Update - Thursday April 19, 2007

Does hard mode in Kryta mean max Tribal Axes and Sickles?

Food for thought.

Oh but there is so much more to do now...If you like farming go with the vanquisher title...here;s the best part...you can bring a balanced party of 8 and not have to worry about dying in a single hit when a necro strips your enchants...Sure you could solo a few mobs at a time, but you had to avoid certian mobs due to the makeup...now, you clear the whole area hitting all the mobs and getting better loot in hard mode...At least "Vanquishing" and area HAS to be better than attacking the same mobs over an over..

This update is barely 9 hours old and people are already crying Doom and Gloom...Give it a shot FFS...You may actually like it!

Look what pop-out in the high end forum. I doubt he had it before this update.

Max Dmg TRIBAL AXE

Why not just start banning accounts of bot farmers? It's pretty obvious when you go into Granite Citadel and see 50 monks running around in the same exact path who the bot is. Hell, hire me and I'll make a list for ya anet then you can stop punishing the players who actually do play their characters when they farm. I have 10 characters with what 15 heroes each? Thats 15 Ghials staffs at 100k total (on the cheap) and thats just the staff not including runes. Thats only one Necro and 14 other Heroes to furnish for. Thanks for finding a way to keep the poor man down. You have officially became the "Big Brother" of gaming.

I am 100% sure they did NOT do this because of high server loads or bandwidth issues 1 more instance of a person in their own map is not a going to be a dramatic usage in server resources or bandwidth. Anet does not hate farming, even Gaile Gray has said many times that they accept the idea of legitimate farming. It's just the bots that exploit it that ruin the fun for everyone.

1 reason I can think they limit heroes is that most of the people who can afford Nightfall would be playing the entire game with their heroes and ignoring everyone else who doesn't have heroes. Then those without heroes are left with un-customizable henchies But not because of server issues. Another reason I would say is balance. 7 customized heroes and 1 human in some missions? There goes any difficulty to complete the mission

I liked farming, it was fun for me (for example solo uw dervish, thats not boring), I was doing it when i was bored, and now, time to find farm-parties, what takes tons of time, oh yes, now we can wait 30-60 mins for a good farming, congratulations Anet.
Time for me to stop GW (because they've already nerfed chestruns, and I wont do all the missions again, STILL BORING)

and if people can't afford stuff - what will happen?
I think the prices will drop again to a level where people can afford it again...
(because thats the only way for the seller to make some money)

you are missing the point... I personally am farming for the gold not a darn title farming for the green.. not a title... farming for the ecto not a title..I could give to crap loads for the title I want the loot.. I like hard mode... they could have left normal mode alone though... bad move Anet.. losing a 2 year vet. and if this is how GW2 will be .. time for me to move on

I guess I am a minimalist...I only get one set of 15k armor for my toons...Right now on my monk, I am working on getting all the skills and elites...I could give a crap if she is still in Green Sunspear armor...I have monk with toons in FOW armor and it doesn't make their skills or their game play any better...

There will be ways to make money...and why are the rich worried about the poor and vice versa? Is it all about prestige? Is it all about having cool skins? I bet I have 200-300k of cool elite skins on my heros...who cares? play the game your away and if you want to jump ship for the grind fest that is WOW...go for it...this is still an awesome game.

Those who want to make money will find a way.

You just anticipated me of some minutes, this was the very 1st thing which came to my mind after reading the update.

Forget about their intention to stop ebay gold sellers, or encourage cooperative gaming.
That's the real reason, no other.

With the introduction of heroes they already got a significant increase in number of instances. Personally I've done most of NF missions with heroes/henchies to be sure to get masters, and so many other people I know.
With GW1 coming to an end soon, they have to find ways to cut down the costs required to keep working the servers of a product they already sold and got money and will not give significant further incomes.


Besides the "less gold" issue, I would like to point out some other things :

1. Collector items
Well, with 8 active characters and the need to equip tons of heroes, I farmed also for collectibles. Farming Behemots gave behemot hides to exchange with a perfect fire wand, farming Bull Trainer Giants gave their jawbones to exchange for a perfect chalice.
Now, it will become a problem also to decently equip your heroes with collector items.
Proposal to A.net: reduce the number of collectibles required from 5 to 2, in order to allow players to get collectors items.


