORR DE’s and watch crowds of ranged shoot at me but kill themselves, then loot.

Mesmers can solo any group boss that does not summon zergs of adds without getting hit once when played properly; if you slip up it’s very easy to recover and buy yourself LOTS of time, and at the end of the day, if things go very wrong, you have about 7-8 ways to escape, depending on what cooldowns are available and traits you have.

Finally, for soloists, mesmer’s downed state is VERY strong. it produces clones, moves you out of aoe circles, and stealths you.

In pvp mesmers are not as “bunker-ey” as guardians, but in pve they are the most “bunker-ey” class out there. If you like this idea and choose a mesmer, I strongly recommend ditching the scepter for either a staff, a greatsword, or a sword/focus combo asap, as scepter is the starting weapon, and is also the worst weapon in the mesmer arsenal.

Do the order armors (priory, vigil, whispers) have upgrade slots?

This is not clear on the online resources, and it’s dead important to me. (i’m facing ideal stat combo for my build IF there’s an upgrade slot on each piece v.s. preferred cosmetics)

Movement

• It’s very important to keep moving in this game.

In 15 levels I realized this and went out and bought a razr nostromo. (it’s sold in best buy, looks like a cross between a mouse, a keyboard, and an xbox controller, probably get a good deal in the after xmas sales?)

This allows me to play the game with a similar control scheme to the halo series (run and turn camera with mouse, strafe with left dpad, use abilities with left hand). Much less clumsy and more precise than wasd

circle strafing – or – running, stopping as your dodge bar gets high enough, attacking, and dodging in the opposite direction will work.

Builds
After that, I’d choose a tankier build. (there should be a lot of bunker builds floating around on the boards, choose one and run with it, for my ele I went d/d.. the ele is now 30 with a sepc 0/10/0/10/0 and can really take a pounding.. just slaughter whole crowds, take down multiple vets solo).

Once you get the movement down and have a build planned, you’ll start to get more and more survivable as you level…

Ability Chains
as you level, learn how your abilities interact (again, there are whole threads on what people use to combo together). It reads like a complicated mess, but it flows naturally once you try it a few times.
There are certain abilities which are meant to chain together to help you put out max damage while avoiding incoming damage.

More foriving professions for people with low mobility
When all else fails (or if you feel you’re clumsy on the mobility), try mesmer with sword/sword and scepter/focus with heavy investment in inspiration, 20 in dueling (for clone on dodge), and the rest in chaos. This is, by far, the tankiest build in the game. It produces clones that take the hits for you constantly, has long periods of invulnerability you can alternate with blocks on short cooldown, and copious utilities and escapes. I’ve survived every group event which does not overwhelm you with dozens of adds using this build without having to move much at all.

I also notice staff necro is very good so long as you’re not ambushed. You just lay out marks and lead mobs through them, they’re almost dead by the time they reach you, and at the end of the day you have a menagerie of pets to help draw attention from yourself and hamper enemies.

I hope this helps a little.

I’m on Sea of Sorrows (camped out until 4:30 am on a weekend pacific to get in) and it’s an excellent server.

Just be sure you have a CPU and vid card beefy enough to take the punishment of standing in a crowd of over 100 to kill dragons.

Powerr.3649:

Immediate needed changes imo:

-Revert mesmer trait “shattered strength”

I play a mesmer, primarily PVE, and would rather see mesmers balanced by fixing the shatter exploit that’s causing mind-wrack to do 100% more than it’s supposed to (you fool the game into calculating the damage as 3 separate 1-clone shatters rather than 1 single 3-clone shatter).

Before the shattered strength buff, mesmers may as well AFK in dynamic events for the lack of loot they were receiving, and the might stacking itself would not be an issue if this pre-existing bug were not still being exploited.

Getting rid of the bug would bring down their highest burst level by 50% and allow mesmers to be balanced around the properly functioning ability rather than the top-end of an exploit.

