Guild Wars 2

I had lots of trouble doing this one on my Norn, I could not make the jump where the letter is, I ended up using a sword skill to get across the gap. I have done this on human sized characters and found it much easier. The issue is the ghosts where the letter is, and the gap you need to jump across, can respawn quite quickly meaning you can spend considerable time in combat in that one spot if you try to fight your way along.

When I am levelling or gathering I am usually solo unless someone wants to tag along. But the nature of GW2 also means I can call out for help in map or guild chat and get the help I need for a champion or a skill point. With GW1 you HAD to either group up or take henchies/heroes, where with GW2 a lot of content is soloable, but DE also tend to balance out for groups.

Anyone know where to get the quaggan potion, feel like running around as a quaggan hitting some city poi’s.

Gear that is lower than the level you are being down levelled to is also being down levelled as if it matched your level. For example I am lvl 42, in a lvl28 area, have lvl 14 chest with +8 power and 35 defence.

Stats without it are (naked chest):
Power: 231
Attack: 450
Armour: 301

Stats with it:
Power: 236
Attack: 455
Armour: 324

If I goto a zone of my level the stats are:
Without it (naked chest):
Power: 408
Attack: 720
Armour: 505

With it:
Power: 416
Attack: 728
Armour: 540

This piece of armour is LOWER than the level I am being down levelled to. I also tested this with other equipment LOWER than the level I am being down levelled to with the same result.

It appears that regardless of the level of your gear, the gear stats are being brought down the same amount as your characters level when down levelled. Which means for characters who do not have gear that closely matches their level, they are worse off when down levelled than characters whose level match the areas level, with the same gear.

I am levelling a character and in doing so solely upgrading their equipment from drops. I completely the last 15-25 area, got 1 item I could upgrade, got another item from map completion reward that I could also use. I am averaging 2 drops per map that I can upgrade to.

My character is level 42, her equipment is
Head: lvl 27
Shoulders: lvl 34
Chest: lvl 14
Gloves: lvl 38
Pants: lvl 32
Boots: lvl 26
Greatsword: lvl 33
Sword: lvl 27
Pistol: lvl 36
Spear: lvl 31
Trident: lvl 20

Yes, I am aware I can buy equipment and have done so with the previous 2 characters I have levelled. I am just showing how bad it is when you don’t buy equipment.

I have completed 5 × 1-15 zones, 4 × 15-25 zones, and am now doing a 25-35 zone which I had started previously but my gear was too low for at the time. Prior to Nov 15 I have levelled 2 characters without problems using only drops and was often in zones a couple of levels higher than the character. This time around I have to stick to zones lower than the character because her equipment is not sufficient enough to survive long enough to kill a foe equal to her level. I even struggle in some situations with foes much lower than her, especially when foes are in groups and agroing one agros them all, I am wondering if this is a down levelling issue when gear does not match your characters level.

StygSec.7163:

In my long winded post a page or so back I mentioned Aurora’s Remains and the event there. I only brought it up that it had this weird otherworldly homey feeling to it. The event I did solo wasn’t too terribly hard, and it did have a chest at the end. Granted it wasn’t a huge chest it was a Sylvari-looking chest. I looted a few greens and blues from it. Event link is below.

It’s http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Draw_out_and_destroy_the_Demagogue%27s_spirit

Weird, I just did this event and got no chest after killing the champion, did get loot from the body though

Zogyark.4597:

It’s clearly not from an event that has been run into the ground tens of thousands of times, that much is for sure.

This ^^^, we cannot rule out a popular event. Just because we have not had someone say they found it does not mean it has not already dropped. How many people run those events yet do not come to forums, and since Final Rest is not on TP, anyone who does not look at the forums might think because it is not listed it might be worthless.

The drop rate IS extremely low so ruling out an event based on its popularity could mean we’re missing it all together.

