Showing Posts For Dracones.9105:
1 2
That’s because you pay a subscription to WoW for updates, and you don’t to Anet.
Actually I did spent $50 on gems when I came back to GW2 a couple weeks ago. It really shouldn’t be a sub vs non-sub issue as money should be coming into the game. The gem store is their “sub” model.
GW1 was non-sub and had expansions. There was permanent, long term content in that game with new classes, new features, entire new areas of the game opening up and so on. Of course they lacked steady revenue which is why we have a gem store today. But the problem with GW2 is for people who played the game 2 years ago and left due to boredom/mechanics issues is there really any reason for them to come back today, stay around awhile and end up spending money in the gem store?
Try being a WoW player. 8 months without new content, and 8 more until their next expansion!
Not the best example. I came back to GW2 after a couple years and nothing has really changed. A new WvW map where each team just zergs and tries to avoid the other teams, 1 new gear type and a single new high end dungeon.
Meanwhile looking back at re-installing WoW after two years I have 2 entire expansions worth of content and everyone talking about the next expansion’s content. Not to mention patch 6.0 which will completely change the game’s mechanics in a lot of ways. Actually it was talk about that patch that got me interested in that game again.
It was the April 15th patch that brought me back to GW2, but the game is exactly the same as I left it. It’s still zerg/stack/zerker with the same old class problems with the same areas of the game to play in.
A problem is that the game sort of lacks leveling content. Dungeons are a no-go until you hit max level unless you want to be kicked from groups all the time(great newbie experience here BTW) and in WvW you’re just so much weaker than a level 80 toon.
That pretty much leaves the explorable world and personal story line.
I quit because I got tired of spamming chat LFG to try to find a group for dungeon runs. The game itself I always found to be really fun, it’s just that I don’t care for single player MMO’s.
Any online game for me needs to have pretty instant group access. FPS games have always given me this experience and I don’t really understand why MMO developers think they don’t need to provide it. I want to get in, hook up with a PUG and be in a dungeon within a couple minutes of logging into their game.
WoW tends to pull me back now and again because of its group finder, but even with that if I’m not playing a tank or healer(both of which are stressful), it’s a 30 minute wait as DPS which just isn’t the gaming experience I want.
But it sounds like GW2 has added a somewhat decent LFG tool recently so I’m re-installing now to check that out. However… casual group content is key IMO for these games. I remember the 2012 Mad King Halloween event and that thing was just pure awesome fun. Easy to get into, not too hard, didn’t take long to run and groups were forming within a minute, any level could join.
I’ve been playing MMO’s since EQ 1’s beta and that made it into my top 10 MMO experiences.
It’d take way longer than a week to implement a proper LFG. A week wouldn’t even cover the meetings to discuss ways to implement it. And then even after the implementation has been set, a manager has to schedule out how many dev hours it takes, fit that into the project schedule and then watch as devs get sidetracked by the latest Emergency Gotta Fix It Now™ issue that crops up and sidetracks his devs and causes project goals to slip schedule.
And when the devs do get to work on it nobody took into consideration how Tom(who left the company months ago) designed element X to talk with protocol Y and things aren’t working out like everyone had hoped. So either more hours have to be committed or it’s back to the drawing board to find a work around.
Then there’s QA, which again has to be scheduled by another manager and made to fit into an already crunched schedule. And then, oh kitten, feature Y causes a server crash in QA. Everyone into meeting room 7 so we can whiteboard a work around for THAT issue now too. Who wrote that? Oh, Billy is stuck on another project that’s higher priority, so Frank is going to have to come up to speed on that section of code first.
Yeah, a week. LOL.
The dungeons are absolutely doable at their stated level requirement and usually have a path that’s easier than the others for groups that aren’t finely tuned. The issue is that now that the game has matured, more people are level 80 and the dungeons really are easier when you’re 80. So many groups prefer just to optimize with wanting everyone to be 80.
This isn’t the fault of those groups at all. It’s a problem with the game mechanics that cater to it and the lack of any tools that allow for “scrub” lowbie players to hook up with other players who aren’t trying to optimize.
