Guild Wars 2

Just like how legendary weapons allow you to freely swap sigils!

Neko.9021:

Do people really need survivable gear to do stuff easily ever since the Great Power Creep Patch of June 2015?

Some people always will need survivable gear. Some use skill and practice to laugh off boss mechanics instead of gear, but to each their own.

I really doubt you see my point then. Let me try again.

1. The application of the rule is as important as the drafting.

2. Whoever is making rulings on particular records needs to be very careful in the application of the rules.

3. “Don’t go out of bounds” should be very clear and easy to apply

4. Who was it that approved the molten facility record?

The application of the rules are as important as the drafting. “Don’t go out of bounds” should have been a very clear rule, but we’ve seen that even that was subject to debate.

As long as we push to be more explicit in the wording and application of the rules, the worse it gets for competitors and spectators alike.

If staff can be mele, greatsword can be used underwater.

If Warrior and Guardian can both use greatsword, then why can’t Warrior use wall of reflect?

Why does anet not follow these very logical trends?

Nike.2631:

CrAcKeDmUfFiN.9402:

Is a Phalanx Strength Warrior not a specialist? Warrior drops from mid-tier damage to dead last to provide groupwide might and banners. Or is that not significant enough because they’re still wearing berserker’s gear?

Quite the opposite – the problem is that even when you’re committing to Support, there’s not a better choice than Zerker.

Maybe if Giver’s armor/jewelry had the boon duration stat the points OBVIOUSLY should be generating (1% per ten stat points as seen in several trait lines) instead of being castrated at 1% per piece, maybe the “zerker meta” would actually resolve itself…

It’s not that there’s a “not a better choice than Zerker” exactly. The reality is that when you are committing to support your allies, that the stats on your armor don’t really make a difference. In that regard, Phalanx Strength is actually an exception because you need to be critting in order to generate might, but the point remains.

If anything, one could easily make the argument that the barrier to entry being so low allows for far more build diversity than the anti berserker crowd would lead you to believe. If I, today, want to run a dps warrior or a phalanx warrior (giving differing roles and playstyles), I only need to swap out utilities and traits. I’m not pidgeonholed into a build simply because of the gold cost associated with making a new set of gear to run a slightly different build.

There’s really not much that the stats on your armor do for you, and that’s a pretty nice way to go. At the end of the day, you get a more significant change in how a class “feels” by swapping weapons than you do from equipping a different set of stats on your armor. Some of us happen to like that about the game today, allowing for easy changes in our playstyles without carrying around 3-4 sets of gear. We can all cry for diversity for diversity’s sake, but an arbitrary number in your hero panel is a really unimaginative and ultimately unsatisfying way to do it.

Nike.2631:

maha.7902:

so yeah, control is pretty kitten strong. in fact the whole meta is anchored around it right now – you shut down bosses with co-ordinated CC and burst them without interruption.

You say “right now”. Let me ask our various masters of mastery-ness:

Has the Dungeon meta-game meaningfully changed in the last 2 years?

CrAcKeDmUfFiN.9402:

Support and control currently are the definition of the meta. “Specialists” already exist and are the bedrock of a meta composition today.

I’ll bite. Walk me through what a “Support Specialist” and a “Control Specialist” look like.

Is a Phalanx Strength Warrior not a specialist? Warrior drops from mid-tier damage to dead last to provide groupwide might and banners. Or is that not significant enough because they’re still wearing berserker’s gear?

Nike.2631:

maha.7902:

so yeah, control is pretty kitten strong. in fact the whole meta is anchored around it right now – you shut down bosses with co-ordinated CC and burst them without interruption.

You say “right now”. Let me ask our various masters of mastery-ness:

Has the Dungeon meta-game meaningfully changed in the last 2 years?

Nike.2631:

I am the person saying they clearly want to make control and support more of a thing you can focus on and I think arranging things so specialists deliver enough benefit that they could be one more tool in the toolbox of the elite is building on and adding to the goodness of the good thing we have now.

Support and control currently are the definition of the meta. “Specialists” already exist and are the bedrock of a meta composition today.

Same. So no aura or sounds for Dreamer owners. Excellent way to spend a couple of thousand of gold.

D/d will restore endurance and has superior damage, making it the go-to option in boss fights. If you haven’t yet, bind something to “about face” and slot withdraw. You’ll have far more dodges than you need with that setup, and you’ll not mess up defiant stacks trying to get evade frames out of your weapon set.

Yeah, it’s surprisingly easy to phase a lvl 50 archdiviner in a single deep freeze. I’m okay with actually having to fight him instead of safely repeating a short, coordinated burst of damage.

