Guild Wars 2

Raids are not the only conctent that have excluxive items linked to it which is quite obvious so i presume that was just badly worded on your part.

One of the strongest reasons for linking specific rewards to specific content is to incentivize players to do that content and rewarding them with something apart from just currency.

The problem with just beeing able to buy everithing by doing everything you want to in the game is that there always is a most efficient way to get currency, at the moment it’s obviously auric basin.
And since many players, regardless of if they play solo or in groups, try to work towards their goals as efficiently as possible, which results in them feeling forced to run that most rewarding content and reduces the ammount fo players in other parts of the game. The other problem is that running the same thing over and over speeds up peoples burnout on guild wars.

And you can pug raids, i’m not saying its pleasant because the nature of the content requires coordination, but you can

What do you think would be better about the game if they gave us increased stats?

@ MadRabbit
1. You give up quite a lot of power and ferocity for your build so you damage WILL be lower compared to someone playing berserker gear. It will be easier to use because of the vitality, but i would rather advocate for newer players to take as many berserker pieces as they are comfortable with and take soldier or marauder for survivability until they are comfortable with less health. Then its easier to switch those pieces than to take different gear altogether.

2. Getting 100% critchance on your own isn’t really usefull out in the open world if you are giving up so much damage for it and if you have a spotter ranger or a warrior with banner of discipline in your group (which is the case in raids or many dungeon groups which in the only places where it really matters) you will be wasting that buff. You basically will be critting more often when on your own, but your crits will do considerably less damage.

3. Taking Acrobatics over Deadly Arts is a huge damage loss as every enemy will have at least one condition on them even by just autoattacking them on your own and to call executioner clunky is quite unreasonable as it will increase your damage for 20% over half of every fight. Additionally Mug gives you some nice additional damage and a heal when you need it.

4. Acrobatics doens’t give 15% damage buff while at full initiative, you are thinking of trickery. And while that is a nice buff especially since the autoattack damage was increased it probably won’t be up for the whole fight so is even more inferior to Deadly Arts. So really taking Acrobatics is more of a hindrance, i agree with Asrat that you should switch to Invigorating Precision if you need more survivability.

5. You can survive on HoT maps in full berserker gear without problem if you pay attention to your enemies, if you want an easy time in the open world i would suggest playing ranger

Since the buff to AA damage thief is one of the best direct damage classes in game at the moment.
If you would make a case to increase thieves group support in some way i think that would be valid but the damage doen’t need a buff atm. For condi thief to be competitive there needs to be some rework of venoms and a strong condie set.

Hey, welcome back

Dungeons: They nerfed the gold reward and the xp you get in the end so from a rewards perspective its not really worth it to run dungeons compared to other content. They did this to incentivize people to run fractals and the raid.

FotM: Its one specific fractal per level now and in the higher levels with specific instabilitys too. They also reduced the amount of daily chests you can get by grouping fractals into 1-20, 21-50 and 51 to 100 with one daily chest for three fractals in each range with also one specific daily in the lower areas like 17 for example. This results in people generaly running 3 times swamp which gets boring quite fast if you want to play efficiently.
If you have Heart of Thorns you will get quite good Xp from fractals to level your masteries, but if you don’t have it you can’t really advance over 50 as you won’t be able to get enough AR.

I wont give my opinion on the state of PvE to not get too salty

He said in a reply that he intends to post this here too, so ther is no need to write them off yet

At least for the “high end” backpieces they seem to go with wings atm.
I would prefer something else as im not that much into these overly large backpacks, but looking at the whole of backpieces there are many different ones even if you dont count the ridiculous amount of crafting backpieces^^

This sounds like the poster is trolling, you shouldn’t pay attention to him then.
And even if he isn’t trolling he is in a VERY small minority even if you just skim through the comments there so you wouldn’t need to worry, i don’t always agree with Arenanet but making this game hardcore only is probably one of the last things they would do^^

I agreel, especially on point 8.
The storytelling in season 1 was definitely worse than in season 2, but season 1 offered a way more varied gameplay with things like tower of nightmares, battle for lions arch and 2 new dungeons. In season 2 we mainly got two metaevent maps and tons of story instances. And while those were quite good i never thought this to be the strong point of guildwars 2.

