Poll on the 10/10 and 10/11 Update

Unlock all Skills.

And a player, can amass ectos at the rate of about 2-3 per hour, currently. Might be even more, depending on luck, but that's the average rate I've observed. Note that this is obviously by solo farming.

I like how Anet is constantly playing with our world, it's all good.

I run a pretty generous guild and I help my members buy skills and armor and all that jazz. FARMING! It is important! How the hell else can we make the mass amounts of gold to help our fellow members.
By regular game play? Lol! Sure thing.
This newest patch just made things so much harder for me, but w/e. Interesting to say the least.

I don't personally like to farm, but I like to know that when I need to I don't have to spend all day doing it for 100 griff wings. So yeah just keep nerfing Anet. Nerf the skills and nerf the loot. And you will rue the day you release chapter 2 because me and my guild of friends will go play BF2 or something more fun now that this game is about to suck hardcore.

UAS: Unlock All Skills. I wasn't in the beta, but apparently there was a weekend when all skills were available to people making PvP-only avatars simply by clicking on a button. This was heaven to the PvP'ers, and the PvP community has been aching for that UAS button ever since, as they find playing PvE to unlock skills & items a chore/drag/boring. It's not as big an issue now as it was just after release, when half the threads on this site were always about UAS, as PvP'ers can now easily unlock the skills they want with faction points.
EoE: Edge of Extinction. Ranger spirit which, when one creature dies, does damage to all creatures of same type. Used in PvP to create cascades (one dies & the damage kills another; the damage from both of these kills another etc etc) called "edge-bombs", started by having members of own team commit suicide.

EDIT: FARMING: solo-killing Aatxe or Smite-Crawlers the underworld/fissure of woe with an invincimonk. Apparently. As farming everywhere else is still easy. Those who claim solo-farming is dead should go to Augury Rock, intl district, and see the professional farming army in full action.

Those are the ones looking for the last hurrah.

Solo farming in Augry Rock has turned into childs play. All you need is 16 in Axe, Mending, Live Vicariously and the ability to hit "C" then "spacebar". There is no longer a giant herd to take on and present a challenge. I suspect that most of the damage comes from Gladiators Defense, however, because of the low quantity of MOBs that can be rounded up at once, anyone can just do it as well as a veteran.

And thanks to Xethrion on the stat about how many Ecto are available in the UW. 2-3 per hour pushes the rewards to ten times what can be found elsewhere alone. Throw in a Eternal Bow once and a while and for the money, you better go to the UW.

Unlikely... when I used to farm griffons, pre-patch, I could earn roughly 15-18k per hour.

About 1.2-1.5k per run of 4.5 minutes, excluding ID and selling time every 3 runs.

The main draw of the UW has always been the ecto. If you dont' get any ecto, you're looking at a loss of gold per time spent.

10 times might be a bit high.. more like 5 times I would think, post patch. The patch hasn't slowed down my invincimonk's farming much, and the drops have gotten better because of the spoonfed imonks who can't adapt who are being left out. Much better than griffons now. If not for ettins, my warrior would be gathering dust

PS : I've gotten 11 ecto today in about 3-4 hours of farming. Better than my average rate. Not sure if I was just lucky today.

I belong to a fairly good sized guild who has gone from a large group of active players to one where I am often the only one online. When asking fellow guild members why their recent lack of playing most will say that the with all the changes to gw it isn't a game they are finding much enjoyment playing anymore. I too have sat in towns where there is constant complaining about these changes, with the exception of those who are using the changes to make a fortune running other players. Personally I am the type of player that prefers using henchies or guildmates when playing as I am most likely one of the rare older players who has a great dislike of dealing with those who are determined to act like idiots in groups, often resulting in the need to spend hours trying to do something that with henchies would take half as long. Nor am I a player that wants to sit back and just pay while someone else runs the particular mission. I do find myself more and more helping others who are finding the game near impossible to progress on since they are newer to the game and have yet to learn it's subtle strategies for free. That would in itself not be a bad thing however the levels of frustration I myself feel and am hearing in others is definately discouraging me from considering buying future expansions.

I understand the need to try to balance a game especially pvp however not all of us play pvp and it seems as if we are being penalized for those who abuse the game. Perhaps a better solution would be to somehow separate the two or restrict the levels for pvp so those who bulk up don't have the advantage over others there.

