Guild Wars 2

spoj.9672:

On the other side of the coin. I dont see why anyone plays sPvP. Its a mess, its boring and unintuitive to watch. This makes it a poor candidate for esports. If you want a competative fix there are plenty of better games.

Not only that, PvP in general means you want something RPGs are specifically nothing about: a level playing field.

RPGs are about making your character better, faster, stronger. Gw2 goes against a lot of this, but it still has elements of this. It also features some strong rock-paper-scissor elements in the skill/trait selection.
Yet PvPers expect a level playing field? While only having a portion of your skills equipped? With a subset of available stats? How? :o

Supposedly damage was nerfed in order to compensate for things like : ascended gear being introduced, 2 sigils on 2 handed weapons and whatnot.
I don’t really buy it but there could be a reasoning behind this.

I cannot support you enough on some of the other issues though :

-The pull towards an eSport has been very annoying – I guess they’re doing it because other eSports generate a lot of money and hype – but it’s pretty clear that 2+ years into the game it’ll never be that huge eSport hit they want it to be.

-The complete disregard towards content fixes, clipping issues, progress impeding bugs, quality of content( LS season 1 beginning) and rewards for high end activities ( FOTM CDI has been and gone with not much to show for it) are things that are taking a steady toll on the player base even for very dedicated players such as myself.

-Regarding items – the fact that you can’t salvage ( or do anything with) ascended drops means that you’ll be stuck with * a lot of items that will be useless to you* and will just end up cluttering your inventory.
There should be a way to salvage/manage these drops.
In most cases you’ll be happier with an exotic drop than an ascended one.

-Communication is another area where they’ve somewhat failed to be up to par with players’ expectations.
Things like " new legendary items and new legendary types in 2013" were announced only to have nothing said about them later.
I understand things change, priorities shift (see China launch) but at least be up front and honest with your players and if you realize you’re not going to achieve one of the goals you set yourself then at least post it on the forums so people can know.
It would have been pretty easy I imagine to say " we can’t do new legendary items in 2013 – sorry- it’s not going to happen".

-The lack of new content – new dungeons or fractals is another issue that should be addressed. Sure – the living world is fun but after you’re done doing your LS and the events what are you left with?

FOTM is this game’s end game in PVE – yet it’s seen very little improvements, very little additions and no improvements at all in terms of rewards. The rewards for a level 50 run are completely out of balance with the amount of time, effort, dedication and financial investment it takes to be able to play and complete a fotm 50.
You get 1.5 gold and not much else. For well over an hour of pretty difficult content. Not really what I’d call alright considering you can CoF P1 in less than 10 minutes with any group.

Also I forgot fractal leaderboards and the fractal reset.

You can’t take away people’s progress and say that you’re doing it in order to balance things out for this new " leaderboard thing" that’s going to be super awesome and then ignore what you said and not make any leaderboards.
That’s bound to make people ( such as myself) lose faith.

But but Harper! eSports! The future! Everyone needs it! Solitaire eSports competitions, 5v5! Everything needs eSports! EEEESPOOOOOOORTS!

(I couldn’t be any more sick of sPvP if they tried. If they were to remove it, I think I’d only notice because the annoying extra walk to the portal in HotM would be gone and you’d get directly to LA instead. The development attitude towards the rest of the non-sPvP game really makes it impossible not to dislike sPvP on a basic level.)

And for a game that wants is sPVP to be the next big thing I feel they’ve done very little to improve it.
There have been very few new maps and literally no new game modes in 2 years.
No matter how fun and exciting your game play is – if in 2 years people never stop playing the same game format I think that you’ll eventually have a lot of bored people.

Also the announcer voice just makes me cringe. It’s that bad.

Dirame.8521:

I’m sorry what damage was nerfed exactly? If what you’re talking about is the PvE damage of mobs then I get your post but if it’s Warrior damage then all I’ve got is laughter for you.

Oh yea, everyone in Arenanet is working on esphats. I mean, they couldn’t possibly be working on anything else with over 300 employees. Esphats definitely has to be the reason they haven’t fixed all the things wrong with the game.

Laugh all you want. I’m still correct, so whatevs.

I actually did read it all. The conclusion I arrived at was based on both your response I quoted above and several portions of your post, that I will list below:

I did not anticipate ArenaNet to be so heavily focused on forcing “e-sports” into this game. There is virtually no concern over how balance updates in their PvP portion of the game impact anything in PvE or WvW. I have progressively watched them nerf damage into the ground without making changes to mechanics of bosses or
compensating by lowering health pools of any mobs at all.

Of course, I also understand you have issues regarding bugs, as I posted in my earlier response:

New bugs have been introduced to dungeons without old ones being fixed. Popular world bosses like Tequatl went on with terrible bugs for months before finally being fixed.

But perhaps I am not as concerned about these bugs as you are, since eventually they do get fixed and, as I mentioned before, the constant updates are very intricate and no company can release a perfect patch every two weeks.

Then we come to this:

I’m not mindlessly ranting about how much I hate the game because I don’t. I’m just disappointed to see that once again, they’re nerfing damage, forcing their game to be as casual-friendly as possible yet trying to force e-sports into it at the same time (doesn’t even make sense to me how they think it’s ever going to work), ignoring dungeons and loads of bugs/exploits that have been around for longer than a year, and not introducing any content with meaningful rewards or content to challenge anybody besides newcomers.

Perhaps I am not as concerned about you about those things, but to me:

Bugs are a part of the game, eventually they do get fixed. No game is perfect, and sometimes making sure there’s something new for players to do takes precedence over fixing a bug that has been around for ages and generally does not hurt a large audience.

Anet made changes to try to satisfy everyone, not just casual players, as was seen with the Armor repair cost removal, the LS update that is only playable by L 80s right now, -and- the ‘balance’ patch upcoming to buff/nerf classes

There’s a living story update every two weeks full of lore, craftable weapons, loot, and map space/changes. None of it has to do with e-sports, and it’s frankly beautifully designed.

