Guild Wars 2

Tigaseye.2047:

They have said we will need all ascended to raid.

They have not. You are likely referring to a controversial tweet that can be interpreted in multiple ways, and included speculative words like “should” and “probably”. Even if you really really WANT to understand the tweet the way you do, the alleged “requirement” only applied to the very very last boss of all the raids, and guess what – all the other raid bosses do drop ascended gear.

So the very worst case scenario would be that you have to kill the lower bosses several times before trying the very last one. However, I doubt even that will be the case.

And don’t forget that ascended trinkets are easy to get from multiple sources in the game, and are not a grind. So when comparing the “power” of “people in ascended” and “people in exotics” one should probably assume that both do have ascended trinkets.

Anyway, there is another thread about this topic, and a discussion about “is it required or not” is better suited there:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/How-will-raids-actually-require-Ascended/5625315

Shikigami.4013:

Just a side note about gold buying: What you write makes no sense at all. If anyone is willing to spend real money to get ingame gold, the “current gem to gold ratio” which you say has “doubled” works in his favor and not against him. Because now he gets twice as much gold if he buys gems from ArenaNet and exchanges them for gold, which is a perfectly legit and intended thing to do. So the gem to gold ratio in no way drives people to 3rd party sites.

Whoa, whoa, whoa… spending money for in game currency is an intended thing to do? Blasphemy! I assume you mean it is intended to deter people from going to 3rd party sites?

Do you realize, if you play the cards right as a developer, make it into a state of inflation such that it deems buying gems to save time inevitable. If there is that option 3rd party or not, there is something wrong with the in game economics. I don’t understand why people are ok with gems to gold. Gems for items is understood.

Devs probably understand that if you make rewards dismal, people will pay up to make up for it. Dirty tactics but clever nonetheless.

When I try make my ascended armor, the first thing I discovered is that there were time gated items. Then I saw the TP that such items were also too expensive to my standards, it seemed impossible to buy about 30 bolts of damask.

So I changed my tactic, I calculated how many days I have to. Put a goal to do one bolt of damask per day, in something like 30 days I finished my full armor.

jessiejay.3625:

Whoa, whoa, whoa… spending money for in game currency is an intended thing to do? Blasphemy! I assume you mean it is intended to deter people from going to 3rd party sites?

Do you realize, if you play the cards right as a developer, make it into a state of inflation such that it deems buying gems to save time inevitable. If there is that option 3rd party or not, there is something wrong with the in game economics. I don’t understand why people are ok with gems to gold. Gems for items is understood.

Devs probably understand that if you make rewards dismal, people will pay up to make up for it. Dirty tactics but clever nonetheless.

I don’t quite understand your reaction. Exchnging gems to gold has been in the game since release, and it would be horribly silly to exchange gold for gems first, and then exchange those gems back to gold. The only OTHER way to get gems is by spending real money, so what else would the intended use of a “gems to gold” exchange be than to obtain gold for real money?

Of course this was fully intended, and has been working fine for 3 years now.

6 hours a day is not casual.

crepuscular.9047:

Dear Anet,

first of all, sorry i’m ranting here.
secondly, sorry if i’m double posting.

I’m posting this on my thoughts of your team’s comments prior to HoT’s launch that your team wants to have players to try out other build variants, and what I found that really turn me off, a casual player.

I know some hardcore players will probably flame me for what I’m going to say below.

Just some background on how long I have played GW2 (excluding GW1), and how frequent I play and what most of my time spent on during my play time, which other casual players may or may not share.

I started playing GW2 about 7 months ago, and I spent about 5-6hours a day playing, sometimes double the hours on weekends.

Each day I would spend 3-4hours on WB follow by about 1hr on fractal, the remaining time exploring tyria, map meta events, and occasionally story.

So, with the above frequency i spent on in-game contents, I finally saved enough to go for ascended armors, bought the new recipes and was really excited to try out the new Viper states.

However, when I opened up my crafting list and scrolled down to check out materials I need to craft the new ascended insignia, excitement turned to grieve, and a feeling of lost of hopes.

To craft just one of these insignia, just base on the cost of the material from TP, it’s equivalent to 300g. If to farm for the material, as a casual player, it’s going to take months.

To hardcore players, it probably will not take that long to either gather 1200g or farm for the materials, but to the casual players that wanting to try out new builds with the new stats introduced in HoT, it’s becomes extremely agonising experience of repetitive grind, which will probably end up with one of these scenarios.

