Guild Wars 2

“For example a warrior with 2 daggers..really??’ —--

2 Classes use Staff as a melee weapon, The Rev uses a hammer to cast magical projectiles, The Engineer has a skill that makes Pistols act like a Flamethrower, the necro axes skills never physically touch their target, the Mesmer uses a Greatsword to shoot beams of pure energy….. Of all the things to suggest sound stupid, the top of your list is “Warrior with 2 daggers”?

The problem you’re having right now is that you’re all over the map as to what constitutes a good idea and a bad idea. Like in what way does a 2H Axe uniquely differ from a Greatsword, when they’re both cleaving weapons? How can a Burst skill be made that isn’t already represented by either the GS or Axe? Consider Axe Master Hareth attacks animate the same way one would use a Hammer, and his spin attack is modeled after a Guardian GS skill. If they swapped the axe for a hammer, I doubt anyone would had questioned it.

As for everything else….. it has to get shot down based on backward compatibility. Racial skills are ultimately an abandoned idea… to the point where the Rev influentially doesn’t even have access to them. The race itself won’t be done, because it calls for the creation of a dedicated starter zone, the retroactive recording all story content up to that point, and retconing all previous story to explain why a race that previously choose to stay out of the conflict has always been at its forefront.

This game doesn’t accrue content the way WoW does, and by extension most other MMORPGs, making it prone to some pretty glaring continuity errors when it comes to story. And so far, the suggestions to reconcile this problem are just as contrived as the justification for having the new races in the first place. And those are just the most apparent practical issues, before even beginning to touch on the disconnect on how players are meant to value charters “as characters” rather then play things.

Then looking at story moving forward…. adding more races seriously start to complicate the political scene as they start piling up. Its like Shonen Jump Syndrome…. where the continuous addition of characters inevitably results in the inability to maintain coherent interaction within the story. A common sign of this is when characters start becoming interchangeable, and story arcs are unable to achieve satisfying closure as the cast creates too many plot threads to follow. For instance…. how can a Tengu be Pact Commander, while still reference involvement in Zhaitan’s downfall, when the Tengu didn’t get involved until much later, and how no one seems to react to the fact that the Commander was a Tengu that whole time. Even with the races we have now, any references made to the commander’s race have to be interchange within the main story thread, and to do so, must represent the Commander’s race as being unremarkable in the political climate. And given the significance of a Commander coming from the secondary races would have in the lore…… I have a hard time seeing how this could be work in the story without it getting incredibly contrived.

Flatley.1620:

I was sure I asked about this but do you think I can find that post now?

It would be a nice option to have a DVD/BD “version” but I suspect it may run into problems internationally for box set release. It would, however, alleviate frustration when your DDL drops out with one file to go…

Thats irrelevant considering Day 1 patches on single offline player games are the norm; and how this is an online game where updates are almost weekly. Anyone remember the Day 1 patch for the game? I wanna say over 2GB, but I’m not sure how much of that was carried from head start build and beta builds. Yeah there “one file to go”….. but was that file something identical to what was on the disk? Or was that file part of the day 1 patch?

The problem is physical disks are expensive to distribute compared to digital distribution, and the data on it often weeks or months out of date by the time consumers actually get it in their hands.

For people who complain about data caps and bandwidth limits…. take into perspective that in an age were netflix, steam, sports streaming and Yotube is at the center of our entertainment consumption, for many ISPs to fall so woefully behind on infrastructure support is almost culturally oppressive. To keep referring to physical disks as “viable alternatives”, when the software they contain can’t even be used on its own, or often shipped with the intent to fix later, is using it as excuse to avoid dealing with the much bigger, more immediate issue of internet performance.

DakotaCoty.5721:

Offair.2563:

They don’t even take time to fix the search forum. Instead they post a sticky with a work around. So nope no improvements incoming.

Surely If the community can work together, we can be heard and this dream can become a reality.

More like a nightmare. The problem with “suggesting” software, is that when people think its open for discussion, they’ll devolve into arguments about which software is better then all the other software, and lament when their preference wasn’t chosen.

The software scene for forums is also supremely fractured; and has only gotten more chaotic as its evolved into a demand for “Communication Platforms” instead of discrete, single focus services. You have frameworks, products made from frameworks, products made from propitiatory frameworks, propitiatory products, services, software as a service, supported, unsupported, open source, close source, industry standard, non-standard, modular, bundles, fixed packages……. and not a single one of them capable of actually addressing all know use cases, and especially not without extensive cost in either licensing, outsourced development, or in-house experts.

Players see this as a user experience, but for the people running it, its business decision based on cost/returns. The problem that arises from this is the inherently fickleness of large communities like this one, where something as inane as the color scheme can be make or break; which can eventually turn the new platform into an amplifier for them to voice how much they hate using it.

As the saying goes….. “Everything sucks and needs to change, but in the end I liked the old way better”.

Carighan.6758:

I am still not sure I’d not go a step further and remove a lot of customization in favor of just having simple picks from a dropdown. I understand build templates are more or less the same thing, but it’d also massively simplify the spec/trait setups and remove a lot of things which can break.

What I mean is, we have millions of options. And yet we pick from a dozen of “builds”. These include runes, sigils, gear stats, traits, skills, everything. So… why are all of these separate options? Why don’t things such as stats, traits etc all get folded?

I’d probably go with Skills, Weapon, Traitlines. Traitlines don’t have further picks inside them, they also each give a fixed amount of stat bonuses and/or procs (to replace sigils/runes). Depending on traitline. So all I have to do to swap things is swap out the traitlines and maybe equip a different weapon.

But if you do that, well over the half the Meta builds wouldn’t be possible if they adhered to the Trait line’s theme. And it makes even less sense since all Especs have Utility for Damage, Control and Support rolled into it.

The narrow meta is symptomatic of the players, not systemic to the buildcraft. Encounter design also drives a lot of the meta; and prior to raids enforcing diversity in roles, dungeon speed clear meta came about because people were farming CoF more then any other dungeon in the game. And born out of the same laziness that created the Zerks meta, the players tried to forcibly apply it to every other part of the game…and would avoid it if the level didn’t cooperate. And rather then mix up the builds, we just kept forcing it until zerks become so prominent, the Devs had to design something that would directly counter it…. which is how we got the first batch of Modrem in Drytop/Silverwastes, and their over the top use of every CC and AOE known in the game.

So no…. binding the trait lines to stats and fixed traits doesn’t fix the problem. If anything, it’ll make it worse, as classes would be shut out due to lacking utility. We’ve already seen what happens when a key trait gets nerfed, resulting in a huge shift in meta that built around it. By making key traits and trait lines the same thing, losing that one thing that makes you useful will cause people to drop classes even more then they do now.

There is no real “best” class, since the Meta changes with every balance pass. Generally Guardians are favorable, because its easy to find something for them to do. But despite that, they aren’t in the Raid meta aside from being a competent DD with Auxiliary support. They’re more popular in Fractals, because it can bring support that a 5 man team can’t really afford to dedicate a whole slot to.

If you want to go dumb as mud…. Daredevil thief. The rotation is painfully simple. Spam 1, use dodge for buff, use 2, spam 1 again.

