Guild Wars 2

As I originally guessed, its gonna be bad in PvP. There is no way in hell that this is beta than Herald in PvP.

Its an alright spec. Personally, I find it to be the least…satisfying out of all the elite specs. It doesn’t really feel special. The whole “firing arrows through the mists” is a really cool concept, but doesn’t feel fleshed out. There’s really one skill, maybe 2 depending on what you count as it, that feels like it does this in a cool manner.

The utility skills are lame too. Some of them are good, but as others have said, they seem super PvE focused. They’re basically ranger spirits.

I think Renegade will fill kitten that the class has needed for a long time in PvE. But I think other gamemodes will feel disappointed.

I think DH is such a good example of how poorly balance was considered. Don’t get me wrong, its a fun class. I have nothing against it. But mechanically speaking, it is one of the strongest PvP classes in the game. It is a perfect example of this issue. The AoE capabilities, the boon application, condi cleanses, etc. I mean the main “counter” to it is outlasting it…

Vennyhedgie.5369:

I like jalis a lot, I just want the hammers not to despawn when they colide with grass. Like seriously that’s the only real problem with that legend.

I use Jalis when paired with the lifesteal traits when using condi builds and it’s great sustain when you can keep the hammers up, lots of small packets of damage and healing end up adding up.
Road + mace 3 is 20 secs of swiftness if timed properly, and even when it’s not it’s still 10 seconds (+5 if you have a certain invocation skill) so it’s already 100% uptime.

And when traited it offers great defensive skills as well as a ver powerful defiance bar breaker with increased taunt duration. Forceful engagement is one of the best soft cc skills with taunt+slow, and it’s hilarious to use in wvw to force people out of zergs lol

Is this for WvW? I’ve always seen people get chastised for using Jalis in PvP. Never really considered the lifesteal applications of it though.

Today I’d like to start a discussion about the Legendary Dwarf Stance.

In your opinion, what is the current state of this legend? Is it in a good or bad state? What roles do you view this legend as filling or should be filling?

If you think it is in a good state, where does it excel? How do you use it to get the most bang for your buck (or energy in this case).

If you think it is in a bad state, what needs to be changed? What are some of your ideas for “fixing” it?

Finally, what gamemode do you mainly play?

With PvE, it looks like Renegade does more damage than Glint. However, it offers less boons/team support. Not none, but less.

I’m not an expert PvEr, but it seems like raiders/fractals would prefer glint because of her might and fury.

The new elite spec looks fun. Let me make that clear. But it doesn’t look good nor do I think it will get anywhere close to meta. Why?

This is an Elite Spec. This means we have to choose between the new spec and Herald.

Right now, I don’t see the new legend being anywhere close to meta. If the legend was release today, I highly doubt the meta would change at all.

Lets think about it.

Herald:

1. Get out of jail free heal. Fully negates AND heals against condition and physical damage

2. AoE reveal + infinite fury (20% increase change to crit)

3. AoE Condi + infinite Swiftness

4. AoE Might + cone vulnability

5. Cone knockback + protection.

The self sustain and team support being output by Herald is amazing.

Renegade – I see a few main boons so far. AoE bleed application on allies, AoE increase to condi damage and critical strike damage (not chance). AoE lifesteal application on allies. 3 second alacrity. All of these cost a significant amount of resource. You have an F1 skill to apply might on a 10 second cooldown, but for it to be effective you need to build up this favor. I don’t see that happening often in PvP. Perhaps WvW. Not sure about PvE either (depends on how spread out the fights are). I’m not sure about the heal. It heals for a total of about 5k on the tooltip over the course of 10 seconds. Is this really worth taking over Heralds heal? One that completely negates any damage AND heals you for that damage? One that applies Regen to everyone around you over time without being locked into one place?

My point is, Renegade is cool. It looks cool, like all of revenant. But it doesn’t seem good.

The only way I see Renegade coming close to the meta is to buff the other legends. Give more sustain to the other legends. Right now to counter rev in PvP and WvW you just have to focus it. Glint’s heal is the only way it can negate being focused for a limite amount of time. After that it doesn’t have enough stun breaks, condi cleansers, or self sustain to be able to do anything against a hard, low CD burst or two+ focused.

The team support of Herald in raids and fractals is so pheneomenal for its class that I don’t see any comps preferring Renegade.

Either that or you nerf all of the other classes. For the love of god, don’t nerf Herald without giving us something good in return.

Or the traits are really good.

Malthurius.6870:

The point of revenant, to me, is adaptability; much like how elementalist is adaptable through elements and their weapon skills, revenant is adaptable through their legends and utility skills.

You bring up a couple of legend combinations and state “why not play this class instead”, well, because that class can’t do what the other legend combinations you listed can; but there are some major differences between the legend pairs and the classes you compared to. Sure, maybe some of these legends under perform as the moment, but that can be fixed with balancing patches. Each legend at least has some uniqueness (Glint’s Facets or Ventari’s Tablet for examples), and the energy and upkeep system of revenant makes the profession play differently than every other class.

But I never see anyone play it like that. No one takes advantage of the adaptability because it isn’t good.

Lets take the current meta builds.

Fractal: Bereserker. Half the time you’re sitting in Hearld giving off boons. Why not just play Guardian? They output more DPS and give just of good as boons without having to worry about energy. 90% you’re not using the other legend.

WvW: The only time where the adaptability is actually used.

Raids: Same thing as Fractals. You’re taking the part of a physical DPS that puts out boons. Again, guardians seem to be the better choice.

PvP: You’re either a weak necromancer or a weak guardian. Two popular builds. One does condi damage and absorbs conditions. Doesn’t remove them, only applies resist. The other is a physical DPS boon applier. How do you counter a revenant in PvP? Focused CC, Focused Condition Damage, Focused Physical Damage. Pretty much every class in the game.

Right now Revenant has no identity. No purpose. It is out classed by every other class. Not only this, but every single good build REQUIRES Herald! Why? Because every legend offers so little team support and self sustain that the class would be completely useless without it. The physical DPS and benefits of the other legends aren’t good enough to warrant taking them over boons. And 50% of the reason why you take glint is because her heal is a get out of jail free card. If herald didn’t exist, no one would ever want a Revenant on their team. They would rather have a necro or a guardian.

I’m not too optimistic about the new legend. I’m going to withhold my final judgement till I play it, but it looks very underwhelming.

What revenant needs is LESS RNG TRAITS, more ways of dealing with any kind of pressure. Ways that don’t involved herald. Finally, the other legends need to take on a better role/identity and actually give off some team support to warrant taking it over herald.

Ask yourself. Does the new legend REALLY look better than Herald? Don’t forget, you have to choose. You can either have infinite fury, might, swiftness, insane boon application, and a get out of jail free card…or you can be a ranged condition damage whose boons that it applies aren’t good enough to compete with Herald’s support. Just looking at the damage numbers (I’m not sure if they’re in 80 gear when they took those pics), it looks significantly less than hammer. I doubt any PvEr will want to take this and certainly not the other modes.

I want to love Rev. They’re such a cool class design. Such a cool lore background. Everything about them is cool. I just get really frustrated when I’m playing and the feeling of “I could do this in a quarter of the work with another class” keeps popping up. Especially in PvP.

Yeah I can see myself running a Kala+hammer build. Should be about to output some insane DPS.

Honestly the skills kind of remind me a mix between longbow warrior and a ranger with spirits. We’ll see.

I think with Ventari, they should make the tablet stay in position when switching legends. Instead of seeing it desummoned. I can see it being used 100% more often. I know I would.

Its a tough issue to solve. Sadly I can only see skill splitting working here. I feel like if they tone everything down…well the PvErs and WvWers would be kittened.

My personal philosophy is that no one class can put out more than 2 conditions and 2 boons. I feel like it would make things a lot more interesting and make classes feel more impactful.

Right now I’m playing revenant where I’m spamming boons and #1. Its really…sad.

What I mean by this is that it seems like there is an overabundance of…everything in the game right now.

There are a ton of boon applications, ton of condi applications, ton of AoEs, etc. Nothing feels special anymore. I corrupt boons, they are applied again. I corrupt, applied again. Points are filled to the point of blindness with AoEs and skill graphics.

I remember when the game first started and some of the boons/condis seemed rare. Blind, aegis, stability, etc. Now during fights I constantly see them. None stop.

I can’t help but feel like this is one of the reasons PvP spectating never really took off. There is so much stuff being constantly thrown at the screen that can be incredibly hard for spectators to tell what the heck is going on, what the major game changing plays were, etc.

I really want to love Revenant. Their design with legends is so cool. But playing it has been frustrating, especially in PvP. Here’s what I don’t understand about Revs…what is their purpose? They seem to have no unique purpose.

Mallyx/Hearld – Why not play Necro?

Shiro/Hearld – Why not play Guardian?

