(edited by Ahkaskar.3906)
Showing Posts For Ahkaskar.3906:
- Blade shards (already covered, just saying though)
- Luck
- Vision crystals
- Milling basins
- Pile of Salt and Pepper
- Tenebrous and Shimmering crystals
- Scribing materials (Lumber cores, pristine feathers, festive transoms, etc)
- Doubloons definitely
- Amalgamated gemstones
Some “maybe” items:
- Baubles
- Potions of PvP reward
- Potions of WvW reward
- Piles of Silky Sand
Runes and Sigils would be nice but I honestly think that whole system needs an overhaul more than to be swept under material storage. I would say they make up the largest slice of the “garbage” that I don’t know if I want to keep or toss, and when I mass salvage stuff they’re the equivalent of a memory leak for my inventory. I might be running around WvW and then have to stop and dump runes and sigils before I can play any more.
I for one do not miss the 2013 bi-weekly update schedule. There were definitely periods where I couldn’t risk NOT logging into GW2 every day, and that was incredibly stressful.
I guess I’m not all that bothered about legendary development being suspended—at present the busywork and material crunching is more noticeable than the scavenger hunt and it feels bad. Maybe the time will be used to re-evaluate the model?
What I didn’t like about how things went down following the release of HoT was that we knew nearly nothing about how the systems would function. For instance, there were many, many streams showing off the decoration system. But basically nothing telling us the costs or the rationale.
Why do we have to be a high level guild to even have a decent complement of basic decorations? Why are pouches of brown pigment used as a component for every single stage of the process? Why is it taking so long to get around to reducing the grind? Overall, what I feel HoT has best taught the community how to do, is farm. Farm for wood. Farm for sand. Farm for potatoes. Farm for liquid gold, any way you can. Was this anticipated? If not, why? GW2 players have been avid farmers since day 1, especially with how many recipes in the game use 250 as an input quantity. The jokes practically write themselves.
There were also many streams and text posts talking about the specializations but nothing telling us how many hero points we’d have to get to utilize them. I’ll grant that this was addressed shortly after release with the cost reduction, but it should highlight the point that there is a communication disconnect between ArenaNet and the playerbase.
Everyone loves the hype train, but it’s important to guide expectations as well.
I get that aspects of the design change from day to day, but I think what is really upsetting the community is that we are all often surprised—either in the way updates are released, or the way new features function.
I get that marketing loves to tout the benefits and is trying to sell us on a product, but what many of us want to know is the nitty-gritty functionality. We want to know the costs. We want to know how long it is expected to take.
If we’re blindsided by a grind-ridden ladder when we expect a lore-driven scavenger hunt, we’re going to be disappointed. But if someone told us from the start it would take 6160 Elder Wood Planks to make Nevermore? Well, at least we could say we knew what we were getting into before we started. (https://gw2efficiency.com/crafting/calculator/71383-Nevermore)
I also get that ANet wants to do things different and exciting, but I don’t understand why things like Guild Halls don’t function anything like Wildstar’s (another NCSoft product) plot system. I feel like that would have been low-hanging fruit and an example of excellent, well-received design that should have been easy to access. Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes the best wheel is the one everyone already knows how to use.
ANet, I hope you know that most of us want you to succeed. I feel Mike’s approach to communication is an improvement, but there’s still room to grow. The community interaction is there, but we need more functional meat to chew into, not fluff.
(It’s a selfish wish, but I wish I could have a direct dialog with someone there, just so I could understand what the decision points were)
(edited by Ahkaskar.3906)
The random roll for this week already happened and we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions for the first three mission slots that guilds have unlocked once you’re able to access the expansion (as you unlock deeper into your guild hall, you’ll be able to unlock more mission slots). We wanted to make sure everyone knew this information ahead of time.
Colin, is it possible that the favor requirement for guild hall expeditions could be waived for the first week of HoT release? Either that or the first guild hall expedition could cost only gold, not favor.
As it stands my guild won’t know if we can even attempt the Guild Hall expedition until Friday evening and we’ve had a chance to see what the misisons are, and that’s far too late to schedule anything for Saturday.
