Wow peeps are harsh. They already told us what to expect in April. The fact that they are fixing things is a great step! Rome was not built in a day, so chill and wait. Complaining about it all the time only discourages others to continue playing.
Mylerian/FA/Just Respawn
You’re totally right! I mean waiting 3.5 years for things to be fixed is very reasonable!
" What happened was the fan base wasn’t happy with the living story so we switched to an expansion model and the expansion didn’t do well. That’s what happened. If the expansion had done better, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
Exactly Vayne. If they had made HoT soloable I bet my precious Bunny Ears that they would have sold more copies of the expansion…never underestimate the numbers of soloists….we are more in number than people think.
No, soloable isn’t the major issue of why the expansion failed. It certainly hurts it, but the real cause is depth. The game lacks depth and the expansion did nothing to really change that. The art in the game is great, the combat is fluid, but the mechanics of the game fall flat every time. The new zones were basically the same rehashed stuff, Orr 2.0. You finish the zones and then what? That’s always been the problem and they have yet to solve it. That’s why people didn’t buy the expansion. Combine that with 3 years of less than palatable patches and there was zero trust that ArenaNet could deliver on an expansion worth $50.
The only thing keeping this game afloat is the MMO dought. I can’t think of any AAA mmos even in production at the moment. If there was another Big MMO releasing people would be leaving, but there isn’t so they languish and wait for the miracle patch that turns out lackluster. Who would have thought that the hopes and dreams of the MMO genre would be pinned on Indy studios and Eastern MMOs. At least we are finally at the tail end of the WoW clones and we can start branching back out to MMO worlds that have some depth.
I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We’re a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we’re confident you’ll love. But I’m not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.
Mo
I’ve been waiting since release for a patch that I loved and have yet to receive one in 3.5 years. At release I just wanted throw money at you, but every single patch has made me doubt and mistrust you more and more. ArenaNet has either focused on one thing to the detriment of everything else or they’ve put out thrown together things that did not work and feel like salt on a wound. WvW has needed major changes since week one and so far all we have are promises. Of course Legendaries were promised too so how much can we trust you there. I’m not sure how long you expect people to wait.
My advice, if you advertised HoT with legendaries then you put in the legendaries. Otherwise anything you announce or say cannot be trusted. If you can’t pull through on something you made a big fuss about and sold the expansion on then how are we going to trust you for anything else?
I don’t get why raids were added when there weren’t even enough resources for PvE, PvP and WvW.
This. They spent the first 3 years focusing mostly on LS to the detriment of the game. I’m not sure what they thought would happen with raids. I mean they couldn’t even support dungeons and raids are much more complicated. ANet needs to desperately restructure their development team and that includes management. They’ve been slow at developing for awhile and the work put out is fairly slapdash. I think they need to put a little more money into keeping devs that know what they are doing and growing the team than to keep investors happy.
What do people have to complain about? How about the amount of content and “features” you get simply isn’t worth the price? FFXIV offered far more content and mechanics for a lower price. WvW got a map that was absolutely terrible, its like they saw the complaints about EotM and thought they were complinents. How about when ArenaNet said that new specs wouldn’t be alpha specs, but for the most part they are. How about them taking content that was available pre-HoT and gating it behind HoT content?
I think the most frustrating thing is that people might have expected things to change after HoT released. Sadly though we are back in the same old rut, extremely slow updates that only focus on one area of the game and questionable implementations.
I think the problem is that ArenaNet is horrible at multitasking. If they are working on raids then everything else is on the backburner. On top of that there release schedule is either slow or anemic. Go look at what FFXIV has put in since Heavansward launched vs HOT.
This all results in players knowing that if ArenaNet is working on raids then the rest of the game won’t see any major updates for at least 6 months. Had they built some depth into the game in the last 3 years it might not be such a big issue, but they didn’t and it sadly is.
Why do so many people seem excited at the prospect of GW2/HoT failing? You do understand that if GW2 starts to fail in short time there will be no GW2 to play. If you are here posting then I would think you would not like a product you paid for to be shut down completely, see CoH.
Perhaps you are hoping that failure means some dramatic change in the game that caters to your preference. The corporate world does not always work like that. They often do not hang on to products that under perform over time even if sales a marginal. They might do some house cleaning of staff first (not saying that is what happened to Colin) in hope of some change in performance but I’ve seen that fail many times as well. In many cases as far is investing that is a huge red flag.
What you should be hoping for instead is some acknowledgment from Anet that they are working to improve the current product as well as expand into future products. Wait.. Mike O’Brien pretty much said that during the AMA on reddit.
People like acknowledgement that they were correct. GW2 not doing well is exactly that, acknowledgement that ArenaNet has consistently made the wrong decisions. Do you understand how many people feel slighted or wronged by ArenaNet at this point? Did you forget when ArenaNet flip-flopped their ideals and added ascended? Then lied and said it was always planned? How about when necromancers were told they just didn’t know how to play their class? Or Rangers being told pets won’t be fixed? CDI’s? Small guilds being told to just join bigger guilds to do guild missions? Dungeons being abandoned? Grind being added at every turn? WvW being put on the back burner? Class balance taking forever and when it does come it’s like they through darts at a board? The whole pre-order fiasco? The removing vanilla content and gating it behind the expansion?
ArenaNet has angered A LOT of people. You don’t think those people want to watch ArenaNet suffer like they have? It might seem like a waste of time to you, but to them it’s probably equally as entertaining as farming gold for hours on end.
The problems with ArenaNet have been known for a while: Poor management and bad compensation. They have a lot of employee turnover and lose the experienced devs. This leaves them hiring new devs that take time to get settled in. Don’t trust my opinion though! Go read all the reviews on glassdoor.
Honestly this change shows how little thought is being put into this.
This is what really bothers me about this change. Taking away ANY amulet is completely missing the target; stat combinations have never been a problem, even celestial was never an issue on its own. All amulets provide the same amount of raw stats, it’s up to the class to use (or abuse) them. Professions, traitlines, and skills are what make builds broken; the amulets being used are merely symptomatic of this.
The fact that they removed two of the least popular amulets while giving a nonsensical and nonspecific reason like “pushed gameplay in a direction that we weren’t happy with” is just insulting. They make no mention of what direction that is, or what about these amulets makes them unhappy. Claiming no 4 stat amulet should have toughness or vitality as a primary stat is equally ridiculous, as they give no reasoning or context on this idea. Why are 4 stat amulets given these constraints but not 3 stat? Mender’s was just added, so we are to assume healing power is allowed as a primary stat on these amulets, despite also being a “tank stat”? Why? Also, are supposed to ignore that all amulets with concentration have been systematically removed? Is this a coincidence or are the stated reasons something thought up after?
I can’t even begin to criticize or even conceptualize the design process when the communications director fails to deliver even the most basic ideas to us. This is the kind of Orwellian abuse of language I expect from Riot games, not Arena net.
Welcome to GW2. The game is so incredibly poorly balanced that it’s astonishing. What MMO allows a class to literally be 1 hit? GW2 has such extremes that it makes balance impossible. These things needed addressed in beta, but nope! Shove it out the door where a thief can down a player instantly from stealth. The extreme damage pushed everyone into defensive builds unless you had a cheese build(stealth, evasion, etc). The stats are still messed up and they keep tossing more and more things on top of that poorly done system. I REALLY hoped in HoT they would do a rework, they didn’t and things are worse than ever.
ITT: People with Nvidia cards wanting DX12.
Nvidia performs worst on DX12. Check the benchmarks. Tried myself in Ashes of The Singularity. I lost 2 fps over DX11. GG Nvidia.
You lost 2 fps on Nvidia in a game thats sponsored by AMD and coded specifically for AMD? Wow. Nvidia sucks :/
Actually 900 series perform worse in all dx12 games (i have 970 myself) as the “direct 12 ready” was a marketing lie. They do not have features build in hardware and instead they try to emulate it via driver which causes fps loss. Nvidia – “the way it’s meant to be ripped off”
You’re not entirely correct. The 900 series is not worse in all dx12 games. Even in the Ashes benchmark the 980 TI comes out ahead of the Fury X after they released a new driver. NO CURRENT GPU HAS ALL DX12 FEATURES BUILT IN. That includes both Nvidia and AMD. I’m not sure what you expected given that there is a handful of games that support dx12 at the moment and what? 2 benchmarks? It will take time for drivers and game devs to take full advantage of DX12. Wait until more benchmarks and games come out then decide if you think Nvidia or AMD is better for what you want to do. As of right now though you’re complaining about something you’re not going to be using for a good bit of time and things will have changed a lot by the time you do. It’s like judging a game based on alpha.
