Guild Wars 2

Purple Miku.7032:

Not sure what you’re referring to but if you mean simply stealthing when it splits (assuming NPC is dead too), then all that happens is the two vile oozes will relocate depending on where you killed the ancient ooze. It so happens to be the case that if you killed it at the coral, the vile oozes move through the wall.

All the elite risen will deathwalk through walls too. It doesn’t seem so much as a glitch as it is simply overlooked and weird.

It sounds like a remnant from GW1. It reminds me a lot of how we used Resurrection scrolls to move through walls/gates for specific record tactics and lazy dungeon runners.

Wisp.2634:

I only have problem with the usage of Fiery Rush to the walls. The “meta” is to have 2 eles for FGS. Thats why you should ban the usage of it, in this way. They only pick the 2 eles to have the FGS.

Unfortunately for you, but fortunately for us, that’s not your call to make. The tournament is being hosted by [DnT] and uses the restricted ruleset from gwscr.com, a ruleset agreed upon by the dungeon community. If you feel that the ruleset should be changed, feel free to bring it up to the attention of the gwscr.com team and have it up for debate. You whining on the forums isn’t going to achieve much.

Wisp.2634:

I think it will be a shame for ANET if they are live streaming the game in this aspect. This is the PvE should be played? Stack more eles for FGS and kill in the corner? It will be a negative advertisement for the game.

They could do much better. And for the tournament is a shame too. This will say to the people, they should play like this.

Except Anet has nothing to do with the tournament or the streams, other than providing a gem price. That is all. This is a player-organized tournament. I don’t understand why you’re dragging Anet into this.

If you don’t like the use of FGS, don’t watch the streams. Also, there are other rules to make it more interesting. Not being able to rez defeated party members for example. Need I remind you that although FGS is high DPS when used against a wall, bringing 2 eles and making sure they don’t die isn’t going to be an evident task, since eles are pretty squishy. The tournament will be interesting in the sense that it’s going to provide a lot of risk/reward tactics.

Devata.6589:

Anyway it’s the current system is obviously not bothering you but I do hope you understand where they are coming from. And not thats not just because they are all just bad players. However, if thats what you like to believe thats of course also fine.

Oh, there are mistakes with the system, I will agree to that, but it’s just that people make a problem out of the wrong thing.

Also, the solution this thread proposes is hardly a solution. The problem isn’t lack of roles, or the game being a DPS race, it’s lack of AI

And pigeonholing people into set roles isn’t going to solve anything, it’s only going to make things worse.

As always, clueless people are complaining about the wrong things to Anet.

Devata.6589:

“Not to mention, the way GW2 works is a lot more engaging than any trinity game was.” I guess everybody complaining about dull combat and lack of roles and that it’s all DPS, DPS DPS and talking about 1, 1,1,1 is disagreeing with you on that I guess. But it’s nice you like it.

I personally think that’s mainly because most of those people complaining about lack of roles and just 1,1,1,1 are oblivious and terrible players who have no idea how to properly play the game. It might also explain why there’s so many of them, since the skill and knowledge of the average player in the game is quite abysmal.

Devata.6589:

“everyone has his little purpose” At least is honest of you to call it ‘little’. As the problem is that everybody’s real purpose is DPS (aka lack of roles).

You call it lack of roles, I call it hybridization. Everyone is a hybrid DPS/support/controller. Just because a lot of people fail to play that hybrid design properly doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It means a lot of people are bad at this game.

As for trinity games giving you more of a purpose, I highly disagree, but since I’m not going to repeat my opinion in the matter at nauseam, I guess we can agree to disagree.

Devata.6589:

“As for not much of a team effort going on, that just proves that you are completely oblivious as to how organized groups work.” Yeah ‘All stack!! BUFF!!!, DPS!!’ No offense but thats your general ‘organized groups work’. You might consider that heavy team effort. Other people prefer some more then that. But the problem is that in most cases this in fact is the best tactic.

The difference with a trinity game was that your DPS team got carried by your tanks. I don’t see how it was such a bigger team effort. If you had bad tanks in DoA, you were SOL, and you’d fail. The DPSers were just there to kill things, it was hardly engaging (don’t get me wrong, I loved DoA, but calling it engaging as anything other than tank would be delusional, unless you were doing some funky tactics).

A team effort where everyone contributes equally and is expected to do their fair share of support, buffing and DPS is quite a bit more engaging, and team oriented than waiting for your tank to ball up or pull the enemies and DPSing them down.

I’d rather list what I don’t want from future dungeons.

• Unskippable cutscenes: I don’t care how pretty they are, the fact that you’re assuming I want to watch them once is cute, because I don’t. The fact that you assume I’d want to watch them every time I do your dungeon, without giving me an option to cop out, is insulting.

• Unskippable dialogue: by the same token, I’m not interested in Caithe’s PMS-y whining about Scarlet. Nor am I interested in what Graham and Rox think about anything. I hate NPC’s and what they have to say. The fact that I’m losing time every time I run a dungeon because you thought I was moved by your story is quite frustrating.

• Time gates: time gating can be done well in small doses. Arah p3 ritual (to some degree, it’s not good, but it isn’t bad either), CoF p3 defend, Snowblind campfire… All those things are acceptable time gates. They are a semi-engaging encounter that doesn’t take all too long. Examples of bad time gates: Arah p4 Grenth, AC p3 burrows… I don’t want to be forced to spend a fixed amount of time that is frustratingly long doing a boring event.

• Too many kitten puzzles: case in point: Aetherpath.

• Losing progress: never forget.

• Bosses with lame immunity mechanics: Southsun “dungeon”, anyone?

• Unblockable attacks: I don’t mind all too much that they made Malrona unreflectable, I get why they did it, but it frustrates me to no end that you can’t even block the attacks anymore. This is just an example, the new Fractals are full of attacks that are unblockable. I don’t like to be forced to memorize every kitten move in your game that can or can’t be blocked. We need consistency, not some random “will my aegis save me this time, or will I be kittened?” bullkitten.

• Undodgeable attacks: just, no.

• More gear gates: I liked that you could progress in old fractals without proper AR, because only on Maw did you need it, and your buddies could save you. Right now, if you want to progress, you better have the proper AR, or you’re not going to be able to progress. The fact that passive effects like AR are favored over skilled gameplay is frankly insulting.

That’s most of the stuff that comes to mind right now. Could be forgetting something.