So, all of that being sifted through, I am left with the only thing that seems to ring with a bit of validity:

they’re nerfing damage

Which happens to be at the top of your list.

Of course, I made an assumption that the entirety of the post was “fueled” by the recent damage nerf. And again, I thought that was quite crazy, which is why I just asked you to confirm that it wasn’t just a veneer of -lots of things are wrong with the game- to cover -My #2 does less now.- I apologize if I came off as lazy, but this is the information I was trying to validate.

I’m still curious though.

Was I wrong?

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Was I wrong?

You basically just said “I don’t care about these problems as much as you” and used that reasoning to come to the conclusion that they aren’t valid complaints.

I dunno about Miku, but I’d call that the end of the argument right there and just move right on past you.

I am honestly not surprised about the esports thing now that I think about it. I’m realizing that it seems to be common in mmo’s without a subscription. God knows WoT has a godawful esports set up that that game was most certainly not set up to use.

Black Box.9312:

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Was I wrong?

You basically just said “I don’t care about these problems as much as you” and used that reasoning to come to the conclusion that they aren’t valid complaints.

I dunno about Miku, but I’d call that the end of the argument right there and just move right on past you.

My opinion has little bearing on what other players consider valid.

I very plainly stated that, of the topics Miku considered valid, most of them except the glaring one I noted were either directly addressed or had reason for not being addressed immediately, with evidence that they’d be addressed eventually.

Further, I am not arguing against anything. I am merely asking if the situation was fueled by the damage nerf.

I’m not going to pretend that I care about a couple of bugs when it is obvious that Anet is at least trying to do something , but far be it from me to use that to deem something invalid without proof to the contrary.

There is no “basically” there. I mentioned my stance on how I viewed the topics being addressed because I felt I should be honest in the event that I am not as jaded about these things. There is a solid reason for each topic that proves there is work being done in the problem areas. Don’t ignore it because I feel a little less strongly about it.

Azure, I really don’t care about what you have to say at this point. Black Box.9312 hit the nail on the head— you just told me everything that’s in my post is invalid and are attacking me for something that isn’t even true. I’ve mentioned everything that I’m bothered from and if you choose to not believe me, that’s your call.

I already explained why these Living Story updates aren’t enough. It’s ultimately the same thing as before; just stuff you can get done within an hour or two then you’re back to doing the exact same stuff you’ve done since launch waiting for weeks until you can have 1-2 hours of new content again. Oh boy!

—

Also Harper, I’m glad we agree with each other on so many of these issues but thanks for bringing up the lack of communication bit. Good freakin’ point.

While I understand the significance of making sure you don’t give your customers the wrong impression, communication can’t just be eradicated entirely because you want to make sure you don’t say something that you change your mind about later! Wtf!

Completely agree with you on that. It’s not hard to tell your playerbase what’s going on, as they obviously just did on their stream recently talking about upcoming balance changes.

On this note it’s also very sad that they can’t be honest about things that they eventually mess with in a dungeon. For example, Alphard’s hook attack was bugged for nearly a year and would always instantly 1-shot anyone pulled… they finally change it back to normal without a word of it anywhere in the patch notes. Such idiots, seriously. I think most people actually referred to it as Alphard getting “nerfed” because they were so used to the glitch that they thought that it was actually the way she was intended to be. That’s really pathetic.

Purple Miku.7032:

Azure, I really don’t care about what you have to say at this point. Black Box.9312 hit the nail on the head— you just told me everything that’s in my post is invalid and are attacking me for something that isn’t even true. I’ve mentioned everything that I’m bothered from and if you choose to not believe me, that’s your call.

Not even an attack; merely curiosity, but to each their own.~

I…also didn’t believe you were not bothered. I have no idea where you got that.

Sorry, I guess?

Things -slowly- moving in the right direction is better than no progress, was what I was getting at. Or trying to get at. w.e.

Purple Miku.7032:

Sure I understand it’s a long read to many, but no one’s forcing you to come here. If you’re looking for a thread that requires less reading, there’s plenty of other ones to choose from. Go on and see for yourselves.

I read your entire post the first time I posted and all I could gather was that you didn’t like a certain change because it caters to newbs which is why my first post in this thread was phrased the way it was.

And you said, “laugh all you want” and that prompted me to think that you’re angry about the 100B nerf. And you’re still not denying it so I’m going to continue assuming that’s what you’re on about. And frankly that is the silliest thing to be angry about. No offence intended.

Communication is the key to any functional relationship.
Even one between a company and its customers. Or a game developer and the player base.

The problem Anet seems to have is that they have a vision of how they want to do things – use that vision to hype the player base then when things change for whatever reason they fail to tell us what’s going on and leave us in the dark.

It happened many times over :

Fractal reset and leader boards, new legendary weapons, new legendary types, introduction of ascended, healing signet nerf, ranger CDI – specifically pets, and so on and so forth.

They seemed to be going in the right direction with CDI threads but then no conclusion is posted.
I’d have liked to see some direct result of CDI threads – if not in the game itself immediately ( because you can’t change it on a moment’s notice) at least in a post on the forum in which they could state their intention and ideas they took away from CDIs. Things they’d do, things they wouldn’t do – things they might and might not consider.

I for one would like an answer to the age old question :

Will we see more GW1 skins brought over?

Would an answer be that hard?

Harper.4173:

Communication is the key to any functional relationship.
Even one between a company and its customers. Or a game developer and the player base.

The problem Anet seems to have is that they have a vision of how they want to do things – use that vision to hype the player base then when things change for whatever reason they fail to tell us what’s going on and leave us in the dark.

It happened many times over :

Fractal reset and leader boards, new legendary weapons, new legendary types, introduction of ascended, healing signet nerf, ranger CDI – specifically pets, and so on and so forth.