The no credit for kills might be part of the issue, I am going around levelling a character, and I notice some kills I am not getting XP for, despite the combat log being full of attacks.

This is just one example where I didn’t get XP for a kill.

slayer achievements missing a point

Find a server that owns all of WvW so you can map it easier. Apart from that the world map is pretty straight forward. The only issue may be in Orr where some skill points can be pretty tough solo.

Navi.7142:

How likely could it be that the vet/ champ problem mentioned by Jason could affect also other, openworld foes?
If the kill credit for these enemies is not working, maybe it is not working for the others, too?

The problem with going down this line of thinking is that what about those of us who are the only one killing and still get bad/no drops. Even though we are the only ones doing the killing is the system that flawed that even solo kills will sometimes not count?

And what about these new chests that are meant to drop good loot, but instead are dropping junk? Surely something else is in play here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/poss-loot-drop-fix-check-your-clocks/first#post1421336

This ^^^ thread suggests time differences are the cause of loot drop issues, and when checking my time against server time, my computers clock is 5 seconds faster than the server time. Since my computer time is set by the apple asia time server I am going to assume my time is correct give or take a second for lag etc…

Could this be the cause of all the loot issues, our computer time being off compared to server time? There are threads about other issues where the computers time vs server time was suspected to be the cause …

ok, checked the in game clock against my phone and computer.

My phone uses the phone companies time, and it is 4sec faster than ingame server time.

My computer uses apple time server and is 5 seconds faster than ingame server time.

Is the time difference the reason for bad loot?

Vavume.8065:

It has become far far worse than it was before, in both wvw and places like Lions Arch.

This culling issue can also be seen in dynamic events with large mobs, half the time you do not see the mob until they are on top of you.

My clock is set by the internet, so unless the time server is wrong, then my time is correct.

There are a few issues with loot, things not dropping when they should, “good loot” chests dropping junk, change in the frequency of rare drops, magic find giving less drops for some, no longer able to level a character from loot alone, and so on.

The evidence is that there is an issue, but it appears the coding is so complicated that the problem does not immediately stand out. I have come to the conclusion that this problem may never be solved simply because it is too difficult to nail down a cause. We the users believe the issue is “diminished return” and with the rise of more people feeling the loot issues, and the passing comment that there were recent diminished return changes, it seems even more obvious.

Unfortunately because diminished return is a safety net, any changes to is are not publicised to protect it against people exploiting it to its limits. If all this is the result of diminished return we may never know, but it is driving people away, I myself am playing less because I log on and I know I am not going to have a good loot day.

Quaggan
Skritt
Tengu

It is amusing seeing people try to fit builds into the generic RPG DPS/Tank/Healer fits. Guild Wars 2 offers a lot of setup options but unfortunately gameplay can be difficult if you try to fit into one of the generic RPG builds, or be less rewarding.

Your best option is to play around with different setups, different trait lines, and work out a build that works for you. If you decide to go a support style role, you will still need to do some damage to get rewards.

When the game first opened there was no DR, so yes it was easier to farm for your legendary. But the rules have changed and those who got their legendary before hand are sitting pretty. I can understand the frustration as it stands now, it is really hard and expensive to get a legendary and because of this have decided myself that I will not deliberately go for one unless I pick up a precursor.

Seems this thread has gone quiet, but a read of the recent threads around DR shows the topic is still quite hot.

Based on statements said around DR I am going to assume was instituted as a safety net to prevent exploitation of bugs that allowed a person to profit unfairly from drops or event/dungeon rewards. This has since been extended to parking characters at events, such as dragons.

The issue with DR is it punishes players for doing stuff that is required by the game. For example, someone might need some tier 6 crafting materials, but do not have the money to buy them. Their solution is to either farm for them, or farm for gold to buy them. To farm for the item mean killing the same type foes time and time again to try to get the materials, and with the low drop rates you need to kill hundreds of them to get enough to make a complete amour set. In doing so, you end up hitting DR quite quickly and are forced to farm even longer than it would take without DR.