Well, there surely were fewer weapon skins in the gemstore than in game, quite a few more actualy.
Yes, they have to earn money somehow, but the ratio between ingame/gemstore is out of balance in my opinion.
And again only my opinion, but i would be waaay more tempted to pay real money for some of those weapons if they were directly purchasable and not through this horrible rng system.

Well, at least new players get shown early on what its like to play something else than warrior i suppose :P

First off: i dislike this new unlocking in general, but on thief its especially bad.

Dagger/Dagger: No backstab until level 10 as you have no reliably stealth means Autoattacking until 50% life, then heatseeker.
Sword/Pistol: Porting in with 2, then autoattacking until you are level 7, the you get pistolwhip
Pistol/Pistol: Autoatacking until level 7, then you can use unload (or you use the subpar onehanded number 3)
The list goes on…

The early leveling consists mainly of autoattacking which plays insanely boring. This is a horrible way to show newer players the thief and the game in general.

What would be the use of this option?

We were at the end of the molten furnace fractal, right before the weapon tests. We entered the room as usual but at some point the dialoge of the weapon test engieneer stopped and the fractal didn’t proceed with the weapon test.

Wiping and partial reentering of the dungeon didn’t solve the problem so we had to quit that run.

I don’t realy know how this bug occured, i guess we were maybe too fast for the trigger, as Braham and Rox were starting their dialogue quite late in comparison to other runs.

If you don’t want to get involved in a topic opening a thread about it is not the most intelligent thing to do.
The nerf to blinding powder will be more than a slight nerf in pvp in my opinion, but it might be quite devastating for pve.

lordkrall.7241:

GuzziHero.2467:

Nothing from Personal Story matters at all. Your race, Order, chosen Study Race or any of the decisions you made. None of it makes any difference to the story outside of the PS. You may as well forget it exists.

That is actually outright lying.
The race at least does effect dialogues quite a bit.

To a very small bit, yes. But Taimi still treats my asura like she is a norn without any technical knowhow.

Bombsaway.7198:

Heck no. Without change games get stale. Better to change frequently and adjust quickly. The only mode of gameplay that gets a bit more unbalanced is PvP but even then, the pace of change is too slow in this game not too fast (even for PvP).

There are far more casual players than hypercompetitive ones. There will be balance issues, but probably only a few critical ones.

Maybe i wasn’t clear enough, I’m completely with you here. I meant that they should give us changes in smaller bits more often, and not like this with such an amount at nearly the same time.
I definitely don’t think changes should come less often than now, I don’t think there realy are people who find this insanely slow speed too fast

Please don’t get me wrong here, I’m looking forward to all the changes incoming in the close future, may it be the trait rework in the feature patch or the long expected balance patch and the sigil rework. I think all of these are great and an important step for a better game overall.

I’m just very worried about all of them beeing introduced in such a short timeframe. The new possibilities that will arise with all these combined seem incredibly many and I seriously doubt that it will be possible to see what effect what change had resulting in big difficulties for future balance.

I think it would be a good idea to stretch out changes over longer periods of time in the future to prevent this.

Carbon Footprint.3421:

The reason is that if a new player lvl 20-ish saw the pact helping defend LA it would break the flow time and story when they help create the Pact 10-20 levels later. They have basically painted themselves into a corner with the PS and nothing can enter or leave the PS. All events of the LS happen after/outside of the PS.

I completely agree with the OP here, i wonderes about this myself some patches ago.
It may be true that they didn’t connect the personal story with the living story because of new players, but that was a bad decision in my opinion.

