Guild Wars 2

Since the inception of megaservers I’ve noticed that with world boss kills/meta events that it’s getting increasingly hard to land enough hits on bosses for the loot. I personally run a zerker staff ele as my main, so AoE damage is no problem. Tagging is no problem. The only problem I’m seeing now is that tagging isn’t enough anymore. The way the game deals out loot is like a massive DPS race. You do enough damage, you stand a better chance of getting loot.

On some champions I do the most amount of damage that I can, and don’t even get a champ box/bag drop from it.

This is becoming a legitimate issue (if it weren’t before already), and this thread is here to help find a resolution to this problem. Is there a way to re-orient the system’s loot tables and reward-for-kill participation a little better to accommodate the advent of megaservers?

This has been a problem for months and months. The solution is for them to vastly lower the dmg % done threshold for loot allocation. Otherwise they should just scrap the current broken system and go back to the standard MMO mob tagging system.

The loot allocation system has been broken for a long time. On many occasions I’ve arrived at the Centaur event, leap of faith, followed by whirling wrath and gotten an exotic loot bag from the last 3 warbeasts alive, even with 40 people slapping it before I arrived. Other times being in the zerg and going all out on a champ gave me nohting.
There seems to be no obvious way to improve the loot chance other than being in a party.
(Lets also not forget getting white champ bags when you solo a champ)

That’s what happens when you remove roles, the game itself is a DPS race.

Can we maybe get some more practical ideas about what could be done to remedy this?

Add very challenging content (which I can’t see happening) or bring back roles.

Don’t form zergs over 50 people. I’ve never seen any hard confirmation, but during the Assault Knight debacle that theory seemed to hold pretty well. Basically it seems the internal loot register for individual mobs caps out at around 50-100 people at any given time, but somehow reallocates credit to new arrivals even if they dealt much less damage.

This doesn’t apply to events, Tequatl does give loot for most participants. However there are a few problems here too: You must get credit on an individual mob of some sort to get credit for the event, and if a mob’s death finishes the event that mob doesn’t contribute properly (test this with the guards during the Frozen Maw event, only tagging the Veteran will rarely, if ever, get you credit)

Not sure about mobs being despawned by the event (especially those alive at completion, like Tequatl battery defense), so the best approach probably is to find a medium-sized blob that is guaranteed to kill its enemies, but doesn’t go over the 50+ tag limit. If there’s any kind of large, hp-loaded structure go for that instantly, I have yet to fail tagging the “Destroy the Dragon Totem” event (gold credit on a zerk mesmer only spamming sword autoattack) but struggle to even get bronze on the guards. (Frozen Maw chain in case you don’t know)

This is a bigger issue in Wub than anything, everything falls WAY too fast for the server to credit people.

Best idea: Remove kill drops from bosses. Rewards are now bestowed via the pop up chest and the criteria is participation in the event (i.e. if you get bronze, silver, or gold, you get the pop up chest).

They already have this for the non-mob bosses.

There are 2 problems:
- Cap should be REMOVED
- Items should drop from corpses like in WvW because in timed events there’s no time to watch the ground for loot and even a sound effects or particles if precursor dropped

But IMHO I never understood why in MMOS there’s no full autoloot, lemme just enjoy hitting mobs and stop worrying about looking around spamming F.

mtpelion.4562:

Best idea: Remove kill drops from bosses. Rewards are now bestowed via the pop up chest and the criteria is participation in the event (i.e. if you get bronze, silver, or gold, you get the pop up chest).

They already have this for the non-mob bosses.

I believe you’re onto something there.. I just hope Anet takes heed.

I had given up on doing the tramp chain in FGS. With a zerg of 30+ people I wasn’t getting credit for any hits, because the beasties were going down so fast. It wasn’t worth the effort of running around.

I did notice that was a bit different today, especially with the Icebrood troika. It actually took longer than 30 seconds to kill each one, so you were guaranteed getting a hit on them.

No matter what Anet does it will not satisfy everyone but I do think things can be improved. I would rather these champs be more than a spam skills and/or auto attack and move on to the next one. Anet should add more to the bosses and how they function to force people to do more than stand still and spam attacks and rush on to the next one.

People would complain about getting less loot with things taking longer but Anet could simply add scaled rewards to the events based on participation. This would make it so that the more you do, the harder the fight is, the better rewards you could get. There are so many events throughout the game world that are not the simple kill repeat, Anet should implement this more especially on level 80 zones.