Click on the function, then do the input combo you want it to respond to. The only limitation is that it can only recognize 1 trigger (a key), but multiple modifier keys (ctrl, alt, shift) in conjunction.

Elena.1543:

So, I decided to go thief, Now I pre ordered the new expansion but I refuse to use the boost since I need to learn the game and what’s going on. Thanks for the help btw.

What’s good crafting profs to take? what’s useful and what’s stupidly expensive that’s not useful for anything? I know that rafting can help with lvls and such so am I better ignoring it?

Sorry for the questions well no I’m not I just want to know things and be good

Every crafting profession has its use if you do Legendary crafting. The Gifts recipes needed for them are spread out across all the disciples; and some gifts require materials that refined on a different crafting line. (Like how Gift of Metal needs Jewler to refine Plat ingots).

In terms of usefulness, you’ll want to take the Smithing type that matches the armor of your main class, as you’ll inevitably need to do Ascended crafting if you do collections of any type. This also allows you to craft Ascd armor pieces, sacrificial armor for tokens (collections), and rune crafting (which arguably the most useful part outside of armor crafting).

Secondly its also useful to take a Smithing type that matches the weapons you use. For the new Expak, Weapon smith for melee weapons and Huntsman for ranged weapons are solid choices. These also make Utility consumables. Generally weapons are easy enough to obtain through other means; so its not particularly critical to have this unless you’re doing legendary crafting.

Third most useful is Cooking. Food is a major reoccurring cost for raids, so its possible to make a profit off by selling high demand items on TP.

All of them are expensive to max out….. so its really question of how you want to go about doing them.

Hashire Kazemeijin.6719:

Aight, thanks. I’ll probably keep not messing with them, then. Unless a really cool set comes out, since so far the only ones I like so far is the Cosmic Set.

Theres objectively better gathering tools due to quriks in their animations and secondary drops. Unbound magic tools are, hands down, the most well worth of the gathering tools, since the unbound magic can be converted into Gold and collection items from Living Story S3 maps. Second most valuable is Watchwork Mining pick- which yields sprockets that are worth at least a silver each. Third is based on faster then normal gathering animations… phoenix and consortium sickles hit half way through the animation, or the Solar logging tool hits 4 times per use. Fourth is most other tools with normal gathering speeds. And there is a Fifth rank for tools that only hit “after” the animation plays…. making them take longer then normal.

Walker.7204:

There’s lots of these returning player topics on the board, and rather than start another one, I just thought I’d hop on this one.

I’m also back after a long layoff (stopped playing shortly after HoT), and I’m just curious about the best way to start up the game again.

I have all the jobs at 80, but I’ve completely forgotten how to play them. What would you recommend doing to get the feel and relearn the game again?

Should I just pick one class and focus on that, or just bounce around a bit?

If none of your characters have it yet….. have the one you plan on playing first do some map completion in Tyria to get a handle on it again. If you want a more focused goal, go after the various Hero points on tyrian maps so you can use them later to fill out Elite specs faster. Map complete is low impact, so it gives you time to get used to the game play again. Because once you start diving into Expac content, the difficulty level spikes sharply…. I mean straight up night and day difference.

If you’re going for PoF Especs, you’ll have to wait to find out what the requirements are to progress them. For HoT Especs, you can max them out pretty quickly by joining hero point trains starting Verdant Brink. You’ll need Gliding 2 and Itzel 1 Mastery at minimum to do this, since those are the main mobility abilities you need to travel around.

LS3 maps require gems to unlock if you missed them when they went live…. so if you don’t buy at least one (I recommend Head of the Snake if you’re looking specifically for Seraph stats), its ultimately a moot point.

The alternative is to focus on Raids. You don’t “need” Ascended gear for raids, its just the stat bonus adds to the DPS. However, you DO need them for Fractals…. and fractals are expensive to progress through due to the entire Asc gear system being a huge money sink when it was introduced.

So what you do is get a raid compatible DPS build (usually zerk stats anyway) in exotics, and farm weekly raids for maganite shards. Those can be traded in directly for Asc gear with various stats; where as every other method for armor involves expensive crafting. A Full wing clears yield 50 shards (with a weekly reset), but partial awards are given for partial clears (based on how far you got). 1125 shards for a full armor set, 900 for a full trinket set.

If you do go LS3 maps, keep in mind that there is a 50 token limit on gathering nodes per type, per day account wide. You can still harvest nodes, but they won’t yield tokens. The token drop is pure RNG as well…. so keep going until you count 50, or get bored. The exception to this is Winterberries; which are only limited to per character, per day. Cost for trinkets is 100 tokens for rings, 125 for Amulet, 150 for Accessory, and 200 for a backpiece. Double that for items bought with Winterberries.

As for time…. at 2 hours a day, you aren’t gonna get much done. And crafting an armor set costs ~350g base line + cost of Insignia. [Assuming you already have lvl 500 crafting in the armor type you want]

Honestly….. theres no “fast way” of doing this if you’re starting from nothing. Its either going to cost you a lot of time, a lot of gold, or a lot of luck.

I highly doubt you’ll find what you’re looking for in any deliberate fashion. Aside from towns being bigger (as a by product of map size increases), most of the interesting content is hinting at group comp rather then pug coalescence.

Also….. what game are you remembering? Core Tyria was always chaos, and most of the events are Group oriented….. we just figured out how to cheese them.

Solzero.5380:

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

Solzero.5380:

Isn’t anets job to balance this sort of thing?

Yes. And the way they have chosen to balance it is by keeping the new weapons and elite specs tied together.

And the game is really fun right now, right? So exciting!

It is! Think about it….. at the rate they have to nerf things, do you really want them to have even more reasons to nerf one thing that indirectly breaks 12 other things?

Einlanzer.1627:

starlinvf.1358:

Because back porting Personal Story would be nigh impossible, time line continuity would be shot (its borderline broken with Revenant as is), and trying to use new zones wouldn’t work unless they automatically started at level 80…. which won’t happen for a myriad of reasons. From new player experience to gearing concerns.

Except there’s no reason they have to do this. A far better way to introduce new races would be with a new personal story tied to them, and it doesn’t have to have the same scope and complexity as the original did, either. And if they didn’t want to even do that, I’m sure most players would accept new races that had no personal story.

Otherwise, it’s just a matter of hooking them up with the right characters for the LW story.

Given the casual audience this game attracts, you can’t ignore the possibility of a new player wanting to pick that specific race for its style (since GW2 is one of the few games that separate it from class) at the on set; which would create problems with learning curve, and lock out all the old story content in the process if your forced them into a PoF only starting point.

This game has enough problem with acclimation of new players conditioned to WoW standardized tropes; so you want to, at every opportunity, NOT throw them into the deep end of the build craft, with no familiarity with basic game mechanics, and expect them to coexist in (and design for) a level to house both of them with equal consideration for player performance.

The Lvl80 boost into Silverwaste is still the harshest introduction to a game “that isn’t EVE”- pitting completely inept/inexperienced players against the cheesiest mobs outside of Raids, and expecting them to get handle on class feel in the process. Thats NOT what the lvl80 boost is for… but that’s exactly what New players are doing, because they feel the need to get caught up to the expansion as quick as possible. Using leveling and/or the person story as a guide rail for new players, gives them enough time to unlearn their old habits from previous games, so they can relearn things in GW2’s style when its time dive into build craft and group content.

