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Playing a toon of the opposite gender?

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Bearhugger.4326

I guess I’m old enough to be able to identify myself to a character I play regardless of his or her gender. I usually play whatever I think looks cooler to me, so males in Bioware and Blizzard games, females in Square-Enix games and GW2. And I have no problem bonding and identifying to my characters, or others identifying me to that character.

For GW2 I identify easier to a female human than to a male charr or norn. But then I identify even better to an asuras of either gender than to a GW2 human because I’m the mathy/science type and I just love them for that.

Spellbreaker in PvE?

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Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

In PvE, can’t Full Counter be useful for tanking though? The cooldown is only 8 seconds, (according to WP) it stops anything, and it’s followed by evade frames to boot. Combine that with mace/shield and a lot of health, signet of healing and the usual survival/support utilities and you’re going to give a hard time to a computer-controlled creature to kill you. You also get a big Taunt skill for whatever it’s worth. (I know GW2 taunt is not the typical MMO taunt.)

Does Tanking exist?

in Warrior

Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

The thing is, people still look at classes in GW2 the way they look at them in other games:

Warrior = Tank
Guardian = Off-tank/Healer
Elementalist = Ranged DPS/Healer
Ranger = Ranged DPS
etc.

GW2 isn’t structured like this. GW2 says “Here are classes. Classes have tools that make them fill a variety of roles in different ways. If you want to be tanky, build a class tanky and see what makes it different.” As to how well they’ve accomplished giving each class tanky/damage/support options, that’s a topic for another day, but fundamentally each class is designed around tools and playstyle, not a given role.

What’s contested is more the fact that tanking is owned by a fashionista class instead of either one of the heavy armor classes. This is absolute nonsense, counter-intuitive and misleading. And frankly as one of the classes that has the cool armors it’s disappointing to be incompetent as a tank, especially when the guy that tanks well wears a dress.

I don’t think warriors would object tanking belonging to guardians or revenants, as long as you get at least one valid tank option for one of the heavy armor class.

Elite Specs in Gem Store?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

I actually think it’s pretty reasonable to offer a service to unlock elite specs. I don’t know why I would ever buy an elite spec apiece instead of the whole expansion since it’s just 20$ now, but perhaps that would be a sell to those people who are still on free accounts.

But there’s a big problem. You would need to get your hero points somewhere to unlock the skills, and there’s not enough hero points in core Tyria to unlock everything? So where would you get those hero points?

If they unlock all the skills for you, you’re essentially buying power because expansion purchaser have to work for their hero points, and buying power is crossing the line.

If you don’t get any hero points you pretty much can’t use your elite spec so what’s the point to buy it?

Why did ArenaNet abandon Elder Dragon bosses

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Bearhugger.4326

Dragons CAN work as villains. Nidhogg in FFXIV Heavensward was a very important villain and he was a dragon, and that didn’t stop the game expansion from having a very compelling storyline from start to finish.

It’s just that in Guild Wars 2 the elder dragons are more akin to forces of natures instead of being actual antagonists with goals, personalities and objectives that your character can be personally motivated to hunt. The elder dragons don’t plot to kill your friends, to drive you into madness, or to manipulate governments into doing their bidding, they’re just there being a nuisance to the world. So they don’t make very interesting final bosses on their own. You know why they must be put down, but you’re not very involved with them; you’re just a grunt hunting them.

That kind of villain only works when there are humans acting on their behalf, tapping into their powers, communing with them, etc. For example, if Caudicus found a way to summon an elder dragon and used it to attack Charr lands, while rallying his supporter to gain power in Divinity’s Reach, ejects Jennah and start to eradicate the Charr, suddenly I would be much more motivated to go after Caudicus’ elder dragon, and I think the game of politics that would follow between Charr and humans would be very interesting to follow.

Would you like to see more "realistic" sets?

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Bearhugger.4326

Being overly realistic is boring in my opinion and sometimes even ugly. For example, one of the best medieval helmet (in real history) was something like a pighead bassinet but it’s so ugly that I don’t think you would find a lot of people putting that on their warrior. A bit of fantasy and fashion in their costume design can go a long way to make desirable armor sets, and in a MMO that rewards with cosmetics this is a must.

I think most people asking for realistic/utilitarian skins are confusing fantasy armor with over-designed, over-the-top armors. I really don’t want to work hard to get an armor with ridiculous spikes and light effects that makes me look like a Christmas tree, a pair of enormous shoulder pads with bull heads that droll lava, or a transformer sword taller than my character that doesn’t even look like a sword and has ton of crap on the blade that make it look like a terrible cutter.

What I would like is something similar to the “elite” armor sets of Guild Wars 1. The prestigious gear should look like a nobler, scarier, sexier or flashier version of the plain old sets, and next to the other players you would look like you’re their commander or something. For heavy armors I think they should look at FFXIV Heavenswards for inspiration; in that game/expansion the high level armor is still standard armor but it will have a cape or a robe or something else to make your character look like a high-ranked knight or a lord, and I think it looks really, really good if you’re into knightly styles of armor. For 5 years I have been using a mix-and-match of the Heritage armor with the Draconic legpieces to get that kind of looks, and getting more options would be nice.

Race should matter! A short rant.

