If not then don’t, but don’t expect ANET to come in here and beg for your money.
Funny, they basically begged for our money with the preorder with the promise of new gameplay for each class. How about expecting ANET to come in here and apologize and/or offer refunds on HOT?
Tempest is new gameplay, just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I for one actually like it and am looking forward to running an shared Auras build in raids or in stronghold. Also HOT is more than just the elite spec for Elementalists, or even just Elite specs in general.
PvP has steadily grown in population and play hours going on nearly a year now. It’s sky-rocketed since the game went free, and the two weeks before this have been our best weeks literally since the week the game launched. We anticipate this week will be the best week login/play wise PvP has ever had in the history of Gw2.
Hope you folks are using I.P.‘s to help filter down those of us with multiple accounts? And, to be honest, we’re freaking bored and have little to do in game. Thus, we’re just killing time in PvP
If only they were releasing an expansion in like a month, then people might have something new to play.
Oh wait, they are releasing an expansion in a month.
If any single item worth more than 1g drops for me then I’ll post here. Please don’t hold your breath as I’m well into account wide diminishing returns due to being here since head start.
ANet doesn’t want longevity, they need new sales.
You mean you are convinced that ANET is out to get you and nerfing your drops? Maybe you need to craft a tinfoil hat in real life so ANET can stop reading your thoughts as well.
There is no such thing as account wide diminishing returns.
Juggernaut still stacks might, it just wasn’t listed in the description. Also Engineer is the least filled out core specialization so until we have the full trait list it is much too early to tell.
I was under the impression that they were using a completely different engine.
(Also hence no capes, except for but-capez)
I thought it was a heavily modified GW1 engine, but I could be wrong.
GW1 had no jumping and basically no Z-axis at all, and the amount of changes to mod that engine to make GW2 it might as well be a new engine. You could run into mobs standing below you on a bridge in GW1 and you would be blocked, and they could execute melee attacks against you and you against them.
Now did they maybe use some of the code of their earlier engine? Sure, but the amount of modification that happened from GW1 to GW2 is like saying that an F16 is a modification of the Wright Bros aircraft.
Download speed is currently around 165-180 a second. as for other activities, the only other thing im doing is checking these forums.
At that speed downloading the 20ish gigs of GW2 to play will take about 30 hours, and most likely you are not maintaining a consistent speed.
Basically either you internet or your connection to the GW2 is garbage and your just going to have to tough it out til its done.
Alternatively you can try the streaming client, which will let you play sooner or even right now. Just add “-StreamingClient” to the target line of the GW2 shortcut your using, though you need to close it first.
To do that right click the GW2 shortcut, then go all the way to the bottom of the options to Properties and then add “-StreamingClient” outside of the quotation marks of the target line. It should look something like this when your done.
Have you traveled back from the future having played through all the content of Heart of Thorns? If not then kindly stop whining about it.
Nobody outside of ANET has seen all the things that are planned for HoT. If you want to talk about what has been revealed then fine, but whinging and moaning about how HoT isn’t living up to your expectations of what an expansion is when it isn’t even out yet is stupid.
If you think the Invoker is intuitive then you must have never played it. Having to memorize the combinations alone is difficult but then being able to quickly pull off a spell chain requires an amazing amount of knowledge and experience with the character.
And it isn’t even just hit three keys then Invoke, since it also takes into account the previous orbs you have which means that a skilled player will be able to accomplish invoke a spell with fewer keystrokes than someone who just memorize the the three key combos.
Well they arent going to nerf zerker gear, just with eliminating the stats from the traits is enough, so a guardian for example, using full zerker, will have 0 healing power, 0 defense or boon duration, because zerker gear only gives as we all know power, precision, and ferocity. And you know that a guardian needs at least 500 on healing power to be able to do something, and if he is going full dps, it will be the same, will be even more crystal canon. The same thing can aply for the other professions, those who rely on trait points to balance the lack of stats of the zerker gear.
Very few if any of the Meta builds spec into the tree that gave Healing Power. They don’t even spec into the defensive trees either. Most are 6,6 then 2 points somewhere else with some exceptions. That means that all told most standard zerker builds will have more Healing Power, Toughness, and Vitality then they did previously.
There are a few exceptions, Phanlanx Strength warriors will have less vitality for example, but really anybody who thinks that the Trait change will kill Zerker is silly.
