Maybe I’m reading the changes wrong, but this is my perception of the most recent balance changes that we have waited months (MONTHS) for. Is this anybody else’s feeling as well?
This is exactly what I was feeling. If these skills were so unbalanced ain PvP then why where they left alone for WvW? Then they wonder why people feel Anet has an unprofessional treatment of the game mode and the those that play it. It feels like we were snubbed yet again.
Reading through the notes, a few of the changes are also for WvW. I’m also pretty sure the Epidemic change was made because of WvW.
Saul is a side story as far as the GW2 main story is concerned. A stronger argument exists around whether the Forsaken Thicket storyline is a side story as it feeds directly into LS3.
Personally, as a non-raider, I’m fine with how ANet have been handling story in raids. No major plot elements are gated behind raids (IMO at least) and even then ANet have included the ability for players to get a lot of the lore from a cleared instance.
Most people that are active enough to login daily (with the possible exception of alt accounts) will most likely consume at least part of their coins.
I don’t think that is true at all. Many players login every day but have no intention or ambition of crafting a legendary, either because of the cost or the effort (or maybe because of the annoying sound fx!)
Those players just get the daily reward and deposit it just like any other crafting material. MCs will only come to their attention when they overflow their storage, or when they read threads like this.
Mystic Coins are used for a lot more things than legendary. They’re not even a big part of crafting a legendary.
Indeed. I log in every day and dont make any of those either.
Good for you.
Astralporing said “most people” for a reason. If most people didn’t use coin they would only cost a few copper, like most things that people do not use. The reason they’re so expensive is because they’re very limited but used for a lot of things.
Even saying “most people” is an assumption, not a fact. True, anecdotal evidence doesn’t disprove the assertion, but without evidence, people are free to disagree with it.
If it’s too much bother or time involvement for you, then you also have the option of skipping it.
I’m not being flippant, as I found myself in the past obsessing over completing dailies with my ever reducing game time (real life has been interesting over the last few years) instead of just playing the parts of the game I enjoy. Once I gave up the completionist urge and accepted that there would be days where I wouldn’t get the daily reward, my enjoyment of my limited time in game improved dramatically.
I firmly believe that the grind in this game exists only if you play it that way. I play on a very casual basis, but I have geared one character in full ascended and am currently working on my first legendary without feeling like any of it has been a grind. I just play what I want to, do the dailies that are quick or fit with my plans, and make some progress every day that I login towards my long term goals.
I don’t know if it was mentioned in this thread, but access to gliding is one of the benefits of owning HoT, especially as it can be used throughout core Tyria. You will need to play some of the HoT storyline and first zone to unlock it on your account, but it’s well worth it.
I agree that it’s annoying, especially if it happens to you several times in a row.
The tactic I used last year to avoid this frustration was to stay in the instance and wait for it to cycle round to the start again. Sure I have to spend time waiting, but I’m guaranteed a full round once the waiting is over.
I can back up some of what Traced has mentioned as I have been mining the king size candy corn node in my home instance with an asuran alt and copper picks.
With my first interaction on the node I get 4 strikes. I see 4 lots of xp show in game and 4 “charges” consumed from the tools. My second interaction then consists of 2 strikes plus the remaining “wasted” animations that produce no materials.
I don’t recall how many strikes are animated on my asuran, but the 3rd and 4th portions of xp are awarded very close together. I also don’t know if the same results would apply to other races.
Regardless of semantics, several reasons have been given as to why this feature is gated behind masteries. I’m in a similar position to the OP in not having enough points to complete the track, but I knew this was a possibility when I focussed on the legendary track first and I’m okay with going out of my comfort zone to earn the last few points I need.
While I think this would be a great feature, I suspect implementing it would be a complex task. It would likely involve passing individual account wardrobe information as parameters to whatever filter/search systems the TP has available, or worse, building new systems to accommodate the feature.
It may actually be quicker and easier for the community to implement a tool that looks up TP prices for locked/unlocked skins using the API.
I agree that the change was poorly communicated and while it means that I personally can’t just buy the gift once I’m ready to start working on my first legendary (I’m currently on the 3rd collection for the precursor), I like the addition of reward tracks to WvW and am okay with the new method of acquisition.
Unfortunately, the nature of MMOs means that game mechanics, etc. are subject to change and sometimes that means players long term plans get disrupted. In this instance, ANet could have easily done more to let people know and minimise the disruption, but even if they had done so, there would still be players who missed the notification complaining about missing out on buying the gift with badges.