They seemed to be going in the right direction with CDI threads but then no conclusion is posted.
I’d have liked to see some direct result of CDI threads – if not in the game itself immediately ( because you can’t change it on a moment’s notice) at least in a post on the forum in which they could state their intention and ideas they took away from CDIs. Things they’d do, things they wouldn’t do – things they might and might not consider.

I for one would like an answer to the age old question :

Will we see more GW1 skins brought over?

Would an answer be that hard?

Probably not, but there would be a string of questions to follow that one, if they answered “yes” for instance.

which ones?
when?
why not X? why Y?

Of course, the answer could just as easily be “we don’t know” based on how they feel about Gw1 and its closeness/separation from Gw2, the state of the models for the items that bear the skins, and many other facets.

So, there’s a chance there could be difficulty in even answering a question like that unless there’s been significant preparation or meetings held for it beforehand.

Regarding player feedback, though; I’d like to see more, especially if they guff something up and have to stealth nerf it. No problem with that.

Harper.4173:

Communication is the key to any functional relationship.
Even one between a company and its customers. Or a game developer and the player base.

This is so important. The number one thing that bothers me the most about how Anet has handled this game is the fact that they make changes that they intentionally omit from the patch notes. They claim that it’s because of fixes related to exploits, but obvious exceptions to this rule aside, there’s no reason to hide acknowledgment of an exploit once it’s FIXED. This issue gives the impression that Anet doesn’t trust their player base, their paying customers, enough to be honest and transparent with us, and that just feels so wrong to me.

Dirame.8521:

Purple Miku.7032:

Sure I understand it’s a long read to many, but no one’s forcing you to come here. If you’re looking for a thread that requires less reading, there’s plenty of other ones to choose from. Go on and see for yourselves.

I read your entire post the first time I posted and all I could gather was that you didn’t like a certain change because it caters to newbs which is why my first post in this thread was phrased the way it was.

And you said, “laugh all you want” and that prompted me to think that you’re angry about the 100B nerf. And you’re still not denying it so I’m going to continue assuming that’s what you’re on about. And frankly that is the silliest thing to be angry about. No offence intended.

I am upset about the nerf to greatsword, but that’s among many other things that I’ve listed in my OP which you chose to ignore. If you’re certain that you don’t have a problem understanding what I’ve put in my OP, then why are you choosing to believe that I didn’t list a lot of other things that I’m bothered from instead of just that one particular detail?

You’re being extremely pedantic about it. I understand that most of the things that I’m bothered from you aren’t, but I don’t think that justifies you basically telling me that none of it counts as a valid complaint just because you don’t have a problem with them, which is what I infer from you telling me that you can “summarize this block of text with the fact that I’m upset about 100b getting nerfed’.”

If it helps, I’ll elaborate on why I have a problem with greatswords being nerfed since you are focusing so much on it. I do not do PvP on GW2. I hate it. Because of that, this change does absolutely nothing beneficial for me. Berserker’s Power is an obvious choice of a trait when you’re focusing on maximizing DPS, so burst skills aren’t viable options here unless used as a finishing move. Since mobs and bosses on this game have a ton of HP (which I have complained about in my OP), this means burst skills are pretty much useless altogether.

So it’s pretty obvious that I’m taking once again another hit here. To make things worse, I’m someone that has enjoyed soloing dungeons. I’ve also loved going for my best times and pushing myself to see how fast I can do things such as Lupicus solos or Korga solos and such. This warrior nerf is an additional nerf to the following:

-The implementation of ferocity which completely trivialized all of the lower-tiered dungeons to the point of none of them being even remotely challenging to solo, my damage is very very very noticeably reduced in the higher dungeons (more specifically, anywhere that I’m level near or at level 80 rather than downscaled). Any groups aside from those pug teams consisting of first-timers will find all of the dungeons drastically easier. While some people enjoy the idea of being able to play with totally subpar setups and still be able to win every time, this alienates people that prefer challenge.

-The changes to stacking sigils (i.e. Bloodlust, Accuracy). They were completely fine the way that they were. The DPS increase in a group setting was very negligible in a casual run of any dungeon path and it was never a deciding factor to determine whether or not groups were able to succeed. Not only are they still buggy with underwater vs. land weapons, but there was virtually nothing in PvE to justify the change. Before this change, these sigils were very purposeful. Afterwards they’re not even worth using aside from super niche situations like someone attempting for a Lupicus solo record. The only logical conclusion is that the nerf was either WvW or PvP related.

-The nerf to strength runes. While this change wasn’t nearly as noticeable as the previous two were, it was almost completely redundant as far as PvE is concerned. Prior to them nerfing the damage by 2%, it was already well-established that Scholar runes were optimal for DPS in a group setting with appropriate fury/might uptime. It was already well-established that Strength runes were optimal for solo settings, as a person in a solo setting is never able to maintain 100% uptime on capped might/fury. After the change, these facts remain the same. Absolutely nothing changed other than slightly reduced damage output for Strength runes users. Once again, this change was only because of PvP/WvW. I will agree that Strength runes for sure deserved tweaking, but all Arenanet decided to do was nerf damage. Why? Why not implement a tradeoff for the damage like the conditional 10% damage modifier from Scholar runes? It was a very lazy change and poorly thought out.

I can elaborate more on this, but it’s getting to be a pretty long response as it is. Would you care for me to go into detail about any of the other things that I’ve mentioned in my OP and explain why I’m bothered by them as well?

@OP:

If they are trying to make this an esport, it is a fail. esports do not have balance patches once every 6 months.

This is, and always has been, a PvE game. Any publicity as a result of tournaments is to drive people to PvE.

Black Box.9312:

Harper.4173:

Communication is the key to any functional relationship.
Even one between a company and its customers. Or a game developer and the player base.

This is so important. The number one thing that bothers me the most about how Anet has handled this game is the fact that they make changes that they intentionally omit from the patch notes. They claim that it’s because of fixes related to exploits, but obvious exceptions to this rule aside, there’s no reason to hide acknowledgment of an exploit once it’s FIXED. This issue gives the impression that Anet doesn’t trust their player base, their paying customers, enough to be honest and transparent with us, and that just feels so wrong to me.

