Cool - Should have the time over the weekend and will give a shout- about how long for a noob to finish it?
For a game that's otherwise fairly polished, the lack of a LFG system for dungeons is kind of astounding. I refuse to do the spamming LFG in chat channels thing and thus have only done one dungeon so far (and we 4-manned it because we couldn't easily find a 5th). And now with the 7-day cooldown on server switching, it's not like I can easily group up with most of y'all either. As much as I really enjoyed the game for a month or two, maybe they should have delayed their launch until they could get LFG and guesting ironed out. At least there's no monthly fee, though, so playing an hour or two here and there doesn't feel like wasting money.
I don't think you need to be on the same server to do dungeons. I've been able to play with people on other servers all the time for dungeon mode. I agree though that there should have been LFG tool from the start of launch.
Hey ArenaNet - quick favor, if you could. Maybe we might consider potentially just possibly changing the enemy type on the Risen that seem to overflow all of Orr from the Risen type to their base type for the purposes of the kill so many types daily? I've really come to appreciate my daily serving of love gravy (finally, something immediately useful from the daily), so imagine my shock when I teleported back to Leap after finishing Gorge at 13 types and then stayed pegged at 14 types for.....well, basically ever. I mean, that seems in line with the intent of the daily goal, right?
Brian, I completely agree with that sentiment. It would certainly make the daily achievement in Orr a hell of a lot easier. Still, head to WvW, hit Lion's Arch and run south or north into one of those zones to kill a few things. Heck, you can even kill creatures in WvW around the controlled area with ease. It's a hindrance, but I'm still really hoping they'll implement an LFG function before something like this. That was probably my biggest disappointment on launch or shortly thereafter was finding no LFG tool for dungeons. How that slipped by the devs is beyond me. Completely off topic, but for anyone who gets easily bored should try the engineer.
Actually, I find it easier to just head to WvW one of the boarderlands. There's enough different Mob types that I've completed the daily kill varity in WvW alone. Best bet is to hit one of the oposing sides boarderlands, then sneak out one of the "Backways" that lead to a river, and most likely the fishes and/or lizards on the riverbank will do it for you. After you're done, just log out to char select and back in and you're back at the point where you entered into WvW with no need to worry about Waypoint TP charges to get there.
Thank you lady luck! Completed Lornar Pass and got a black lion key. Used it on a chest and found the Greatsaw Greatsword skin lying inside. Hello Trading Post!!!
I'm intimidated impressed too. I considered entering it, but then I remembered I haven't used modelling clay or the like since eating playdough in first grade.
Much cheaper than $39.00 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=clay I was posting about the game Guild Wars 2, which is $39 on Amazon
Oy. Orr is....man. Leap is worse than Straits of Devastation. I get having one zone like this, but three? And so many of the events are completely impossible to do without a zerg mob on your side. It took me four tries to get around the behol...duh...Eye of Zhaitan to tag that last point of interest in the underground passage, and then you've got sea monsters over to one side and a super priestess in the middle and a camp that's never actually finished (nobody seems to want to bother with defending it after it's taken) that doesn't say it's a group event, but you really need a group to do. Ugh. I'm about 77% done, but this zone is just exhausting. Does every player really have to run through ALL of this to get that last dungeon? Or do you get that waypoint for free? I do hpe that these zones get redone sooner rather than later. It's inevitable that they'll have to (crowds will nly get thinner as the game ages). If I wasn't so close to finishing the PvE map (and so thoroughly in need of exotic gear at this point in my career), I'd be tempted to wait until the game turns these into regular old heart zones. Which they really need to do at some point. That would be super helpful. I hope they're planning on that, because I don't want to do the Burning Crusade/Wrath content time warp thing trying to finish up these territories.
AHhhh finally at about 55ish with my Mesmer. Glad I stuck with it even after feeling hugely gimped and underpowered compared to my Ranger- now with some good gear, good traits (and I am really starting to like the Greatsword oddly enough) I feel like something more than wet paper when I go up against mobs. Definitely feeling good about it now. Plus, she is so much cuter than my Ranger- I seriously need some gold so I can get that Assassin's armor for her.
