6081

It sounds like a great idea, glad to see them do it. Sadly, it is only for Heart of the Mists at first, and the rest of the areas ‘later’. I just hope they are a bit quicker about it than WoW’s connected realms - it is taking them forrrreeeeeever. I expected a much quicker pace after the kinks were worked out of the first few attempts.

6082

Just a reminder that this patch hits sometime later today. Hopefully the guild sees some folks log on to check out the changes today!

I just started playing again recently after a long break, and it’s still as fun as ever.

6083

Is there an Looking for Dungeon automatch feature in the game yet?

I stopped very early on, when I got to the level of the first dungeon, and realized that I no longer had the desire to sit around spamming chat and reading chat spam just to get a random group together to do the dungeon that I wanted to do.

I otherwise really liked the game, but running dungeons in groups is a huge part of the fun of these games for me, and I have never yet found a guild that comes close to having enough people on to do lower level stuff that I usually want to do during the times that I actually have available (I’m not a power gamer, and most guilds very quickly get to having most players be at a level where they’re just running the same end-phase dungeons over and over). Not anyone else’s fault, just due to my circumstances, but it is what it is, and a good Dungeon Finder function really helps.

6084

So sloppy. People on the forums, when they stay up, are complaining. No official message of ANY kind about when the patch is supposed to happen. Customer support is non-existent.

It’s not even the usual “we’re working on it”. Just nothing. As if they completely forgot there was a patch scheduled today.

6085

Yes. I get in dungeons all the time this way. But the real issue is that the dungeons, regardless of the level they artificially kick you down to, are really meant for 80s packing 80s gear. I’ve ran dungeons – like AC, which has an artificial level cap of 30 – smoothly when everyone is bringing in a downscaled 80. But I’ve also had multiple team wipes in dungeons where a couple of the group were “natural” 30s and 40s, or whatnot.

Also, the dungeons aren’t optimized for natural play; they favor speed runs and gimmicks. Take AC again, for example. You rush in past the first grawl mound – which you’re ostensibly supposed to destroy – to “stack” for the spider queen boss, otherwise she wipes you out. You then just run past the rest of the trash mobs to get to the other bosses, and you have stack on most of those, too. Or the Manor story mission. There’s one part if you don’t have a thief who can cloak the entire party so you can rush to the final boss… you’re screwed.

Dungeons are awesome loot generators, but lord do they require gamey, gimmicky tactics.

6086

Patch is downloading for me now.

6087

Well, I logged in and can’t say I’m so happy.

The wardrobe requires that you spend real money, or it’s useless. And the trait nerf caused my 26 level character to lose HALF its health pool.

I really don’t know the point of these changes. They just made the game sensibly worse.

So beside my character being nerfed out of oblivion and a wardrobe system I’ll never use, I don’t know what else this patch is about. I didn’t see anything else pertinent to me.

6088

Bam. Title of your memoir.

6089

Wait, what? How so?

-Tom

6090

Dungeons are definitely doable at the opening level. The issue with “natural” 30s and 40s is that they’re likely under-geared for their level. You’d do just as poorly with L80s that are running L60-L70 blues and greens (compared to L40s running a mixture of L20-L30 gear). I suspect a bunch of “natural” 30s and 40s in full yellows of the appropriate level would do just fine (no one would spend that money on that though). Especially story dungeons - bring a full group of L80 geared in exotics into, say, TA story, and laugh as you kill the final boss before she even gets her run-away cutscene. Fully geared 80s are clearly too powerful for those.

As for gimmicky speedruns - yeah, that’s the unfortunate side effect of a superbly lazy playerbase. It’s not all that much harder to not gimmick the whole thing, and sometimes I find that screwing up the gimmick (happens quite often) will often lose more time than just doing things the correct way would have taken anyway (if you screw up the spider boss corner gimmick, it will murder you in a second flat).

However, Fractals (excepting dredge) and the replacement for TA Path 2 are legitimately well designed dungeons without those exploitable design weaknesses, so definitely give those a shot.

6091

Why does losing half your HP matter if the content is rebalanced accordingly?

You are correct, however, in that the trait rework is stupid in that it only starts at L30 rather than L10 now. It is far too long for new characters to open up that line of character customization/builds.

