Showing Posts For Ekera.5281:
Missed touching on something in my earlier post that I didn’t want to let slide.
But the gameplay is horrible, no one wants to run around and kite as a melee character.
Willfully labeling yourself as a “melee character” is not only shortsighted it’s completely against the design of the game. All classes have the ability to use both close-range/melee and long range abilities.
I’m guessing you are a warrior. You have a longbow for long-range AoE (and an immobilize). You have a rifle for long-range single target (and a snare). You also have about a million ways to “kite” (on the very few things that actually require this) – Stomp, Kick, Endure Pain to survive getting caught up to, Fear Me!, Whirlwind back through a group chasing you (you’ll evade all their attacks as you pass through and gain some distance), Shield offhand abilities. I’m probably missing more.
The biggest thing I’ve taken away from the professions and the way they’re set up and how dungeons are laid out is that you need to be versatile and a little creative. You need to consider different tactics.
If you don’t like this style of play, then that’s fine, but don’t ruin it for the rest of us who do.
Ok, let’s try and cover these points one at a time since you make some pretty sweeping (and poor) generalizations:
1) Long term hardcore WoW raider experience was utilized to create the dungeons. So the AOEs, the boss attacks are all like end game raid mechanics. They one shot you or disolve your HP bar in a second. Just did TA explore and boy did the worm boss just suck.
With the exception of a few fights (like Giganticus Lupicus), there is very little about the dungeon fights in this game that feels like a WoW raid. Bosses generally have a couple mechanics to deal with and once you figure them out they are pretty simple to handle. Just because they are not mechanics that YOU PERSONALLY are familiar with does not make them the realm of “hardcore raiding.”
Let’s take the wurm boss in TA as an example since you brought it up. The fight is very very simple. Poison AoEs – keep on the move (you do know every single ability in the game can be cast on the move, right?), dodge roll if you get in a bad spot, use heals liberally. If you’re melee, the wurm does a short-range sweeping knockback. He winds up for it, as most monsters that have that ability do, so dodge roll to avoid it. You also have to handle Volatile Blossoms respawning during the fight, and while I will agree with most people that these things are probably the most annoying aspect of TA, handling this is a matter of knowing where they are to begin with and them trying to avoid those areas.
Like a lot of dungeon fights, a good amount of doing well here requires forethought and/or experience. You may go down the first few times you do it. You may even die. Once you’ve gone through the fight a couple times, barring bad luck or mistakes, you’ll probably survive the whole fight.
2) They removed the tank, DPS, support from the game. Probably the stupidest move I have ever seen happen.
There are very few fights where I see the need to kite, and even if what you say were the case, why is this a problem? Again, ALL ABILITIES CAN BE CAST ON THE MOVE. The fact that you don’t get to stand in one spot and spam 2 abilities until everything’s dead should be a good thing. Do you not get how boring and unfun that is? Fights should feel like a challenge. The good ones should feel like controlled chaos. If that’s not fun for you then you’re certainly welcome to your opinion but you are definitely not part of some vast majority that prefers that style of combat/dungeoneering.
3) And I guess more of an offshoot of number 2, the dungeons are still copying the WoW model or typical MMO dungeon design. But in those games you have support, tank, and DPS roles. So we are playing dungeons that feel like we ought to have designated roles but we don’t. So its a lot of dying, a lot of annoying kiting, and the dungeons are tuned down just enough to make it viable. But the gameplay is horrible, no one wants to run around and kite as a melee character.
If you manage to come back to this thread and actually make this a discussion instead of a rant, I would very much like you to qualify what you’re talking about here. What dungeon fights have you done where you said to yourself, “There is no WAY we can do this without a dedicated tank and a healer. There’s just no way.” Because I would like to disprove you.
There are a staggering amount of support and control abilities available to ALL classes that supplant the need for a tank or a healer. Enemies can be slowed, rooted, knocked down. Classes can put out small amounts of group healing that, when combined with your own self-heals and with each other, really up the survivability of the group as a whole. Abilities are made to be dodged.
Are there fights that aren’t tuned well? Of course. This is release content, and there’s a lot of it. It’s never going to be perfect. Are there fights that don’t quite work? Definitely. I’m hoping ANet learns from some of the mistakes and not-great designs. Primarily, dungeons where the choice becomes “kill a WHOLE lot of trash” or “run blindly through all the trash as a group while hoping you all survive” (Arah and CM, I’m looking at you) aren’t the product of great design. There are certainly other ways to pace things out without throwing 12 pulls of stuff at a group.