• Buy gold off 3rd party sites. (I think your team is probably well aware that players wanting to experience more of your contents may turn to this, especially with the current gem to gold ratio, which the cost of gem pretty much doubled in the last 6 months)
• Stay in existing build, most likely Berzerker and become bored.
• Stay in the lower grade Exotic gears, get left behind from the new harder contents because they are still getting their gears (I’m pretty sure you know what I’m talking about since your team made the comments on twitch)

This is not simply a new stat to us players, but a huge amount of investment from the players themselves, that can turn into just a single virtual copper coin with a change of design directions from your team.

so Anet, if your team want more build diversities in your player base, and wanting players to do more fun things in your game and progress onto all these additional contents in your team put so much hard work into.
Please don’t turn away from GW2’s design philosophy inherited from GW1.
Please be considerate to those players that can only play after their 9to5 work.
Please be considerate to those players that have a family to look after, and see your game a way to relief their daily stress.
Please be considerate to the health of all your players, they need to stand up, walk around and exercise a bit, have some face to face communications to their peers and families rather than glued to panel of tiny light bulbs all day.

No one asked you to make the ascended in a day. You can take your time in making it. Just like me, I am 70% there in making my first ever Legendary. At it only took me 3 years to get to 70%. So, you see, I would probably get my Legendary in 2018……

hi all, OP here, thanks for all the responses.

Yes, sorry, the title of the post is a bit misleading. (45 character limit)

Like I have said, not everyone will agree with my point of view.

first of all, discussion of my own view as casual.
Yes, i would agree it is all down to mentality and personal views; I come on, fight some WB, then sit around and wait around to do the next WB, and that takes about most of my online time, then find and participate in fractal and one HoT map meta with the remaining time.
Some people will call my online time and activities as hardcore. (my personal view of hardcore player is someone who stays on 8 hours or more a day and do the same content during a single online session; yes, i’m gonna get flamed for this)
Of course, like some will tell me, why not just put all my online time into farming for the crafting materials or gold.

second, yes, I am already on ascended gears on 2 of my toons (different types) from 7 months of game play. And yes, I do enjoy playing higher tier fractals.
I have switched stats on my gears on my ascended gears.

thrd, regarding the buying gold, like I have said, it’s a possible scenario.
I do know a GW2 vateran player who went down this path, and has gotten a temporary ban for his action.

What I’m questioning, is the relative costs/efforts required to switch to the new stats in HoT, which requires 5-10 times the costs/efforts required compared to the existing stats, considering the base materials require from them are from HoT maps only.
If Areana net would like people to try out the new stats they have created, should they not make the efforts/costs required to craft the insignia/inscription to be about the same scale as others so that it’s more acessible?
And considering the limited online time a lot of people have, they usually would farm for these materials while they do the map meta.

i would not mind if anet raise the fixed based costs/efforts of crafting ascended weapon/armor, (but that will be unfair to the newer players) , but the variables attached to the gears should be about the same, if not a bit more.
As we all know, anet tunes the mechanics and build stats every now and then, and a better meta may be required, chances that the old stats that you are running may require a full refresh.
When the costs/efforts is not in balance, would the player not question him/herself, to throw away all those efforts or stay in an inferior build, and have the sense that you are not contributing to your team at the best of what you possibly can?

SilverThorn.5047:

saturn.4810:

I would love to hear how to make 300g in less than a week as a casual player.

4 hrs of SW chest farm = 11g/hr approx
44×7 = 308g week

flush all champ bags in mystic toilet… get lucky… score a precursor +500~800g

i got leaf of kudzu with flushes before you ask

That isnt casual gameplay that is grinding, casual players do not grind.
A heart here and there an event there, trying to figure out what to buy/sell log off and do a real version of that. and RNG has to be with you to be lucky.

“Casual” is like the word “grind.”

Everyone has a different definition for it.

The problem with GW2 was that literally the whole core game was too casual. The second they do something to fix that people start crying.

Sry my Friend if you do 3 to 4 hours of WB Everyday and wondering why you can’t get your ascended gear, haven’t you questioned if you got your priorities straight? I mean WB aren’t exactly the best source of income.. Sry for all the 3 to 4 hours you wasted Everyday.. Unless you got lucky and got a pre ofc. Sry for your loss.