What is your end game? “How do I have fun?” is such a poorly phrased question, that lends me to believe that you’re looking for justification to force yourself to do something you don’t enjoy, rather then being open to trying to find enjoyment of it.

Personally I don’t like sPvP enough to it regularly….. but I know why I don’t like it. Skill division in the lower ranks are too chaotic, I’m not good enough to compete in the higher ranks, and the rewards don’t translate to PvE enough to be worth getting into other then wanting competitive play. Its still enjoyable for a change of pace; but inevitably turns to frustration the moment I take it even the least bit seriously.
On the other hand, I love WvW since team comps benefit from a greater diversity of builds, I can get far more mileage out of Support play (which I’m better at anyway), and the community there is nowhere near as “intense” as sPvP.

Aside from Especs, everything about the expansions is PvE content. Since PvP and PvE combat operate on vastly different principles, if you’re hoping for some glint of familiarity between the 2 modes… you’re not gonna find it. So the only recourse is be open to an entirely new game experience, and draw enjoyment from having to relearn combat strategy from the ground up. PoF won’t be different in this regard either.

Honestly, you’re better off focusing on a game thats strictly PvP, since you’ll have more luck finding something better tailored specifically to that style of play.

Honestly it can’t work. Action Cam is extremely clunky, and theres really no way to make it work better without disorienting view point snapping, or having to use exclusively use tab targetting. Another problem is ground target, which insanely difficult to use without a high vantage point from the camera.

If the core of the complaint by these folks is not seeing their hands in frame…… then they really have no idea what they want.

Because back porting Personal Story would be nigh impossible, time line continuity would be shot (its borderline broken with Revenant as is), and trying to use new zones wouldn’t work unless they automatically started at level 80…. which won’t happen for a myriad of reasons. From new player experience to gearing concerns.

It’ll still tie in, but not trigger the same way it does for the standard mechanic. When they added Reaper shroud, it mapped traits to their slot number to simplify it. Looking at the preliminary wiki article, Scourge is getting 5 F skills, which can easily map to traits linked to Shroud skills.

They kind of already do…… but the Core specs, by intent, are not focused the way Especs are. There are still a lot of strong builds that only use Core Specs, but harder content (Fractals/Raids) specifically benefit from the greater utility focus of most Especs.

Honestly they don’t need new mechanics, its more that each core class has a blind spot in their setup (by design) in order to push group cohesion. What the HOT Especs did was fill those blind spots with a highly focused build theme, giving them very satisfying, and much needed build diversity.

If anything needs to be tweaked, its that some core specs have obvious best in slot choices, largely due to that class having poor internal synergy. I’m looking at you Ranger.

Probably because its not. Physical distribution is expensive for “baseline” products, costing per unit with a fixed profit margin; where digital distribution has a high initial cost, but turns to pure profit once initial costs are recouped.

Only consoles majorly benefit from physical copies at this point (part of the illusion of ownership), as any online game already needs a digital distribution platform to function. If anything…. only special editions, with extra physical goods, is actually worth the time to manufacture, as they’re guaranteed to sell for most titles. But physical “standard edition” copies can sit on a shelf for months, and not turn a profit… eventually getting marked down to cost, or below cost, just to get rid of it.

Or they could just do what Zynga and few other MMOs did, and just produce code cards for the brick and mortars, sold like gift cards. Anet already has distribution channels for Gem cards…. So its a very cost effective way to get a physical presence, without the huge logistics cost of Game Disks.

If you look cost break downs of AAA titles, only 15-20% of each physical copy sold goes back to the developer. 40% goes to the publisher, while the rest is split between royalties, distribution and retailer profit margin (~25%). Thats assuming these numbers can be trusted……

Digital distribution on the other hand costs less then half even when you include returns for both publisher and developer. Which raises the question…. why are digital editions of a game still the same price as physical copies? Its actually more political then practical…. mostly having to do with comparison shopping, and a long standing agreement with physical distributors. But as brick stores become irrelevant, publishers are conveniently forgetting to pass on the cost difference.

There is NO LIMIT to the number of incoming damage sources. There is only a cap on the number of outgoing hits a skill can inflict per pulse (assume all skills are single pulse as base line), and a maximum number of stacks for states (conditions, boons, buffs, etc) on an entity, on a per state basis. Most boons and conditions also have a 1 stack back buffer which discriminates toward the “best incoming” stack, discarding others, and gets moved into the active stacks when there is room.

If you’re asking what I think you’re asking… the only way to defuse incoming damage of a Well Bomb is to have enough bodies on it distribute the hits over. If minions weren’t so fragile, they’d actually be the perfect foil to large scale AOE Pirate shipping.

finkle.9513:

Ok so looking at the new skills/ classes etc Its overwhelming to see that basically all classes have multiple modes with the F keys, like ele always had f1-f4 for different elemental skills.

All these new class skills have the 4x f keys, and more skills under rotation like rev uses herald/ glint etc

So instead of building new skills, it just seems they over complicate thing by having so much going on, and it being a dexterity Challenger over a skilled knowledge one.

How do you add distinct functionality without contextual limitations? Adding new binds is the only way to make that happen. For instance….. how do you use the new “context action” with the existing keys, without it robbing the original functionality of that key when active? F is our base line interaction key… and thats used for too many things to count; but it can be limited to physical proximity as its context. However, the Action key is conditional and completely disconnected from anything other then a specific, exclusive state on the player. Its identical in concept to “bundles”, which robs the skill bar when active, and can only have one state loaded at a time.

What expanding the F-keys is doing, is avoiding the requirement to load something into a slot in order to change whats actions it triggers. Again, Kits being an example of this. Or Rev’s Facet of Nature being universal to the Espec, but not forcing it to displace another skill in the Core Rev’s limited line up.

You’re focusing on the wrong problem. The point system they use ultimately isn’t a problem compared to how things are obtained, and how mastery points are expressly used as a gating mechanism for each relevant mechanic, and region of the game that uses them. Trivialize it, and the gating mechanism falls apart….. but we have nothing to replace it with, because GW2 doesn’t use level caps and gear checks as a universal system. More importantly, if they were made map specific nodes (like Gliding was originally going be for HOT), it ends up disrupting the exploration aspect of the game, and forces it to behave more like a puzzle. Think Zephyerite aspects in Drytop, and how Gliding completely circumvented every major restriction on that map. That difference in application is SIGNIFICANT in ways you aren’t even bothering to consider.

HOT mobility masteries, and nearly all the initial complaints with the mastery system, can easily be boiled down to the design of Verdant Brink, and how it had to condense several hours of early progress (more or less a soft tutorial) into a space the size of Drytop. Once you had Updraft Gliding and Bouncing mushroom (a whole 4 Mastery points total) nearly all of those problems go away. The reason was simple….. VB is an extremely vertical map, with a lot of vertical access ways. AB doesn’t have that problem, because all the transit zones are ground level, and the map is circular (easy to get around by converging on the central ring of Tarir’s outer gates). TD problems were the exact opposite, because there were very few vertical path ways, but each Meta region (the space above each lane) is its own vertical map.

