Guild Wars 2

First tier problems

Also, to be constructive, I’ll add that, any bias towards higher ranked players over lower ranked then creates the problem of preventing lower ranked players (potentially just new and wanting to try something new) from ever progressing at all, while higher ranked players continue to be able to play without waiting, increasing rank further, increasing the gap between themselves and new players, making new players wait even longer, etc etc.

I won’t deny that waiting in a queue for a significant portion of the game is painful. But biasing against new/low rank players is a terrible (and elitist) solution. If anything, the reverse would be better: bias towards low rank new players. It would allow new players to try it out, and since they wouldn’t likely be playing for 20 hours a day like some, the queue would cycle faster, more people would be waiting shorter amounts of time (i.e. Shortest Job First scheduling).

But in the end, they’ve announced the Edges of the Mists that’s in development, and that should hopefully solve this issue anyway. True PvE players will be satisfied with that temporary, non-scoring area, while new players actually interested in learning WvW, and WvW vets alike, will be able to remain in a much shorter queue for the real thing.

silvermember.8941:

I feel like one shot attacks would be fine it they are performed by the boss and we can actually use one of the supposedly 3 pillars of guild wars 2 combat: not damage, not support, but Control. Obviously, by now I believe Arenanet has completely forgotten about that the three pillar thing and are simply trying random things to see how they work.

None of the bosses have defiant. Pull, push, daze, whatever control you want, can interrupt their one shots. Unless you define control as something other than pull, push, daze, etc skills?

What the gauntlet fights remind me of is old-school NES games. Those games we challenging, and for a lot of them, everything killed you in one hit. But those games, like the gauntlet for the most part, were also predictable once you learned the pattern. RNG didn’t exist in the NES (or maybe it did, I could be making this all up), so you’d just have to keep retrying a level, getting a little bit further each time, until you beat it.

The gauntlet fights. for the most part, are the same. Maybe DED a bit more random now that they tried to reduce the farming. But Liadri for example. When I was fighting her, I’d notice it always starts with a cosmic rift across from where you start. Then you gotta run back to the otherside for the first whirlpool, but wait, by then the shadowfall is going to hit first behind it, then in front of it, so be ready to position yourself appropriately…

…etc. Sure, there’s some small difference in the exact location of everything, but they’re all in the same general area. The shadowfall attacks have painfully difficult to see aoe rings, but they always fall in the same pattern. Its designed so one wrong move will mean you fail, but its repeatable and you can learn the patterns. These bosses don’t even have the ridiculous amounts of health that some very boring boss fights consist of (fractal jellyfish boss? Aka afk-autoattack-boss)

Granted, it isn’t without its flaws. The biggest one being that if you die, you either need to hope there’s someone around you kind enough to rez, or you need to respawn and run all the way back. And also, the limited number of arenas means you might not be able to retry right away, when you may have thought you just got it down, and want to retry right again before you forget what you needed to do to get it right.

I’d probably alternate between A and B, until I got bored and went for E to join some more people doing quick farms. Having done Liandri myself, I know it helped to have someone to rez you so you could try again without having to run all the way back, and frankly, waiting an extra 20 for someone to kill deadeye quick is still quicker (and cheaper) than waypointing and running all the way back.

I don’t mind sharing an arena with people, as long as they seem reasonable themselves.

That said, I did have one instance where I joined an arena with one person DED farming in it. So I joined for the same thing. After I went in once, the guy decides to then try and kill his target extremely slowly, blind tanking without doing any damage.

Alright. I go in again, and he tells me I’d better leave “his” arena or every fight of his is going to be like that. After that, he swapped to running in circles with Halmi for the whole 3 mins before logging out/in so he didn’t fall down. Or if he died, he had a second account logged in to rez him. So I’d take my 20-30 seconds and make a bit of coin, he’d take his 3 minutes to try and get me to leave.

Long story short, I spent a good 20 minutes there (until my guild did our bounty), doing my turn, then chatting with my guild during his turns, specifically because he was an kitten .

Morale of the story: DBAD

Just going to throw this out there and hope maybe a dev will like it:

Why not let people trade 2 or 3 (or X) fractal weapons they’ve already gotten for a single fractal weapon of their choice?

It doesn’t really sound like anyone is complaining that “a” skin is difficult to get. Its the fact that the chance of getting “the” skin you want is so small, and that chance never increases no matter how many times you do the fractal. Run a bunch and slowly collect random skins you don’t really want, and trade a handful for the one you do. Won’t conflict with tokens. Will still reward doing higher level fractals more than lower ones. But most importantly, it still gives a reasonable goal that you can make progress towards, rather than the whole skinner box “maybe this next run will be the lucky one in a million”

EDIT: And for a simple way to implement this, just make all fractal weapons salvage 100% guaranteed into some account bound token (lump of fractal ore?), with a new trader that takes X of these in exchange for a new weapon of choice.