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Bearhugger.4326

What would be cool is if the game allowed you to use racial skills on all skill slots very early (like level 5 or 10) so that you can have the fantasy of playing a character of your selected race. And then, as you level up, you gradually replace those racials with your profession’s actual skills.

At end-game though, races should be cosmetic only. The last thing I want is my warrior becoming subpar because Arenanet tuned norns and charrs in a way that makes them better warriors than other races. What’s the point of making a human or asura warrior if norns and charrs are straight up better? There isn’t. It’s only interesting (maybe…) if you can class change your character because then you can sacrifice roles you like less to empower roles you like more.

But even then, a game like Guild Wars 2 that puts emphasis on cosmetic rewards should never ask you to choose between power and looks. This is against one of the game’s core design philosophy.

wintersday on june 27th

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

It’s clearly a gem store promotion.

Other than unique dyes, I’m not sure which Wintersday item are cool enough to warrant some kind of mid-summer special promotion though.

In Game Marriage system

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Bearhugger.4326

And how does Anet know the two to be wed in-game are married out-game? I would totally “marry” my alt accounts to get the benefits you mentioned.

This sounds like a big headache for Anet unless it is no more than a title.

If you want to marry your alt accounts more power to you.

I’m saying that a marriage feature should be designed with features for actual couples and have features that make sense for them. Whether you’re actually a couple IRL is irrelevant.

Arenanet has broken its promise

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Bearhugger.4326

Putting nostalgia aside, the original game direction had a lot of great ideas to the point where I seriously thought it was the real WoW killer… but the implementation of most of these great ideas was a failure. The game had serious issues that have since then been addressed.

  • The personal story with branching choices was a great idea on paper, but it turned out that most choices had no moral implications and therefore was uninteresting, and the sheer number of missions they had to do meant that most missions you did lasted for 5 or 10 minutes. With LW2 and 3, you have missions that last much longer and you still get some choices to make here and there. You can also replay it. The story mode is much better today.
  • Replacing healers and tank roles with the more generic roles of “support” and “control” looked like a great ideas at first but with their implementation the best party build was 5 DPS in berserker and players who would have preferred playing a tank or a healer were alienated. I realize that putting tanks and healers in raids is opposite to their initial philosophy, but at least the players who enjoyed these roles are not left behind now.
  • Dynamic events are a great idea to make the zones feel alive, but people outlevel a zone far too quickly to notice the dynamic changes to a zone, and there is not enough incentive to go back to the mid-level zones because it’s naturally more fun to play in a level 80 area where you’re at full power. And the effort it must have taken to make the zones change depending on success or failure of the events is cool but ultimately feels like a waste of developer effort. I feel that the FATE system of FFXIV works just as well and doesn’t force the devs to make event chains and zone changes.
  • The downed state is a good idea on paper but in practice it’s only useful if some enemy is near death. If you’re downed in solo and your enemy is not almost dead you’re basically stuck watching your character getting slowly killed for 10 seconds and there’s nothing you can do. I am still waiting for a suicide option when downed. PvP players don’t seem too fond of the downed system either but I don’t know about PvP.
  • Town clothes were a very promising toy for role-players, but it was underdeveloped and the devs preferred killing the feature outright and replaced it with outfits.

And I could keep going for hours. My point is that despite the storm of praises and 10/10 that it has received at launch, vanilla GW2 was far from perfect, and while there are definitely things that I liked more about vanilla GW2, I think the game is overall better today than it was back then. Heart of Thorns was a disappointment but it was not all bad, and it did bring some genuinely good things to the game.

(edited by Bearhugger.4326)

In Game Marriage system

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Bearhugger.4326

Hi, so i’ve been playing guild wars 2 ever since it came out, It’s by far my favorite game and will probably be for some time. But the only thing I really miss is a in game marriage system, I know it can’t be made up with a snap of the devs fingers but just something to think about, it wouldn’t be hard, have a cut scene or something and then give titles to the married couple saying blanks wife or blanks husband. And the marriage certificates to get married obviously could be on the gem store and I know a lot of people who would go for that.

Oh God…

I’m sorry. I have been a pen & paper role-player since around 1990 and am all for implementing more role-playing content into the game, but this is taking it too far for me. In all honesty, it even creeps me out a bit (probably because an in-game acquaintance ones started telling me about his “in-game wife” as opposed to his real-life wife and how they always marry in every online RPG… errrr, okay).

The point is to actually marry your significant other that you play the game with and affirm yourself as a couple, not to marry some random stranger for content access. I also play FF where there is a marriage system and I would never think of marrying my character to a stranger, or even a guild member.

Other than titles, the rewards for marrying should only make sense for two people playing together and that 100% trust each other, such as (opt-in) access to the other person’s bank accounts and currencies, some form of access to the other’s characters, etc. (Couples that play the game know each other’s passwords, may as well make it legit.)

The focus is on new content but ...

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

No compromise, please! A replayable season 1 should be just like the replayable season 2, 3, etc. Take the important parts of season 1 (there aren’t that many) put them into instances and tell the story that way. If it’s too much work for them they’re more than justified to charge gems for the episodes, but I want a full-blown story chapter, not fractals.

You do know that most of season 1 was open world right?