So can we all agree that we run vitality/toughness food in AC because you cannot crit the burrows?

Really don’t like this change. As someone who allocates different portions of my daily in-game earnings into different vaults within my personal guild bank, I only see this creating problems. It’s far too easy to tell people to “just keep your money in your account vault”, yet we can see that guild banks have become a tool for managing gold in a more sophisticated fashion than the in-game equivalent of throwing all of your cash into a big pile on the floor.

It’s far easier to resist the temptation to spend money when you have to go out of your way to get it all out of a guild bank, but it’s also much easier to see: “I earned twenty gold today because I started at two gold and I am now at twenty-two gold. I’ll put 16 into this tab and 4 into this tab”. Whereas, the option of only using the account wallet forces you to remember exactly how much gold you had the day before.

I’m not going to ask for crazy sophisticated tools to track and save in-game gold, but I dislike the idea that I’ll be another step away from my own gold because I chose to responsibly manage it.

I agree that watching cutscenes isn’t at the detriment of a group, and that it’s not really a great reason to kick someone. That’s also why I’d be interested to hear the other side of the story. It doesn’t really make sense to me to kick someone at the very end of a dungeon after all of the cutscenes have been watched. That time that OP spent watching the cutscenes was already gone, so there really wasn’t anything to be gained by kicking anyone at that point. I really only see two possibilities (neither of which I endorse, and both of which I’ve been subjected to personally)

1. They wanted to give the dungeon to a friend. Someone wanted story mode done on one of their toons or needed a reward track unlocked, so they kicked “those guys watching the cutscenes” to bring in a buddy or two. I’d imagine most people have run into this at one point or another, and its never a good feeling to have something you invested time in taken away from you for nothing.

2. They’re just crummy people who do crummy things for no real reason. They just wanted to bully someone or feel superior, so they found someone to pick on and did a mean thing to them. It happens, but its by no means the norm. This community is actually friendly and generally accepting, we really don’t need to worry about two bad apples in the grand scheme of things.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

And then the 3 members kick them at the end to deny them rewards.

how can someone defend that? The OP gave us his side of the story, and it may or may not have happened that way. But people defend this. Right here.

No one said that it is okay to “kick them at the end to deny them rewards”. And yes we might be talking about a brand new player to the game, but that doesn’t mean they’re infants incapable of communication or adaptation. I do remember being a new player, vividly. I remember when someone explained simple dungeon terms to me and I remember pugging a lot of dungeons that didn’t go well.

One very simple thing that any individual can understand, regardless of skill or experience, is that there are four other members of your party that you need to work with in order to beat the encounter. It made no difference whether I was a day 1 player or a polished veteran, I was 20% of any given dungeon group. If my group decides to watch all the cutscenes, I have to deal with that. If my group wants to kill literally every single mob in the dungeon, that’s something I have to work with. If I don’t agree to the strategies the group uses, I need to leave that group. If my group sees that I am childishly going to do what I want at the expense of my group, they have every right to kick me.

The members of the group should have kicked OP and relisted as soon as it became very apparent that they were not team players. Instead, they decided to be vindictive by waiting until the end of the dungeon. OP should have decided to leave as soon as they saw that they had very different priorities as the other members of the group. Instead, they stayed and obstinately refused to adapt or work with their team.

Lilith Ajit.6173:

If I join a nondescript group, and they say “berserker gear” after the first boss (assuming that’s when they notice dps is lacking) and I say “I don’t have any.” or “I am not wearing it because i won’t survive” and do not switch, and they don’t kick me, and we continue the dungeon only to be kicked at the last boss as I worked with them to get there, you’re saying that’s justified? That’s not an unjust kicking?

Seriously colesy, what happened to you?

If we’re going to assume that we’ve heard the full story, we can agree that kicking someone at the very last boss purely to be malicious isn’t justified.

That being said, if you join a group and want to work against your team instead of for it, I don’t see why anyone would want to keep you around. Is it right to allow someone to stay in the dungeon until the last boss to kick you if you’re going to stubbornly do whatever you want? No, but does that mean when you join a group that you can do whatever in the world you want under the argument of “Hey it didn’t have X requirement in the lfg, I can do as I please. If you kick me for whatever reason, I’ll report you”?