Firstly i think they did iritate way more players this way as i think there are way more players that completed the story and now wonder why the pact and they as a commander didn’t think scarlet to be enough of a threat to do something. Defending Tyria against dragons is nice but pointless if there is noone to protect.

Secondly they didn’t even avoid this disruption of the timeline for new players this way as they will have to include the pact at least for the fight of future elder dragons.

I don’t think he insulted the devs. To say they “neglected to even look into it” of course is an assumption, but i think that is by far the most likely possibility even though it is phrased harsh. The alternative would be that they looked into it and weren’t capablle enough to fix it fastar than in nearly a year and i don’t think the devs to be that bad at their jobs, it’s seems more like a resource problem.

So i think that the reson for this probably isn’t that they actively decide not to fix things.
Firstly the long time between the balancepatches delays implementation even if they maybe would be able to fix this earlier.
And secondly that Anet decided to put much of their resources into creating new content and mechanics and less in polishing existing stuff. This of course is again an assumption but i think you can deduce that from the way the game developed since release. Things are changed and fixed, but it is at a relatively slow rate compared to other games.
(Malthias already said most of this, but i agree with it and think it answers you post)

And again: i don’t think that his posts are that insulting, they of course are critical about the way Anet balances the game as that is the topic of this thread, but i must have missed the points where he is insulting the devs.

I completely agree, thanks for taking the time to write all this but i think that it is spot on. Lets hope it gets some attention.

And this is why i think that GW2 could be better now if they focused more on the actual world and worked on dynamic events and stuff

The Holy Eldar.3624:

They promised to move everything “LA-exclusive” to the Vigil keep which they did. There are retrainers in every major city, every starter zone, every WvW map. Shouldn’t be too hard to click enter the mists, leave the mists right?

I seriously don’t get why some people defend this like that.
Yes, it is still possible to do crafting and retraiting.
Yes, it is no big deal to go to other maps to do so, at least for most people.
But still, it is a change for the worse and a little more inconvenient for some people than it was before. So why do you defend that? Because it doesn’t affect you and therefore there is no need for it to be changed?

Medazolam.3058:

what is stopping you from going to another city? serious question. what existing convenience did they remove that wasn’t already more convenient in other locations?

If i want to do fractals and need to retrait for that i have to go to another city to do that as there are no trainers in the vigil keep.

Zen Way of Harmony.7980:

Initially they thought exotics would be much more difficult for players to get, so ascended was brought it. From what I can tell this amounts to what they hoped exotics would be. If anything, that level of gear is really only for folks who want to work for it, and is not necessary for any content except high level fractals, which is already endgame like content.

It would be nice if people would stop posting this as this is the most obvious marketing lie that arenanet has stated in the history of GW2.
Firstly it would implie that the gamedesigners working on that were completely imcapable to do their job and had no clue how long it would take to get exotics.

And secondly they explicitely stated before launch that they wanted people to have best in slot gear upon hitting level 80. That is a statement that is completely opposite of that, so the best explanation is that there was a change in the direction they wanted the game to go, but they tried to hide that behind that statement,

Well, Scarlet might be mad and a mediocre written character, but at least she isn’t incompetent like most of the characters we got on our side^^

It seems like you formulated some rules that you think should apply to gw2 and made changelists based on you opinion how to balance gw2.

Firstly i think that many of your changes don’t make sense, even in your own logic. For example i dont see any justification to nerf the general damage of thiefs by roughly 20%. You say you don’t want them to have burst what would justify nerfing things like backstab, but how do you explain nerfing things like surprise shot?

Secondly and more imortantly i don’t see any basis for those rules you set up at all. It seems like you simply stated them and expect the game to follow your opinion, or where else did you get them from? Gw2 isn’t completely balanced at the moment but it works relatively well despite not following your rules.

There is not much to discuss i think, the EotM achievements seem possible to achieve and the WvW ones have been completely over the top. I hope this indicates a rebalancing of the WvW achievements.