Of course I know, but how do you want to relive world-changing events such as the destruction of old Lion’s Arch if it remains open world? You can’t.

What people want them to do is a remake of season 1 that plays in instances so that you can live the story and it’s major dungeons and battles solo. Yes, that means taking things like Tower of Nightmares and the battle of Lion’s Arch and making solo instanced versions of those where you play with your bros of Dragon’s Watch.

So basically, season 1 would be new content, simply because the actual content of season 1 is not reusable in the new format. New content, which would monopolize some development resources, but if they put a season 1 I want an actual story I can play through, not some half-done excuse like a fractal or a bunch of cutscenes. If they have to charge for it I will be happy to pay up, but I want a real season, in the current format. Nothing less.

The focus is on new content but ...

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Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

No compromise, please! A replayable season 1 should be just like the replayable season 2, 3, etc. Take the important parts of season 1 (there aren’t that many) put them into instances and tell the story that way. If it’s too much work for them they’re more than justified to charge gems for the episodes, but I want a full-blown story chapter, not fractals.

Feedback:why gf couldn't get into this game

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Bearhugger.4326

The main campaign is not very good, although depending on the race you picked you will have a good time in the first 20-25. Norn and sylvari have extra boring starter quests where as charr and asuras have very enjoyable ones. Humans are sort of in the middle.

But in all cases, the fact that they tried to have branching missions meant that they had to split their efforts in many missions instead of focusing on a single mission, and make it great. This is by far my biggest issue with the main campaign. Missions rarely last more than 10 minutes because they had to make soooo many missions. The LS seasons fix that by culling the unnecessary branching.

It’s when you’re doing the LW seasons that it get really good, but you have to do main story first. In essence, this game has the same problem as FFXIV: story starts out boring and gets very, very good later, you just have to tough the boring part. At least GW2 let you skip the main campaign once you hit level 80 (I think) but on the flip side you have to buy it with gems.

Wearing two headgears (face/head) at once?

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Bearhugger.4326

Well it could just be an additional cosmetic slot in addition to the costume, so no stats. The only problem is that some head gear have their own face gear, so they would need a system to decide which takes priority.

In Game Marriage system

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Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

I’d do it like that:

  • The two players make a party of 2 and speak to whatever the marriage authority is for their race. Each race has it’s own wedding ceremony. If the two players are of different race they get to pick one or the other.
  • Each player gets a recipe to craft your ring and your wedding dress (or tuxedo), which are bind-on-pickup so you make it yourself. It takes 400 Jewelcrafter to craft the ring since it’s exotic. (Deal with it.) The dress and tuxedo can take 1 tailor since it’s just a costume. Depending on your race and gender you would get an race-appropriate costume. Both players need to craft both the dress/tux and the ring to marry. You can’t equip either until the ceremony.
  • To help gather the materials the game would send both players to do content designed for two players. Could be mini-dungeons, instanced content, etc. Nothing crazy, no PvP, etc. Just a little thing that the soon-to-be-married can do together.
  • Once they have the items, the couple has to reserve an instance for their wedding and you send invitations. The point is to let you invite as many people as you want while leaving the trolls out. If you do it in the the open in the wedding area of Lion’s Arch this is too troll-bait, especially if it’s a same-sex marriage.
  • Once the couple is married they get a title <partner>‘s wife/husband and get to equip and dye their wedding costume. In addition, as a couple you get the option to share currencies and bank accounts, if both players agree to. Couples usually know each other’s account login anyway, so this is just a convenience. If you divorce both players lose all these privileges.
  • You don’t get anything that would compel min-maxers to marry, such as making the a ring legendary with stat selection, or having a teleport-to-other spell. You only want this to be used by actual couples. (Or people that are curious what it is like.)

Sadly though, the marriage feature would probably too niche to warrant the development time that this would require.

Wearing two headgears (face/head) at once?

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Bearhugger.4326

Yeah it would be nice if things like glasses, eye patches, bandannas, etc. were their own equipment slot instead of taking the entire head slot. That would be quite a bit of work on their side though, I wouldn’t keep my hopes up.

Sylvari = Canon race for GW2 story?

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Bearhugger.4326

Bearhugger.4326

Well if you recall pre-launch, both the artists and the writers seemed to have A LOT of love for the Sylvari race. There was a lot of blog posts and interviews about the design of the race, a lot more than for any other race.

I didn’t think they would go as far as to make them the “hero” race of the game though. It felt like they were trying to “force” us to like the race by putting a Sylvari in the foreground at every corner, and they went as far as putting a Sylvary-exclusive achievement in HoT. I happen to not like the Sylvari very much, so it came out as more annoying than cool to me.

I hope that Sylvaris will take the backseat for the next expansion and let us explore the other races of the game. I don’t mean to completely erase them from the story (Canach is my buddy!) just don’t make the story focused on Sylvaris this time around. Please?

Dark eyes should be free

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Bearhugger.4326

It’s most likely an oversight. I would not have thought about it either. I don’t think they honestly sought out to make gem sells at the expense of their Asian/African players.

In fact for a company that likes to get on its high horses about diversity questions it’s probably an embarrassing oversight now that someone points that out, heh.

I hope they change their minds about the dark eyes or just add a second dark eye color that’s free to choose. It’s a very reasonable request in my opinion.