Lets get 1 straight, perfect balance is impossible, with that out of the way,i have never seen a game with such a long stream of broken meta patches one after the other.
Every other game out there manages to get some right here and there, but i honestly cant recall a gw2 meta where 2 or 3 specs didnt absolutely crush the competition.you never played wow huh ? this games pvp is golden compared to that lol.
btw seems like the devs are just lazy or don’t care they aren’t even communicating with us about the issues
they seem like turning into Blizzard 2.0 you know pvp balance patch every 1 year no content for another 1 year while ignoring the whole community…
I cannot attest to post-WotLK, but Vanilla WoW PvP destroys gw2 by a huge margin. WSG in vanilla allowed for a ton of different specs to be very effective. There was no “perfect” group, you just needed to build to your groups strengths. BC PvP got dicey because of Arena and them trying to balance based on it. It was still way better than GW2 though.
There is just so much wrong with GW2 balance that I can’t even begin to know where to start. The whole system is poorly built from the ground up with with zero thought in balancing damage, healing, mitigation, and control. How can some classes be a viable dot class when others have more access to all the dots? How can some be an effective bunker when other classes have more access to protection and healing.
The game needed a serious balance team and what we got was a few people that were clueless. Remember when necromancers were told they just didn’t know how to play? How about them saying there isn’t a chance that pets will get better AI, yet there is a class whose dps is hugely tied to them? Those devs that thought they could balance the game failed horribly and what’s worse is that their decisions have made the game worse. Remember when necromancers had a bleed stack taken of their weapon skill because of dhumfire? Then dhumfire was drastically altered and that bleed stack remained gone?
Fun Facts:
1. High Social Environment does not mean casual friendly, as far as technical definition is concerned it actually means requiring of High Social Skills, so when someone says this is a High Social Experience he means you need to have excellent communication skills. Guess what game environment requires that? Raids. Anyone who has put “High Social Skills” on their resume knows this.
2. Dungeons originally were suppose to be harder than the raids that were released with GW2 Hot. It was advertised kitten. Dungeons were nerfed to satisfy the WoW kiddies who came to the game. that couldn’t function out of the UI fiesta that WoW has become.
3. Aside from the grind fest added in HoT, the CGC released in HoT is in line with the original intentions of Anet.
On #2 they didn’t do a lot of nerfing. What happened is that the game is so poorly balanced that once players figured out the “broken” specs they became extremely easy. Let’s also not forget that by making these dungeons at lower levels it means you can be undergeared going in with a lot less traits so that made them really hard when leveling and easier once fully geared/specced. Then they introduced Ascended gear which the dungeons clearly were never balanced around.
The biggest example of this is Lupicus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZS_pBNS0xc
You can’t blame this one of casuals wanting nerfs. Depending on your level, spec, and gear the difficulty ranges from stupidly hard to “was that a boss?”
MMORPG.com's 2015 Best DLC/Expansion (MMO)
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Distaste.4801
And yet it lost to ESO for best MMO. How unfortunate :/
That being said HoT really is lacking content and a lot of stuff like the story or the fact that we got very few new skins ingame make it seem rushed. Still liking the game but as far as expansions are concerned Heavensward should have won by a country mile.Nope, Heaven sword release(3.0) has no where near as much content as HoT, It has 3 maps(including a city), a few skills for each class no where near specs of hot of course and end game is still the same token grind.
It did however come with 3 new jobs/classes and a new race. Features, at this point, 10 new dungeons and 3 raids. Seems like more content than HoT to me.
Nevermind all the new armours, weapons, mini-games, activities, mounts, quests, etc. HS has waaay, way more content than HoT (and vanilla FFXIV has far more content than vanilla GW2) and it’s not a fair comparison seeing as it’s a subscription game. Back when I played it there were tonnes of content updates that added raids, gear, quests, classes, jobs, etc. etc.
Wasn’t this the game that had to close down for a couple of years because it launched so badly they had to press the redo button on it? Yeah that’s what I thought.
HoT has changed many of the systems in the game. In a way, it’s the redo button that FF XIV did, before they started doing good things. Anet has told us that HoT is more of the roadmap forward than just an expansion. That was my understanding of it. Masteries, specializations, elite specializations, even the change to dungeons and fractals are all in preparation for what comes next.
So yeah, if you’re going to talk FF XIV, their first big “expansion” was actually a complete rewrite of a game with an abysmal launch.
Let’s talk about it then.
FFXIV launched at it wasn’t great. The players did not enjoy it and due to poor retention Square Enix made a decision to re-do the game. They suspended the subscription, footing the bill to keep the servers open The project lead was fired and a new one brought in from the dragon quest series. They didn’t just revamp the game that failed, they completely redid it. The difference between FFXIV and FFXIV:ARR is like night and day compared to GW2 and HoT. You cannot compare the amount of changes that happened and the amount of content added. It’s more like going from GW1 to GW2.
You’re really going to try and compare HoT to the revamp of FFXIV though? I mean one company admitted there was major issues, owned up to them, redid the game at their own major expense, and re-released to huge success. The other NEVER owns up to their issues, kept the game active at players expense, put in illogical systems that make things worse, and let portions of the game rot. ArenaNet’s continued development of GW2 has been nothing short of abysmal starting with the Ascended patch 3 months after launch. For every good thing they put in you can find two bad. FFXIV on the other hand has done a decent job of expanding on systems without destroying things.
The only thing having servers does is implement server loyalty and nothing more.
What megaservers do is open up a vastly larger amounts of players and guilds to fight. Ends the empty dead maps. Removes the ques. Ultimately will make for much larger communities.
Everything you see right now with a server can be done with a megaserver EXCEPT being handcuffed to one server in the name of loyalty.
Lol. You’re one of those idiots that can’t think about consequences, aren’t you.
Clearly the consequences of doing things they way they are currently is MUCH better right? OH wait, server populations are dying, some dead, and you’re still going to rally on the “server pride” front?
The only consequence of merging servers or making a mega-server is killing server pride, given the repercussion of not doing so is the gamemode itself dying I’d say it’s a very smart move to megaserver up. I’m not so short sighted and selfish that I’d cling to some loose bond because it makes me feel special while the game dies. If you kill server communities, new communities will form. They always have and they always will. A new system could even include factions that guilds could join that mercenary out to whatever side has less people. Each week guilds and factions compete to see who can take more keeps, kill more enemies, etc. The other major bonus is that there is then a much easier time dealing with off-peak capping and population imbalances.
You need to face it. Server communities are all but dead. No one really cares anymore who won what matchup, not even T1. 2 years ago this forum would have been on fire with people from T1 flaming each other, now? Nothing. It’s time for a new system that combats off-peak domination, low(no) populations, and brings back competition.
How many WvW lead designer switches is this now? 4? perhaps 5? Me thinks there is some major mismanagement, the higher ups need to stop drinking the koolaid and making decisions based purely on spreadsheet numbers.
Depends on which raids in FFXIV you’re talking about.
First off you need to know that each class has a rotation be it for healing, DPS, or tanking. Most of these rotations are very hard to perform perfectly while raiding as there can be a large amount of movement that breaks the rotation. Next the damage difference between a perfect rotation and a sloppy one is night and day at least for damage, I’m talking 25%-50% or more.
24 man raids are easy difficulty. You still need to watch out for mechanics, but it’s very forgiving in that most of the time a single person screwing up wont wipe the group. So even though people might miss a mechanic and die they can often get a rez.
Normal raids are moderate difficulty. They have mechanics you need to pay attention to but there is a lot of leeway as far as damage the raid takes and how much DPS is required. An infrequent death here is not a huge issue.