The other option, to farm for gold, means you need to find areas, several to avoid DR, where drops are profitable, or to harvest high end resources. This requires a lot of traveling and ultimately contributes to the ever increasing cost of crafting materials as more and more people buy instead of farm the materials.

So, do I farm my kitten off, suffer DR and hope I get the amount I need in a reasonable amount of time, or do I farm my kitten off so I can buy the materials knowing that I am contributing to the increasing cost.

DR goes against the “play the way you want” mantra when it affects players who decide to gather the materials themselves, because it punishes them for doing so. The only ones who win are bots who farm these materials 24/7, I’ve seen them doing it, and our gold, if we choose to buy these materials, goes to the gold sellers.

So, do we suffer DR and farm for many many hours ourselves, or do we just farm for gold and aide the bane of the MMO world by giving our gold to the gold sellers who farmed the material for us? This is the choice DR forces us to make.

morrolan.9608:

Just noticed this in the dungeons sub forum from Robert Hrouda: “Since DR is a safety net system for exploits, we’re likely not going to announce when and how we made changes to it.”

I think its safe to say its gone far beyond being a safety net for exploits.

From reading some of the stuff Robert has said, it looks like DR also kicks in if you do an event too much without doing something else. And he also says they recently made changes to DR which is probably why we are now seeing more people with the loot issue.

DR should be removed from drops.

With the current loot issues I would not pay to play GW2. I do not mind spending a little with seasonal content but with loot issues making levelling characters a chore, or grinding for endgame gear much harder, gw2 would not get a subscription from me. I learnt my lesson from eve.

I got rewarded the daily achievement despite not having completed the dailies.

Also received daily again after completing them.

Navi.7142:

The number of people is enormously affecting my drops.
The best number of players for highest amount of loot and some better quality loot whilst doing the event chain (penitent, shelter, ..) in orr is 5.
< 5 and 8+ people = less loot + lower quality loot

If only, prior to Nov15 there were a lot more people doing the events I do, and even bots. There is a lot less now when compared to pre Nov15 numbers. These events have also changed since then to scale up with more numbers, so more foes compared to pre Nov15 numbers.

tigirius.9014:

A thought occurs about this situation. What about results from mac client users? Are there any in this thread and if so can you guys post the captures of the results you are receiving because if you are receiving better loot en masse that means there’s a programming error most likely.

I am using the mac beta client. It is just the windows client run in a wine type environment.

I used the windows and mac version on same computer and the result was the same.

There are plenty of guilds that do not require 100% representation. These guilds are aware that they cannot cater to every need of their members and allow them to rep other guild as long as you represent them some times.

On this issue, it has been my experience that regardless of gear, MF, no MF, GC, BB, or some other random setup, the successful dungeon runs have been with groups where someone took charge and directed the group. Groups that I have been less successful in have often had little or no communication.

It is my experience that gear does not dictate a good run, but communication does.

From my understanding, the LFG tool in game only works for people on your friends list.

I can understand from time to time that maintenance needs to be done on servers, what I don’t understand is I thought the design of GW2 meant there would be no “downtime”.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Guild-Wars-2-Will-Have-Less-Downtime-than-Original-324947.kittenml

ArenaNet aims to get to a situation where most gamers never see a “down for maintenance” message while playing Guild Wars 2.

http://www.vg247.com/2013/01/28/guild-wars-2-dev-reflects-on-launch-security-issues-were-not-done/

Quote from Colin Johanson

We hope you go your entire lifetime of the game with Guild Wars 2 and never see the message “Guild Wars 2 is currently down for maintenance”.

Zenyatoo.4059:

“but alas it can not be entered in open world (only via personal story).”

wait what. Yes it can. Ive totally gone in there from the world map, got the explorer achievement and everything. There’s a small chest in there too.

Are we talking about different artesian waters?