1.) You have to do full runs of 4 fractals to get the reward and an increase of you fractal level.

2.) Fractals are time consuming so bring some time

3.) Yes you get the chest after a full run.

Learn how to dodge the attacks of the bosses as they will hurt quite much on higher levels :P

The explanation is that stomping doesn’t count as an attack and therefore the “chaneled skills still hit” rule doesn’t apply. If you wanted to make stomp an actual attack there would emerge other problems, as the stomped could be blocked by aegis given by a guardian for example in that case.

jsduke.6537:

ANet is aware. What matters is what they will do about it, and we won’t know that until the Scarlet LS wraps up and we see what they do with the next Living Story. If they are able to take what they have learned and make a truly enjoyable Living Story next time, then I can forgive them for Scarlet as a “learning experience”.

They surely are walking new terrain for an MMO of this size with the living story, but the story itself is not one of them. It seems a bit like the story writers are still learning too, as you can see many things that were criticized in the forums were in some way implemented in the game during the last releases.
But the headwriters should not have to learn how to tell good storys, that should be a job requirement.
I kind of hope that someone else will take care of the story for the future of GW2…

Sanduskel.1850:

What???? can’t really read that. At any rate, i see plenty of thieves playing tonight. Doesn’t appear to be any reduction.

At least you try a bit harder now, I nearly thought you didn’t see any future for thiefs anymore and didn’t bother with good trolling attempts^^

dDuff.3860:

Now it is awesome back again

Indeed, the pistolwhip feels great again. But it’s a bit sad that S/P got so much collateral damage from the nerfs to S/D, i realy don’t like the casttime on infiltrator return :/

Well we shouldn’t complain about getting few updates to this bug considering there are many issues where there is no information at all from dev side.
But as a sidenote i think it is hilarious that the only one answering is Josh and his job isn’t remotely close to this topic. Don’t get me wrong, big thanks to Josh for this, but it realy shows how horrible the communication from the PVE devs is and has been since lauch.

Sanduskel.1850:

I did it in my head. you wouldn’t understand it!

With your experience i didn’t think you would go do such brutal obvious trolls, a good troll has to be slightly subtle enough that people will believe you. In my opinion that was realy under your possibilities, you have shown in this forum that you are capable of more.

What makes you think that everyone will habe them?
From the forums i got the impression that there are many that don’t want them for various reasons.

I think she should pair skritt and elder dragons, the skrit could ride in thousands on one of them and invade everywhere they would land, the invasions could be replaced by that^^

Of couse there is winning for ANET, simply leave the stuff from last year in and bring a some good new stuff. I don’t expect much, but somethng like a new minigame or some fun events around the world aren’t too unreasonable in my opinion.

To jokke: tose things surely are great, but they are in no way related to wintersday, those are different teams working on that and they are released when they are ready and have nothing to do with the story or festival events that come up at the same time.

I find this quite disappionting. It sounds like completely the same content and even the rewards are the same (just the wintersday stuff of course, not armors and new skills). I realy hoped for a bit more than that.
But it sound like it won’t be as bad as halloween where there was even less stuff you could do compared to last year…

Ayrilana, those videos are not realy helpful.

The first is actualy good, but its about a well coordinated group with realy good team composition (good use of guardian reflects) and in no way applyable to average groups. Not to mention that even that would be harder with the new patches (instability like the more damage from sides and behind and dredge fractal is hell).

The second one is good played, but nearly a year old and the team uses bugs that have been fixed. Additionaly it’s on level 20 prior to this patch and therefore the dredge are quite less strong and numerous than on high fractals. And the same about beeing prior to this patch argument as above.

The third is on level 8 and way over half a year old so no much value to that.