All they really needed to do different in the early section of HOT was to define a clearer pathway for how to spend points, and being more cognizant of map signalling in Metroidvania map design methodology. And if you look back…. that was the big problem with figuring out to navigate VB.

As for utilizing content…. technically you only need to unlock all the materies if you plan to do achievements and/or legendary weapons. You only “need” Gliding 3 to complete the expansion (the Modremoth battle), and they took out the requirement for Itzel Poison… which was the only other “requirement” for the story.
But the reason they chained content into requisites was to lessen the amount of compartmentalization required of the maps. Because what you’re asking is effectively removing mastery points as a gating system for general progress, and replacing it with the ever growing trivialness that is Spirit Shards, and its Predecessor the Skill point system. This would force those mechanics to be map specific elements, rather then general abilities of the character, if there was any hope to control how they progressed through the map.

As weird as it sounds…. it has to work the way it does with finite collected points, because its the only way to ensure you’re being forced to exercise certain abilities in order to progress toward others further in the list. And of everything that can be considered “bad” about the current system- using EXP gating when its completely disconnected from how those abilities are used, is by far, the most blatant, unimaginative way to slow progress.

Theres also a conscious excess of points spread out in other areas of the game, allowing you skip certain things and changing the path taken to unlocking everything you need/want. Again… its another Metroidvania concept, where speed runners can figure out alternate pathways either changing the order of what they collect, or skipping their collection if they aren’t entirely necessary nor have a beneficial time/cost. And its pretty clear that Living Season chapters add to the excess, allowing a very easy to way backfill missing mastery tracks without having to complete the base content of the expansion.

Don’t confuse “progress” with “accumulation”…… because that distinction is important when talking about how many of the older systems were design, compared to the newer ones.

Dravyn.4671:

Abakk.9176:

Dravyn.4671:

Do you think there will be an animation when you mount? I hate when you summon your mount and it just appears beneath you (SWTOR, Rift, WoW). Games like ESO, BDO, LOTRO, etc all have a quick mount/dismount animation and I feel it really adds to immersion.

Any one know yet?

Yep, WoodenPotato shown it. Its a nice realistic POOFFF! … and there you go.

Ugh, that just screams lazy to me

Having a cast time for mount/dismount isn’t compatible with how fast the combat in this game works. They event demonstrated that each mount has a “dive” skill that is used an opening attack when engaging enemies, as a way to compensate for them not having their own attack skills.

Consider how quickly people get frustrated in this game with anything that takes more then 2 seconds to channel…. and then go ape kitten if it also roots you while casting.

As for the quote that came before it. They don’t want to do “quick” mounts and dismounts, because the mounts are not independent entities…… otherwise it just becomes channeling a skill that gets you killed at the worst possible moment.

They’re effectively transform mechanics that are used all over the rest of the game, and benefits in the fact that its using the player’s entity to track through space. Going the other route of making mounts their own entity introduces several steps that WILL cause problems if the server gets uncooperative for any reason. Remember all the problem Gliding had at launch, when it was server authoritative? All the problems this game historically has with “rooted” skills and responsiveness? Or even server driven movement skills like Zeypherite aspects, and some of the old SAB mechanics?

Trinnitty.8256:

I would trade home instances for player housing in a heart beat. I would like to set up my own area put things where I want it. Transfer all nodes to housing would be nice. then also you can use scribing to make your own decorations and furniture to fill your House.

I don’t understand why people think home instance and custom placement are somehow mutually exclusive concepts. All there needs to be is a building inside the home instance with open space, and the rest becomes self explanatory.

If I’m understanding the after show analysis, Gliding will not be integral to the map design, and mushrooms will be rare in the desert. There is a very long discussion to this question if we tried to go in depth about it….. but the short version is it’ll be useful (like it is in Tyrian maps), but POF isn’t expressly designed to take advantage of it. If anything, more effort was put into making sure Gliding doesn’t circumvent the Mounts when it comes to travel.

Keep in mind that the desert is going to be mostly flat, with a lot of open space between any significant vertical locations, outside of things purposely built to be tall (like towns, rock formations, and canyons). Gliding might help you get down to the bottom safely…. but thats like working your way down from the top of a jumping puzzle. It doesn’t help you get to the top in the first place, and at best is just the most direct path to the starting point.

You have to be aware of how they designed maps through each era of the game. Fully encompassing map events don’t work without fully coordinated players, because the event chains are hard to push otherwise. Orr was specifically designed for coordinated push from one side of the map to the other….. they’re also the only maps to in the original line up that don’t have Heart quests (for a reason).

Bit of history on the game’s beta phases….. Open world events used to be the main focus of all the maps, would trigger on a regular basis, and would be how players would level up. However…. players had a tendency to move around too fast, and miss events in the cool down time between triggers. As a result, they’d very quickly wander into areas too high for them, and didn’t have a clear idea of how they were supposed to gain EXP, given how little killing mobs awards. Hearts were introduced as a way to slow players down long enough for an event to trigger nearby, getting their attention.

But then theres Orr. Orr, from Fort Trinity and on, is meant to pushed in a sequential order, getting the cooperation of the whole map to make it work. But it was pretty clear early on, that getting players to be coordinated for that long is incredibly difficult. Seeing behaviors early in testing- Players wanted to be in certain locations to farm for loot; and stopped participating in group events once they got areas that were easy to farm drops from. With the map cap as low as it was back in those days, you’d have 10-15% of the population doing their own thing, and another 40-50% focusing on easily farmed areas of the map….. that leaves only half the of the map pop bothering with upkeeping the map meta. The ultimate affect of this was seen in Orr after launch; where players were proactively working to make events fail, so they can retrigger events which are good for farming. The 2 most troublesome were the Grenth loop, and Arah Assault (which blocked access to Arah the dungeon).

HOT maps tried to address this, by using a Map’s meta for rewards, but allowed unhindered traversal for map complete and achievement hunting. Some where still locked behind event chains… and those remain the “most complained about issue” when it comes to feed back on the achievement and mastery progress.

What the new maps are suggesting are pretty obvious if you’ve looked at other popular MMOs. The Hydra looks to be their attempt at BAMs from Tera Online; very likely fused with a riff on Monster Hunter’s approach to tracking and trapping. In GW2 terms, BAMS are the equivalent of free roaming Champs, and offer bigger challenge and EXP reward if you’re up for killing them; or simply avoided if you don’t. But keep in mind that Tera has a traditional leveling grind, so there is greater incentive to fight them regularly. The whole premise of Monster Hunter is a long process of tracking a creature, observing it to learn its behaviors, and then setting a trap for it. Its a lot of prep work to determine the right strategy, bringing the right equipment, finding the ideal space to fight it in, and setting the right trap to make it vulnerable to attack.
If they’ve managed to replicate that with any measure of success….. the replay value of this is going to be as good as the raids (possibly better).

If the maps are as big as they claim… the large open space would make this type of content possible, but without interfering with traversal, like it does in HOT maps.

Everything I’ve seen so far suggests they’re pitching the playground design of the core maps; but now have enough room to insert regional metas that was introduced with HOT. Think about it….. they tried this once before with the Modrem invasion in the level 15 zones of Tyria. But it turned into a complete nightmare, because low level players couldn’t avoid it, nor could they participate due to the scaling. A larger, less dense map, enables the ability to insert these types of events without the kind of disruption created in existing maps. More importantly, mounts play into this as they’re built into the design of the new maps, and letting the Devs use a different approach to how they use fast travel and level layouts.