I feel you are risking loosing a good majority of people like myself as you attempt to thwart those who would abuse the game. I will now be telling those I see who feel the same way to come here and post their feelings. Hopefully they will, as I think it will help reflect the attitudes that are currently running through the game. I know there are those who bore easily and want harder and harder challenges however there are those who just want to play and have fun too..not to mention those new to the game who are finding it impossible.

Course your mileage may vary

I think you better do more research...Read the Guild Wars Interview with 1UP.com, they actually state their stand on farming, running, etc...

Anet do support the idea of farming, they just dont like selling the plat on ebay.

ANet doesn't support solo farming. Or at least, solo farming high level areas, where the drops are actually good. They want you to farm in groups of 8. For every single area. Which isn't farming in my opinion, it's 'watch the drops go to other people'. But meh, I have bad luck and I'm bitter. Which is why I always solo farm.

Wow, so many people not willing to 'evolve' with an ever evolving game...



Sure, the monsters run around like their stupider, but wouldn't that make them easier to kill if you're 'smarter' than they are?

The farmers possibilities have practically fallen down the proverbial toilet and I personally lost my w/n ability to farm with his old Mark of Pain setup, WHICH IS FINE... It's not impossible for me to kill groups, it's just that I need to be more careful, that's all... A Disease inducing W/N through Virulence and Putrid Explosion sounds like a lot of fun to use...

Parties should start treating monsters almost like in a pvp situation. Why? Well, monsters run away now so bringing a snare is going to be of great use. [do I smell trappers anyone? Ice elementalists?]

Monsters seem to know who to attack as well. I saw 4 griff's switch targets when the monk they were hitting put up Shield of Judgement, they went after the ele...

Now we're in a situation where the REAL gamers will adapt and the "I don't want to use much effort" farmers will either get smart and adapt as well, or, as the poll stated, not compromise and leave the game altogether.

Good for them, and better for me. I'm tired of these people selling zealous axe hafts for 20 plat (you heard me, a 1e./hit 1e. degen haft for 20k.... Wtf? ) Maybe now with farming down the tubes, it might actually be worth near that much *not*...

Gold, for us casual players, isn't an easy comodity. To us, who can only run around with barely 20 plat on one char, and none on the others, it has real value. Listening for people selling stuff for 100 plat and the like is downright outrageous. (thankfully, those are mostly 'for show' items and possesses no logical uses whatsoever)

The 'talk' of having an easy 60 plat should be fading now since farming idiots (aka dumb pve monsters) is now a thing of the past... I'm not ditching my axe, but I am using different curses skills to fill my bill... (yay Shadow of Fear)

Keep the pain coming Anet! You know who your REAL gamers are...

Please read, and understand the interview before have any commend on it.

Please read, and understand the statement made by Gaile, before you make a 'commend' on my comment. kthxbye.

And btw, this interview was posted a week ago. Which was when I read it. It seems alright, until you get to the part where 'players amass much more gold more quickly than other players' or something like that. It SOUNDS alright.. until you ask yourselves.. just what is ANet's definition of the average player's gold acquisition rate. 1-1.5k per hour? With FoW armour costing somewhat in access of 1 million, I'm sure as hell NOT going to spend 1000 hours 'playing normally' to get it.

Yep, you'll need that $100 as a downpayment for the $400 Playstation 3.

(I take it the $100 is for both GW and CoH? Was that really such a bad deal?)

have the AoE spells (such as firestorm) follow the monster it was cast on. so your spell isnt totally wasted but other monsters can run out of range. you could then lure the monster with firestorm on him onto the group attacking your monk.. which would then scatter out of the firestorm allowing your monk to recover (for example)

Thanks for the poll.
I love playing an ele and this has now made that character useless to a point. What's the point of the mage henchie? He was relatively useless before but now.....
Back to the point, yes some people farm, others don't. Some of us enjoy using AoE spells to deal damage when we are just running through quests and are getting mobbed. AoE is pretty useless in PvP..players know better and now in PvE... there is no point to them. The least that can now be done, is to give us more direct damge spells and completely lose any AoE spells in the game. Just my opinion.

When things stop working as they should, it's generally referred to as 'being broken', not 'evolution'.

