Justacravat.8320

Hello, all! I decided to put a little welcome packet together for the steam launch to help alleviate some strain on veteran players and guilds so they're not answering the same question multiple times in rapid succession and for more shy players who find it scary to shout questions in map chat. It's not all-encompassing, but I tried to get as many questions as I could that are generally questions I've seen from beginners. The document includes an FAQ, some guides my guild has made for beginners, some helpful links for things like builds, tools, and popular guides, and some information on where to easily find gear post-80. It includes a clickable table of contents and isn't really meant to be read from start to end, but more-so used as a resource that can be searched when things arise. If you have anything you think I should add, please feel free to recommend it! I definitely don't pretend I know everything, so please also feel free to tell me if I've gotten something wrong here so I can fix it as my goal is to provide our new friends with the best information we can. If you find this helpful, feel free to post it in any guilds, chats, or wherever you see fit -no credits or anything needed. I've also created a short link so you can easily give it in-game- the link can be found highlighted on page 1. New Player Welcome Packet I hope everyone has a great Tuesday and a good Steam launch! I look forward to seeing the community turn out for our new friends! 🙂

I love to see the stab for druid being placed on a glyph. Giving me a use for the class skills are quite nice, since a lot of the glyphs are either hyper situational or very underwhelming right now. One big thing that I do wish though, for druid, is that base alac generation was increased so I don't HAVE to take 3 spirits. Right now, if a fight needs condi cleanse or if I just prefer to take healing spring I'm kind of kitten out of luck and couldn't bring stab even if I wanted to. On the other hand, heal firebrand is still able to maintain quickness and have 2 open utility spots and mechanist has a lot of that functionality just tied in (on top of 1 or 2 available skills to swap). I'd like to see some build freedom on supports/healers so I can actually make choices that allow me to support (cc, stab, roots, etc), rather than tying me down to a single skill option and having no choice but to spam it. Overall, a step in the right direction as long as long as good changes continue to happen.

While some in the community have been extreme, and I 10000% agree that death threats are never called for- especially for a video game- I feel like a bit of acknowledgement that there was some unprofessional behaviour, at a minimum, would be appreciated at this point. I'm not calling for someone to lose their job, or saying that the doomers are right, but reading some of that stuff, even completely in context, really hurt and is hard to justify. It's not a private discord between friends, it was a place where devs were communicating with prominent members of the community about a product they work on.

IMO I think the community is largely at fault for LFG being filled with 3 classes. I've come across parties that will just straight up kick a druid or ele healer before even saying anything because they refuse to not have a healbrand. I've run across parties that require a condi rr or alacren. These things can be nice in some instances, sure, but they're not at all necessary if you have any clue what you're doing. Mechs aren't designed to be tackled with aegis and can be dodged, or ele/druid can heal you outright better than a healbrand can as their raw heals just beat hb. For fracs like Siren's Reef as well, you'll find people insisting that a hb join the party, but in a lot of groups they struggle to heal through the add damage while you're on the ship and a druid or heal ele is great to pump up a party. Scrapper has the ability to heal well and provide quickness while it does (similar to hb) and it can stealth and superspeed, which are really nice for certain circumstances, but I've also seen so many people refuse a heal scrapper or quick scrap in their party because they've been trained to follow the meta. The only reason there isn't diversity is because half of the people enforcing the meta don't actually understand it and some of these classes, when played at a high enough level, pump out a few percentage points of extra damage or make up for lazy players or not knowing mechanics (aegis/stab)- but let's be honest with ourselves, your average PUG isn't playing at high enough level for it to actually matter. There are benefits and downsides to most specs, but NA LFG needs to realize this for the problem to be fixed. It's not a simple issue of balance.

Forgive me if there is another post I missed where this should be located, but I just wanted to take a moment after reading the postmortem to say how amazing it is to have a company with that degree of communication. I've heard Anet hasn't been the best with it, largely before I joined the game, but it's been a long time since I've seen something to the degree of that breakdown (or the proceeding one explaining server issues). There were admissions of things going wrong, no one was thrown under the buss for the issues, and things were explained in a way the average player could understand them. I think most players understand bugs, hiccups, and issues and understand when things aren't absolutely perfect, but communication goes such a long way to making me feel more confident about supporting this company and this amazing game. Again, thank you.

It sounds like you haven't spent a lot of time in lab. Almost every group is eventually interrupted or harmed by either trolling or someone not observing the rules the organized group has. This hurts everyone's profit and can even cut your earnings in half or more depending on the severity of the issue. If someone is opening the boss doors ahead of the mob doors, now people are dying as they're trying to kill mobs when the group didn't want to touch the boss doors in the first place. Also, the mobs for the doors are dependent on how many people are present in the area when you open it. You can have 2-3 mobs come out of one door and complete the event. Also, definitely a significant amount of profit comes in tagging the trash. This is often why you'll see serious farming groups looping around the center twice or not want to do bosses as the time you're taking to do them doesn't really justify the profit loss. As an aside- I like the new bosses mechanic wise, but don't really feel like any of the bosses are worth the effort considering it takes a while to kill them and the chests are only lootable once per day. With a fully "meta" lab group, you're doing very low damage and killing these bosses takes an insane amount of time and effort. I also think they could do something like a "hard mode" for lab that would increase the exp of mobs. That could help with the issue and would mean that open world or raid builds were less harmful to groups, but realistically making it so a commander could take more control of their instance would be the best way.