Normal primals are easy
Hard primals are easy to moderate
Extreme Primals are moderate to hard
Savage Raids are incredibly hard. These things are tuned with 95% perfection in mind. That means 95% of the time you cannot miss a mechanic, DPS requirements are very very tight and tanks can die in a single hit if they aren’t using mitigation cooldowns at the right times along with other classes using mitigation buffs to help them. To give you an idea of how hard the latest savage content was, it took weeks and weeks for the top guilds to beat the final floor. The number guilds that have done it is probably in the dozens. The first floor miniboss was considered a major roadblock for a lot of guilds.
FFXIV offers a higher skill cap, more complex fights, well tuned fights, lots more content, and better balance.
GW2 has dodges and a lot more instant abilities and less complex/tight skill rotations(worse for hardcore players but better for casual).
I’d say GW2’s current raids are about the moderate difficulty level. They certainly aren’t anywhere near FFXIV’s savage mode stuff. I’d probably say that if it was put into FFXIV people would be pugging it.
Timers create artificial difficulty(AKA lazy design). They can work when there are locked in roles(holy trinity) as a means to test DPS since tanks/healers are constantly being tested, but in GW2 we don’t have those roles so it really only works to kill class/build diversity. They need to embrace what makes GW2 unique, otherwise players might as well go play WoW or FFXIV since they have far better raids.
I really hope they add mechanics that force raids to heal so much health per second on an NPC over the course of a fight, absorb X amount of damage, max out conditions on a boss or he wipes you, or to evade X amount of times. It would at least force people out of berserker or to see why timers like that in GW2 are fairly dumb.
As for those saying that full soldiers players would cheese the raids without timers, then build mechanics that require full concentration, as full concentration wains quickly in long battles. Players make mistakes and as the fight goes on those mistakes should add up. There are literally tons of examples of raids and mechanics to draw from, they just need to make sure they fit GW2.
“waaaaaah we have to full glass and actually try to survive instead of slowly wittling down bosses over the course of 30min waaaah”
This is an action based MMO, enforcing mostly full glass specs is the right thing to do in PvE, ANet knows that.
I don’t understand what people don’t understand here.
The fact that you require DPS gear to kill the boss makes it HARDER not EASIER. Isn’t the complaint about zerker that it trivializes a lot of older content (dungeons) because you can kill everything extremely fast without caring much about their mechanics? Well, you can’t do that here, so why is everyone up in arms?
This is good game design for, like you said, an action MMORPG.
People hate the berserker meta because it pigeonholes them into a single build. Putting people into berserker specs does not make it harder at all. The fight is over quicker and thus you need to the mechanics less. It seems harder because a single hit might kill you, but it is equally as hard to keep doing mechanics for long periods of time because concentration wains, luck falters, and resources run low.
This is absolute terrible game design. GOOD game design would allow any spec played with equal skill to complete the boss because what they give-up on offense would give them survivability to last longer. GW2 does not do this and that’s one of it’s biggest issues. The class balance is a mess and the meta balance is just as bad. Any raids designed with those in mind will be just as bad. The game needs a solid foundation and what we have is some Styrofoam.
How is one type of gear = one type of build? You have lots of variables in your traitlines and utilities which you change depending on situation.
Also, why exactly is enforcing active instead of passive defense inside PvE of a, let me say it again, action based MMO, bad design? You want to turn the game into something it isn’t with full blown tanks and healers.
Also, just fyi, the Vale Guardian enrage is “simply” 200% damage, not a party wipe. So yeah, if you’re full nomads party then glhf, you can probably still wittle him down over time.
One type of gear is going to determine how you build your traits. If you’re going full DPS you’re going to take the traits that increase your DPS first, then whatever is left will be situational. It enforces speccing a certain way and taking certain classes.
Enforcing active based defense is fine, but if you’re going to have other stats then they need to be balanced as well. Why even have the other stats if they aren’t going to make them viable? I absolutely would love to see full blown tanks and healers through specs and stats, that would add a lot more depth to the game. In that same breath I will also say that they should not be 100% necessary,. All classes, stats, and specs should ultimately be equal. Just because it is an “action” mmo does not mean they get to forsake all other stats/abilities/traits, otherwise class customization is extremely boring, which is exactly why people are angry about the berserker meta.
The vale guardian doing 200% more damage after enrage does not make survivable specs suddenly viable. At that point they are going to be just as survivable as berserker specs negating the point of the spec in the first place.
Enrage timers in GW2 are just bad design given the lack of roles. They were created in order to test DPS roles since tanks/healers were constantly on trial. It is very easy to tell if a tank or healer is doing their job, but dps isn’t so easy. Hence enrage timers. So why use it in GW2 where there isn’t tank/healer/dps and class customization is built around building how you want? They took a mechanic without knowing why it was created or used and are using it to artificially increase difficulty while in the process are killing the class customization that’s supposed to make them unique. I can’t think of another way to describe that except bad design.
The only question you need to ask yourself to determine if the fight is poorly designed or not is to ask this “If there was no enrage timer would the fight be hard?”. If you think the fight would be really easy, then clearly it’s not that well designed. If the fight would still be hard then it’s a well designed fight. This isn’t to say that enrage timers can’t be used to make great encounters, quite the opposite, but they can’t just be slapped on to add difficulty of what would otherwise be a cake walk.
“waaaaaah we have to full glass and actually try to survive instead of slowly wittling down bosses over the course of 30min waaaah”
This is an action based MMO, enforcing mostly full glass specs is the right thing to do in PvE, ANet knows that.
I don’t understand what people don’t understand here.
The fact that you require DPS gear to kill the boss makes it HARDER not EASIER. Isn’t the complaint about zerker that it trivializes a lot of older content (dungeons) because you can kill everything extremely fast without caring much about their mechanics? Well, you can’t do that here, so why is everyone up in arms?
This is good game design for, like you said, an action MMORPG.
People hate the berserker meta because it pigeonholes them into a single build. Putting people into berserker specs does not make it harder at all. The fight is over quicker and thus you need to the mechanics less. It seems harder because a single hit might kill you, but it is equally as hard to keep doing mechanics for long periods of time because concentration wains, luck falters, and resources run low.
This is absolute terrible game design. GOOD game design would allow any spec played with equal skill to complete the boss because what they give-up on offense would give them survivability to last longer. GW2 does not do this and that’s one of it’s biggest issues. The class balance is a mess and the meta balance is just as bad. Any raids designed with those in mind will be just as bad. The game needs a solid foundation and what we have is some Styrofoam.
Umm in the first 19 days FFXIV had 3 hotfix patches, 2 of which rivaled what you would see in a GW2 major patch, and a content patch that released their raid normal mode as well as another long list of fixes. In the first month they released 5 hotfix patches and 2 major patches. Let’s also not forget that Heavensward released in a far better state with far more content.
“Give them time” is the most ill-informed thing that anyone could say about ArenaNet right now. They had 3 years and STILL haven’t fixed a lot of the major issues the game has. It took them 2.5 years to finally make changes to conditions so they weren’t useless in dynamic events. Let that sink in for a moment. 1 of the only 2 ways to do damage was absolutely useless in dynamic events. Events that were supposed to be a major portion of the content. Oh but it’s even worse when you consider their combo system, a major game mechanic, actually made the situation worse. That is a gigantic mammoth issue that should have been dealt with in the first few months…2.5 years later and they finally got around to it. I realize that technical issues could be at play, but when other MMO’s had already fixed that issue LONG ago(nearly a decade) that’s a BS excuse. Of course after dev(s?) had said as one of their excuses for not changing it that allowing everyone to place condiitions on a boss would kill it too quick…
The good will and faith are gone. They burned those bridges multiple times. The way HoT has been handled from start to finish has only reinforced that.
They’re aware and working on it.
They were aware and working on it 3 years and 3-4 WvW lead designers ago, well at least nightcapping. The population issues were brought up during CDI’s and acknowledged, but like 99.999% of the WvW CDI suggestion nothing came of it. I would expect a “fix” in 1 year. Raids will come out in the next 3 months, the next 3 months will be dedicated to making those raids better and SPvP. 3 months after that it’s back to LS. It’s too little too late really, I don’t really see the WvW community getting reinvigorated for another round of being ignored by devs and waiting 3 years for major fixes.