While pure speculation….. this has the potential to recapture the “trek” aspect of Guildwars 1, where players could spend up to an hour traveling to a remote location to look for rare drops, capture Elite skills, or used for some unique quests. As a result of this, group content becomes less chaotic, finally benefits forming groups “before” looking for an event. Up until now, most players show up just before the event with the biggest reward starts, do the event, then leave. If my postulation is correct- having a group comp before leaving a town greatly improves your chances of success, and greatly reduces Randos from scaling up events without being competent enough to contribute. Think about all their attempts to deal with AFKers at event locations, getting tags to get credit, then going idle for the rest of the event.

All in all… there is a lot of potential to leverage the larger space and higher population cap to start doing a lot of things the older ones can’t, given their designed density.

Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.2946:

Meanma.5623:

tekfan.3179:

Like Logan suddenly hopping out from the back and doing a flipflop into the energies.

It will be Rytlock doing that.

“Later, cub.”

I’m afraid you’re right.

The irony of a Charr god…. I wouldn’t put it past their writers.

They’re going to be hard by design, and naturally you’ll need to bring stronger builds to compensate. HOT maps are also designed around different principles then the base game….. if you have not played the base game for a decent amount of time, I would NOT recommend trying to do HOT content without an extensive understanding of how your class works.

This isn’t really a case of what build to run, so much as having to not only learn the major difference in how combat in Guildwars 2 works… but having to relearn them again, as Heart of Thorns goes out of its way to test you on your understanding of the game’s combat system. Action has to be measured, understanding the limits of your class, and where/when its safe to engage enemies, is critical to doing anything in those maps. While this makes it sound hard…. its actually not. The problem with Core Tyria is that the AI behavior and encounter designs don’t really test the player beyond very basic actions. This has lead to a habit of novice players just face tanking like any other MMO, and DPS them until someone dies.

But as players gain experience in harder content, it reinforces the strongest aspects of the game’s action combat system….. the active mitigation and AVOIDANCE of damage, complimented with class build synergy.

I know it sounds kind of vague- but there is a massive amount of information that has to be conveyed to understand what makes HOT maps so difficult. And none of that makes any sense unless you can understand why fights in the base game content landed up being so easy. I’m sure other people will just drop a ton of instructions and hints to help…. but I want to get across that point that simply following the advise, without understanding the “why” tends to get you stuck more often then it helps.

So here is what I can suggest to help with context. Heart of Thorns is built around the advancement of Mastery tracks (which enable mobility within the maps) and Elite Specialization (which a form of power creep required to keep pace with the new map’s spike in difficulty). You need to be aware of both of these, and seek to advance the early levels of these as quickly as possible. Without them, travel is incredible difficult… but with them, it eventually becomes trivial. Elite specializations in particular are important for most classes, because it gives access to skills tailored to handle fights against Modrem and other mob types you’ll encounter in later maps.

Also keep in mind that most of HOT is meant to done as a group…. so you WILL be at a disadvantage without nearby players to lend help. But as your experience with a class improves, you can progressively become less dependent on help, and can solo the less difficult content without much struggle. But to get there, you need to learn the ins and outs of what your class does, and what they’re strengths and weaknesses are.

Now Engineers are inherently a hybird support class… one of, if not the most versatile class in the game. However, you’re not designed to be front line brawler; and the Scrapper spec is more PvP focused. That said… you can leverage scrapper for its burst damage, which is something the base class makes very complicated. You CAN make it work… but harder to accomplish on Engineer.

So heres what you should look into doing. Your first major goal is getting Hero points to unlock Scrapper. Verdant brink usually has a lot of Commanders doing hero point trains, whose goal is to help guide you to all the Hero points on the map, and help do the challenges that are difficult to solo. However, to keep you with them, you need Gliding mastery ( level 2) and Itzel 1 (for jumping mushrooms) unlocked. So the first thing you need to do is work on Gliding Mastery. Since these are progressed through Experience points, you should stay on the East side of the map and do nearby events to get XP to fill the track. There are also enough easily reached Mastery points on that side of the map to get you started. Its a pain to get started on, and will take a couple hours (minimum)…. but once you’re past that hurdle, moving forward will be a lot easier.

Assuming you got through a Hero Point train, you should have most of the Scrapper line unlocked. For an easy build to work with, take Explosives, Firearms, and Scrapper (or Tools in the interim), and focus all your traits on direct damage, explosives and bomb kits. This will give you a huge bump in direct damage to kits things that try to follow you, while the scrapper line introduces a mix of offensive and defensive traits to make you a bit more survivable. The Hammer has a strong stun, a block skill, and enables a combo to chain daze on a target by using skill 5, and then skill 3 inside the lighting field.

For gear, most people run all berskers…. I would recommend using mixing in either soldiers or knights stats trinkets to boost your survivability, until you can get a handle on dodging. Also try to avoid fighting more then 2 things at a time, and make as much use of the CC skills at your disposal.

Other people can give more specific tips, and answer other questions…. but I’m hoping this post gives you at least enough insight into the situation to start becoming aware of the game’s approach to play- and through that awareness, start taking advantage of the tools the game gives you.

That still leaves the question of how this is going to be addressed. Are they going to rely on Gift of Maguuma, or are they changing the crafting process again?

How dare they challenge me in any way shape or form!!!!! I deserve to get these weapons, because I exist.

I find it ironic that people complain about these things when, personally, I find some of the steps in the crafting process to be unforgivably lazy, or grossly transparent in how they’re designed as a gating mechanism, rather then being an actual challenge or adventure. The daily crafting is one… though alternative through trading just barely makes amends for it. I find achievement requirements (both direct and indirect) to be hit and miss. Some are provide an interesting experience; but some are, or at least involve tasks which are abnormally frustrating for what they are. Much of which is a result of the inconsistent nature of many Jumping Puzzles, Event chains, or even access to locations.

Now for cost…. I agree and disagree. I’m not directly upset with the total cost or material requirements. However, I am upset with the inconsistent sources of many of the materials in the game, and how it affects the TP. Mystic Coins and Leather are the current frustrating bottle necks…. and the only reason Leather is even a problem is because of its disproportionate inclusion in so many newer recipes.

As for Utility….. the stat swapping of legendary gear is a complete after thought, and added as a solution to a problem left by the conversion to Wardrobe, and the Mystic Forge back end code not being positioned to handle exponential recipe growth when either a new skin or weapon stat gets added to the game. Weapon stats are now Meta data values rather then fixed to the item ID value.

However, there is still the problem of slotted upgrades (like sigils), which can’t be changed to match the build requirements. This renders the utility of the stat swap kind of useless, beyond situations where only minor adjustments are needed (like tuning a chornotank for toughness).

As such….. the Stat swapping utility should NOT be considered a selling point for Legendary gear. And really doesn’t justify its own cost to save 14 slots in a bag, used for a full second set of gear. A whole set that costs only as much as ONE piece of legendary armor. So you’d need to justify having at least 12 full sets of gear to justify that cost… and still get screwed over by the lack of Rune swapping.

