Guild Wars 2

Ordika.9513:

This was something that annoyed me to no end. No only are there very few waypoints for such large maps, but then you allow almost all of them to be contested 50% of the time making death a very large penalty in terms of time sink. Which exacerbates the death of the main draw for me on core game, which was freedom to explore.

In the core game I could take risks and not worry about dying because I could generally rez close to my location and it wasn’t to much of a time sink to get back to where I was. But HoT is not explorer friendly in that you don’t have the ability to get back quickly nor the time to just stop and analyze your surroundings.

HoT, and Dry Top and Silverwastes before it, could basically be summed up as ‘Orr II: BOHICA’. They all have that same philosophy that makes exploration very challenging at best, and screamingly frustrating at worst, and also makes it such that a sparsely populated map is death. I feel for anyone trying to even just do the HoT story once PoF comes out and the HoT maps become ghost towns.

Though on the plus side, if you get comfortable with HoT maps, the vanilla maps feel like EZ mode when you visit them.

Eggshells.1748:

I’m not seeing it .. I saw the A Donari pointed out.

Sadly the stills make it less obvious. In game, not only is it a texture mismatch, but they don’t meet properly, so you get specks of background peeking through now and them. Most obvious on light backgrounds (moving the character on the login screen makes it look like she has a blinking LED belt the way that seam twinkles.)

Donari.5237:

I can see the seam you mention but what draws my attention is the A in a circle on her belly (an illusion made from pattern/shading/muscles). She has an ANet brand!

Yeah, who knew the Sylvari went in for body modification huh? So many of them are branded there.

Slightly better image quality here.
(Sorry for the minor flood of posts, this has been bugging me since launch.)

I should note, the screenshot compression actually makes the seam somewhat less obnoxious, if the forum would let me upload the bitmap screen cap I have it becomes a bit more obvious and close to what I see in game.

I am speaking, of course, of the visible seam on character models in certain armor. I can understand if there is some mismatch with piecemeal armor, but even fully matched sets can have a prominent visible seam, like the image attached. This has been an issue marring an otherwise excellent visual presentation for some time now, and it is a shame it has gone on for so long.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Not everybody would be interested to replay an area that they have already done for 0 rewards.

ANet has to decide if this game is for casual or hardcore players. I will not buy HoT if it is only for hardcore players. They only need to declare it so.

I am an old man with a family and many other real life responsibilities and my reflexes and eyesight are not as good as they were. Gaining 1337 skills in an MMO is about as low in my priority list as it gets. It is mere entertainment to me. Ask me if I want to be a 1337 TV couch potato.

No MMO that hasn’t taken an unholy beating *cough*Wildstar*cough* has declared itself for either camp. They’d be foolish to do so, it limits sales. So I doubt you’ll get your desired declaration from Anet.

OK, look, most times I think of myself as pretty casual (haven’t farmed endless dungeons, haven’t done more than tour the fractals enough to clear each one once, only ascended goodies on my 80s are laurel purchases, etc.) but there comes a point when you have to ask if you’re barking up the right tree. With the exception of the evolved worm, sometimes teq, and a few achievements this game is about as casual friendly as it comes (at least when it comes to seeing storylines and getting through the content once, legendaries are an unmitigated, -unholy- grind, with ascended crafted items being a touch behind them.) I’ve played a few MMOs (WoW, Wildstar, STO, SWTOR, TERA, Allods Online, Prius Online, Foresaken World, and Ragnarok Online,) I can promise you that if this game is too much for you, MMOs are really not going to work out for you.

Thoughts on this thread:
-There’s no need for the 133t/anti-133t ad hominem war.
-Just as not everything in life can or should be handed out like Halloween candy, not everything needs to be for only the uber 1%.
-OP: If you thought that boss was bad, the next two will make you weep.
-OP: Online games and utterly craptastic Internet connections do not ever mix. I don’t support the bashing done by those who are video game masochists (in my opinion) but it isn’t Anet’s fault if you have sub-par Internet access.
-None of the Glint’s Lair bosses were too hard per se, but they all take way too long. Did that on a mesmer and engi so far, and both times by about 2/3 of the way through a boss’s health I was desperately wishing for the fights to be done. No mechanics are fun when repeated too many times.