At a minimum the game really needs a heavily moderated cross server /lfg channel where you could just “/lfg 40 ranger looking to start a lowbie group for an AC path 1 run” and reach a decent sized crowd.
I always thought of a dungeon finder like New York vs Smalltown Indiana. Smalltown is a lot smaller, you run into jerks(but that’s just how Bob acts after a couple beers), everyone knows everyone, etc. Go to New York though where everyone is a stranger and suddenly it seems like the world is full of jerks. It’s just what happens when you throw a lot of people together.
MMO’s really miss out on implementing mechanics to correct the behavior though. For example, take GW2’s giving exp for rezzing another player. It drastically changes the feel of the game when you’re sucking dirt and 5 total strangers run over and start helping you back up. I’ve had more than 1 person comment to me about that with this game.
Designers could really look into other ways to codify in rewards for behaviors they want to promote. Another Eve example, there’s been been serious recommendations for that game to allow players to “career” into being a professional newbie helper. Just like mining, production, running alliances, etc are careers, people have designed ways that players could sponser/help newbies and get paid out for their work if the newbie stays with the game.
There’s a whole goldmine of untapped ways to push the playerbase into behaving and acting in ways you want and even turning them into unpaid promoters and helpers for your game. To me that’s why it’s very frustrating to see devs focus on rolling out dungeon 2.1 and completely ignore coming up with new ways for players to interact with each other. It’s the interacting part which is why we play these games and is why we stay around in them.
dracones in wow these things where never really needed in part because of server community but mostly due to a straight forward progression.
No it was needed in WoW too. Pre-finder my friend and I had to move to Moon Guard because as a high pop RP server it still had groups sometimes running the low end dungeons. On our old home server and most other servers any dungeon sub max level were DOA for grouping up in. Shadowfang, Wailing, Scarlet, etc… it’d been years since we had ran those instances prior to Moon Guard and even on that server it was a long wait for groups and some instances(Deadmines) was a non-starter for Horde. But still we spent the $ to move our characters over because otherwise that gameplay was dead to us.
Enter the cross realm dungeon finder and suddenly you could run those instances 24/7 no matter what server you were on. It was a dramatic improvement in the game and opened up the ability to completely level via instances if you wanted too.
However, you guys moaning and whining are being ridiculous. If you can’t find a group then that’s solely your problem.
Actually, no it’s not my problem. Typical GW2 group finding experience: Hit Plains of Ashford and spam /map for LFG. No groups forming, create one myself. Pull in a level 38 who’s also looking. Level 80 warrior joins, sees we’re both below level 80 so he quits out immediately and starts looking elsewhere. Pretty much the same thing in LA. Everyone else is running the flavor of the month dungeon or not interested in a sub 80 group.
After 20-30 mins of this I /quit game, fire up Eve, ask for a fleet in Militia channel and it’s “Link here, we’re deck 2 in TeamSpeak, cruisers on down, bring tackle frig if you’re low SP.”
GW2 would be total instant groups if they had a cross server dungeon finder. There’s no DPS/Tank/Healer BS that slows down WoW’s finder. It’d be fantastic.
But instead they’re doing the typical MMO BS of creating a multiplayer game without actual tools to bring people together. City of Heroes in 2004 had better group tools than most MMO’s do today. Developers need to stop thinking that this is okay.
It absolutely 100% hurts their player retention when players run into these walls. Single player in these games gets boring fast and there’s always another shiny “single-player-we-don’t-believe-in-group-finders” MMO’s begging for players and they’ll entertain for a bit until you run into the same walls and move onto the next one.
Add me to the list of “I don’t play the game anymore due to lack of a dungeon finder” people.
I can pop into MWO and run in an 8 man squad pretty much instantly and militia fleet ops are running all the time in Eve.
Why MMO companies ignore coding in co-ordination tools for the “multiplayer” part of their game is beyond me.
Nice. I wish it would have a “level 80’s only” checkmark or something else to qualify more what people are looking for.