Navi.7142:

I agree. Please consider to split more into pve and pvp versions.
As a pve mesmer I just want to be viable and competitive in openworld pve (eg. DEs) and sometimes dungeons. I want to contribute in group fighting. =)

Thanks.

This is doable without splitting pvp from pve.

They need to give us more aoe that is not clone dependent andtone down shatter damage, and/or better yet take shattered stregth and debelitating dissipation even further and shunt our clones even further in the direction of boon and condition source (clones as mobile boon and condition turrets sound stupidly fun, I’d love to see that paired with mantras to produce a rival to heavy water elementalists for a ‘max clone uptime – punishment to attackers for clone death’ group support ).

Mesmer offers tremendous opportunities to get creative instead of going the lazy way out and making us a different class in pvp.

Liewec.2896:

its got to a state in pvp where i’d be quite happy if they SmiteBoon’d the hell out of shatter messies.
ofcourse a pvp/pve splite would be required.
im through getting insta killed by mesmers with 20 stacks of might…

love that Anet buffed their FOTM build and then post a forum comment “yes its wicked! we’ll be watching it!”
yes, you’ll be watching…
rather than fixing the game you just watch and every month or so throw a dart at a board while blindfolded to decide what to buff/nerf…
a chimpanzee could design a game with more balance,
what happened to the GW1 devs?

So do you play a backstab thief or a heartseeker thief?

The original post is full of impatience and subjective value judgment.

MMO’s are inherently imbalanced at launch and usually take at least 8 months to even begin to approach it due to the inherent complexity. The devs are simply no match for players in terms of finding and exploiting ability synergy.

The main issues I see are as follows:

1 – glass cannon builds need to be toned down. People usually don’t bunker unless compelled. The consensus for most is that the only gameplay less fun than bunker specs hitting like wet noodles would be being destroyed before you can react. Once glass cannons are no longer able to do this, many people pidgeon-holed into bunker builds will branch out into others, and you will see more build variety.

2 – utility skills need a major look. Right now people feel compelled to stock condition removal, stun breaks, and stability, leaving the rest to the dustbin, because these are absolute necessities in both pvp and pve. (stability might not be as needed).
If they could build these basics into your toon some other way (like it is with a properly traited ele), then spice up the others (particularly signets and mantras, which are beyond meh), then some real variety will pop up there.

Both of these require one thing: TIME

They have to iron out the major bugs while also churning out content. Once the bugs have died down they will be able to look at the signets issue. The burst issue they’re already looking at, though I’m not very satisfied with their answer on thieves. Thieves are simply too survivable for their current damage. Mesmers are just as slippery and were nerfed to the ground, so why the double-standard?

condiments.8043:

quercus.9261:

95% of the people on this thread have no reading comprehension.

THIS IS A BUG

There is a bug with shatters that will cause big broken damage if you go in a certain order. People in the know are being hush-hush because they don’t want this widely known. Somebody posted what is going on a few times in this thread however.

Devs know about this and it will be fixed.

Is this a recent bug? Because mesmer still did pretty big damage even before the patch too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpE2k3ZN1vU

At least you can react to this, but its still pretty high on a 1700 toughness target.

No, it’s only become a huge issue now because of the might stacking.

I hope they fix it rather than just straight-nerf something.

I don’t like being nerfed over a bug.

aydenunited.5729:

Israel.7056:

We don’t even know exactly what they’re going to change yet. I don’t think Sharp’s post is entirely clear.

I think I’ll wait until I actually have something concrete to look at to either cheer or despair.

At worst you’ll just reset to where you were before the patch, which was already very good in PvP, at the top next to Guardian.

I have no clue how it affects PvE.

this patch finally gave us ONE build we could use in pve that would give us a reasonable number of sparkling corpses in cursed shore events. (20/20/10/0/30 GS, shatter-might)

If it gets nerfed in any way we go back to camping the TP if we want anything decent out of PVE.