Devata.6589:

Errant.1942:

Devata.6589:

maha.7902:

Except you are focusing on DPS all the time as (for example) a tank because you’re focusing on maximising your party’s damage output by holding aggro in trinity games and then dropping off as much defensive gear as possible yourself so that you can hold aggro and do a little more damage yourself. The whole focus in games is DPS and maximising it.

A tank is not focusing on DPS, a healer is no focusing on DPS. The DPSers are focusing on DPS. Sure in the end it’s damage (from those DPSers) that kills the boss but when you are tanking you have other things on your mind then DPS. In GW2 is really trying to maximize your DPS output while also staying alive. (thats why toughness is this nice extra people appreciate).

You seem to forget that dungeons and raids are a team effort. Although your tank and your healer aren’t focusing on DPS, in the end, it’s a means to an end to boost your team DPS. Same goes for current team builds. Many meta builds sacrifice personal DPS in order to boost team DPS for example.

No I did not forget that. In fact the whole discussion was about teamwork. No the team effort is to kill the enemy. Yes that means he needs damage (well thats not always true but usually). But thats still something else as that everybody is focusing on DPS. Damage per Second! In GW2 everybody is just focusing on DPS. In fact there is not much of real team effort going on. Not like it is in the HT example (or one of the many other examples)

People might not have been focusing on DPS, but their purpose in the team was to raise DPS. I don’t see how this is any different from the current situation.

Not to mention, the way GW2 works is a lot more engaging than any trinity game was. Your team utility is spread out over the entire team, everyone has his little purpose: might stacking, fury, blinds, interrupts, aegis, banners, pulling… Those are all little things that go on in organized groups that people focus on besides doing DPS. They’re all things that are meant to boost team DPS, but they’re other things too.

In a trinity game you’d have your healer which was not doing direct damage, but focusing on keeping the tank/team alive in order to keep DPS up. This wasn’t a more interesting design if you ask me. I could play a UA monk in FoW/Deep/Urgoz/DoA while completely kittenfaced drunk. As long as I was able to keep my eyes open, and had the motor functions available to click some skills every now and then, I’d be fine. I could tank drunk as well, but not as drunk as I could still UA. The role was boring as hell. In GW2, you don’t have a boring heal bot. You can play one, but one isn’t mandated by the game.

Same goes for tanking. Although it was by far the most fun role in DoA (since I could do some really funky YOLO stuff, and just goof around in general), if I wasn’t being an idiot while doing so, it was a pretty boring role that existed of pulling and balling mobs. I just made it fun. In GW2, everyone is constantly engaged in combat, which, imo, makes for a far more interesting combat system than a trinity MMO with “designated roles”.

As for not much of a team effort going on, that just proves that you are completely oblivious as to how organized groups work.

Devata.6589:

maha.7902:

Except you are focusing on DPS all the time as (for example) a tank because you’re focusing on maximising your party’s damage output by holding aggro in trinity games and then dropping off as much defensive gear as possible yourself so that you can hold aggro and do a little more damage yourself. The whole focus in games is DPS and maximising it.

A tank is not focusing on DPS, a healer is no focusing on DPS. The DPSers are focusing on DPS. Sure in the end it’s damage (from those DPSers) that kills the boss but when you are tanking you have other things on your mind then DPS. In GW2 is really trying to maximize your DPS output while also staying alive. (thats why toughness is this nice extra people appreciate).

You seem to forget that dungeons and raids are a team effort. Although your tank and your healer aren’t focusing on DPS, in the end, it’s a means to an end to boost your team DPS. Same goes for current team builds. Many meta builds sacrifice personal DPS in order to boost team DPS for example.

OP seems to be under the impression that Anet has anything to do with the tournament. Other than giving gem cards to the winning and second placed team (a gesture that is immensely appreciated by the community), they have nothing to do with it. I think Grouch said something about helping with streams or something to that extent, but the organization is completely done by [DnT] and members of the dungeon community.

As for FGS being used in a tournament setting. As long as everyone has access to the skill, it’s fair game. Not to mention, in some cases the skill is actually used as a movement booster more than a DPS skill. Case in point although, not the most common example, still.

Devata.6589:

So we got this one ‘tactic’ all over the place. You see thats why people complain about combat being sort of dull. PvE at least and WvW is very similar.

In GW1 and most other trinity games, we also had one tactic all over the place: ball and spike. Or, tank and spank, how ever you want to call it. For some reason, this was better?

Devata.6589:

“As for everything being based on DPS. This has been the same concept in every game ever.” There is a difference between DPS being the focus everywhere or DPS always having a role in every game. And then no it’s not always a focus. If we take the holy trinity example it’s very much tank, heal and DPS. That are 3 different roles that are equally important to the game. The tactic depends on the content but always needs those 3 roles. There is no focus on DPS there. No good healer means you are not likely to complete, same for tank and DPS. You need them all and so tactics resolve around them all.

And yet, you still fail to realize that the only reasons tankers and healers existed in trinity games was to maximize DPS. They existed to keep aggro from the DPSers and heal them up if need be, or heal the tanks, whatever, so the DPSers had an easier time to DPS things down. Those 3 different roles were all equally important to maximize DPS. The focus was still DPS, just in another disguise.

Devata.6589:

While not a great fan of how Tequatl is set up (because it’s in the open map and so hard to organize, but thats another topic) there are multiple roles. The stack and DPS is there but only for those hitting the toe of Tequatl. Turrets have a complete different role (yes part of there role also exist within the stack and DPS ’tactic) especially if you also take the defending of the turrets into consideration.

Guess what the turrents and defending of it ultimately results into? Increasing DPS. I was going to link you to the Hardened Scales page on wiki, because I mistakenly thought that for every stack he took less damage, but the idea still stands. If he gets 20 stacks, he becomes invulnerable. The turrents exist to 1. keep the boss vulnerable 2. keep the players alive by taking out poison fields. Both of these mechanics ensure an upkeep of DPS. It’s again in a little disguise, but it all boils down to the same idea.

Devata.6589:

I did even see some other examples in dungeons that where interesting however they where extremely simple (beginning of dredge fractal in FotM) or in the end the easiest way to beat it was again DPS.

The cage in Dredge is actually a really good example of a mechanic in game that isn’t based on DPS. DPS isn’t going to help you there much, since you’ll have to take out some dredge, but can’t kill them all, since they’ll respawn if you do. Same goes for the turret and bomb event, no DPS focus there either. But they’re more an exception than the rule.