The issue would be if Anet made champs and events more complex and worth fighting then they would have to ensure the players get more loot and/or better loot/rewards to encourage people to do the events rather than mindlessly kill champs over and over and watch at the RNG screws them over and over.

Can’t they just set a minimum hit? Maybe for normal mobs 1 hit, veteran mobs 3 hits, champion mobs 10 hits, world bosses 10 hits? From a server point of view it’d make a heck load more sense counting hits than summing all the damage values, and it’ll stop the dps race issue.

There is a reasonable logic behind this: If you do not manage to cause enough damage to an enemy, you do not qualify for a reward. While I can agree with this is system on a basic level, it is very quirky. You get party vs. single player, weird scaling of party vs. party. On champs and world bosses, you usually should be able to tag enough. If you don´t manage to do this, chances are loot shouldn´t really be your character´s biggest concern. Tagging in mass events is completely broken though in my opinion. Most players can destroy a group of standard enemies with 2 AOE attacks, it becomes a game of where you are at the very moment mobs spawn and the tenth of a second when to activate your skill. Not a very satisfying system at all.

Ok .. before complaining about this, you should maybe think twice how the solution may look :

1. Mobs get even more hitpoints. Has anyone problems tagging the Champion Icewolf at Jormag ?

2. We get no loot at all.

The champion Icewolf has the “best” of both .. millions of hitpoints and no loot.
Do you really want all events infested with mobs like that one ?

Izdubar.9540:

This has been a problem for months and months. The solution is for them to vastly lower the dmg % done threshold for loot allocation. Otherwise they should just scrap the current broken system and go back to the standard MMO mob tagging system.

If they went back to the standard MMO mob tagging system, most of the population would be mad as hell. I came here to get away from that, because no matter what, that was more broken than this.

I have no problem, and I just use Rifle for world events so my damage is junk.

Group up with other people there. That helps the no-loot thing in EOTM, so worth a try at world events.

This is the whole problem with the game. In most MMO’s whoever hits the mob first gets kill credit for it, or if you are in a party credit is cycled through each party member one kill at a time with a greed/need system on rare loot.

In GW2 everyone gets full credit. This lead to the rise of the zerg. 100 people can run around in a group and kill 100 things in 10 minutes to get 100 loot. if those 100 people spread out into small groups of 5 people each and populated the world everyone would get less loot.

Basically the DPS meta, the zerg problem, the lack of loot impact (everything feels cheap), the lack of roles, the server lag, and the fact that all bosses are HP sponges, all boil down to this one central problem: Anet changed the loot rules to be “more friendly”. Switch back to traditional MMO loot rule sets and 90% of the games issues melt away.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Switch back to traditional MMO loot rule sets and 90% of the games issues melt away.

Instead we would then have the old problems of killstealing / griefing and everything else that comes with that. Oh .. and people maybe just don’t play anymore .. that would of course solve all problems

Psychol.5783:

There are 2 problems:
- Cap should be REMOVED
- Items should drop from corpses like in WvW because in timed events there’s no time to watch the ground for loot and even a sound effects or particles if precursor dropped

But IMHO I never understood why in MMOS there’s no full autoloot, lemme just enjoy hitting mobs and stop worrying about looking around spamming F.

One glaring problem immediately comes to mind… what do you do when your bags are full? If it’s full auto-loot you’d either need a background type of message which some people would complain they missed and therefore lost a lot of loot or you’d need a foreground message which some people would complain got them killed when the message got in the way. Then you have the range issue… can you loot that corpse a thousand feet away or do you need to get to a minimum distance, in which case you’re still chasing loot anyhow.

I like how WvW does it. I have the AoE loot set to “L” (for Loot), the loot bags drop at my feet, I hit “L” and collect them. Nice, clean and tidy. If your inventory is full you still see the bags on the ground by you and it’s pretty obvious.

I have noticed this a lot since the patch as well.

It seems like champions have a 50 person tag-cap. People tagging them too late get nothing. That’s not fun.

In general I don’t find zerging every megaevent with a 200 man zerg to be especially compelling. I’d much rather ANet created more separate instances with less players rather than having 200+ megazergs.

Dee Jay.2460:

I have noticed this a lot since the patch as well.

