Pale Branch Spear

[g e o.2589]

Can the Pale Branch Spear have a better acquisition method? Currently it’s only a super rare drop from Syntri worlboss, and it’s account bound. It’s one of the very few new spear skins and has no reliable acquisition method. 
 

Either make this not account bound, or add it to a vendor for a premium price please 

 

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pale_Branch_Spear

[Ish Troj.2076]

I dunno.. i just had it drop and it's super pretty. Nice feeling blessed by the rnGesus (for once) ! 😄

 

good luck + happy hunting

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

It's nice for rare things to stay rare, and help motivate people to try harder at the meta,  but that is just my opinion.

[Sobx.1758]

1 hour ago, Dinas Dragonbane.2978 said:

It's nice for rare things to stay rare, and help motivate people to try harder at the meta,  but that is just my opinion.

I agree with that opinion.
As always, I could see things like that being an issue if it was about drops giving player characters power. But it's about skins so it's perfectly fine for some of them being rare.

Edited September 13 by Sobx.1758

[ShadowKatt.6740]

2 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

I agree with that opinion.
As always, I could see things like that being an issue if it was about drops giving player characters power. But it's about skins so it's perfectly fine for some of them being rare.

I'll disagree with that opinion.

Rare things being rare IS good, I'll agree with that. Tying it to random chance is not. You are right that if it's an RNG drop it's wicked awesome when you get it. We've all had that happen at some point. But how quickly you forget about how absolutely despondent it is to keep working time after time because a 1% drop means that the other 99 times you're going to do all the work and get nothing. I mean, I don't know what you do for a job. Let's say you flip burgers at McDonalds for a living. And now you're only going to get paid for 1 out of ever 100 burgers you make. Not only would that quickly get VERY depressing, but after a short while you would stop doing it completely.

It's one of the things I've praised and chastised GW2 for. There is SO much in this game that is tied to collections, either scavanger hunts or checklists for other achievements where you can work for defined goals and track your progress. You know, 100%, that if you go out and do the thing, you will get the thing. However with EoD more and more stuff is being gated behind RNG. Catch a random fish, find a random plant, and now, just wait for a random drop. This is the kind of tactic you see in gatcha games, the same ones that have the whole gaming industry in trouble because they're basically just slot machine gambling. This is a far step from that, but it's one step closer to it and it's a bad step to have taken at all.

[Sobx.1758]

35 minutes ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

Rare things being rare IS good, I'll agree with that. Tying it to random chance is not. You are right that if it's an RNG drop it's wicked awesome when you get it. We've all had that happen at some point. But how quickly you forget about how absolutely despondent it is (...) Let's say you flip burgers at McDonalds for a living. And now you're only going to get paid for 1 out of ever 100 burgers you make. Not only would that quickly get VERY depressing, but after a short while you would stop doing it completely.

Well, it's not to me. The important part of it is for you to still, you know, at least somewhat like the game and its gameplay loop. If you're forcing yourself to play the game for some rare shiny but you don't like a second of it then I feel it's not on the drop itself, but on the choices you make in regards of choosing the games to play. The "rare drop" items in this game are so few and far inbetween that some of them being bound simply to a rare chance drops is not an issue for me at all. Nor is it some "tiring /despondent work" you're describing in your post. If this situation is remotely comparable for you to "getting paid for 1 out of 100 burgers you make in your burger-flipping work" then perhaps it's time to rethink your choices? Of course, to each their own!

35 minutes ago, ShadowKatt.6740 said:

It's one of the things I've praised and chastised GW2 for. There is SO much in this game that is tied to collections, either scavanger hunts or checklists for other achievements where you can work for defined goals and track your progress.

Exactly: there was and still is so much in gw2 that follows that non-rng route, that I'm convinced having heavily limited number of rare drops shouldn't be an issue (and so for me it isn't). I might have agreed with you if anything (or most... or at least a large part?) the players wanted to get was bound to that heavy rng. But it isn't.

Btw I suspect drops like this will get their "safety net" in a form of being added to vendor for some kind of currency -or multiple- at the end of jw patch cycle, similarly how it was done with Gharr for soto. I don't think it's needed for every item but it is what it is.

Edited September 13 by Sobx.1758

[Quench.7091]

While I think that super rare RNG drops are fine, I also think that they probably should've made it sellable on the trading post for this case. Spear skins are already lacking in quantity and this one probably doesn't suit the tastes of most people. Gold is a good way to encourage players to keep fighting the boss even if they don't like the skin. The event itself will probably die out in LFG after a few content updates.

[Ashen.2907]

13 hours ago, Dinas Dragonbane.2978 said:

It's nice for rare things to stay rare, and help motivate people to try harder at the meta,  but that is just my opinion.

Agreed.

Cosmetic trophies are nice as a part of an overall varied reward system.

[Timey.6853]

I'm in agreement with it being weird that this spear can't be sold on the TP; I might get it more if it was ascended since that'd match the general pattern, but no. It's just an exotic. Also, I foresee there coming a time when some people will have gotten 10 of the things and just have to keep salvaging them because there's literally nothing else you can do with them, while other people do it every day for a year and never see one. Why do I foresee this? Guess who has had at least 5 Frostsaws drop, which are also account-bound so I can't even give them away or sell them. Cool skin and all (pun intended) but who actually needs that many ascended greatswords???

It's fine for them to be rare so that people will want them + they'll retain some value, but being account bound means their profit = 0 since you can't even sell the rare drop once you get extra... And since the meta's rewards aren't anywhere near as profitable as basically any other event that happens in the same timeslot, I do have concerns that people will eventually stop running it once they get the skin. Or at the very least, enough people will stop that you won't be able to get the numbers for a clear anymore. It takes a LOT of people (and some decent coordination) to beat that meta, and there's already a lot of timeslots that I go look in LFG for a group and there's just nobody even doing it. Trying harder only does so much when there's no population on a map.