Panties: bunched. http://www.guildwars2hub.com/features/previews/lost-shores-preview New tier of gear could mean a lot of things. If it means another grind to re-cap myself for WvW, it also means I'm done. Hopefully they're not discarding the old capped level/capped stats thing that GW1 had and WvW requires for a level playing field.
Legendaries are a tier above exotics but have the same stats. I'm guessing these are basically green items from GW1: gear named after a particular boss with fixed stats, appearance and mods. Not sure what's up with the infusion stuff, but I'm guessing it's related to the new mobs or the new dungeon.
Here's a little bit of information about Ascended gear from the official site: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/linsey-murdock-unveils-new-high-end-ascended-gear/ This disappoints me because I thought this kind of gear progression and the associated grind was not what GW2 was about. I wonder whether they will update the gear that can be bought with existing dungeon tokens to be on a par with Ascended gear.
Even though the stat advantage is indeed very minor I too am disappointed that they threw out the "all end gear is the same" so quickly.
It might actually be more than just a minor stat increase, as they seemed to have chosen a magic find set for us to compare values which seems to mask the actual stat differences. If you just look at the first two stats, it seems its just a marginal +5 stat increase for each stat. If you then look at the magic find (MF) comparision, its a 3% increase which doesn't seem that big a deal. The issue is that for that item, MF is the primary stat, so it doesn't make the Ascended armor look all that much better than current exotics. If you replaced MF with one of the other primary stat (Power, Precision, Toughness, etc), the 3% MF, depending on which slot it is in, can give you anywhere from +34 - +101 of whatever primary stat is equal to the MF for just that one armor piece alone. I know when the new content goes live, its just the accessories slots that are getting the Ascended treatment, but they specifically said, that eventually armor and weapons would get that treatment too. I'm willing to give them a pass if its a one time thing, but I hope this isn't the start of "power creep" and the gear treadmill that I've hated in other mmorpgs. I also don't really like the idea of infusion. This person explained it much better than I could: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/view/forums/post/5401751 Now that I thnk about it, the 3% MF might be more equal to an upgrade slot item which would probably make it more like +5-+10 for the primary stat. Either way, I'm more against the principle of it, as it seems to go against one of their design philosophies of having more of a horizontal approach when introducing new gear which is one of the reasons I brought the game.
Could somebody tell this game that I'm not done yet? I don't even have Exotics in all my slots yet and now there's another step beyond the step beyond that? I mean, I just capped out Jewelcrafting and I don't have enough wizard jizz to make an earring, let alone the basic materials to make the yellow gems that I assume you need to craft an exotic. Leather is just laughable (though I seem to have gotten really lucky? on clearing one of the top maps and I've got a stack of 40 of the top leather that I can't use because I'm short a bunch of the next-to-top leather).
I'm not happy with this. It's not the Ascended items per se, as those are essentially an item with a stat orb (rather than a rune) minus the ability to change the orb. Since that's exactly what I predicted I'm not annoyed about it. If there's really a stat difference between exotic+orb and ascended I'll be very annoyed, but until then I'm cautiously accepting. The infusions are another story entirely. Anet has already said that they'll be related to doing dungeons and that they'll come in different tiers. I don't intend to grind this shit just to do dungeons, so if it becomes required I certainly won't be spending more money on this game (thus far $120 for two boxes, one of which was for my brother, and like ten bucks to get him a costume so $130 total). My biggest issue is that the whole thing feels like a bait and switch. I was sold a game without item grind. Item grind may now be added. I do not want item grind in my games and probably won't play any more if it gets added. The concept makes me irritable. edit: Looking at the ascended shit again, yes I'm annoyed at this too. It's a definite stat bonus. Fuck that noise.
I'm also annoyed that they added a roguelike style infinite dungeon with ramping up difficulty and then decided to give players a way to lower the difficulty through gear. I MEAN COME ON. How am I supposed to estimate the peen size increase of reaching dungeon level five when all my friends have different levels of dugeon resistance? How are we supposed to compete without a level playing field? I can't understand why on earth they'd add a cool system and then immediately trivialize it. Especially when the standard bitching about content gating won't apply as you can see any of the nine sections on the first level. The whole thing makes no sense.