What doesn't work?

So How is this going to affect the economy? Farmers were sometimes resonable with ther pricing because the amount of time it took to gather goods was minimal. But if now it takes say twice as much, is the pricing in GW going to be relative to the increase of the farmers efforts? I can see it now, gold bow blah blah blah 500K. Am i wrong on this?

i dont like the update personally,it makes the pve more like pvp,not everyone enjoys pvp, while i do enjoy it sometimes i like to be able to, play with my pve style as well, and even tho i've made the adjustments to my toons, to still enjoy pve the update,really screwed some of my toons,all in all i don't like it!!!!!!

Well, lets look at this. Items will be in much shorter supply. Lots of people still have incredible quantities of gold. Yes, prices will go up at a rate that will make all the children of Tyria cry.

On the positive...... well there still is no positive. I guess after everyone has spent all of thier money, prices will go back down. However, I suspect that the richest of people have stacks of Ecto, Rubies, and Saphires, since the measily 1mill limit on gold in storage is not enough. So, yea the buyers are screwed.

I hope this doesn't get lost in the Flurry of posts about the AoE nerf. I believe it adds yet another glitch to AI that will serve to make the game harder for no good reason.

I've noticed some people mentioning that the Droknar's run got harder because they added more worms.

THIS IS NOT THE PROBLEM!

The problem is, the last patch was supposed to "make monsters follow you less".

It did the EXACT OPPOSITE for some monsters. Whether this was intentional or not (and I am strongly leaning towards that it was) I do not know.

The problem is not that there are more worms on the Droknar's run, it is that they DO NOT LEAVE YOU.

They follow you all the way to the second "tunnel", past the first batch of dwarves in the first part of Lornar's to Droknar.

In addition, I've noticed that avicara with 'pending spells' now follow longer distances approximately 5 times as much since this last patch (great job ANET) and they STILL follow all the way to the end of the zone.

A couple of other ancedotes:

Was I was running in the desert with my ranger to go complete the 15 point attribute quest (by myself mind you) . I agro'd a desert worm. Now most of you who have done the 15 point quest may have encountered this worm, he sometimes appears right before you have to walk over the fallen statue. Well I made it past him and he proceeded to fight the ghost that stands there. I had the worm targetted (he doesn't follow after a certain point because the statue is treated like a bridge). Long story short, I completed the 15 point quest and the worm had dropped off my target because of the range. So I start heading back and guess what I see standing there looking all pissed off?

Yep, you guessed it.. the worm was STILL AGRO'D ON ME but STUCK!.

Then last night I was down in uw with a 3 person team (spare me your opinions on soloing please) We were at the last part of the clearing the chamber quest where you have to clear the room where the Terrorweb Dryders are. After dying and getting ressed, I noticed the spawn looked a bit wierd but it was still moving around down there. We proceeded pull to kill a lone Grasping Darkness (aka squid), and the fact that it was alone is important. This squid was also moving away from me when I pulled it.

At any rate we decided that going straight on into the chamber was too risky because of the wierdness of movement in the spawn. We decided to back out, and head to the right side entrance (people familiar with uw know it's the entrance where the last aaxte sits by when clearing them out). On the way to this second entrance to the chamber, all the monsters were clearly off the radar (just want to point that out). Well guess what, as soon as we get to the other entrance, guess what makes a beeline for us, WELL outside of agro range? (I'm talking 2 agro circles worth).. the rest of the squid group that didn't for some reason get pulled when we killed the lone squid!!! Before this patch to fix "making monsters leave you easier" I have NEVER seen anything like that. Note, we were not using AoE spells affected by patch.

Another simple test that anyone can do is to check out the new and improved ice imp agro range in Lornar's. It's easy. Take a bow out there, equip 1 running skill. Now find yourself a nice patch of Imps (make sure they are "relatively" stationary kind so you can see where their point of origin is) Shoot an imp, and turn around , walk out of their freeze if you get it and then watch them return back to their spot. Get it so they are just off your radar screen when they leave and so far that you loose the imp as a target, then turn around. Wow. Imp's that would have normally forgotten about you now remember you EVEN OFF OF RADAR.