Um, I’ve gone there is open world, the door is locked and cannot be opened.

The benefits of magic find(MF) have been hotly debated for quite some time on these forums. Some will argue that magic find is great for getting extra loot while others argue that they are worse of with magic find. The bottom line is you need to experiment and find out if magic find is working for you the way you expect it to.

As for hiding in dungeon groups with magic find, that is your personal choice and if people are going to vet pugs based on what armour they have then you can simply find another group to go with. Good group leaders tend to do well with pugs who follow direction than a leader who expects everyone to know what to do, regardless of magic find.

Personally I am worse off with magic find unless I am after fine crafting materials so I only ever wear it if I am farming for them. Your experience may differ.

I think the concern with multiboxing is that someone can control multiple accounts with a single input. After reading some stuff on the internet I can understand the concern. There is hardware and software designed for multiboxing that allow a single input to be sent to multiple computers/processes, therefore a single press of #1 is sent to all game clients without the user having to switch between clients.

From what I can tell this is a “grey” area as the user is still in control of the characters, but is not controlling them separately.

Navi.7142:

The “doing it wrong” argument doesn’t make any sense, because if that would have been the case, we would have done it wrong since we started playing gw2.

I have to agree with this, my drops changed, not the way I play, so if I was doing it wrong the whole time then my drops would not have changed the way they have.

I don’t the “Defend the Ash Legions Camp” event at Guardpoint Decimus in Plains of Ashford scales well, we had 5 people on the event and the mobs kept AoEing the tents so by 2min remaining the event failed.

It was not for lack of co-ordination, 2 people had one side while 3 had the other side.

More people = more mobs = more AoE = tents destroyed quicker.

Tintaglia.4762:

Would someone please link to a screenshot or video of the chest? I have not seen one and I may have overlooked it.

I haven’t got a screenshot for you, but these chests do not appear immediately after the kill, they take a few seconds to “shimmy” into existence and because of this are easy to miss if you are moving fast through an area.

from https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Q-Is-multi-boxing-allowed/245276

Multiboxing is very simmilar to botting and 3rd party programming so according to Anet’s policy it is strictly forbidden. Please, refrain from making use of this and report any player you see making use of this.
Since the question has been answered , this thread is closed.
Thanks
EDIT: This post has been quoted in other forum posts, but it is inaccurate. ArenaNet does not prohibit Multi- or Dual-Boxing as along as the player is active on each account and is not botting or using other third-party programs to “play” the account.

Some people have been asking for evidence of how I play to prove I get bad drops. So here is a video of me doing an event today.

Now to be clear, prior to doing this event I was on a different character in the shiver peaks, levelling it up. This character has not been played in the last 24 hours. I did not kill or do any events with this character prior to this one. There is NO DR on the event as you can see by the event reward.

Also note that culling issues made me miss a group a couple of times.

http://youtu.be/ljaMlyi7wfw

It looks like during the editing process I missed 1 fine so add it to the count.

I can’t help thinking about the gargoyle and keep checking GW1 information on them. They were found south of the wall around Ascalon, and north of what is now Black Citadel. Mergoyles were found around Lions Arch and what is now Divinity’s Reach/Queensdale. If the gargoyle on the staff is going to have any correlation to its origin these would be the areas I would start with.

Add to this that gargoyles used to live in catacombs and that catacombs are the final physical resting place of bodies whose souls went to the underworld, and that the Shadow Behemoth is from the underworld, it all makes is quite plausible that the Shadow Behemoth is the keeper of Final Rest.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Secrets_in_the_Swamp

Somewhere there is a boss laughing at us.

ok, maybe I mis-understood.

I just finished watching a youtube video about some of the lore in GW2, and something grabbed my attention and I needed to research further. In the video they state that in lore the Black Citadel was built on top of the ruins of the city Ascalon. But when looking at the maps from around the time of the searing, and comparing it to the map of today, Ascalon was to the east of where Black Citadel is today. In fact the plains of ashford map has the city ruins marked to the east.

