Guild Wars 2

First time buying anything on Black Lion, and I have no idea where to get my stuff from. I bought 10 fine transmutation stones, so….. where do I pick em up from? They didn’t appear in the pickup tab (which would’ve made sense), not in my inv, not in my bank… what now?

Why thank you :P

marnick.4305:

Until I heard about ascended items. I love ascended items as a one time gear increment. Nice to have another long time goal. If it becomes a tiered system however, it’ll be devastating for people like me (the absolute majority of players) who will fall behind and never be able to join pvp, dungeons, guilds etc. It happened in other games with tiered gear, I really don’t want it to happen to my favourite game.

This is botched reasoning. If the absolute majority of players is without means of getting all these cool new items, isn’t the playing field still level? The absolute majority of players cannot be unfair to the absolute majority of players. It would only be a problem if the absolute majority DID get all the gear and a minority that never could would be victimised. Fortunately it’s the other way around, and all we’re dealing with here is a glorified case of “I want what he has otherwise it’s unfair.”

The way I see Guild Wars 2 as it was sold to people is as something equal to communism. People were tired of the competition and the hawkishness and the race of living in a capitalist society, where the wealthy exploited the poor. Most people feel like in MMO’s they are the poor because they don’t have the capital (time) to invest in getting somewhere with their lives (characters).

Then Guild Wars 2 comes along and promises a poor (undergeared) man’s utopia where everything’s equal and a certain quality of life is assured and people can live in a levelled playing field where life is fair. Then when it’s made people discover that the lack of progress is grounding society to a halt and that a brain drain is commencing that’s taking people back into the capitalist world of competition and opportunity. I’m sure that in 1989 the Soviet Union still had a few ardent communists running around insisting that their system was perfect, but the country collapsed two years later for a reason.

I think you should’ve never believed them in the first place. Making an MMO and then promising a stale loot table is like making a boat and promising it’s not waterproof. There may be people out there who really really really want a boat that isn’t waterproof, but those people probably don’t understand what the point of a boat is in the first place.

So dedicate less time? I mean it depends on how important that legendary weapon is to you. I personally couldn’t give a hoot. I know you came up with two hours a day because I used it as an example in my other thread. Fact is that if you want to spend only four hours a week instead of two hours a day then all it means is you get your legendary later. Since you claim to have a life, I don’t think you would be all to concerned over when exactly you get your legendary, right?

@ Cyferwolf.

I personally never really understood the “I have limited time” argument. The majority of people do. Picture any WvW clash of players and then imagine that of the 40 vs 40 brawl going on perhaps 3 or 4 people are actually powergamers that must always have the best items. They aren’t going to make a difference at that scale. For sPvP the problem is solved by matching teams according to their average itemlevel.

I don’t have all the time in the world either, and even with only a few hours a day to spend on GW2 I created two decked-out 80’s without breaking a sweat. In WoW I was in a raidguild that raided two nights a week to accomodate people with jobs and our progress wasn’t any less than that of 5 night a week guilds. It’s about efficiency, not time. Now that I know the process of being level 80 and getting gear in GW2 after having done it on my warrior, I can do it faster on my Necro because I know what to look out for and how to go about it. I can now do the same amount of work in half the time.

That is the true problem. Not power creep, efficiency creep. Not every character you level is going to take the same amount of time as the first one. As you get better and better levelling a character goes from being an epic journey to a trivial hurdle, and getting exotics goes from being a goal worth chasing to something you do just because it’s dotting the i.

The only people in my guild here in GW2 who still have bad gear are the ones who literally never play. The ones who play even a few hours a week have pretty much wrapped their characters up. Now we can level new stuff. Yay.

There’s no risk in powercreep. All it means is that a few nolifers get their chars maxed out the next day, that’s their problem. They’re the ones bored again. For the rest of us it’s simply more stuff to do, more goals to chase. Gear already trivialises the game anyway, even without growth in itemlevel. Ascalonian Catacombs is easier as a level 80 in exotics downlevelled to thirty than it is as a fresh thirty in level 20ish blues and greens.