Profession change, please.

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Bearhugger.4326

Having played FF, I wonder why they can’t just let us level every job on a single character.

The first game had a secondary profession system where you could pick up pretty much anything from another profession and meld it with your primary.

The least they could do for the second game is to let us learn and switch professions, as long as you have to level all of them from level 1 that’s not much different from having alts, with all the things that are already shared between an account’s characters.

The only issue is that character slots would suddenly less attractive, so they would probably have to sell the option on the gem store.

Yes and were do you suggest anet get the money for character slots that they then have to refund?

Why would they feel compelled to refund character slots? Multi-profession characters have their pros and their cons compared to plain old alts. For example, alts have their own inventory space whereas if you had many professions on your character you would have to carry their gear somewhere. It makes character slots less compelling, sure, but it doesn’t make them obsolete. And if it’s a money issue for them they can sell alt-profession unlocks on the gem store, I would be fine with that.

Profession change, please.

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Bearhugger.4326

Having played FF, I wonder why they can’t just let us level every job on a single character.

The first game had a secondary profession system where you could pick up pretty much anything from another profession and meld it with your primary.

The least they could do for the second game is to let us learn and switch professions, as long as you have to level all of them from level 1 that’s not much different from having alts, with all the things that are already shared between an account’s characters.

The only issue is that character slots would suddenly less attractive, so they would probably have to sell the option on the gem store.

Adding personality stances?

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Bearhugger.4326

I think that’s a good idea. Thumbs up for me.

There is something similar in FF14 where you can change your idle and sitting pose to give a bit of personality to your character, and your suggestion is basically to give that to all animations, not just the idle poses. I like that.

[Suggestions] Future Elite Specializations

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Bearhugger.4326

Fallen (Guardian elite specialization)

Once a valiant protector of Tyria, the recent events have shaked the Guardian’s faith and resolve, and s/he is now on the verge of madness and corruption, constantly being torn between his oath and his inner madness.

Concept
A recurring theme of the holy warrior archetype is the light vs darkness duality. (Think about Star Wars, Final Fantasy IV, Warcraft 3, etc.) As the “paladin” archetype of Guild Wars 2, I would have an elite specialization have you play a guardian that is on the verge of turning evil.

The Fallen is themed around a character that has two personalities: his usual guardian personality which is all about honor and selflessness, and his dark, evil and twisted alter ego. In the game, it is like playing two characters rolled into one, each having 2 distinct weapon slots, stats, and utility skill slots. The player can enter dark form (aka: fall into madness) anytime, but switching back to light form has a long cooldown and/or require you to be out of combat. This is also to put emphasis on the fact that this is not a shroud-like ability; if you switch to your dark form, you must commit to it because there is no coming back for a while.

(I’m leaving the balance of such a character in the hands of people that know the balance of the game far better than I do. I’m interested in themes and concepts here.)

New Mechanic: Collapse (F4)
The guardian falls to madness, swapping the stats, equipped weapons and utilities with those assigned to the dark form. You can never block during madness and all healing is reduced, but you gain increased damage. This alters weapon skills into “dark” versions of themselves, and corrupts the guardian’s Virtues into Vices:

  • Vice of Tyranny: Replaces Virtue of Justice. Very long cast time with an obvious tell. If the enemy has more HP than the Fallen, it takes some damage, nothing special. If it has less HP than the Fallen, Vice of Tyranny deals far more damage. In either case though, Vice of Tyranny cannot kill or down the foe, essentially leaving it at 1 HP if it would otherwise kill it.
  • Vice of Corruption: Replaces Virtue of Resolve. Applies a short Corruption debuff to a foe. If that foe is defeated (not just downed) while the Corruption debuff is on, it will become a Corrupted Husk, serving as a mindless turret minion for the Fallen for a short period of time. The Corrupted Husk is killed easily, but it itself spreads Corruption, allowing for more Corrupted Husks to be spawned if not taken care of.
  • Vice of Cowardice: Replaces Virtue of Courage. Unblockable PBAoE fear+torment. (Boring, but I have no idea.)

New weapon: None
Instead of a new weapon, all guardian weapon skills are altered into “dark” versions after entering Madness, giving them slightly different animations. Generally, dark weapon skills are like their usual version but tends to replace the boons with conditions, the healing with bleeds or more damage, the aegis with unblockable traits, and so on. The Fallen also gets access to 4 weapon slots (sort of… the usual 2 for the normal form and 2 additional ones for the dark form) so I think that a new weapon would be too much.

New utilities: Corruption. (Obviously.)
You can only equip those on the utility bar of the dark form. As for weapon, both forms have their utility skill slots.

New elite: Vengeful Duality
Deal damage based on much HP you had lost in your light form before entering dark form, and switch you back to your light form for a short duration.

(edited by Bearhugger.4326)

Most boring race

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Bearhugger.4326

Sylvaris are the most boring race. The devs’ attempts to make them special in vanilla and HoT at the expense of the 4 more interesting races just exasperates the issue. They made them immune to Zaithan’s influence and made one of them leader of the pact despite being awfully boring. Scarlet should have been an Asura but for some reason they forced her to be a Sylvari. Hearts of Thorns was all about Sylvaris. After what she did, I wish my character told Caithe to choke and die when she reappeared after Heart of Thorns. I just don’t like Sylvaris, I hope the next expansions put Sylvaris at the backseat for a little while and focus on the other races.