You see, in zergs of risen we don’t get as much chance to take advantage of the bug that lets us “trick” the clone counter and cause 100% extra mind wrack damage, so if they don’t specifically fix that bug (when has ANet ever targeted the right problem?) then we end up sucking fumes again like we did pre-patch in pve.

kitteno.8103:

plasmacutter.2709:

Precursors are inflating faster than I, as a normal person playing the game in the intended, paced manner, can gain cash.

People, who play the game in “paced manner” do not deserve Legendary. During development of the game Anet has clearly stated that Legendary is only for those, who want to grind heavily and dedicate a lot of time on getting this weapon.

Charged Lodestones is another issue, because it’s literally impossible to grind them and because they’re affecting those, who want to make non-Legendary weapon.

Red post or it’s just you fallaciously calling on nonexistent authority.

What I remember reading was that Legendaries were supposed to be the capstone of an established GW2 career.

This concept does not necessarily require you to “beat the market” or “grind quickly”.

This is supposed to be a game, a fantasy world. One would think ANet could work to mitigate the kind of social injustices (especially in this economy) that people log in to avoid.

Zid.4196:

plasmacutter.2709:

In regard to precursors, the vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t think it’s fine. It’s one thing to have a high but stable price, its another to see continued inflation vastly outpacing individual income. This is what is happening now. Precursors are an unreachable goal for the vast, vast majority because ANet has failed to tune the drop rates properly.

Again, it’s not the inflation. Precursors, lodestones, etc: all the hard drops for legendaries and elite skins will continue to rise in price faster than inflation. They are a fast moving goal post because the richest players have no problem paying that much for them. The root of the issue is the Trading Post which is a tool for creating vast wealth inequalities similar to those in the real world. While that is not a problem per se, people playing fantasy MMOs do expect legendary weapons to be awarded for more than playing the TP better than 99% of the population. At the moment the best way to get a legendary is to park your toon in the TP at lvl 2 and alt-tab to gw2spidy.

As I’ve pointed out before, GW2 design unwisely chose to defy both the soulbind on acquire legendary components of casual MMOs that don’t allow for legendary purchasing on the open market; and the harsh penalties on death that the hardcore MMOs with detailed economy have. As a result, one doesn’t need to play GW2 to get a legendary and in fact one is wasting time when not playing the TP.

For example, a person with legendary (yep, the orange ones) in WoW is a person who raided a lot and his entire guild decided he is worthy of the single legendary that can reasonably be assembled. A person with the legendary “equivalent” in EVE, the supercapital ship, certainly has the skill and knowledge to play the game well enough to protect his ship, and trust me there isn’t anything that gets pilots scrambling as the yell “supercapital tackled at X”. Whereas owning legendary in GW2 means…what? That the owner applied math and tracking software to win the TP mostly at the expense of the other players? Not very legendary, especially in the setting of GW2, supposedly a game of heroes like the Destiny’s Edge and not Monopoly gentlemen.

The trading post is not the problem.

It’s a function of supply vs demand.

Other MMO’s do an excellent job of tweaking the drop rates of expensive items such as end-game weapons to maintain a stable price.

ANet needs to get their act together in this regard. If the supply remains as low as it is (i’m seeing a rolling average of 10 in any given month), yes, it will continue to soar inexorably out of reach.

They tried a short-term fix with karka chests, but it was a rather crude shock to the supply and they really just need to start slowly dialing it up until the price and stability are where they want it. (i’d suggest dialing it up disporoportionately higher for chests and champions to reward higher efforts)

The other option, of course, to make legendaries reflect skill, is to put precursors at the end of event chains, explorables, etc and soulbind precursors on pickup. This would allow dramatic increases in drop rates while assuring random lvl 3 noobs couldn’t buy one off the TP.

kitanas.3596:

GamerToukotsu.4219:

Astraea.6075:

plasmacutter.2709:

Astraea.6075:

Avan.1540:

Likely not when a very large number of people started recording these issues; there’s a thread with well over 1000 posts on it in the general forum.

Look up the phrase “confirmation bias”. I’m not saying there isn’t an issue with drop rates, but citing numbers of posts that support your view doesn’t actually prove it.

