Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen this mentioned multiple times on the forums already, but no response from any staffers. I figure this is worth its own thread, as it’s one of my huge gripes with this game (as well as some of my friends).

I recently switched from playing a warrior to playing my guardian. Specifically, an almost entirely support based guardian using scepter+shield/staff and shouts on utility skills.

The first problem is the DE rewards for your participation: they don’t seem to take into account buffs, healing or anything other than straight damage dealt to the event monsters/objects. Using empower as an example, I can increase people’s power at my level by about 1260 at my current level, which more or less doubles most people’s damage. Applying this buff to upwards of 20 people in a large event would amount to me contributing tens of thousands of damage. What does the game award me with? Zip, ziltch, nothing. I was actually shooting myself in the foot by channeling for 4 seconds and not helping out. Another instance of this: healing. I have 2 heals on my staff skillbar, my healing breeze which heals multiple people in a cone, and regeneration on a shout. In addition to these I have two forms of protection (33% damage reduction) from a shout and my shield offhand to further mitigate damage to players. My contribution input for these are seemingly nothing, as I consistently get bronze/silver contribution levels when my auto-attacking warrior contributing a FRACTION of what my guardian does would easily obtain gold level participation in what I would consider most if not all events that I went to where I didn’t come in late.

The second problem is monster loot. While I’m busy protecting people that are dealing the damage so that we can better succeed at the mission, I am not tagging monsters and getting loot. So I have to choose between keeping my team alive with heals and boons, and auto attacking with my staff to tag the incoming monsters. This is not in any way ideal or acceptable. The loot issue also arises with classes who are simply unable to tag monsters quickly and effectively, such as elementalists, whose spells often have a delay associated with them. When in many of the larger events, monsters will often die before the ground targeted AOE spells will even hit.

So there it is. Those are my two main gripes with Dynamic Events in their current state. It would be greatly appreciated if ArenaNet could address these (hopefully sooner than later) as it really does take a lot of the fun of events being shoehorned into playing my character other than how it was desgined to be played because I simply cannot get rewarded properly for my efforts for playing my way. I can also imagine it being frustrating when classes simply don’t have the tools to be competitive for tagging mobs.

I agree completely and have seen several threads that mention this but absolutely no dev response. DE and WvWvW share this same problem. I love my guardian to death but have had a hard time getting gold at a lot of events if I don’t hurry to tag mobs.

I agree too. I wasn’t able to get any loot in WvW because in the time I need to cast a spell, the foe is already died. I wanted also to raise a Guardian, but relating to this issue you are talking about, i decided to wait.

Staff guardians are actually great at being credit hogs. The staff auto-attack is strong and fast enough to claim credit in a large AoE, but not really enough to kill things.

I agree completely though; Nowadays I won’t rez someone if I know there is a possibility that I won’t get gold, or i’ll miss out on AoEing a wave of 15 enemies for an extra 1500 exp.

But instead of calling me a selfish, it would be better to rework the system to accommodate playing as a team, rather than DEs being a rush to AoE tag things so that wouldn’t be necessary.

The way I see it, doing anything should award credit. If you heal or put boons on people, you should awarded for every monster a player booned kills.

If you stop to ressurrect someone, instead of being cheated out of a wave of exp, you should get exp from everything in a 1200 yard radius.

I agree completely. Dynamic Events are fun now if there are only 2-3 players and your support makes the difference between winning and losing, but as soon as the zerg arrives, you have to focus singlymindedly on reaching and tagging the mobs in the 3 seconds that they’re alive.
I carry a staff on my Guardian for reasons mentioned above, though I like it the least of all weapon choices. On my Engi I spam grenades and get 5 times the loot I got using any other weapon.