I don’t mind mechanics like dredge that don’t let you focus on DPS, given that they’re interesting and engaging (things the dredge events aren’t all that much in my eyes, even after the changes). But, in the end, you can’t design an entire dungeon without encounters that exist of “do damage to X until it dies”. There might be mechanics in place you need to use to enhance the damage done (Bjarl for example), but in the end, it’s all the same idea: “make sure X dies”.

I like this thread.

It’s got the Baphomet stamp of approval.

Also, you’re all missing one serious point. What if Alphard is a woman who identifies as a man with a vulva?

Even if dungeons create money, it pales compared to open world generating money.

A small subset of the players actually actively does dungeons. Let’s say for every 5 dungeon players, there’s 45 non-dungeon players. Rough estimate of 10% dungeoneers, which is probably a pretty generous estimate.

Let’s say our trusty dungeroons do a couple of dungeon paths. Let’s ignore Arah for a second, and assume an average dungeon party. Let’s say they manage to do AC p1, AC p3, SE p1 and TA up in 1 hour (again, a very generous estimate for the average dungeon party). This in total will generate 5.2 gold + drops per player. Let’s say merching all the drops nets around 80 silver, so we can round it up to 6 gold in that hour. Again a pretty generous estimate. This means our trusty dungeroonies have generated about 30 gold in that hour while playing dungeons.

Let’s say our 45 play-how-I-wanties have been playing open world as well, doing events, getting drops, etc. How poorly need they be rewarded in order to break even with our trusty dungeroonero’s? They would need to generate a mere 66.66 silver per person in that hour to break even with the dungeroofies. I’m pretty sure one can generate a lot more money (I’m not talking about mats and the likes, but money from merching drops) in that 1 hour timespan that a simple 66 silver and 66 copper.

Oh but wait, there is more. Once our dungerdoodles have done all their daily paths, their money generating crimes are done. They can’t do any more horrible deeds to GW2’s poor economy. But in the meantime, all your open-worlderoons are still generating gold non-stop, by a lot bigger margin than dungeon runners are.

TL;DR leave the dungeroofiedoodles alone

Devata.6589:

Errant.1942:

Devata.6589:

I play the game but there is no real tactics going on. I just do what everybody does.

So, what you’re really saying is that you have no idea how tactics work and why they work, because you “just do what everybody does”.

Because, when I play the game, I know what I’m doing (or at least, I usually do), and why I’m executing the tactics. It’s not just “stack and DPS”, it’s pulling, might stacking, blind spamming, timed Aegis and condi cleanse, proper use of CC, proper DPS rotations…

Oow I understand just fine how and why that works. I also explained that multiple time in this thread I think. And one of main the reasons it works is because everything is so much based on DPS, the stacking is indeed for the buffing. And thats basically how you can defeat 90% of the content in this game. And thats what people are complaining about if they say it’s all about DPS. It does not make that any better if you understand why it works.

I do but does that make the combat more interesting because I do? Does it make teamwork more interesting because you understand why it works? Does it make the fight more intense because you know it works? Does it make the content more fun because you know why it works? No sorry it doesn’t.

But you said there is no tactics going on (I left the one bolded sentence). So, you’re saying that stacking buffs, using terrain to your advantage, proper use of utilities in order to mitigate damage, etc, are not tactics?

Or are they just not tactics because you don’t like them?

As for everything being based on DPS. This has been the same concept in every game ever. Every META team build in every game ever focused on bringing as much DPS as they possibly can in order to beat the content faster. The way it’s executed is just different.

I’ll refer to GW1 as my example, and to the area I played the most and know the best: DoA.

The teambuild existed of 2 tanks, a rezbot monk, a bonder elementalist and 4 spikers. Now, the builds and tactics in DoA changed a lot over the years. I watched many of them change, so I know why they changed as well. As for the basics: most of DoA existed tanks doing pulls of large amounts of enemies and balling them up in various ways, and then spiking them down in a couple of seconds.

Back in the days, when there was still a lot of fine tuning going on and you didn’t have a large player base of experienced spikers, spikes would be bad. So people used to take a CC skill ‘Deep Freeze’, which was a horrible skill, but it CC’ed the enemies and slowed them down, so when spikes went bad, people still had some extra time to spike the enemies before they reached the team.

This got changed eventually, because the skill was a huge energy drain, a waste of a second profession, and you could easily swap it out for more DPS.

Same goes for the rezbot bar. It used to be full-on healing and support, but it wasn’t needed. Really, that bar needed to have 4 skills on it, all the other ones were open for more useful stuff. So, they changed the bar around to take skills that gave DPS, or could speed up certain parts with shadow steps, etc. Same goes for the spiker bars. They got updated all the time to switch for more DPS.

That’s simply how a game works. Once you’re familiar with the basics, you’re going to fine tune in order to increase your DPS, or take utility to speed up the run (in DoA this was mainly done through splits, hence also the 2 tanks).

People seem to cry doom and gloom because the games endgame is evolving to optimize DPS and push clear times down through various tactics. But that’s just the natural process of any game, the same happened in GW1, and the same will happen if Anet releases new content: it will take some time to get all the mechanics down, maybe there will be some struggles, but once we figure it all out, it will be back to optimizing for DPS and pushing clear times.

Good luck finding me a game where this didn’t happen.

Darkeon.2389:

and values speed over amusement.

Brace yourself, because the following idea might completely melt your brain…

are you ready?

okay, here it goes…

it’s a crazy idea, I know, but bare with me…

maybe…

just maybe…

like, really just maybe…

some people…

and I know this is going to sound insane…

but maybe…

some people…

get their amusement…

now, wait for it, right…

because this is mindblowing…

maybe…

some people…

get their amusement…

from doing things fast…

Get it.

Xae Isareth.1364:

Errant.1942:

Xae Isareth.1364:

but if they choose say, Arah P4, then we might see something interesting.

Yeah, 5 minutes of ranging Melandru sure sounds super interesting. Especially seeing how melee tactics involve quite a bit of risk, and people don’t really want to have people die in that path. 4 manning Grenth is easy, 3 manning becomes obnoxious and 2 manning is going to be a serious pain in the kitten . Not so much because it’s hard to do the Wraith (Wethospu solo’ed it, so technically it’s possible, but I think it’s safe to say not everyone is Wethospu) but because dodging the lifesteal is going to get harder and harder once you’ve got less people.