Mustafa.7684:

I think people will like this video.. it explains exactly what we expected from teq with sa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWwHAw1MUmI

kitten did I just watch man? Did someone invent digitally transmitted LSD?

So, just had a pugish map kill Teq, at around 4:30 or so left. Anyone who -likes- standing under him, staring at his majestically rotten belly, and swinging at air yet somehow doing damage… well I suppose this is the fight for you. I preferred him pre 6/23 patch, where you could, you know, -move around- during the fight because you could go ranged.
Hopefully Anet gets around to fixing the crit spots now that they’ve neutered the guardian trait.

So reading through this, the fix is obvious, and needed across all the world bosses that got buffed anyway: Fix the crit spots.

The maps that beat Teq stack melee on the crit spot. That is the key strat. Make all his hitboxes critable and he’s back to being challenging without requiring special gear, builds, and character selection (seriously, who thinks a world boss should be melee only? Challenge is one thing, being that narrow in your requirements is quite the other.)

The other bosses need their crit spots fixed mostly because currently they are just dull slogs. SB, Maw, Shatt, etc. taking twice as long as they did before the 6/23 patch is not an improvement for anyone.

Southsun Survival is an updated version of the final event from BWE3 (Hunger Royale.) Seems like they did tweak it a bit, but the core concepts are the same.

Gaudrath.6725:

Has it occurred to anyone that AoE is actually too dominant in this game? That virtually every class is full of AoE skills?

And that maybe the devs would like combat to look less like carpet bombing?
Dunno. If they nerf AoE but buff single target damage or survivability where needed, it could actually be a good thing.

Given the often huge numbers of mobs thrown at players in events, no, AoE is not too dominant. Try to single target kill every mob that spawns during Shatterer some time and then say with a straight face that AoE is broken. Go on, I’ll wait.

Re: LFG: This needs to be more of a priority. Most of my lack of desire to play is that what i want to do requires a group, yet even in a guild of 400+ finding groups can take 20-40 minutes, and I can’t really do anything -else- while group hunting. A tool to automate the process, even if it does not speed it up, would be a blessing (and the web site is not enough, as it still ties me up with group finding, rather than letting me farm, do daily achievements, etc. while waiting for the group to fill up.)

Re: AoE: Have they seen staff ele? Defensive skills aside, staff ele has -2- skills that only hit one target (earth 1, air 2, unless I’ve missed something.) You could make the case for water 1, though that has a splash effect that heals (so it ‘hits’ more than one thing in some way) and also is so low damage it really is more of a heal.

And you can’t really make the case for other weapons since eles can’t swap. So either I roll single target, and get stampeded by mobs if a botch a pull, or I roll AoE and single mods will take me infinity+1 to kill.

Also… buff engineers. Mine is tired of being a second rate grenade monkey.

Yeah… I’m not sure if they’ve seen staff ele? Defensive skills aside, staff ele has -2- skills that only hit one target (earth 1, air 2, unless I’ve missed something.) You could make the case for water 1, though that has a splash effect that heals (so it ‘hits’ more than one thing in some way) and also is so low damage it really is more of a heal.

And you can’t really make the case for other weapons since eles can’t swap. So either I roll single target, and get stampeded by mobs if a botch a pull, or I roll AoE and single mods will take me infinity+1 to kill.

Also… buff engineers. Mine is tired of being a second rate grenade monkey.

Looks like we have a game crashing bug in the mix too.

…for a public test server!

Really, I know that Anet has a thing for not releasing spoilers, they love to surprise us and all that. But this is too much. The recent, on the surface bug-fix patch actually -added- bugs, most of them knocking on the door of game breaking*. And all of them would have been caught with mighty quickness if we had a test server (as opposed to all servers being test servers, it seems.)

Please add a test server. We want to test this stuff with you, to get this game working as it should, please in the name of all that you consider holy -let us-!