AFK camping wouldn't be too much of an issue here because the rewards would be far less than a lot of other afk farm spots due to the respawn timers and density of mobs here. You could also solve this issue easily with a system they already use for strikes- when you enter a strike a timer begins counting down until you're kicked out. Put a few hour timer on it, require a squad and a minimum player number to enter, and you've solved the issue. Even if you do end up having a squad of afk farmers they'd likely end up similar to bauble farm where they just organize a map full of them. It's also kind of hard because when a tag wants to start organized farm in a map, they can't see you or know what you're doing so it's not like they're able to know they're interrupting you. The opposite issues could also be solved with the private squad option, though. Chaos can be interesting, but not when the chaos is one person running ahead of everyone to kill everything or purposefully sabotaging a run- especially if you've spent time organizing it and have an otherwise good group who is following directions and being respectful of other players.

I've been running lab pretty hardcore for 2 years now and I've never seen a group ask for no legendaries. IMO legendaries are great to have because it's a lot easier to change to what the group needs- more damage for the rear end so we're killing everything, less damage for the front/mid, etc. Often commanders and groups will ask people who don't have specific lab builds to take off their trinkets because with a full damage build, players will half shot a normal mob and make it so no one else can hit them and therefor won't get loot. The point of organized lab farms is to tag all the normal mobs and run in circles to maximize your bags per hour, which directly equates to either money or chances at the good drops from bags. If someone is killing all the mobs before other players can tag them, they're not really being able to farm the event and are, effectively, wasting their time. Also, the argument of "discriminating towards people who put effort into the game" is really confusing and poorly thought out. The people who put effort into the game are generally those who know what lab farm is and are there to make money to fund their other legendaries or whatever project they're working on. No one is saying you can't have skill or strategy in the lab, but there are groups who do have a strategy to maximize profit from their farm and one person not following the rules asked of them can ruin it for the whole group. If your mindset is also "well those people are breaking the rules so I will as well because it's not fair", that's pretty childish and only adds to the problem to make it worse. If you don't like how people are acting on the map or what the commanders are asking, join a different map- there are plenty of options on how parties are being run. It's really a simple matter of respecting your fellow players so that everyone can get what they're working towards.

We all know tagging for anything can often be like herding cats, but in an instance where one person running ahead of the pack and insta-killing all the mobs, touching doors ahead of groups, or opening boss doors and dragging them to the group can really hurt a coordinated farm effort it's extremely frustrating when you get these kind of people in your instance and can't do anything about it. The tag has only two options- 1) Ignore them and continue through and try to get the best they can for their group or 2) Swap instances and try to shake the trolls/players who won't listen. These sort of things happen with every farm group and it gets frustrating when you're trying to farm and one person significantly cuts your bags per hour because they refuse to listen to like to make everyone else upset. We have private instances commanders are able to open for certain events already, so why not add that ability to the lab and give people who choose to tag and make coordinated groups a way to have more control over their farm? After all, no one is running in circles spamming 1 for their health. I love love love the lab, love the halloween event, and think it's one of the best events I've played in an MMO ever, but this is the one major sticking point that really just can feel awful. It'd feel amazing if next year Anet could implement a way for commanders to be able to open an instance that lets people come and go as they please, but be able to kick those who aren't following group rules and actually kick them from the instance like you would from a strike or dungeon if someone is being bad for the group. You could do it similarly to dragonstorm or marionette where there is a public map you could join, or a private map you could open. I really think this would severely improve the quality of life for this event and take away virtually all major frustration associated with it.

I'm happy to have received all of the items that the pre-order deluxe version gives, but I'm confused as to why it was decided to send out a skin for the skiff that can't be consumed or used for half a year. It's taking up an inventory slot now, which definitely doesn't feel great.

I actually have to keep names turned off because my computer chugs when I am in populated zones if not, but these cats sound super fun~ I think I've seen them in home instances before.

Hello everyone! I've been in the game a bit over a month now and have finished the story, but I'm kind of in the space of "now what". I've leveled 4 characters (because thankfully this game obviously wants you to have alts) and I've geared them all, I'm working towards ascended pieces on my main and have been learning strikes and fractals. Ascended gear takes some time, so I only have back, accessories, rings, amulet, and one weapon right now. Now that my checklist of basic things is much shorter than it was at the beginning, I'm kind of questioning what else I should work towards. I know there are some cool legendary weapons and armor, but aside from that obvious answer what cool little trinkets, vendor unlocks, etc. do you recommend to make life in the game easier or just get because they're neat?