Reminds me of changes such as the TP tax exploit being fixed with no mention in the patch notes until a few hours after the patch hit. Luckily I only sold a stack of mithril, but I keep shivering imagining selling some of the more expensive items I have.

And if you’re going to call me out on using the TP tax exploit, it saves you paying 4.99% off of the listing fee. This can be significant, which was why it was addressed after it emerged openly.

The way things are as it stands is anything is only an exploit once it gets fixed, until then it’s simply working as intended, although you shouldn’t abuse things too hardcore.

Ah I think I get it now. The constant patches are simply making PVE less enjoyable than what it was.

In effect, Anet is making you take more time to do what you previously tentatively enjoyed at best, due to bugs, lack of endgame content, and oversimplification of existing content to cater to new players.

It’s almost like the portion of the game you enjoyed is being removed, due to the lower dungeons being rofleasy and the higher ones taking ages due to the warrior reductions.

Understandable. I apologize for and recant my previous statement.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

Ah I think I get it now. The constant patches are simply making PVE less enjoyable than what it was.

In effect, Anet is making you take more time to do what you previously tentatively enjoyed at best, due to bugs, lack of endgame content, and oversimplification of existing content to cater to new players.

It’s almost like the portion of the game you enjoyed is being removed, due to the lower dungeons being rofleasy and the higher ones taking ages due to the warrior reductions.

Understandable. I apologize for and recant my previous statement.

Yeah, you did a good job at concisely explaining most of what I was trying to say but I want to correct you on the “higher ones taking ages” part. Instead of wording it like that, it’d be more accurate to merely state “taking longer” because the difference in for example a Lupicus solo is roughly 40 or so seconds now compared to what they were before any of these nerfs took place. With the soon-to-come nerf, it’s likely going to be another 30 seconds slower.

Thanks for the apology, I’m glad we understand each other.

Disclaimer: Written during the wee hours of the morning. Please ask if I’m being unclear. English is not my native language and so on and so forth.

Hey Miku,

I was actually once in your stream chat and talking about Engineers, to which you replied that they don’t really have a place in groups. I want to express that I do agree with you on the points you made and sympathize with you.

What I said about Engineers is significant to what I want to add: Designing around PvP has hurt many professions greatly in the PvE-land. Sure it’s not visible if one plays a Warrior, Guardian or Elementalist, but it does make a person rethink their time spent in game when it dawns on them that it’s super-hard to get into competent groups with anything but said three professions.

I’m enough of a donkey to not give up on my principles – even if I geared a Warrior just to experience that side too – and really insist on being able to play an Engineer, or a Necromancer if I want to. That’s never going to happen though, because espawts and balancing around it, giving the proverbial finger to the PvE-peons.

I don’t advocate or want easy dungeons, dumb AI mobs or anything of the sort. The way that the balance has been swung around isn’t really comprehensible in any other way than PvP-focus. My Engineer is borderline OP in all PvP formats but complete garbage in PvE unless the group is built specifically to accommodate him.

There has been a lot of talk about potential and whatnot in this thread, but I admit I gave up some time ago. I maybe log in every once in a while to talk to friends but I don’t even think I will have a challenge, a meaningful PvE experience, or even a meaningful PvP experience in this game.

I guess I could be extra salty and say that “Well at least you can solo Arah on your Warrior”, but we both know that that’s just diluting the points you made. Sometimes I thought of that, but then I realized what you basically wrote, with the points I messily wrote about added in. I think most posters have some kind of nostalgia still going for this game, but to be frank, Guild Wars 2 feels to me like a theme park, and not a video game. Sure things could be worse, but the “community” has already been conditioned in a certain way and PvE is down in the gutter (HP sponges, numerous one shots, just generally overwhelming the player in < 1 second instead of challenging them mechanically or in a contest of endurance). That, and despite numerous attempts to “fix” PvP, both game formats have been less than attractive for a long time now.

While I’m complaining, I’m absolutely heartbroken about the way the open world content means throwing a zerg at things and winning. It’s insulting somehow as I used to raid quite religiously in other games, and endure a lot of hardship to overcome specific challenges. Now I can just go AFK during a Tequatl fight as long as I melee some mobs while drinking tea, and still get the chests, which invariably contain garbage. There’s almost no individual responsibility. As long as you can do damage and press a few buttons, and conceptually understand buff/debuff, you’re golden.

I really want to emphasize this as I think it’s the single biggest annoyance in the game besides the PvP-obsession; almost all loot is garbage, and the feeling of success is diluted, even drowned by the worthless crap you get from every chest. Why do I need a chest if the challenge was worth nothing of value? In addition the contents are totally RNG and that’s unfair. It makes people think about what’s important, and that’s maximizing the number of chests / hour. The end result is more zerging, exploiting broken events, farming the stuff that even the lowest common denominator can manage (usually), and what they want is to never fail and always get the chests because we’ve all been brainwashed by now, if ever so slightly.
In this environment, we can’t have challenges, because failing at things is unacceptable because then you would be excluded from the giant loot chest hamster-wheel. If you can’t have a chance for failure, you can’t have a profound challenge and it’s inevitable to feel the way you do.

Quitting said prior game(s) with raiding came about much more “naturally” if you will, as I simply felt I achieved enough and gradually lost interest. With this game, a niggling doubt turned into frustration and just burnt me out. I probably sounded like an angry old person during the post, but really, I don’t enjoy what is there to do.

Best of luck for whatever you decide to do from now on.

Kaiyanwan.8521:

The combo system is well done? The failure that is the combo system is the reason for melee stacking.
The combo system is the reason everything feels the same, because it is all you got to understand and then bunch up and burn down whatever gets close (or stuck in a corner).

Personally, I feel the combo system is done extremely well.