Polls are blunt instruments when it comes to gathering feedback, but ANet are using them to get a high level view of what the whole community wants from the game mode or to approve changes such as reward tracks. Detailed feedback is being provided through other channels (e.g. forums) that are dominated by veteran WvW players.
Why exclude those who have an interest in the game mode from providing feedback on it? You’re assuming the amount of votes the restrictions would remove from the results of a poll would make a significant difference to the results.
@lil devils x: I misunderstand nothing and was simply stating my situation to explain how potential restrictions on who can vote in these polls that have been suggested in this thread would impact my attitude to the game mode.
Basing your argument on the minimum limit of the range of WvW activity the poll respondents is completely spurious. I doubt the number of “hour per week or less” players voting in the poll had any significant impact on the final results and in my opinion, restricting the polls could make newer players feel discouraged from becoming more dedicated to the game mode.
I understand and appreciate the dedication of veteran WwW players and I know I owe a lot of the fun I’ve had playing WvW to them, but they are also able (and more likely) to participate in the polls. The polls are not the only place for dedicated players to give feedback either, as the subject of the latest poll proves, the devs are paying attention to the forums, where the majority of nuanced feedback would be provided by dedicated players.
The hour per week player could describe me some weeks due to RL restrictions. I’m primarily a PvE player and usually join WvW to finish off my dailies, but end up still playing the game mode after they’re completed, often till I need to log off for the evening.
I’m currently just under rank 140 despite playing since headstart and only have about 1.6k player kills. I freely admit that I’m not an expert with the game mode, but I have fun playing it (when time permits) and have voted in every poll.
But if certain posters get their way, my voice will be excluded and my interest in the game mode will be diminished. In my view, all paying customers should have the opportunity to vote if they so wish, otherwise you risk alienating players who have an interest in the game mode but don’t meet whatever eligibility criteria is applied.
Besides, all this arguing over who is allowed to vote is ignoring the fact that ANet have confirmed the split of the recent poll results were consistent across the different levels of player WvW activity.
As a casual player currently working on a precursor collection who could have bought the gift with badges before this change but didn’t, I have to say that I’m okay with having to obtain it via a reward track instead.
I do think ANet should have issued a reminder announcement about this after the poll where the community voted for reward tracks to leave beta, but I don’t think they should reinstate the vendor because they didn’t do so.
One of my friends is a very new player and they weren’t aware of JPs until they were added to the mix of dailies. As a result of this change, my friend has now found another part of the game that she enjoys and is working on finding and completing them all.
This is not to discount the OPs perspective as I understand JPs aren’t everyone’s thing, but just to illustrate that new players do benefit from being encouraged to try out different content.
The free to play game has a lot of restrictions in place that your paid account doesn’t have, so you already have a benefit from having bought the game.
You have to be kittenting me. Patch notes say a lot of words. "Err, they must have put some great effort in this… ".
It’s missing a lot of stuff and with all the HoT changes (long overdue, I might add) it’s basically yet another kitten-you to all core players. ANet treats GW2 as if it’s something separate and inferior to HoT, whereas in reality it’s the other way around. How cheap can you get…
Core is unlikely to see much in the way of future development that isn’t related to HoT. As far as ANet are concerned, HoT is GW2 going forward until the next xpac drops.
While this may suck for those who haven’t bought HoT, there are valid reasons for why a company is reluctant to spend development resources on the “old version” of their product. I’m also unaware of any MMO that has spent significant time on developing content that wasn’t related to their most current expansion.
To extend the life of a set of raids and satisfy both casuals and hard core raiders, maybe they could put in an ez mode form a raid cycle behind.
That is, once this set of raid wings is done and there is a new set of raids coming out, add the ez mode set then on the old raids for casuals to do and see the content, with suitably reduced rewards. Repeat with each new set of raid wings.
Yep. Exactly my thoughts. Unless of course they have some special plan to keep the older Raid wings relevant even after new ones appear, otherwise adding a reduced version when very few people are running them is a good choice.
No power creep from gear treadmill plus requirements for legendary armor means that older raids should remain relevant for longer than usual imo.
I also agree with most of IndigoSundown’s post, but I would treat the 5% value with some suspicion as I vaguely recall this was quoted in reference to the proportion of raiders (players?) who had entered the highest tier of raid back in vanilla WoW (or maybe Burning Crusade) when the raid tiers were heavily gated by attunements.