This may be an unintended result of the "Flee-Return" code put in for AoE, but then again, how can you explain the worm's and avicara? (Plus I wasn't using Fiery Arrows or anything special AoE affected in my ice Imp example, just a regular bow on a warrior with no marksmenship)

Anyway I just thought I would bring this up since no one else was mentioning.

And before you think "oh Good this really screws the runners" note, I have no problem with either of these things being a Pro runner, if you check out the prices in Beacons, they have gone up to an average of 4k now because of what I have mentioned... so this is all good for me. I just wanted to point it out because it does affect normal PvE for balanced groups and this is not a good thing.

Hope someone fixes it.

NO

what you mean is *WHEN THINGS STOP WORKING JUST THE WAYI THINK THEY SHOULD WORK*

boo-hoo you lost some spells until they make some more adjustments.

they may be weeks getting data and adjusting the same way they did with faction.

i am a pyromancer so i got hit the hardest so dont say i dont feel the pain.

i lost 2 skills which i loved (firestorm,searing heat)

incendary bonds work nicely and i will try meteor in a bit.

it is not broken.

wait until the next fix of AI where the half dozen skeleton rangers follow you around a corner with poison arrows instead of standing there shooting at the wall as you laugh.

Interesting...... the source of income for most has droped away and the source of income for others goes up....

I have no problem paying a runner to run me to Droknar's, but if the money leaves the system runners will loose business.... followed with runners leaving the profession..... followed with a complete inability to get run anywhere without a previously known group running you.

I see a collapse coming.

We're playing an evolving game. Sometimes you like the changes sometimes you don't. Be a grown-up and either learn to deal with the changes (like many seem to have done) or quit and play something else.
In general people in this community are a little higher standard of player and will adapt without too much fuss. But I was getting tired of hearing everyone in every district crying about the patch when it came out. Someone tell me when it's over so I can turn back on my local channel.

The overall whining has calmed down from what I have noticed, ToA has gone back to its old ways and eles are finding groups and easily to boot.

I kind of like it, because when my N/Me is getting bombed on by melee attacks, I can chase them off with a quick Chaos Storm on top of myself. I don't have to run around like a chicken with my head cut off to try and shake them. On the other hand, I don't like this, because, when I try to use a Chaos Storm on an enemy who is far away from me, they just walk away, then my skill ends up being useless. So, in short, it's a good idea, but it doesn't work all that well.

-SZ

I absolutely agree. I'm actually thinking that this opens up a ton of possibilities that didn't exist before.

I'm actually contemplating using a W/E for the first time (and no, I'm not a hammer warrior) for the potential "nuker runner" build.

I adapted after the partial nerfing of the -55 monk, and it made me a better player for it. This also is a nice challenge to overcome. If anything, it's keeping the game fresh.

On the contrary, it sounds like it works just as it should.

Area-effect spells that cause damage and drain energy tend to make enemies reluctant to stay within their range. The monster moves the same distance in either case when escaping the field, but that five-step retreat is more useful to you at close range (taking it away from you and out of melee range) than at a distance (where it can simply move into a safe unoccupied area). What's not logical about that?

This is not only to affect solo farming. Its for these other classes that are getting no love in pve. Hopefully now we'll see more balanced parties, instead of the 3 w/mo's, 3 monks, and 2 nukes....

Again they didn't nerf the spells, they made the ai smarter..... AI > aoe spammer......gotta be smarter than the AI now....

actually, if you do every quest and every mission, you should be at least level 13-15 by the time you enter kryta, 17 or so when you enter the maguuma jungle, and past 20 when you enter the desert (with a skill-point level or two under your belt).


and to those of you who think the world is going to blow up and we'll all be sent to an alternate dimension consisting of hellfire and brimstone, just because prices of items will go up, i pray you remember this;
in the time before sorrows (a month or two) furnace a perfect 8 15>50 fellblade was going for JUST OVER 2 million, as were 8 15>50 chaos axes.
8 15>50 longswords and fellblades were in excess of 450k a piece, bows were also substancially higher, and hammers could actually compare with swords and axes in value (ie a perfect hammer in general couldnt be purchased for a mere 100k).
ecto was at the price it is right now; 13k market value (a week or 2 b4 sorrows it dropped to 8-9k), and noone really complained.
then with the release of the invincimonk build and the implimentation os sorrows furnace (and the subsequent MASSIVE increase in drop-rates) and chest farming and yadda yadda, the market was oversaturated, and within a very short timespan many items dropped by as much as 50% of thier pre-sorrows market value.
instead of complaining that anet took away the easyness in which you could solo-farm, be greatful they allowed it to remain possible for so long.
had this patch occured with skipping sorrows furnace and the invincimonk craze, i have a feeling this wouldnt be an issue, because not one of the people here who were unable to farm then would have been granted that ability, and so the patch would have afforded them NO differing state of financial affluence. in short they wouldnt be complaining "OMG I CANT FARM!" because they would have never been able to farm in the first place, b4 the invincimonk build was released it was only the few who possessed it that were able to successfully solo the UW.