+1…. This is the games problem in a nutshell. Unless you play 20 hours a day you feel locked out of entirely too much in this game. The OP plays 5- 6 hours a day and up to double that on the weekend and he feels like a casual. This speaks volumes. This game feels too much like work.

Is what the OP asked for too much? No! He wants is the best stat armor to play the game with. He probably has well over 2,000 hours of game play by now.

It’s not like he asked for a free legendary.

Zach.2618:

Sry my Friend if you do 3 to 4 hours of WB Everyday and wondering why you can’t get your ascended gear, haven’t you questioned if you got your priorities straight? I mean WB aren’t exactly the best source of income.. Sry for all the 3 to 4 hours you wasted Everyday.. Unless you got lucky and got a pre ofc. Sry for your loss.

Yeah, this game is funny like that. You have to work not play. No thanks! I play to have fun, not work. If I am going to work for them; they are going to have to start mailing me a check.

Vayne.8563:

Maximillian Greil.1965:

I think the underlying thing here, what everyone is trying to vocalize but it seems to not be worded correctly is as follows: in base GW2, you could play for 2-3 hours a day and feel like you accomplished something meaningful. You played some dungeons, did some pvp, did some world bosses, whatever. In HoT, 2-3 hours doesn’t seem to make a dent in anything. It makes things seem overwhelming.

That’s what I understand from the conversation anyway.

Guild Wars 1 was the same way though. Once you had everything in the base game done, the stuff you had left to do was like a long, slow crawl. Survivor title, Defender of Ascalon title, the kurzick/luxon progression, the lightbringer progression, filling books in Eye of the North….sure when you start a new character you get stuff like achievements really fast.

And then you get most of them and it takes a long time to get the next thing.

The problem isn’t that people can’t make progress. They simply can’t make the specific type of progress they want. They want masteries to be a short term goal when that wasn’t intended. But there are plenty of achievements that are easy to get. You can get through the story pretty fast (in fact that’s one of the complaints about the game).

So yeah. I get stuff accomplished every day. Now I play a lot more than most players. Then again I"m level 55 mastery and have a ton of the new achievements done.

Yes, but in GW1 titles were just vanity. They didn’t bar you from content. In HoT, not having masteries can prevent you from exploring the map.

Hammerguard.9834:

The problem with GW2 was that literally the whole core game was too casual. The second they do something to fix that people start crying.

yes because they signed up for a casual game. If you have a game that’s casual for 3 years, then you change it… people are going to be upset. It’s not what they wanted.

Nothing was changed, though. It was added upon. It’s called an EXPANSION.

Stop being so mad the entirety of the game isn’t catering to one specific group of people.

This is the biggest joke of a conversation I ever been apart off.

So core Tyria just suddenly doesn’t exist for you people anymore? Is it HoT or nothing? Did fractals force 50+? Did dungeons get deleted?

The game was already one sided. The expansion helped the other. That doesn’t mean that the whole game was suddenly flipped over.

My son is 9 years old.

He is extremely casual with Guild Wars 2, though he has been playing since launch.

In the few hours that he has played Heart of Thorns, he has explored all of the new maps and enjoyed every moment. He doesn’t think about min/maxing and having ascended gear, he gradually gains gold because he doesn’t spend anything (and I help him sell materials at the right time..)

But other than that, for him, it’s not hard. He dies less than I do.

You know why? Because he doesn’t run around in a damage-focused build. He can stand up to most of the bosses , and has enough healing power to save others when they go down.

If he is doing fine with his 3 year old exotic set, why aren’t you?

Wwefan.4982:

Be considerate to casual players you mean the players they have catered to for 3 years casual players have been catered to for so long its the hardcore players turn.

That doesn’t make any sense as in three years those hardcore players have all left ages ago. GW2 lacked true hardcore reputation becuase of three things.

Rally System
Dodge mechanic
Army of ONE

The game is built around Dodge so any class in any gear can kill any mob if they know how to properly dodge though they should be at the proper level. Death penalty is rather non-existant as we have the rally system. Last mobs are made for the individual while in other MMO’s you can easily be overpowered by a mob but your not an army of one so your reliant on others. That doesn’t mean your an army of one it only means mobs are scalled to the group not the individual and these harder mobs can indeed still be defeated solo by an elitist playing at the top of his game.

Gw2 lacked all of that so catering to a non-existant sect will destroy this game tis the go to feel good MMO of choice after all. At least it was prior to HoT though people are still waiting for the major patches to see what changes before making there final judgment.

Astralporing.1957:

Shikigami.4013:

You do not need ascended items to play, be it casual or hardcore.

That might have been true year ago, but is becoming less and less true with each passing day. Ascended offer significant advantage over exotics, and since the new content is no longer balanced around rares, as it was originally (and in fact in some cases is finetuned to make ascended “strongly encouraged”), saying “ascended aren’t needed” is now closer and closer to saying that you don’t need any form of transportation beyond your shoes to get from NY to LA.

I second this. I remember a minor rant I gave in map chat after getting clobbered in Verdant (by a Troll and its posse. Which included THREE Menders) about how maybe the bloody healers shouldn’t come in threes (much less a Veteran, in a later encounter). Someone responded by telling me to “do more damage.”

I wanted to reply, “how exactly?” Given I was carrying my WvW Ranger, respecced for play in HoTs because she’s my most powerful character. Most of her Trinkets are Ascended, and the remaining Exotics are there for more useful stats (like Condi duration, because she was a Bleeder and Burner). She used to be an Axe-Torch kind of gal but I switched to Axe-Axe for more CC. Her other weapon is a Longbow, although I sometimes switch to Shortbow when the fighting gets to “CQB” levels and I need both weapons to be ready to fight close in.

I’m holding my own so far, even with my badly-equipped Thief-now-Daredevil, but sometimes you just end up getting… overfatigued fighting in Maguuma. I sometimes quip to Guildmates, “the dawn seems so far off…” before the next round of Mordrem assault your Rally Point and stuff is flying everywhere.

I’m not whining. It’s just that… it seems like a hard life already, y’know? I took some time out to try and advance my Personal Story so I can help a guildie take down Zhaitan, and I was in Arah, and… we were killing things. Level 80 things.

In Maguuma, even the Tendrils are… 83? And you have ugly angry Salad guys on angrier tauntaun-looking things that knock you down one after the other and Saladified Trolls who call these moving AOE things…

… and they come with MENDERS.

By the Six, Menders.

Dont bother with the ascended Viper stuff, craft assassines and reforge it, mutch cheaper

Maximillian Greil.1965:

Hammerguard.9834:

The problem with GW2 was that literally the whole core game was too casual. The second they do something to fix that people start crying.

yes because they signed up for a casual game. If you have a game that’s casual for 3 years, then you change it… people are going to be upset. It’s not what they wanted.

+1, You beat me to it.

Hammerguard.9834:

This is the biggest joke of a conversation I ever been apart off.

Agreed, please stop.

SHM.7628:

+1…. This is the games problem in a nutshell. Unless you play 20 hours a day you feel locked out of entirely too much in this game. The OP plays 5- 6 hours a day and up to double that on the weekend and he feels like a casual. This speaks volumes. This game feels too much like work.

Is what the OP asked for too much? No! He wants is the best stat armor to play the game with. He probably has well over 2,000 hours of game play by now.

It’s not like he asked for a free legendary.

The thing is though, you can get the best stuff if u just have an overview of what must be done, so that the time available can be better spent. One little example is that when I log in daily, I have 8 lvl 80s stationed at big gathering spots, making 8 9g a day, at spot for materials that always are in demand, and it just takes 10 minutes! That is efficient play, and you can be casual or hardcore to pull that off. That is what OP seemes to be lacking, set a goal and find out one of the better/faster ways to achieve it. Before I did tequatl daily, it gives about 14k karma with karma infusion for just max 10 mins work daily, and it dropped me a lot of ascended weapons that I could cheaply change stats in the forge, instead of crafting, and I also have 3 mill karma which is nifty and will be in the future most likely.

Just some short food for thought to OP.

My definition for casual is less an 1h per day. And if you have RL (Work + Family) this easily becomes to much. I am in that department and feel like unable to get ascended armor. But i am fine with my exotic set.

A note:
I would even pay money in gemstore if it won´t hurt (i did i once by bying HOT ultimate). But when i have to pay over 10$ for an piece its no option. I am quite shure i woul buy a complete ascended armor set in gemstore for 50$.
And i think a lot of casual players think that way. It might lead to a bit ascended infaltion but would get people to spend money.

PS: Theres another thing i would pay up to 50$. To create a new account but being able to take characters (+their gear and map acievements) from my existing one for it.