@that_shaman@mstdn.social That was smooth, but did you see the Boots?

I know it's entirely my own fault, but I somehow feel I have to get the weekly rift hunts and weekly vault tasks done, before moving on to things I actually like to do in the game.

I enjoy experimenting with different builds and classes, and thus always have a need for new equipment of different stat varieties. For armor, I like to utilize the Bladed armor set, which has selectable stats, exotic rarity and is available in all weight classes. It's also comparatively fairly easy to farm for, since most pieces can be bought with a combination of local currency and gold, while the chestpiece can be obtained through an event that regularly gets organized runs.

Unfortunately, armor is only part of what one needs to fully equip a character. So far I've been getting by with crafting, but there are prefixes that I don't have the recipes for, and no way to obtain them.

So, are there any reasonably simple ways to farm for weapons, trinkets and back items of exotic rarity and with selectable stats? I only own the Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire expansions atm, so anything within those limitations would be cool.

My pattern recognition sees knobs in every cloud, bush and pile of sticks. But the blue at Vale Guardian or Mai Trin? Simply doesn't exist for me.

I'm waiting for a fix but it seems the studio of my OS works at a tectonic speed. Is there a workaround? Only half joking...

Had the +crit Relic on my open world build because numbers, but at some point I decided to switch that up as an experiment. The Eye of Cerus removes boons from enemies it hits, boon removal is the only thing my swiss army knife open world build is lacking in a bit.

What I noticed is that my playstyle changed. And I always enjoy changes to the way I play more than I enjoy bigger numbers. That's why the nerf to Temporal Curtain enrages me to no end, because it ruins the flow of the playstyle without actually changing anything beyong turning everything clunky because fuck you. Fucking hell, I can barely CC in WvW keep balustrades anymore, that nerf broke quite literally every application of the skill. The same penchant makes me enjoy Eye of Cerus, my elite now has an additional use. An additional mechanic. Since I loathe the loss of mechanics, I naturally do usually love to gain mechanics. Popping it on a pile of enemies, on the gate to Forged with Fire, whenever I actually need boon removal, and so on, and so forth.

Cool little extra utility, that thing. I wish all Relics were like that. Obvious balance challenges notwithstanding.

I see a lot of guides popping up which suggest that Rift Hunting is a good method of making gold in the game, but I completely fail to understand this. IMHO it's terribly boring and does not even have a good gold/hour ratio.

My understanding is that the main reason for doing Rifts is to get those Essences which you will need for the new Legendary PvE Armor, i. e. you do the Weekly Rift Hunting Achievements which give you a decent amount of additional higher level Essences (even from Tier 1 Rifts) and that's it.

Doing Tier 1 Rifts without receiving Kryptis Rift Extraction containers has very poor rewards and doing Tier 2 and/or Tier 3 requires very expensive Kryptis Motivation consumables which means you either need to join (leech) a Tier 2|3 Rift Hunting Squad (those appear to be rare) or organize one yourself and try to share the costs. But maybe I'm not quite getting it.

Addition: It appears that the gold making strategy is based on using the Essences you get from your Rift Hunts to craft and then sell Uncommon and Rare Kryptis Motivations on the TP which implies the following to make this actually work:

• You don't need thoses Essences yourself, i. e. you are not interested in the new Open World Legendary Armor which requires a LOT of them.
• There is or rather continues to be a market for those Motivations, i. e. people are willing to buy them to do (additional) T2 and/or T3 Rift Hunts for higher level Essences beyond the 5 x 5 Weekly Rift Hunts which grant them via reward chests.

Here are some gold making alternatives with varying levels of required skill/engagement.

• Fishing
  • sell Chunk of Ancient Ambergris
  • craft and sell Zephyrite Fish Jerky
• Daily (limited chests) Map Metas
  • Dragonfall, not on a fixed schedule, IMHO the best (most fun) map meta in the game
  • Istan (Palawadan + Great Hall), every 2 hours, use LFG to check for a squad and join the commander's map instance early
  • ...
• Daily Fractals
• Easy Daily Strikes, i. e.
  • Shiverpeaks Pass
  • Fraenir of Jormag
  • Voice of the Fallen and Claw of the Fallen
  • Cosmic Observatory
• Other Daily Strikes including Challenge Motes (CM)
• Weekly Raids
• sPvP (Automated Tournaments)

... from which you could choose the actual eqipped sets. This would allow for one Equipment Template for Power with all power weapons (stats) and one for Conditions or Support with all condition/support weapons (stats) and it would solve the weapon swapping issues with Legendary Weapons.