That’s the whole point. There’s a risk reward consideration there. You can choose to take risk, and have a chance to get ahead of the other team, or choose to play safe, and hope the other team screws up.

That doesn’t exist in say, AC3, because apart from maybe the first spider pull, there is just the one speedrun tactic, and zero risk of death.

Besides, there’s no excitement in watching AC3. You know how it’s gonna play out, no one’s gonna screw up, and it’s a dungeon you’ve played two billion times already. It’s about exciting to watch as watching your own back hand.

I wasn’t having a stab at you, I was having a stab at Arah p4 and the fact that forced ranging and time gating at Grenth is horrible design.

Same goes for AC p3. The time gating at the burrows makes the path pretty terrible to me.

That said, I hardly doubt anyone is going to pick AC p3 as their chosen path, since there isn’t really much you can do to get an edge over your opponent.

Tommyknocker.6089:

I’m in a guild and play a necro main. And although I have been invited to do a few runs if they don’t want to do a LFG, I usually bow out because I find the mechanisms both tiring and monotonous, and would rather fight in WvW where every day is a different experience.

“No, I don’t want content added that I won’t like, but other people will, whilst I already have content that I enjoy and that caters to my needs.”

Get it.

Xae Isareth.1364:

but if they choose say, Arah P4, then we might see something interesting.

Yeah, 5 minutes of ranging Melandru sure sounds super interesting. Especially seeing how melee tactics involve quite a bit of risk, and people don’t really want to have people die in that path. 4 manning Grenth is easy, 3 manning becomes obnoxious and 2 manning is going to be a serious pain in the kitten . Not so much because it’s hard to do the Wraith (Wethospu solo’ed it, so technically it’s possible, but I think it’s safe to say not everyone is Wethospu) but because dodging the lifesteal is going to get harder and harder once you’ve got less people.

Devata.6589:

I play the game but there is no real tactics going on. I just do what everybody does. Have a zerker set (and s knigth’s set mainly for WvW). And when playing with a group it is mainly stack and DPS. I don’t consider that tactic but not doing that will result in a lot of negative reactions. What is sort of understandable as thats how it works in this game. But no I do not consider that tactics so if it comes to tactics I do the same as everybody.. nothing really because there is no requirement for tactics it’s just stack and DPS.

So, what you’re really saying is that you have no idea how tactics work and why they work, because you “just do what everybody does”.

Because, when I play the game, I know what I’m doing (or at least, I usually do), and why I’m executing the tactics. It’s not just “stack and DPS”, it’s pulling, might stacking, blind spamming, timed Aegis and condi cleanse, proper use of CC, proper DPS rotations…

Jerus.4350:

Errant.1942:

@Bezagron

You keep saying that there should be dedicated support that needs to look at support before DPS. But that’s simply not how it works. People will always take the bare minimum they need for support and spec full offense after they covered all their bases. This has always been done in any MMO with a META ever.Even in GW1, in DoA, we had 2 backline support roles, and one of them took certain extra skills to speed up some encounters, depending on which team build you ran. In fact, the META right now is having that person take 1 skill that’s useful in exactly 4 spots in the entire area. Yet, they take it, because it speeds up those 4 encounters enough to make it worth taking that skill, and an extra support skill would be redundant anyway.

People take defensive support in high-level Fractals. A hammer Guardian for perma prot, blind spam on multiple characters usually. Other than that, I don’t really see what more support you need. Forcing people to take support is not good design. Right now, anyone can run anything. You have complete freedom. I really don’t understand why people want to deviate from full freedom in order to get their niche satisfied.

The bolded, I have to say the first line is incorrect based on the following lines. As you say you cover the bases… that IS treating support first, but simply stopping that as soon as you are covered.

A guardian/mesmer is there for support first, and DPS second. Just so happen that with the game as it is, we can run full glass cannon builds with only a few concessions to our DPS in order to have that support we need.

Mesmer can run 66002 or 64004 for DPS, but when they want more reflects they’ll bounce to 64040 or something like that. And the whole time they’re choosing their weapons/traits based on primarily the support they bring with mantras going in the default spots if nothing is needed.

Same for guard. I run hammer so I will go 55040 for max DPS, but I rarely have the opportunity to run that as I usually want Consecrations which means 35042 at a minimum. But I also usually want to cover condition removal in my group personally. So I drop to 33044. The DPS additions are dropped instantly when the utility and support is needed. I only bring the max DPS when I know I’m safe to do so.

Support first, DPS in every spot that you don’t need to choose the support option.

You just validated exactly what I said. Take the bare minimum you need, maybe add some extra leeway in case you don’t trust yourself enough, and spec for full offense after that. You gave several examples to prove exactly that point. Hammer 5/5/0/4/0 is full DPS, but sometimes you need MoC, so you spec 3/5/0/4/2, but besides that 2 in Virtues, you still go full DPS, which is pretty much exactly what I said.

It works the same in every MMO there is, even trinity MMO’s. You take the minimum defense you need, in the form of tanks and backline, and once you got the defense you need, you fill your party with DPSers.

The only difference now is that everyone is a hybrid support/DPS role. How is this bad?

Dual.8953:

First, I think that hard mode shouldn’t offer more gold and mats than normal mode. Hard mode shouldn’t be something people go to farm, but rather a place for players to test their skill.
Rather that gold and such the rewards in hard mode should be status symbols. Unique skins and titles.
I think the best way to distribute them would be track rewards rather than tokens or RNG.

Yeah, if that is how it’s implemented, people will run it once, just to get the achievement or title, or get the reward from it they want (provided they actually want one of the rewards, given the effort), and then never ever touch it again.

You might think it’s noble to run a path purely for the challenge of it, but if it’s not properly rewarding, people aren’t going to run it. The Aetherpath in TA provided some artificial challenge, which was poorly implemented. Most of it exists of pointlessly long puzzles. And, I don’t mind a puzzle in a dungeon path, in fact, most dungeon paths have a puzzle in them (orb in Arah p3/4, CoF p1 gate, CoE lasers and the button in p1…) and they’re just fine. The thing is, Aetherpath included too many puzzles, artificially slowing you down and making the path a lot less interesting.

It also included some anti-melee mechanics, as in, thing that blow up in your face when you die. Also, a lot of stuns, confusion etc, all things that would slow down a melee zerker party.

Remind me again how popular the Aetherpath is.

