Guild Wars 2

Same.
Transmuted Order of Whispers gear with irreplaceable red trim.
(As of new update.)

Oh Roach! That made me lol!

Had an interesting experience last month. The monthly came up and, oh my gosh, we have to do dungeons! I’ve made a few friends, randomly, since launch, and so I asked around with the intention of forming a dungeon group. Turned out these guys hadn’t really explored the dungeons either. A few were game. I posted an LFG in LA: ‘Need fourth and fifth to join friendly, relaxed bunch for monthly dungs.’ In that way, I got to meet more like-minded people.
We had a blast! We ran story modes on TA and HotW, and did a few exp paths. We weren’t great, and were very inexperienced, but had no trouble making it through. Mostly the group chat was silent – I think we were all concentrating so hard – but we’d relax and chat briefly during the little respites, and do the group pat on back at the end of a run.
One of our group had to prepare dinner for her daughter, and we found another fifth from one of our friends lists. He was great fun too. Man, that butcher in HotW took it out of us!
There are loads of us out there. We’re not hardcore gamers, and we don’t enjoy the pressure associated with many of the group-only events. Moreover, we won’t tolerate that kind of pressure. We miss out on a lot of stuff, but we don’t mind so much because we just don’t want the stress. My worst GW2 experiences have been running dungs with guys who scurry away shouting ‘LEAVE THOSE WURMS!’ over their shoulder; and trying to keep up with some arbitrary zerg in WvW, throwing gold at the armor repair guy every few minutes, all to fulfil the requirements for the Gift of Mastery.
Conversely, my most enjoyable experiences have been slaughtering multi-limbed, googly-eyed critters with friendly people whom I’ve never met before!

I think it’s these kinds of pressures that put a lot of people off the social aspects of MMOs. You don’t have to be any good; but, if you do want to improve, there are some super suggestions in this thread.

Iruwen.3164:

I can only say again what has been said above: 100% MF makes a 0,1% chance a 0,2% chance. 1000 oder 10000 drops would probably be an adequate sample size.

And in the context of the title of this thread, my answer would be ‘No, the investment is not worth it.’
But it could be, and it should be, and the world would be a better place.
Like anything else, if I invest time and virtual currency into something, I would expect it to yield a proportionate reward. MF gear does not currently do this.
Given how wonderfully well so much of the game has been balanced, I really can only read this as a dodgy, swept-under-the-rug algorithm. An infuriating one. Infuriating because players need to see responses to their actions.

What an awesome idea! Seconded!
Would love to see some ‘darker’ legendary bows. A plague longbow which rains corrupted critters on barrage! Maybe some sort of Lifestealer bow which changes colour/fx as it stacks lifesteal. Oh yes!

Would also be great if it bookmarked your last visit instead of defaulting to the gem store.

I’d say the point is that, if MF is actually working, it doesn’t make anywhere near enough difference. I’ve been farming with my son for a long time now; he has next to no MF and I have around 100%. I would reasonably expect to either receive more mats than him, or more rares – or anything at all to indicate to me that all the gold, karmas, and laurels I’ve invested in MF gear are paying off. In reality, the difference in our fortunes is unnoticeable. We’ll often compare mat drops after a few hours farming together. I really can’t see the MF making any difference whatsoever. Moreover, after our most recent run, he had about 25% more T5 and T6 mats than me, and we’re both tagging and taking down exactly the same amount of critters.
I’d suggest that any MF system should prevent this from happening at all. If you pump up your MF, you should expect better returns.
I suspect we’re engaging in another Final Rest topic here: we’ll log in after an update one day and suddenly find MF working.

Been reading the forums with interest lately and a thought occurs to me.
What would you get if you merged the Final Rest threads with the Chest Event Lag threads with the End Game threads?