So is the lore wrong? Are the charr telling a tall tale? Or is Mr Woodenpotatoes sadly mistaken?

Morrigan.2809:

It is a fairly rare openworld dungeon with an underwater boss, lots of puzzles involving fire and water and it is in Ascalon.

You might be onto something.

Consider this, most if not all the land events are often completed by players. But water events are often avoided. So it could well be a boss that has not been encountered very often, and the most likely place would be in the water.

NW straits of devastation is a champion krait … was listed as a group event so didn’t bother trying to do it. Just to the south there is a structure I will check out later tonight since internet lag is making gameplay impossible at the moment.

Josh Foreman.8250:

Karizee.8076:

Hey Josh, any word on when that “Mother of all jumping puzzles” you said you were working on will be in game?

I’ve been dropping some more tidbits on the other JP thread.

Please, not another clock tower style speed puzzle.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

I’ll ask around tomorrow to see if anything changed, but looking at it right now I see no changes to the fractal chest loot.

Speak with Colin Johanson, they are investigating loot issues with the game that people have been experiencing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Share-your-data-about-perceived-strange-drop-behavior-here/1357916

And yes while there are people who don’t see a loot issue, more people have been experiencing loot issues since the Jan 28 patch.

Awesome.6120:

Pretty sure if they started banning for this every player with a mesmer would be gone.

Not only this, but every player who used a portal gun in the same way.

Putting aside the loot issue, I do enjoy GW2. I am levelling my 6th character and in the process of levelling revisit many areas of Tyria. I often find content I didn’t notice before or events that I’ve not seen running before.

I find if you stick to one small part of the game, you can get burnt out on it quite quickly. During my gaming time each day I will use different characters and visit different areas to do different things from chasing around those big chickens (dragons) to harvesting ori, to getting a massive repair bill in WvW, to just levelling, plus fit in my dailies.

Tyria is a big world, it is a waste not to take full advantage of it.

Gretl.3156:

After browsing in the Internet I find out about a XXXXX mod.

You might want to modify your post, so as to not promote hacks.

Something to consider…

Firstly, the average not so educated about the game player when they get to 80 will likely get magic find gear so they can get much better drops, their mates are all telling them that magic find improves their chances of good drops and good drops mean more money. This is what I did with my first 2 characters. Until I worked out that magic find was a worthless piece of kitten furballs.

I then have spent alot of time trying to fit out other characters in anything other than magic find, and even got a second set of gear for my main character. I now run my main with the second set of gear for dungeons and only use magic find if I am farming for fine crafting materials (because for me that all it improves the drop of).

Now in saying that I did run some dungeon early on when I still only had the magic find set, and found that if someone takes charge and directs everyone as to what to do then the dungeon run goes well. Its when you get people expecting that everyone knows what to do and does not say a word that I found the dungeon runs went bad, even in the ones I knew, because there was no communication.

These days my main has sacrificed DPS to offer bonuses to the group and sometimes I get the “why do you use that build, you have less DPS” to which I reply “because I offer group bonuses”.

According to WIKI, DR can kick in for dungeons, events, and loot drops. Now with dungeons and events we can tell DR has kicked in just by looking at the rewards we are getting, however with loot drops this is not as obvious. We “think” DR is kicking in when we start to get less quality/quantity of loot, but we can not be certain, and it seems to stick no matter where we go.

I propose that for loot drop DR, that a debuf is displayed when loot drop DR comes into effect. This would firstly help to work out if the current loot issues people are experiencing are in fact related to DR, and secondly advise people that they need to move on to a different area.

What about the bots though … well anyone who has seen the bots at work know that they do not care about DR and farm the same spots 24/7. DR only affects players and since players are alerted to DR for dungeons and events, I think it only fair they be alerted for loot drops too.