(on a side note, bring TAFU back, I miss Vevina, she was actually and interesting fight)

Devata.6589:

Well obviously everybody complain about the fact that it’s all so heavily focused on DPS in stead of some good team-play and different roles, does not consider stack and DPS to be fun. But sure there will also be people whole like just ‘brainless’ zerging and DPSing. Others like fights that require some more tactics.

If running organized zerker tactics is so easy, why do people always complain about zerkers being dead? I don’t get it, people always claim 2 things: 1. zerker takes no skill and there is no risk/reward 2. zerkers are always dead. It can be one, or the other, but it can’t be both. Unless it actually does have risk/reward and bad players can’t pull it off.

Also, running in organized groups isn’t mindless zerging. It’s spamming blinds, timing Aegis, stacking might, keeping vuln up, keeping the proper buffs on your group, etc.

Just because it doesn’t happen in PUG groups doesn’t mean that everybody plays as unorganized as you do.

part 2

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I mean, we could also say because I spent the arduous amount of time and effort to run Prophecies with only henchmen through to the end for every mission, I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about how it was dead simple up until Thunderhead Keep? Or because I never went into GvG I don’t know anything about the “true” game of Guild Wars?

Prophecies was dead simple even after Thunderhead Keep, but that is, taking into account power creep and heroes. You’ll never hear me argue that prophecies was dead simple using only henchmen, because it wasn’t. Mainly because the henchmen were atrocious. So, I guess I’ll congratulate you for the effort, but you’re failing to realize why people say those things. You seem agitated that people called prophecies dead simple, while it was. It wasn’t if you put up arbitrary rules to make it more difficult, but when people say it was easy, they implicitly imply “when using heroes and meta builds”.

The same goes for when I talk about GW1 end game. When I say it was fun and rewarding, I implicitly imply “when speedclearing with an experienced team.” If you did UW with only heroes in NM without consets, it was brutally hard, mindcrushingly unforgiving and not even close to rewarding enough for the effort put in. Same in DoA. If you ran it with heroes, you’d run into a lot of trouble, and you wouldn’t be rewarded as much as elsewhere in the game.

That means that if you say “well, it was never rewarding for me, because I didn’t run it the way you did” doesn’t suddenly imply the areas weren’t rewarding. That means they weren’t rewarding if you choose to make them unrewarding by inefficient gameplay. That’s not my fault, nor Anets fault.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Likewise, should I expect awesome rewards and gold to rain from on high based on the word of someone who played it like you did? Saying the rewards are awesome, following it with “but I had two characters at the same time, so it was doubled” sort of strikes me to wonder whether it was rewarding because you had two characters so it was double-normal, or was it really lucrative because it was initially highly so and you were doubling that?

I never two-boxed UW/FoW/DoA/Deep/Urgoz/… I only referred to that for chest running, and my buddy who did Bogroots that way. I really don’t see how you tied the lucrativity of DoA to dual-account chest running.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It’s hard to tell. All I know is I never made good money doing it, semi-casually over the course of a couple months. (Which is to say, as often as I could make the time and align with people I trusted.)

No offense, but if you didn’t make any money doing any of the elite areas in GW1, you probably did it wrong. Although, given, you could lose money, if you kept failing, due to having to pop consets, but assuming a victorious run, any of the elite areas in GW1 would reward you at least decently.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

. . . no, I like your opinion just fine. I don’t agree with it, and my personal experience hasn’t matched. And it still didn’t address anything else I raised in my posts, namely how the exclusive rewards were . . . in the end, either farming for cool skins or gold farming through selling stuff off.

In a game that has always been advertised as being a cosmetics-based game, what else do you expect from elite areas other than shiny skins and titles? There really isn’t much more such a game can offer, is there?

I didn’t address it because I don’t see it as a problem. You seem to do, there really isn’t much I can say to change your mind, nor is there anything you can say to change mine. The benefits I see in the model of being able to sell your drops are the exact downsides you see, so not much point in arguing something we won’t agree on.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

One of which has been what people really have said they want out of endgame content, because they can goldfarm elsewhere with better results. I’m still not sure how people would appreciate skins as the exclusive rewards except as a means to get more gold.

The difference with gold farming elsewhere is that gold farming in open world is pretty mind numbing and easy. Call me entitled, or an elitist, but I like content that the average player can’t beat without putting effort in, or being sufficiently skilled that rewards people that actually can beat the content. That’s why I liked DoA. And even there, PUGs could still clear it by moshing their way through the area in NM spamming Destructive was Glaive.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I didn’t say it was different from mine, so it must be wrong. What is it with putting words in my mouth for disagreeing? I said, and you even quoted it, this isn’t on par with what other players did. (Which, from memory, was devoting a lot of time learning to micro the Hero builds they had going on.)

You said my view of the game was distorted because I had a different experience than you had. Calling my view distorted (in my eyes) is a way of invalidating my opinion. You can disagree with this sentiment, but that’s why I said you discarded my opinion. So I don’t really think I put words in your mouth.

Lunar Sunset.8742:

I think most MMO gamers understand GW2 is pretty much a clusterkitten of spamming skills with as little coordination as possible and still be able to get the “job” in decent timing. This game is a boring DPS race no matter what, with a meta it’s just a boring fast DPS race. I don’t think many people care about this stupid tournament that proves nothing other than I have gud muscle memory.

Can’t wait to see your team compete. I’m sure you’ll rock our world with your clusterkitten of spamming skills with as little coordination as possible.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Yet I never saw any ‘unique’ weapon skins drop out of Eye dungeon chests. I saw them out of the Zaishen chest, but that required me to go farm keys. And they were terrible stats, so I kept them for looks. Also “farming Bogroots with four accounts” is not a standard, usual player. Not to mention the word “farming”, which assumes he probably got more junk than good stuff.

I’m very aware that what my friend did was far from the norm. But if you never saw a single weapon skin from the EotN dungeon chests, my guess would be you didn’t run them very often. I never got any decent skins with good stats as a drop either, but I didn’t mind as much, because I did the dungeons more for fun than for money. I wanted money, I’d run DoA. I saw a lot of people get nice drops though. If running with a full party of 8, at least once every 3-4 dungeon runs (worst case scenario here), I’d see one of the skins unique to the dungeon drop (not necessarily the expensive ones).

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I ran it because it was one of the last challenges I hadn’t actually passed. I am glad I didn’t run it for the Ecto because I rarely saw it. Or “sweet drops”. Usually I just wound up storing trophies in case Nick wanted them.