So that really only leaves one thing…… Cosmetic value. Despite all the mechanical features of legendary gear, the cosmetics are the only thing that does, or could dictate such a high value.

How dare they challenge me in any way shape or form!!!!! I deserve to get these weapons, because I exist.

I find it ironic that people complain about these things when, personally, I find some of the steps in the crafting process to be unforgivably lazy, or grossly transparent in how they’re designed as a gating mechanism, rather then being an actual challenge or adventure. The daily crafting is one… though alternative through trading just barely makes amends for it. I find achievement requirements (both direct and indirect) to be hit and miss. Some are provide an interesting experience; but some are, or at least involve tasks which are abnormally frustrating for what they are. Much of which is a result of the inconsistent nature of many Jumping Puzzles, Event chains, or even access to locations.

Now for cost…. I agree and disagree. I’m not directly upset with the total cost or material requirements. However, I am upset with the inconsistent sources of many of the materials in the game, and how it affects the TP. Mystic Coins and Leather are the current frustrating bottle necks…. and the only reason Leather is even a problem is because of its disproportionate inclusion in so many newer recipes.

As for Utility….. the stat swapping of legendary gear is a complete after thought, and added as a solution to a problem left by the conversion to Wardrobe, and the Mystic Forge back end code not being positioned to handle exponential recipe growth when either a new skin or weapon stat gets added to the game. Weapon stats are now Meta data values rather then fixed to the item ID value.

However, there is still the problem of slotted upgrades (like sigils), which can’t be changed to match the build requirements. This renders the utility of the stat swap kind of useless, beyond situations where only minor adjustments are needed (like tuning a chornotank for toughness).

As such….. the Stat swapping utility should NOT be considered a selling point for Legendary gear. And really doesn’t justify its own cost to save 14 slots in a bag, used for a full second set of gear. A whole set that costs only as much as ONE piece of legendary armor. So you’d need to justify having at least 12 full sets of gear to justify that cost… and still get screwed over by the lack of Rune swapping.

So that really only leaves one thing…… Cosmetic value. Despite all the mechanical features of legendary gear, the cosmetics are the only thing that does, or could dictate such a high value.

I think the bigger question raised will be the World Gift used in crafting them. Currently Gen 1 uses Gift of Exploration to produce Gift of Mastery. Gen 2 weapons currently use Gift of Maguuma Mastery, which requires all the Masteries unlocked for Heart of Thorns. Its very obvious this was the initial design intent to have it tied to the Expansions…. But if the next Expansion comes out, will the remaining legendary weapons from Gen 2 use Gift of Maguuma Mastery, or Gift of (Dessert?) Mastery from the new expansion?

Imagine you’re a new player joining in during this current expansion, do all its content without going through HOT first (because Elona is where all the fun is at the moment), see the new Legendary weapons in LS4, start work on one…. and then realize you completely mastering everything in PoF has zero contribution to the new Legendaries, because it requires Gift of Maguuma mastery.

This presents a very real problem moving forward, if the Legendary weapon generations aren’t directly coinciding with the expansions, but the gifts in their creation are. I also can’t see them using clone recipes to allow any Expansion mastery gift to qualify for any weapon, as that trivializes the process for existing players moving forward. They do need more incentive for players to get the expansion;, and Legendary weapon sets were a small, but significant part of that.

Leo G.4501:

Gendou.9620:

Do you understand what “Core” means? You can cherry pick what you think is relevant all day, but nothing core from paragons is in this game, period. What are paragons known for? Spear throwing and songs/chants. What is not in this game? That.

Well, Guardians do have spear throwing. It’s just underwater. There’s also the Dragonhunter F1 skill that throws a spear with a tether.

Songs/chants, if Shouts aren’t the equivalent, there are other types of skills that are similar:

Chants = Mantras? Not a GW1 player but the concept seems similar. A mantra is something you chant over and over.

Songs = Mesmer has musical abilities in their trident skills.

All in all, why is it so desired to proliferate whole concepts across games? Not saying I wouldn’t want a new class, but in this game, the profession dictates the characters’ skill type while their specializations dictate the characters’ effect. In a non-related example, in City of Heroes, the archetype dictated skill alignment and purpose while their powersets dictated their skill effects (a Defender was a support with offensive blasts, while the Force Field/Energy Blast powerset dictated how they accomplished that). So what does the Paragon do that the other professions cannot or could not with a specialization?

Thats not the same thing as a Core Design concept. You’re relating aesthetics and themes as mechanical equivalents, when the reality of the game is a lot different.

Paragons had 3 unique aspects in the first game. Chants, Echos, and Energy recovery from successful application of the first 2. Chants differ from shouts in that they are conditional effects that active under certain conditions (the inverse of Hexes). Echos are enchantment-like buffs which trigger specifically when chants trigger or expire. They’re basically an inverse of the Mesmer hex lines, but with AOE as a standard.

The reason none of the classes fall into any of these categories, is because this type of triggering mechanism is only universally applicable to Boons and Conditions. Some classes have skills or traits which yield triggered stack effects… but none of the classes are specifically built around that idea. Mantras also fail this comparison, because their charges are manually triggered and don’t naturally expire. Mantras also aren’t inherently musical; and are more force of will through mental repetition. Example – “Fear is the mind killer”.

The closest approximation in terms of design concept to a Paragon would be the Herald. An AOE support class, works by continuous application of Effects (boons), with a musical sub-theme, and has an energy management system (albeit simplified) that drives it.

Start a new character, or read new player guide. Or just “wing it”.

Guildwars 2 uses a dynamic level scaling system on both players and mobs. ANY player that enters a zone thats lower then his current level will down scale their level and gear tier to match whats appropriate for the area. A minor side effect to the formula they use is that higher levels are statistically weaker then those matched levels when down scaled, and is done to account for the fact that high level players scale very heavily on traits and skills. So while they’re statistically weaker, their traits (if synergized) are still a massive net gain over newer characters haven’t unlocked them yet.

But all that accounts for a fairly small fraction of what you’re seeing. The big shift here is the change from defensive to offensive stats. Because of how damage is calculated, and the HP scales players live in, the thresholds for 1 -2 hit difference in death blows is deceptively high, but gives a pretty big window to recover due to how slow mobs attack. Combine the level scaling with the fact that you dumped all your defensive stats, and it should be no surprise that things can kill you in less hits.

The conventional wisdom in this game goes like this. All fights outside of raids are a battle of attrition. Trying to tank incoming damage, while not being able to dish it out, is the best way to lose a fight in the long run. However, active defense skills, traits and boons are significantly more powerful then then raw defense stats. Since you have to trade offensive stats for defense stats, but not have to trade them with active defenses, most players opt for the highest practical damage output and rely on dodging and defense skills to avoid damage. This requires players to be as mobile as possible, and plays to the game’s greatest mechanical strengths.

From this branches another bit of conventional wisdom….. the faster you kill the something, the less damage it can deal back. Between these, the general consensus is “the faster you clear an area, the less danger you have to deal with”. Hence why players very heavily favor offensive builds whenever possible.

Defensive stats can be useful in general builds IF you know how little you need to make a difference. For some classes, like Necros, a little bit of defense can go a long way with them. But for classes like Ele, which have very low defense and very few scaling traits, they need more defensive stats to make a significant difference.