It does when you’re trying to confirm people are not delusional.

Generally you can confirm something is “real” when a significant number of people observe it.

when was the last time over 2000 people were kitten enough to go post in a thread?

Was it a real in-game issue then?

And what about people not having an issue? They won’t post at going “omg… drops are unchanged”.

Again, not saying there isn’t an issue, but citing post count isn’t evidence.

I think the biggest issue isn’t that there was a change in the loot parameter but, there was an actual change or more people are hitting the diminishing returns curve of loot.

the point is that this could just be a string of bad luck. if there are say, 1 million people playing GW2 (made up number) then, though statistical probability, there will be those who have atrociously bad luck. they attribute that bad luck to a change in loot parameter, and a thread is born. other people with similar luck come on to report there claim, which keeps the thread going.

I’m pretty much drowned in statistics for my degrees. RNG is RNG, RNG ceases to be Random when you go a month after a specific patch with loot quality radically reduced.

If I plotted this it would clearly pass a chow break-point test, and look like the jobs numbers from 2006 to 2009.

Given that it only hits about 30-40% of my guildies (along with myself), while the others are fine, I’m going with the theory that DR is being triggered, or some permanent “bot-flag” is being placed on accounts that shouldn’t be.

Ryuujin.8236:

and some people started -selling precursors_, the horror – and they destroyed the econ… no wait… the economy was fine.

This is subjective.

The “health” of an economy is a matter of perspective and goals of the humans impacted.

I guarantee you that pre-revolution, the nobility thought the french economy was fine too.

In regard to precursors, the vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t think it’s fine. It’s one thing to have a high but stable price, its another to see continued inflation vastly outpacing individual income. This is what is happening now. Precursors are an unreachable goal for the vast, vast majority because ANet has failed to tune the drop rates properly.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

TL;DR

It’s Supply vs Demand. The ones who own the Legendaries can decide whatever price to sell it for. If they choose to sell for 200 or 2,000 gold, that’s all up to them. But the players who want one can either pay these prices, or take the time to make their own.

There’s nothing wrong with selling something you own for a price you want.

There currently is an issue with supply in this game.

precursors should not inflate faster than the median income if ANet doesn’t want people feeling their efforts at progression are futile.

Materials such as lodestones are frankly out of control, as well.

If you want to constrict the supply of t6 mats and lodestones to that degree, then you need to lower the requirement for recipes, otherwise they’ll continue to skyrocket and remain out of reach for the majority of the playerbase.

If you’re not going to reduce the required number of these mats, then their supply needs to be increased from drops, and this means fixing the DR system and making loot progressive as you fight more difficult enemies.

Again, the reason prices are able to creep so high is because players don’t have a reasonable option for obtaining it without the TP’s help…. the TP has a monopoly.

Rouven.7409:

Juxtapositronic.1405

If a player finds an epic economic adventure to be fun, who are you to judge them? What does their effort have to do with your experience in the game?

If they go out and cash-shop their way to a legendary, does that matter to you?

I am not judging and quite frankly I do not personally care how ever you aquired what ever you may have. If you check my posting history you may find that stated a few times.

There are only two main ways of “gold” into the “economy”.

Buying gems and converting them – limited by the amount people are willing to spend.
Looting something in game and selling it.

The “third” way that we are talking about here is other players through the TP.

Usually – I am repeating myself – this is none of my business and does not concern me – but here it is the center of everything and as a result it has to concern me in the long run. I am absolutely happy to buy something from the TP from another player who went out there and “farmed” the mithril or whatever. Here, this is no longer the case – because of the nature of the marketplace – you may find a few threads about different main ingredients that you cannot simply farm per se – I am most likely to pay someone who will turn around and will try to sell me something else even more expensive.

See, other games you have to go out and slay mobs for a tiny per cent chance, here you have to throw items (goods you buy for gold) into a big slot machine.