Depends how you ran it. If you did it in speedclear teams, depending on what area you ran, you’d get quite some ecto’s. Pools, pits, plains, wastes, those 4 areas would drop a lot of ecto’s. If you ran vale/lab/mountain only, then yes, I’d understand you didn’t see much ecto. Or if you ran some balanced way team that cleared every area as a team, you wouldn’t see much ecto’s drop either, because it got shared over the whole party.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

All fine and good, but that rewarding note is only good for people who were good at running DoA and would allow people along they didn’t know. And, again, the rewards were mostly cosmetic (very nice looking, though) and the cash could be lucrative . . . but then, so could other options. As noted, platinum wasn’t exceptionally hard to earn, it ranged from “time consuming” to “you lucky son of a skritt”.

No, the 60-80k/run in HM was regardless of clearing time. If it’d be on an hourly basis, with back-to-back runs, it would be 120-160k/hour for experienced guilds, 80-106k/hour for mediocre guilds, and 72-96k/hour for bad guilds. So, it was available for anyone with the skill to clear the area. As for allowing people along, there wasn’t much to making a mesmer, getting it to the end of Nightfall, gear up appropriately, and applying to a DoA guild to learn the basics. If you wanted, you could even work your way up from the mediocre guilds to the pro’s.

I don’t get why people complain about the exclusiveness of some high-end guilds. If you don’t want to make the sacrifices they ask you to make in order to run with them, don’t expect to get the benefits of running with them.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Again, dual accounts isn’t something normal players generally do. But I did make profits on chest runs once my luck rose high enough for my Lockpick retention to be roughly 50+%.

Even with single account running, I’d still make money, I just did it with 2 accounts because I could open more chests that way.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

It’s not really rose-colored glasses, correct. Really it’s more of a distorted lens since your experience isn’t quite on par with other players’ experiences. Especially if you still ‘boxed’ two accounts.

I could discard your opinion using the exact same logic. “Your opinion doesn’t count, because your experience was different from mine.” is not really a sound argument.

“People wanting content where Berserker sucks should remember that it needs be so hard, that they will cry, not just a river, but a huge ocean.” – Wethospu

That aside, forcing a Hard Mode that ‘counters the META’ isn’t going to solve much. If people like the Hard Mode, they’ll just find a new META to complete it as efficiently as possible, and you’ll just have 2 different META’s, and then people will complain about that META as well, and we’ll be full circle.

Also, I don’t see how artificially forcing people to wear more defensive gear, thus stretching out fights makes anything interesting. Forcing people to range isn’t very interesting either. Look at the Ooze boss in Arah p1, or Melandru in Arah p4, and look how much love those bosses. Hint: they don’t.

@Bezagron

You keep saying that there should be dedicated support that needs to look at support before DPS. But that’s simply not how it works. People will always take the bare minimum they need for support and spec full offense after they covered all their bases. This has always been done in any MMO with a META ever. Even in GW1, in DoA, we had 2 backline support roles, and one of them took certain extra skills to speed up some encounters, depending on which team build you ran. In fact, the META right now is having that person take 1 skill that’s useful in exactly 4 spots in the entire area. Yet, they take it, because it speeds up those 4 encounters enough to make it worth taking that skill, and an extra support skill would be redundant anyway.

People take defensive support in high-level Fractals. A hammer Guardian for perma prot, blind spam on multiple characters usually. Other than that, I don’t really see what more support you need. Forcing people to take support is not good design. Right now, anyone can run anything. You have complete freedom. I really don’t understand why people want to deviate from full freedom in order to get their niche satisfied.

Ariete The Phoenix.8276:

Are we allowed to use the executioner axe?

I think that’s covered in the GWSCR ruleset. If not, Cookie should probably update that.

Vayne.8563:

I found at least dungeon rewards in Guild Wars 1 to be meaningless, even in hard mode. Do a hard mode dungeon get a couple of gold items you could sell as unided golds, always hoping for their rare drop.

I wanted a frog scepter. I ran bogroot growths more than dozens of times. Probably closer to hundreds. Never saw hide nor hair of a frog scepter.

Most of the rewards I got from that dungeon were pretty much worthless.

And if you weren’t solo farming the Underworld to get ectos, and played it with a full party, your chances of getting one weren’t that good.

The time spent to get set up and get through stuff was a lot longer and if you wiped you had to go in again. You didn’t get a gold for doing a 12 minute dungeon run in Guild Wars 1, you paid a platinum to enter FoW or the Underworld, and if you wiped you were kicked.

To some people that’s just more rewarding I guess.

Then there were the lockpicks to open chests to get a purple or a yellow and break the lockpick.

Those who say Guild Wars 1 was more rewarding must have been playing a different game than I.

The drop chances of EotN dungeon weapons were actually pretty decent. I saw a lot of them drop. A friend of mine even got double Froggy drops at least 4 times, but then again, he farmed Bogroots with 4 accounts, while his buddy did the same, and they made stupendous amounts of money doing so. Upwards of 1000e/week.

As for UW and FoW requiring 1 platinum and kicking you out if you screwed up, it was something that was mainly meant to keep solo farmers at bay that would farm the first mobs in every instance and go back. Seriously though, 1 platinum wasn’t a lot of money, so paying it to enter FoW/UW wasn’t that big of a deal.

UW wasn’t very rewarding in the end, because of time taken/consumables and bad drops if you ran the wrong area. I knew people that usually lost money doing a UW run. They just kept doing it because they loved the area. They weren’t in it for the money.

DoA was very rewarding in fact, and wasn’t an RNG slot machine. You needed a maximum of 4 full HM runs, and you would have a tormented weapon. Usually it was around 3 runs, because of drops, and 4 runs would even net you an additional 5 gemsets that you could sell if you wanted, which is 1/3 of another armbrace. We calculated once that a single DoA run would net you about 70 platinum on average per run, usually going upwards of 80-90k for the people that looted after the run.

As for chest running being unrewarding, I actually made money doing dual/triple account chest runs. And it was pretty good money too, nothing compared to running DoA, but I didn’t care, since I just enjoyed chestrunning (20k+ chests over 2 accounts).

displacedTitan.6897:

Its the same rose-colored glasses people put on when they talk about WvW compared to DaoC, they tend to gloss over the horrible balance and tedium and just remember the good times they had. I bet if you could go back to those forums from the time people were running them they would look at lot like these forums today, people saying Ultima Online was THE BEST GAME EVER and how DaoC had so many problems and was unrewarding/casual, etc. etc.