EDIT: Actually, Canach is fine. I like him. Mostly for his cynism. But he also doesn’t seem to care much about Sylvari problems.

GW2 has beautiful and, unlike one of the posters on the first page said, a very interesting set of races and cultures to choose from. Just check the competitors out there: It’s basically human only with a few changes, but still too human.

I just pull out one over-rated game, Final Fantasy 14:
The races are, as mentioned above, humans:

  • Hyur = Humans
  • Roegadyn = Tall Humans
  • Mi’Quote = Humans with cat tail
  • Elezen = Stretched, giraffe-like humans
  • Lalafell = Small, pear-like humans
  • Au’Ra = Humans with toy horns bought at Toys’R’Us for €2.99

It’s stupid and the Lalafell are the best by far. Guess what: NONE of those races have any real culture. It’s a 2-liner about their origins, and that’s it. There is no personal story either, you are a dumb and mindless contract worker doing fetch quests, none of the NPC take you for real, in the cutscenes random NPC come in and yell “WE did it” and you can not even talk apart from “Ah” and “ugh”. However, when a female Mi’Quote fires an arrow (which happens a lot as Bard), it’s “Ahh..Uh!!Ah! Uh!”.

Here we have two races that are very difficult and great design-wise:
The Charr and Sylvari.

The Charr, actual beast-cats (unlike the aforementioned Mi’Quote) that still retained a form of civilization. The subtle grunting and snarling when they talk is just a little but beautiful detail other gaming companies do not care for. I really like Charr.

Sylvari are cabbage people made from tree branches and leaves, I do not like them, but from an aesthetical viewpoint, they are very interesting.

Perhaps, but FFXIV has 5 to 10x more armor sets than GW2, they’re more varied, they’re about the same quality, and they’re 99% obtainable in-game without cash shop. That’s thanks to having relatively similar body shapes on all races.

Given that “nobody” plays Charr and Asuras in GW2 anyway, I consider that having so many widely different races at the detriment of customization and cosmetics was a HUGE mistake on Arenanet’s part, and I wouldn’t be surprised to catch a few devs say that they regret it off the record. The game is supposed to reward with cosmetics, and armor sets are the most important customization option for most people, but the devs themselves say that it’s too hard for them to pump as many as in the first game due to having so many different races. That super varied set of races holds back the rewards system, which is a huge problem in a MMO. I’d go as far as to say that they should have gone with only humans like in GW1. I mean everyone plays humans, big humans (norn) or green humans (sylvari) so why put the effort?

Of course that doesn’t mean that I disagree with your point about GW2 having more varied races than most other MMOs, I’m just saying that the cost was not worth it in my opinion.

(edited by Bearhugger.4326)

Feeling Vs Balance

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Bearhugger.4326

Meh. Arenanet has never been very good at balance. The game’s change history has been a string of overbuffs and overnerfs ever since launch, which is typical of development teams that know that their game has a balance issue but have no clear understanding of all the states, numbers and conditions that are at play, and just can’t pinpoint the actual issue. Truth be told, balancing an MMO is hard. Very hard. Because it involves both a number problem and a social problem.

This is why the approach of Guild Wars 1 was so brilliant. Instead of trying to balance the game in vain they just threw hundreds of skills per expansion and let the community sort out what is good and what is bad, and with the sheer number of skills there was, there was always a dozen builds to try. But I disgress.

It’s a shame but I don’t think they will come back on that decision for the Warrior changes, however bad it is. They didn’t come back on their decisions for the other terrible changes they have made in the past.

Please defend the medium legendary armor

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Bearhugger.4326

Medium armor has a history of tossing thieves under the bus because sure a trench coat makes sense for a ranger and an engineer however it doesn’t for a thief. A theif is like an Assassin, Rogue or Ninja they move stealthily and quickly. In all of Gw1 I can’t think of a single extended coat that assassins used. Yet in Gw2 there flooded with the things barely any armor suitable for a theif and the ones that are will typically be racial.

Umm, sorry but that’s just wrong.

Your character is not an assassin or a ninja. It’s a thief. The thief class may have inherited skills from the GW1 assassin but it’s a thief. And thieves want to wear ample clothes with large pockets to hide the stolen goods. The assassination and acrobatics sub-themes fit the thief because the stereotypical fantasy thief runs fast, is hard to catch, and the evil ones are honorless backstabbers, but it’s still a thief, and as such it makes total sense that a thief would wear trenchcoats and other long clothes.

It’s on ranger that the trenchcoats do not not fit at all. When you’re hunting in the wilds you don’t want to be wearing long and ample clothes, that will get stuck everywhere and catch a ton of crap like dead branches, pollen and pine needles and get dirty real fast. Rangers should get wood runner themed gear or something like that.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that there are way too many trenchcoats for the medium professions, but to say that we get an overabundance of trenchcoats because of everyone but thieves is ridiculous.

(edited by Bearhugger.4326)

@devs please make more underwater content.