2. Gold items and upgrades
It seems, from the first impressions, that rate of gold drops in HM has significantly increased.
This will cause a large influx of gold items in the market. Combine this with the lesser and lesser availability of cash and ectos, and it will result in a quick decrease of prices.
For those who are interested in gold items an upgrades, this sounds good.


2. Greens
What will happen to them? They will become much rarer of course, but will their price skyrocket?
I don't think so, with less and less money available to players, and many more golds and perfect upgrades available, my guess is that they will stabilize on the current values.
But again, some cheap but perfect greens were the ideal choice to equip your heroes. Ghial staff, Scareater, Byzzr Benediction, all of these are excellent gear to farm and put on your Oliases and Dunkoros. Now they're simply gone.


4. Runes
Hopefully, there will be more gold armor drops and consequently more runes available.
Runes are essential part of any character exactly like the basic 1.5k armors, they are not luxury items.
If this update will make them unaffordable for most players, due to the lack of available cash, A.net will have to rethink the rune system and put fixed prices on all runes, independently from the classes.


Farming was good to be able to get all the above things, which helped to enjoy more the game experience.
I farmed in the past to get nice skin weaps and 15k or Vabbi armors for 8 chars and equip heroes, currently I have 1.5M in gold and ectos and probably spend the same amount to buy everything I wanted (with the exception of a FoW armor that I don't want), so I'm not too worried.
I stopped farming and went for titles, nevertheless I felt confident that if I may have desired or needed something, I could have used my ability to farm, and spending some time killing mobs I could have afforded.
Now this has gone too.


Welcome to the new phasing out GW1.
Whatever we may think, the real reason behind the update is this, again:

Here is a cynical view for you....

1. "Customers" are a really odd breed. They stick to products/brand names that they know (even if it is not the 'best' product on the market or the 'best' product for them) - a familiar name in a sea of unknown objects that they gravitate to - why do you think Brand Awareness is the greatest aim of all marketing?

2. Guild Wars players will remain biased towards a Guild Wars product in the future, no matter what they experienced in the original product - because they originally loved that product, and it's a familiar face in a sea of unfamiliar game packages.

3. GW2 is going to hit the market 2 years from now. How to induce these current players to migrate to GW2?

4. Ahhh - long term marketer knows about point No 1. So make the current GW1 product less fun to play than the new product in the pipeline. We have 2 years to systematically destroy the general appeal of GW1.

Mess with the "majority" of player's levels of fun enough and they will leave GW1 - but when they go to the shop later to look for a game to purchase - point Number 1 kicks in sub-consciously. Brand awareness.

GG Anet marketers .... LOLLOLLOLLOL

[EDIT]
Abnaxus got in as I was typing my post - yes server issues for GW1 - get everyone to move to GW2, please.

well rare weapons like colossals scimitars will probably become more common in HM so they will probably drop alot in price.

Best update ever!

Access to FoW, UW, Urgoz and The Deep that I can earn for myself! I thought it would never happen!

And the end of solo farming will do wonders for the economy. It was terrible for one painfully boring mode of play to be SO much more lucrative than everything else.

No it wont speedy.

What do most of you people who Associate with the economy (trading) do.

I've only done about 10 trades in my 1.5 years here, if you associated with other players now than a price Increase is plausible.

Theres less items and alot of people want them now because they can't get them.

Shreaders Talons, 1 of the cheapest greens ever may see a price drop simply because in normal mode greens are even harder and in hardmode just getting to him is difficult.

I've played GW since the initial release. I don't farm and it never bothered me if people chose to farm. But, the inevitable inflation will be difficult for players like me that don't farm to equip characters and heros. So, after reading everyone''s input only one of a few things can happen;

1. If the farming nerf remains, an unknown percentage of people will stop playing GW (I bet Anet knows how many solo characters are enetering areas).

2. The farming nerf will get rolled back and the economy returned to its previous state. Everyone's happy.

3. The number of ecto and shard for FoW armor will be reduced, again hitting the game economy pretty hard.

As far as GW pushing people toward GW2 already that would be a bit silly with the release date so far away. If we were six months out from the realease of GW2 then I would agree with you.

Insults to any individual or the community as a whole will be deleted. Please keep your posts on topic and contributing. 'Leaving' posts will also be deleted.

Can we get some official word - clarification - on the loot scale update??

tyche7, Gaile responded in a thread with the following.