They’ve wasted so much time on terrible updates. EotM was supposed to help with queued maps, of course at the time it released that wasn’t an issue at all. The Ruins of power…that are pretty useless All of the traps. The entire mastery system. Finally we have this new map that most people hate. I’m sure I missed some, but that just shows how forgettable they are. I really can’t say I have much hope for whatever nightcapping, population, or mechanics fixes they might implement, given the history it’s more scary than uplifting.
they’ve had over 2 years to correct the problems with WvW population issues, not to mentiokittenllion suggestions, but they do NOTHING to fix it. So, most people have just moved on to a different game. It’s a shame, to me it’s GW2’s greatest asset, the developers obviously do not feel the same.
Um they created server population caps, specific to WVW, just recently too. However, it will take time to show any effect. It’s already shown some signs of working. Guess folks are too impatient.
Those caps are are a bandaid on a nicked artery. Sure they keep the blood from squirting everywhere, but it doesn’t solve the problems at all. WvW is and has always been designed poorly. The base design was “okay” but really needed some changes and certainly needed to be built upon. In 3 years they’ve built nothing important on to WvW and the “fixes” they implement often make the game worse. EotM did nothing to build on the WvW experience and neither did WvW masteries, the power ruins, or traps. Arguably the greatest thing to happen to WvW was the graphics rendering change, how sad is that?
The absolute biggest failure of WvW is that it wasn’t designed with anything valuable to fight over. There needs to be a reason to fight, a reason to keep coming back, something that creates tension. No one cares about a buff, they want something tangible. I like RFOnlines RvR as they had something to fight over, the winner of the chip war got mining rights and could mine 8 hours until the next chip war. Mining provided upgrades. GW2 has nothing like that, you fight because it’s fun, but with no real reward it gets old and boring. After all this is a MMORPG and progression is the name of the game.
Blame the TP flippers for the price. They have been pouncing on everything desirable in the past 2 weeks and jacking the price up. Endless bat tonic went from 80 to 278 gold.
You mean the people removing gold from the economy are responsible? For inflation? Really? o.o
The gold is not removed from the economy, it is then being used to flip more stuff on the TP. ArenaNet allowed people to gain control of the market that now have so much gold that they can buy up pretty much anything in the game and resell at whatever price they see fit. It simply isn’t healthy for the economy and they should have stepped in to correct it, but to this very day haven’t. ArenaNet makes things every worse by sticking to anti-farming, which means a normal person can’t expect to even farm for their item in a timely manner. The salt on the wound is that ArenaNet then makes 250 of certain items required in the recipe.
What ArenaNet need to do is implement code that “sets” a certain price on an item and when the price on the TP is above that the drop rates increase by the same amount. So if something skyrockets 100x then the droprate will also increase by 100×. It might be able to be manipulated, but I’d assume that at that level it would be fairly detectable by ArenaNet and they could dole out some punishments. At least with this system the normal players could compete with the trading post bots.
Elite Specializations & Hero Point Feedback [Merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Distaste.4801
Yeah I was being generous I guess, they really didn’t think this through at all.
Really. You think the folks whose livelihoods depend on the game and have been working towards this release for about two years now didn’t think about it?
They have different MOTIVES than you, and different goals, but there’s no question who in this conversation hasn’t “thought about it”.
Them thinking about it and thinking it through are two very very different things. Their goal is to make money through there game and by constantly implementing systems that either infuriate or frustrate the player they aren’t going to do that. You’re correct that they are thinking about it differently in that they want to keep people playing in order to make money, but they aren’t thinking it through. They implement hardcore grind to keep people playing, but most people will see the grind and stop playing. It’s not like the grind is cleverly hidden either, it’s blatant. The outcry from such shouldn’t come as a surprise because it’s well known that out and out grind is not popular or fun. Remember the GW2 design manifesto…
ArenaNet does not think things through. I’ll give you a shining example to back my claim. Remember when new commander tags were being put in? They were literally the only thing that ever came of the WvW CDI’s. Now in those CDI’s it was talked about AT LENGTH why new commander tags were needed and what functionality they needed. The idea was that adding at the very least new colors would allow for commanders to switch colors to coordinate attacks and defense. So what does ArenaNet do? They add new commander tags but make players pay for each color. That of course runs counter to the entire purpose of wanting new tags, since the cost of a commander tag is not trivial and WvW is not known for it’s immense gold farming opportunities. The players INSTANTLY upon seeing how terrible this was implemented whip into a frenzy of outcry and only then does it dawn on ArenaNet that it was a bad system and they change it. The fact that it was a 5 minute photoshop job and the only real improvement to WvW in 2(?) years didn’t really help things either. They saw the chance to gouge players and keep them grinding, yet somehow didn’t think that it would anger the players when it completely kills the reason for implementing it in the first place.
This is not the only time this has happened. Every single major patch there is at least 1 system that is not thought out and ultimately makes the game worse. ArenaNet has changes that sound awful on paper and are worse on implementation. Even better is they can announce what sounds like a slam dunk awesome change and STILL have a horrible implementation, case in point elite specs. A new way to play your character! Only need to grind your face off for dozens of hours..New Legendary collection! Only they cost more than just buying it off the tp. Their current formula is to identify what make players happy and stick a butt load of grinding in front of it.
If you think that 5 hours and 10+ tries is considered hard then you might want to try another game. FFXIV mechanics absolutely destroy this stuff and the savage stuff is insane. The last 2 bosses in Alexanders savage the top guilds spent 8+ hour days for WEEKS trying to get the bosses down. Heck I remember WoW vanilla MC the first boss taking more than 5 hours and more than 10+ attempts…
The only reason fights take weeks to defeat in games like FFXIV and WoW is very simple: They force you fight them undergeared. I’m not saying the fights aren’t engaging, but the fact of the matter is that this is exactly how they’re tuned and how games with gear progression work. You step into a raid undergeared, and fight it at a disadvantage for a few weeks. The more you succeed or the more time goes on, your raid gradually grows in strength due to better damage, healing etc. This allows things to be easier.
What separates the best guilds from the mediocre in those games is simply how well they optimize and form strategies under the circumstances of being at a big disadvantage. This is not to discredit them, but to show that such a system would not work in this game.
Also, there’s many other reasons why a boss might not die. It could be simply bugged, making it harder than inended. In FFXIV, I remember Twintania was not killed for weeks simply because Twister was bugged. Once it was fixed, it died on the day of that patch. Sure it was “hard” but it also wasn’t enjoyable to lose due to things like that.
Saying gear is what makes FFXIV hard is not exactly wrong but it’s not true either. What makes FFXIV hard is that the savage stuff is balanced around being nearly perfect. You need to do your class rotations, execute the strategy, and have the gear. The class rotations alone take a lot of concentrations to nail and the difference between getting them right and not is huge. These rotations are timed down to the second, the margins for error are slim to say the least. The mechanics are so tightly tuned that it’s impressive. Look at Extreme titan, you literally don’t have a second to spare when avoiding the ground AOE’s, you have to react the second they come out or your dead. I say all this as someone who was hardcore into raiding when AQ40, Naxx, Sunwell, etc came out. FFXIV has fine tuned their hardcore content to a level that I’ve never seen in any other game and to say it’s only because of lack of gear is so short sighted.
Sadly GW2 will never achieve that level of “hard”. Classes are too imbalanced and balancing for the top specs is just going to create a toxic atmosphere. I really hope these playtesting guilds test other builds besides the min-max stuff. The one thing that could make GW2 unique is it’s classes/builds, but if we are stuck with 6 berserkers, 1 tank, 1 healer/support, it’s just going to be sad.
Without the input of top PvE players, there’s little chance the raids will turn out well.
Just look at how fast and easily the boss was downed in the beta. I doubt they intended for that to happen as they were supposedly showcasing their new hard/challenging content. In fact they’re probably in panic mode, hence the invitations.
Losing the idea of “world first” is definitely worth it when the alternative are raids that will be easily completed a couple hours after they launch.
Umm i just want to tell you that they made the boss down easy. In fact Team A theorycrafted over 5 hours and had many practices, and not only that but individually they are excellent players. Also it took them 10+ tries not including the figuring out mechanic part, many being leaving the boss at 0.1% health before wiping. Team B spent much less time to kill the Vale Guardian nonetheless, but it took us a good solid 6 hours+ before we were able to kill him.