When you join a dungeon, you’re contributing to a group effort. If you decide that you don’t like the direction that the group is taking, leave. Simple as that. If you don’t want to skip the trash mobs or stack in a corner for the old fgs meta, then that isn’t the group for you. You have every right to be upset that whoever listed the lfg didn’t put in 100% of their gameplan and requirements, but they also have the right to be upset that you didn’t decide to find a more suitable group after discovering that it wouldn’t be a good fit for you.

If you do join a group and discover that they’re practicing strategies that you don’t want to participate in, it’s on you to either adapt or leave. If you really hate that they want you to skip the cutscenes, then you can say “Hey, well I need to find another group for this then. It’d be great if you were more specific in your lfg listing next time” instead of saying “Well I don’t care what you want to do, I’m going to watch all the cutscenes anyway because your legally-binding lfg post didn’t specifically state to skip them and there’s nothing you can do”

Of course as soon as it became apparent that OP was not going to work with their team, they should have been kicked(instead of waiting until the end of the run). Of course the lfg should have said something to imply that they were going to attempt to get the run done as quickly as reasonably possible. Keeping someone in your group to kick them at the end isn’t justified, but neither is obstinately working against the group after they communicate with you.

Is this guy for real?

sunset.3056:

Ahhh, Langrim, I knew that name was familar. I’m used to seeing you on my BLOCKLIST!

This guy plays out like he’s the victim “oh I am just a lonely guise looking for zerk group and dey always mean to me.”

In reality, this guy is brutally mean to all pugs. The group I was in was constantly told how much we sucked, had low DPS and were a bunch of failures. So eventually, I was fed up with him being this way, whispered 2 people (that I knew we also pugs, the 4th was his buddy, I could tell) and we all consented to kick him on the second fractal. The categorized fractal. Then lone behold his friend (who we did not kick, they were not being mean) starts to re-invite him, I keep denying, eventually he’s accepted before I could kick again. All 3 of the pugs were kicked out of the fractal.

Yeah, play the victim. You’re obviously not.

I can vouch for this as well, at least the part of Langrim “playing the victim”. This guy’s pretty full of it, and I drop group if I see him appear in my parties.

I’m still waiting for “lol just kidding guys :P”

Ashen.2907:

NoTrigger.8396:

Ashen.2907:

NoTrigger.8396:

how is it incorrect? tell me one thing in PvE that is challenging for a group

That is called moving the goalpost.

why? its exactly what raids are for and what i was talking about.

Ashen.2907:

Even so there are options for challenge for groups in PvE.

tell me where the options are please.

You said 100% of the content in this game. Raids do not, currently, exist in this game. As you were speaking in the present tense you could not have been, accurately, speaking of raids. If you were intending to speak of raids then you are correct in that there are not currently any (traditional MMO) raids in GW2.

To be honest I am not sure why you would have felt the need to say so as it is common knowledge. I, for example, would not make a point of stating that there are no interstellar space ship mounts in GW2. To each their own I suppose.

To be clear, you said, “nothing,” not one thing, exists in GW2 for people who enjoy a challenge. Now its no PvE group based content for those who want a challenge. That is the goal post move I referred to.

Still, some dungeons have options that are challenging, or were until people had played them to the point that they knew them like the back of their hands. Personally I have always found PvE content to lose its challenge within a few weeks/months of its introduction. Once you learn the mobs’ builds, behavior, etc the challenge becomes centered around paying attention or staying awake while following a script.

People requesting more challenging content, and I include myself in this, are asking the devs to spend resources on content that many (perhaps even the majority) of players will not enjoy and that those for whom it is developed will render incapable of fulfilling its design purpose by the very act of using it.

I am not a fan of self imposed handicaps to substitute for inherent encounter challenge but has your group done every dungeon path naked, without traits, no utility skills, etc ? If all you are looking for is a challenging experience, with rewards being irrelevant, then these options might very well provide it. It wouldn’t work for me as I want something that is challenging for me/my character at my/his best, but who knows maybe you will like it.

I mean, basically. Yeah.

Lavafrost of Maguuma.6807:

As other people are saying, Living Story just doesn’t have the replay value dungeons have. You basically do it once for the story, then a few times to get the achievements. Development manpower should be focused on content that has stronger replay value, such as dungeons, WvW and SAB, NOT content that’s abandoned after being played for an hour or two.

I think even Anet was aware of the fact that a storyline is less replayable than other content because of how much they stressed the “branching” storyline. The idea was that you could play through it many times and have a very different experience instead of getting exactly the same story over and over. I don’t understand why anyone would prefer content that has zero re-playability over content that is enjoyable for weeks or months.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

CrAcKeDmUfFiN.9402:

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Another thought. This Reddit thread about the subject does a very good job looking at reward structure and incentives:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2edh9b/making_dungeons_worthwhile_in_3_easy_steps/

Making dungeons worthwhile in 3 easy steps

Step 1: Rewards: You know why no one plays most dungeons? Because their rewards are awful.