I played for about 2 years now. For a long time I hardly had any money. I remember getting collector armour for my monk in Crystal Desert. I play Forest Gump here and say "that was the happiest day of my life" The game was amazing. So many people, lots of quests, the world seemed endless. I remember getting my first Droknar armour. That took quite a lot of time, it was SO expensive. But then I bought it and finished the game, even those titan quests. At that time I knew nothing about farming. I was poor and very happy
And then they opened Sorrow Furnace. I have no idea how I managed to farm almost 300K there in just about a month. With that amount of money I made lots of different chars and bought them nice armours only to realize how boring that was. I had to do all the quests again and that was no fun. So I quit GW for a couple of months.
And then I bought Factions. It was amazing. I started Ritualist with the intention to explore Cantha. And I did exactly that, getting my grandmaster cartographer title. I really enjoyed the whole adventure. But 15K Kurzik armour, that I really wanted, was out of my reach. Some of you probably remember when amber cost 4K+. So what I did was... yep, I found vengeful rit build and went solo farming. It was quite alright until I got tired. And then I farmed a little bit more. Got me quite a while to get the armour but I managed. The end. Why? Cause there was nothing really after that. I could farm or I could play PvP. And I did both until the release of Nightfall.
And yet again, I bought the next chapter. And it was really good. I made a paragon (since everyone else played dervishes ). The problems started even before I reached level 20. Those corsair quests are much like farming, you get in, kill everyone, get back, and then you go there again and kill everyone again. Booooring. I got tired of my char right around the time I got to Vabbi. I managed to finish Nightfall with my necro though (in PvE it's always easy with MM). By that time I had 10 chars and I was really bored. So I had to find some new goal. And the only one available was to get FoW armour. Now that's a lot of farming. I chose the best farming areas - Kaineng, Kamadan, Lion's Arch . It took me a week to get my first FoW set for my warrior. Then a month to get FoW for my ranger and almost 2 months to get FoW for my monk (+hat for my rit, I really like it). Trading was getting harder and harder. At one point it became obvious that markets went out of the window.
So here I am now: lots of chars, 3 FoW sets, and absolutely no desire to 1) do any quests, 2) do any missions, 3) farm, 4) trade. If ANET tried the old trick and released another chapter I wouldn’t probably buy it. The only 2 things that I do now in PvE are running everywhere with my shadow form assassin and solo farm for the sake of it. That is, go outside alone and have some fun. Now solo farm is nerfed. Even though I don't care about drops I still would like to have some because I like shiny things and I like when I am lucky. What do I get instead? Hard missions. Well, that's just perfect! I hate PUGs and old missions with new monsters are still old missions and therefore they are boring. This sounds like the end of PvE for me. I don't know what ANET should do to make me play PvE again. Maybe something will come up later but for now I am done.
But I am not going to quit ) GvG is still there and it didn't change a bit. 2W+2E+2Me+2Mo is still a viable build And that is the only thing that is enjoyable in GW for me now. I believe lots of people think the same. GW will survive all PvE nerfs since it's not really a PvE-oriented game. But if they touch GvG... that will be THE END.

So now I guess there's no reason NOT to bring along henchies, since they are no longer going to reduce your drops. Unless you get tired of rezzing the healers.

Dang, just when I was starting to get into soloing too.

Is it me or in Hard Mode, all the enemies attacked faster and do more damage than you could heal!

Yeah I'd say I got 1/8 of the normal drops on one of my solo runs...oh well. So now we will have less of a way to make money, less rares out there....sounds like a big price increase to me....the Totem axes I used to sell for 5k....I'll start the bidding at 50k....oh well, hopefully GW:EN is worth getting....

Yes they support farming but what's the point when you only getting 1/8 of the drops? taking away the anti-farming only going to help bots and not human farmers because they lost motivation.


BTW finding farming builds is also a way for players to enjoy themselves. If i enjoy killing the same mob 10,000 times, who the hell are you to say that is not fun?

Funny thing is that humans will finally tire of farming but the bots never get tired, they just don't get as much as quickly but they can still farm...funny thing...

But her statements make it seem like she is confused about how the loot scaling is currently functioning. It would be nice to see a 'there might be a glitch. The devs are looking into it' or even a 'The death of solo farming is what was intended' statement just so we all know for sure.

This update is too good to describe in words. I approve of every single line of it completely. Hard mode, from what I've played so far, is how I always thought the game should be.

