Danikat.8537

Welcome back! I think you're making the right choice by holding off on buying the expansions, no sense paying for more of the game if you're not sure you're going to play it. You won't miss out on anything by doing that. I think the only difference it will make before you get to level 80 is that you'll get a tempoary trial of the raptor mount at level 10 instead of permanently unlocking it like you would if you had an expansion, but the raptor isn't required for anything in the core game and you will be able to unlock it later on if you choose to buy Path of Fire or End of Dragons. Other than that everything in the expansions is for level 80 characters so you don't need to decide on buying them until you get to that point. If you do want to buy a level 80 boost I strongly recommend buying an expansion instead. Each one comes with a level 80 boost and it's not much more expensive than just buying the boost from the gem store. (Not sure of exact prices in other currencies but in the UK it's £17 for the boost or £22-26 for an expansion pack.)

Adding to what was said above: each storyline (expansion or living world episode) functions as a stand-alone story so once a character gets to level 80 they can play them in any order you want. For example a new level 80 who has never done any story before could start with End of Dragons, or Season 3 episode 5, or whichever other point you want. The Story Journal will give you all the options. (If you wanted to you could play it all in reverse order, I'm not sure why anyone would want to, but the game will let you.) The story telling is linear - a character who skipped ahead will still be recognised by the reoccuring characters, talk to them as if they know them and reference past events as if they were there, but that may not be a problem unless you haven't played it before and don't want to risk spoilers.

You need to gain 10 crafting levels, how difficult that is depends on how much you've already levelled crafting, because higher levels need more XP and fewer of the items you can craft will give XP. Crafting anything where the name isn't greyed out will give you XP which counts towards new crafting levels, but you'll get a lot more by using the Discovery tab to create new items. You might need to craft some things first before you can use discovery - for example an Armorsmith will need to make the 2 component parts for an armor piece (Legging Panel and Legging Lining for example) and an Insignia and then use the Discovery tab to combine them into a new item - the recipe for this will then be added into the list so you can easily re-make it, but that won't give as much XP as discovering new ones. It is a kind of tutorial, but mainly a prompt for level appropriate things you could be doing. You can always ignore any you don't want to do, the only thing that will happen is you won't get the XP and you can always do them later if you want to, you'll never get locked out of them because you levelled up too much or anything like that. You can stop them showing up on the right side of the screen by choosing any other achievement(s) and clicking the eye icon to track them, that will overwrite the default list and show only the one(s) you're tracking. You'll still be able to see the Character Adventure Guide achievements in the Hero Panel (and can track those as well, if you want to) and can go back to the default list at any time by removing all the ones you're tracking. Annoyingly it's not possible to have no achievemnts showing on screen. If there's none I actually want to track I pick one with a short name I'm not likely to complete (Shield Master for example) so it just sits there and keeps the list to 1 line.

Downscaling only affects your attributes and I think it affects each source individually - so if you've got a full set of equipment and runes and you're downscaled to level 5 it will reduce the bonuses from each item but won't bring it down to what a real level 5 character (who wouldn't have shoulder or head armour and wouldn't have runes) would have. Likewise it won't remove the effects of traits, sigils, relics and other things which low level characters won't have, which can add additional sources of damage. I'm not sure what it would take for Anet to make it more effective without causing problems for players. I don't think it would be a good idea for it to disable traits for example, but maybe they could change the way the stat reduction is calculated so having lots of different sources doesn't counter-act the scaling. Or even add a simple damage reduction as well as reducing attributes.

It could also be confusing, because games have been using some tech which is very similar to currently popular "AI" (including machine learning and neural networks) for decades and have other processes which can produce the same results as some of the 'innovative' uses currently being discussed. For example I've recently seen people hyping up the idea that AI text generators could enable NPCs to react to events in the game, changing their dialogue as the player progresses through the story and even commenting on player choices and how they affected the world. Which sounds great, but also very familiar to anyone who has played RPGs or adventure games because it's been standard in games for decades now.

As far as I know it's never come up. It's mainly websites and games that allow user-created content that need to have a public policy for it. I assume Anet have internal rules on what tools and processes their employees can use at work, but I don't know why that would ever be publicised.