I'm not optimistic about these changes, although I kinda understand the impetus. They made getting a full set of Exotics not overly difficult (which I have no problem with) but for folks who honestly enjoy chasing carrots the Legendaries are just too damn long and hard without enough of a sense of making progress along the way. Of course, they're in a bit of a corner because the solution of just making Legendaries very much faster and easier to acquire is a slap in the face for the folks who've already done the grind. So we've now got the equivalent of mini-Legendaries, which I look at and say, eh. Like Aeon though, I would greatly have preferred if the stats were equivalent to Exotic and the primary difference and reason you'd want this stuff simply came from the Infusion mechanic - not that they are direct upgrades that would give an stat advantage for people playing WvW. Ideally that they'd take a TF2 approach and create a lot of sidegrades that create variety and allow different gear to do different, but not necessarily superior, things.
Do we know that the stat advantage actually comes into play in any competitive setting? I could see the game enabling, say, infinity many plus to any stat in the top level zone, but the arenas and battlegrounds would have a hard ceiling that you can reach with just Exotics. That would keep the competitive environment pristine, at a minimum. For that matter, in this game you could apply the same cutoff rules to the top dungeons and zones and probably 60% or more of the audience would never notice, though I guess that they wouldn't be able to come out and say that those last two hundred pluses you can get aren't going to actually do anything until Cantha comes out and there's a level 90 zone or something.
Well, the sPvP stats are on a completely different set of gear that's not affected by this. The WvW though is. I'm a bit curious as to whether they'll handle that properly and do something like you suggest, because from the sound of it you aren't going to be able to get Ascended gear through WvW and having a purely PvE thing provide a PvP advantage is a MMO 101 no-no that I'd assume A.Net groks.
I'm so not fond of the gear inflation already. Progression raiding can be done without stat increases, you're just not going to appeal to the people who want better gear than everyone else. But.. you're going to have to decide what playerbases you can and cannot keep. Personally, progression raiding with stat increases just strikes me as terrible for WvW balance unless they strip the extra stats out in WvW, and strikes me as poor for development resources as your progression folks who already have legendaries are simply going to grind the fuck out of this content and demand even more resources thrown their way. ANet can't keep ahead of them content wise, and shouldn't be feeling pressured to do so in the first place. Legendaries were never going to take months to make because there's nothing time gating them. So naturally people are going to race for them because that's what people DO. I guess I just don't see any up sides to the new gear tier, and a bunch of down sides.
You are probably leaping to conclusions when you assume that the armor slot versions of these won't have 'runes', also. We're only getting jewelry and the back slot in this batch; there's no particular reason to think that armor slot infusions won't also have set bonuses.
Setting aside the Ascended Gear discussion for a minute, I am excited about the new Fractals of the Mists dungeons. I've posted an update to the Guild Events thread, but I'll reiterate here that I'll be on at 8:30 PM Eastern tomorrow night (Friday November 16th) and I think it'd be great if we could get some turnout to give this new content a go. There is NO level requirement for these dungeons - everybody gets bolstered to 80 for the purpose of running them. For more on the content read here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/leah-rivera-on-the-new-fractals-of-the-mist-dungeon/ Back on the Ascended Gear discussion now, A.Net released this response:
OK great? But you don't know what stats (or, potentially, set bonuses) will be attached to the infusion itself, nor do you know that they won't build rune stats and set bonuses into the ascended armor. Because we haven't seen the ascended armor yet. It is *not safe* to assume they won't have those things.
There has to be more to it than that, or they wouldn't differentiate between 'defensive infusions' and other kinds. Infusion in GW1 was literally just a plot point. This is more like radiance in LOTRO, but with more to it.
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-November-15-2012/first#post744278 TUNAMORPH!!!
I actually really like that patch, both for all the fixes and dungeon loot improvements, and that they finally split some skills into pve/pvp versions for balance. The latter screams that they may be smart enough to not screw over wvw with ascended stats all over the place. Eventually.
As confirmed ingame infusions have stats too, making tier 2 gear even more powerful. The "ArenaNet is sacrificing one of their stated core principles" complaining intensified, and I agree more and more with it.