So depending on what class you are, you should look into taking a defensive trait line to cover mistakes while you learn how to Dodge better. Just to get some perspective of how powerful class skills are- Mesmers are the Current meta tank for Raids. They do this with only enough Toughness to take agro from the rest of the group…. usually a measly 50 points to make sure the AI picks them first. Everything else is handled entirely through their skills. A good Chrono tank can do this without taking a hit unless they absolutely have to.

So with all that in perspective, the next level of playing the game is getting good with the game’s strongest mechanics. Learn to utilize dodging, learn to leverage your skills, and learn how to synergize traits so they play off each other, and compound in power.

If you plan on doing jumpping puzzles, then you’ll want to invest in a Mesmer. Portals are invaluable for some JPs, and while a bit harder to play, they can realistically solo champs if you spec for sustain damage.

For something more tanky thats good for roaming, I’d recommend a Necro with Power Reaper/Minion master spec. The load out is Valks armor/weapons with Zerk/Valk hybrid trinkets, Blood Magic/Death Magic/Reaper. Main traits are Vampiric Presence, Flesh of the Master, Necromatic Corruption, Death Nova, Augury of death, Decimate defenses and Reapers Onslaught. Skills are Blood fiend, Shadow Fiend, Bone Fiend, and RISE!. Weapons choice is Great Sword and Axe/Focus, and rune choice is open to any power or ferocity set you care to run.

The premise is pretty straight forward. The extra HP from Valks increases your shroud capacity (should give 21-24k HP, with another 12k in Shroud HP), while the Minions provide bonus toughness (flesh of the master) and dmg redirect (rise) to mitigate incoming damage. The minions also life steal for you, and allows them to heal through Shroud (normally healing is blocked while shroud is active). When they’re undirected, they also distract nearby mobs, or (collectively) do respectable damage when focused on a single target. Vampirc traits also heal through shroud, allowing minor burst heal for multi-hit attacks. This combination is where this build gets most of its Tank, and gets increasingly stronger self-sustain as more mobs are in melee range.

To top it off, its also got impressive sustain damage and high crit potential from the combination of Decimate Defenses (which gives +2% Crit chance PER stack of Vul on a target), and the multitude of vulnerability sources on your weapons. Even with all exotics, this build can navigate HOT pretty easily; and the CC skills from Reaper wrecks Mordrem like no tomorrow.

The only real vulnerability in this build is limited stability…. but if you’re doing open world, and you get disabled, you can easily pop shroud and just soak the damage until you get back up. It can reliably solo champs, but has diminished performance when there aren’t trash mobs to compound “Rise!” and the AOE life force generating skills.

and after all of that, I only just now realized you meant 67 master points rather then level 67….. in which case, half the stuff I wrote down isn’t relevant.

Ok…. so heres the quick and dirty on mastery points. You only need to do certain ones for Legendary crafting. Since you have access to LS3 maps, I HIGHLY recommend you do them to get the easy mastery points and MP achievements, and shove all of that into Leyline Gliding first, Itzel poison mastery second, and Nuhoch wallows if don’t already have them. These are the mobility mastery unlocks need to traverse all areas of the HOT Jungle, so you can get the various Mastery point challenges, hero points, and other map complete stuff. This makes getting the other mastery point/achievement stuff massively easier to fill out the tracks, so you can get the vendor stuff needed for Legendary crafting.

Ancient magics and Raid aren’t required for completion. However, Ancient magics have mobility skills that are needed for LS3 maps, and are worth taking since they have excess MP you can gain to put toward the main tracks.

Honestly, you are insanely far behind. HOT Legendary weapons require the following to be done.

- You need at least 1 level 80 (which is required to start work on Mastery Points)
- You need to have done the first chapter of Heart of Thorns Story to unlock Mastery Tracks on the account.
- You need have 19 Tyrian Mastery points to complete the Legendary Crafting Track
- You’ll need to have fully leveled Weaponsmith Crafting (there are guides on how to cost efficiently level, but its still an expensive process)

All that is just to unlock the ability to get the recipe from Hobbs.

To actually “start” crafting for this particular weapon, you’ll need access to a Living Story season 3 map (which you should have if you’ve logged in since the last patch). This gives you access to key things you’ll need for all steps of the crafting process….
- Unbound Magic (you’re gonna need a LOT of this)…
- …. to buy Tributes, which you use to craft Shards.

With all the item specific stuff out of the way, you’ll need a metric kitten of Tier 5 mats in order to craft the 3 Swords that will eventually result in the Precursor sword “Save the Queen”. Again… I can not understate how much you’ll need. Something in the order of 12k mithril ore, and another 12k in elder wood logs, 6.7k T5 fine mats, and leather for the inscription.

The next step is to craft the legendary gifts needed to promote it to its Legendary form.

Tyria:
- Complete map Exploration of ALL of Core Tyria on a single Character. This means everything that existed on game launch, and specifically excludes Drytop, Silverwaste, Southsun, Heart of Thorns, and anything from Living World chapters. This gives you 2 “Gift of Exploration”, and is the primary item you need for ALL legendary weapons.

From Heart of Maguuma Maps (from the expansion), you need to complete Map exploration of each of the 4 maps. This will give you a gift item from each map, which combine into an intermediate item needed for a later step. Unlike Core Tyria, these can be done on different characters for each map area.

You’ll also need to complete the main Heart of Thorns Mastery Tracks- Gliding, Itzel, Exalted, and Nuchoch. You will NEED to do this, as it unlocks a set of items you purchase from vendors to create another intermediate gift item.

On top of this, you’ll also have to spend a minimum of 6-8 hours in World vs World doing the Gift of Battle reward track. This is also a Primary item for legendary weapons, and is unavoidable due it being account bound. There are also 2 types tokens needed that are obtained from sPvP and WvW (shards of glory and memories of battle), however both of these can be bought of the TP.

For HOT weapons you’ll also need items from Fractals of the Mist. Stabilizing Matrices can be bought off the TP, and they’re pretty expensive; but you can get them from daily fractal chests and from salvage process you’ll have to do for Ball of Darkenergy. The ball of dark energy can ONLY be obtained by salvaging Ascended gear (and is account bound)…. with the only guaranteed drop from weapons or armor (trinkets are low chance). You could “technically” do this without ever stepping in a fractal, but why waste 3 laurels when you can go into the Fractal lobby and talk to one of the Vendors.

Head spinning yet? Theres still more to go.

You’ll need to do each HOT map meta multiple times to get items from the map specific nodes (airship cargo, chak cache, exalted chests, and noxious pods) to get map specific materials. These combine to create Crystalline Ingots for the Gift Maguuma. Crystalline Ore tends to be the biggest pain in butt, since the only safe time to gather them is on a successful Dragonstand meta (most estimates put it around 6 trips to gather enough). You’ll also need Amalgamated Gemstones, which are actually cheaper to buy off the TP as long as they’re less then 2.3g each.

If you’ve managed to get this far, you STILL have a couple more problems. The mystic Tribute you need to make requires a LOT of materials. You “can” collect them yourself, but it’ll take months due to a blind spot in the drop methods of mid tier fine mats (bloods/fangs/etc). Depending on how long you’ve been playing, most people have minor stock piles gathered passively over the course of the last couple of years. if you don’t have that, you’ll have to turn to the TP to find them…. and it’ll be VERY expensive.