Renegade – Why not play Ranger? The “charr” are exactly the same as spirits

The only “cool”/unique thing about a Rev is Ventari and that isn’t really in meta. Only in WvW as a healer.

It just seems like Revenant fills a role that is already filled. Rev will also be fighting this never endless battle where it either does so well that it takes over the role of Necros or Guardians or it does so poorly that Guardians or Necros take over its role.

It just seems like Revenant has no identity. Nothing to make it desired or useful in the game compared to the other classes. Never mind that Revs, in my opinion, are significantly more complex.

So after a long break from the game, I mainly just come back for the story here and there.

I decided to try to see if I can get back into the swing of things. Looking at some of the previous events, I wanted to get the bloodstone harvest helm.

It has been a horrible first taste for trying to get back into the game. It really surprises me, disappoints me, and worries me that something like this still made it into the game and hasn’t changed.

1. The set up is atrocious. You require someone to go and kill one particular enemy type over and over again? Who wants to do that? Each I’ve done it I’ve been the only one doing this. It is so boring and time consuming for nothing.

2. Wyvern needs a serious difficulty rework. The AoE, the flying around wasting time, the difficult getting up there, the difficulty finding a group because if is a HoT zone, the fact a second event spawns on it, etc. Tried it two times. First time, big zerg, couldn’t kill it in time despite no wipes. Second time, couldn’t get anyone to come help. Had to spam chat, by the time we started it was down to 9.5 minutes. Entire zerg wiped and gave up when the second event spawned ontop of us.

I have limited time to play and it really is annoying to spend an hour trying to do this and not get anything out of it. I had really hoped a solution to “old group events” has been thought out by now. Because I really don’t want to sit here spamming chat trying to form a group before hand only to fail again. I guess I’ll wait till the weekend to give it an another attempt. But it disappoints me that the event is at a point where the “best bet” is to not do it till the weekend.

So if you have any tips on how to successfully do this, please let me know. If this is another event where its successful completion is like throwing a dart in the dark, its gonna be a bit sad.

Arvizal.8436:

Do you have anything in mind? In my opinion maps like Dragons Stand and Tangled Depths were pretty new concepts, and raids have taken the community by storm. To me, HoT didn’t feel like reskinned content but I definitely wish there was more in terms of content in general, mostly in terms of actual maps though. Luckily we get new ones with the LS now, along with more story. However I can’t think of a entirely “New” concept to be added, so I’m interested.

Although I’ve been playing since launch, GW2 is my first MMO so maybe I have less ideas for new content as opposed to people who have been playing MMOs for much longer.

The thing about HoT, for me, is that a lot of its content is derived from the living story season 2. Many of the map wide events have designs that are very similar to what we saw in Season 1 or 2. I’d have to say that AB is probably the most unique. But the rest of the maps were pretty similar. VB is a typical do events at X locations then go up and kill Y boss. It was nothing spectacular. TD and DS were both lane based boss fights. Which many of us experienced before with Vinewrath and Marionette. I think the issue was that because the designs were pretty similar at the core + a reward scheme that we’ve seen before; it didn’t hold our interest long enough that the grind required.

Now in terms of ideas, it would have be something completely new. In terms of actual content designs, it is tough. I think it would be easier to first list out things that I feel are old. Stack and smack bosses, scavenger hunts, resource gathering grind, lane based boss fights, kill X amount of enemies to fill up the bar, secure area events, anything similar to the mini games, etc.

A good example of something that was completely new to PvE was the first time we went into the Silverwastes. It was basically WvW, but in PvE form. We hadn’t seen this and it was a success. I had a blast in there. The first time seeing those airships come down and perform a bombardment was an awesome feeling. But doing another map that is similar wouldn’t have nearly the same effect on the community kitten did.

I think one possible avenue is looking into vehicles and how vehicles can play a bigger (and more entertaining) part of the game. Such as having a huge fight with Airships above a map. Like a dragon champion invades or something and players drive those huge Airships (and the canons in them) to fight the dragon champion. Something like that perhaps?

It’s tough because it seems like Anet has done all that they can with this game in terms of what we have on us now. They’d have to invent some new stuff to shake things up and open up avenues for new content designs. On that, I have no idea. The gliding system I think is a good example of this. It offered a new way to design raids and such. We’ve seen them take advantage of that, but there needs to be multiple new systems like that in an expansion release. To completely revolutionize the way content is looked at.

I’ve been playing this game since the first month of release. However, like many, a bit after the release of HoT my time started dropping drastically. I had hoped that with the new living story it would reignite my interest. Sadly, it really hasn’t done much.

First, there were many aspects that were good. The new pvp map is good, the QoL changes is good, WvW changes are good, etc.

However, from what I’m seeing on population counters (like reddit), our numbers haven’t changed much. We jumped up drastically on patch day, but now we’re back to normal. It hasn’t even been a week. Why is this?

Well, I think its a case of where we (as a community) and Anet are misinterpreting success of previous patches. See, in theory this patch sounds like it would be good. You’re using/expanding on methods/designs of content that you already have a lot of experience in. It is polished. However, this hasn’t led to Gw2’s success. Before HoT I was really confident that Gw2 could easily rise to WoWisc numbers. Sadly, we seem to have plateaued at our success. I think the next possible answer we need to investigate to reignite Gw2’s success train is the word New.

When season 1 and 2 of the living story is when I saw, as a player, the most growth in the game. Statistically I’m not sure since I don’t have access to it. But I saw the most new players, a lot of people being constantly active, etc. Why is this? It is because Season 1 and 2 were completely new experiences in the game. It was like nothing we had experienced before. Because of this, veteran and new players alike were basically going into this content like they were playing Gw2 for the first time. It was great. Season 1 was comprised of a lot of feature patches and experiments for the living story. Each chapter was something new. Again, nothing we had experienced. Season 2 took the lessons you learned in season 1 and expanded upon them. Polish them. Added to them. The increase in polish/quality was so drastic it was again…a new experience for any player.

Then HoT released. Take what you learned in vanilla, season 1, season 2; polish it, release it with a new theme/skin, boom success. Sadly, it didn’t work out. As many know, numbers dropped much faster then they should have. Why? People were bored. We had seen all of this stuff before. The scavenger hunts, the collections, the events, etc. We had been doing this stuff for 3 years at this point. Many of us did it a few times and were bored already. It felt too similar. Adventures? Not really new. Many of them felt like mini games we’ve played before or dynamic event designs. New specializations? No they weren’t. Many of them felt incredibly similar to class specs that were in the game since vanilla. Nothing felt new. It felt like old content with a new skin + gliding. While this isn’t the only problem with HoT, I think this was a major contributing factor.

Now the living story season 3 has released. A living story that is supposed to last us months. It doesn’t look like it has lasted a week. The subreddit alone has already seen drastic drop in numbers. I don’t think we got above 1,000 current users. On a Saturday during patch week. I’m running around Bloodstone Fen and it just feels void of players. So many times I’m come upon an event that doesn’t seem like anyone is doing it. Maybe 3-4. The content itself? Reskins just like HoT. We have a scavenger. We have the achievements. We have two new resources to grind out. A new mastery to destroy the pacing of the story. Events feel so similar. Stack and smack this champion/boss, kill these enemies in this area, etc. It feels…old. I was thinking of getting the back, but then I saw that I need 200 of one resources and 5,000 of the other. The ways to get these resources are the same ways I’ve been grinding resources for 3 years. I have absolutely no interest in doing that again.

The story itself was good. The aesthetics look good. It is just the designs themselves that are old.

If you want to see the same amount of growth and success that we saw in season 1 and 2, you have to give new. New experiences. I think that’s the key. I wasn’t sure if it was and I wanted to see how the living story episode turned out. Seeing such a massive difference in population in my immediate perception area from season 2 episode 1 and season 3, I feel more confident this is a solution we need to start looking into. I know this isn’t the first issue. The core components that originally attracted the playerbase, Anet has been moving more and more away from. I see many people complaining about this already (like making things less and less soloable). But that’s a discussion for another thread.

So today I bought the Sentinel’s outfit and I thought “The auric weaponset would go great with this”. I decided to also take a look at collection associated with it. If you craft all of the weapons, this is what they require.

3,300 auric dust
3,300 auric slivers
around 246g in materials (other crafted items)

So the only thing you can’t buy from that list on the TP is the auric dust, which only drops from chests in the AB meta event and the Dragon Stand’s noxious pods. Compounded with this is that it will only drop 1-2 and it may not always drop. You may also get some of those lovely leaf fossils, among a lot of other items.

However, you can still get these items from the story mission. So lets say you’re like me and have 9 character slots. The default ones from when you bought the game + the HoT one. One of each character. You play through and you get every skin 2 hander skin and 3 of the 1h. This brings the cost down to.