Step 2: Improve the AI

Yeah, I’m not certain as to how to respond to this.

1. Dungeons are incredibly rewarding. They offer the best (or most consistent) in terms of gold rewards that you could hope for in game.

2. Improve the AI? Easy? Really? So the second step in the “easy” fix to dungeons is just rework 100% of mob AI from the ground up? I’m sure that could be done during someone’s lunchbreak, because reworking all of the different mob types (think about how many mobs there are in dungeons for a minute) would be a crazy ridiculous amount of work.

Gold rewards are unbalanced, and fractal rewards are RNG. That’s a pretty easy improvement right there. Despite what you said, I’ve been told that farming nets you more gold than a dungeon tour.

I agree AI takes more work.

Seeing as how doing a casual dungeon tour nets 30+gold a day, and doing every tier of fractals per day would net less than 10g in terms of guaranteed rewards, I’d say that farming fractals is significantly less rewarding on a day to day basis. Again, you can argue that RNG will bridge this gap, but my point is that when RNG isn’t on your side it leaves a bad taste in your mouth and turns people off of doing that content at all.

I don’t think the AI needs to be prioritized in any capacity. It would take a crazy amount of manhours so that we can do exactly the same content that we do today, but with slightly different strategies.

Nevets Crimsonwing.5271:

Another thought. This Reddit thread about the subject does a very good job looking at reward structure and incentives:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2edh9b/making_dungeons_worthwhile_in_3_easy_steps/

Making dungeons worthwhile in 3 easy steps

Step 1: Rewards: You know why no one plays most dungeons? Because their rewards are awful.

Step 2: Improve the AI

Yeah, I’m not certain as to how to respond to this.

1. Dungeons are incredibly rewarding. They offer the best (or most consistent) in terms of gold rewards that you could hope for in game.

2. Improve the AI? Easy? Really? So the second step in the “easy” fix to dungeons is just rework 100% of mob AI from the ground up? I’m sure that could be done during someone’s lunchbreak, because reworking all of the different mob types (think about how many mobs there are in dungeons for a minute) would be a crazy ridiculous amount of work.

Honestly, as long as we’re seeing improvements in fractals, I’m okay with the number of dungeons we have. I’d love to see more, but I realize that time/resources are finite. That being said, there feels like a lot that still needs to be addressed from the fractal CDI that we had awhile back. #1 for me was the rewards.

The rewards in fractals feel tremendously underwhelming. I think it’s a crummy feeling to spend more time doing harder content and to see 1g50s and a bunch of currency (with hardly any value/uses) as a reward. It feels like a waste of time.

That being said, sometimes you do get something worthwhile, but this isn’t the most commonplace thing. Every time I finish a fractal, I feel like I’m rolling a die (did I get something awesome or did I get nothing again), but when I finish an Arah path I know I’m getting something back for the time I spent in that dungeon. I think gold rewards, alone, would be a significant boost the satisfaction that an individual would get from completing a fractal without making ascended weapons/armor or fractal skins drop like candy. It’d be nice because you’d be (at least) finishing the fractal knowing that your time spent wasn’t entirely for rolling a die that isn’t likely to give you something worthwhile.

So, adding consistency to the rewards or adding value to pristines/ordinary fractal relics would be a good first step, but the addition of fractals would be hugely beneficial as well.

I look forward to seeing more fractals and seeing more content in group, instanced PvE, and I hope to see a lot of expansion upon our current fractals.

Guess I can take a crack at it with my recently reworked thief

Armor:

1. Subterfuge Hood (hidden)
2. Mist Walker Shoulders
3. Assassin’s Coat
4. Lawless Gloves
5. Vigil’s Honor Leggings
6. Buccaneer Boots

Dyes:

1. Abyss
2. Midnight Blue
3. Regal
4. Deep Glacial Sky

Link to Imgur album

Nemesis.2019:

I am a Staff/GS guardian and i don’t use Zerker gear, PvT/Cleric, I love the staff for Empower heals and might stacks, now there are some dungeons in which i go Hammer/Mace and Shield..

Why.

I applaud the work that was put into this and the dedication it takes to record all of these drops for months on end, but that doesn’t compare to doing such unrewarding and challenging content on a daily basis for all these months.

1. Thief
2. Necromancer
3. Ranger

Only pugs bump :P