*Don’t believe me? Well, there’s jumping , god-mode mobs , traits broken by skills , and FUBAR mesmer phantasms

mulch.2586:

Well the beauty of it is, they can give apparent progression to the many people who complained that there was no way to improve their characters, while giving stat increases that are so minor, none of the old content will need retuning. So it all can still be done with exotic, and not trivialized to ascended.

Edit: with the holidays it took me a while to respond — the point that I made was that because of the formulas that determine characters’ performance in GW2, what appear to be meaningful changes in stats do not translate to discernible performance changes in game. For example, adding 50 power on an item (substantially larger than we’ve seen on ascended) is still less than 2% increase in damage for a typical player character. This is in contrast to other games (e.g., Rift) where a new tier often represents 10 times that increase.

So this vertical progression is, in fact, basically flat.

Firstly, I deeply hope this is their actual thought process. Sadly, they haven’t given us much to go on one way or another, so imaginations are running wild.

Secondly, this idea runs afoul of the nature of gamers. We, as gamers, have been trained by uncounted games in the past that if an item exists that has better stats, we will one day find some content that requires those stats (or at the very least, the gamer of average skill will need those stats to complete the content, even if the exceptionally skilled can make do with lesser gear,) and therefore in order to see that content we have to acquire the higher stat gear. Gear with higher stats is never seen as optional since, well, why would it be put in the game if it was not needed?

Now, Anet might be trying, with some of their vague and rare replies, to hint at that, but stating that there is no intention to add grind or gear treadmill, but again we as a community of gamers are only going by our experiences of the past, and thus we instinctively flinch away from even a hint of the above the way an abused person would flinch away from a upraised fist.

thisolderhead.5127:

Why not get to know some people who have been fun (or even good/effective if the time vs. reward OCD drives you) to run with and keep running with them?

The trouble I’ve had so far is the two groups are somewhat segregated. The most effective other players I’ve run across have been the least enjoyable personality wise, and the nicer folks have been anywhere from ‘poor’ to ‘waterboarding is more fun’ in terms of the effect their skill level has on the run. I don’t need every run to go like a special ops raid, but multiple wipes starts to kill the enjoyment after a while.

So, in all the rumbling and arguing of recent days about Fractals and Ascended gear, something became apparent to me that seems to have not been talked about: Fractals are -painful- to run in PuGs.

Now, not saying they aren’t doable, I’ve run each mini-dungeon at least once in one PuG or another, but they are uniformly painful to slog through that way. They require (at least if you want the run to be smooth and fun, as opposed to an exercise in wipes and repair bills) a level of coordination and actual group play not present in other content in the game. A lot of folks like that sort of thing, and want more of it, and I’m not saying they’re wrong. But not everyone is part of a well oiled dungeon running machine, and I’m concerned over whether or not, moving forward, people will need to be married to the guilds (and selecting their guilds based on the skill of the players rather than the personalities of them) in order to get the most out of this game?

Warlord.9074:

Find a large PVE guild and join it. Or go to another server where a lot of PVErs are at. Some server have huge PVE populations and PVE guild other servers are more WVW orientated.

Going back to my first post, I am not 100% certain that will help, as being in a guild doesn’t change a person’s motivation. Even so, I rarely see guilds advertising on my server (Jade Quarry, big on WvW, apparently not so much on the rest.) So if you have any leads on which server(s) are all about the dungeon runs, I’d be glad to hear them (or if you know where on the web I might dig up said info, without casting random fishing lines into Google.)

Revolution.6301:

your confusing yourself with the rest of us. You have time to spend 5+hrs a day. The rest of us with school and work and a social life don’t.

That is not productive and not welcome. I am trying to make a valid concern known to Anet and the community, and also looking for ways to address it. Personal attacks really don’t serve either purpose.

Warlord.9074:

The issue is that it takes no time to get to 80. Its not that people rushed to 80 its that it doesn’t take more than a month to get there. lol If you took your time to get 80 than great. I was 80 in the 1st 3 weeks of game launch and fully geared in exotics by the time the Trading post had started working. I have never spent a dime on this game and have 3 sets of exotic gear and every weapon is exotic.