1,050 auric dust
1,050 auric slivers
around 120g in matierals

It’s a lot better, but still that’s an insane amount of grinding two maps. What is it all for?

5 achievement points and this back piece
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Auric_Backplate.jpg

This is almost insulting. That isn’t even the “cool” version of the backpack. After you finally get that backpack to get the cool one, you have to go farm various events and hope and RNG item drops from them.

This is the cool one,
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Luminate's_Backplate

I would be OK with this if the items had a 100% drop rate. Or if the dust could be found on the TP. Or if there were more ways of getting it instead of just 2 measly maps.

Considering I have yet to see anyone with the title of backpiece, this can’t be a popular collection?

I would much rather spend my time and money on a legendary. Heck, I’m sure I could probably get a legendary in the amount of time it would take for me to grind this collection out. This should have a look over to make sure that it is what you want.

So something I don’t see talked a lot about in here or in game is replaying the story (or event doing it an alts).

Personally, I can’t stand doing it on alts or over again. Here are a few reasons.

1. Bugs/Inconsistency. A good recent example is The Jungle Provides. First Kaana ended up bugging out and getting stuck. So I had to restart the whole instance over again. Then I was doing one of the side missions (totems) and was gliding with my totem. Little did I know they put a point where you fall and die. There are some air drafts that have a significant portion of them cut off (like the bottom half). Trying to get too low causes you to “die” and respawn. So I went for an air draft, died in the middle of the air, and lost my totem. Stuff like this isn’t exactly uncommon in the story and is just annoying.

2. Dialogue. Ok the Dialogue was interesting the first time around. Maybe the second. I absolutely hate the amount of waiting around there is. Listening to NPCs talk, “escorting” them, etc. It just gets boring. There should be a way to skip these two steps.

These are the two major reasons I dislike doing the story over again. It just gets tiresome after the second time around.

Mesmer

Name: Spectacle/Jester

Concept: The main inspiration I had for this concept is the Temple of Lyssa in Orr. In this world boss, she can deploy an attack where you have to not look at her in order to not get hit by it. I think this concept should be expanded upon. This class would have various abilities, benefits, and offensive measures that revolve around people “looking” at them. So you could have an AoE stun where people look at you and are stunned, you have one called audience where allies are looking at you they get benefits/you get benefits, things of that nature. You will no longer have clones, but will instead of “verses”. You have an F1-F3 ability that are “songs” or verses. Similar to shouts, but are channeled dialogue. You then have the abilities called “entertainment”, which are small dance moves or “jokes” or any form of entertainment. These have effects on their own, but can be combined with verses to produce devastating/beneficial effects.

New Weapon: Warhorn mainhand. Various sounds can be deployed from the warhorn and are your traditional “bard” style skillsets. #1 is three tones that could provide AoE boons or conditions. #2 is a cone wave that pushes people back. #3 could be “Debilitating Decibels” which would mess with the targets controls (like reverse them).

Necromancer

Name: Consumption/Consumed

Concept: This concept is heavily derived from the MOBA classes like Abathur and that parasite one from HoN. It relies on acting as a parasite, feeding off of both allies or enemies to produce beneficial or devastating results. Deathshrould would be replaced with Parasitic Form. You transform into a parasite with no abilities. Instead, you seek to latch onto something. The first living player or enemy you come into contact with, you become attached with them. Animation being based off of the karaka hatchlings. You can attach to both allies or enemies. Allies means your abilities are support based while enemies is more offensive. Your abilities would be parasites, which would either benefit or hurt the target. It would also somehow be attached to you. They’re similar to channel spells, but are conditions and you need to be within a certain range of the target for it to continue working. Condition transfer, boon transfer, attack speed/damage modifiers, etc. Your elite would be decompose. This is based off of the Modus Sceleris necro that turns into rats. You fall apart into a ton of different parasites that spread around and attack. You can end it early or once all the parasites are dead you return to your form.

Traits: The traits can improve the parasitic form reducing the rate of degeneration, improving effects, etc. You can have ones that help improve the parasite abilities too.

New Weapon: Sword MH. The auto attack is standard, but it transfers a 1 condition that is half of the current time to a target. #2 would “release” some of your parasites inside of you by cutting yourself and causing you damage but spawning 1 or 2 parasites around you that attack nearby enemies. #3 would be parasitic leech. This would attach to an enemy and slow them while speeding you up. #4 would be an aoe spin. #5 would be somekind of tunnel ability. You do a small channel and it teleports you to your selected location.

Ranger

Name: Sharpshooting/Sharpshooter

Concept: The Ranger lacks a pet, but makes up for it with a significant increase in damage. What replaces the pet mechanic is a “stance” mechanic. There are three stances. Standing, Crouched, and Prone. Standing is normal with no benefits, crouched rewards moderate amount of damage/range but has a movement speed debuff, prone rewards a large amount of damage/range but you are unable to move. The ranger doesn’t have a large attack speed, but instead has range and damage.

Traits: The traits are standard ones that could reduce CD or make certain aspects of the class more beneficial. Thing such as decrease certain negative effects of abilities (like the tick on Hold Breath) or adding more benefits.

Abilities: The abilities would resemble what you typical see of a sniper/sharpshooter. One called camouflage that turns you invisible while standing still and out of combat. One called “Hold Breath” that exponentially ticks away at your health for an increase in damage. “In my sights” that increases damage from sources other then yourself to a target. The spec lacks defense abilities (aside from the heal of course).

New Weapon: Rifle. Slow and steady wins the race is what this weapon goes by. It differentiates itself from the Engineers Rifle and Warrior’s rifle by utilizing range and slow attack speed (but high damage). The #1 is an auto, #2 is armor piercing bullet that goes through blocks and protection, #3 is poison tipped bullet, #4 is “disarm” where you shoot the weapon out of an enemies hand (unable to attack for X time), #5 is suppressing fire that makes your attack slow/cripple the enemy. Now this is special because they all buff the auto attack. One at a time. So you use #2, then #1 to get the armor piercing effect.

Thief

Name: Piracy/Corsair

Concept: Stealing now becomes more important, in that it impacts how the elite specs abilities each work. You can no longer use the items you steal. Instead they get added to your “booty”. Your abilities gain different affects depending what you have in the booty chest. For example, stealing from a necro awards a condition focused item in the booty chest. This means your your ability will have a condition affect added to it.

Traits: The traits are standard ones that could reduce CD or make certain aspects of the class more beneficial. For example, maybe you get more uses out of the items you put in the booty chest.

Abilities: Pirate themed abilities. Native Magic heal, one that involves a bird, bombardment from your ship, etc. These all have bonus affects depending on what has recently been stolen.

New Weapon: Rifle. This ability works similar to the booty system, except with an “ammo” system. The rifle has a auto attack, as per usual. The #2 is a melee bash where the rifle’s animation is used similar to a baseball bat. #3 is called “Extra Gunpowder” which is an attack that depends on which type of ammo you’re using. #4 and #5 are your ammos. They each have a cast time and no initiative cost. #4 is “Junk Ammo”. This makes your auto attack change into a cone fired, close range gun. You use the junk around you to fire. #5 is bullets, which is a ranged single target ability. If you use #3 with Junk Ammo, it increases damage and the size of the cone. #3 with bullets increases damage and range.

Engineer

Name: Mobile Suit Golem/Pilot

Concept: The class revolves around using a transformation that transforms the Engineer into a Golem. This works similar to Deathshroud, in that it changes his weapon abilities and disables his Utilities. Unknown how it would interact with toolbelt abilities. Possibly replace them with 3 new abilities discussed below.

Traits: The traits are in 3 tiers and each tier represents a different part of the golem. With the popularity of Fallout 4, offering a similar system to Power armor could provide positive reactions. Each tier of the trait customizes a different part of the golem. The first tier could be upper (arms and head), second tier could be legs, third could could be torso. There are 3 types of golem modules that are from the games popular races. Asuran, Charr, and Dredge. Asuran revolves around DPS. Charr revolves around sustainability/tanking. Dredge revolves around utility. The choice of the modules could change how the golem looks in game.

Abilities: The Golem would follow an engineer around, much like the current Ranger pet does. It has a series of abilities that are mediocre in strength. One that heals the Engineer, a mobility focused ability (the Golem grabs the Engineer and jumps away from enemies/to a location), a cone damage, then an AoE attack. Finally an ultimate that could be single target. These abilities are lesser version of piloted versions. If the engineer pilots the golem, they are the same abilities but more powerful. The engineer can then push a button (perhaps replace the toolbelt) to enter the Golem. Doing this gives the Engineer the HP of the Golem at the time of entering it. If this HP is destroyed, the golem explodes and the Engineer appears with a health bar previous minus damage taken from the exploding golem. There will be two exit ways. A normal exit which will exit the golem and the golem will have whatever HP it had when the player exited. Or eject. Eject exits immediately and destroys the golem in the process, however the engineer will take now damage. (F1 – enter, F2 – exit, F3 – eject).