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Bearhugger.4326

Well the developers gave underwater it’s own skill bar and pushed the mode farther than any other RPG developer has before, and people still dread fighting underwater. Perhaps it’s time to accept the obvious conclusion, that players generally don’t want to be forced into underwater combat. I know I don’t.

Which isn’t to say that underwater combat shouldn’t be a part of the game at all, but it shouldn’t be brought back to the 20% of world content that it was originally intended to be.

I would pay 50$ for an expansion if....

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Bearhugger.4326

World PvP would be fine if they make a map specifically for it. We just don’t want to see it in the classic maps, because the game’s PvE is designed to make players naturally team up instead of fearing each other. If they made it in the open-world it would have to be opt-in like in WoW, and in WoW nobody opts in for world PvP because that’s just asking to get ganked.

But you could have a corner of the WvW map that mimics open-world PvP in other games. Maybe you can gather exclusive tradeable crafting materials that are used to craft new armor sets and consumable. That may be enough to convince the more adventurous players to go there, gather some mats and sell it on the trade post to make gold. Then do something to reward players for actually doing PvP in the zone, maybe you get x% of your opponent’s gathered materials if you defeat them, or a buff that increases how much you gather.

Is expansion 2 make or break for GW2?

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Bearhugger.4326

I’m late on the Living World content (not done with episode 4 yet) but so far as a completely casual solo-PvE player, I really like what I’ve seen as of late, and the sheer size of the new map make the next episode look awesome. If they can keep the pace with the expansion and further content, I think we’re looking into a very good future for the game.

It’s just very unfortunate that it took 5 years for the game to get there. After an original game that lacked in end-game content and an expansion that, despite having a lot of hidden gems like adventures, ultimately disappointed a lot of people by it’s small size. It may be difficult to convince players to give another chance to the game. Even though I truly believe it deserves another look, it may be a hard sell. In a sense, it may already be broken in terms of growth.

But there is hope. There are not a lot of new MMOs these days, and the two most popular ones (WoW and FF14) are pay-to-play which is a non-starter for a lot of people, so while the game is 5 years old, Guild Wars 2’s traditional niche of being a super casual-friendly MMO with no power creep and a pay-for-the-box business model may still have it’s place.

But it’s to Arenanet to worry about such things. As long as the expansion release I’m happy.

New characters/classes/races please

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Bearhugger.4326

I hope they don’t add new races. It already looks like they chew more than they could bite with 5 races because they regularly reminds us how much it makes it harder to make armors, which happen to be a big deal in a game that pretends to reward with skins. If they keep adding more races it will just increase the workload, for creating new costumes and armors, and in the end most people stick to the humanoids for their main anyway (Norns, humans, sylvs) so it would probably be a waste of effort.

If they want to spend time on player characters, I think that time would be better spent improving their character creator, implementing cloaks and capes and creating more armor sets.

Why is Common Clothing a tonic?

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Bearhugger.4326

I’d actually like to see a return and improvement of the town clothes feature. They didn’t even give a chance to that feature they just cut it in 2014.

Like countless other things about GW2 at launch, I thought the idea behind town clothes was awesome but the implementation was terrible, because you had to manually turn it on and then turn it off, which means that you would only use it when you’re in a role-playing mindset.

Town clothes needed to automatically revert to armor upon entering combat.

The game also needed a opt-out setting that can make your character automatically put on town clothes in town, after X minutes spent in town, etc.

Legendary Armor: Feedback [merged]

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Bearhugger.4326

The reaction is not surprising. It’s impossible to satisfy everyone with one single set, especially when it has to be enough outlandish and over-the-top to earn the title “legendary.”

I wonder how many ordinary (non-legendary) sets they could have made by the time they made the legendary armors, because Heart of Thorns really could have used more sets at launch. If they could have added 3 or 4 additional sets for all armor classes and put them in game (perhaps as LW3 episode rewards) that could have eased the lack of new options in Fashion Wars 2, which is still an issue.

Now, even though I always play solo and unguilded, I fully believe that raiders and top-PvP players should have unique perks for the sake of bragging rights (sorry, you shouldn’t be able to get everything solo) so I’m not saying that the concept of giving them legendary armors is bad, but if it came at the cost of sets for more casual players then this is a bit unfortunate.

School Uniform

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Bearhugger.4326

I don’t think we would have gotten it even if it was released. This was most likely designed for their release on the Asian market, and, I’d wager, at the request of NCSoft in Korea.

Then I guess they didn’t find it very lore-friendly to see a bunch of females dressed up like school girls walking around to fight Zaithan and decided to never release it. Obviously this is all speculation.

"nearly 400 people at ArenaNet" speculation

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Bearhugger.4326

Programmers are not even the majority on development team anymore. And among the programmers, some don’t actually write code that is shipped with game, instead they write code to support production. You have tools programmers (they make level editors, etc. so not shipped), you have pipeline programmers (build machine, versioning, deployment, etc.), etc. Depending on how big Arenanet’s budget is, they will also have library and programmer tool builders that will help make the code that’s already written reusable and improving other programmers’ productivity.

Better engine? Though they do appear to have (I’m sorry to say if any Anet programmer is reading but it does look like it from the outside) one of the worst game engine out there, it’s probably polished and debugged enough for Guild Wars 2’s needs. I don’t think what they would gain would be worth the risk and the effort.