I'm a casual and infrequent WvW player and for me it's been about the same as normal, but with slightly more complaining in Team chat during the first few days. I'm normally on Desolation but not in any WvW guilds. I was away when the selection was happening so I didn't choose a guild, it was left with the (currently inactive) one I picked for a previous beta. I think the team I ended up on is Giant's Rise, but I'd have to log in to confirm. I've recognised a few people I normally see in WvW but most of the commanders are new to me. But I've just been doing what I normally do - joining open tags and following them around objectives when I can and capping what I can solo or with whoever happens to be around when I can't find a tag to join and the experience doing that has been the same as when I do it on Deso - both the good and the bad. We've had times when no one is building siege even though the squad menu says we have supply, people dropping random siege in the middle of nowhere for no reason (and then for some reason it gets built instantly), one commander who seemed to be running in circles at random and bumped into objectives or enemy groups purely by chance, and other weirdness, but also plenty of effective groups who are able to get stuff done. I don't expect to be able to stay with any of the regular players from Desolation when world restructuring finally goes live because I don't think I play WvW often enough for any of the guilds to take me, so my main concern (having been on the same server since launch) was whether I'd be able to get the same experience in whatever team/s I do land in and so far the betas have made me think I will, so I'm not too worried. Still a bit sad about losing a server I've been on for over a decade, and not being able to stick with any of the commanders I like, but I can't do anything about that.

I don't understand it either. Sometimes I think they're trying to complete the event as quickly as possible so they get their progress and can move on to whatever they actually want to do with their time but then people do it with timed events and others where killing things faster doesn't actually help, so I'm not sure. I suspect some people don't actually know what their skills do, so they rely on spamming all the buttons and don't know which ones to use selectively. Also if they know they're not a great player they might assume they can't do enough damage to be a problem to anyone else. I've definitely seen other problems caused by not knowing what their skills do. Last Halloween I met a level 80 mesmer with several mastery points who had no idea mesmer greatsword 5 does knockback and instead assumed since GW2 combat encourages movement almost all enemies will "jump" backwards at random points during the fight, it just happens all the time and there's nothing players can do about it. (You can imagine how popular they were in a Lab farming squad.) We got talking and apparently they'd stopped reading skill descriptions early on because they didn't understand them and just activated skills as soon as they came off cooldown and hoped for the best. Having said that sometimes it can be surprisingly difficult to avoid killing things before other players have a chance to tag them. Even when you're at the recommended level a lot of low level enemies can be killed in a couple of hits so it can be very easy to wipe them out, especially with a ranged weapon. But the strangest problem I've noticed is new players will sometimes mimic higher level players (or even lower level characters using customised skins and dyes, indicating they're not a new account) so if someone does slow down or stop attacking to allow newer players around them to tag enemies those players will also stop attacking. I haven't found a good solution to that yet, the few times I've tried to explain what I'm doing it's either been ignored, or once I was accused of leeching and once got a whisper saying I'd been reported for showing off. (Nothing came of it obviously, I don't even know if they actually reported me, but they clearly weren't happy.)

Hold on, why are all these suggestions ways to make ascended equipment more desirable/useful outside Fractals? I thought this thread was about problems getting groups or progressing through Fractals. If the actual problem is you think crafting ascended gear is too expensive for the small stat boost (which isn't required in most of the game) we absolutely can have that conversation, but it's almost entirely seperate from what this topic says it's about.

Ironically ESO does. They've recently started selling alternate animations for gathering (kind of like GW2's infinite gathering tools, except in ESO it never required a consumable item), for teleporting and a few other things. Also mount skins obviously, which are a kind of summon or effect I think. It's not optional but they've also changed the animations for some skills over time, like changing which spear model is used for templar jabs. They also sell 'personalities' which change the animations your character uses for walking, running, jumping and some emotes. I've never understood why they made the 1 skin for the warden bear and then nothing else. Even if they stuck to different kinds of bear it'd be popular (a polar bear to go with the warden's ice magic is an obvious choice) but if they sold other animals as well it'd be a big hit, and they wouldn't even need to design new models, they could use existing ones like wolves or lions. Admittedly I don't know what's actually involved in changing skill effects or summons, but I do know it's happened before in GW2 as well - sometimes when they change how a skill functions they also change the animation to match the new function, and at some point they also added swimming animations to the necromancer's flesh golem. So it is possible to change them. What may not be possible is players selecting which version they want to use, but they've added that option for other things so I assume it would be possible to build it.