And 1 mechanic of the Vale Guardian is missing, so you have to take that into consideration as well. Also out of many, many raid teams, how many actually have killed the Vale Guardian? I’m sure EU could have done it too without the unfortunate schedule, but I am sure the percentage is very small compared to the entire active GW2 population.I hope they make more designs like this, and I don’t mind the rise in difficulty after DnT/Att’s feedback, but it saddens me to see when people think the Vale Guardian was easy to kill when it fact it took us all the weekends to theorycraft, practice, and execute the mechanic. And I can’t stress this enough, that all of our members in our guild, are all tested and tried veterans who were very adept at their class.
If you think that 5 hours and 10+ tries is considered hard then you might want to try another game. FFXIV mechanics absolutely destroy this stuff and the savage stuff is insane. The last 2 bosses in Alexanders savage the top guilds spent 8+ hour days for WEEKS trying to get the bosses down. Heck I remember WoW vanilla MC the first boss taking more than 5 hours and more than 10+ attempts…
Guys they have lots of data and been running models and are likely to have economics and maths degrees or doctorates. Its crazy to shoot them down when you really don’t have access to the information, knowledge and expertise they do.
Wait and see.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not like these are the same people that have been working on GW2’s economy since the game launched. If they were then it would be time to panic because GW2’s economy is awful….oh wait. How many different currencies are there now? Karma abandoned. Low level mats that are worth more than higher. ArenaNet has proved time and time again that “wait and see” is the absolute worst thing you can do with them. Given the sluggish pace that they develop at, the faster you start pointing out the giant flaws the sooner they get fixed. Sure it will still take 2-3 years(i wish this was a joke), but not the 2-3 years and 4 months(seriously) if you had waited to see how badly it was implemented.
This thread is humorous to me. Literally the first week that WvW went to a 7 day schedule the whole nightcapping issue was brought up in tons of threads. A lot of possible solutions were proposed, nothing was done. Maybe year or so after it was brought up again in a big thread and tons of things were proposed, nothing happened. Then again it came up in a CDI and just like 99% of the things talked about in all the CDIs, nothing happened.
Night capping has been a major issue for 3 years and it’s already taken it’s toll. The time in which a nightcapping solution would have been majorly beneficial has passed. What we need now is a new WvW server solution to increase population and keep all 3 sides filled.
That’s because most people that ask for a difficult content do not really want it to be difficult. They want it restricted. Preferably in a way that will limit access to everyone except them and their friends.
Exactly.
Except the restriction comes from the difficulty not gear.. Full Ascended Armour grants +20 Primary Stat and +16 Secondary Stats – it will not be a barrier, people are jumping on this topic to try and frame the debate as exclusive and unfair without appreciating the FACTS.
Do not let people convince you that raids are out of reach of participation due to gear – they are lying to you for selfish gains (Ohoni just wants access to raid armour skins and weapon skins, he is not interested in a challenging and rewarding game mode existing).
And more weapon damage and more armor. If the raid is tuned well then those stats will make a difference. DPSers taking less damage means they can DPS longer before breaking to survive. Higher DPS means mobs will die quicker and thus players will take even less damage. Damage alone gets hugely multiplied so those stats quickly balloon up. Ask any top tier raider if even 1% more stats matter when trying new hard content, the answer will always be yes. Heck in FFXIV the new Alexander savage the 3rd floor is a prime example of exactly that. The difference between a clear and failure was the group having new weapons. If the raid designers working on GW2 are good and want hard content then it will be balanced for ascended and it will still leave very little room for error.
I’m all for challenging and downright hard content, just don’t gate it behind grind gear. Put new/better ways to obtain ascended gear in a timely manner into the game.
dlonie.6547Ascended gear is a 10% increase over exotics.
About 15% for damage for the dps gear.
Can you share your source on that? I made up a quick spreadsheet (attached).
If any more experienced theorycrafters out there can shed some light on these numbers, it’d be appreciated, but it really seems as though both the 10% and 15% increases are exaggerated from these numbers. I assume those higher estimates account for buffs, rotations, etc? Are they looking at precision/ferocity/etc instead of effective crit chance/crit dmg? Or are they just not real?
But just looking at the straight numbers, going from exotic to ascended:
Power: 2613 —> 2707 (3.6%)
Crit Damage: 226.40% --> 230.67% (1.89%)
Crit Chance: 62.43% —> 65.29% (4.58%)
Weapon Strength: 1048 --> 1100 (4.96%)
Weapon strength and power already make up a ~9% damage boost.
Take the warriors auto attack vs a 2000 armor target. (Weapon strength * Power * .70 )/2000
1100*2707= 2,977,700 * .7= 2,084,390 /2000= 1,042
1048*2613= 2,738,424 *.7= 1,916,896/2000= 958
958 →1,042 = 8.76% increase.
Now that’s with no crit or crit damage. Remember that 9% will be further increased with each crit. That measely 84 dmg difference is suddenly a bunch more because of percentages.
2169 – 2403= 234 or 10.78% difference
The crit rate of course we can just make a flat % DPS increase for easy math of 10.78%+4.58% = 15.38%
That of course is just an auto-atack and not accounting for boons. This is not as easy as looking at the stat increase on the armor and saying “It’s only 3% more stats!”. The percentages and multipliers behind the scenes make a 3% increase a sizable damage boost. By all means check my math, I am a baker not a math expert, and I’m pretty sure that if you start looking at boons and bigger multiplier attacks the dps increase gets even bigger.
I’m not saying that the raids should be tuned for exotic either. I’m saying that ascended needs to be made more accessible so that the determining factor for the raid is skill, not gear.
It’s recommended, not required. The first Vale Guardian kill over the weekend had over 1:00 left to the enrage. Skill and builds are going to be the bigger factor in the success of your raid.
It’s a little disingenuous to say recommended when there is a hard enrage timer. Full ascended vs full exotics can easily makeup that minute or more. Lower armor means taking more damage and trying to survive rather than putting out full dps. Lower stats and weapon damage obviously means lower damage especially with multipliers. The icing on the cake is that with lower damage adds don’t die as fast and you take more damage, thus leading back to the trying to survive thing.
Let’s not forget that the first boss is a berserker/sinister fight, which is already a slap in the face considering that’s what the community has wanted gone for 2+ years. When the first to clear had to do almost full dps specs with everyone in ascended I don’t really see anything short of full dps specced exotic groups that are top tier players even having a chance. I truly hope that the other boss encounters feature more in-depth balancing as to require more than 1-2 tank/healer specs and the rest full dps to meet an artificial difficulty barrier. That will cause issues in itself though given the first boss is a dps check, so prepare for more outrage when people need to change spec mid-raid and have 3-4 ascended sets to support those specs.
Honestly, ArenaNet needs to be working on a way for players to gear up with multiple ascended sets. If they are going to pull raids from other MMO’s then they need the infrastructure that leads up to it as well. In other MMO’s you do the dungeons/raids in a set order so you can gear up to meet that next challenge. In GW2 there is no way to really gear up for raids besides a huge grind(money or mats), hitting the RNG jackpot, or time gated stuff.
You’re just avoiding saying that ascended is required because you know it will cause outrage. What you need to be asking yourself is why would that be the case and how can ArenaNet as a whole solve that issue. It’s fine if you’re avoiding it now as long as you have a solution later, but if there is no solution the outrage is going to happen. Make ascended more accessible and there won’t be much outrage, but ignore the issue and force people into the current system and it’s not going to be pretty.
Couple days in SW and pretty much anybody has a full set of ascended, and there’s no telling what other acquisiton methods they may or may not have added to HoT.
I’d love to know what you’re doing out in the silverwastes because I still have zero ascended armor as far as I’m concerned. Trinkets, sure, but those only come in the sinister variety at the vendor. Crafting for armor and the occasional weapon is still required and it’s still huge grind and money sink. While it may be fine for people like us who’ve been playing the game consistently or on-and-off for over a year, it’s going to scare away the influx of new and returning players
So I’m going to agree with the other user here who claims that raids are going to be completely dead in 5 months or less because of this – even moreso if the rewards themselves are underwhelming and grindy via currencies like fractal relics and so on. They need to scale like fractals so that full exotics can experience it and beat via lower levels, at the very least. Difficulty should be relatively the same, but don’t gate all of this behind a grindy gear-wall.