It seems like champions have a 50 person tag-cap. People tagging them too late get nothing. That’s not fun.

So you think a 1 person cap would be better ? I still prefer the 50 .. and my god .. if i don’t get a bag of one of the Avatars at Wurm or whatever .. they weren’t even Champs before the patch.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Basically the DPS meta, the zerg problem, the lack of loot impact (everything feels cheap), the lack of roles, the server lag, and the fact that all bosses are HP sponges, all boil down to this one central problem: Anet changed the loot rules to be “more friendly”. Switch back to traditional MMO loot rule sets and 90% of the games issues melt away.

I fail to see how lack of roles (which was actually done by design; there was never supposed to be dedicated roles) and lack of encounter mechanics is a loot issue.

Not to mention going back to an old MMO loot system would completely destroy people’s interest in doing open-world events. Everyone would just run instanced content for the guaranteed rewards.

Firstly, what they need to do is work out a better system for scaling, so that the encounter stays at least equally challenging depending on how many people are there. Not only will all players need to participate to succeed, but they won’t need to cap the encounter scaling either, or it can be capped at a higher number.

I personally thing that each world boss needs to have their own scaling formula linked primarily to their mechanics, as opposed to just health and add spawns. For example, the Shatterer would look something like this:

• Imprisonment Crystals – For every 3 people, an extra person will be trapped. For every 30 people, The Shatterer will also do an AoE verson of this move aimed at the largest congregation of players. All players caught will be trapped.
• Summons Pulsating Crystals – For every 3 people, an extra crystal spawns at a random location. For every 20 people, The Shatterer will also summon 5 Empowering Crystals, increasing the damage and health regen of all Branded in the area.

With a scaling system such as this, because all players would need to participate lest the event fail, they can then reward based on how long the person has been there participating, as opposed to how much damage was done.

Beldin.5498:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Switch back to traditional MMO loot rule sets and 90% of the games issues melt away.

Instead we would then have the old problems of killstealing / griefing and everything else that comes with that. Oh .. and people maybe just don’t play anymore .. that would of course solve all problems

The 500k+ players in the previous Wildstar beta would imply otherwise…

Also how do you killsteal? Whoever hits the mob first gets credit, there is no stealing, you hit it then it is yours, end of story. Unlike GW2 where someone can tag a mob but then a glass cannon thief comes along and bursts it down, steals your loot and you get nothing. So yes GW2 has kill stealing and griefing, but traditional MMO’s do not.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The 500k+ players in the previous Wildstar beta would imply otherwise…

Also how do you killsteal? Whoever hits the mob first gets credit, there is no stealing, you hit it then it is yours, end of story. Unlike GW2 where someone can tag a mob but then a glass cannon thief comes along and bursts it down, steals your loot and you get nothing. So yes GW2 has kill stealing and griefing, but traditional MMO’s do not.

Take a Necro for example, or Ranger that can lay down traps before mobs actually spawn. Or simply the problem of a melee character that runs to a mob, and every ranged user just easy tags the mob before him.

Also in games like Lineage 2 the person who did the most damage got the loot. Was always nice when i fought a mob, and then a china farmer with his assassin killed it with a big backstab from behind and picked up the loot.

And Wildstar .. those people are mostly WoW players and used to that i think, since Wildstars audience is really different than GW2.

My issue with Meta Events directly it’s the huge FPS Drops.

Okay WvW may be optimized for Zergs, but PvE simply isn’t, doing world bosses since this game started i’m very disappointed i started having unplayable experiences, specially at Karka Queen.

VOLKON.1290:

I like how WvW does it. I have the AoE loot set to “L” (for Loot), the loot bags drop at my feet, I hit “L” and collect them. Nice, clean and tidy. If your inventory is full you still see the bags on the ground by you and it’s pretty obvious.

I believe WvW loot system could be further improved. I can’t count how many times I’ve gone head-long into a rival zerg with our’s and tagged mobs left right and centre, and like most people, yes I eventually get beat-up on. No one is around to revive you and here you see all these loot bags piling up around you for the kill credit that you just got for tagging the mobs that helped kill you.

The loot doesn’t sit there forever, I believe it’s something like 2mins before it’s gone. What could really help is if the loot that dropped for you (ie. that you earned) could respawn back at the waypoint at the same time as you do.