This game is so easy to level and make money in. I think like a full set of Exo gear is what about 15g? I can farm 15g in like 15 hours probably. People didn’t rush to end game content its that it just doesn’t take that long to reach it. If you took your time and were slow fine. But you didnt need to do that. By the way I have 100% map completion so don’t say I didn’t experience the game and rushed…. It just isnt that hard.

Call it a touch of alt-itis if you like, I have 2 80s, a 58, and a 26. I never said leveling was too hard or too long, I only said I thought I would have more time to grind out dungeon skins. The two issues are not connected.

Hemah.4361:

You do realize that a lot of other guys complain about this, right?

Now, bear with me, this is just an idea: How about you guys run older dungeons together? If it’s such a big problem, then i’m sure that there will be a lot of people having this problem, and therefor it would be self-regulating because these people can just gang up and form a party.

Seriously, there will always be an influx of new players in this game. Sure, lvl 80 characters might not want to run certain dungeons all the time as they did before, but then you’ll just have to settle with running AC with a lvl 50.

That may help some, but there are general and specific issues I have here:

All the folks who want older content are not on the same server, and not all on at the same time. Heck, most of the time I only ever saw folks forming parties for a few dungeons (mostly AC, TA, a smattering of CoF, and once in a while Arah,) before the new dungeon, now even all of that is gone.

There are level 80 paths you realize. Sure, if AC is all I want, I can always find warm bodies. What about, for example, CoE?

In the whole large explosion about gear and power and whatnot, a simple but important question was overlooked.

What about older content?

When I started the game, I was under the impression I could take my time, see the sights, and eventually get around to other content when I felt like it. So I didn’t rush to 80 and then rush to run the dungeons that have the skins I want. I thought that, with the gear plateau, there would always be a spread of people to group with running whichever dungeons I might be interested in at the time.

Now I see I was mistaken, this is not the case. It may not be what Anet intended, but the fact is the community at large has moved into the newest dungeon with the best shinies, and like so many other MMOs all the older dungeon bosses get to practice their card games in boredom.

So, what about all that older content? How do we run it now? (And before you say get a guild, being in guild doesn’t magically make people care about content they otherwise wouldn’t, they’ll still want to run the newest and shiniest.)

Mian.1945:

Do you understand what inflation is in the real world. IE The only means to secure an increase in wealth is an increase in productivity (skill) not pay rises. If you don’t understand that then you’ll never understand MMO design tactics.

On a gear progression system your “guy” is never stronger he’s only less weak than the devs made him yesterday.

Yes and no. The ‘guy’ is not stronger in relation to whatever the maximum is. 100% is 100%. But he is stronger relative to the -old- maximum. Easy example: go to any traditional MMO, level to max, then head back to the starter area. Proceed to be a tiny god wiping out entire species. So MMO stat inflation is not quite like real world currency inflation, since some things don’t inflate.

I still don’t like a treadmill system for experiencing new content, and if one is looking at max level content only the inflation metaphor holds, but it is not a complete fit to the game.

If you keep checkpointing rather than learning to not die, you must have the secret to endless wealth for all those repair fees.

mjharrison.3209:

There was no statistical gap between exotic and legendary — you invented one. Resistance to the Agony mechanic could have easily been introduced as a rune set, sigil or some other new kind of power-stat-free enchantment and still required the same amount of time investment as current Ascended gear.

The Ascended tier and Infusion mechanic was clearly and explicitly created as a gear treadmill, and continuing to feed players BS is only going to infuriate people more.

It was stated in several places clearly that the gap they reference is one of effort to acquire, not one of utility. When they talk about the gap between exotics and legendaries, they mean the gap in time/effort/grind to get -only-. You do your argument no favors by pressing an invalid point. It would be better to state there was no need to add stats to Ascended, or that the grind for Ascended is tilted a bit too close to the the legendary end of the spectrum, or other sorts of anti-Ascended gear arguments.