Presumably if down-scaling was rebalanced to be more effective as several people suggested earlier in this thread that would also affect mount skills. With the added bonus that it would reduce damage by high level players but leave low level players unaffected. It wouldn't make mounts slower, but as I said I don't think that's as much of a problem because in practice it's just as likely to mean someone misses an event starting up because they ran off too quickly. Some individual events would probably benefit from adjustments as well. Two I've encountered recently (because I've been in Wayfarer Foothills) are: 1) Collecting ice blocks for Ulfred - the number required goes up when there's more players in the area, but the number of ice elementals and the speed they spawn stays the same. They're weak enough that even an appropriately levelled character (level 4) can kill them in a few hits which means it's hard for multiple players to get drops from the same one, and then everyone is left waiting around for them to respawn. 2) Collecting armor scraps for Rani - this one has the opposite problem. If it starts up just before/during the Svanir Sharman world boss the number of armor scraps required scales up for the number of players doing that event, then never goes back down, even after they leave the area, making it extremely time consuming to complete and meaning the following event probably won't spawn on that map. (When I saw this happen earlier this week we got to 30 scraps collected, which almost 1/2 filled the bar, so we'd have needed about 60 or 70 to complete it, but most people did one circuit around the area, turned in what they had (about 7-10) and then gave up because it was taking too long. There's many other events with similar problems, those are just the ones I've seen most recently. I suspect that would be much more time consuming than adjusting down-scaling because each event would need individual changes, but I think it'd be worth doing.

I'm an intermittent/casual Fractal player (I do them occasionally when I want something from them but not often) and the only problem I have with agony resistance is that it's character specific. I've got 10 level 80 characters but only ever do Fractals on 2 of them because it's not worth the hassle of getting agony resistance for the others (especially if they're already using other infusions), but that limits what I can contribute to a group above the lowest levels. I've actually had the opposite experience in terms of which tiers are more popular, I see a lot more groups for Tier 1 and less for 2 and 3. I think it picks up again at Tier 4, but I've only done those a couple of times. I suspect a lot of people do the same as me - if they're doing a Fractal for the Wizard's Vault or for a collection or achievement they use the lowest tier that will qualify because it's likely to be easier and quicker. (If I just need to do 'a fractal' and it doesn't matter which one I tend to look for groups doing specific ones, especially if they need it for an achievement. When I made Ad Infinitum I really appreciated other people doing that.) I disagree that it's a problem that ascended equipment mainly comes from the areas of the game which require it. As someone who had no intention of getting it when it first came out and took years to get even 1 character in full ascended I see that as a positive because it tells me I can safely ignore ascended unless I want to play those more difficult areas and if I do then starting to play it will help me get what I need to complete it. (I suppose that ties into agony resistance being character-specific, most of my level 80 characters are still using exotics because they don't do things which need ascended. Although they all have 1 legendary item because I made Ad Infinitum so I'd stop holding onto stupid numbers of spare backpacks.) Also there already are alternatives besides crafting: you can get rings and accessories (which give the biggest stat difference) from laurel vendors on in Living World maps, some weapons and armour from achievements and a few pieces each season from the Wizard's Vault. It may not be practical to fully gear up a character that way but it's enough to get started, especially for Fractals where you mainly need it as something to slot agony resistance into.

I'd love to get something like Fort Aspenwood or Jade Quarry in GW2, but I don't think this is a good way of doing it. Within each weekly matchup WvW tends to run on it's own schedule. If a group is in the middle of attacking or defending a keep or whatever they're not going to stop doing that because some event has opened up, even if it only comes up every 3 hours. I think having a different type of PvP appearing in the middle of WvW matches would most likely be seen as an annoyance. If the rewards aren't better than playing normally it'll be ignored, if they are better it will split groups between those who want the rewards and those who want to focus on persistent objectives and it'll just be seen as annoying, or at best something to rush through so it's been done and everyone can carry on with WvW. PvP would have the opposite problem: matches are only 15 minutes long, so you can't interrupt them with a special event every 3 hours. I think what you're saying is every few hours a new game mode would be available, in addition to the existing ones (conquest, murderball, stronghold etc.) but if that's the case why not just have it available all the time?