I enjoy playing dungeons on my chars, but not in groups that only want 80’s.
This might have already been said and declared a bug, but recharge on my flame trap tooltip says 12s, but its actually 30s. Please tell me this is a bug. If its not, then we got a harpoon gun buff and that’s it? Looooool.
It’s a bug. There will be a hotfix for it tonight.
Unfortunately I don’t think you’re going to see ranger fixes for a bit yet. If they’re doing some core class mechanic revamps that’s going to take a lot more dev time than the usual class fixes.
And then even after the revamp is done there’ll be the usual tweaking that’ll need to be done on top of that.
So if you’re not happy with rangers today, I doubt that’s going to change anytime in the next few months.
45 minutes?
But I wouldn’t expect a miracle patch. Truth be told Anet has a lot on its plate and every class has bugs and issues. Tweaks and fixes will probably be a long time coming.
I’m also a cond/traps/crit ranger and there’s no problem with that build. The problem is that it’s pretty much the only viable build. Pretty much every class has an interesting ways to build and spec and use weapon skills. But with rangers it’s crit/cond, and auto-attack FTW.
That’s what’s supposed to be worked on.
what i wonder is, if you’ve done, say lvl 5, can you still do level 5 or are you required to do level 6 instead?
One way would be to find another player doing level 5 and join his group. But it’d be nice if you could downlevel yourself.
I could see where you might be in a really good group that carries you, get to level 6 but then be sort of stuck because you should really be on level 3 until your gear gets better.
This is a huge problem for this genre. Too many people were introduced to MMOs with WoW so their ideal vision for MMOs is WoW. So they want all MMOs to be like WoW.
I started in on playing muds back in the early 90’s and even ended up writing code for Smaug mud in the late 90’s(google Dracones and smaugmud). The constant striving for better gear was a big part of those games.
The concept made its ways into MMO’s via Everquest which was based heavily on Diku mud concepts. So no, it’s not a WoW thing.
Yes. I’m a casual player and exotics are just so easy to get. Past that is the huge grind for legendaries which is something I’ll never get. So… there’s not a whole lot for me to log in for once I have my exotics.
No it will end up like every other MMO. You will always find people in the lowbie zones piddling around on alts or whatever but in the middle of the game people will blaze through those areas and never go back. So this will only get progressively worse…
Pretty much this. One problem is that when you down level the loot tables sort of suck. So at 80 you’ll kitten yourself going back to old zones for fun. Dungeons are the exception because of the tokens.
Would be pretty easy to add Ascended items to the vendors….600 tokens for an ascended whatever for example.
This makes the most logical sense. Although I wonder if using the current tokens wouldn’t just make people bypass exotic completely and grind for ascended instead.
Except for the fact that rewards scale, so there will be some of the standard….lfm 10 fractals completed minimum.
I don’t see why this should be an issue. Players that’ve gone 10 fractals deep should be able to form deep fractal groups that are specialized for the harder content.
And for us casuals we can pull in players from all level ranges to run the shallow fractals. I ran the mad king dungeon at level 35 with a group of level 20’s at one point. It was a lot of fun and kudos to Anet for creating a dungeon system that’s both shallow(easy for newbies to get into) and deep(hard core players).
I don’t have a problem with this, so long as the stats are only a very slight boost. It amazes me how much people obsess over 1 or 2% differences. You could probably have a huge number of tiers above exotic that are only 0.5% better each tier and people would obsess over getting them even though they make no practical impact on gameplay.
Rangers aren’t exactly weak in PvE, especially when comparing to mesmers. Though support-wise it’s mostly due to healing springs. Spirits are supposed to get some sort of buff, but it’s anyone’s guess how that’ll turn out.
One sided story is one sided.
Then you have to consider the opporunity loss for taking those traits. For example you can run a very strong condition/kiting build with no traits in traps and pick up some very strong defensive or offensive traits. Not sure if the spirits currently make up for the sacrifices you have to make to build around them.
Pretty much. Even then, traiting into traps work nicely with condition builds because of bleed on crit traits and sigils, never mind that traps do condition damage too.