He’s complaining about something that’s always been there - transmutation stones. They were used to transfer an item’s skin onto another item’s stats. Nothing’s really changed, now you just have a collection of all the skins you’ve used that you can pull out whenever. Just HRose being himself.

IIRC, you still can get stones from map completion as well (just as before), and the older stones convert at a 1-1 or a 3-1 ratio depending on their type (L80 or L1-79).

6092

Ah, those. I seem to recall I have plenty of usused stones. And, like everything else, you can buy them using ingame currency just fine, can’t you?

-Tom
6093

Yeah, looks like 600 gems ~ 58 gold for 25, so ~2g30s each. Or more inefficiently, 150 gems ~ 15 gold for 5, ~3g each.

No idea how much you get from map completion.

6094

Even if monsters seem weaker, my survivability sucks because I basically have no time to properly act. Monsters die faster, but I die much faster too. I don’t know how good is the balance, but gameplay is worse for me.

Plus, it’s a disaster in PvP. It’s not like they nerfed my PvP enemies as well. If I go PvP I now have half my health, whereas every true level 80 is as powerful as before. So they opened a HUGE gap between those at level 80 and everyone else. Trying WvW before level 80 is now almost pointless.

Speaking for myself, through my 26 levels I made 1 gold and 50 silver TOTAL. So if I wanted to buy the minimum of 5 stones I’d need 15 gold. Which is FIFTEEN times the amount I have.

Now tell me what’s wrong if I say “The wardrobe requires that you spend real money, or it’s useless.”

Being able to use the wardrobe merely 5 times requires about 2 euros or $2. It’s certainly not some kind of feature you can actually use freely. It’s very obvious that they designed it to expect making money from it.

6095

You make way more money at higher levels, that’s why the gold to gem ratio is what it is.

6096

Of course it’s designed so that they can make money from it. Why would they throw away one of their primary income generators? Applying different skins to gear has always cost money. They weren’t going to change that.

Make sure to take advantage of the five free transmutation charges they’re offering in the store (the offer is only good until midnight Wednesday). And as a side note, I wouldn’t spend charges on transmuting things until 80. You level too fast and replace gear too quickly to do it earlier.

6097

You have a decent change of getting free transmutation charges every time you complete a map, and even at level 26 there are plenty of maps you could complete. I have never paid anything for my transmutations, and now I have dozens in the bank.

But you really shouldn’t be using those transmutation charges until you reach level 80. You should be fully replacing your gear at least once every 4-5 levels, and if you reskin that often then your transmutation charges won’t last long. By the way, if you want to save money then I recommend only buying blue gear because you can resell it for full value.

Regardless, your complaint has nothing to do with the patch. The limitations on reskinning are basically the same (actually it is little bit easier now that stones can be used as well as crystals). The main change was in the interface.

6098

That’s completely incorrect. PvP still is equal stats. Hit the PvP setup button on the top of the screen and actually SET your stats and gear. Also, at this point in time, there are plenty of people that know the game mechanics really well, and how to build appropriately. I had one round last night were we won 500-25 on the new deathmatch only map (5 points per kill). I’m guessing you might have been on the other end of that =p

As malkav noted, your income is much higher at 80. You get 1.5g from just completing ONE dungeon path in Ascalonian Catacombs, one of the more popular dungeons. Depending on how well your group is, this can be done in 20 minutes (perfect gimmick run), but more likely 30-40 minutes. It’s certainly feasible.

Gold income is higher than it was a year ago, demand for gem store items is higher than a year ago (when there was nothing anyone wanted in the store), and who knows how many people are dumping real money in the store has changed - that’s why the gold/gem ratio is also considerably higher than a year ago.

And as stated, you still should be getting “free” stones from map completion. I have ~30 transmutations purely from that. And apparently they can be from PvP rewards now as well - picked up one yesterday from screwing around there.

EDIT: But yeah, admittedly if you don’t want to spend real money, this is definitely you shouldn’t pay attention to until you’re 80 and settle on a look, since you will be changing gear often.

6099

It looks like he’s referring to WvW, which even before this patch was always suicidal if you were downleveled. So it’s really no different than before.

6100

That might be the case. Yeah, that’s definitely suicidal if you try to solo roam or small party roam, unless you do some very gimmicky things to take advantage of the upleveling system (eg/ bring a level 16 character fully geared out in level 16 blues - apparently your uplevel stats will be slightly better than L80 in exotics - at least until you hit level 17).