This is the worst update EVER!

You just completely ruined my only fun left in this game. I will pray that this is a glitch that will be removed from normal mode.

Honestly, I think the most notable part of this update is the fact that Reversal of Fortune's animation was finally fixed.

Gaile cannot be serious in this quote...she's either purposefully misunderstanding what ANET has done or I agree with the comment that she must be confused. I am baffled as to how ANET could take a universally anticipated update and turn it into a major slam against the small team and solo farmers. Seriously, I've completed all three chapters multiple times and doing them again in hard mode may be appealing at some time in future but really isn't right now.

ANET has also in a one fell swoop destroyed an incentive for the farming community to come up with creative solo and small team builds taking an important source of skill trail and error out of the game. Normally businesses work hard to turn a negative experience into a positive one...this is a great example of the exact reverse. What a letdown.

Innocent question: If farming is so fun, why does it matter how rare the drops are?

Are you doing it for fun or not?

Part of the fun WAS watching the loot drop from everyone you killed.

I do this now with only 3 heroes. I replace the last 4 slot with hench because even hench are better players then pugs.

I think the size of groups needs to be rethought in hard mode. FT Ranik for example , only allows 4 in a group. But the npcs are level 23, and hit FAST, and HARD. I think it needs to be 6 at least.

Yes, and it is freaking AWESOME for anti-melee SS necros! They do so much damage now especially in the early Prophecies HM missions!

How the hell do you get into Hard mode?

I just love how I post a comment that was not bad harsh or rude and it gets deleted from here

I don't get it. She says "you'll have the freedom to do so" but even before the update, sometimes the drop rate got ridicilous (even for the first time farming that zone). And now it's 8 times more ridicilous I tried to farm UW with my Ele and I only got 400gp + 4 or 5 crappy common items as a loot for the whole run. That's just equal to what ? 600gp ?

I'm not saying revert it back to the last night but make it something better ! Please lol

Btw, when i entered UW in HM just to try, it said something like
"Hard Mode has been disabled. IGN has no requirements for the Hard Mode" (second sentence was something like that i couldn't remember exactly) but HM was on and I saw a LvL 32 Bladed Aatxe and a LvL 25 Dying Nightmare that was cool if i was entering with 8, though

Accessing Hard Mode
-To gain access to a campaign's Hard mode, you must win the final mission for that campaign in Normal mode.
-Once you win a campaign with any character on your account, every level 20 character on that same account will have access to Hard mode for that campaign.
-All Hard mode content is intended for level 20 characters. All monsters are at least level 20, and all henchmen who are below level 20 are automatically promoted to level 20 when taken into Hard mode.

After doing the things above, you'll see a selection box top of the party window.

Insults to others fine I can understand, but why on earth would you delete posts that says theyre considering leaving GW??? Anet needs to be made aware of what they are doing. There are ALOT of people that solo farm that are hurt by this update. We shouldnt be forced to go into PUGS when we can do ourselves faster and easier. First you have to find a group for farming and that takes alot of time right there. Then you have to pray that you dont have one of the noob groups(most of the time you will). Why should those of us that like to go out alone and not deal with other peoples crap be punished?
You really should leave these posts intact that talk about leaving so Anet can read them. Ever heard of freedom of Speech?

I have done today the solo smite run in UW (E/Me), I took down a group of 13 smites, you know what the loot was?????
* White Ram's Hammer
* 108 Gold

So yes solo'n is nerfd, I think ANet thit it because of all those bots running in and out again.
So how bigger the party is how more you get..... I did a mission today on HM "The Great Northern Wall", we had in that very short mission 5 Gold drops

So thanks for the update ANet

Why should people in groups be punished by getting less drops than if they went out by themselves? If you solo it, go ahead! You don't need a group, the update made soloing easier, and you wouldn't make any less money than if you were in a group. So go ahead, do it faster and easier. You wont be rewarded for using your little skill exploitation anymore however, but you are still 100% free to do so and you are NO LONGER PUNISHED for choosing to do so (the anti-farming code was removed).

And freedom of speech doesn't exist on a message board. People own these message boards and pay money to keep them up. It is their property and they can remove what they want from their own property. I am not allowed to put a giant sign on your yard or hold a huge protest even with freedom of speech, because it is your property. This board is someone elses property and if you don't respect the rules, you get evicted.