A customizable UI would not surprise me. That’s the kind of thing I expect them to ship eventually. They most likely already have UI design tools internally, so they would “just” (I know…) have to plug it into their game engine.

There’s a lot of misconceptions about what a game programmer does. A programmer is not a game designer, and she’s usually not a game designer’s coding poodle either. A game programmer typically builds the core framework that supports the game (the engine) and will build the base features of the game, leaving enough screws and buttons to let non-tech people to customize the gameplay and other stuff to their liking.

Other things you mentioned like balance or WvW are usually the game designers department, unless they require a change in the game’s foundation. Programmers time is too precious to waste it tweaking damage modifiers or creating new buffs or debuffs when they could be fixing bugs or creating new features and tools. Instead of that, tool programmers will give designers enough screws and buttons to tweak the gameplay without bothering programmers all the time. It’s only when those tools are not enough that a programmer will actually do the job for them.

Wooden Potatoes Grande Review

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Bearhugger.4326

He made a lot of very strong points about elite specialization.

100% agree that they’re basically handing roles to the wrong classes.

It’s great that chronomancers and scrappers get the option to be good tanks with their elite specialization, but warriors and guardians should also be competent tanks (their class fantasy) and yet they are not, because their tanking does not come from an elite specialization.

The same goes for healing, nobody made a ranger to heal. Instead you’d expect that to be given to water elementalists and guardians, yet those are poor healers in comparison because it comes from an elite specialization, while the elementalist and guardian healing is a core class component.

In the long term, elite specialization could create a strong dissonance between the class fantasy and what they are actually good at. It seems to point to my warrior being more likely to get competitive at healing than at tanking, which is complete nonsense. And if that’s how it’s going to be, I would prefer elite specializations to enhance a core function of the class instead of expanding into new roles and areas of expertise that are more or less related to the players expectations of what that class can do.

Wooden Potatoes Grande Review

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Bearhugger.4326

I think he’s correct on most account. It’s a good recap of what happened since season 2, if anything.

I will watch his video on elite specs when it’s out.

How is GW2 doing?

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Bearhugger.4326

I feel that the game is dropping players, but since the game is solo friendly to a fault and the megaserver system should make sure that all popular zones are decently populated, I wouldn’t worry about the population drop if it turns out to be real. (That’s Arenanet’s problem.)

Personally, I play this game on and off, almost always solo and unguilded, but if someone wants me to join a group for non-PvP content I’ll be happy to help. For what I get out of this game, it’s well worth the initial price + expansion price.

WTB actual balance

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Bearhugger.4326

The frequency of balance patches is fine. What Arenanet needs is a public test server to test them out first.

They have a tendency to overnerf and then to overbuff to compensate. Having players actually test their changes for them to collect data on would probably help them finding the sweet spot.

EDIT: Could also help them find the right changes to address balance issues without collateral damages to other builds.

Is GW2 Worth Getting Into? (2017)

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Bearhugger.4326

The population of Guild Wars 2 should be pretty stable 5 years after it’s release. There aren’t other MMOs quite like Guild Wars 2 so it’s not like there’s competition if you’re happy with it. Unless Arenanet makes a major mistake or announces Guild Wars 3 I don’t see people massively jump out of the game.

Guild Wars 2 is a casual MMO first and foremost. Instead of patching new raids and difficulty mode they patch in new story and world zones. Which isn’t to say there are no raids but that does not appear to be the focus.

I think GW2 is the best MMO that does not have monthly fees. (Best overall is FF14 for me.)

So in the end it is Lake Doric after all.

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Bearhugger.4326

They weren’t lying, but they weren’t telling all the truth.

But I appreciate that they didn’t. I was surprised to read “Lake Doric” on my loading screen.

Episode 4 - Head of the Snake

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Bearhugger.4326

I just hope they don’t end up destroying Divinity’s Reach. It’s by far the prettiest capital city in the game, looking even better than old Lion’s Arch.

How does everyone feel about Sylvari now?

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Bearhugger.4326

After what she did in season 2, as a human, I really wish my character just told Caithe to kitten off and get lost. The leader of Dragon’s Watch doesn’t care (nor does she have the time) to listen to Caithe’s petty sylvari rambling. Dragon Watch has to prepare for 2 awakening dragons, but also for a Mursaat of questionable allegiances and the white mantle plotting to overthrow the beloved queen.

But no, my character will probably be nice to Caithe, happily listen to her ramblings for hours again, and eagerly await the next time she’ll fail her.

Canach is the only sylvari the commander wants near her in Dragon’s Watch, because he doesn’t come with sylvari drama, just the sylvari goodness.

GW2 The Best MMORPG

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Bearhugger.4326

I don’t think FFXIV has a better character creator than GW2. FFXIV has more options but those are all discrete choices. GW2 has continuous sliders so you can get the property closer to what you want, and it also has a better dye system. Also, GW2 may not have boob and muscle sliders but they have a lot of preset body types, and personally I found the type of body I wanted for all my humans and norns so I have nothing to complain about there. Not saying that GW2’s character creator couldn’t be improved with 2017 tech, but it’s not awful either. I think GW2 got character creator tech from another NCSoft game (Aion?) but then put tighter limits to the slider to prevent players from creating characters that are too much out of proportions.

