GW2 – Loot Rains From The Sky

500 words.

I’m a little annoyed with the loot in GW2. Loot basically rains from the sky in that game, filling your bags in mere seconds. I never thought I would say anything like this in an MMO, but: For the love of god, stop giving me so much loot! You can’t take a step without getting some kind of trophy bag. And when you open that bag, out spills two or three or six or ten more pieces of loot!

Part of my annoyance is the obvious calculated strategy to force me into buying more inventory space. I’ve already bought inventory space. The only things I’ve bought from the Gem Store in two years are: Bank space, inventory space, and character slots. I don’t think I should have to buy more. (What I’d like to buy are bigger bags.)

The other part of my annoyance is that I have no clue what any of this loot is for. Blade Shards? No clue. Quaggan Tonics? Not the faintest. And they come in different colors, so they use up even more space! Refugee’s Belongings? I saw you can trade them for a whole list of stuff, but I have no idea what the stuff is or why I’d want it. Childhood Drawings? Okay, I know those give me luck points, which is really the only useful piece of loot I’ve found lately. Airship Passes? Key Pieces? Raggedly Clothes and Socks? I’m sure some or all of that was currency from past events that is now useless, but I better keep them just in case, right?

I get Minipets which are cool, but why do they have to take up bag space? Why can’t they go into a separate collectible area? And where are they coming from? I have no idea. They just appear in my bag during downtime between zergs.

Why do I need all these stupid Booster Potions? I hate single-use consumables just on principle. I never, ever want to use them, because someday I might need one. So if I use it, I won’t have it when I really need it. So there sits that one esoteric Booster that would help in the obscure case that I need to run faster while simultaneously crafting a staff. Because someday I might need to actually do that.

I opened some stuff once and out came a dozen pieces of PvP gear, one for every class. What in blue blazes? Where did that come from? I haven’t set foot in a PvP instance. All I did was spend ten minutes in WvW during Season 1 just to look around. Now there’s a dozen more bag or bank slots I need to find somewhere to store this junk.

I guess my point is that GW2 gives out so much loot that it’s completely desisitized me to any joy in getting loot. There’s so much you can’t keep it straight, and you don’t even care to. It’s a great example of how to go too far.

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Archived Comments

gattsuru 2014-03-06T03:47:00Z

Minipets and (one of each individual skin of) PVP gear can be sent to a Collectibles tab. Note that the PvP skins only show up from the lockers in The Heart of the Mists, though you can send them to collectibles from anywhere. Duplicate PvP gear skin can either be destroyed (if you don’t plan on sPvP at all) or salvaged for materials that go to the PvP collectibles tab.

You /probably/ got the PvP gear skins from your Achievement chests, since they usually have a couple of more common ones.

It used to be worse : early in the game’s release, dungeon tokens, and karma was per-character rather than per-account. You could quite easily fill the base bank tab just with dungeon tokens (if you were in a guild that did a lot of dungeons, which admittedly isn’t common even with the current, lackluster LFG tool).

Most of the consumables aren’t very useful. The only really important boosters are the Crafting, Magic Find, and Birthday Boosters, now that the Karma boosters don’t apply to consumables. Tonics are only used for Costume Brawls or aesthetics. Unless you’re after a very specific event skin, there’s usually not much need to store any event tokens that lack a Collectibles slot. Even knowing those general rules, though, it’s easy to get bogged down with Endless Transformation Potions, Event Cutscene items, transmutation stones, mystic forge ingredients, and heaven help you if you’re doing anything that involves the cash shop’s sales.

But what’s frustrating is that, short of checking Dulfy, there’s no way to know what the useful stuff is for, or what is important, and it often takes ridiculous amounts of space to manage the important stuff. It takes 950 Blade Shards to create Tempered Spinal Blades, which is four inventory slots per character. That’s the /only/ use for the damned things, but it’s a way to get an ascended-grade backpiece for a couple hundred gold less than the previous normal prices. But you also need the blueprint scraps, and more importantly to know that all this stuff can be tossed into the Mystic Forge in the first place. Mercifully, everything but the knowledge is tradeable on the Market, but it’s still mindbogglingly complicated and a massive glut of space-hogging junk.

((And this whole system leads to a situation where it is more cost-effective to create a personal guild, level that guild with gold or gold-bought-from-gems, and use a Guild Bank, rather than try to get extra normal bank storage.))

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