Lostwingman.5034:

I am honestly not surprised about the esports thing now that I think about it. I’m realizing that it seems to be common in mmo’s without a subscription. God knows WoT has a godawful esports set up that that game was most certainly not set up to use.

You shouldn’t be surprised at all about the Esports agenda in GW2 because they discussed and promoted that aspect for almost a year before release. Honestly, it is not like it should be a shock to anyone that PvP would take priority with the game, because they said it indeed would, regularly. Personally I thing pushing Esports in an MMO is a bad idea, and that it must be allowed to develop organically on its own, but that is just my take on it.

Harper.4173:

The problem Anet seems to have is that they have a vision of how they want to do things – use that vision to hype the player base then when things change for whatever reason they fail to tell us what’s going on and leave us in the dark.

Fractal reset and leader boards, new legendary weapons, new legendary types, introduction of ascended, healing signet nerf, ranger CDI – specifically pets, and so on and so forth.

hard to claim that now, since they have a live stream and post videos on the blog that explain what they are trying to do.

Not to mention that they in fact did explain in great detail, every single item you listed here. Yet your claiming they didn’t communicate any of it. If you failed to see the information, that is purely your fault, because it was all over the forums.

Hello Oakwind!

First of all I want to correct you on that— I’m pretty sure you must have misinterpreted me or perhaps I misunderstood your question. Engineers most certainly do have a purpose in groups, but when it comes for record speedclear attempts they are not valuable. The reasoning behind this statement is that they don’t bring anything unique to the table for teams to benefit from— they are a class that’s capable of doing loads of things and have arguably the most utility overall (stealth, blasting fire fields, insane vulnerability stacking, etc).

The thing is, thief is able to provide stealth as well and has the highest DPS in the game aside from elementalists (in optimal conditions, that is), so when stealth is desired a thief is generally a better option in record attempts. As well as that, an elementalist is able to cap vulnerability using fiery rush + weak spot and just about all speedclears will involve this as it’s also the highest DPS in the game by far.

If reflects are needed, guardian is typically first-choice. If time warp/portals are super beneficial for a path/fractal, mesmer it is.

Generally speaking, the more elementalists the better (for record attempts) and you swap them out for a class that is able to provide the utility needed/desired.

For casual runs/pug runs, there’s nothing wrong about a properly built engineer. The biggest problem is that people hear all of these things about all of the different classes and take them too literally. People behave as if they’re not able to do AC without an ele (it’s easy no matter what, lol). People behave as if Lupi is a nightmare without reflects. People behave as if FotM is impossible without a guard (it sure is hell without one at higher levels, but it’s not mandatory to just complete the run). I could go on but I’m sure you get the point.

Oakwind.6187:

Guild Wars 2 feels to me like a theme park, and not a video game. Sure things could be worse, but the “community” has already been conditioned in a certain way and PvE is down in the gutter (HP sponges, numerous one shots, just generally overwhelming the player in < 1 second instead of challenging them mechanically or in a contest of endurance).

Well said… and I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Oakwind.6187:

almost all loot is garbage, and the feeling of success is diluted, even drowned by the worthless crap you get from every chest. Why do I need a chest if the challenge was worth nothing of value? In addition the contents are totally RNG and that’s unfair. It makes people think about what’s important, and that’s maximizing the number of chests / hour. The end result is more zerging, exploiting broken events, farming the stuff that even the lowest common denominator can manage (usually), and what they want is to never fail and always get the chests because we’ve all been brainwashed by now, if ever so slightly.

…you are a very convincing writer. I’d feel like a total kitten if I was a developer for ArenaNet right now and stumbled upon this post.

It’s so true— that is exactly what happens; just about everybody is trying to obtain as many chests as possible because it’s literally all RNG.

The Crown Pavilion this summer was a perfect example of that. I have friends who braindlessly farmed that for over 1,000 gold pavilion reward chests… speaks for itself, eh?

Good morning,

I want to refer to below:

Purple Miku.7032:

First of all I want to correct you on that— I’m pretty sure you must have misinterpreted me or perhaps I misunderstood your question. Engineers most certainly do have a purpose in groups, but when it comes for record speedclear attempts they are not valuable. The reasoning behind this statement is that they don’t bring anything unique to the table for teams to benefit from— they are a class that’s capable of doing loads of things and have arguably the most utility overall (stealth, blasting fire fields, insane vulnerability stacking, etc).

The thing is, thief is able to provide stealth as well and has the highest DPS in the game aside from elementalists (in optimal conditions, that is), so when stealth is desired a thief is generally a better option in record attempts. As well as that, an elementalist is able to cap vulnerability using fiery rush + weak spot and just about all speedclears will involve this as it’s also the highest DPS in the game by far.

If reflects are needed, guardian is typically first-choice. If time warp/portals are super beneficial for a path/fractal, mesmer it is.

Generally speaking, the more elementalists the better (for record attempts) and you swap them out for a class that is able to provide the utility needed/desired.

For casual runs/pug runs, there’s nothing wrong about a properly built engineer. The biggest problem is that people hear all of these things about all of the different classes and take them too literally. People behave as if they’re not able to do AC without an ele (it’s easy no matter what, lol). People behave as if Lupi is a nightmare without reflects. People behave as if FotM is impossible without a guard (it sure is hell without one at higher levels, but it’s not mandatory to just complete the run). I could go on but I’m sure you get the point.

You didn’t misunderstand my question back then, but perhaps I wasn’t clear as to what my intent was. I am indeed interested in challenging myself, and that means doing speed clears, higher level fractals and so on and so forth. Indeed I can do a casual run and be useful, even solo some things, but that’s again down to just how good the Engineer is in PvP; the mass control and utility translates to helpless mobs. However, other professions can do what Engineers can do but better, bringing nothing truly desirable to the table. That little epiphany is what prompted me to ask from you, as an experiment. You aren’t the only person who I have asked, as I prefer asking those who can, instead of relying on… “other sources”.