As for BDO, well duh, of course it has the best character creator, the game is basically designed to let you create perfect drop dead gorgeous female characters because later they’re going to sell you sexy gear for her in the store. The gear female characters get in-game is very ugly, and that’s for a reason.

ANET. Make outfits separated then I'll buy.

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Bearhugger.4326

I’ve suggested selling them in both forms, an outfit, and armor skins to be mixed and matched. People want more skins, and these models are already in the game. It would be simple enough, but I doubt they would ever do it, though I don’t know why. I don’t see a lot of people running around at 80 in outfits outside of the new ones in the market.

It wouldn’t be “simple enough”. It would be a nightmare. The current armor sets in the game are designed to be mix-and-matched with pieces from different armor sets without having too much clipping or seam issues. This is why armor sets for a certain class (medium, heavy, light) tend to be similar. All medium legs are designed to be mix and matched with trenchcoats, but if you wear something like a heavy or light armor skirt/kilt with a trenchcoat the skirt will go right through the trenchcoat and it will look horrible. This is also why the “wear any armor weight on any class” suggestions are very unlikely to happen.

If they made outfits pieces you guys would be complaining that you got yet another trenchcoat for medium, yet another ballerina tu-tu nonsense for light, and some chain mail “skirt” for heavy, because there’s only certain armor designs that are meant to go with each armor weight, unless they start doing it like old MMOs where the armor is just a texture on top of your body, and I’m sure you’ll agree that it wouldn’t be cool.

Making outfits not mixed-and-matchable allows the devs to break these restrictions about what goes with that and give you looks unlike anything you’ve seen for your armor weight. So I hope they never cut outfits in pieces. The real problem with outfits is that they’re sold exclusively in the store, and for a MMO that is supposed to reward with cosmetic, this is the last place I want to get my outfits.

Curious why more people don't PvP or WvW

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Bearhugger.4326

I’m just not a competitive person. PvP gets the worst of me and on top of that I’m a sore loser when I play against strangers so that puts me in a terrible mood, especially when I’m on my main. I also couldn’t care less about esport and competitive gaming and the fact that the devs have been pushing on making GW2 structured PvP an esport since the beginning guarantees that I will never step foot in a PvP arena. I don’t mind that PvP is an important part of the game, a MMO should absolutely try to have a diverse player base and I encourage Arenanet to make PvP as good as they can, but I want no part in it.

I’m more interested in story, solo play, exploration and role-playing. I don’t PvP but I don’t raid either to be quite honest.

Elite Spec suggestion

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Bearhugger.4326

For the weapon I agree that there should be no lock on the elite spec, because the weapon that elite specs have generally little relevance with the theme of the class. It’s going to be silly in a few expansions where warriors get scepter and it’s actually better than the elementalist scepter because it comes as part of an elite spec, and then elementalist has a better greatsword or shield than warrior for the same reason.

I want to eventually get scepter or pistol on my warrior. (I mean why not?) But I don’t want those to ever be the focus of any warrior elite specs because those will always be out of theme on the warrior class.

Other parts of an elite specs, like the skills and mechanics. No, those are part of the flavour of the elite spec so keep them locked to the elite.

Incredibly low player skill population?

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Bearhugger.4326

It may be worth noting that they originally made world PvE harder in Heart of Thorns, but they got a lot of backlash for it, and then MO took over, they toned down the difficulty so the HoT maps.

As long as bad players can fail your events I agree with the devs about making world PvE easy though, because that’s a huge source of conflict if a bad players comes to your event and fails it through being clueless and it’s clear, from nearly all game design decision they have taken in world PvE, that the devs want to avoid player conflicts. They don’t always succeed, (ie: event trains purposely failing events for faster repop and OMG the hateful whispers will storm upon you should you succeed one such event…) but that seems to be what they are going for. Meeting another player in world PvE is rarely bad news in GW2, which is not something I can say for a lot of other MMOs.

But hey, GW2 is reputed to be one of these MMOs with a nice and welcoming community. I’d bet this has something to do with it.

Lazarus (Spoilers)

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Bearhugger.4326

I think Arenanet are going to keep the mystery on his ulterior motives and allegance for a very, very long time. Right now it makes sense that he would be an ally because the dragons are menacing him as much as they are menacing us so he’ll play nice, but when all dragons are dead —and with 2 dragons awakened and 2 dead it may come quicker than expected-- he may see it as his time to “fill the void.”

One thing’s sure though: after he says that the White Mantle should revere him as a god, I “agree” with my character. I don’t trust him.

If he’s actually a good mursaat Arenanet will probably just get him corrupted by <insert some magical corrupting artifact or spell>. I mean come on, he’s WAY too powerful a creature, not turning him into a villain at some point would be a waste.

New Legendary Shield (Shooshadoo)

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Bearhugger.4326

I was wondering what happened to the Saints Row devs after THQ went under… Looks like they got hired by Arenanet to design legendaries. XD

Server DC /Crashing 11/15/2016 -11/17/2016

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Bearhugger.4326

Yep, disconnected. Was in a Living World 3 instance although looking at other posters, it’s obviously game-wide.