Kichwas.7152

So my suspicion is more or less right? Scrapper is just fine, it's just not popular and doesn't look as good 'on paper'. I am slowly working my way through all 12 characters... and Engineer was a deep alt for me. But she happened to be one of the only ones that had not even started Path of Fire and... I just recently realized that you want to pick all three choices for the council at the very start of Path of Fire and then run the entire thing with each choice to be able to unlock 4 ascended back items (the 4ths for having gotten the first 3)... so... dusting off the Engineer and one other alt. And as noted above I did recently use the engineer in some lower fractals for a bit and noticed better than expected results. So... if Hammer Scrapper is just fine, then I think I will put that Ascended hammer on the to-do list. Hammers / Maces / Clubs are my favorite weapon choices in fantasy games. Swords just make me feel like you're going after someone with a TV Informercial knife... and the sound effects for swords in a lot of games make them feel even weaker. In Guild Wars the sound and animation for hammers and maces make them feel about 20x more potent than they actually are... so I'm always searching for a play option where the weapon is actually good.

Keep in mind that the stuttering frames issue you reported in your other thread might not resolve with a new GPU if you go with nVidia. They've got a bug in their drivers right now, and no one seems to have isolated what the common factor is between people who have the problem and people who don't. But if you have the issue, you can't upgrade your nVidia driver past 452.06 See your other thread where I posted links and info about this.

Are you on an nVidia card? (I think gtx970 is nVidia). This isn't a Guild Wars 2 issue but a bad set of drivers from nVidia. This problem has been plaguing me here in Guild Wars since september. Random freezes when in action, turning, jumping, whatever... Many jumping puzzles where I was doing fine, screen froze, and I cam back to a dead character. Recently resubbed to WoW... and the issue followed me into that game. On searching, I found the issue in this tread: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/frametime-spikes-causing-stutter/717899/19?u=ayobami-aerie-peak To sum up... the last good nVidia driver was 452.06 Every nVidia driver since has had code in it for the 3xxx series of cards, that is messing up games for SOME people on other cards. I'm on an RTX 2080 in an AMD Ryzan 2700 system. The issue has been seen on both 1xxx and 2xxx cards - but some people with the same cards don't have it. No idea what's the common link yet... But here is where you can get the working driver for a rollback: https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/162984/en-us

> @"Danikat.8537" said: > That's part of the reason I stick to buying select licences and the occasional 5-pack (although the main reason is I don't like loot boxes and never buy them - I want to know exactly what I'm getting for my money). The only problem with that approach is I think the select licences are too expensive, so I wait until they're on sale for 800 gems or less, which can take a while. But since they're purely cosmetic (and I had to wait months for any skins I wanted to be available at all) I don't mind waiting. Back when I played WoW - I think I bought about 10-20 new mounts over the years. In Wildstar, I bought a few. In ESO I've bought several. In FFXIV, I've bought a few. Here... I bought the Halloween pack when it first came out - it think it was low priced at the time. And I have bought exactly one other mount skin since - the new bird raptor. The price is set poorly. It's above impulse buy, so a person stops and thinks 'do I really want that, is it really going to improve my experience?' - and once you are thinking about a purchase, the majority of potential buyers walk. Expensive goods like cars, home AC, and so on work by using high-pressure sales psych tricks to keep you from thinking about what's going on until after you sign a contract, and cheap goods work by making the price low enough that you don't care. Everything in between - has to deliver quality and wait for you to come back after thinking it over. The price needs to be about half of what it is. Cut it there, and they'd get about 3-4x as many buyers. There is a point where this diminishes, but I suspect it's even lower than half... because these things are not even new mounts, they're mostly just reskins - and so the impulse price on that is probably around under $3-5... Yet that bird... cost me $20. Which is why it was the first time since 2017 that I bought any mount skin. (there is one other I am thinking over... but even if I did get that, that's not a way to fund a business - 2 sales in 4 years...)

That poll is badly set up - given that it presumes someone plays all of these or none of these, and then just asks frequency. I play fractals almost every day that I log in. I used to do a lot of dungeons but those are just too old feeling now. I've yet to bother with strike missions and I'm not even sure I know what a DRM is yet.

Snowcrows only has Holosmith. For Scrapper they list a healer. Likewise metabattle and discretize. Metabattle lists one power scrapper, and it's for Open World - so no rotation listed as Open World is basically the no-skill-required-or-desired space for rolling a cat's butt over the keyboard and collecting loot... O.o Thus my other thread asking what is wrong with power scrapper that results in not seeing it anywhere?

It'd be nice to have the ability to turn the effects off without having to replace them.