Nature Magic could’ve been a cool tree that worked well with Beastmastery, but you have to use every major trait to make spirits even remotely useful. That leaves nothing left really to trait on for your pet.
For example lets say there are 2 fundemental ranger playstyles; bow based kiting with melee burst/escape/evade, and pet based.
A condition/crit SB/traps ranger is actually very tanking and dangerous to be in close with. My sPvP ranger runs with 3k armor, 50% crit and 1400 condition damage.
But I think the issue with rangers is less about “power” and more that there isn’t a lot of build variety to the class because a lot of the weapon sets and skills are really sub par.
I run both a ranger and mesmer in sPvP and I find my ranger to be just as viable. The issue is that with my mesmer I have many different options in how I build out. The class just has so many good weapon, skill and trait combinations to play with. With my mesmer I’m always wanting to swap out to new things and respec. But with the ranger I rarely even bother to weapon swap.
I really don’t think Swift should get grief for preferring to take 80’s. He’s just being honest and the system does have a minor favoring towards 80’s, if you don’t know the person you’re inviting to your group. Especially on something like AC path 3, there’s a pretty hardcore DPS check early on that can stall a group that isn’t well geared.
One nice thing is if you’re having problems with this you can always hunt down a good dungeon running guild and switch servers to sync up with them. Running a dungeon with vent/teamspeak/mumble with people that can organize for any given dungeon is going to be superior to a PUG any day.
What I mind is how marginalized our healing ability us. Some professions like say, Rangers, get an area heal baseline.
Yes, but rangers don’t get reflects, don’t get an AE quickness, can’t group up enemy packs and can’t stealth allies. You can’t really compare 1 skill across classes. Ranger healing is pretty much the only thing they have for support right now because spirits are pretty much the suck.
I think mesmers bring in a nice balance of support to teams.
I agree with Deathfrost. While I don’t like bugs, I can accept them if the underlying game is well done. And I think this game has a fantastic social PvE core to it. Guilds can run events in lower level zones and include everyone, even run low end dungeons with lower level guildies.
The PUGs are pretty good, just need a minor LFG system to make putting them together easier. Dynamic events can get bugged, but most of them work really well and are a lot of fun.
Anet wouldn’t need to make you auto-port to the dungeon since you can just waypoint to it anyway.
Hmm, maybe. Blurred Frenzy with sword spec would have a 25% uptime. I can spec a master trait and gain a 25% uptime reflect on temporal curtain, have it affect the warden and reduce his cooldown.
Probably a poor tool tip. Though it’d be a lot more useful of a trait if it also worked with Blurred Frenzy and Blurred Inscriptions.
This only works on F4 shattering. Not other forms of distortion.
I really wish the game had DPS meters. I think damage output is less about the class and more about the build and what you’re fighting.
If Level scaling was gone would you feel motivated to visit lower level areas again?
Posted by: Dracones.9105
Level scaling = best thing done in MMOs in years. I love that as I level up I don’t lose earlier content. And it’s fantastic that Anet can introduce “lowbie” dungeons/content and still cater to the 80 crowd.
Ranger have 1 skills, barrage on longbow, which is useful for AE on sieges and it’s nowhere near as good as berserker. It’s pretty much comparable to chaos storm and has about the same cooldown.
Why can’t something take a week to get for a normal player? why is that so wrong?
Because it takes away something for the really hardcore player to strive for. If everyone can achieve everything, then there’s really nothing in this game for the 1% or 0.1% of the playerbase that wants to play 40 hours a week and strive for something.
Having said that, there needs to be tiers for each type of player. I’ll never own a twilight or sunrise on my mesmer, but I can certainly spend a few weekends getting a nice looking dungeon exotic.
Honestly it would probably be helpful to post in every class forum a “state of the class” type of thing going over where Anet feels each class needs work and what the devs are looking at.
I believe if you have 3 phantasms a new clone will overwrite a phantasm.
For me though in general I’m trying to throw more and more shatters in. If you have a couple illusion skills cooled down it’s basically free damage to shatter and then toss them out.
