Rasimir.6239

What's keeping you from playing dungeons? It's really easy to put up an lfg for pretty much any dungeon path and have it filled in a matter of minutes. In fact I frequently have a much easier time getting a dungeon party going than a mid- or worse low-tier fractal party. If anything's dead as far as lfg is concerned, in my experience it's low-tier fractals, not dungeons.

While you can't buy the durability rune from the trading post, you can buy it directly from the heroics notary in wvw for proofs/testimonies of heroics. Depending on how much wvw you have already played (and thus testimonies gathered) this might actually be the cheaper option. Also be aware that exotic gear will not get you far into Fractals, since those need agony resistance that can only be slotted into ascended or legendary gear (with the exception of a handful of special items like crafting backpacks). If you really are asking about exotic gear (and it's not just a typo), then look for some cheaper alternative to nightmare/elementalist, because you will switch out the gear for ascended long before a best-in-slot rune makes any difference.

You can farm materials by farming mobs, but it is a slow process. The drop chance isn't crazy high (one crafting mat every 10-20 mobs maybe?), plus the game discourages players from farming one area for too long by implementing diminishing returns. If your character has been in that area for more than an hour that is likely why you are not getting anything but trash items. On the other hand, the game has a lot of systems in place that make material gathering actually viable, just not by single-mindedly farming mobs. There are map bonus rewards for participating in events, jumping puzzles, mini dungeons and similar on all maps. Check the mouseover tooltip of the maps on the world map view to see what is available on which map right now. The trading system in this game is very robust, too. Pick up anything you come across, salvage all equipment you don't need, and then check which of the materials you actually need and which you don't need. Often you have a surplus of one thing that you can sell to buy the materials you are lacking. On a side note, not being able to kill stuff in level-appropriate maps is usually a question of player skill rather than equipment. Higher rarity equipment helps, but your personal skill with using your character and its toolkit, from finding the right build for your playstyle to actually using said build is the main factor in combat in this game. Equipment doesn't carry you in this game, your skill does, and you only get that skill by training and experience. May I ask what class(es) you are playing? You are playing the core game only, no expansions, right? All classes are able to easily solo on-level mobs on core specializations if you know what you're doing. It's the learning what to do and how to do it on your class of choice that is the hard part of this game.

This whole discussion misses one fundamental fact: the weekly vendors were originally introduced to give players with surplus festival currency a way to use some of that currency. The weekly vendors were never meant to offer valuable festival rewards for everyone. If you look at it from that perspective, outrageous prices for the wares the weekly vendor offers are actually reasonable. Those players who have farmed a festival to the point they have currency coming out of their ears do get a tiny bit of value from that extra currency, as opposed to the extra currency having no value at all before the introduction of weekly vendors. Exchange vouchers from the vendors aren't meant to have competitive prices to getting the voucher currency directly. If you want dungeon tokens but find the vouchers too expensive, just go and play the dungeon. It's probably a lot quicker to grab the dungeon currency that way. If on the other hand you enjoy the festival to the point where you have more zhaitaffy than you know what to do with, the voucher isn't really that expensive anymore because you passively accumulate the materials needed to buy the voucher just from playing the content you enjoy (aka the festival). That's the kind of people the weekly vendors target. The nice thing about weekly festival vendors, just like pretty much all other daily or weekly repeatables in this game, is that you don't miss out if you don't do them. They'll give you a nice bonus if they happen to match the content you're playing anyway because you enjoy the activity, but if you don't enjoy what it takes to get them, you can easily get the wares/rewards/whatever another way (in the case of vouchers by actually playing the content offering the voucher currencies).

That's an easy question to answer: personally I think the legendary armory will benefit a lot of people, while the ones that may feel their duplicate legendaries are now "worthless" (a definition I still don't agree with btw 😉 ) are few in comparrison and not exactly on the "needy" end of the wealth spectrum as far as the GW2 player base as a whole goes. In a way ANet is somewhat leveling the field with the armory, by making usage of legendary equipment across different characters more accessible to everyone. Those that invested in duplicate legendaries really are not loosing anything (they still have access to best-in-slot equipment for all of the slots they own at least one legendary piece for, and most of them had the advantage of the duplicate pieces for a good while already). It's more that the rest of the playerbase is catching up, which I still see as a net positive.