New Weapon: Ability to use mace (1h). The 3 abilities would revolve around building up “scrap”. Scrap is required to repair your golem or build a new golem if yours gets destroyed during concept. The third ability would repair the golem while the second one builds it. The auto attack generates scrap.

Jaymee.1560:

I really can’t say much myself, but… it truly does seem like GW 2 compared to GW 1 is very much lacking in the story-telling department. The aspect of releasing more content that involves more of a competitive nature over that of a story being told me is painstakingly obvious.

I remember GW 1 being very rich into the story-telling aspect of the journey we players take.

The story is decent.

The main difference between Gw1 and Gw2 for me was that in Gw1 each mission was its own story. There was no open world. Simply instances that were designed in at a specific time in the universe for a specific event.

It’s one of the reasons why I think the Living World is the major factor that kept this game alive for so long. The constant stream of new content helped extend vanilla life content, but kept story constantly interesting.

They messed up on a lot of things with the HoT release. I think there are two major things that are affecting their population. 1, no living world. Waiting almost a year after HoT to restart the living world was a horrible mistake. The game relies on it too much. It should’ve started in January/Feb. 2, Guild Halls. Guild Halls could’ve opened up a new avenue for adding purpose and incentives to old/new content. Same goes with Scribing decorations. Instead, they’re both huge gold drains. So the incentive behind this new content gets muddled into the incentive that has existed since release…earning tons of gold.

The issue is that when people said they wanted Anet to release expansions, they weren’t thinking anything close to HoT.

When they were thinking of expansions, they imagine WoW size expansions or Gw1 style expansions. Large amounts of content, content that would last for a year – 2 years, lots of new rewards that are worth getting, etc.

HoT was a decent expansion, but it wasn’t anything what so many expected when they asked for expansions online.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Something I noticed among myself and others that I play with who’ve played 2 years or more. We have problem seeing purpose in what we do.

We like to play content, but compared to vanilla content; we don’t play new content as nearly as much as we used too. I think the issue lies in purpose. “Why” should we play this content?

Since release the main sources of incentive seemed the following. Achievements (once they were added), Equipment/stats, and Skins. After playing the game for so long, they just don’t excite us like they use too. It used to be “we can’t wait”, but now we’re like “meh”.

You need to introduce more rewards/incentives to help keep the veteran playerbase. You don’t have the luxury of “resetting” every expansion like WoW does.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Obviously I go into this knowing that some players will be very upset. That’s why it’s such a tough decision.

Ankdarkwolf, Darkmikau, Ballads, Spira, Caerbannog, Cysgod, you each posted a variant of an accusation I’ve seen many times over the past few months on the forums, something along the lines of, “AN shipped half an expansion with HoT.” I take issue with that. We shipped a new region full of content, a new mastery system, gliding, guild halls, a new profession, nine new elite specializations for existing professions, and more. Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, “We’ve been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates.” While I fully get that you’re disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.

Mo

I’ve been playing this game for a long time. I bought it around release. I’ve been playing MMOs since early 2000. I don’t think this is a case of releasing half an expansion. This is about what an expansion means in the industry itself. Here is what people are used to.

Expansion Releases > Play expansion content for 1-2 years > New Expansion.

Now Anet has taken a different direction on how to push out content. You took on the mantle of the whole living world release style (which I loved). However, when you announced and released an expansion…people were relating their expectations to previous experiences.

For example, with WoW they release an expansion and people play it for 2 years. The content has a 2 year lifespan.

In Guild Wars 1 you pushed out expansions really fast. It was what, a year between them? These expansions were also filled with content.

So what happens when these expansions are released? People play the expansion content, almost exclusively, for 2 years. The content had a large life span.

Now with HoT, this wasn’t so. A lot of the content people did once, but they also went back to vanilla content. The content just doesn’t have a large life span. So while in terms of quality and quantity, it was pretty up there. However, it didn’t deliver on the replay ability and the life span of the content. A majority of people I knew (including myself) did the content for about a month. Possibly two. Then we found ourselves back doing Vanilla content a majority of the time. Doing the daily fractal which isn’t uncommon to be below level 50. Doing the world boss train.

The thing that makes WoW expansions so successful are the ladders. They put in a ton of ladders to climb. Faction/currency ladders, dungeon/raid ladders, gear tier ladders, etc. These weren’t optional either. You had to do some of these things to keep up. In the processes, previous content would die. We, as a community and Anet, need to find some way to replace these ladders with something that fits into the games design.

For example, right now the major reward structure in the game is gold. People seem to want to gravitate towards actions that have a good work/stress to gold ratio. One of the major reasons the World Boss train and Silverwastes chest train is so popular.

Now if we ignore the gold reward structure and look at HoT focused rewards. We have the main following. Stat combinations, gear looks, and achievements (includes collections).

1. Stat Combinations – Right now your meta (with the exception of sPvP) doesn’t change a lot. Zerker is still very popular, especially in PvE. Since the meta remained unchanged (as it always has over the course of the game that has led us to 27 stat combinations for ascended and 33 for exotic), many people didn’t care. They didn’t want to farm crystalline ore in DS or do any of those events over and over again for the new stat combinations. It simply wasn’t worth it. Especially when the currencies often had a wide range of uses and needs.

2. Gear Looks – this is pretty simple. If the gear doesn’t look good/cool to a person, they don’t want it. I don’t see a lot of people running around with Bladed or Leystone armor sets. I don’t play as often as I used too, but I think in the months since HoT I’ve only seen maybe 5-6 full sets of Leystone. Maybe 1-2 full bladed (that includes the chest).

3. Achievements – This was probably your most successful reward avenue. Often they were none grindy achievements and collections that people would complete. Collecting masks, killing a certain boss, etc. They were great. This was the major reason I saw personally people doing certain events or actions over and over again.

The rest of the rewards are tied to gold. Guild Halls? Gold drains. Scribing? Gold drain. It doesn’t matter if you make it so something is built with materials. As long as those materials can be bought and sold on the TP, people will associate them as a gold based reward structure (and then it falls upon that work to gold ratio).

Finally, you have the other parts of the game. While these were released for free, I personally consider them apart of the expansion.

1. Stronghold – A surprisingly large number of PvPers don’t seem to like this gamemode. It isn’t uncommon for me to have seen people group up and request not to be queued up with this gamemode. It’s very saddening since it was a major form of hype for sPvP in the months prior to release.

2. New Desert BL – you already know the issues behind this guy

3. Dungeon Reward Nerf – even if it was a 1% nerf, it would’ve been horrible. Not a lot of people realize that it isn’t pointless to do dungeons. But it became sort of “circlejerky” to talk about how horrible dungeons are now and they have no point. It really sped up the amount of people not doing dungeons.

I think there were a lot of better ways you could’ve taken this expansion in a few aspects.

Guild Halls should not have been gold drains. The way you should’ve expanded this content’s lifespan is by forcing guild members to group up. Invent some kind of currency that you could ONLY acquire from doing certain events/actions with guild members in your group. World Events, Mini Dungeons (I love these btw), Jumping Puzzles, Dungeons (these should’ve been made the major way to gain said currency to make up for the dungeon nerf), Fractals, WvW, sPvP, etc. The Guild Hall system SHOULD have been centered around teamwork with Guildies to progress, not gold begging/donations.

Scribing/Decoration. Decorations should not have been connected so much with Scribing. The best way to have handled decorations is to make it so decorations would have been sold by special NPCs that are locked behind certain open world events (JP, MD, Events, WB, etc). What these vendors would sell would depend on the region. Shiverpeak/norn style decorations from the Shiverpeak areas, for example. Currency used? Majority – Guild currency spoken above AND Karma. Minority – Gold. Those three currencies together with a small focus on the gold part (kind of like how the decoration merchant is now, only 10s). This would’ve also fed into the exploration and world part of the game. The world you have in Guild Wars 2 is amazing. People constantly talked about how Gw2 had the best leveling experience. Your open world was great. It was the nice mix of relaxing, actiony, exploration, lore, stories, and events. Putting these hidden vendors behind special events would’ve played into this more.

Donari.5237:

The core of the OP seems to be that halls and decorations cost too much. Agreed! Many many threads on this forum agree with you. And good news: so do the Devs.

Will they really fix it enough to make it fun? There’s no telling. But they did announce, in live streams and in text posts, that they know Scribing is too expensive and they will be revamping it. They couldn’t do it for the January update as it is a major change that needs testing and balancing, but it is coming. (soon)

Something I’m scared of the “we’re too far in now” type of outlook. There are loads of people and guilds that have already spent enormous amounts of gold on this stuff. The question is how big is this population? How will the react to a sudden decrease in costs? What if instead of costing 800g to level up scribing, it goes down to like 40-100g? How will people react?