It’s really not rose-colored glasses, or at least not for me. I went back and played GW1 for a few months earlier this year due to being jaded from the Fractured patch. It was still fun to run said areas.

Zaxares.5419:

I want the Fractal Sword, personally. :/

I’ve gotten 5. I even have one sitting in my bank from before Fractured, because I didn’t know what character to put it on any more…

I don’t want any more Swords (5) or Tridents (3)…

I do have an Axe, which is nice I guess, but I don’t even use it anymore due to stacking sigils becoming redundant…

ODB.6891:

Simple solution, don’t stay in a group with more than one person with the same guild tag. I make it a habit to check guild tags and quit groups like that immediately. Too much hassle to deal with. Either they play a certain way and expect everyone else to mind read and follow, or you get shenanigans like this kick and replace for a guildie at the last minute. Pugs should be pugs…not some partial guild run looking to take advantage. Better to start over immediately than deal with wasted time and no reward at the end.

I’m constantly scanning pug groups I join for warning signs to bail (extremely low dps, obvious signs that the rest of the group is on voice chat instead of in-game chat, more than one with the same guild tag, bad weapon choice, buffs indicating low dps builds, notoriously bad classes for fractals). Learn the warning signs and what you are willing to tolerate and your pug experience will get better.

Your loss, I’ve carried PUGs with guildies and friends through <40min Fractals before. Blew the minds of some when we used the DnT tactics on Old Tom and melted him without even using the crystals.

I’m also highly confused why you think extremely low DPS and bad weapon choices are indicators of people in the same guild, and on voice chat. Being on voice chat and being in a guild team usually get you very high DPS and decent builds, unless you run with bad guilds.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

But most of the rewards were skins, or ways to get skins, and the person I just replied to seemed to think that wasn’t enough.

So what is?

For me personally? Because you seem so hell-bent on me defining what rewarding would be, I’ll try to answer it.

For me, rewarding, challenging endgame content would be content that’s hard to complete in an unorganized/unskilled group, but fast/modestly hard in a skilled/organized group. Meaning that you need to learn the area to get proficient at it. Arah is something that comes close to this. It’s possible to do all the paths (bar p4) in <15minutes with an organized, skilled team, but it’s going to be hell to complete in an unskilled/unorganized team.

Rewarding, meaning for me that the amount of skill needed to proficiently complete the area is reflected in the rewards it gives, relative to content that doesn’t take much skill to complete. A good comparison to this is DoA. It was very rewarding if you completed it fast enough (~30-35mins for the teams I usually ran with), and it was more rewarding than all other content in the game, barring high-end GvG tournaments. But then again, I spent a lot of time learning all the roles and the area in order to be able to clear the content so fast.

The problem right now is that most content is either not proportionally rewarding, since content that takes barely any skill will reward you very similarly to the challenging content. And the few rewards you can actually get are usually accountbound, meaning you can’t make a profit out of it. Add to that the way most rewards are time gated (although with the current design, that’s reasonable).

I know many people will scold me for wanting to be able to do endgame areas to make money by selling the stuff I earn, but I don’t see this as a bad thing. It’s how I enjoyed playing GW1, and besides the benefits it yields me, it also benefits people that don’t want to play challenging content, but do want some of the cosmetic rewards. It’s a win-win in my eyes.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Boneheart.3561:

Errant.1942:

ARWEN never proposed anything like that…

ARWEN hasn’t proposed anything. This entire thread is bait.

It’s nice discussion, mostly. I mean, if you get past the people who think “having something of end-game difficulty” is going to automatically make the stuff they put in worth getting. That didn’t even work for War in Kryta, let alone Underworld and Domain of Anguish.

What, are you kidding me? The reason I got into DoA in the first place was the fact that it was so rewarding. The reason I fell in love with the area was because I actually enjoyed it a lot. After a while I was so stupidly rich (for reasons other than farming DoA, although DoA provided the starting capital) that running DoA for cash wasn’t a motivator anymore. And it wasn’t for many of my friends either. A lot of us were so rich that we ran out of ways to spend it. We kept running DoA though, not for the money, but because we actually liked the area. There were a lot of people like that, and if you would go back to GW1 right now, you’d find that there are still guilds who run DoA and who are very active 24/7. Tell me why people would run an elite area in a dead game if they didn’t actually like the area?

Jack.1469:

Seems to me the only solution at this point is to make kicking impossible to do after a certain point to discourage this.

Then this would be abused by people going afk after that certain point and leeching their way to completion.

The system isn’t perfect, but neither is an alternative system.

There will always be a way to abuse the system, and to be fair, the only way they can improve on the current system is to make the vote/kick require 3 votes instead of 2. But changing it so you can’t kick people after a certain point is not going to solve anything. It will just introduce a new form of abuse.

Also, don’t forget, you’re just hearing this guy’s version of the story. What if the guild says he was actually a terrible player, and they kept asking him to step up his game, and they kicked him after he refused to change his playstyle? I’ve kicked people for this reason, and it’s basically the only reason I’ll kick someone. And you need to be pretty abysmal and persistent if you want me to go as far as kicking you.

draconx.3102:

Losing your progress is an important part of the fractal experience.

This was perfect. Thank you. Never forget.

MasterYoda.8563:

stobie.2134:

People demanding end game content generally demand the accompanying ‘better gear than everyone else,’ which leads to another gear based mmo. No thanks.

That’s what I don’t understand with many of these threads where players want to change gw2 into other games that they’ve played instead of enjoying this one for what it is.

ARWEN never proposed anything like that, if anything, he proposed to complete opposite. I’m not saying his message was delivered perfectly (far from), but I agree with most of it.

He was referring back to GW1 end-game content, which wasn’t gear gated, time gated or a deliberate grind. It was fun (at least to me), challenging, rewarding, and here’s a shocker, completely optional.

And before anyone accuses me of having nostalgia tainted glasses, after the Fractured update, I actually quit GW2 and went back to GW1, and played all the elite areas again, and still loved every minute of it, despite the fact that the rewards are pretty worthless to me now.

GW1 end-game had the virtue of having every reward being sellable, meaning that someone who didn’t want to bother doing the area could just buy it using money acquired elsewhere (although some people might disagree that this is a good thing, I hardly think the RNG-gated Fractal weapons or the dungeon token based Dungeon weapons are so much better, since neither really hold prestige).