I agree with this. Downscaling has never really worked properly, a downscaled character is always more powerful than a genuinely low level one, but it wouldn't surprise me if it's gotten worse in recent years because there's more sources of stats (like the jade bot, a 6th rune bonus in addition to relics giving the old bonuses etc). I think it would be useful for down-scalling to be looked at again and made more dramatic. I don't know what exactly would work - just increasing how much each thing is reduced, changing how it's calculated or what, but I'm sure Anet could work something out. Having said that I also agree that the best thing to do now is not worry about it and don't try to rush and keep up. I recently had to restart my 'perma-death' challenge character so I've been going around Wayfarer Foothills on a low level character with no mounts, no gliding and only white equipment and while there have been time when players on mounts have rushed in and cleared events before I could reach them there's also been several times when they've rushed off again and missed a new event starting up (either following on from the one they completed or one that just happens to be in the same area) so I've been able to do that one instead. I haven't been counting of course but I feel like I haven't missed that many events overall. I was playing my previous perma-death character exactly the same way, and it took about 55 hours to get to level 75, through a mix of story and map completion. Events are a good source of XP, but they're not so important that you can't afford to miss one or need to rush all over the map chasing them if it's not fun to do that. You'll have a better experience if you just do the ones you can when you come across them and don't worry about trying to keep up with players racing across the map.

I sort-of disagree with this. I agree that players should think carefully before selling MC (or any valuable item) but I've sold them on several occasions and can't remember ever having to buy them. A big part of the reason for that is I've 'only' made 6 legendary items in over 11 years of playing and always been put off making most of the other things which need them because of the cost of other materials. (Although I did make the Triforce Pendant.) When I do make a legendary it takes me a long time and I'm usually thinking about it for a while before I start so I have time to save up Mystic Coins. I know I'm probably an anomaly among players on the forum where the assumption seems to be everyone has or is aiming for full legendary equipment ASAP, but I suspect most average players are in a similar position and actually capable of getting more Mystic Coins than they're going to use.

I agree, I've always suspected it was a mistake that some skins became unobtainable when the PvP rewards system was replaced and I think most of them have been added back in (the armour skins all went into the Legacy Armor reward track) so it seems a shame some are still missing.

Is it possible that part of the change is that Anet have successfully discouraged players farming login rewards on dozens of alt accounts? (Something they were asked to do repeatedly for years.) I know the focus of that complaint was that they'd drive down the price of materials from the crafting bags and laurels, but it would have had a similar impact on Mystic Coins. That's a genuine question BTW, I don't know. The Wizard's Vault has actually got me back to playing my second account more, but I've only got the one (two technically, but I almost never use the free one) and it was never just for farming. I can imagine if someone had 10+ accounts they just logged into to collect the reward and nothing else the idea of doing dailies or weeklies on all of them is not going to be appealing. But I think what we're seeing is actually much more long-term trends. If you look at the full price history of Mystic Coins it was going up steadily from about November 2014 until about June 2021 when it dropped, then it started rising again in about October 2021. Even if you look at just the recent history in more detail it doesn't fit with the WV, or SotO being the only cause: This is showing the TP buy and sell prices and the supply and demand from January 2023 until January 2024. The Wizard's Vault was announced on the 15th August 2023 and launched on the 22nd with the rest of SotO. The first WV season ran for 77 days, until 31st October, the second season began immediately after. There's a slight jump in price from the 14th - 18th August (when the WV was announced), but only going from 1.41g - 1.55g, then the price drops shortly after SotO is released, rising equally sharply in late September/early October. That will be due to the WV, specifically specifically speculators buying up coins when it's announced then either dumping them when it was released and the actual supply and cost was known or other players priositising using AA for Coins and selling them for gold. That's followed by an equally sharp recovery in late September/early October. But what I find interesting is there's no accompanying change in supply or demand around the same time. The supply increased slightly during that initial price jump, from just over 74,000 - just over 89,000 (Before anyone freaks about about 'maximum legendaries it's possible to make' please remember 'supply' means the number currently for sale on the TP, not the total number of coins in the game.) then dropped back around the 20th September but is relatively consistent and demand likewise barely changed, so it looks like the price change there is all due to speculation. There is however a very big jump in demand in early March 2023, but I'm not sure why. That's around the time What Lies Beneath came out, but I don't know of anything in that episode which would increase demand for Mystic Coins (if anyone does know please tell me). The other reason I think it's speculation rather than actual supply or demand issues is the pattern isn't repeated in early November when the Wizard's Vault refreshed. There's no dip in price (or increase in supply) when 'everyone' trades AA for Mystic Coins and sells them and no spike afterwards when that supply dries up until the next refresh. I think that was a one-off caused by the unfamiliarily of the new system, not actual changes in supply (or demand). More importantly looking at the price of Mystic Coins across the whole of the game's life that was a tiny, tiny, blip that barely even registers: The price was rising relatively steadily from about November 2014, dropped significantly in mid 2021 but was rising again before the WV or SotO was even announced. I think what's more likely than this all being due to the WV is something happened back in 2021 which caused the price to drop (in spite of rising demand) but then it started to recover and has now returned to it's previous levels. I'm not sure what caused that though. My best guess is EoD legendaries not requiring as many Mystic Coins, followed by speculation that SotO ones (specifically the new armour) will do, but I don't know. Especially since the demand actually increased when the price was dropping and increased again when it started going up.