If GW2 were to stubbornly refuse to give me better loot than what I have then there was no point for me to buy this game in the first place. Darksiders 2 has dungeons and a stale loot table aswell. I did two playthroughs and called it, because I’d seen everything. Might be I’ll play it again a few months from now. Not saying I didn’t have fun with it, I did, but you run out of stuff to do fast in a game built like that. An MMO can offer a different experience.

Here’s what I don’t get.

Levelling in GW2 is easy, especially if you’re lucky enough to find a few crafting boosters in your black lion chests. Yesterday I logged in to my level 74 necromancer and had enough mats in the back from levelling my warrior to 80 and getting her decked out that I could level my necro’s artificing and tailoring to 400 from 350ish in one go, thereby getting me all the experience I needed to hit 80.

I went from 74 to 80 in ~25 minutes time, counting the minutes spent running back and forth between black lion and the hoelbrak crafting stations to get additional mats for discoveries (putrid essences and such).

I now own the game for just over a month and a half and I have two level 80’s, my warrior who’s decked in exotics and my necromancer who when I woke up was level 74 in assorted greens and blues and 25 minutes later was 80 wearing all rares. For my necromancer all I now have left to do is, basically, get exotics, but I’ve got enough karma to buy the ones I need from the temple vendors in Orr and I’ve got enough ectos and gossamer stored to craft the ones I need from tailoring. If I want I can be kitted out in full exotics a week from now, days even, and then I’d still have cash to spare to buy orichalcum rings on black lion.

Levelling in this game is easy.

Getting max gear at level 80 is easy.

Aesthetic upgrades would be interesting if there were enough armour models to go around, but even then, why would I want to keep transmuting different looks onto the same armour? Not to mention that at some point you’re going to run out of transmutation stones because you’ve got all zones explored.

Basically the only thing you can really do in this game is level a new char, but if you went for 100% world explore on your first like I did then it becomes an exercise in repetition.

The only thing I could possibly want to achieve at this point is a legendary weapon. I could get one by not logging in more than one to two hours a day over the coming months and just gradually working my way towards it.

I don’t consider logging in for one to two hours a day to get a weapon I’ll never actually really use (because when I have it I have everything and the last thing I want to do is grind places with it that have nothing left to offer) as ‘playing’ a game. I want to play guild wars 2. I don’t want to meander through it.

Power creep is the only solution. There always has to be something to chase. There have to be better items, better upgrades, more things to do. As it stands Guild Wars 2 is a game where I could within 3 to 4 months have 5 exoticed 80’s, all of different classes. If I achieve that I’m done. I literally have nothing more to do.

It seems to me that people fear power creep because they’re afraid they might not be able to get those items while others are. I’ll tell you something about these supposed ‘others’: in a game where there’s nothing to do, they don’t exist. Even in my own guild people are pretty much only online when we agree to do a dungeon to give ourselves the illusion we’re still playing this game. It’s dead otherwise. What’s wrong with giving people an incentive to keep playing? Because I promise you that your single item-level gear utopia is going to be a very deserted one.

Yeah I love norn as well, but I always play female chars. Norn women are awesome, there’s no way around it. Each time I try to make a human female I get annoyed at how scrawny and weak she is. Norn gals feel like they can take on the world and look good doing it.

Kruunch.3714:

You cited WoW as the model of boss fights that aren’t health dumps?

Hmmmm.

No, if you read again you see that I cite WoW as the model of developers that at first made healthdump bossfights and then grew to understand that there were more interesting ways to design bossfights. As you can see, I made mention of Drakkisath and Garr as exceptionally boring vanilla bosses. In fact I can’t recall a single person before UBRS was capped to 10 players that willingly went in there with less than 15 because the fights were such a drag. A lot of bosses in this game feel like 10 man encounters that we’re forced to 5 man.

If you look at a lot of post-vanilla bosses you see a lot of interesting mechanics that really demand class knowledge of people in the raid. It became far more than just depleting a big healthbar like in the old days of Molten Core.

My problem with GW2 is indeed that bosses take too long. Kohler was mentioned above as an example of a bossfight done right but even there the truth is that after you’ve dodged three or so of his hooks you’ve pretty much proven your ability to conquer this encounter and thus the 5 to 10 minutes of DPS that follow are nothing but a chore. A lot of fights simply take forever.