As for the areas themselves, without going into the “ehrmegurd, Shadow Form was broken, and the team builds were gimmicky” debate, they required teamwork and knowledge of the area, and were really unforgiving when it came to dieing (as in wipe = you’re done).

Some of them had some pretty nifty and creative mechanics (Deep, Urgoz, 4 Horsemen, …). Some were maybe a titbit too rewarding (DoASC 30min runs), but it required a really experienced team, so I personally think it wasn’t unbalanced. Especially seeing how the disproportionate rewards came from the time spent clearing rather than the area itself. As it was pretty unrewarding for people who choose safer, but slower tactics.

So no, ARWEN isn’t asking for gear-gated raids that require tons of grind. He’s asking for a format like GW1, where you had rewarding, optional, challenging end-game areas that required teamwork to be cleared fast, with rewards that aren’t account/soulbound so people who don’t want to do the content shouldn’t be gated from the rewards.

Dub.1273:

Please ban everything but ac, ta, se and arah. As a side product, that bans all un-fun dungeons.

Then how could someone choose HotW p2 or p3 just to troll the other teams?

Grifenqt.3401:

Nick.6972:

High FOTMs rewarding? Nice joke.

Again.
FoTM 50 has highest drop chance of ascended gear/infused rings available in-game. So yes – its rewarding based on how game is “low-rewarding”.

A couple of things:

First of all, level 30+ can still drop uninfused rings (which should have been fixed months ago, or at least an explanation should have been given why they updated this). And uninfused rings are pretty worthless.

Secondly, although yes, Fractals has the highest chance of dropping Ascended weapon/armor boxes, there is still RNG tied to the boxes. I’ve got a Healer’s chest in my bank that I’m never going to open, because I don’t use armor sets with Healing power in it. Maybe if I ever decided to start doing WvW (not a very big chance), I might use it for the Celestial stats, but other than that, I have no use for it.

A lot of people who play Fractals only really need Raider’s chests, but guess what, if you get an armor chest, there’s only a 1/4 chance you’ll get that chest, because you also have Defender’s, Healer’s and Malicious. None of these give armor stats that I am interested in. I can’t use them. So, even if I did get an armor chest, I’ve only got a 1/4 chance I’ll actually use it.

The RNG on Ascended weapon boxes is even worse. There are 19 different weapon stats. Only 2 of these are stats I’d even bother using on any of my characters: Berserker’s and Assassin’s. Any other weapon stat is practically useless to me. I did get a Rabbid chest once that I used to give my warrior a Longbow (a weapon I’ll most likely never use, but if I ever would, it would be in a condi solo build, in which case, it’s kinda nice). So, that’s a 2/19 chance I’ll even use the weapon box.

So, using the data from the spreadsheet some people are keeping, which says that Fractal lvl50 has a 9.09% chance to give a weapon box, and a 12.73% chance to give an armor box, that gives me a total chance of 0.95% chance I’ll get a useful weapon and a 3.2% chance I’ll get a useful armor chest. The weapon drop rates are about 4% for lvl49 and 1.83% for lvl50 (but it’s a small sample size, so I’ll say a 3% overall). So, that all added together, means that I’ve got a grand total of around 7% chance a lvl50 Fractal will give me something useful. That is, if I don’t get another freaking Fractal Sword (5 and counting), or another skin I already got.

Tell me again how rewarding Fractal lvl50 is.

Honestly, I’m liking the drop rates for Ascended boxes, but the drop rates for weapons are disgustingly low…

I haven’t seen a weapon since I got a Trident a few days after the Fractured patch..

I’m not very lucky when it comes to skins either. I’ve gotten 5 swords (all pre-Fractured), 3 tridents (one post-Fractured, but it isn’t a skin), 1 warhorn, 1 axe and 1 spear. I actually have an untransmuted sword still in my bank because I couldn’t find another character to put it on.

Also, rings, so many rings…

But, that’s not the point of my post. To be quite honest, the update to the drops has been fairly decent. I’ve gotten 2 weapon boxes (Assassin’s and Rabid) and 3 armor boxes since the update (2x Defender and 1x Healer, so kind of useless, but still).

So, yes, it’s still RNG, but I think it’s a pretty decent chance to get something nice, and when they open up higher levels, the chances will go up even more.

Agreed. If you’re going to put new skins in boxes give us the option to just BUY the skins in the gem store as well.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

are you matching the proper mine defuse skill to the appropriate mine? An icon over the mine should match the icon of the defuse skill.

Yessir I am! I’ll try and make a video tonight.

Invictus.1503:

Mine works just fine. It is a target skills so if you have fast casting on make sure you are targeting on the mine properly.

Well this is the problem! It’s a ground targeted skill and it’s never explicitly SAID anywhere that the skills are ground targeted! So if you always play with fast-cast targeting on there’s no way to figure this out! Might be really nice if one of the NPCs or the skill mouseovers would point this out

Is it just me or does it seem like the defuse skills simply DO NOT WORK on a majority of the mines in the solo instance of the Canach fight? Am I doing something wrong or what? I’m standing RIGHT NEXT to a RED mine, AFTER using scan and I’m facing towards the mine. I use the defuse skill and NOTHING happens. This seems to be the case with at least 75% of the mines. What gives Anet?

Aries.9528:

Karizee it‘s a server for China mainland its not Asia server.Its different.China server only has simplified chinese but Asia server will have at least Korean and Traditional Chinese these two languages.

There will not be a server located on the Asia mainland for playing with US/European players. There will be completely localized separate servers for Korea and China.

They’re already doing closed betas in Korea and China for separate servers over there. Do you know how to use Google?

Those maps arne’t leaks and they aren’t new: they’re ancient maps that were DAT mined back in beta by those of us who knew how to do it. They’re almost certainly not completed maps and will never show up ingame. It’s up for debate as to whether or not they’re even WvW maps, it’s fairly commonly thought that they’re maps of the mists as a whole (WvW + HoTM + Fractals + any new stuff).

As for the armor skins, they showed up in the DAT files after the last patch. Those are just the models (tracking down the textures to go with them is a pain but its being worked on) but there are a few associated text strings that imply an air-flight themed zone to go with them.

Would be much better if you actually researched the posts on reddit from a year and a half ago where they were released instead of reposting them on the official forums sigh.