A video of a group doing it recently in the upper 40s in 30 mins would be impressive, but still doesn’t negate the fact that nearly all fractal groups take way longer for this. By the way i would like to know how long such a group would take for all other fractals as I would bet quite a lot that these would be cleared way faster in that case

Evocatus Rex.6857:

Secondly, they will most probably be like racial skills, bit of flavour but not the best skills. In which case it won’t matter.

I sincerely hope its not more semiuseless skills like racials, this game needs more viable skills for build variety.

In guess the turning respawn off would nearly be enough, yes.
It would still be quite annoying to kill a whole army of dredge but at least you could actualy fight your way through.

The problen exists for over a year, i guess they don’t care to solve that problem as it can’t be that hard to set the votes required to kick someone on three.

They didn’t say that they would be in this update definitely, but as it isnt there this was a big communication error they made. Choosing the skin is what many fractal players have been hoping for since fractal release and to talk about it right before the big fractal patch and not stating this wont be in is bound to bring disappointment from players.

While raging about this is not a good way to react to it I dont think that completely defending them without any criticism isn’t good feedback either.

It surely isn’t P2W in the sense of winning over some other player as looks are subjective, but i guess you could say that its winning in the sense of reaching the games goal. The endgame of gw2 is meant to be about the looks (at least it was meant to be that way) so i expected it to be about working towards cool skins.

Since the release of GW2 there hasn’t been one full armor set been released in the game apart from the gemstore (the achievement armors were the closest with 3 parts). For weapon skins it’s at least similar, we got a big bunch there, but the most are obtainable with black lion tickets (what i find i horrible system as it’s completely random if you get a ticket, even if you were willing to pay for it)

Apart from the Fractal weapons we haven’t realy gotten any skins to work towards to by doing special things, working towards skins mostly means farming the gold to buy the skins from the tp/convert gems to buy them from the gemstore and that is something i think is unhealty for the game (or am i the only one who doesn’t enjoy cof that much?)

Tachii.3506:

Though even if I say this, the gold reward should increase based on the level, but I assume that’s happening already.

On what basis do you assume that?
They just released the big fractal patch and it wasnt implemented like that so it obviously wasn’t an issue for them 2 days ago.

Regarding the fractal relics i think the value of relics is realy high for people just starting with fractals, but as soon as you get everything you want from those they are nearly worthless, and especialy the people that get high in fractals probably will have no use for them realy soon.

First i wanted to complain that since launch there wasnt one complete armor skin introduced outside of the gemstore while the count there was 9 before this patch and that it would be 12 now, but seeing those its even more hilarious. To simply take old skins and stick on some extra glow is a disgrace and to expect people to pay 800 gems for that is nearly an insult.
I also agree that its unacceptable that one of the skins is human t3 for all races as this devalues the human uniqueness to some degree.

To Yamagawa (or Portable Corpse if you like that better), that event is annoying but still quite okay as you are right about the good farm aspect. But even the event that you are needed to do if that event fails is highly annoying, still beeing nothing compared to CoE where you have to do a full event chain of 20min+ if you want to enter as it is closed very often even on main play times.

I’m not sure they thought that much of the lore part when they were making the phantasm weapons craftable. I thing they just had the models and the effects and it was easy to make them weapon skins then

My idea for better rewards would be something like the Luxon and Kurzick faction in GW1. If you are doing events that are helping the ogres you could gain ogre rank whick would allow you to buy special ogre weapon and armor skins.

It obviously needs those skins first to do something like that and it seems to be quite some effort for you to produce those considering we didn’t see a single whole armor set in the last year apart from the gemstore, but you could start with the ones you already have.
Every character is only allowed to buy the armor and weapons from the order he joined in his personal story. You could make Vigil, Order of Whispers and Durmant Priory factions and when a player finishes an event helping one of them he gains rank and lets say after 30 events he is allowed to buy the boots, 30 next the gloves or something like that. At least I would be higly motivated to do events for the Durmant Headgear on my Thief

DEs are the thing I enjoy most about Guild Wars and I would love to see a good reward system and an evolution in the events.