The blanket statement that GW2 is doing WoW’s dungeons only worse, and that this game suffers from the lack of trinity roles, is just poorly thought out and ill-informed. To me, it seems like a knee-jerk reaction and an unwillingness to see things done a different way as new and interesting.
(edited by Ekera.5281)
It’s only a ‘punishment’ if all you’re after is loot. Some of us are not skritt and actually enjoy playing the game.
Deriding someone for playing for loot in a loot-based game is like yelling at someone for driving their car on the street. Since when is it not “playing the game?”
Getting loot via speed-clearing dungeons may not be YOUR chosen style of play (and it’s not really mine, either), but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.
This whole topic is kind of pointless since Alpha’s ground spike circles are 100% avoidable 100% of the time if you actually dodge roll them as opposed to ineffectively trying to run out of them.
Running out requires a lot more exact timing than dodging. Additionally, independent of banners/pets causing circles, if you’re in a group with several melee you’re going to get trapped between a mess of circles anyway, so running out becomes not much of an option there. Dodge roll gets it every time.
You can find rabid vocal fan boys for anything in this world.
Yes, dungeons are horrible in this game.
Just because with hard work and a great group you can learn to get on farm mode in these dungeons does not mean that they are well design or fun. They are not.
Anet has the numbers and I’m sure there is a large large problem with dungeon participation.
You think months from now anyone is going to bother with dungeons?
I’m curious as to where you see elements of fanboyism in this thread. You’re welcome to point them out.
Meantime, I repeat what I said in my previous post:
“If you want to be constructive, you can point out where exactly it is you’re running into trouble and what it is that’s holding you up so we can give advice or, at worst, indicate that yes this is a known problem area of a dungeon that is poorly tuned and is generally accepted as requiring a fix. But… you’d prefer to complain aimlessly and without any constructive end.”
All you’ve said here is “dungeons” and “horrible.” Unspecific and unhelpful.
It hasn’t taken hard work and a great group to get dungeons on farm. I run almost exclusively in pick-up groups. I’d say a good 80% of the time I don’t know anyone in the group going in. Sometimes a guildy or someone I’ve run with before is along, once in a very rare while I run with several guildies, but they don’t do a whole lot of dungeons.
Dungeons are not easy. They should not be easy. Some are moderately difficult. Some are HARD. There are also some that are poorly-tuned or overlong. They’re definitely not perfect and ANet has some things to learn from, in my opinion. That said, I enjoy them.
Have you considered that perhaps dungeons just aren’t for you?
This seems to be a common line of thinking: I die constantly and have to rez and run back with everyone else in my group several times just to complete a fight, well, it must be poor design decisions. I mean, that’s obviously the case right? Couldn’t possibly be an error in how your group is going about the fight, of course.
I don’t know what to tell you. On the few fights where I’ve had to do them several times, it was due to clearly identifiable errors in tactics or playstyle on the part of myself or other players in the group, and certainly not to the degree you’re indicating.
If you want to be constructive, you can point out where exactly it is you’re running into trouble and what it is that’s holding you up so we can give advice or, at worst, indicate that yes this is a known problem area of a dungeon that is poorly tuned and is generally accepted as requiring a fix. But… you’d prefer to complain aimlessly and without any constructive end.
Agreed. Dungeons are terrible.
Die-rez-die-rez is not a feature or a mechanic, it is sloppy design.
Funny, I don’t experience die-rez-die-rez in my dungeons. Maybe we’re playing different games.
Or see above.
They can stop antagonizing paying customers and open two-way dialog with us. Tell us what they plan to do, and when, or at least present a coherent response why they are keeping things as-is.
The thing is, a lot of your expectations are unrealistic considering the nature of the game and the way dungeons are designed.
That’s not to say I don’t agree with some of your points but I also vehemently disagree with some.
1. Bugs. Of course bugs need to be fixed. Stuff involving dodging, like where you try to dodge roll away from a melee hit only to roll in place and get smacked anyway. I’d lump unintuitive design in here too, things like the Destroyer Troll boss in CoE Front Door path. Huge hp boss, doesn’t attack, requires minimal effort to kill, just takes forEVER. Not a good design. I’d hope to see some of these get ironed out sooner rather than later.