Andulias.9516:

Deified.7520:

Andulias.9516:

Deified.7520:

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

First, no, rewards have never been an issue. Like I said, you seem to be playing the wrong game. 90% of the core GW2 players don’t want what you describe. We don’t want gear treadmill, we want new skins. I’m sorry, but what you say is a non-issue for most of us. Remember what happened when they added ascended items? Read my lips – nobody wants gear treadmill.

Second, that’s an issue your guild has. We wanted to have a cool place to meet up and we got that. The core of my guild is very tight, we help each other constantly, have a second guild so that people who can’t do GMs on Monday do them on Sunday (with a lot of people who have already done them helping out just because) and are always on TS. If your guildies are doing this just for the personal rewards, well, I already said it – you are in the wrong guild. And in the wrong game.

Third, I’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. I’ve played maybe about a dozen, maybe more. So I can confidently say this – never in the history of the entire genre has there ever been an upward trend after the release of an expansion (maybe EvE? probably not though, and those aren’t paid). Reddit users going back down to pre-HoT levels when there is no big news around is not only expected, it’s perfectly fine. Your argumentation is ludicrous and based entirely on the idea that just because you don’t like something, nobody does and therefore the game is doing badly. Even though you have ZERO data to support this. Not to mention GW2 was DESIGNED to be the MMO you play, leave, then return, play again and leave. That’s the point of B2P for Christ’s sake. So please, don’t make kitten up about whether the game is doing well or not, because you have absolutely no idea. Neither does anyone on these forums, no matter how insightful they might fancy themselves

It’s pretty easy to tell that populations are dropping. You said it yourself that there has never been an upward trend. I’m not saying that the game is dead or dying, but I think for an expansion we’re losing players too fast. That’s great you’ve been playing MMOs for 13 years. You can’t really say too much about Gw2 using that though. Gw2 is too different. There haven’t been a ton of hugely popular horizontal MMOs in the past 13 years, maybe if you consider Gw1.

I’ve played since release and every time there has been a content addition to the game or even content changes, rewards is one of the focal points of the discussion. I mean just recently dungeons were declared “dead” because the rewards aren’t good enough. I constantly see people complaining how dungeons are pointless to do because the rewards aren’t there anymore. With Vinewrath people complained about the chest farm being too good. People have complained in the past that certain dungeon paths aren’t worth it (TA). Some are too easy to do. These complaints have always been there. I didn’t mention anything about a vertical climb, don’t put words in my mouth. I said that there is an issue rewards and there has always been complaints dealing with rewards.

I have yet to see anyone in full leystone armor. I have rarely seen anyone in full bladed (that has the chest). Maybe 1 or 2. Mistward is the most popular armor set that I’ve seen people wearing. I haven’t seen anyone with the animated machine weapons. The expensive special skins on the TP from RNG drops are more common since you can buy them from the TP. I think I’ve seen maybe 5-6 people with weapons from raids. I just hardly seen any of the HoT skins while playing.

The new stats are hugely underused. Out of all the new stats, vipers/sinister are the only stats that are in the meta right now. The rest are old stats, like the eternal king zerker.

My point is that my anecdotal evidence suggest that nobody really likes the skin. Not enough for them to be as common as say T3 or other similar ones. Looking on meta build websites you’ll see that the new stats are serverly underused. So with these two in minds (i know anecdotal evidence isn’t 100%, but considering we can’t see the data on how many people have a certain skin unlocked or used, we can’t really draw conclusions from anything else. Plus we’re already using anecdotal evidence to defend the guild design), the two major forms of rewards and incentives aren’t being used. Nobody wants to go through the trouble of getting stats because they’re not “good” or in the meta. Finally, as I said earlier, if you don’t want the skin you don’t care.

Right now only 8/29 people online between all of my guilds are in a HoT zone. Last night during peak hours it was 15/74 people online were in one of the 4 HoT zones. Even if we count fractal of the mist (which I pm’d a few and they weren’t above level 50), it’s not a huge increase in numbers.

We know they did decently well with sales. They increased profits from Q3 to Q4 (Q4 was expansion released) by about 85%.

My point is that when you release an expansion for a game, many people are expecting to spend a lot of time in the expansion. If people are so quick to return to vanilla, why purchase future expansions? I mean I’m watching what all my friends and all the guilds are doing. They’re doing all vanilla content. World Boss trains, under level 50 fractals, etc. Many of them did the expansion content to get certain skins if they wanted, but got what they wanted in a month and went back to vanilla. Why? Because vanilla offers better rewards or almost equal rewards for less work.

Why do you think they nerfed dungeons? It wasn’t a coincidence that they nerfed them prior to the release of HoT. Imagine if the audience still perceived dungeons are worth doing for gold. We would probably have even less in HoT content.

But that isn’t the point of this discussion. I’m just saying that the implementation of the Guild Halls and Scribing was serverly flawed. It only was fit for a small percentage of the audience and by just looking at different guilds donation tabs and guild bank donations, you can see that relative to the size of the guild there is a small percentage of players in each guild doing a majority of the work.

Andulias.9516:

Deified.7520:

Hey,
The only incentive was skins and if you didn’t like the skin, well you didn’t have any reason to care about it.

You are playing the wrong game. And maybe with the wrong guild.

In my guild there are about 230 people, of which about 30-40 are pretty active, so business as usual.

We maxed out everything yesterday. World first. One of the world firsts at least.

Nobody ever demanded anything from any of us. Boss-man would update us on what was needed and each contributed however much they wanted. Then a couple of other guildies went crazy and decorated the place and now it looks awesome, I mean, we have a Chinese Garden kind of thing going (we call it “Beer Garden”), we have arcs, our guild initials on the walls, it’s awesome! We also had a jumping puzzle that led to a part of the map that wasn’t even finished by Anet, I spent maybe an hour just exploring that.

As for the raids – what exactly did you want? To shower you with money? You have legendary armor, you have skins and exclusive minnies to show off. If you want a gear treadmill, I suggest you play some other game. Because that’s not what GW2 is about.

The GH was not a resounding success, but it was NOT a failure.

I’m sorry, but I can’t help but feel your guild is not the common experience. We had people who donated and “went crazy”. However, that was maybe 1-5% of our guild population. Most of the population (despite being active and playing content) simply didn’t donate. Majority of them simply didn’t care because the rewards didn’t serve a purpose.

As for raids, yes I did. That is exactly what I expected. You have supposedly the hardest content in the game that not only requires 10 players, but is on a weekly cooldown. I expect some pretty good rewards.

Rewards have been an issue in this game since release. With the horizontal set up there’s little incentive to continue playing expansion content. So you have situations like we have now where HoT PvE zones have population issues where maybe one instance of each map completes the meta each rotation.

Guild Halls should’ve been areas where guilds were incentivized to play together. For example, they should have made decorations mainly bought with resonating crystals. These decoration merchants would come from all parts of the game and be hidden/locked behind certain events. Maybe you have to get to the end of a mini dungeon or jumping puzzle for a few. Maybe you have to complete a event chain in a zone. Open world content like that. To get resonating crystals, the main method would be from certain events. Completing events with guildies in your group or squad give you a medium to high chance of rewarding crystals. Completing dungeons and fractals with 3 or more guildies rewards you with crystals (with dungeons rewarding more then fractals). Taking WvW camps or doing guild team sPvP. All of these guild focused activities reward crystals that would be mainly used in decoration and upgrades.

There are a lot of areas where HoT didn’t deliver. You can see we’ve been bleeding players pretty fast. I mean just look at social medias. Reddit was getting 1200-1500 peak visitors and now its back down to pre expansion release levels. You don’t want your game returning to “normal” populations a mere 5 months after release. Especially for a f2p game.

Silverthorn.8576:

ok you don’t know what you are talking about, thx.

Yes, they not the most mobile in the game. However, they did get mobility. More then I think they need in my opinion. I remember they removed vanilla DS teleport because it was too much mobility. A evading leap is practically the same thing.

I think they should get rid of the evading factor, but add in stability. Like you use it and you get 2 stacks of stability.

Something I’ve noticed over the past 3+ years with playing is that with each new balance patch builds also strive to fill every combat role to the greatest degree. So they’re looking to be able to CC, deal damage, and have survivability to the greatest degree. Its no surprise with a no holy trinity game design. I always felt that with each major meta change, those 3 things increased in frequency.

HoT was tipping point for this.

You took those three concepts and increased them dramatically in each class. Now you have this meta where playing anything other the new elite specs is VERY frustrating. Lets take a look at two classes.