In the end that’s getting nerfed too, slightly, and the drops are starting to spill from the chalice. I’m not against nerfs like these because reasons, but because I do not understand what the direction here is. What is it that Arenanet is trying to tell me? Am I to resort to reading between the lines, or just smile and wave at my guildmates who are invested into their Warrior, Guardian and Elementalist, convinced that things will get better soon™? This is part of the frustration that I mentioned earlier. I have a list of failed toons really: Engineer, Necromancer, Mesmer and Ranger. Those have been interesting to me, but easily trumped by what my Warrior can do. Ahh… I don’t really want to go back into that.

Purple Miku.7032:

The Crown Pavilion this summer was a perfect example of that. I have friends who braindlessly farmed that for over 1,000 gold pavilion reward chests… speaks for itself, eh?

It does. I’ve had many a debate with my fellow guild members about content. They simply want more of it and faster, and nobody seems to mind the glaring holes in gameplay or the mindless grind attached to everything.

In that regard, I sincerely hope that Arenanet would continue to revise and iterate on the game. The recent challenge modes attached to the Living Story 2 ep 4 give us a glimpse that it is possible to implement challenge modes and attached rewards to things. I absolutely loved running things in Hard Mode in Guild Wars and I wish I could do that here too. What I don’t want to do is farm bosses for 1000 RNG chests, for any reason. Some people want to and I have no opinion for or against what is good for them.

It was good sharing thoughts with you, and reading some of the discussion in this thread. All the best to your future ventures.

I’m pretty sure engi was just used in AC and COE story records. So if you’d feel free to elaborate on this ‘no good for record run’ attitude and provide actual video evidence of doing them without engi that would be cool. Or we can carry on with the ‘make claims without even spending two seconds to confirm them’ behaviour, like people have done to Guang and myself so many times.

Pretty sure engi was not the reason for those records. There was no previous CoE record. And the AC record was beaten by less than 10 seconds. Could easily be done with a thief instead. Engi has no place while fgs and icebow still work.

Feel free to beat it then.

I hardly know anyone who’s ever even done CoE story without exploiting to the last boss tbh. I also don’t remember any of the encounters in the path at all, so I can’t recall whether or not the majority of them are FGSable.

Basically any boss that you can make use of FGS for, vuln is taken care of. Pretty much any time that stealth is needed, thief is just about always picked. Since I don’t know CoE story and don’t really care about story modes, I can’t really say much about them. Engineer might legitimately be better to take for some of them, but I can’t confirm that.

Anywho, any particular reason why you’re always so belligerent with me and just about everyone else? Seeking attention or what?

ocirne.7915:

Although, the reason that this was possible, was that there were countless of interactions between countless of skills. in GW2, there is nothing of that, there is no Sever Attery -> Gash, none of the skills interact with any of the other skills in any way.

To start of right from the bat, I have to say im WAY more of a PvP player than a PvE player in this game. Simply because when I played my first dungeon and realized how there were such blatant exploits to beating it to the point where the most optimal strategy was to turn off my brain, I instantly said, “nope not for me.” I’ve had the game since launch and, to this day, no legendary and just your basic exotic gear + acended trinkets (no acended backpiece). But I really don’t care to get a legendary so whatever.

However addressing this quote, from a PvP perspective, this really isn’t the case. As player dependent skill becomes greater, it becomes even less of an issue as there are many different class combinations with different skills that can play off of one another. Sure there are “cheap” tactics in the game, but for the most part if a team took the time and put in the effort (which many in the pvp community don’t want to do – so much whine instead) were to fight the one-trick-pony groups, the team who put in the most effort will win.

Heck, in the early days of PvE, there were threads in forums saying how dungeon running is where the PvE game is at. The open world stuff was bland and uninteresting. In dungeons however, you were forced into a 5-man havoc squad to take on what was in there. At the time, people were trying to figure out the best ways to run through dungeons, and the lobotomy tools we now know today for dungeon running weren’t really played with.

From a present day PvE perspective however, I can certainly see the case for this. The ai is too easily exploitable and creates dungeon runs which require the least amount of thought possible to accomplish. Let’s face it, as an example, wall LOSing mobs + FGS4 kills virtually all things no matter what.

It’s important I say the words, “too easily” because, to a certain extent, it should be easy to take advantage of mobs. For example, if you use immob on a target and have a tankier class hit that target, there is a very good chance that the immobed target will switch aggro. That’s good game design. Instead what we get is wave after wave of trash mobs which are most easily destroyed by blatant ai exploitations. Ironically given the risk of the fight, where you can easily get 1-shotted by a boss or by a pack of 10 trash mobs, I completely understand why people turn to such blunt and direct tools to tackle such problems.

In a pvp comparison, it’s like I’m trying to play an entire game centered around the map called Skyhammer. In pvp land, Skyhammer is the symbol of everything wrong with the game – I’m serious on this. Nobody who takes the pvp in this game seriously likes Skyhammer. It involves a cannon that has a ridiculously huge radius that can 1 shot you while you’re fighting someone. Oh and you can’t dodge it. Also the map is filled with other 1-shot mechanics involving pushing or pulling people off the map. It’s not fun when you just want to fight other people.

Back to PvE though, I’m certain that there are people out there who would try and argue that the game should provide some level of easy PvE runs because a MMO needs to have some stable farming measures so that people can buy their gear that they want/need. To them, I say look at where the economy was when the game first started, and look at where it is now. At the start of the game, you could buy 100 gems for like 10 to 20 silver. Now you have to spend double digits of gold. Just 3 to 5 months ago, legendaries were around 2000 gold. Now they are around 3.5 to 4000 gold. The inflation in the game is real. If you made the game somewhat more difficult to play, it would be easier for everyone to get what they need – as backwards as that sounds.

To the OP: I appreciate the thread. I don’t know why it was moved to profession balance page as that doesn’t make sense.