While this figure may be generally accepted, that may be just because it’s been repeated so often since then.
I probably will even though I haven’t spent much time in the HoT maps yet and haven’t even completed the story (mostly due to my super casual playstyle and lack of time).
Since GW2 launched, this is the only game that’s been able to hold my interest, so even though I don’t play as much as I would like to, I’m okay with pre-ordering the next expansion.
While HoT may have its problems, ANet is working on addressing them (maybe not as fast as people hope) and I’m sure they have learned a lot from this expansion.
I enjoyed GW, but I haven’t been back since GW2 launched. Despite some missteps, I’m generally pleased with the game’s overall direction and can’t wait to see what the future holds for the game.
And yet, some of us enjoy this game more than we enjoyed it’s predecessor.
In core GW2 Tyria, ANet has given us an immersive open world to explore with lore and stories scattered throughout each zone that I prefer to the instanced world of GW.
As for value for money, for me this game has easily surpassed the value I received from GW and it’s campaigns (I’ve spent about the same amount on each game).
Id be interested to know what standard of player, gear wise HOT was designed for.
For example , are there any players playing HOT who like it who have low level gear, such as masterwork or less?
Is there any real reason not to have at least rares?
I’m posting from my phone atm, so can’t find the link right now, but I recall a statement from the devs prior to HoT’s release that the maps were designed to be “end game” zones that would challenge players.
As a result, I suspect that if the maps were designed for a specific gear level, it would at least be rare, if not exotic level gear. Having said that, skill > gear in this game, so a skilled player could probably breeze through the new maps with a lower level of gear than the developers designed them around.
The restrictions on F2P accounts are in place to protect the economy from being overrun by RMT gold sellers and bots, and the general consensus seems to be that they are necessary and useful.
And yes, ANet expects F2P players to buy the game if they want to have the restrictions removed. It’s one of the reasons they haven’t added a bunch of microtransactions to the gem store targeting F2P accounts like other MMOs have.
Firstly, I’m unlikely to ever set foot in one of GW2’s raids due to my time-poor casual play style, but I’m not going to begrudge the fact that they were added to the game as there is a section of the playerbase that clearly wants challenging group content in this kind of format.
However the first raid wing has been out for about 2 weeks and people expect to be able to complete it with pugs? If I was looking to work towards my legendary armor right now, I’d be looking for a guild or other group of like-minded people who are willing to put in the time and effort to learn the fights and “get good” at them.
This doesn’t really excuse the issues with LFG, but I don’t think ANet expected raiders to use the tool to form pick up groups to take on content that requires organization and coordination.
Given you can also work towards legendary armor without defeating a raid boss, I think ANet has at least offered a path for obtaining it that doesn’t solely rely on how skilled your companions are.
I assume the ones listed on the TP were placed by players who received bugged stones (i.e. they weren’t account bound) before the bug was fixed. ANet has been reluctant to remove listings from the TP in the past for whatever reason, so I’m not completely surprised that these listings weren’t removed.
Would you consider playing HoT, “braindead farming”?
I’ve made probably about 200g just from playing HoT since launch. I’ve taken two characters through the expansion and working on a third. Across all three, I have about 3 stacks of Silk, tons of Elder Wood, about a stack of Ancient Wood, bookoo’s of leather mats, I know for a fact, 3 stacks of Flax, nearly 200 Ectos, etc…etc… and this isn’t figured into the amount of gold I mentioned I’ve made, this stuff’s just sitting in my character’s inventories/bank.
My point being, getting the mats required for Ascended gear seems to be pretty easy. Work on HoT achievements, level them Masteries, run a few of your characters through for the Crystilline Ore, pick-up all the Flax to sell ( still at around 6-7s each ) and sell what you don’t need.
Don’t know, doesn’t seem too hard to me.
I wouldn’t consider playing HoT brain dead no, but none of my characters are currently at the level cap to even start with any of their content. I’m a very casual player and I used dungeons to finance my gear as well as my occasional crafting leveling. I have no idea how you amassed over 200g, but I’m sure it was through quite a bit of dedicated play time. I only really have the opportunity to play an hour or two at most when I get the free time to actually play.
Why are you complaining about the dungeon nerf and making gold when you haven’t reached max level yet?
I’ll probably try out the Dragonhunter and check out the new map, etc. with it. I also want to try it out on some live content and check out the masteries and map rewards.