2. I’ve run with pick-up groups for 95% of my dungeons. This includes enough CoF to get a full set of armor and most of the rest of the explorable paths (still have to tackle most of Arah/CoE). The only time I’ve seen graveyard zerging is when the vast majority of the group did not know what to expect going in AND several people were clearly poorly traited/talented for dungeon content. Glass cannon types.
A bunch of people have said it already but this game does not have a tanking role. Period. There are survivability choices you can make but only in the context of letting you take a couple extra hits. There are group healing choices you can make but in the context of supplementing self-healing and just plain smart play avoiding environmental damage and boss abilities. A number of fights require critical thinking in regards to how to go about winning. I like that a lot.
In the context of the idea that yes, there are occasional poorly-designed encounters, the overall thing I’ve taken away from dungeons is this: if you just died, there was a better way to do what you were doing.
3. Environmental traps/puzzles. Yeah here’s one where you and I are at polar opposites. I love the boulder trap in CoF Path 1. Though it can be very frustrating I love the flame tunnel trap in CoF Path 3. The laser trap in CoE Front Door. Flame gargoyles and floor spikes in AC. Hell, the first time I was in that room in CM where spikes started coming up from the floor I laughed because it was straight up like kids yelling THE FLOOR IS LAVA.
It’s creative game design and it makes the dungeons more than just a mindless slog through a series of trash and bosses over and over. It spices things up, and it makes these places feel like real enemy strongholds rather than just a bus station where all the bad guys hang out. There’s such a thing as too much but I haven’t yet encountered it yet.
4. This is situational. There are some places where trash (and in some cases, bosses) have way too much hp. The bosses in Honor of the Waves are pretty bad for this. Especially where mechanics are relatively easy to figure out and deal with, all it becomes is a marathon to kill stuff before you die of boredom.
Some stuff needs to have a lot of hp because the idea is to consistently survive over a long period of time. Giganticus Lupicus in Arah is a great example of a huge hp boss that feels reasonable for having it. Some of the Honor of the Waves bosses could benefit by leaving their hp the same but giving them a second “phase” of abilities, making the fight feel more dynamic.
5. Also agree here but as many have pointed out ANet has agreed and are working on a solution.
Overall… GW2 dungeons aren’t perfect by any stretch but they’re so much more dynamic and different. As a long time WoW player, it took years for Blizzard to even approach the kind of experience in a dungeon that ANet has put in at launch. That things aren’t always perfectly designed or tuned is, frankly, to be expected given that this is still a VERY young game.
Anyone who played WoW back in vanilla remembers the absolute nightmare slogs that were Blackrock Depths, Scholomance or Lower Blackrock Spire with an inexperienced group. The time I’ve spent in any given GW2 dungeon is dwarfed (BRD pun intended) by the hours it took to complete some of the launch dungeons in WoW, and those had very little variety beyond kill trash, kill boss, repeat ad nauseum.
So while I hope to see some eventual retuning and thought that signals ANet learning from their initial set of dungeon content, I’m pretty happy with things so far.
It’s easier to believe there’s some mystical person out there with tens of thousands of gold just picking markets to mess with and “ruining” the economy with a few button presses. Something like that doesn’t require rationality or critical thinking.
ILLUMINATI
New build incoming!
There are plenty of fights where, given the choice between melee and ranged, it would be stupid to stay in melee. The endboss fights in TA explorabe mode come to mind immediately but there are definitely others. So an all melee build/weapons loadout is shortsighted.
On top of that, most builds I use for PvE include the traits in Tactics that reduce shout cooldowns and allow them to heal. If you’re in a ranged heavy group it makes sense to stay near them as much as possible when shouts are off cooldown so you’re giving your group members the benefits of your support characteristics. Typically on fights where there’s no heavy bias towards melee or ranged I’ll swap between both to take advantage of ability cooldowns. Swap to greatsword, Bladetrail, Rush in, Hundred Blades, Whirlwind away, swap back to Longbow and pop Combustive Shot with a full adrenaline bar.
I carry a rifle around at all times in case I need slightly better single target damage but anything with the possibility of AoE the longbow is superior.
One of this profession’s greatest strength is its versatility through weapons choice. Dismissing the longbow as terrible because you were in an instance with a bad warrior is silly. Inexperienced or poor players are always going to be around. A greater number might use a greatsword and/or longbow because they’re easy weapons to pick up but that doesn’t make the weapons themselves terrible.