Guardian. Something I noticed with dragonhunter is they got a huge increased in burst damage. Now meditation guard pre HoT was already pretty high damage output, but it was also mainly melee. The bunker specs or heavy on the survivability side specs also paid the price of damage. So one of the downfalls of playing the guard was that being ranged was one of your weakeness and dealing with it through blocks/teleports/etc was something to perfect. With Dragonhunter you basically gave them a huge amount of ranged DPS and didn’t ask for anything in return. Guardians was one of the best survivability classes (especially boon and direct heal wise) pre-Hot. You went in and increased their DPS substantially while asking very little in return.

Necromancer. Necromancer was one of the easiest classes to counter. Mainly because they liked mobility and CC protection. So focusing on them first was done often. With HoT you gave them mobility, CC protection, more CC, more conditions, and finally more life force regen. So now you have reapers who are dealing immense amount of damage, can easily protect themselves from CC, and can output an insane amount of CC.

My point is, there seems to have been a trend with HoT was you took a classes weaknesses and attempted to put in an elite spec that addressed those weakness. However, the price you pay for such an elite spec is so little that all the classes just lost their main weakness. I think that’s why you see so many people talking about how every class is overpowered now. Its because you took the downfall of every class and pretty much heavily reduced its presence or straight up got ride of it. Attempting to do anything other than these elite specs is hugely punishing because you’re just getting pummeled. I mean after playing these matches it seems like the game has fallen more and more into “spam”. I’m just getting spammed with conditions, CC, burst, everything; constantly through a battle. Especially if its against 2v2 or higher. You see peoples boon bars and they constantly have boons.

There seems to be a frequency creep with balancing of everything.

http://dulfy.net/2015/11/17/gw2-plasma-weapon-skins-gallery/

Probably the closest were gonna get to a lightsaber.

With HoT, there seemed to be a large focus on large group open world content that was hard.

So this got me thinking, should future expansions have a similar objective (where they introduce a lot of open world content that requires a sizable group of people)? If yes, what possible troubles do you think can arise from it (such as population concernts among old and new content)?

If no, what design objectives should be focused on? What type of content? Dungeons, fractals, some form of instanced content, large explorable zones (like Lornars Pass), etc?

Something I’ve noticed since HoT Guild Halls were released is the sudden decrease in desire to donate and progress a guild hall. Many saw the price and noped. They would rather put those items towards personal goals (such as legendary) or sell them on the TP for coin. I’ve talked to many of them and most of them agree that there just aren’t good enough personal rewards to get a guild hall.

So there are two routes I can see Anet going if they want to fix this. First, they reduce the requirements in terms of materials.

The second route is to put more bonuses for personal players at the end. There’s one may way I can see doing this that will not only produce a unique experience that will get guilds to work together and unify, but greatly benefit players.

Decoration Buffs.

So the concept works like this, you have two components. You have an upgrade component (such as workshop 2 or guild trader) and a decoration. When you have both of them, they produce a special buff that is applied to all players in the guild. Here are some examples.

-Sunless Inoculation – Fighting Teuqatl the Sunless has provided your guild with deep knowledge of plague magic. All players will receive a -15% condition duration applied to them while in the open world or instanced PvE (fractals, dungeons, raids) while the Tequatl Trophy/Decoration is placed in your guild hall

Requirements:
1. Guild Tequatl Kill – Your guild spawns and successfully kills Tequatl. This will give the guild access to decoration (such as a Trophy of Tequatl).
2. Guild War Room 2

-Ogden’s Hammer – Your guilds members have shared their deep and masterful knowledge of the smiting arts. While Ogden’s Hammer is deployed in the Guild Hall, all required crafting materials for weaponsmithing and armorsmithing are decreased by half if the required amount is greater then one.

Requirements:
1. 50 Armorsmithing Pendulums – They required 450. Are low to medium in cost. They have a weekly timer. Its key to note that in terms of materials, these will NOT be expensive. Their purpose is mainly for crafters to donate something that more represents their level. You could also use backpacks here too. The weekly timer forces players to work together, instead of just one person doing it.

2. 50 Weaponsmithing Pendulums – similar to above

3. Workshop 2

These are of course just examples, but you get my point. They will provide VERY Good buffs to the personal player by employing a mix of guild hall requirements and group content requirements. You can’t make these small bonuses like the 3-10% increases from the exp buffs. While those exp buffs are ok, they’re small enough that not many people care too much about them. They’re also not global, so it’s not uncommon for guild members to forget about them. I know in my examples they seem a bit overpowered, but think about it. Workshop 2 requires a ton of items right now. Current prices have it over 800g in items. Tavern 2 I think is well over 1,200g. So not only is there a timegate to these upgrades, but also they have quite large expense attached to them. I know my guild of 130+ active players will be taking close to 1 month at current rates to achieve. Tavern 2 could easily take 3-4 months. Plus achieving whatever content requirement, which again wont be easy. These are extensive and hard/grindy requirements.

My point is, there needs to be more personal incentive for players to donate. You’ve sort of enforced a very self centered outlook in the game by providing a reward system that can be easily achieved alone or through open world content (where grouping will often happen automatically, like vanilla world bosses).

Kampilan.3895:

And, what do you know? It’s still an enjoyable game.

I’ll go back to HoTS later. There’s so much of Tyria I haven’t seen, despite over a year of playing.

Yeah, this seems to be the outlook of a lot of people i know. My main guild may have 15-20 people on at once, and perhaps 3-4 in HoT zones. Many went back to vanilla because, as you’ve said, it is a lot less tiring.

I mean I just did TD twice in a row and as you said, its exhausting. Setting up for 45 minutes only to fail. Seeing people tear others apart in map chat and blaming one another.

It is enjoyable to finally finish, but I’ll use Tarir as an example. I tried it about 4 times near launch, but failed hard. Basically exhausting as TD is now. Tried it again and passed, but very closely. Again very exhausting event. When I finally completed it, I just had no desire to go back there. I’ve done it once, but just too stressful for me to go back and try it again. Especially when there’s a lot easier/relaxed content out there. TD will probably be the same way once I finally do it once.

I’m just wondering if this exhausting and stress is spilling over. Since the Raid update, it seems like a majority of what I’m seeing online (forums, social media like reddit) is very critical/rage. They bring up some valid points, but I wonder if all this anger is from the stressful content that a majority of the expansion is. If it is, is it good for the game? Should Anet address it to make it easier?

Now I’ve been playing the game for 3 years, so I’ve seen a lot of rage from the community. The refugee path rage, the first queen’s gauntlent, the first Mad King’s Clocktower, Toxic Tower, Marionette, Tequatl rework, Triple Trouble, etc.

Since the release of HoT, the stress levels and amount of rage seems to have gone up, more then usual. Not just in game, but over the social media outlets as well. Even reddit, a forum which isn’t normally very irritable, has been so. I’ve seen people who hardly WvW get up in arms over the “leaked” WvW information. People who hardly ever sPvP treating the recent league as a personal insult. It’s been strange. So I started looking at where this rage could be coming from.

Could the amount of hard content be the source of the stress? Tarir, VB full night complete, TD, Raids, 100+ level fractals, etc. They’re all pretty difficult. Especially with Raids and even more so with Open World content in Maguuma, they take a pretty significant setup time and are often on timers.

So do you think that the significant increase in difficult content is leading to overall increased stress levels of the playerbase when concerning the game? Is this leading to a more irritable community that is becoming upset by content/game changes to a much greater degree?

If yes, what do you think Anet can do to address this? Are events like Tarir and TD too hard, but are past the point of no return so they can’t nerf them?

If no, do you believe that there’s an increase in rage as of late? If yes, why do you think it is?

Telemin.7380:

Also good for breakbars.

In regards to what else is open to use to take down a break bar (plus what you’re sacrificing to get a Taunt ability), is it really that good?

I mean I can see the two traits (warrior and ranger) being good, mainly when considering the other choices and situations when choosing those.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

pvp called…

they would like to speak to you.

Are you saying its really good in PvP? I’m not expert, but it seems like energy would be better spent else where for Revenant.

Hey,

So one of the many things I was excited before the release of HoT was tautn. It seemed like an interesting condition that could really do interesting things. Sadly it is not that way. Currently it feels mostly useless.

First, there are only four ways to apply taunt in the game right now. Only one of these is a Utility Skill. The first way is the only utility skill that does taunt by default, Forced Engagement with dwarf legend in Revenant. The second way is the trait Beastly Warden for Rangers (F2=Taunt nearby foes). Then you have Eye for an Eye in Revenant again (disabled = taunt foe). Finally there is Bloody Roar trait for warriors (taunt when going zerk). That’s it.

However, the issues don’t end there. The only utility skill Force Engagement is very underpowered. It cost a significant portion of your energy, which can go towards better things. The elite that heavily reduces damage, the channel that reduces damage, heals, and deals damage. The AoE stability application. The heal. Every weapon skill. You get my point. It basically cost so much and does so little, there’s no viable way to use it.