Purple Miku.7032:

I hardly know anyone who’s ever even done CoE story without exploiting to the last boss tbh. I also don’t remember any of the encounters in the path at all, so I can’t recall whether or not the majority of them are FGSable.

Basically any boss that you can make use of FGS for, vuln is taken care of. Pretty much any time that stealth is needed, thief is just about always picked. Since I don’t know CoE story and don’t really care about story modes, I can’t really say much about them. Engineer might legitimately be better to take for some of them, but I can’t confirm that.

Anywho, any particular reason why you’re always so belligerent with me and just about everyone else? Seeking attention or what?

Stop making bold claims and then making absolutely zero effort to prove them and it will no longer be necessary. Do you know who else likes to make claims without any knowledge or experience? The supposed casuals you dislike. Open your mind a little.

If anything you’re the one making the bold claims. It’s common sense that in order to maximize DPS you take as many of the classes that are capable of producing it as you possibly can unless certain utilities are necessary in order to speed up the run, in which case you’d substitute for them. Since engineers offer absolutely nothing unique, this is why in the majority of cases they generally aren’t chosen for record runs. It’s a pretty simple concept, so I’m kind of surprised that someone being in one of the most elite PvE guilds would struggle so much with it tbh.

You can continue to keep amusing me if you’d like, but you should probably take your business elsewhere and try to talk to people that don’t regard you as an angry child.

Here is how I see it. Record run is done with engineer. You claim engineer isn’t worth taking for a record. Do faster run without engineer. Claim proven. Axe having higher co efficient versus gs was taken as ‘common sense’ until people actually bothered to do the math rather than just assuming strife was right. Again, open your eyes. Experiment with new ideas. Dub mentioned phalanx strength to me, I entertained it (while most dismissed it) forwarded it to the rest of the guild and now it’s considered a decent fractal build or a pug dungeon build. Open your eyes. Actually test things yourself before assuming.

Ironically we in rT were never using pure axe even while everyone was saying oh axe is best dps. An arguement you guys had with us led to you finally testing GS properly and so nike revised his conclusion on warrior and then you revised it again and went back to what weve been using pretty much the whole time (xD). Most of us go by what we feel is best and that tends to differ slightly from almost all meta builds posted by DnT. Some of you guys are almost as bad as Guang sometimes. The game isnt played on a spreadsheet. Although sometimes i think its more of an EU NA divide. SC seems pretty similar to us in build approach.

Also your arguement for engi is laughable. There was no previous record for CoE. People dont just shoot out records every few minutes. Also everything in CoE story mode can be fgs’d or icebowed. Theres no rooted bosses and theres plenty of walls/pillars to pulls mobs to.

The engi beat our ac time by less than 10 seconds. From that its pretty safe to say the only difference was luck/slightly smoother run overall. Engi was wasted. Thief was fine. If we want to retake the record we also have to find people that care enough to want to beat a record with no new strats (lame).

Carighan.6758:

I think as far as balancing goes, just being more daring would help a lot. I mean look at WoW, 6,8 million subs still, 12,1 mil max, and 10 years going.
And what do they do? They change tons of skills constantly, exchanging the entire functionality, merging them, splitting them off, removing them, adding them.

Yes, this upsets the balance, constantly.

But, between the frequent wild swings in balance, the devs get very very useful input about what the actual underlying problems are. So over time, the WoW-balance-line slowly homes in on the target.

Ofc, being not nearly there after 10 years, and WoW still being easily best-balanced MMO I’ve played, might also bring you to the – IMO correct – conclusion that balancing MMOs is a futile task. I agree, complexity of combat + skills + classes + gear is way too high to be balanced or even close to balanced, no matter what.
Still, if nothing else WoW’s way of constantly re-mixing their classes keeps things more fresh.

At it, ANet! Come on, try it a bit! The combat and it’s balance are stale from 2 years of neglect outside of ignorable miniscule sPvP-centric changes. Do something big. Give me 16 glamours as a Mesmer. Swap Clone / Shatter skills, making clone-generation the class ability. Make elites (across the board) low-cooldown super-power skills which completely define your current playstyle due to dominating it.
Will these work? Probably not! But you won’t get any input without trying it out!

And this is exactly the problem which I wrote in another thread. ANet is TOO AFRAID to touch anything because they’re so focused on e-sports, but the bottom line is that the more you touch the more competitive the game becomes. Why? Because then the meta doesn’t exist.

You heard me, the less meta there is, the more competitive games are. Look at all the major games in e-sports. Starcraft, League, DoTA. Yes, they have some metas in them, but they are very far from being set in stone. In the latter two, the 2/1/2 lane split early evolved into 1/1/1/2 into blobbing into lane swapping with now a meta that only really exists for the first five minutes of professional games. With starcraft, MLG players pull off strategies sometimes in the middle of a tournament that absolutely nobody has ever seen before nor expected to work.

These games also see near-constant tweaks and adjustments, reworks, and changes which can makes something go form awful to OP-meta-breaking in a patch. But that’s what they’re designed to do. When a change occurs and a meta breaks, players have to recreate strategies. They need to totally dive back into the game just like they did when it launched and nobody knew what was going on. And when the meta is broken or is constantly changing and nothing is set in stone, the game feels not only more fresh, but ultimately, more balanced. Players will not necessarily know what works all the time, and only months down the road perhaps will someone new discover something incredible. As it stands, GW2 is stale. And it’s not getting any better. ANet needs to stop with the promotional stuff for their “e-sport” which is unbalanced, stale, and lacks diversity due to a lack of necessary overhauls they’ve been ignoring instead for “low-hanging fruit” fixes which have accomplished nothing. Nobody wants to watch a sport where there’s no anticipation for a bizarre strategy or major play to win. And as this game becomes increasingly more stale for PvE players with the failing “balance” around sPvP, new games will emerge for both the PvE players and the PvP ones. ANet has the potential to make this one of the greatest games ever to hit the market, yet all we’re seeing are LS updates which frankly are too far and few between and nonsense e-sport coverage and videos from their studio about the game we already know about. They need to freshen up their game. They need to break down the walls they’ve been doing so hard to hold together which ultimately just hold everyone back and wish to make them leave even more.