Just a quick point, you are incorrect here. Korea just passed laws this year that made this exact thing illiegal and legislation is up in Japan and other countries over the same thing. Right now, the fact they are virtual goods is circumventing current laws, but they are good with real world cash values (i.e., real money is exchanged for them) and therefore many countries are looking into this now.
P.S. There is proposed legislation in the US as well, though it hasn’t made the floor yet.
So, to say it isn’t a big deal when this is going on all over the place, I don’t think so. My bet is, these RNG practices will be legislated out by most countries over the next couple of years.
A quick read of a couple articles on the subject suggests that Korea’s law is intended to stop the exchange of in-game items and currency for real world currency. The most obvious example of this would be Diablo 3 which is currently a big target over there, the reason being you can spend time finding items in-game and turn them into real cash.
Since you can’t do that in Guild Wars 2, not seeing a connection.
We’re also moving pretty far afield of the point here since the vast majority of the people posting in here are those who bought keys, didn’t get what they wanted, and are now throwing out all sorts of accusations and dire predictions about GW2 and in-game gambling and such. It defies logic to imagine people being this righteously indignant and apt to start quoting laws and current events if the drop rates were higher. Do you see the disconnect there?
You just have to look at the companies past history, heck they even recently shut down a game and sacked the entire development team without notice, a team that was making them money by the way, to cover a refocusing on their Eastern market and teams even if said teams haven’t been doing so great.).
The fun thing about the law is it evolves, while you say that it can’t be legislated, all it takes is for example some one to pass a ‘Virtual goods/currency act’ that gives some measure of value to these items, and boom there you go new untapped taxes for cash hungry governments.
We’ve already started towards this with several ruling against the deletion of peoples characters, accounts and items by malicious third parties.
If they shut the game down, they shut it down. I’m going to go out in a limb here and say that GW2 probably has many many times the playerbase that CoH did even in its heyday, but that’s purely speculation. Point is, what NCSoft might or might not do in the future isn’t really relevant to this discussion.
Neither, of course, is what “governments” might do to legislate in-game mini transactions that result in nothing of tangible value.
Wayshuba:
“Because otherwise it is classified as true gambling and falls under various different laws. They are delivering other goods, so technically you are always getting something, but just not what people are spending money on.”
Please clarify for me how the Black Lion chests fit your definition of “true gambling.” What do you even mean by that? Of course it’s gambling. A gamble is defined as staking or risking money on something defined by chance. That’s exactly what this is, and that’s exactly what it was made out to be.
So, forgive me if I take a dim view of people who are DEMANDING (in huge capital letters) their money back, or saying they were deceived or hoodwinked, or (my favorite) forced to buy keys for chests that don’t pay out what they want. 90% of the people complaining this vociferously are absolutely not so naive as to believe they are owed something for their money besides a chance at some purely cosmetic fun stuff. They’re just upset they didn’t win and are taking it out on a convenient target.
The issue here isn’t that it’s a gamble, it’s that it’s a gamble that people are unhappy with. That’s understandable. That also is what my first point in the post you quoted pertains to: if Anet believes the chances are too low and people are going to swear off gems en masse then they’ll up drop rates or add additional items. They’ll adjust the payout in some way to compensate and get people buying gems.
And to repeat what I said earlier, there is nothing about this that fits the legal, casino-type definition of gambling. Not a thing. You are not receiving anything of tangible value. You can’t resell anything you receive for real currency without breaking Anet’s very clear Terms of Service. There’s no expectation of actual, monetary payback for the money you put in. It may be gambling, but it’s not Gambling. Understand?
If the money stops flowing in, then as a Western Developer, NCSoft won’t hesitate in shutting them down.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next three or four years, laws do get passed that make these types of grab bag/box transactions classed as gambling, after all if you take a look at say Zynga, governments are missing out on quite a big piece of the pie from these transactions.
First let me say I’m glad we have NCSoft’s COO here to let us know their plans regarding Arenanet going forward. Thanks for that!
Second, nothing you receive in game has any tangible real-world value. Selling gold, items or accounts for money is against the Terms of Service. So it’s not really possible to legislate against this as a form of actual gambling since all you are doing is paying money for virtual cosmetic items that have no resale value.
If it’s in ANet’s best interest to up drop rates to induce more key purchases then they will. If it’s not, they won’t.
Someone explain why spending any amount of money on keys entitles you to anything other than a series of random chances. Go ahead, I’ll wait.