The final big issue is its use. As it stands right now, it’s mainly pointless in PvE. The only time a taunt would be useful in PvE is against Elites (silver). Why? First normal and veterans a mainly no problem for a majority of classes, no matter their builds. I’ve never heard about anyone having trouble killing a normal mob or veteran. So that leaves Champions, Elites, and World Bosses. Well this is considered a CC condition, which means when you use it on something with a break bar it does nothing exception drain the break bar. Not a lot at that either.

It seems like if we really want taunt to come into more play, it really needs to start having an influence on things with break bars. Now I can understand it not working on something like Shatterer. But against champions/mobile mobs like that, it would be so useful.

The only time elites really appear is in group content (normally large) thanks to scaling. When that happens there is usually so many people around that Taunt doesn’t really make an impact in the battle. It’s better to use your energy on anything else.

Those are just my thoughts on the condition. Both new conditions Slow (mainly mesmer can apply this) and Taunt seem hugely underused. Especially taunt.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Deified.7520:

I mean if you need something from the Meta event, why not help? Why go off and do something else? The issue is that when one person does this, that’s not that bad. However if a pretty sizable portion does this, then it creates problems. Because then you don’t have enough people doing the Meta.

However, the main target of that statement of mine are those who go afk during the metas or go and “hide”. Usually I find 5-10 who are just chilling inside the map waiting to see if it will be completed. Not doing anything excepting afking.

Well, my main problem with this attitude that no one can play how they want during a meta is it doesn’t take into consideration people that don’t have a long time to play and don’t necessarily want to spend that time doing a meta they may have already done enough times to be sick of it. Maybe they don’t “need” anything from the meta.

Or a meta that fails more than it succeeds and so wastes their short playing time.

Or any of a dozen other valid reasons for wanting to have the freedom to choose what they want to do with their own gaming time.

The problem lies not with the player. The problem lies with the scaling of a meta that does not adjust itself to the number of people actually doing it.

Yeap, I agree 100%. I want to say that I don’t blame any of the people I’m talking about in my post. I see completely why they do what they do and understand it (except for those who just AFK sitting in a meta event. That’s not nice).

It’s one of the major reasons I think they should put in proper scaling. Map wide meta evenets are still kind of a new thing for Anet. They didn’t really come into play (we had large metas, but not map wide) till Dry Top. So it’s still a new concept.

But they really really need good scaling. Like you said, having a proper scaling system will be hugely beneficial in allow players to play how they play. But again, AFKers are still a concern. If a group decides to send 90% of the zerg away from the meta so that it will be easier to complete, then they all jump in at the last minute to get the reward, it’s an issue. They’re going to have to make some kind of better system that can more easily detect how much a person contributed. Like for every stage you get some kind of flag on your account that tells the code that you did that stage. If you have flags for all the stages, then you get the best reward.

Another major benefit is that the content will be done when it most likely has huge population decreases in future expansions. One of the major reasons that Core Tyria world events are still completed is mainly because they’re a lot easier then Maguuma. So those will always be the easy ones. However, if the introduce another expansion with world events that are equally as hard as Maguuma…I don’t see the populations in Maguuma doing well for itself. So having a proper scaling design will greatly help anyone who decides to actually play these zones in the future.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Sthenith.5196:

Well, i agree 100% with OP. There’s nothing more to add really…exceeeept for one thing :
“leeches”.

They’re not really leeches, they’re the ones that want their HP points or some event done so they can enter and finish map completion. It’s very understandable, and it shows how badly the setup in HoT really is. TD being the worst map ever designed.

For the rest, you hit the nail right on the spot.

Yeah, no kidding. People playing the content that’s there and completing maps are not leeches. That’s just ridiculous.

I mean if you need something from the Meta event, why not help? Why go off and do something else? The issue is that when one person does this, that’s not that bad. However if a pretty sizable portion does this, then it creates problems. Because then you don’t have enough people doing the Meta.

However, the main target of that statement of mine are those who go afk during the metas or go and “hide”. Usually I find 5-10 who are just chilling inside the map waiting to see if it will be completed. Not doing anything excepting afking.

Obtena.7952:

If there is a focus on gold, it’s because the player puts it there. Anet has designed this game so you can use the same gear for all level 80 content, with a few exceptions. That minimizes the need to ‘focus on gold’ in the endgame and simply allows the player to … play the game. The gear that you need to do this content that allows you to focus on playing the game is obtained through a reasonable amount of activities and gathering, including leveling up to 80.

Yeah, the players have created it and its been that way since release. I personally don’t think its good for the game in the long run. What ever hype or game time extension Guild Halls and Scribing could have offered players has disappeared because of the endgame gold focus. They’re just so expensive that players stopped caring about them.

I understand where you’re coming from with the Gem stance. I’m curious though, on how many people actually transfer golds to gem. I’ve always felt its never been worth it (considering how much stuff cost in ingame gold compared to how many gems you can get for 10$). I more then often just buy stuff off of the gem store.

However, I still think its an issue that needs to be solved. Tangled Depths is a joke right now in terms of the Meta. I keep going into that map and seeing all those issues I listed. Everyone just seems so depressed when it comes to the subject of even attempting it. The reward is so small to the amount of work/time that needs to be put into it, that nobody bothers attempting it. I think the root of the issue is the reliance on Gold.

I mean, I don’t know what else to replace the gold with that would satisfy the issue with Gems/money. But in my guilds and friends, the hard meta events, guild hall, and scribing didn’t do much for them endgame wise. Mainly because it cost so much gold or is so hard compared to the reward you get (as in its a bad reward for the amount of work it requires) that they don’t bother.

if they keep the gold, at the very least make things like Guild Halls less reliant on it. Then increase the amount of unique rewards from the meta events. And put in proper scaling for future problems. With the hardest event in the game (Tangled Depths and Three Headed Wurm) they have like 1-4 “unique” items to them, some achievements, and thats it. It’s not enough to convince people to work towards it.

laokoko.7403:

I didn’t read all this but I’ll share a secret. I made most of my money just selling legendary.

And the journey of making legendary means you can play every part of the game. From doing map completion, doing wvw, farming karma and skill point.

So really, you don’t need to do the same boring farm every day.

I’m not saying they need to offer more gold or more variety. I’m saying they need to take the focus away from gold. Gold is connected to endgame and I feel like it’s affecting the game poorly (I expanded on it more in OP).

The Greyhawk.9107:

Looks kinda like a cross between Darth Vader and the Shredder.

Darth Shredder

Sounds like an amazing metal band name.

A bit of spoilers for HoT below, careful. This is also long because its something I’ve been concerned about since launch and have thought A LOT about.

TL;DR – The game’s endgame is too focused on gold. It’s killed the hype behind Guild Halls and Scribing. It’s splitting up players and causing new content to drain. Everyone thinks gold to work ratio first.

Now I’ve been playing this game for 3 years, since launch. I’ve loved every minute of it and I don’t plan on quitting. I’ve gotten more then my moneys worth and I think HoT is a good expansion for the game.

However, there is one issue that has always persisted and I’ve expressed concern about before, gold. Since launch the game’s endgame progression has heavily revolved around gold. What I mean by this is the amount of times you can either make gold off an item (so selling it) or having to spend gold. This did one major thing.

It created a greedy playerbase. Now this isn’t their fault, they’re just doing what gives them the most fun. I don’t blame them. However, they are all about gold. It doesn’t matter how many items you give them, the endgame playerbase will start thinking about the amount of work/stress/time they’re putting into a peice of content and the amount of gold they’re getting back. This expansion did nothing to fix this issue and it’s slowly killing the expansions content. I’ve noticed the people I play with have drastically fallen off in time spent doing anything related to HoT. A majority of their time is still spent in Tyria doing the world boss train, fractals, or farming dungeons. Lets dissect down the way this is appearing in maps

>General

In all Maguuma areas, you will see a lot of leeches. It’s not surprising either, since the game is very grind heavy. These players need a very specific thing. Maybe a mastery, maybe a hero point that’s locked behind something, maybe a vendor. However, they just don’t feel like putting in the enormous effort it takes to do these events. I’ve talked to a few, and a common theme was “There have been so many times where I’ve spent a ton of time and stress trying to do something, and it only fails. I’d rather just relax and do some random small stuff and if it succeeds then I’m there to benefit”. This is especially common in Tangled Depths.

>Verdant Brink

Right now the most common bosses I see killed are Matriarch and Patriarch. I don’t see a full map completion done. Axe master is also rarely killed, along with the rest. Why is this? They’re significantly difficult, especially with being tied to masteries. So people see the amount of stress/work, see the pay off, and go “meh”. People have either failed so many times or seen it fail so many times that they don’t even bother trying. They’d rather go farm dungeons/fracs/world boss train in Tyria and spend the same amount of time earning a lot more gold.