I can’t believe you’re actually telling me to go out of my way to grind mind-numbingly monotonous beginner paths for RNG that hardly anyone ever does more than once per character nor will give the slightest ounce of a —-- about, just so that I can prove my claim online to the almighty certainly-not-full-of-himself maha.7902.

Do you even think before you type your messages?

P.S. Phalanx Strength is still terrible.

RuneScape introduced Pay to Win with the Squeal. ArenaNet isn’t perfect and you’ll hear me complain about them elsewhere (esp. slow bugfixing on very simple bugs I can fix for them for free), but they’re not in the same order of magnitude of mismanagement.

I was one of the elite group of players who left RuneScape en-masse during that debacle. By this, I mean a player that had 99 for every single skill. There was about 250-325 of us who left together, we were in partial communication. The update to erase free players from the high scores entirely after that was motivated in part by the majority of maxed players who all terminated RuneScape subscriptions – it doesn’t look nice for your game if your leaderboard is filled with people who had already quit.

More on topic confusion works differently between players and PvE, as well as Warrior skill 5, among others. There are precedents for setting things differently between the PvE and any form of PvP mode, which proves there is no technical limitation – and thus, the act of trying to balance three entire gamemodes on a single situation seems to indicate apathy towards proper optimisation.

As an example, control is hideously overpowered in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. Conditions are hideously overpowered in PvP and hideously useless in PvE except fringe cases. Ranged weapons are ok in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. Mobility skills are ok in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. I’m sure you can think of many more examples.

Hayashi.3416:

RuneScape introduced Pay to Win with the Squeal. ArenaNet isn’t perfect and you’ll hear me complain about them elsewhere (esp. slow bugfixing on very simple bugs I can fix for them for free), but they’re not in the same order of magnitude of mismanagement.

I was one of the elite group of players who left RuneScape en-masse during that debacle. By this, I mean a player that had 99 for every single skill. There was about 250-325 of us who left together, we were in partial communication. The update to erase free players from the high scores entirely after that was motivated in part by the majority of maxed players who all terminated RuneScape subscriptions – it doesn’t look nice for your game if your leaderboard is filled with people who had already quit.

More on topic confusion works differently between players and PvE, as well as Warrior skill 5, among others. There are precedents for setting things differently between the PvE and any form of PvP mode, which proves there is no technical limitation – and thus, the act of trying to balance three entire gamemodes on a single situation seems to indicate apathy towards proper optimisation.

As an example, control is hideously overpowered in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. Conditions are hideously overpowered in PvP and hideously useless in PvE except fringe cases. Ranged weapons are ok in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. Mobility skills are ok in PvP applications and hideously useless in PvE. I’m sure you can think of many more examples.

Good post and you’re very right, however I want point out that control is useful in PvE but can’t be spammed (and for good reason). Defiance I find is perfectly fine in dungeons, but the scaling in open world is utterly grotesque. For example there’s simply no possibility of getting a deep feeze off on a boss in an open world zerg because by the time the defiance stacks finally are removed some clown would have certainly reapplied them instantly. The system has its flaws, but I’d rather have defiance than being able to perpetually cc bosses.

Btw, cool to see another veteran RS player. I probably wasn’t maxed at the same time as you, but I got my completionist cape in jan 2012. I think it was pretty obvious that the game and company went in a terrible direction once Andrew & Paul sold off their shares and left the board of directors. They were absolute geniuses for it too tbh. They left right when they knew their game’s potential for growth was at its peak, and right before it went to hell.

Yeah. Pve is just ball and burst. What i miss is an opportunity to every class to be good in any aspect of the game. Condi, cc, burst, sustain, bunker. A lot of players stop playing because they cant do his/her favourite game mode on high level with his/her favourite class

McWolfy.5924:

Yeah. Pve is just ball and burst. What i miss is an opportunity to every class to be good in any aspect of the game. Condi, cc, burst, sustain, bunker. A lot of players stop playing because they cant do his/her favourite game mode on high level with his/her favourite class

The same is applicable to WvW. I recently had to stop running with mine or reroll a new class.

@RS: I was also in that boat with a very special character of mine which also got destroyed in the change. Terrible shame what happened to that game, and just how absolutely massive the damage can be with sloppy design and failing to understand the game state and its players – a path ANet is dangerously encroaching with their current design philosophy.

I’m guessing you had a pure. :/

Ranged tank. 99 Ranged/Defense/HP/Magic at 53 prayer with 104 combat with almost nothing in attack/strength. That change really screwed me over as when it landed I instantly hit the maximum level and there went my thousands of hours since elementary school of trying to perfect my build and do the game content without the rest of it as well as my hardcore PvP’ing career. Consequently, HP on armor led me surpassed by those who were simply richer and I just gave up.

I knew of someone who was a ranged tank. Those types didn’t start to become too popular up until pking started to morph into the trashy form of everyone congesting into edgeville— I preferred it way back before that happened when ranged tanks were less known and caught people offguard. Especially when Karil’s xbow was the #1 ranged weapon and before they added those kitten dark bows and void armor. Back then, ranged tanks were the absolute freakin’ best.

Long before I maxed out all of my combat stats in the 2004-2006ish era, I too had high ranged. The days before magic shortbow’s special attack was only 50%… omg. So fun.

I’m next to positive void and dark bows were added before karil’s, as the barrows addition came long after slayer if I’m not mistaken. I was of the sort that did wilderness runs and stake dueling.

Though you’d never see a ranged tank play a dark bow. That was a PJ/safe-zone hugging pure build as tanks would run excal specials with a rcbow for the added defense with void to gain massive defense to the point where it would take > 99 attack to land a hit reliably, meanwhile running 10% increased ranged accuracy and damage from the armor.