I built an entire set of ascended heavy armor in a week, starting at zero armorcrafting, doing nothing but silverwastes. Salvage the trash, sell the mats you don’t need, use the resulting money to buy the ones you do, use laurels from dailies to fill in the difference.
Granted I was off work that week so I probably played 6ish hours a day, but given a more normal play schedule of the industry average 20ish hours a week, you’re still only looking at about a month.
That’s a HUGE difference compared to the first time I crafted the stuff, getting dragonite on world boss timers and being hard capped on empy shards due to the daily cooldown of world chests containing them.
Not only that, it is literally best in slot gear. It’s the first assumed goal of every player once they hit 80 and figure out their build. Those who choose not to persue it have already made a conscious choice to be less mechanically powerful than they could be. You can’t exactly design content you claim to be a challenge for your veteran players around the assumption that people that started your game two days ago would even have interest, let alone gear and ability to complete it.
I spent my first four months in GW2 doing nothing but world completion, story, and dungeons, and that was before fractals, the living story, achievement chests, and collections were even a thing.
The assumption that new players would immediately prioritize the “endgame hard content” without also being willing to pursue the most efficient route toward that goal kind of doesn’t make sense.
I have tons of super casual people in my guild. They choose manageable goals that are fun for their preferred playtime and schedule because that content exists and is built for that type of player, and anet has been very good about giving them a continual stream of new things to do right up until the content drought after LS2 that left every type of player without new content for several months while anet was buckling down on HoT.
Why do people that never pvp, wvw, dungeon, or fractal suddenly even care about raids? All of those pieces of content have unique skins as well. It’s not like that stuff was changed to make it more accessible to the guy who only wants to solo open world events 5 hours a week. What they did do though was introduce a constant stream of content that was achievable on that schedule, and paid out pretty good rewards for playing it that way.
I just don’t get it I guess. Are people just afraid that going forward GW2 will become a raid focused game? It just doesn’t seem to be the direction anet is going given the focus on story and open world in HoT versus the extremely small amount of raid content that isn’t even finished or playable on release day.
People care because ArenaNet is going to be less than intelligent and put the best rewards in raids, because without that no one will continue to do them. If legendary armor was gated by SPvP or WvW you would have people upset, but with Legendary being gated by raids is it not okay for non-raiders to be upset? Not to mention that ArenaNet tends to have tunnel vision and will probably spend 75% of future development time on raids. I mean look what happened to class balance, WvW, SPvP, dungeons, fractals, etc… ArenaNet started to focus on Living world and everything else fell by the wayside.
Maybe because it is a game and not the olympics?
Maybe because Anet needs many people to play GW2 and buy items in their shop, not a wasteland with a few really skilled people?
Maybe because it is fair?
Maybe because second class players are first unhappy and then former players?But just go on with that arguments please. It argues much better for my points than I ever could.
So because about 1% of the game is too hard for some people to do the game suddenly turns from a game to the olympics?
Raids is a single VERY minor part of the game. The vast majority of the content will still be fully possible to do for everyone.
Fair? So someone that plays for 10 minutes a day should have the exact same things as someone that plays 10 hours a day? Why should anyone bother playing any more than 10 minutes a day if everything could just be done and accessed with that time?
Raids aren’t going to be a minor part, they are going to be the endgame. You might as well say that raids were a minor part of WoW, which isn’t a lie considering the amount of leveling content and quests. The real truth of the matter is that by bringing in raids everyone knows that is what they are going to focus on. ArenaNet has consitantly focused on one area at the absolute detriment of others, so it’s understandable that with the new endgame people are worried about not being able to do it. If they can’t what else will they be doing because we already know that if ArenaNet is working on raids then everything else is getting very very minor updates.
Let’s also not forget that GW2 was sold on the idea that they didn’t want to do raids. That it was more casual friendly and you didn’t need to sink a good portion of your life into doing raids. This premise is what attracted a lot of people and now you’re surprised that when raids are being implemented people are complaining? Personally I don’t see this going well for ArenaNet either way. They either design hard raids that very few complete leaving the rest of the playerbase to feel neglected/betrayed then get bored and quit, OR they design fair raids that aren’t super rewarding and thus no one does them and people get bored and quit. They’ve designed themselves into a corner and in order to get out they are going to take some big hits.
Skins absolutely fit that criteria specifically because skins do not have a use at all as purely cosmetic, non-mechanical rewards.
People don’t ever have a “use” for a skin, only a desire for it.
If there was a specific stat combo you could only pick up by raiding? That’s not cool, and not how GW2 works. Will they add additional legendary armor sets outside raids? I sure hope they will so people can get the little QoL stat swapping feature even if they just farm open world stuff all day.
Skins, however, are fine to segregate by content and have been done this way since release, including but not limited to being segregated not only by content, but by class and race as well because they don’t produce a barrier to accessing other content.
/rant
Specific Stat combo you can only pick up from raiding? That’s not how GW2 works? Have you played since launch? Because that’s exactly how GW2 has always worked. They have always played specific combos or gear levels behind certain content.
At release you could only get certain gear in certain places. WvW only provided soldier stats. Karma vendors only provided 6 stat combos so if you wanted another you were forced into farming dungeons, which also provided a lot less tokens per run. Then it was ascended rings and if you wanted them you were forced into Fractals. Then it was amulets/earrings and if you wanted them you had to do fractals, guild missions, or dailies, which forced people to do things they didn’t want to do in their own right, Then ascended weapons/armor which forced people into crafting, which forced them into farming.
The idea that GW2 was built on letting people play they way they want was officially dead when ascended was announced. The funniest thing is they even did an Reddit AMA during the whole controversy and said it was a mistake to release Ascended with only one avenue to obtain it and that they would add more avenues soon. They kinda did with Dailies and guild missions although that still forced a large portion of players to forced into something. Then of course they completely forget that mistake and make ascended armor/weapons crafting only(.0001% drop rate doesn’t count). The biggest tell of all though is Karma. The supposed universal currency that allowed players to play the way they want and still be rewarded is…useless.
/rant
Top stats should be easily acquired and skins should be hard to obtain. That’s what the game was sold as and that’s how I think they need to design going forward. Raids should have some awesome looking skins and the legendary armor should require doing things in every part of the game, not just raids. They won’t do that though because without some giant carrot people will do the raids once and never return. Another major issue that ArenaNet has had with using skins as a carrot is that most of the skins are just not that great, at least not good enough to warrant doing a dungeon 50x for it.
Just because they want to attract new people doesn’t mean the GW2 playerbase is declining. Even WoW has been trying to attract new people continuously during its 12 year long lifespan.
Oh puh-leaze. Is Warcraft now free-to-play? Have they gotten rid of their subscription base format? No? Then kindly take that nonsense elsewhere.
It ain’t flying.
Going F2P isn’t the only way to attract more players, fyi.
There are 4 real ways to attract more players 1. New content 2. Complete revamp 3. F2P 4. Word of mouth. ArenaNet has tried the new content route and even with the expansion it seems this was not enough. ArenaNet can barely develop on what they have in a timely/thoughtful manner let alone do a complete revamp, FFXIV pulled it off though and it’s now #2 and climbing. F2P is clearly what ArenaNet is trying next. Word of mouth for GW2 has been bad due to a multitude of reasons for a long while. ArenaNet being so tight lipped, poor development cycle, glacial class balance, and amateur feature implementation top the list.
So yes, F2P isn’t the only way, but it is certainly the only way that GW2 is going to gain players. Maybe ArenaNet will turn things around and start showing some competent design work, given the last 3 years though…
Is it true that people are boycotting this because it is overpriced? I’ve got like 20 friends who all play and none of them are preordering. In fact, when I suggested that I was going to preorder they all told me not to and that there was a huge boycott on this game. Can somebody tell me if it’s just my friends or if this is a game-wide occurence?
It’s not really a boycott, it’s just a general consensus that it’s overpriced and not worth $50. Even with what they have announced today it’s not worth $50, maybe $30 at a push.