On the danger of repeating myself: that is your interpretation of what was said. The other interpretation, namely that there will never be stronger equipment than legendary equipment, still stands, and whether or not you want to keep using different pieces of legendary equipment on different characters or re-use just one from next month on is your choice, but doesn't make the equipment any weaker than it is now. Change happens, especially in a massive online game like this one. Change has always happened. Every time, there are winners and (hopefully far less) "loosers", however you define loosing in this context. Anything you do in an evolving game holds the risk that at one point in the future hindsight will tell you that it might've been more efficient to do things differently. Contrary to other games that drop a gear tier increase every year or so, the legendary armory is a boon to a large part of the playerbase, and even those that now have duplicate items haven't lost anything apart from the feeling that they may not have played as efficiently as they would have if they had known what was to come. Technically none of your extra legendaries is useless with the upcoming change, they are just not as useful any more as they used to be. Even then, that usefulness was mostly in the quality of life department, since you could already share your equipment among all characters, although at the premium of taking extra time to configure builds every time you swap. You could also have just used ascended equipment instead of the extra legendary, but you chose to go the legendary route instead. It was your own choice. That totally depends on whether ANet wants people to play more instanced content (raids), like pretty much any other MMO out there, or open world, the signature strength of this game (up to now). You can already gather the resources for legendary weapons through a variety of gameplay, and they do play a large factor in the stability of the game's trading system. Somehow I doubt ANet will introduce ways to reliably gather legendary weapons that allow people to largely opt-out of both open world gameplay (gifts of exploration and material gathering, plus wvw/pvp reward tracks that also add to the material supply) and the material trading market.

Where exactly did you get this line from? I do seem to recall that they at one point promised that legendary gear will never be eclipsed by a higher gear tier with higher stats, but I don't remember them ever saying anything about having other options of the same strength. Technically the legendary armory will not be different than sharing a single legendary piece of equipment now, it just adds some qol to the sharing part. It won't change the stats on any of the items you already have (and have potentially used for months or even years already), nor will it introduce items with higher stats.

What exactly is your definition of "endgame content", and why does it make a game inherently superior if it offers exactly that kind of content? I can easily understand that the content provided by ESO and FFXIV appeals to a lot of players, including you, but it's personal preference. I on the other hand have played ESO since beta, and still play it regularly, but GW2 is easily is my favorite and #1 MMO to this day, despite the disaster that is the cutting of half of the IBS. It offers the kind of content I enjoy, and stays clear of the kind of content I not enjoy, including the "endgame" instanced content grind that keeps putting me off ESO again and again. ESO is a good game, I thoroughly enjoy a lot of it (story, open world maps), but it just can't keep up with GW2 when it comes to providing content and entertainment that I personally enjoy. I'm sure there's plenty of people who prefer one or the other, but that doesn't make one game objectively better or worse than the other, just better or worse at appealing to different people.

Depends on the situation. In a large wvw zerg you may want to cast your skills on a target that is not necessarily in your subgroup. Good luck with finding the right person in a zerg of 50 in the middle of combat. On the other hand, it's easy to target them if they're right in front of you and you see that they're low. In a way I guess it's a question of playing the game vs. playing the UI.

You can buy all racial armor skins on any character regardless of race in wvw. It's not necessary to have a character of a certain race to unlock their racial armor skins. That said, I'm with the devs here. There are so many considerations to make when thinking about race changing, starting with soulbound gear with racial skins that you can't use afterwards. Then there's the whole personal story. What about the achievements tied to the racial arcs? Do you get double rewards for re-playing the story as the new race? How do you handle the choice of order and allied race for the lvl 40/50 story archs? What about the npcs in your home instance and later personal story missions that are tied to the choices you made during the earlier story steps? And most of all, what about the support overhead when dealing with people that race-changed and some of the above questions didn't turn out the way they expected them to? You might not care about the consistency of your character's story or the rewards those steps give, but I guarantee there's people that will flood support because re-doing the story on another race didn't give them another blacklion key on lvl 10 or allow them to choose another order to gain access to that order's skin vendor. You might shrug and say "tough luck", but somehow I doubt ANet would want another wave of "company and support are evil" threads because people expected something else.