I agree the Abomination Greatsword sounds likely. All the abomination weapons have a green animated eye with a slit pupil, and a reaper with a greatsword would have it across their back. They could have been wearing a backpack as well which would make it harder to see what the eye was attached to.

For future reference: this will happen with all armour skins and all outfits. They're two seperate things: any outfit you equip will hide all armour the character is wearing and replace it with only the outfit, there's no way to have some bits of armour with an outfit (even if the outfit doesn't cover that part of the character).

It's not quite the same but they have created skins for less commonly used weapons. For example longbow can only be used by 3 professions (and not always a popular choice for those 3) but they've made gem store skins for it. Necromancer may only be 1 profession but it's a very popular one. Also this doesn't have to be something they do only for necromancers, there's been a lot of requests for different skins or effects for profession abilities. Different skins for the mechanist golem is a common one, and different colour schemes for profession skills.

I was wondering about that too. Spirit Shards are used for a lot of things, but many of those are one-time purchases (either literally limited to once per account or skins which you only need to buy once because then they're in the wardrobe). Other than that the main use is buying items for making ascended and legendary equipment, so I assume some people are doing that on a regular basis, but then I would have thought all the other materials and currencies required would be more of a barrier than spirit shards. They're also used to upgrade siege for WvW, but I'd just buy the superior siege from the Heroics Notary (or the Portable Provisioner, so you can buy it when you need it instead of filling up bag space).

I think the 'trick' is not to take it personally. It's a game, none of it matters and there's no real harm done even from killing someone, they're sat at home playing on their computer, same as you. As long as no one's taking it seriously fighting against your friends can actually be more fun, because you can talk about it afterwards (or during). I'm in a PvE/social guild where a lot of people play WvW but because it's not what the guild is for we're all on different servers so we often end up fighting each other and have had some very silly conversations about it. Also we once got to confuse a whole zerg because we attacked a keep my guild had claimed and then after taking it over (which did involve killing a few guild mates) we claimed it for the same guild. I think a few people thought it was a bug until we explained. 😀 Also, you might already know this but Anet are already working on a system that will help: at some point (we're currently in what they said will be the last beta) WvW is going to form worlds based on guilds instead of servers, so if you're in a guild with your friends and select it as your WvW guild you'll always be grouped with them and won't have to fight against them. Of course it's possible to be in 5 guilds, and you'll only be able to pick one for WvW so you could still end up fighting against another guild, or against people you know who aren't in your guild.

Another factor to consider: There's no way to know if you're seeing everyone who is in the same map as you or just a tiny sub-section of them. The game can create as many copies of a PvE map as needed for the people who want to go there. (I think the 4 WvW maps are the only exception to that, there's always 1 of each per match-up, so a maximum of 8 on NA and 9 on EU, fewer if there's linked servers). The upside of that is you'll never be stuck in a queue to get into a map or find it so crowded it crashes (or so crowded it's impossible to get anything done), but the downside is even on very busy maps you can end up in a copy of the map with fewer people so it looks empty. The LFG tool allows you to either find a group to join on another map (or they might be on the same one and just in a different area, that's happened to me before) or start a group to get more people into your copy of the map and doing the same thing you are, so it's usually not a problem if you land in a less populated map, but the instancing still means you can't know if the people you can see are everyone who's there or just the ones who happen to be in the same copy you are.