Beerzilla.3297:

You say you want the dungeon to be available for everyone to experience, and yet what is happening in-game is people are excluded from parties for lack of that experience. You say gating the higher levels is not intended as a treadmill, and yet it is effectively a treadmill thanks to the Agony mechanic. There is no skill required to make it past Agony, you either have the gear to mitigate it or you don’t. Seems to me to be a poor design, completely contrary to the manifesto and principles this game was sold on.

eh, I’m no fan of the newest gear due to chilling implications, but you can get a group for a lvl 1 Fractal run in minutes. “LFxM FotM, any lvl accepted, just looking for a quick run.” Replace x with however many people you need, you’ll be in the dungeon in minutes. Do this a few time and you’ll see all 9 random mini-dungeons (you don’t need to run at the highest level your party is capable of, you can set it lower.) Current content -is- nicely accessible. The issue is a large concern, due to gear, elitism in the community born from gear, and vague wording from Anet, that future content will not be.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

The Agony mechanic wasn’t introduced at the start of the dungeon so that everybody can experience the content. While one of the goals of the Fractals of the Mists dungeon was to provide some difficult content for players looking for a challenge, we also wanted the dungeon to be available for everybody to experience. While getting far into the dungeon requires agony resistance from ascended gear, the content was designed to provide challenging content, and to allow players to choose what difficulty they wanted to play at.

As for ascended gear, to reiterate what Chris has said (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/A-message-from-our-Studio-Design-Director-Chris-Whiteside), it’s not intended as a treadmill, but rather as a tier of rewards that can help bridge the gap between Exotics (a few hours of effort to acquire a piece) and Legendaries (hundreds of hours of effort to acquire one). They’re currently only available in the Fractals of the Mist Dungeon, but we’re going to be adding new ways to acquire them, both inside of WvW as well as elsewhere in PvE.

I can’t speak for others, but my question here is, as above (and even quoted in your post,) will it stay this way? Will folks who don’t want to spend the (smaller than legendary but still significant) grind time for Ascended be able to complete the next dungeon/set of dungeons in the same scaling difficulty fashion, or will Agony resist become necessary from the starting portal at some point? A lot of us, it seems, simply don’t want to get caught betting wrong on this, and having to play catch up at a very bad time (ie when most folks seem to be focused on the newest content.)

(And for those who say ‘why don’t all you casual/non-grindy/behind/alt-aholic types band together, that would require us all to be on the same server, with the same play times, and need the same dungeons at the same actual time. The reality is that there are many of us, but we are scattered. Some are 80 already, some not. Some in exotics, some not. Some on one server, some on another, and so on. It is nowhere near as easy for the various folks who get left behind to find each other as it is for the first wave dungeon runners to spam LFG in LA when content is fresh from the oven.)

Stormleaf.1769:

The issue with this is that ArenaNet could have easily made this content require Agony resistance from the beginning as well, by making it some Mystic Forge thing and introducing Agony at fractal level 1. They didn’t; heck, they even made it so low levels can participate. Exotics aren’t even a requirement for the early difficulty levels. If they didn’t do it now, why do you think they’re magically going to start doing it in the future? None of the content in GW2 has been restricted like that. There is zero indication of ArenaNet ever restricting content like that, and it’s simply not helpful to base your argument on an assumption that they’ll magically start doing it.

They may do it in the future due to painting themselves into a corner via power creep. Once folks have half a set of Ascended gear with a nice glob of Agony resist, the only way to make future content challenging for -them- is to tune it taking their level of gear into account. Once they have a full set of Ascended, they’ll likely faceroll their way past anything tuned for folks in rares.

This all, by the way, is setting aside issues in WvW, or issues with finding groups for older dungeons for folks who leveled slowly, leveled alts, or just want cosmetic skins.

Stormleaf.1769:

Except it doesn’t have an item you require, it has an item you want. It has an item made specifically for going deeper and deeper into the dungeon you acquire it from. If you want an item made for an infinitely scaling dungeon that you don’t actually want to participate in, then that’s a problem with your own specific priorities. Not a problem with the game.

Mackdose.6504:

I’d say that the difference is negligible. Some folks have no issue playing the same thing over and over and having lots of fun. Some folks figure that any more than three runs is tedious, grindy, and not worth the trouble.