Second problem is Mystic Clovers and Mystic Coins. Mystic coins are generated by the daily login rewards, and can be traded. However, due to the fixed rate they come in at, this has caused their price to steadily to increase over time. For HOT weapons you need minimum of 250 coins, which takes a full year to get on login rewards alone. For Mystic Clovers, you have 2 choices….. either craft them (which takes another 250 mystic coins), or try to get them through WvW and PvP reward tracks. The latter is time consuming, but still way faster then waiting on mystic coins from login rewards. At 1g per coin, buying them is not that bad proposition if you do things that generate decent gold.

The typical gold value of a HOT legendary is 2500-2700g in tradable materials. This doesn’t account for everything, due to how some items are obtained… but can be considered a “minimum” cost estimate to make these weapons.

Whenever anyone asks “whats the do the marysue class”, the answer is always Guardian. Its the most noob friendly class due to its ability to recover from very dire situations, and can be played both reactive and proactive.

That said…. you will STILL get your ass kicked if you don’t learn the mechanics- This is a GOOD thing, as it segues quickly into combat norms of Dodging, Trait combos, staggering defenses, while still being forgiving on novice players. More importantly, these basics are easily transferred to other classes, allowing you to understand the nuances quicker.

For further recommendations, it depends on how brain dead you generally play. There is a very harsh line between Core Tyria and later content; mostly due to Core Tyria having incredibly dumb down encounter designs following beta feedback. No joke, some people refuse to leave Tyria maps, because they find the notion of pressing the dodge key in a fight to be a personal insult of the highest order.

If you like Buildcraft…. this game offers a decent amount of it.

Since the base game is F2P, and there has been a history of illegitimate keys sold online, a referral program exposes the system to a lot of potential abuse for questionable return on investment. When you consider Xpacs upgrades are put on discount very frequently, all it would matter is referring them to base game (which has zero barrier to play), and them deciding if they want to upgrade their account or not.

For future reference, you can piece together the requirements by looking at previous versions in the generation (2.5 when they dropped collections). You’ll notice the Shards you make have the “theme” gift recipe as its description; which is basically 100 Mystic Runes, 100 shards, Gift of Wood/Metal, Gift of the Mists.

Capes were banned from GW2, because it would bring the backpack skin market to a dead stop.

When HOT launched, there was a Craft vs Collection divide on the stats. There were 2 suspicions at the time HOT launched. Either they going to use Asc Trinkets as a Raid reward (turned out to be true), or they were holding it off for a new tier of crafting later on. Some of the HOT stats were had as achievement rewards; but only 5 Asc Trinkets, 4 of which were Marauders amulets. And you couldn’t get copies of the ones that offered selectable stats as rewards.

HOT stat trinkets were clearly intended to be from crafting in the initial phases (to ensure demand for the new Jewel types), and the Asc versions later as rewards for follow up content. But that changed a bit for Season 3, given the very vocal players who either disliked raids, or didn’t perform well in them; leading to the introduction of alternative sets via gathered tokens.

This was 100% a design decision, since there was always intent to push players into Raids using the new stats as incentives. What they got wrong is how players measure build efficiency vs cost. In fact, GW2 players have a long history of skipping incremental steps, due to soul binding preventing the re-purposing of equipment. How many here skipped making Exotic Vipers? For the cost and effort, having it as Asc (which can move between characters) is a much better investment given the rarity of the gems used to craft insignias.

Thus LS3 is there to completely trivialize the way we get Asc gear, since all attempts to promote incremental upgrades have been either ignored or circumvented by the players.

zomgbuffalo.5276:

sorudo.9054:

zomgbuffalo.5276:

sorudo.9054:

so in short, ppl who don’t like to grind and can’t stand craft grinding will never ever get them.
also, in short, they’re so useless even the TP don’t want them.

I find it funny how some people think that everyone should be entitled to have everything… MMO is based on grind. If you don’t grind you get no juice. Simple as that.

no, an MMO is based on online play, nothing entales grind in MMO or do you not know what MMO stands for?

It’s not about what it stands for, it’s about how it was since MMO began.

How far back are we talking? WoW? EQ? UO? Muds? Most of the early games designed around quest line adventures, and you could beat content above your level if you were smart about it. Sometimes you had to farm, but usually in the context of affording an item, or finding something specific out in the field. Now days the design norm is that of a constant deficit; no matter what you are tasked with, you start at zero, and have to fight every system to make progress.

Its almost ironic that WoW not only broke the trend of how content was done, but also reestablished it in a more diabolical form. Lazy MMOs, and now lazy RPGs, use grinds as a game play element…. not a side effect of choices leading up to that point. The fact you think the two are fundamentally synonymous only shows you don’t seem to understand what any of these terms actually mean.

I would argue “THE Shining Blade” is the proper name for a legendary weapon, given its one of the few instances of actually BEING a weapon directly from GW1 lore.

Like how its long to late to argue the point… but the Fiery Dragon sword would had made an incredible legendary sword with a full set of VFX. Caladbalg Restored could had also been a great opportunity for legendary GS… but apparently people hated collections, so it got knocked down to a Current Events quest line.

You can only see the adv effects of the Moot when your character is intoxicated.

Step 1. Put the brakes on the Hype train.
Step 2. Wait for the announcement

Wild speculation is what got us all in trouble last time. So this time around I’d suggest being more laser focused on whats in the announcement rather then whats not.

vinterberg.2783:

I think the particle system is CPU bound, and there’s really no excuse for not doing them on the GPU using shaders!
Also, the physics is run on the CPU too, so the cloth simulation is probably a big factor in big crowds (Have my char model quality set to medium because of this).

We’re long overdue for a graphics and user interface overhaul!

There are several reasons…. most of which are related to backward compatibility, DX9 legacy, and which APIs/Shaders they are using. Its painfully sub-optimal, but its guaranteed to work, and can be budgeted around.

A graphics overhaul of this era (circa 2006) engine is a pretty huge task. Its not just moving things to dedicated GPU shaders, but also restructuring the entire back end to support more non-serialized tasks. If they can’t break that bottleneck open, then it can still get majorly bogged down by excessive draw calls, data dependencies, and even the network flow in the case of MMOs.

Theres no doubt they’ve been doing upgrades over time. But given the Dev’s admission that the engine is a mess of spaghetti code (bespoke in some cases), and that untangling it wasn’t possible, didn’t inspire much confidence in an overhaul. Now the updates made for HOT fixed how they build and assign mechanics, overhauled physics handling, and updated how world space is mapped and tracked. But graphics has always remained a problem because of how deeply root some of the engine’s behaviors are.

This new team is pretty capable; but theres no good understanding of how bad of a state it is under the hood. Once you get down to the Renderer, with all the connected logic, its like rebuilding half the engine from almost the ground up. One can hope….. but thats 6-12 months (if they’re lucky) of engineering work just to “start” seeing results of any kind.

Keidra warned you that it was going to hurt……. or it’ll kill you.

care to elaborate? I’ve been seeing people complain about mechanics being too complicated….. they’re simple thought puzzles. Kedria even goats you if you about it if take more then a minute.