I haven’t checked all my sub-80 toons yet, but the autobuild worked fine for my level 36 ele. She got given fire spec, and all the skills she was previously using were trained as well.
While it is unfortunate that it didn’t work out so well for others, the complaints about having to “grind” hero points are a bit too dramatic given you can get them just by logging in (tome of knowledge login rewards) if you truly believe the autobuild has made your character unplayable.
At a rate of 2% per 28 days, it would take almost 4 years to reach a cap of 100%. I suspect if a cap exists, it’s going to take a long time to reach it.
- Grind: To us, grind means being required to do the same boring activity over and over again. In particular, the biggest reference we’re talking about here in traditional MMO’s is having to kill the same creatures over and over again to farm for levels or gear. In Gw2, you can gain exp and levels from a massive variety of game play, game modes, and content types. Same goes for the ability to acquire the gear to build up your characters. Similarly, ascended mats can be acquired from a wide variety of content types and game modes to allow you choice and options so you don’t need to grind to complete those goals.
By this definition, Ascended acquisition is not a grind. When you are operating on this very narrow definition of grind, the ANet statements about grind are true. Posters who are operating on a different definition of grind (which is their prerogative) are barking up the wrong tree.
So, can we get over the whole kittening contest about who said what and whether someone lied or not (because by their definition of grind, they didn’t), and get back to discussing the real issue, which is dissatisfaction with perceived grind? Because, honestly, “proving” ANet wrong (you can’t on this subject) and “proving” each other wrong is not conducive to a productive discussion.
And this is where the issue lies, the perception of grind is highly subjective.
I don’t feel this game is grindy because I play the game how I want and gather the materials/gold that I need as I play. But I’m a casual player and have set my expectations and goals accordingly.
Others feel differently, and that’s fine, but neither “side” can reasonably claim to speak for the entire player base (or even a significant portion of it). And no amount of posts claiming this game is grindy/non-grindy will alter how an individual perceives the grind (or lack of it) in this game.
@Bernie: Colin’s statement about not having to spend time “preparing to have fun” still applies despite the grindy nature of ascended acquisition. Very little content is locked away from players who don’t have ascended gear.
As I noted up thread, I’d be looking for something in this range: The current progression, from T1 up, is 1.9, 2.9, 3.9, 4.9, 2.4, 0.5. It should probably be more like 0.5, 0.75, 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, 2. The prices should not be at vendor, but they shouldn’t be so far from vendor either. Anything above vendor*2 is bonus.
You are Entitled to your opinion, I disagree with it. I think the prices should not be so constrained and that the prices should be based on supply/demand principles. Your 0.5->2s progression is not possible without an enormous amount of micro managing. It is also impossible with the economics of material promotion where you get about 1/3 of T+1 mats from the previous. the promotion recipes cost 250 t? mats and on average you receive 80ish T?+1.
300 scraps per day for 36 days is only a problem if you feel compelled to craft it in the minimum time. Not having enough silk to craft on a particular day doesn’t cause you to lose progress.
300 for 36 days, is a problem because other classes dont need that much.
and it was designed to be a daily craft, meaning, they are setting the goal at 300 a day.
as far as not feeling compelled, designing systems that interact with humans means part of your design has to account for human psychology.
The daily craft limit has been set to act as a gate, not a goal. Yes, human psychology will mean that people will treat it as a goal, but that is self-imposed to a large degree.
If you have set yourself a goal of crafting a set of light ascended armor in the minimum time, you will need to put in the effort needed. Is the effort more than needed to do the same for heavy ascended? Sure, but both are arbitrary goals, not ones set by the game itself.
This is how I, as a casual player who has only crafted 4/6 of my main’s (heavy) ascended armor, view the daily craft gate. YMMV.
300 scraps per day for 36 days is only a problem if you feel compelled to craft it in the minimum time. Not having enough silk to craft on a particular day doesn’t cause you to lose progress.
The biggest problem with this suggestion is that people will still want to buy gold, and without an official method they will turn to buying from illicit sources, and as a consequence more accounts will get compromised which increases the workload for ANet’s customer support team.
While gold is very useful in this game, there are items you can’t obtain solely with gold (e.g. dungeon weapon and armor skins, ascended weapons and armor) and the guy swinging the “credit-card legendary” doesn’t affect my play experience any more or less than the other guy swinging a legendary that they farmed themselves .