Or perhaps to rephrase it slightly better: due to the absense of a dedicated healer and a good aggro mechanic, there’s no way to invest a boss’s difficulty in the damage he deals.

I know that in most MMO’s it’s often considered bad to invoke WoW as an example of how to do things right. There’s a lot of people with grudges towards that game for whatever reason. I don’t care. I’ve not played Cataclysm or Mists, but I have raided almost everything there is to raid up to and including Icecrown 25 hardmodes, so I like to think I know a thing or two about PvE that works.

Quite simply, GW2 PvE does not work.

Do bosses die? Yes. Are dungeons completable? Yes. Can any group setup at all complete a dungeon and defeat a boss? Yes, and while this was initially one of the game’s main selling points, I contend that it is now its prime drawback. Why?

Because if you want to create a dungeon that players can enter with any class setup whatsoever, then you cannot design bosses to account for the presence of certain abilities. You can’t give them high damage, because players might not be able to outheal it. You can’t give them a varied arsenal of abilities, because players might not be able to counter it all. All you can effectively do is give them a boatload of health and make even a group of exotic-clad players take 15 minutes to deplete it.

I like it believe that after spending 5 minutes in combat with the boss without dying, wiping or generally struggling to hold on for dear life, a group has proven their ability to defeat a boss. Everything after that is pure chore and a waste of time. Yet for some reason every boss in the game exists as a pure health dump. There’s not a single encounter in all of HotW explorable or SE explorable that can be rapidly completed. I’ve not fought a single storymode boss that doesn’t take forever.

ArenaNet, don’t you agree that it would simply be a lot more fun to be able to design a boss with interesting abilities? I know that with the way we can switch our utility skills and weapons on the fly and adjust our traits according to what each encounter expects of us, you’d think that perhaps bosses would have some more up their sleeves than “kite them around and shoot them from range.”

I understand that some players will come into this thread and rightfully point out to me the versatility of the Necromancer and how that class deals with conditions, the importance of the Guardian and how that class will take care of boons and heals, the CC of warriors or the combo fields produced by thieves and and elementalists, but the truth of the matter is that this all serves to reinforce my point. Yes, dungeons get easier when you take a diversity of classes, but they are designed to be completed by teams far less diverse in an attempt to increase accessibility.

How awesome would it be if there was a boss whose danger was not so much in having some AoE ability (as most seem to have) but in tossing around stacking conditions that would require rapid removal or even redirection. Then you could for a change not give him a bajillion HP but far less and make the challenge not in depleting the healthbar but in managing the way he afflicts group strength.

Blizzard learned this lesson long ago. Their first dungeons and first raids were nothing but encounters that were major health dumps. With each dungeon boss in this game I feel like I’m back to fighting General Drakkisath or Garr. There’s no fun to be had, here. There’s a reason why WoW’s later dungeons became much more dynamic. The drawback there is that certain encounters require the presence of certain classes, but that also adds importance to playing such a class. Right now picking a class really only revolves around a preference of playstyle and not so much your utility to the group. You want to be a Mesmer? Fine. But you could also be an Engineer. We don’t really care. It’s all up to you.

I’ve so far not completed a single dungeon where players were sad to see that it was over. After 15 to 20 minutes of fighting Wollam or the Destroyer of Worlds or whatever other sort of boss you run into, people have generally had enough.

I will say that Blizzard eventually overdid it in WotLK, where some 5 man heroics were nothing more than 10 minute rushfests where you pulled trash along with the boss and AoE’d it all down because you were geared to hell and didn’t care anyway. I feel that GW2 has the potential to strike a solid balance between the state of dungeons as it is now and WoW’s other extreme, but first the developers have to really change their PvE mindset for that to start happening.

So that’s it. Hope to see some people agree.

My femnorn warrior, cruising down the fjords in her… D cup.

I still can’t figure out what my norn says when she goes “I’m strong as…”

As what?

As the proud player of a femnorn warrior I both agree and disagree. Yes, it’s very easy to make a pretty norn. But it’s also rather easy to make an extremely butch one. My point however is that good looks aren’t mutually exclusive with savage looks. The point of norn is that they’re rough and barbaric in appearance, and I think my lean-as-hell warrior pulls that off perfectly fine.

My own warrior’s attached: