I spent the last hour with some guildmates in Orr farming at some dynamic events. Basically the amount of loot and exp that you get is so insane that it felt necessary to start this post. I will try to keep this organized and hope for a fast response, because i can’t imagine that GW2 is meant to work this way.
What we did:
We found 3 events in orr that are located quite close to each other and restart every few minutes. We completed those over and over again with hardly any downtime. (I will name the events/location if requested, but i left it out here since i think that this can severely damage the ingame economy if it is done by too many players)
What we gained from this:
Each of us obtained between 80silver and 1,5gold within one hour of farming. This includes ONLY lootdrops and green/blue items that were sold to the vendors. In addition we got several unidentified dyes, globs of ectoplasm and massive amounts of craftingmaterials from lootbags and salvaging white items.
As far as i know this is a lot more than you can get from spending your time in any other part of the game. (for example dungeons which are meant to be the endgame PvE content, or WvW which already gives quite a bit of karma but has a lot less lootdrops)
The problems that are causing this are:
- a too fast respawn rate of events.
I do understand that the game is supposed to keep players busy and giving them things to do at any point in time, but hearing the same conversations over and over (some events that feel quite unique the first time you do them, restart within 2-5 minutes after completion) gets boring and breaks the immersion
- upscaling of events is not balanced properly.
“zerging” events is too easy – take a “defend this point” mission for example. Players will figure out the spawnpoints rather fast and wait there for the mobs. These run in all clumped up and get slaughtered within 1-2 seconds. Veterans are no challenge either – the only thing that might keep a zerg busy for a few seconds or even a minute are champions. Because the mobs go down this fast, the only thing that players do is firing their best AoE attacks – no skill or use of the great GW2-combat system is required here.
A possible solution would be to spread the spawns of monsters out by a lot. If they don’t run in as clumped up, they avoid a lot more AoE damage and thus the players actually need to start fighting to kill the whole wave.
Personally i would love to see a huge upgrade to the monsters toughness and vitality, if there are many players participating in dynamic events.
The last issue would be the lootsystem.
To me it seems like players get loot if they deal a decent amount of damage to a mob.
Like mentioned above, the waves go down within 1-2 seconds and are hardly a challenge at all, so i found myself arranging my traits and weapons to do the most AoE damage output possible – dropping all support and healing abilities. Basically i went from an allround support to a full glasscannon/dps build to gain the most loot out of these events. I really dislike this, because i enjoy supporting other players a lot!
Possible solutions here would be:
-reducing the amounts of lootdrops! Obviously it is fun to kill a bunch of mobs and have the screen full of looted items after that, but this droprate seems gamebreaking to me. (Please comment on this if you disagree!)
-Granting loot to players who support (via heal or boons) the players who kill the mobs.
-Again, making the mobs tougher and deal more damage, so that glasscannonbuilds don’t pay off that much.
Obviously this problem does not only exist in orr – for example in the hinterlands there are some eventchains that give incredible amounts of loot as well. Since the highest NPC prices for items (except for the commanders book) seem to be 10 gold, i feel that being able to farm these within one day (or just a couple of hours, if you sell the rest of your drops at the tradingpost) should not be possible.
I did not comment too much on the exp and karma that you gain, because you should be able to earn about the same amount of karma in WvW and the exp “only” give skillpoints, so it didn’t feel gamebreaking to me.
The gold and items however will damage the economy if more players start farming events like this. Even though anet did a great job on implementing money sinks like waypointfees, repaircosts and overall merchant prices – if the droprate of items stays like this, those money sinks won’t prevent inflation for long.
Please add your oppinions and suggestions about this and feel free to mention further issues that i might have missed. I hope this will get changed, since the endgame in GW2 will mostly consist of jumping between events and mashing 2-3 buttons otherwise =/
Thanks for listening and creating an awesome game, anet!
(edited by Grunblatt.4608)