The quest for the legendary is, for casual players like myself, a long-ish term goal. The dragon timer website allows me to hop from one event to the next, knowing I’ll grab myself a bunch of rares which, themselves, are ecto lottery tickets. And there’s a chance that an exotic will drop which, unless it’s my precursor, will simply become a bunch of gold and silver.
And now I’m levelling toons in order to do this multiple times a day.
This is beginning to concern me! What will I become?

On the road to the legendary, I’ve kitted myself out with a Corrupted Greatbow, an Arachnophobia, and a Naegling.

So to my point: Would we not generate more end game and alleviate the chest event lag and provide the excitement of the (ultimately disappointing) Final Rest chase by creating lots more cool skins and hiding them in all those other chests around the world?
How cool would it be to hop through Demongrub knowing/suspecting there’s a chance you’ll drop a longbow which fires frogs? Or to open that darned chest at the end of that three hour long Griffonrook bomb run to find the Sequined Quaggan Speargun?

I’m sure the Anet art team would love to come up with hundreds of new designs, and I suspect they wouldn’t take too long to create, and I also suspect we’d have a decent part-solution to many of the oft-cited ‘concerns’.

Downside would be that legendaries would potentially lose their appeal, although provided they always remain BiS, I think this would be moot.

So more skins! Hundreds of cool exotics actually worth hunting for and equipping!
Would certainly appeal to me as I either solo, or mosey around with my son poking our noses into caves and mini-dungs. Heck, I imagine it would appeal to those Final Rest zergs too!

Oh Anwar, so many of us share your pain!
I seriously thought I must be literally the worst jumper in the world!

The one thing above all else that helped me with jumping puzzles was to optimize the performance. (I think it’s in Options > Graphics > Choose Best performance.)
You’ll lose the pretty graphics, which itself can be a hindrance in some parts of JPs, but you’ll up the frame rate and feel a little more in control of your actions!

And take some comfort knowing you’re not alone! There are many many players just as bad as you and I! This guy always puts a smile on my face:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h_Vh43pS8I

Stick with it Anwar!

I kinda sense that we’re all after a little less randomness to our drops.

Just after Christmas, I decided to make a Corrupted Longbow, and so I would spend up to two hours a day farming corrupted lodestones. During that time, I would net between 1 and 3 per hour. I felt a certain amount of control over my rewards. If I wanted corrupted lodestones, I’d log in and go farming in FS and grab a handful of them. I had a goal, and felt as though it was attainable by effort.
I have only dropped one in the last month, and that was by accident (which is to say that I wasn’t farming for it). Instead of being pleased, I was frustrated. Clearly any control I thought I had was an illusion.
Conversely, I have dropped more exotics from random mobs (tunnel farming) in the last fortnight than I have dropped from any means at all in the other five or so months since launch. The best of those, Deathwish, sold for a little over 10g.

I have no idea how to go about improving the odds of a good drop: sometimes MF works, sometimes no MF works; sometimes being in a party works, sometimes soloing works. I just can’t fathom a pattern. I’m all for an element of randomness, but I also like to have a plan of action when I log in, otherwise I simply don’t feel compelled to log in. It all becomes aimless.

And let’s not even go near the precursors! The idea that one person can craft a precursor on their second Mystic Forge attempt while another person can throw hundreds of lvl80 rares into the Forge and still not receive a precursor seems ludicrous to me! It seems unfair. It’s not enough to say that they had the same chance as each other; it would be far more balanced if both players could exert some amount of control over their drops – to be rewarded similarly for similar amounts of investment (in time, effort, and currency).

I have no doubt that drop rates must be a mahoosive headache for the ANet team; but given the amount of posts in this thread, and in similar threads, I do think there needs to be some sort of reevaluation, if only to give us a reasonably solid means of achieving our goals – to give us a sense of purpose and direction and a modicum of control over our destinies.

Still an issue. It’s possible to jump through the round door (no collision) and walk around behind the scenery. Once there, player can get stuck in pretty much every piece of geometry.
(Bramble Pass, top of Straits of Devastation.)