While it was fun to do this, it pretty obviously was a bug.
I find it amazing people get so upset about not being able to obtain a simple skin. Personally to me a game shouldn’t have everything be obtainable by everyone.
At least with GW2 what you can’t obtain is just a skin. It has no game play effect.
Are you guys running dungeons at all or mostly having fun in WvW? I want to do WvW, but right now I’m mostly looking for dungeon running to finish leveling up and save up for my 80 exotics before switching over to WvW.
1) i explain better:“did u ever seen a lvl 35 player in full green?” i think nobody saw any because at lvl 35 you don t waste money on gears that will be obsolete in 10 minutes….
This myth gets popped out a alot and I don’t like it, because it keeps players from gearing up in green as they level up.
First off the leveling curve is flat. Leveling from 35-36 takes as long as leveling from 79-80. So don’t skimp on good gear in the low levels thinking you’ll be leveling too quickly. However, having said that even if you did level quickly the gear is extremely cheap because it almost always sells for a few copper more than vendor sell price at the TP.
So while you may spend 6sp on a full set of green gear at level 35, it’ll vendor for 5 or more sp. Just don’t slot it out with custom runes.
There’s no reason not to be gearing up in greens every few levels as you’re leveling up. Seriously, it costs about as much as a WP transfer and will speed up your leveling and make you more competitive in group events.
Nice use of terrain. I see you switched to offhand pistol.
Well, in the old school MMO’s like EQ, you had downtime. The game’s a lot more social when you’re sitting on the ground with your group waiting 5 minutes for your mana to regen. At that point zone chat becomes more of an attraction.
I really don’t like the zone chat “social” stuff. Barrens Chat in WoW will remain my worst MMO chat experience in nearly 15 years of online gaming.
GW2 to me seems to be a pretty helpful and friendly place. If you die someone will run along and help you back up. Even NPCs will do it sometimes.
I think what I’d like to see though is more guild stuff. I think modern MMO’s work best when they have good guild systems. There’s a lot that could be done on guild levels and the gem store even. Guilds could rent training areas, message boards, guild halls even VOIP servers.
The nice thing about guilds is they let you find players that really fit your personality.
I’d tend to agree its main use is as to allow for offhand pistol/focus and stay ranged.
I hope they introduce more weapons down the road. I’d think every cloth class would love to have, say, a wand as a new primary ranged 1 hand weapon. Just something different so there’s more choices.
I’m sorry, but there’s 5 racial areas of heart content and skill challenges. I’ve gone to other racial areas plenty of times and nailed out events and hearts. Then there’s WvW and PvP. GW2 is far from lacking in content for the early AM crowd.
The biggest issue is the game needs a decent LFG finder for the 30+ dungeons and they need to up the rewards on story modes.
Then anyone can level up 30 in any of the racial zones and hit the LFG for dungeon PUGs when popping out hearts gets boring.
Try running AC in sub par gear. Besides the gear is really cheap to buy. TP masterwork gear is often just a few copper in price higher than what you can sell it to the vendor for.
So you can outfit yourself in full masterwork gear for about the cost to use a single waypoint.
I really like your build Leku. I think you have a really good synergy between condition damage, phantasm/illusion support and then reflect. My only complaint would be I wish there was a way to toss a phantasm in the 6+ slot since the spec does so well with them.
Maybe play with phantasm disenchanter rather than null field? I just don’t know how effective disenchanter is and having them out means less wardens.
I guess the signet is 90 condition damage at level 80. I’d personally probably play with that vs signet of illusions. But if you’re heavy wardens and they’re staying up okay, the domination signet helps them more.
Also I like the scepter with the focus. I know scepter is in the “dislike” category for a lot of mesmers, but range is king in dungeons for a squishy class.
I also think this build is fairly tweakable on the fly. Illusions dying too fast? Swap in illusions and persistent images. Need more cond removal for a fight? Slot both null field and the disenchanter. Can choose to have glamours recharge faster for fights that need that, up your condition removal traits as needed, etc.
1 2