@amplitudelol
CJ has already acknowledged quite a while back that the addition of ascended weapons/armor/trinkets introduced another measure of gear power creep than they had originally intended when they released the game. However they also have been very clear since then that there will be no more stat increase beyond the present set for ascended.Your gear is no more inferior today for Anet having announced Legendary Armor than it was yesterday. Since adding ascended gear legendaries have always had the same stats as ascended. You are not obligated to get legendary armor to get the very best stats in the game. It is simply a prestige & convenience thing.
*Edit for grammar
Funny thing is that when ascended was added they said it was always intended, humorous that something they planned around would suddenly create power creep. Unless gasp! they lied to us back then!They’ve also said they plan to increase the level cap at some point and that there won’t be another rarity of gear added. So what do you think will happen now that the final piece of ascended is out? Level cap raised and the grind begins anew because the old stuff no longer has the best stats. Seriously think for a minute what options ArenaNet has to keep people grinding for something and you’ll see the writing is on the wall. I’d wager that current legendaries will be given an upgrade questline/crafting that will allow them to have the new lvl cap stats.
They had hired a new raid designer for creating this content (I presume the position was filled), and I don’t think we have seen what their new employee is capable of producing just yet. So I wouldn’t compare it to content created by other developers.
The problem is that their base systems limit them immensely. The lack of tank and healers reduces what they can do with a raid. The huge variance in health limits it as well, you can’t have a boss putting out a 20k hit if some classes struggle to get 18k hp. Gear level limits them, are they designing for ascended gear because that sort of ruins the whole “ascended isn’t required”. The horrible class balance will mean that certain builds will find it easy and others will find it absolutely impossible.
I really hope they can do something challenging and unique, but I’m afraid it will just be full of gimmicks(Swap weapon or die, dodge the raid wipe or die) and the beserker meta will reign supreme. I certainly don’t expect any of this to be a real challenge like FFXIV savage stuff, ArenaNet just does not have the balance team to tune things that tightly.
Exactly, if bruiser is not viable then its either bunker or zerker. Bunker counters zerker and people dont like being killed in 2 seconds flat.
End result zerker gets screwed because of high damage.
Ironically i stated this would hapen like 2 weeks into the new patch.
This has been what’s happening in GW2 since release. The burst damage at launch was insanely high so people bunkered to survive. As new gimmick/cheese builds were discovered/introduced things changed a bit, but here we are again. If the berserker TTK is 2-3s then of course everyone is going to run bunker. If people wanted to get insta-gibbed they would play an FPS, they want strategy, skill, and tactics which aren’t present in 2-3s fights.. Ironically though, there are FPS’s where the TTK is higher than GW2 berserker vs berserker.
NA vs EU? Who cares really. The SPvP population is so low that there are a handful of truly skilled teams. Where they come from really doesn’t matter because statistically with so few teams you can’t really see a trend. I’d suggest looking at actual popular esports games to get a real sense of what different regions produce skill wise.
The double ele argument is the stupidest thing I’ve seen on these forums. If that is what got Abjured a win, why didn’t another team use it an win? It’s not cheap, it’s taking advantage of all legal means of winning. Every single team should be doing exactly that. The rage should be directed squarely at ArenaNet for having the worst balance team in the industry and pushing esports before they got things even remotely balanced.
Just want to point out that possible number of combinations does not mean equal number of viable builds. If you factor in:
- trait synergies
- traits blatantly being better than other two choices
- poor trait placement where there’s 0 competition between them
- inability to take two traits from same tier
- potential buggy traitsThe number of possible builds is SIGNIFICANTLY lower. In single digits, actually.
All of the things you listed except the two traits from a same tier are shortcomings of ArenaNet and not the system. They are glacial at class/trait changes and didn’t want to put in the work to balance the traits/skills. Instead they simplified things and smashed traits together.
The number of possible viable builds is roughly the same, which is sad. The game needed MORE options, it needed ArenaNet to step up and balance/revamp traits and skills. This doesn’t set a good precedent either, what will they do about trait balancing now? Combine the 3 lines into 1? Combine lines into a single trait choice? Their balancing team has been an issue since the game released and it really needs to be looked at, more so than the trait system did.
I don’t see this working out well for the game at all. There are a few options here:
1. The content is actually challenging, but the loot isn’t great so people stop doing it
2. The content isn’t challenging and the loot isn’t great so it won’t get used much.
3. The content is challenging and the loot is awesome, they will alienate a good portion of their playerbase
4. The content isn’t challenging and the loot is awesome, it will be speed run farmed.
The key with challenging content is having the reward reflect the difficulty. Just look at triple wurm, the number of people doing that nosedived as the rewards weren’t anywhere near the difficulty. Unless ArenaNet overhauls the gear system/progression I think this is another in a long line of content that wasn’t really worth the time they spent developing it.
I’ll also point out that this might make ascended gear “mandatory”, so we can get back to having the ascended gear argument.
What’s unfortunate in this game is that the treadmill is very limited, and focused on whatever can be done for the most gold in the shortest period of time. That comes down to grinding SW/Drytop, grinding dungeons, or grinding mobs if you have high MF. Again, even the devs say this was never the original intent with parts of this game, and it is one of the issues being addressed with the new Legendary system and map rewards. The game’s designers themselves see that things as they are just aren’t enjoyable, and it certainly will be nice for level 80 players to go back to low level areas while scaled down and challenge the Spider Queen, Troll, etc, with players of all other levels in order to get what they’re needing to craft or purchase what they’re wanting.
The devs said…yeah they also said that karma would be the global currency, but abandoned it. The pre-cursor issues hasn’t been enjoyable for nearly 3 years, there was one good week that was exploited before it was nerfed into this RNG hell. They said they would fix it and we are still waiting, 3 year lag time on that is incredibly disheartening. The devs said that it was a bad decision to release ascended with only one means of getting it, so they released ascended amulets where the only way of getting it for most players was laurels. Then of course they release Ascended weapons and armor with only realistic way of getting them being crafting. What they say and what they do are always two different things.
The take away is that with anything the devs say you need to expect one of three things: 1. They are giving lip service 2. They are being truthful but will implement it in a way that doesn’t address the issue or makes it worse 3. You can expect it in 3-6 years during which time they can’t talk about it.
HoT Price Feedback + Base game included [merged]
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Distaste.4801
Is $50 way too much? Compare it against the games closest to it. The recent WoW expansion is $50. Requires a subscription. The FFXIV expansion is $40 and also requires a subscription which immediately puts it over $50 just to play. ESO is going to release dlc every quarter which will end up being over $50 throughout a one year period.
While I personally don’t mind if Anet gave me the expansion at a lower price or even free, I’m being realistic here. $50 every few YEARS to stay up-to-date with a great MMO is fair.
FFXIV could be had for $30, the digital collectors edition for $45. There were tons of sales on them in the months leading up to launch. Let’s see how often ArenaNet puts HoT on sale…
You need to compare the content for the price. What ArenaNet has promised so far is pretty anemic for an expansion. FFXIV:HW had tons of content compared to what we know of HoT and it was cheaper. The business model of the games do not matter here as that pertains to continued development, which GW2 sorely lacks in anyway. FFXIV puts in more content in a 3 month content patch than GW2 does in a year. ArenaNet went the cash shop route in order to fund continued development, if they actually put some things in it that were worth buying at a decent price they would be making a lot more money.
Why am I going to pay $50+$10(character slot) for a lightweight expansion that I’m almost 100% sure will last me no more than a week or two? Even further I’m sure that ArenaNet’s post-launch support will echo what we have now, which is incredibly slow and not thought out. Even if you want to add on the monthly sub, HoT is still more expensive and appears to have way less than FFXIV.
Honestly, the biggest detractor for me has been ArenaNet’s post-launch development. I have zero faith that should I buy this expansion that ArenaNet will meaningfully develop upon it. The glacial pace of character balance, the lack of WvW support, SPvP getting nothing to expand the gameplay, no new dungeons, etc. This game needs more depth and HoT doesn’t look like it is adding any so I’m not going to sink $50 into on the assumption that ArenaNet will somehow surprise everyone and actually add depth. I might take the risk for $20, $30 is pushing it, $50 and you’re out of your mind.