> @"Opopanax.1803" said: > > @"Kichwas.7152" said: > > I find Renegade in open world PvE to be silly powerful. > > > > As noted above only Reaper has been more 'cheese mode' - I can solo some of the temple chains in Orr on my Reaper and she doesn't even have anything but exotic gear... > > > > Renegade - shortbow and maxe/axe. Swapping between Kala and Malyx - it's pretty absurd. Kala's elite makes me almost as immune to damage as Reaper's shroud mode... In fact I often also use it in fractals up through T3 in moments when we're taking too much damage and there's been a lot of group fail - it's a recovery trick to buy time while the group gets back on track - AND if I place it right I can heal my entire group back to full. > > > > Spamming Bannish Enchantment and Embrace the Darkness can strip the CC bar of bosses off very fast if you have the right talents. > > I'm assuming you are running Runes of Torment? I use Runes of Nightmare. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Nightmare The fear duration is a wasted item, but otherwise everyone on it is perfect and very potent for a condition renegade.

> @"Veprovina.4876" said: > > Honestly, if you play anything except WvW, you'll be swimming in gold. > I get like 10-20 gold per day just playing low tier fractals for half an hour, how is that hard in any way or worse than a farming bot or just buying gold directly? Yep. I do T3 daily and get that result. T3 daily means you'll want 106 Agony so you can run anything in the tier. And that's not that hard to get because the infusions rain on you (multiple times a week I bust past 500 +1 infusions - which I exchange up to +9s and collect for the characters in my account - if I were to sell them, I'd get about 20-30g more per week, give or take). - this means you need 12 infusion slots. That's 2 accessories, 2 attuned/infused rings, and then maybe your weapons and 2 pieces of armor. The gold I would make from 1 week at T2 could buy most of that (you need crafting to 500 though). I spent years NOT doing this and thinking I had no path to getting gold and no path to ever maxing my crafts here... I finally just read a guide on how to most efficiently get each craft to 500 - picked the ones I would need for a single character and maxed them, made just the bare minimum gear to hit T2, and when I saw how much gold it gave me... realized I could rapidly move up from there. Now in the past 2 months I've maxed out every craft except cooking (only because it requires running around and I'm too occupied in fractals) - completed full ascended except back sets on 2 characters, and halfway geared out several more... It's just a small amount of focus to hit T3 that first time, and once you do - you're driving in the fastlane from then on.

If you want to see how bad of an idea it would be, there are a lot of mobile MMOs coming out these days that have 'autoplay' in them. Log in, and your game plays itself. You can then stand around somewhere in all sorts of glam it got for you. If you like that - those MMOs are for you. But they don't tend to have very vibrant communities. They're quick cash grabs to get people hooked on paying for powerups and better odds at the glam... and the studios that make them can churn out several new 'MMOs' a year with the formula...

> @"Smoosh.2718" said: > > @"Kichwas.7152" said: > > > FFXIV has both systems - the random PUG and the list a group and people just join method. > > FFXIV also has a feature of sometimes waiting 2 hours as a DPS for a dungeon queue pop. > Which makes me glad players in Gw2 can change their spec on the fly. > That's a whole other topic but... so does FFXIV. Just switch your class, since every character can play every class, swap to the one that's in demand (a one button press), and the queue pops. Or... Avoid that random tool, and join a manual built group. They have the tool we have here also - and the secret is... DPS get into groups in that pretty fast, because you can look at all the groups forming, what they need, and just slide right into one. - That's why I like the system GW2 has, and that manual system in FFXIV. These tools work better for finding groups to match your interests. Over time even in WoW, the devs mostly abandoned the random LFG tool to low level content. Once you hit max, you need to use the manual system to do 'mythics' and 'world bosses' and 'events'. They've basically been copying from GW2 for a lot of these things... - If I recall right though, in WoW you click to join, and have to wait for someone to accept you. This can result in failing to get into any group because they're all slow to hit accept and it times out or they don't see the notice or whatever. Here people join, and groups usually just 'roll with it' for whatever ends up in the group. And since it's manual, you can also see what's happening if a group is slow to form... like the other day when I was trying to run a T3 fractal late at night - our group wasn't filling, and I could see that there were also no other groups. It was just not the right time. In WoW I might sit in LFG for an hour and think other people were getting groups and maybe I should switch toons or something - all of which would have been useless if no one online was in the tool, but over there I can't see that info like I can here. Unless I'm looking for something "endgame", where they've removed the random tool (funny how in WoW, 99.99% of the game is called 'endgame' - making that term meaningless... but, whatever...).