Villainizing people who like to play the same content for progression whether they are elitist or not over something you don’t find fun because you want the same items with none of the work is unfair.

Don’t like the gear grind? Don’t grind for gear. It’s not like it’s a race to BiS before the next content patch, there’s no prize at the end but the feeling of “I accomplished that.”

Quoting you both as you both make the same argument, essentially, and miss the same issue.

The issue is not with -current- content. No Ascended gear is required to finish every dungeon and kill every boss currently walking Tyria.

The issue is with -future- content. It was stated, when Ascended gear was announced, that Agony (and thus Agony resist) was something that would be involved in content going forward. It was not stated, one way or the other, if it would be required to even attempt future content, and it therefore becomes a simple question: grind Ascended and Agony resist now, so you are ready for the new content no matter what, or wait and see if it will be required, and hope that, if it is, enough other people waited that you can get groups to grind it out.

It is true that as of this moment in time, the grind heavy gear is not required to see any of the content in the game. But we don’t know when or if it will be, and Anet has not said one way or the other. A lot of folks saying it is required are basically taking the cautious path, assuming it will be and preparing for the worst.

Mackdose.6504:

Where’s the gear grind? You mean playing the game? That’s grinding now? Sheesh.

You complain about gear you don’t want (or need) because playing the content the gear is needed for is a grind. You don’t need the gear because you’re not grinding (playing) it, but you’re upset it’s there because other people do want to play the content that requires it?

What’s your point again?

The difference between play and grind is in quantity. Having to run a dungeon a few times to get what you’re after is playing. Having to run said dungeon a few -dozen- times becomes more than a little grindy, at least as a lot of people see it.

Mackdose.6504:

We’ll see how you feel when you hit FotM 20 and need people to be geared to continue to 21. I’m not sure why one game mode suddenly destroys the whole game.

I may never get that far. I expect by then Agony resist would be something of a must, and the grind to get the Ascended backs makes getting a full set of raid gear in WoW seem like a blink of the eye. Back when I played said game, you could acquire (via whatever token the current expansion was using) roughly 1 piece of gear per week using their random dungeon system, plus whatever the RNG gave you while raiding. Unless the Ascended rings have a much higher drop rate than exotics, and even possibly rares, once you get to Fractal 10+, Ascended gear is a heavy grind proposition.

Denouement.3268:

Agony resist is not necessary, I’ve done some Fractals of the Mist scale runs above level 10 without it and I’ve been able to manage just fine, in fact it was fun trying to avoid it, and when I did get hit with it I’ve rarely actually been defeated from it. I have also been with someone who already had Agony resist +10 on a ring, so no it doesn’t take that long.

I can’t make myself be dissatisfied with this, particularly to the point of butthurt that I’ve seen from a lot of these individuals. Just can’t do it.

It has been stated, in the announcement for the Ascended gear, that eventually, at some difficulty level, the Agony resist would become necessary. I only mentioned Fractal 10 because that is when it first appears, it is not yet clear when it becomes a true gear check mechanic, but we have blunt words from Anet staff that the question is when, not if.

The fellow with the ring got some love from the RNG, as I believe at Fractal 10+ you have a chance to get Ascended ring drops (and if he got one with the stats he likes, he -really- got some RNG loving.) Grats to him on his good fortune, but counting on luck to see you through is not a very viable strategy.

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

This is something that existed prior to ascended gear, and was something that we saw happen all the time in GW1, even without any sort of gear progression. Some players, typically people who play the game a lot, tend to only want to play with other players that play like them. They require some sort of proof to get into their party, whether it be displaying your Lightbringer Title, equipping or linking some type of gear, or using some other method of showing that you have already done and are experienced with the content. While ascended gear might be the new excuse, this behavior happens regardless.

While this is not really something that we want to encourage, players do have the choice to play the game in the way they want. We can’t force those players to be all-inclusive in who they invite to the parties they create, and to be honest, doing so would probably make people even more unhappy than they are now, and lead to a lot of undesirable behavior.