Um, no. When I said it's broken, I meant broken.

It wasn't supposed to make orion/cyn useless or a liability to a group.

It wasn't supposed to make a number of skills practically useless because they weren't altered to reflect the change in effectiveness.

It wasn't supposed to make mobs act even more stupid than they were before.

The patch had many effects that were apparently unexpected and obviously weren't even worked on to make them ready when it went live. What we have here is a broken patch that needs more patches to fix it.

It's all well thinking this accident is great, but it doesn't change the fact the patch was a total mess and what remains is a slightly better mess that we have to put up with until they decide to do the work that should have been done before it went live. The devs know it went wrong, most of us can see it went wrong...but they do say ignorance is bliss.

I'm with you brotha...eventually the developers will realize their mistake and roll back the patch so I can echo nuke the shit out of everything again...I can't wait to be usefull again it's hard to find a party right now.

Wow, i thought this was called devolution

Lately I see things going a lot better ingame. Fire nukers still nuking away and cause mass damage. Mobs hardly fleeing.

Anyway, one thing that gets to me is all these people thinking that FoW armour costs a gazillion how do they expect us to get it if we dont farm, or solo UW or whatever. Guys, FoW is supposed to be unique, it's supposed to be special. If everyone had it, it wouldn't be so great anymore. In fact, it would be boring.

FoW armour is supposed to be something maybe what, 1% of the gamers have. Even so, nobody *needs* it. It has no special uses or stats, it's just a long term goal.

Thank you for the indepth explanation. I don't spend a lot of time around the forums, so many of the acronyms confuse me. I'd heard of the EoE skill before, but had no idea how the setup worked. That's very interesting.

I have a problem with nukers. If someone decides to cast an aoe and break agro away from the tanks, they've put monks and every other vulnerable class at risk, which puts the whole group at risk.

I think Anet's in a bad place right now. They've introduced an update that had certain effects on skills. Whether they were unintended or not isn't really the issue for the purposes of this thought train.
*ahem*
New effects on skills, loads of people unhappy and demanding either a change back or to adjust the skills. Well, Anet can't adjust the skills because that would affect the PvP tournament thing that's going on. I don't know how long it will continue, but I expect until at least the end of the year. That leaves Anet with only two options:roll back the update or give us more updates to fix the buggy/broken things. In the meantime, we have to suffer through (now) overpriced skills because they screwed up and didn't test the update thoroughly. Granted, mistakes happen, but this one is just too obvious.

I can't see them rolling it back, because the mods to AoE make sense from an overall, high level perspective. The only time you might stand in an AoE is if the thing you are fighting is almost dead, and if you trust your healers. Otherwise, you would get out too... and remember, most monster groups don't have a healer with them!!

Neither do most IWAY groups, but they generally stand in Fire Storm and other AoEs

Ok, so this updade just blows chunks for a couple of reasons! Farming is still somewhat ok, but has become a real pain to do. Not much fun anymore since they nerfed pro bond and now this update. Plus they have made AoE spells useless in pve. Now I know there are folks out there that think that farming is lame and that Anet doesn't care about them. Well, I got some news there for ya...some people enjoy doing just that and we too are paying customers. We spend our time farming for weapons and money because we like to do just that. AoE spells are no longer effective so why even have them in the game? They have destroyed the elemental profession for people who want to run their charater a certain way. If Anet keeps "adjusting" skills...they will "adjust" themselves right into chapter 13. Many people I know were excited about chapter 2 comming out in the first quarter; however, now they are doubtful if they will even buy it. Anet...leave well enough alone!