So traditionally you have your raids and stuff and you would have to participate there or do your daily quests etc etc. Anet said we want to break away those traditions and let you play like you want – respect the player and so on. Then it turns out – oh, that’s actually not really the case. Instead replace raids with BLTC. To quote other player comments here on the forums “the real pvp”.

Just because I refuse to play the TP – and as a result of the current state no longer sell my items on the TP either – I am basically punished. Ok, here is an example that I just checked right now for you. About two weeks ago I looked into legendary weapons and made myself a roadmap, the most expensive item: the precursor. Not farmable (unless you tell me where hammers drop on a regular basis) – 160G (the colossus)
Two weeks later, today – 320G.
I made a note for the silver doubloons as well, 75G – now 120G.
Everything farmeable (non NPC) I did not look at the price.

I am not really talking to you personally either, I want Arena Net to start thinking about this. About their maxime, their core values. Not what you and I think is right or wrong – but: Is it fun?

This is about right.. I don’t care how much gold people have as long as I can attain what I want without playing bean counter.

It’s an MMORPG. To the people who are defending this idea that everyone else’s experience should be held hostage to the BLTC because it’s fun for them, well, there are plenty of fantasy-stock-market websites that let you trade imaginary dollars and compete with people where your doing so will not make those who don’t want to do this feel that playing the game for progressin is futile. The rest of us want to be able to progress doing normal “RPG Stuff”, like fighting each other over a control point or slaying dragons.

We want an avenue to our progression that does not necessitate “beating the market inflation through day-trading” due to terrible drop rates and un-farm-able items.

The drop-rates need un-sucking, because it’s quite clear the supply is simply too low.

To put it in free-market speech:
going out and farming your own goods is the equivalent of someone thinking the price is too high and starting their own business to “get in on that” or doing it themselves.

The current droprates prevent competition from entering the market through normal production (except botters who don’t go brain-dead from farming 28 hours a day, and exploiters who found bugs that allow them to get obscenely valuable items too quickly), nobody is able to add to the supply of their own volition, so the prices continue to skyrocket, and that’s pretty stupid.

the end of it is,

ANet has clearly laid out a gear progression:

rare->exotic->ascended->legendary

They have also made clear in their PR and promotional posts that they want this game to allow you to progress by playing rather than working and being a wizard rather than being a day-trader.

The current severely nerfed rate of exotics and horrendous precursor rate are counter to the above.

Precursors will continue to skyrocket as long as their drop rates are so low that entire weeks can go by without a single account across all realms receiving one.

Exotics will continue to skyrocket as long as lodestones and other crafting mats continue to remain virtually unobtainable through one’s own play, and the looted ones continue to remain at their abysmal post-11/15 levels.

If they want to accomplish their goals, then they need to have NPC traders who will accept various less-rare goods, karma, tokens, or all of the above to get precursors, and they need to bring the exotic drop rate back to pre-11/15 levels, because atm I’ve stopped doing dragons.

Dragon chest exotic drops have tanked by at least a factor of 10 since the 11/15 patch.

The RNG either has to go, or be brought up to an acceptable level, not 0.0001% from bosses only.

again the burst is due to a bug allowing mind-wrack to do double damage.

fix the bug, and you’ve fixed the burst.

Mesmers need a bug-fix, not a nerf.

Nerfing the damage and leaving the bug will mean only mesmers who exploit will be viable, and in pve mesmers may as well stay in only one zone: the lion’s arch trading post.

How about just fix the bug that’s allowing mesmers to get double mind-wrack damage by “tricking” the damage calculator into thinking their one, 3 clone shatter is actually 3, 1-clone shatters?

I’d rather have elegant unified design than split-spells that make it difficult to adapt from pve to pvp.

How about some serious changes to make aoe less clone-dependent and make shatters all condition-based? (seriously!.. shatter based aoe self-counters… it scales inversely with the number of targets because they always kill the clones as they spawn)

I like the might-stacking as-is.. for once i’m getting “gasp” — sparkling bodies — in cursed shore.

ilJumperMT.4871:

How the hell are people whining about macros on mesmer?