>Tangled Depths

This one is even worse. Probably the worse out of them all. People scoff and crack jokes at the mere mention of completing the META. The amount of stress/work/time that needs to be put into this meta event compared to the amount of gold you’re getting out of it is atrocious. The major reason people are bothering trying to do it now is for the Mistward helm. Once they get it, they never go back.

>Dragon’s Stand

This one is probably the least badly. Mainly because the event is fun, arguable the least stressful out of them all, and the rewards are good. The strategy for it is easy to understand and adopt. However, it still suffers from the above problems. People giving up before starting because it’s not an “organized map”, which I gather means a guild started it/organizing it before hand. The amount of times I see people jump into a map, ask “Is this an organized map?”, then someone responds with “no” and they leave immediately. A surprising portion of people just don’t want to put into the tremendous amount of work these maps take (relative to the rest of the game).

Populations will continue to decline. As players start getting that one specific item or gear they’re going for, they wont want to return to the maps. They’ll go to Tyria where the content is easier and the gold is better. At the rate I’m seeing populations decline among my guilds and friends list (as in how many of them are spending time in Maguuma) its already at about 1/4th of what it was that first week of launch.

Now this gold heavy endgame isn’t only causing people to ignore content that doesn’t meet the bar with work to gold ratio. It also kills hype towards major features that it shouldn’t.

>Guild Halls/Scribes

I know I’m not the only one on here that was majorly hyped for Guild Halls and Scribing. People were saying “Finally, Guild Wars has Guild Halls. Like it should’ve at release! I can’t wait!”. Then it was released and it was a disaster. I remember that first day my guild claimed the hall. Everyone had fun, we were ready. We saw the NPCs, opened up the donations, and then all that hype/joy/happiness went poof. We saw the price. We saw that to even get a Tavern that wasn’t some wood and tents would cost us 6,000g+ in materials. That it would take months before the Guild hall even looked cool. That to build decorations and even level up scribing, we would have to fork over thousands in gold. I mean a Bar Table was posted on reddit earlier that cost what, 2,000g+ to make?

Any creativity, excitement, and guild pride that existed while we claimed that Guild Hall went away. It was replaced with either people who stopped caring or people who would rather sell the materials for gold (again, promoting a greedy playerbase endgame). It’s been over a month since release and these feelings haven’t changed at all. I’m in 3 different guilds and each one is the same story. 90% of the donations are usually done by 5-10 people. Even the guild I’m in that has 300+ people have the same amount of people as the 130 guild donating. That’s not good. Guild Halls are supposed to encourage guild pride and teamwork. Instead what we have are people who (rightfully so, might I add. I don’t blame them at all) taking advantage of the horrible inflation and making tons of gold. Who knows how long this might go on. Now I understand inflation goes down over time. But planning with that in mind will destroy a MMOs popuation. MMOs rely on hype. If people start assuming oh “for the first 1-2 months of release don’t even bother trying to get it” since the prices will be inflated so much, that’s not good. That’s huge time delay of gratification for core features of your expansion.

I mean I can’t imagine the disaster will be with the release of the next expansion. Not in the new content, but the old. How the hell is anyone going to do anything Maguuma if an expansion the same size (or bigger) is released. We may see easy things like a Patriach or Matriach kill done. But Tarir? Gerent? I can’t imagine. Right now you have the playerbase split between the insanely easy Tyria World Boss Train, Orr World Bosses, and Maguuma World Bosses. That’s a lot of content that requires a large amount of people to work together. Naturally they will gravitate to the easier ones. Throw in a new expansion zone, it will further split the playerbase. I mean hell, I don’t know anyone that has completed a three headed wurm in over 5 months. They don’t even bother trying because the work to gold ration from it. This should’ve been a huge warning flag for future events.

>Solving It

Solving this issue is hard. With the current state of the game and how Anet has conditioned the playerbase, we can go two routes. One is the redo the entire current game’s endgames to be more considerate towards the splitting of playerbases. You’ve already tried doing this on the small scale and it ended with quite a few people upset. You nerfed Dungeon Rewards around the time of HoT launch. If dungeons were still as reward as they were and as easy, it would’ve further drained HoT of players. So doing this is probably not only expensive, but also very “bad” PR risky.

The other route is that all future content is either void or heavily absnet of reliance of gold. There are little to no items that you can sell on the TP. Everything from Guild Hall upgrades, Scribing recipes, armor sets, weapon sets, etc; all of it is acquired through playing the content. Not just farming 3 year old content for gold. However the issue of gold reliance still exists. There are still legendaries, the old content, and other things people will be trying to get. So I think you should put in a new scaling system to account for this. To account for much smaller populations doing Tangeled Depths Tarir, and all that hard content. Honestly if you release a new expansion (and a new living story season) following a heavy content reliance designed that I outlined above, you should probably install a scaling system that will allow at minimum 5 players to be able to successfully do this content. A year down the line people will not only be tired of HoT and played the heck out of it, but they’ll be focused on newer content and a new expansion.

I really want to enjoy this game like I used to. I still play it and enjoy it. However the community that I knew is disappearing. All those good people, fun and relaxed times we have during leveling. The niceness and feeling of freedom and exploration. Its been replaced by time tables. By a “gold gold gold gold, give me gold” outlook. Nobody seems interested in playing the game for fun. It’s all bout meeting a time table, like a job. They’ve got to do X dailies, build Y time gated content, do the world boss train and acquired Z gold, etc.

Also, I know this wont be everyone’s experience. These are just the actions/attitudes I’m seeing every time I play.

So it seems like you really wanted to make the Dwarf stance the go to spec for being tanky. However, from what I’ve played around with, it simply doesn’t deliver. The biggest issue I have with it right now are resource cost. Quite frankly, everything just cost too much for what you’re getting.

I mean, sure if we started fights with 100% resource then it would be balanced. But we don’t.

Today I tried to mess around with a Tanky focused build that utilizes Dwarf, it fails on every front.

1. Heal Skill – Probably the only skill I think is in a good position.
2. Forced Engagement – Right now it cost too much, takes too long to cast, and does little in return. With the long cast times, the chances of it getting interrupted in the now CC heavy meta is very high. It Also cost a lot. If you use this on the start of a fight, you basically have to run around auto attacking till you can do anything again. If we were to keep the current amounts of taunt and slow, this skills cast time and resource cost needs to be cut in half. If you want to keep the current cast/resource, then double the slow and taunt. It’s just so…useless. Most players treat it as a small annoyance in PvP.
3. Inspiring Reinforcement – Similar issues to force engagement. The resource cost are too high. Every instance I use this, it doesn’t save me from CC. I still get CC’d or I get pushed out of it. It either needs to pulse a lot more stability and last longer, or that resource cost needs to come down. I think about 20 resource would be a good start.
4. Vengful Hammers – Again, resource cost is too high. When I’m in Jalis, I won’t be dealing a ton of damage. It isn’t a good spec to go into if you want to deal damage. With all the resource cost, I rarely get to use these hammers. By the time I’ve casted my weapon skills or a taunt, I’m spent. I think a resource drain of 3, not 5 is more proper for what this currently does.
5. Rite of the Great Dwarf – I think this is in a slightly good position. I think it should last a little bit longer, considering your’e spending 50 of your resource pool.

Those are my biggest issues. The main pattern is resource cost. For a Legend that is supposed to make you more tanky, the resource cost make the skills not able to keep up with the damage being put out. Both by players and mobs. Right now, its better to just go any other spec, you’d contribute more to your team. If you’re looking to be a tank, most of the other classes outdo the Revenant, by a lot.

Yeah, I finally did it with a group and it cut the time so much. Wish they would’ve told you that its heavily suggested to do it with a group.

On the last story mission for hearts and minds, fighting the Pale Tree is bugged.

Might I say this has been one of the most frustrating, unenjoyable missions I’ve played. And apparently I’m not event done.

Canach, for some reason, was made a legendary boss. Don’t get me wrong, that’s fine for a group. But I’m playing it solo. Running in circles for 20 minutes hitting a health sponge isn’t fun.

Then we get to the pale tree. Oh the Pale Tree. What a buggy mess she is.

1. Randomly doesn’t take damage. Don’t know if the numbers just aren’t appearing (and another health sponge so I can’ really tell on the health bar), but randomly appears to just stop taking damage. Not go invulnerable. Numbers just stop appearing for a few seconds, then start up again.

2. Doesn’t Die. She keeps healing. I’ve fought her for 40 minutes. I’ve restarted twice, got her to 0 HP probably over 20 times. Each time she just heals to 25%.

Its one thing for maybe some lag, but blocking progress and the players don’t know if its a bug or design is horrible. If I knew this was a bug, I could’ve saved so much time by just restarting earlier.

Yeap, looks like they turned it off. Probably for the best considering you could keep your whole team constantly at full in a teamfight in PvP. Didn’t even try it in WvW, but would probably be more insane.