My final argument is that the original game was $60 and that covered the cost of 5 years of development. This expansion has what? 3 years? No sale. Content wise it isn’t even close. Orginal game zones vs expansion? No sale. Classes 8 vs 1? No sale! WvW maps 2v1? No sale. 8 character slots vs 1? No sale! Dungeons? What expansion dungeons :P NO SALE. Even by ArenaNet’s own standards the expansion isn’t worth $50.
Anet had 300 employees in 2013 and probably less now
Not true, they have more employees now than at launch. I’m to lazy to find the video with colin saying this but its out there on record.
Might be true especially with customer service additions, however ArenaNet seems to have a high rate of turnover on employees. Last I heard, take it with a pinch of salt, is they don’t pay too well, don’t have many advancement opportunities, and upper management is not really in touch with the game or most of the company. Even ignoring rumors we know of a bunch of devs that have left ArenaNet. Chris Whiteside, Kate Welch, Rober Hrouda(dungeoneers and rangers cried), Martin Kerstein, Habiib Loew who was in charge of WvW for like a month, and I’m not sure about Mark Ferguson since it gave up on WvW and just seemed to disappear. The point being is that they have lost a lot of prominent people so what does that say about those we’ve never heard of?
The point being that lots of turnover can mean that the new employees are not nearly as efficient as they have to learn the code/tools while trying to make deadlines.
Ignoring all the fanboys here to whiteknight Anet, yes I remember the manifesto and I am as disappointed as well. Anet can backtrack and pretend they meant something else all they want but it won’t change the reality that this isn’t the game we were promised.
ANet doesn’t need to backtrack: they didn’t say what people think they did. People tend to see what they want in a manifesto, which is why Marx wouldn’t be considered a Marxist or even much of a Communist, despite him having written the document that started both movements.
If you want to be disappointed in the game, that’s your right. Personally, I prefer to decide if I enjoy the game that was actually delivered, not as I thought it should have been. As it turns out, I do enjoy this game (even as I wish that ANet would adjust or completely re-do some aspects of it).
tl;dr I don’t care what they said or didn’t say in the manifesto. I care about the game itself.
They do need to backtrack because they said those things. The manifesto might be vague, but the events they attended and held Q&A/Discussions/presentations/interviews aren’t so much.
This is what Mike O’Brien, a founder of ArenaNet said about GW2 prior to launch,
Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.
They backtracked on that within months of launch and then had to gall to say that ascended was always intended to be in the game even though absolutely everything in the game was balanced around exotics. The same was true with grinding and farming yet they consistently put in things that require exactly that. I’m not going to go through every thing they ever advertised the game as to find the lies, there is just no point in it anymore. I really feel bad for those that still trust ArenaNet’s words. There are just too many times where they have been caught in either an outright lie or backtracking on something they said.
Even if the Manifesto didn’t mean what we thought it meant, ArenaNet NEVER corrected anyone on it. They allowed misinformation to be spread in order to profit from it. Keep in mind that the manifesto was dissected by every major MMO news site, there were interviews about it, never once was there a correction or clarification. ArenaNet let those misconceptions drive their hype train and thus have to take responsibility for them. The problem is that ArenaNet never admits they were wrong, they always backtrack, make excuses, and/or offer the bare minimum to make people go away. Just look at the expansion debacle. They did the bare minimum of offering players an extra character slot.
Go to any pvp game forum and people will be begging for nerfs, but it’s not always the best direction.
Something is only overpowered if it discourages higher skill play with something easy to do(skill cieling) or makes a lot of the games content non-viable(balance).
If something is OP because it has a lot of options across all it’s spells you should be buffing other classes not nerfing it. You’re leaving the core problem to fester.
Powercreep reduces skill as it eventually leads to everyone one shotting everyone else. So by your very definition power creep is bad. There are plenty of skills in the game currently that require almost no skill and do insane damage. They need nerfed.
You’re not wrong that some classes need a buff because they have very few options, but there are classes that have pretty much all the options and that isn’t balanced either. Each class/build should have strengths and weaknesses, if they don’t they need brought back in line. What is in line is what ArenaNet needs to decide and stick to so players can decide if that’s what game they want to continue playing or not. Personally speaking I like PvP games where the TTK is greater than 30s so I can actually have some fun using skills and counter playing and using strategy instead of needing twitch reflex so I don’t decimated by a single skill.
Everybody calm down. Anet is doing the smart thing by (slowly) correcting bugs.
Really? Part of the reason GW2 PvP has the “massive” playerbase it does is because they take so long to fix bugs / make balance changes, it is also part of the reason why people get worked up, because it means they have to put up with (or simply leave the game / leave PvP as most have done) some obnoxious OP crap for 6-12 months or they fret about Anet “balancing” some OP thing on their class and nerfing it into oblivion for 6-12 months.
If Anet actually did regular balancing, most people would be a lot more chilled out about these things.
Really i thought gw2 problem was because it had few game modes. Then I heard it was because of the lack of rewards, for some odd reason it keeps changing.
It is all of the above because they failed to build on it. On release SPvP did absolutely nothing for your character and one of the major things in MMO’s is progression. You want to progress your character somehow via stats, loot, looks, story, etc. SPvP gave your main character zero progression. The gamemode was alright as a start, but ArenaNet didn’t expand gamemodes. Some people don’t like sit on point style gameplay so by not having CTF, murder ball, etc cuts them out. Finally their glacial pace of balancing classes can mean a players playstyle is sub-par in PVP and thus both frustrating and pointless. This is exacerbated by the lack of different gamemodes since a build that excels in conquest might not excel in CTF.
If ArenaNet had made SPvP like all other MMO’s where you use your character/gear, given out rewards that helped your character progress, added new gamemodes and not the same gamemode with gimmicks, and done thorough balance patches every 2 months things would have been so much better. Hindsight is 20/20 though, not like they can fix it…
What in the heavens guys? It has been less than one month and you are already complaining about Balance?
I know you have 0 trust at the moment on that matter, but hell, chill a little bit, most games balance every month or, the lesser, every two weeks.
Instead of asking where is the balance you would be much more useful creating topics regarding how do you believe those classes should be balanced and start a constructive discussion.
If by the end of August we had no balance at all, go on and let ANet now again that they are being slow, but there’s no right saying that when the patch has been out for less than one month.
A few points you need to consider.
1. Their previous record- Balance patches took ~6 months, which is by far the worst of of any non-life support AAA MMO I have ever played
2. The quality of the patch- sorry but this level of imbalance is unacceptable and amateurish. It’s not like there were hidden combos that players found, these are things you would find within an hour of testing.
So you’re saying I need to sit back and have patience when I’ve waited 6+ months for some real balance changes on some builds and even worse 3 years on other builds. There were 3 years worth of balance discussions and ArenaNet ignored them and worse mocked them in livestreams. Why would I give them more time? Why would I think they will suddenly start listening? Doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is insanity. The only thing that ArenaNet listens to is massive outcry that could potentially cause bad PR for them.
ArenaNet needs to be held accountable for putting out bad patches like these, not given more time.
not impossible. just that anet is unwilling to do so. see various other threads.
Except that none of the other threads actually give a good solution for it.
It is mainly: “Give less points when people play outside of MY prime-time”. Which really doesn’t work, considering as the game is global and thus there is always primetime somewhere.
There have been plenty of solutions that were way better than what we have now, fair even. There have been hundreds of ideas and there have been threads on it since the match-ups went to a week long. Give points based on population balance of when they were taken. That doesn’t punish any one timezone, it punishes those that cap against no one and rewards taking things when populations are higher. It’s not perfect, but it’s fair. It’s also 1000x better than ArenaNet’s current solution, which is nothing.
ArenaNet simply doesn’t care, 3 years and they’ve done nothing. There is no excuse for that. The system they have now does not work, that was known since launch. Night capping has been an issue for as long as PvP objectives have been in MMO’s. DAOC had alarm clock raids, SWG had base timers to combat it, WAR had nightcapping issues. This is not something that is new and having no solution is worse than at least trying something, at least WAR tried making zones harder to capture based on population imbalance. It’s not that they don’t have a good solution, it’s that they don’t want to put the time/money into fixing it because the population isn’t there anymore to warrant it. Of course the population isn’t there anymore because ArenaNet has done nothing with WvW and focused on LS.