Basically Equipment Templates would have multiple weapon loadout variants. But I assume ArenaNet is more interested in selling us full Equipment Templates, even when those are merely used to store weapon set variants.

Just having 4 additional slots for a passive set would already go a long way. Assuming of course that moving legendary weapons between the active and the passive set would not remove their customization and upgrades.

Enjoy.

Figured there was something fishy for a while now and it seems I finally figured it out.

So if your meta squad of 40+ people that you're usually join is doing its round and one guy that you have blocked because he's a cunt, joins it before you do, you don't see the entire squad and can get fucked. you can still join via /squadjoin, but only if you know that it's there.

Time to run around spamming slurs to get on as many block lists as possible and then join squads, making them invisible to others.

That HAS got to be a bug.

Edit: So I've tested it a bit and it seems like it's been turned on its head. A commander blocking you does not block you from seeing his squad in LFG. But someone joining that squad that YOU have blocked, immediately removes that squad from LFG for you. Like, no refresh needed. Instantly gone for you.

Fun fact: If someone blocks YOU, you still see the squad in LFG. But as soon as YOU block someone, THAT squad where he is hin gets removed from your LFG.

Fucking hell.

@that_shaman@mstdn.social said:

Looks like you can actually equip Jade Bot Cores on a F2P account as well 🤔 (you do need a second player to send one to you)

Are we sure the timer at the Special Tab of the Volkswagen is an indicator for the next phase?

• Which weapon skin did you choose using the Black Lion Weapons Voucher?
• Which skin/mount/... was randomly unlocked by using the Knife Tail Gang Hunting Bond?

I chose the Elegant Fan Focus Skin for my Elementalist (despite Warhorn being the offhand of chocie for pretty much all builds at the moment) and got the Equinox Staff Skin from the Knife Tail Gang member.

It was always my impression that the health of a game or certain kind of content can be measured on its playerbase during off-hours. In times of mega servers and whatnot the amount of people around you during peak means very little if anything at all. The amount of instances of the same map on the other hand...but those aren't getting shown.

SotO is quite literally exactly (one month and) one week old today.

It's half an hour later right now and I'm hanging out at the Awakened Invasion of Gendarren, which goes along nicely.

This is how Weeping Willow says Thank you, ArenaNet!

Amazing! Especially the navigation of Tangled Depths. Some of the transitions were breathtaking, too.

While it's clear that this kind of skill is far, far beyond my reach ... HoT maps are where I need to go and try out the new flying mount masteries.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/138309-we-are-temporarily-disabling-the-ability-to-transform-quartz-into-charged-quartz-crystals-while-we-address-an-issue/#comment-2001604

We are temporarily disabling the ability to transform Quartz into Charged Quartz Crystals while we address an issue.

We'll update once we have addressed the issue and re-enabled this content.

Does anybody know, why?

I just saw this video in my feed. Darens does a good job of criticizing the objectively terrible "review" that LazyPeon made a few days back.

I returned to the game a week ago and was shocked by the amount of experience I got on a new character, and then found out they have added the Adventure Guide, probably to get new players to stick around longer.

My question to the community is what the general opinion of it is? I don't really mind it but I do like the grind since it feels satisfying to me, plus I get easily overwhelmed by stuff and if I was a new player I'd definitely get a headache over the basillion levels I'd be getting with all the gameplay features unlocking.

If it's good for the health of the game then I'm all for it however.

Asking for a friend. Events in a small area like a small cave would be especially grand. E.g. destroying some skull in a cave spawns (event 1) a few waves of enemies (event 2) followed by a boss (event 3), something like that.

Edit: maybe I should've specified that I'm strictly looking within core content. No DLCs or expansions...

It started with the Silent Surf Fractal and kept going with Dagda Strike. Bosses have dozens of millions of hitpoints, and NCNet only balances for the CM/hardcore crowd. E.g. Sunqua CM lore skip, Silent Surf CM boss health nerf.

Since the hardcore crowd keeps whining about things not being hard enough because of power creep, and Anet's history of listening to them, it's sensible to assume that there might be DPS nerfs across the board. Meaning that the new healthsponge approach to bosses will hit the other 90% of the playerbase even harder.

Thoughts?

Mine is probably Mechanist because it is the most fun i can have as a healer. Druid is close on second place.

Link to the Strawpoll

Bonus points if you can guess which class is nerfed the hardest.