Why not schedule it with a backup plan? Do missions if you can, if not have another guild activity planned.
It’s not about what we do instead, it’s just trying to get the Guild Hall going so we can start generating the time-gated currency.
The random roll for this week already happened and we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions for the first three mission slots that guilds have unlocked once you’re able to access the expansion (as you unlock deeper into your guild hall, you’ll be able to unlock more mission slots). We wanted to make sure everyone knew this information ahead of time.
Colin, is it possible that the favor requirement for guild hall expeditions could be waived for the first week of HoT release? Either that or the first guild hall expedition could cost only gold, not favor.
As it stands my guild won’t know if we can even attempt the Guild Hall expedition until Friday evening and we’ve had a chance to see what the misisons are, and that’s far too late to schedule anything for Saturday.
Edit:
For that matter, last we heard the mission reset time was being left at SATURDAY. Does this mean the Friday that HoT lands, the reset time is being adjusted to Monday at the same time?
(edited by Ahkaskar.3906)
Good morning, afternoon, or evening! I’m Ahkaskar, guild leader of The Gathering Storm [STRM].
We’re a small Henge of Denravi-based guild that does a little of everything, but primarily PvE. Most of our events happen on weekends, when we’ll do dungeons for completion, tokens or money. Otherwise, we’ll usually be out in the world helping out wherever we can!
While The Gathering Storm isn’t an RP guild, we’re the in-game representation of the fanon Storm warband, and most of us theme our characters to that end. We don’t require our members to use the Storm ‘band name though, nor do they have to be Charr. We also don’t require representation, but we would prefer to find players who are looking for a primary guild they will represent.
We are also not advertising as openly recruiting, but we are looking for more players to join us. What we’re looking for is like-minded, well-mannered players who see themselves playing for a long time to come, and maybe just need someone to experience the game with. Players who play the game to have fun and are willing to learn, try, and overcome as a team.
If you’re a veteran player looking for a charr-themed guild/warband, or you’re a new player looking for what the game has to offer, and all you need is a team to run with, drop us a line! Most of our big guild events are scheduled at 6PM EDT (3PM PDT) Saturday and Sunday, but the more people we have the more we will do!
Additionally, as we get closer to the release of Heart of Thorns, we are looking for other guilds to form alliances with. If you’re a guild leader looking to join forces for dungeons and guild events, consider us!
If you’re interested, you can contact me in-game at Ahkaskar.3906 or on my main Ahkaskar Stormheart! Don’t be shy, come do a dungeon with us!
I don’t get how that’s easy to disprove. The system itself was tied into the quality of the traits as it required limitations to be put onto other traits that could be selected, even across different trait lines entirely. Even the stats were a consideration into the balance of traits.
That large set size also means that there are a lot of cases that won’t get used or tested or even considered as a valid and sensible build. Hence the comparison to Borderlands guns—very very many are completely useless, worthy only to be vendored for change. Did you ever seriously use the Adept traits from all 5 lines? I never did outside of a joke.
If you want to only count the number of permutations, fine—it used to be a larger number than it is right now. But that’s why they changed it—larger numbers are not always better, especially if you have to make each one useful. (Example: look at the personal story and how many choices you have. How much better is the Living World story because they focused on a narrower path? Yes, that’s a more extreme case.)
On the builds themselves, generally speaking they were oriented around pre-chosen sets of traits. As a GS guardian I’d only ever do 20 Zeal at most with two specific traits—Fiery Wrath and Zealous Blade. I’d never touch the others.
My other trait lines were 25 Radiance and 25 Virtues, never touching the GM traits at all, which were always supposed to be the flavor of each trait line. And even then I got stuck with condi damage which did me absolutely no good.
The only variances were when I’d go 20 in Honor for the recharge reduction, which would stick me with a subpar trait in the Honor Adept slot and forcing me to split the difference elsewhere.