Is it hard to Press Cry of Frustration -> Decoy -> Sword 2 -> MI -> Mind Wrack??

I get 200 apm in moba games. Guess I use macros!!!!!

The shatter damage that comes from this is too high because of a BUG that causes the game to believe you are doing 2-3 shatters with one clone a piece rather than one shatter with 3 clones. This causes 3x base damage for 1, which is much higher than 1x base damage for 3.

I hope they fix this instead of destroying the tiny hope they gave mesmers in pve by allowing us to stack might.

wildcode.5403:

What ever data ANet has looked it, it is obviously not showing the make up of the loot, other wise they would see something fishy, compared to say 6 weeks ago. Compare the data, look for the changes, and then tell us nothing is wrong.

They need to choose a random sample of 1000, with the specific intent of getting the widest range of played time and times online, and track those 1000 individuals for 2 weeks.

This will tell them a great deal about the drop rates. It will probably bear out that:

1 – they are not random (one subset receives substantially less than the other for some reason)

2 – for those on the losing end of 1, they really are overly-penalized.

Zephyr’s boon appears to be applying inconsistent durations of fury and swiftness?

Shocking aura applies the correct 10 second duration of fury and swiftness, but frost aura now consistently only applies 4, and fire aura’s is so brief you won’t notice it if you blink!
(fire aura’s fury and swiftness are so short the fury doesn’t even apply to the next attack)

This is new with this patch. Can we get this fixed?

ephyr’s boon appears to be applying inconsistent durations of fury and swiftness?

Shocking aura applies the correct 10 second duration of fury and swiftness, but frost aura now consistently only applies 4, and fire aura’s is so brief you won’t notice it if you blink!
(fire aura’s fury and swiftness are so short the fury doesn’t even apply to the next attack)

Can we get this fixed?

MLieBennett.9031:

JonathanSharp.7094:

@ Mesmer: We’ll be addressing the current Mesmer build that’s spiking for insane damage. Sorry that change got through – it is something we’ll be fixing.

Think you could fix the bug thats causing the extra 100% Mind Wrack damage, BEFORE you start making changes to the rest of the Mesmer class? Just so you know, to see how things compare without that exploit/bug?

QFMFT

I like shattered strength the way it is in PVE. It allows me to actually keep up for once in DWE’s and provides a dynamic playstyle (you have to monitor and keep up might).

I’d like to see mind wrack toned down instead, maybe moved into partial condition damage (explode then stack x bleed for y seconds.. heck, the condition could depend on the shatter used, Diversion could stack weakness, CoF could blind.)

This would cause optimal gear for shatter builds to move from berserker to rampager gear, and tone down burst by this virtue as well with pretty much zero pve dps negatives.

morphemass.2850:

@Stephane : Actually, can we turn this around please?

Can Anet provide some data on what players should EXPECT in terms of the drop rate of rares/exotics items on a per hour played basis at level 80?

I ask this because many of us believe that there was a significant reduction in rare/exotic drop rate at various levels of Magic Find (%) after the Nov 15th patch and it would be easier if we could tell you NOW if our experiences match your expectations, otherwise you are not going to get data, just anecdotal evidence.

P.S. Please take a look at the prices on exotic items as evidence. They are now dropping so seldomly that soon new players will just look at the game and quit frustrated that they will never be able to purchase even the most simple of exotic dropped items. You should also be able to analyze your own data to see if the drop rate has significantly changed.

I have to agree on this one.

I’ve seen exotics climb from an average of 1.5g each for the useful ones to 4-6g each over the past month.

The not-so-useful ones are now 3g

Some rares are now far-exceeding the price of the far-more-flexible ectos they may salvage into, further indicating a considerable impact there.

This is pretty stiff evidence of drop rates rapidly tanking.

Then you can look at guild chats following an event:
the same accounts linking rares, and the same accounts complaining about blues and whites from dragon chests.

There is a significant subset of the playerbase who receives a worse rate than others.