Dungeons give between 35 silver and 1 gold for the first daily completion per path.

Very good tips, but I just want to clarify this point, since it is not accurate. Guild missions are in fact the same for all guilds each week, provided they have chosen the same mission preference (you can switch between pve, wvw, pvp, and mixed). There are two ways you can encounter a mission on a different difficulty: the guild that started the mission works with a different mission preference (pve and mixed both have pve missions, although not (usually) the same ones) the mission is available on different difficulties that week and you don't have one of the mission slots unlocked yet (e.g. spider race can be available on both the 1st easy slot and the 2nd hard slot for pve missions during the same week)

Whether or not something is rated doesn't release you from behaving like a decent human being when interacting with people, especially people you don't know. Learning social interactions happens through interacting with lots and lots of different people. It's not some abstract knowledge your parents implement into you. Lock the teens away, and you'll eventually end up having to deal with a lot of adults who don't have a clue how to properly interact with people either (as you can very well see in today's society already). That said, the kind of interaction you seem to be hinting at up here (the one that might not be considered ok when interacting with teenagers) is something I don't care for, either, and I'm a good 30 years past being a teenager. I have however accompanied both of my daughters for their first steps of online interaction, in this game among others. There are a lot of people in this game that are fun to play with, no matter if you're 15 or 50, and most of them are considerate and welcoming to people of all ages. Asking for more "tools for interaction" and at the same time telling people to not play this game because of interactions makes it look like you're not really asking for more interactions in general, but only for tools that make people interact in the exact way you want to interact without consideration for other people's preferences and playstyles.

The achievements are moved to the "Current Events" category of the achievement panel once their one week of spotlight is over. They'll stay there indefinitely, so you can do them at any time in the future.

@Danikat.8537 check the wiki page on guild missions. There is a number of players required for most wvw and pvp guild missions (which matches my experience). PvE missions on the other hand can all be done with just one player of the guild participating. The puzzles do require 4-6 players to do the mechanics, but they don't have to be a member of the guild.

I expect it to end up like similar changes in the past. Example (widely different item value, but same mechanic): when mini pets were added to the account wardrobe, you were only able to add one of each kind of mini to the wardrobe. Duplicates you had simply stayed in your inventory, and you were free to use them the same way you did pre-wardrobe. I still have a duplicate mini Moto and Miya left over from that time 😉 . I expect the argument to be something like: you already had use of the duplicates for a long time, so did get value out of them you can still use them, just use the non-armory version of your duplicate heavy armor on one of your characters salvaging will not become an option to avoid the support headache with requests from people who accidentally salvaged their legendaries instead of putting them in the armory.

You do not need Skyscale or Griffon to enjoy content. All of HoT is manouverable with no mounts at all (and actually all the more fun that way to me), and all of PoF is doable without either of the flying mounts. Personally I love the verticality they've introduced to the game. Tangled Depths and Draconis Mons are possibly my two favorite maps of this game, especially before the introduction of mounts. It's an explorer's dream, trying to figure out how to get places with the movement tools the game gives you. I really hope we will see more of this going forward 😄 .

But nobody is forcing you to "play alone together", that's as much your choice as it is my choice to interact with the players I encounter. Why do you need tools to interact with others? I can see how the guild interface could be improved, but that's the only idea I've seen so far that made sense to me. Maybe I'm too old for this, but I honestly can't think of any tools that would make cooperation and interaction with my fellow players, both known and unkown, in any way easier than it is right now (where I can simply talk to people via chat, and find people via lfg).