It's pretty rare to get summarily kicked from a group. I'm sure I must have seen it at some point but I can't remember an example. FFXIV has both systems - the random PUG and the list a group and people just join method. I'd say as a whole the community there trusts the results of the second system more. The random group gets all the 'guess what happened to me in a PUG recently' stories. The list a group system does get the complaints of people using it to sell runs or put up too restrictive of requirements, but for the most part - letting people just join up allows for relatively faster group forming and of people who have the same intentions. IE: if you want to do a speedrun, want a certain comp, etc... - people join knowing that. In the random system when you get a new 'I want to watch all the cutscenes and explore all the side spots' player and a speedrunner there's drama... > @"Van.5796" said: > Not everyone is in a guild or has enough members to run one. And the current system addresses that perfectly. When they added the manual system to FFXIV, it was GW2 that a lot of people cited for inspiration. Noting at that time, the fan-run website that used to be used here. Having played both this and WoW, manual group building tools like this one are vastly better. Over the years, WoW has continuously improved it's manual group building tools - and a lot of that is because people wanted a tool like we have here because having to rely on their guild and friend list wasn't always viable. I'm not sure what state their manual tool is in right now - I do remember it being popular for their world-events system that they also copied from GW2...

If you want these classes to work as typical MMO tanks - just change the current 4 or 5 abilities to apply taunt instead of their current effects. I would argue the 4 as a single target with a 3 second duration. You could then add a new control effect that is PvE only - aggravate. Aggravate would last 25 seconds when used from '4' and 30 seconds when used from 5. On the 4 if you just force your current target to only attack you. On the 5 it would force 5 enemies that are NOT your target to attack you. Aggravate would NOT be a CC and the effected enemy could use ANY of their abilities. They would also do 5% more damage to you, and 2% less to others, while under this effect. - and then you have tanks... - Put aggravate on all shields for any profession that can use a shield. But... GW2 isn't supposed to have a trinity... even if it kinda does in raids... so... what are we doing in this thread anyway? **(as in... if we're going to do this, lets do it all the way, with something like my aggravate effect, otherwise, lets avoid this alltogether and not create a 'half baked' tank.)** A half-tank would just annoy players that want trinity game play and also annoy those that don't want it... we'd be 'halfway in the door' and not in either room... go all the way in, or shut that door.

When crafting ascended weapons it's best to get the mats ready to craft both sets before crafting them at all. Not just agony wise - but also the stat difference. Having crafted a LOT of ascended weapons recently (going through several characters)... it seems to take from 20-50g depending on how many of the 'once a day' mats I had saved up before I started in. If you've got the money for one, usually you've also got it for 2. And if you're crafting armor first - you probably made it to T3 or at the least T2 Fractals by this point. T3 Fractals can give about 8-30g per day if you open ALL of the fractal chests that drop - even with spending gold on keys to unlock them, that won't cut into the cost too deeply... - So I can fund a new weapon, with zero mats on hand before I start, about once every 3 days... Assuming I did NOTHING but run fractals and craft. Armor is similar in cost. I can speed it up a little by doing the regular dailies (2 more gold a day) and selling off assorted mats in my bank that aren't used for ascended items. - which basically means... craft both sets of weapons in one sitting... so you can avoid this issue. Worst case scenario is going to be saving up gold for 12 days... but odds are you will end up only needing 1/2 or less of that time - because the fractals drop more than gold - salvaging all that stuff generates mats to both use and sell, and while doing this keep making the once a day ascended mats. Over the course of the last 3 weeks I've taken 2 characters into almost full ascended gear and Agony over 120 for one, and 147 for the other, as well as passed out 4 more weapons to other characters... I started the whole process with less than 200g on my account, dipped to 6g left BEFORE I started the second character... and have actually increased my gold while making items for the second character, but still under 100g - which is to say, you actually don't need to be rich to do this - you just need to stick to doing the highest tier of fractal dailies you can. So this issue feels very minor to me. You can get past this 'bump' really fast once you start down the path of ascended gear.

It's probably too late in the game's lifecycle to add player housing. But it would have been a great engine for driving sales on the gem store. Look at the 'cash shops' of games like ESO and FFXIV. ESO to a large extent, and FFXIV to a minor extent use player housing as revenue sources for their cash shops. Houses themselves for ESO - in key locations around the game world. Furniture, NPCs, crafting stations, vandors, and more are all things that could be sold for player homes. The now dead MMO Wildstar even sold enough bits and pieces to construct your own buildings on your home parcel... and the only reason that game lasted a few years more than it did was all of the people who got into making and showing off their homes.