I don’t think anyone sane denies that such behavior exists in just about any multiplayer game these days.

The issue is that recent additions to the game, Ascended gear, Infusions, and also the way Fractal difficulty is handled, have had, and will continue to have, an amplifying affect on such bad behaviors. True, you cannot force such people to be all inclusive, but that does not mean you should add things to the game that -encourages- them to be discriminatory either.

Denouement.3268:

I’ve been peaking at this thread and there is something I just don’t get.

All of this strange negativity. What is the source of this? It simply escapes me, I can’t experience it myself even if I tried.

They are adding new content, slowly and progressively even, we’re easing into it, and we can start getting it relatively easy in the same means we have been getting everything else. It may have a slight boost in stats, but why does that make it necessary and why does it make it a monstrosity by virtue of that necessity? It’s something to do, plain and simple.

I’m not on either side of the vertical progression debate, there is no real way to please them both. What side I AM on is this game that I enjoy playing. Thank you Arenanet for your new additions to the game!

And a tip: it is important to express yourself, particularly in a case where you are in a position to give advice and opinion to a group of people that are working on a project. It is all the more important then to not get carried away and let emotions run wild and sharpen the oh-so-common cynical internet perception of isolated text. Not only for your sake,and Arenanet’s project, but also for others, because like breeds like, and this has become a large hive of absurdly negative judgments.

They have stated that future content will use the Agony mechanic and thereby require Infusions (and by extension Ascended gear.) That is what makes it a necessity, not the stat boost (the boost is just a bit of extra salt for the wound for folks who like WvW.)

Look at it this way: Right now, my level 80 warrior in mostly exotic armor and green jewelry can clear all the existing content (even Fractals up to level 10 or so when Agony kicks in.) But future content will make more use of Agony, and so I won’t be able to clear that content without grinding out Ascended gear (and it is a grind, at least at low Fractal levels. 2 full level 1 runs, a full level 2 run, and some aborted attempts that did not finish due to bugs, and I have a measly 85 shards. given that the basic Ascended back and infusion takes around 2000 shards, it will be literally months before I can get even a hint of Agony resist.)

Honestly, if Anet were to even say something like “all future content will be like Fractals, in that you can clear it at the most basic difficulty in partial exotic gear” then I wouldn’t care even a fraction as much, since the grind truly would be optional, rather than required to see certain content.

Loosifah.4739:

So your argument then is that more challenging content = discrimination?

I recall hearing many people argue “You could have just given us more challenging content and not added the ascended gear and this wouldn’t have been a problem”

Not sure you could call it challenge really. None of the boss mechanics I’ve seen are of a ridiculously high skill level. Some take a little time to puzzle out, some are just utterly random and you live and die by RNG. The gear difference comes from old school gear checks… having the DPS to get through a battle of attrition, the health pool to soak up the RNG hate, that sort of faux difficulty that goes away when you have better gear.

Loosifah.4739:

You do see that the gear progression was already in the game before ascended, right? This just proves that. Nobody has ascended yet and this is still happening for the new dungeon.

Before, the gear was not required, or even highly necessary. You could do almost all the content in the game in greens, or rares at the highest, and no one could easily tell if you were undergeared from how long you lived, hard you hit, etc.

Now, it can be pretty dramatic to see the difference, in even low levels of Fractal difficulty, between the geared and the not-so-geared. hence the change in attitudes.

The Good:

-New Zone- A level 80 zone for mat farming and general exploration that is different from Orr and the top bit of Frostgorge.

-New Dungeon- Most of the Fractals are enjoyable, though some (see below) need some work in my view.

-New Gear Skins- Variety of appearance is always a good thing.

-Adjusted Drops- More reason to run more content for worthwhile rewards, also always a good thing.

The Bad:

-Fake Difficulty- Some patches of the Fractals suffer from fake difficulty issues, where a player simply has to die, often several times, to even have a chance to determine a viable strategy. Not sure why anyone thinks dying is ever fun, I just know I do not.

-Bugs, Bugs, more Bugs- The Fractals often have death and sometimes movement bugs.