So yes, they could have gone and rebalanced the trait lines: Removed the stats, combined traits and removed other excess traits, but by that point you’d have basically what you have now. Except that you’d still not have access to THREE improved grandmaster-quality traits simultaneously and you’d still be hemming and hawwing over the final 5 points in a line vs 5 in some one-off because that minor looks so much more appealing than that GM trait that has nothing to do with your build.
At least now they KNOW you will take that GM trait and they can make it relevant to the rest of the line instead of worrying about someone doing some weird overpowered meta combination.
(edited by Ahkaskar.3906)
Even if the old system had more possible options, I use far more variations in the new system. The problem with the old system is it had Borderlands gun syndrome—most of the traits were basically useless and there were a few that were without a doubt your best and only option.
Suffice to say I have much more freedom of choice with fewer possible choices. Less is more.
So we ran into the bug with the game not allowing us to complete our trek points as the markers won’t show up in Queensdale and Malchor’s. It’s also causing the guild UI to not load or connect or work. We couldn’t see the build queue and we couldn’t activate any other missions while we were in the zone.
When I relogged it also showed the timer for the trek at 0 seconds remaining, even though other guild members could see there was 8 minutes left.
Hopefully this helps narrow down the issue.
(edited by Ahkaskar.3906)
One thing I liked about the nightmare tower achievement categories is that I knew exactly how long I had left on them. That bar on the right was a timer and I made sure I had things squared away well before the bar filled.
Fractured, I realize after the fact that it was supposed to be only two weeks (hence, “fortnight”) but I think I, like my guildmates, didn’t actually realize just how little time we had left to get it finished.
This isn’t the first time we’ve missed out because we didn’t know how much time we have left to go. When new content is advertised on the releases page, you tell us when it starts but not when it ends. And considering not every living story lasts four weeks, that is a very important detail. Some players are too casual to keep up with this newer, rapid, irregular beat that was announced back in July.
Some solutions:
- I highly recommend including the completion date on the release page. On the release page for Wintersday it says starts December 10th, but when will it end? That information is more important than when it begins.
- Warnings on twitter would help. Let us know in advance when the content is coming to a close. Of course, not everyone follows Twitter and it relies on the human element to maintain it.
- Include some way for us to see the time ticking down in-game. Knowing how much time we have left via a bar like the Nightmare Tower injection bar or through the achievement window like we have with dailies and monthlies would be a great way to get an exact quantity. This is more costly and complicated than the previous two, of course.
- Create an in-game calendar for tracking events. This is by far the one thing that I don’t see GW2 getting for a long time but it’s the option (IMHO) with the most potential usefulness. Having a calendar that shows exactly when to expect the next update or the run-time of an event would go a long way to helping individuals and guilds (ESPECIALLY but not NECESSARILY if guilds can put events on it) better allocate time.
Thanks in advance for reading. Personally I would be happy with at least the run-time of the event posted on the release page. At least at that point I can put a hard date on when I need to have achievement categories completed.
Yes, I wanted to post a thank you thread to ANet for fixing the charr one-hand animations but I see I was beaten to it. So glad to see that animation fixed.
I think 50 is a bit much when there are only 30 or effigies in the world. No matter how you do this though, whether you run or port, this is probably one of the “easiest” achievements to complete provided you can get through all the zones the effigies are in. It’s not hard, it’s just time consuming.
Far as seeing the world goes, I’ve had 9 months to see the world and I’m still seeing it. Didn’t need something to get me out of Lion’s Arch, I was already running around.
I got one in my first (dropped) southsun crate on the first day. I didn’t even want the stupid thing.
…But I’ll find a use for it.
I just wanted to put in my two cents regarding clothing having different variations for male and female charr. Most outfits make no distinction for charr gender and while I can understand that gem store town clothes are a little different, it seemed odd to me that there was suddenly any outfits for the charr that made any distinctions at all.
I know some people are happy to be able to put their kitty in a frilly winter dress, but I don’t really understand the motivation behind the khaki cargo shorts. I mainly want to say that while the current items can’t be changed, I hope this isn’t going to be a major trend going forward.