Excuse me for saying this, but it sounds a bit like you are trying to play the game back to front. You are diving into an expansion story line (Heart of Thorns) and its associated areas (sounds like you are in the Auric Basin at the moment) without being familiar with the game's basics. Of course that's doable if that's how you like to play, but you will find a lot of situations where the game just expects the player to be familiar with certain basic concepts and mechanics that you are still missing. One of the big design philosophies of this game is that the choice of where to go and what to do is mainly with the player. It's not one of the games that lead you every step of the way. The story is just a (small) part of what you can do, and as such neither meant to nor sufficient to lead you seamlessly through your gameplay. In core Tyria, the part of the game that we got with the original release, the story comes in chapters that unlock every 10 character levels. To reach those levels you need to go out, explore the world, and gather experience (which comes automatically from exploring and interacting with the world, no need to grind anything). The expansion areas are designed for max-level (80) characters. In place of character levels, you now have account-wide mastery levels that unlock abilities, again by feeding them with experience, as well as mastery points that you can gain across the maps. Many of these mastery abilities open up new forms of movement, and in turn you sometimes need these abilities to access further parts of the map. Like character levels and personal story in the core maps, your best bet is to just go out, explore the maps, poke around until you figure out where a path leads or how to overcome an obstacle. Participate in events and adventures you stumble across. Find out what you enjoy about the game and its world. All of this gives you experience, which in turn levels your masteries, as well as making you figure out how to get to the next area. As for ranger pets, most of these can be found in the core maps. Start with your race's starting city. Each of those should have three different ranger pets to tame, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes hidden. Every one of the core Tyria maps has pets you can tame. Go out into the world, explore, and keep your eyes open for those juvenile pets, and you will soon find them all over the place. The expansions are a bit different in that there are only 5 (?) new ranger pets per expansion. These are spread across the 4-5 expansion maps, but mostly a bit hidden. Expansion pets are definitely harder to find and unlock than core pets, so my advice would be to take your ranger back to Lion's Arch or whatever racial city you prefer, step out of the gates, and just go out and explore whatever map you stumble into. This game really is the kind where you "take a direction and just run". Exploration is a big part of it, direction not so much. Just run aimlessly until you find an event, join in, then when the event is over, stick around for a bit to see if the npc has anything else to say, maybe offers something for sale, or kicks off a follow-up event. There are many event chains around that are little mini-stories by themselves, and npc that have nice stories to tell if you talk to them. It's all there for you to discover. Have fun!

Non-guild members can help with challenges and puzzles. If one member of a party/squad is part of a guild that has an active challenge/puzzle running, everyone in that party or squad can enter the instance. We have a small core of people who like to run guild missions and do them weekly for personal rewards only (usually 2-5 people per week). Lately we've teamed up with a new guild with just two active members, and helped them out with their guild missions. While you don't get the mission rewards if you are not a member of the guild that started the challenge/puzzle instance, it's perfectly fine (and can be a lot of fun) to just join in to help. Many of the wvw and pvp missions actually require a minimum of 3 guild members to join (unlike pve missions, you can to a puzzle with just one guild member and 10 friends from outside the guild). Camps and sentries in wvw are among those. If you do have 3 members, then those can be pretty easy though.

I think you misunderstood a good part of what was said about forced interaction. It's not about not wanting to interact with others. It's about choosing who to interact with. Let's say you want to play a fractal, and the game implements a random group finder to make it "easier" to find a group (aka people you are then forced to interact with to finish said fractal). Now imagine that group the game randomly throws at you contains a 30-something who jumps on the game after work and likes to stop and smell the flowers, a 50+ lady with health issues, that enjoys challenge but due to age and health takes a long time to get mechanics down, a school kid who is fairly new to the game and the game mode and just yolo-s into every fight, and a competitive endgame-raider used to playing in ultra-optimized raid compositions. From personal experience I can tell you that this composition can work, if all involved are interested in interacting with each other and open to the different personalities and preferences involved, but 19 times out of 20, if this party is put together randomly, or worse, because the game forces them together to be able to do the content, many if not all of the players involved will not have a good time, and no force on Earth, nor on Tyria, will turn this interaction into a positive one. Right now the game allows me to pick and choose who I interact with. You'd be surprised if you looked at my friends list (the mutual friends that is) full of people I constantly interact with, which ranges from my teenage daughters and their school friends on their first mmo, that play GW2 for dress-up and to decorate guild halls, past national and international friends of all ages, occupations, interests, and skill levels, up top end raiders, wvw-ers, and pvp-ers. I'm in no way restricting my interactions to some imaginery circle of like-minded players. I simply choose to not to interact with people that treat others in a way I don't care to deal with in my free time. The people I do interact with are as diverse as any group you could find in this game, but I've chosen to interact with each of these players. I stand by the fact that there are plenty of people around I don't care to interact with, and am glad this game is not forcing them on me (nor me on them), just as much as I'm glad nobody is forcing me to interact with the weird couple living next door (don't ask, I guess every neighbourhood is bound to have one strange party 😉 ).