The death bugs seem to involve corpses not appearing where they ought to (Cliffside and Uncategorized are well known for this, though it seems any mechanic that requires the player’s downed body to appear someplace other than where it gets downed can cause this.) Mix that with the inability to return to the dungeon unless everyone dies and it can be painful.

The movement bugs I have seen seem random, where a player will not be able to move at all, though they will be able to cast normally. This sometimes goes away on its own, sometimes it can be shaken by some sort of interaction or transformation effect, and sometimes it requires a relog (running into the rejoin issue mentioned above.)

The Ugly:

-Content Gating- “LF2M FotM Lvl16+” …the elitism has begun. It will only get worse as most folks start really getting hit by Agony and requiring Infusions. Very counter to the way everything up until now in the game has been more or less all inclusive.

-Gear Grind- Now perhaps higher level Fractals give amazingly more token, but to grind out -just- a back piece at lower difficulties takes well over 100 Fractals (around 34 full runs, give or take.) Not sure who could see that as anything other than a grind (since yes, the dungeons can be fun, but nothing is fun once you’ve run it -that- far into the ground, at least in my experience.)

-One-time Events- Having been around for a few of these now, I fail to see an up-side. Lag-fest zergs of chaos for those who can attend, and nothing but disappointment for those who miss out because they prefer to schedule their gaming around their life and not vice versa. As above, so much of this game seems designed to foster being inclusive, helpful, and friendly, and yet things like this pop up swimming the other way.

Overall, this is a good game that does a lot of things right. Gathering is not frustrating, crafting gives meaningful rewards just for leveling it, looting is not competitive, neither is mob tagging, and even for things that require groups (outside of dungeons) there is no need to spend half your time hunting for said group before actually, you know, playing the game. All of that gives GW2 a feeling much different from other MMOs, and I am not sure why Anet would want to change that. I can only hope those things I see running counter to that are more mistake than change of direction.

…I guess they fixed this for everyone else? O_o

In many locations, especially indoors and underground, the floor, walls, and sometimes even character models will have an obviously unintended grid of lines on them.

I have seen this pop up on the forums before, but it was thought to be a texture alignment bug. However some additional poking and prodding shows it to be lighting bug. See in the screenshot how the line bisecting my Asura has a different lighting on either side of it.

Changing shadow, shader, and post processing settings does nothing to change this issue. I have the latest official drivers for my card (Radeon HD 7750) but I recall this issue being around for the past several driver versions so I am not certain drivers will (or could) fix it.

If anyone else is seeing this still, please post your video hardware and drivers so we can see what the pattern might be, if it exists.

This is happening for all transmute stones. I tried and was unable to transmute anything. Not sure about loss of gear, glad I didn’t try taking things off though. I hope this is fix soon, half the game seems aimed around getting just the right skins for your 80 exotics.

Setting aside the long running debate of “it’s your system/settings/corrupted files” vs “ANet broke something on their end” (mostly because, well, it is often a bit of -both-… i.e. someone has corrupted settings, but build X tolerates those OK for whatever reason, while new build Y just can’t deal with them and you get lousy results. The problem -is- on the client system, yet it was an ANet change that seemingly caused it.)

I have to say, most folks here have never worked support it seems. First rule of support: it is better to say nothing than say the -wrong- thing. Silence from ANet means the following: They are aware of the issue, but have no solid solution ready to implement, and are not certain when they will.

Why do I say this? Well, if they believed wholeheartedly that the issue was not on their end, they would respond and say so (and have in some cases elsewhere.) If they knew what was wrong and when it would be fixed, they would say -that- too. Silence can only mean that they know, or at least believe, that the issue is somehow under their control, but are not yet ready to announce a fix.

Now, why would they be silent? Because otherwise they only stoke the flames. If they posted “We are aware and working on the issue, we apologize for the inconvenience, we have no current ETA on a fix.” every day, people would just call them incompetent, or blow them off as trotting out lazy boilerplate responses rather than ‘really dealing with it’ even if the supposed boilerplate reply is the precise and unadulterated truth. So, they spare everyone the heartburn, and their lawyers the headaches, and remain silent.