I was just noticing this. Every other moa my level 24 ranger has access to, has 488 vitality, but the black moa has 398.
My guild just attempted 4 bounties, first two were tier 2, last two were tier 1. We failed all of them, due to the way these new bosses work. We’re a smaller guild and we have maybe 10 people available total for these, and we had enough trouble finding these targets before. Prior to this patch, if we pulled Tricksy Trekksa, we usually assumed that would be the last one to be found. This latest patch has made things far more complicated.
We managed to pull Yanonka 3 times in a row and couldn’t figure out how to get the target to spawn even once. We ran around interacting with suspicious rats for at least half an hour with zero results. Then on the last attempt we got both Mayana AND Yanonka, which are both targets with searches that are heavy on the false positives. As we had given up on actually getting any merits for the week, we decided to focus on Mayana so any remaining guildies could get their weekly chest. It took 11 minutes to find them, and when we finally did between our guild and any others that showed up, we had no way of defeating them in time. (Not to mention, since their appearance is randomized you can’t have enough people ready to start the encounter present at the tree they drop out of, as they IMMEDIATELY go into combat)
It took us long enough to get the target to half HP, that by then we had another guild show up and a few extra players who were just in the area, which made the event scale beyond our means. We had just figured out the strategy too, but it had become impossible to coordinate and we could no longer see the boss’s HP drain in anything other than mere pixels at a time. Some of us play some fairly durable characters too, and we could barely stand up to the target’s attacks. We ended up spending a lot of time and effort reviving each other, which makes res-rushing from a WP seem like the only viable strategy.
The scaling taking place in these isn’t new to this patch, and I don’t feel like there were any stealth buffs. However, with the way these scale, it feels like guilds need to be selfish, putting an upper limit on the number of players engaging each target, taking into account any other players who happen upon the encounter. We can fight them with 4 people, but once it gets to 10 or higher a lot of us are going to start incurring repair bills. Basically I don’t feel like asking more players to come help or working with another guild is going to help us, it’s just going to make the fights a lot harder. It doesn’t promote any sense of community this way, just selfishness.
I do enjoy some of the coordination and mechanics required to fight these targets, in a fundamental sense. However I feel like they are even more complicated than dungeon bosses, which coupled with the tight time limit is exceptionally frustrating. You can’t guarantee that everyone out in the open world (or even in your guild) will understand or even listen to your orders. We’ve had players reset sotzz’s defiance stacks with stuns because they don’t completely understand the system. But we need these players there because the bounties function on throwing as many bodies as possible at locating them in the first place. We also can’t guarantee that we have the means necessary to use the mechanic. Last week I took 5 other guildies to fight Komali, and I realized when we got there the only one of us who could employ ANY boon removal whatsoever was a necromancer with 5 second duration well. And we still couldn’t pull the shield off them, especially after PUGs started showing up.
Take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, I’m admittedly flustered as I’m the one who coordinates the bounties for my guild. I’m the one who has to drum up enthusiasm to spend up to an hour running around looking for NPCs without the possibility of getting a reward. I also get all the complaints from my guildmates, who are at least as frustrated as I am. Before this patch, we were at least managing to get a tier 1 complete every week. After this patch, with these new bosses, everyone is feeling very defeated, which is going to make it harder for me to get everyone online to try again in the coming week. People don’t like to sign in and waste over an hour losing, especially to RNG and mechanics out of their hands. They would simply rather just not sign in at that point.
Suggestions:
- Scaling needs an upper limit. Encounters cease to be fun after 10 or 15 people become involved.
- Searching needs to be more consistent. A group of 5 needs to be able to find these targets within 5-10 minutes and these new targets introduce too much RNG and false-positives into the equation. Otherwise, we need more time.
- Mechanics based around target invulnerability, damage reduction, or even dealing large enough amounts of damage to affect a target’s immense, scaling pool of HP need to be actually idiot and/or grief-proof.
My apologies for the long post, but things have really come to a head tonight.
(edited by Ahkaskar.3906)
We already have mounts, they’re called siege golems.