For every person that finds risk exciting, there's a person out there that gets anxious over risks. For every person that likes to compete, there's a person that prefers to cooperate. GW2 is the MMORPG that favors cooperation over competition. It's the game that caters to the kind of personality for whom risk is negative rather than positive. There's much more to interaction than competition and risk. This game offers me many ways to interact with others, more really than most other MMORPGs out there (and I've played plenty of them ever since I first discovered the world of online RPGs back when MUDs were a thing in the early 90s). More important to me though is that in GW2 I am free to choose who to interact with, and when. I am not forced to deal with the competitive, risky kind of player if I don't want to, because there are easy ways to find layed-back, cooperative, friendly people to play with for any kind of content I could want to play. Now you're not advocating for more interaction, but for less. I am a member of several guilds in GW2, and regularly interact with all of them. Why restrict the in-guild interactions to just one community? My dungeon-loving, international guild would never mesh with my casual language-specific one, even though I am an active part of both communities, and any "suggestion" that restricts me on choosing either of them is severely restricting me in my ability to interact with people in-game. Force never improves the quality of interaction, and more often than not doesn't improve the quantity either. If you are missing interactions, go out and interact, find people you mesh with, and enjoy their company. Don't force others to interact with you that are perfectly fine interacting with tons of like-minded people in-game right now. And again were are on the subject of forcing people to interact. If that's what you like, there's lots of games out there that can scratch that itch. Personally I very much prefer that this game lets me choose my own challenges, when, how, and with whomever I choose. GW2 is very good at offering content for a wide variety of players, both play-style and ability-wise. This allows me to interact with interesting people of all levels of abilities. Many of my friends may not be equipped to tackle the kind of challenges I like to tackle in-game, but there is a ton of content we all like to do together. It's enough content to not make them feel left out and drop the game. To me this opens the doors to a lot more interaction (thanks to a lot more accessibility of content) than any of the similar games I have played.

There was a developer posting (or possible Gayle reporting what the developers told her) that explained that many of those invisible walls are in fact safeguards to keep players from going out of bounds in a way that holds the danger of getting the character irretrievably stuck. They didn't quite go into details, but the bottom line was that breaking out of map holds the danger of breaking your character data in a way that wasn't repairable, and you'd end up permanently loosing that character (including inventory, hero points, gem store unlocks and anything else related to the character). Core Tyria maps like Lornar's Pass weren't designed with mounts or gliding in mind. I assume there simply are places that are too time consuming (aka expensive) to fix for the benefit it would give to allow access versus making certain that players don't break their characters or anything else if they get to the place. Mountain tops that allow you to glide or fly to otherwise unreachable places are likely among the main offenders.

I've always been wondering why people are so intent on punishing a few players they feel wronged by, that they'd gladly punish hundreds of innocents as collateral.

So much this! I was on a very low population server back then (this was before they switched to megaserver), and some big event guild decided that our server was the place for them to do the event. Every night at prime time they would guest to our server with enough people to fill the map, and the handful of "natives" that tried to participate would endlessly get called out on map chat for intruding on "their" event and not following their orders (that mostly weren't even given in map chat, but just in their guild chat or voice comm or whatever favored circle they were communicating in). I did get to successfully do the event several times back then, partly by guesting to one of the "big" servers early enough to actually get into the map and not just another overflow, and partly by ignoring chat and joining the event on my home server, but it's really not something that's left me with a lot of good memories. The mechanics were ok-ish, new back then but nothing extraordinary by today's standards, and the social interactions really were one of the low points of season 1.