The guy up there who gets 2 rares per undead zerg event in orr and considers that low.. I spent 3 hours in orr last night traveling up and down the zone and received not one rare, and that is standard for me since the 11/15 patch, before which I used to get 3 an hour just like him.

One Month’s worth of data – boiled down to percentages:

A Great Divide:

The contrast i’m outlining below has been happening to me and about a 30% sub-set of my guild. The rest still receive the pre-11/15 drop rates, and take home 2-3 ectos per major event or dungeon. The makeup of these two groups never changes, the same people get garbage drops post-11/15, the same people have been unchanged
The magic find distribution is equal between both sides of this gaping divide.

pre-11/15 patch. (assuming your target was lootable)

• Dragon Events (provided you waited a day for each dragon):
  rare rate – roughly 80% chance of getting at least 1
  exotic rate – roughly 2% chance of getting 1

• Zone Leveling:
  0-40 zones:
  white rate – roughly 30%
  blue rate – roughly 50%
  green rate – roughly 5%
  40-60 zones:
  white rate – roughly 10%
  blue rate – roughly 40%
  green rate – roughly 15%
  rare rate – roughly 0.5% (one per 3 hour session or so if there’s a lot of killing)
  60+ zones:
  white rate – roughly 10%
  green rate – roughly 15%
  blue rate – roughly 40%
  rare rate – roughly 1 per hour (perhaps 1.8% – rates in orr were always higher)

(balance is made up with bags +/- the random junk item)

• Dynamic Events: (Note, Dungeons have the same loot tables)
  Champions:
  -nothing
  Chests:
  white rate – 10%
  blue rate – 50%
  green rate – 30%
  rare rate – 12% (about 1 in 8 event chests)
  exotic rate – 2% (i’d see one every couple days)

post-11/15 patch:

• Dragon Events (provided you waited a day for each dragon):
  rare rate – roughly 2% chance of getting at least 1
  exotic rate – not 1 seen in a month of play from the dragons

• Zone Leveling:
  0-40 zones:
  white rate – roughly 30%
  blue rate – roughly 10%
  green rate – roughly 1%
  40-60 zones:
  white rate – roughly 20%
  blue rate – roughly 20%
  green rate – roughly 10%
  rare rate – roughly 0.01% (i’ve only seen maybe 1 since the patch?)
  60+ zones:
  white rate – roughly 15%
  green rate – roughly 10%
  blue rate – roughly 25%
  rare rate – roughly 0.01% (i’ve only seen maybe 1 since the patch?)

(balance is made up with bags +/- the random junk item)

• Dynamic Events: (Note, Dungeons have the same loot tables)
  Champions:
  white rate – 60%
  blue rate – 20%
  green rate – 1%
  Chests:
  white rate – 15%
  blue rate – 50%
  green rate – rare rate – 2%
  signet rate (the non-set-bonus runes) – 10%
  rare rate – 2%
  exotic rate – 0.01% (only seen one in a single DE chest the entire month since the patch)

* Thoughts :

I think i (and those 30% of my guildies) am triggering some sort of anti-bot flag and don’t know why. This is evidenced by the apparently massive cliff between one specific subset of the guild and the other, and the fact that the first hour after a new build seems to “temporarily fix” droprates until they plummet once again into the basement.

I’m not trying to “farm”, just play the dynamic events, do explorables, and 100% out zones with my alt. (2 hours leveling alt in a zone, followed by 20 minutes in 2 different paths back to back) That said, If I did not funnel an average amount equivalent to what I used to pay blizzard to ANet, I’d have run completely out of gold by now, given up, and asked for a refund. I’m still considering it because I consider my chance at gear progression or even covering transportation with this level of income futile.

The standard blue gear in lowbie zones is ridiculously rare compared to launch day. At launch I geared my toons in the 1-10 range when i was trying them out in items picked off dead mobs. Now i have to buy them on the TP because they’ve “juuuust crossed” a threshold where you don’t find enough to equip your toon the normal way.