Yeah… but my parents were not willing to pay for the box for me to play nor willing to pay for any future expansions. Must be nice…
You do know that some people who play this game have jobs and buy things for themselves.
And that makes the game not pay to play? It’s not relative truth, one must pay to play initially, regardless if the account was paid for by you or gifted to you by another.
Generally it’s referred to as buy to play, but nonetheless it’s still a payment up front to play. This business model has been used successfully for a very long time by anet, and that is what is used here, or is suppose to be. If they try moving to some other business model, well that’s their fault, but it’s not because b2p doesn’t work as they have proven it does in the past. But still, I distinctly remember paying so that I may play. If you have some other recollection or different experience in that, please share this with us.
Terms only work if people agree on the definitions. If you want to whine that GW2 is P2P because it has a box fee then go ahead but that goes against the understood meaning of what pay to play actually means.
If you were to go out and say that Call of Duty is a pay to play first person shooter everyone would call you a moron.
I might be missing something here, but I think just throwing in more stuff onto the profession mechanics isn’t a good way to go about this.
In Buy to Play games, the developers are tempted to add a lot of power creep, so players feel like they need to buy the newest content or be left behind in the power curve.
In Free to Play games, the developers usually leave content out of the game so it can be sold for (overpriced) prices in the game store.
It’s interesting, isn’kitten , that GW2 suffers the ills of both Buy to Play and Free to Play games?
What content exactly did GW2 cut out to sell on the game store?
At most you can talk about season 2 LW, but that came out way, way, way after GW2 release, so I don’t see how it was “cut out”.
Do you do high level Fractals? If yes, then you need Ascended, if no, then you do not need Ascended gear.
And yet, somehow, the same people that use this argument to defend the Ascended grind, suddenly start loudly protesting at the mere suggestion that ascended stats might get nerfed to exotic level. Regardless whether they do Fractals or not. Because, it seems, ascended stat advantage does matter for them.
Sorry, you can’t have both. Either ascended stat difference doesn’t matter (and we can remove it from the game), or it does, but then we get back to discussion about difficulty of obtaining it.
And back to OP: no, apart from few pieces that come from achievements, there’s no reliable way of obtaining ascended weapons and armor (of suitable stats) without crafting.
I agree with Astralporing 100%
It is hilarious. You get these people saying that ascended stats don’t matter, but when you then say—okay—lets make them the same as exotics, they scream and complain. Which is it?
Basically, does GW2 have a stat grind or does it not?
I hope that we can change it so that it does NOT. There are clearly people who are very invested in the stat grind now, however, who will simultaneously claim that it doesn’t exist while at the same time stonewalling against any attempt to eliminate the stat grind.
Nobody is saying that there is no difference between Ascended an Exotic. What people are saying is that you don’t need Ascended to do any of the content in the game outside of upper level fractals and even that is all about the Agony resistance and not the stat differences.
It’s the Anet way, delete things completely instead of solve the perceived problem they cause.
I’ve said it before but there is a buzzcut hairdo that wouldn’t clip that wouldn’t make our toons look like cue balls when we wear hats. Suspension of disbelief would be easier with that one, instead we get chrome domes of don’t use thisity.
That should be the default hairdo that we get when we wear hats. It won’t happen though because it’s not cash shoppable.
Name an MMO that doesn’t delete hair when your wearing a helmet. In fact name any game with character creation that doesn’t delete hair when your wearing a helmet.
It is just the reality of the system that you cannot make 1 million different models for every helmet/hat to make them make sense with every hairstyle.
No, Ascended armor is crafted for high level fractals, And for other people who like to invest something into the game they play it is a way to get best in slot gear. The stat difference however small is welcome also. We who have made multiple sets of ascended armor have worked hard to do so, why should that be negated to give people the same stats with no work done for them. This just seems like “they have it but i want it but i dont like to work for it” argument to me, kind of entitled.
Tl;dr, If you want something, invest a bit of your time/effort to get it, instead of expecting the world to give it to you no effort required.
So pressing a craft button over and over again is effort and deserves reward but being in active content working with other players and actually playing the game is undeserving? There’s no sense in what you’ve said, your’e simply saying that people who have more free time during the day to waste much of it crafting deserve better gear while people who have to work and commute and want to actually play the games challenging content with the time they have can F off with exotics.
There is nothing in the game that you can’t do in exotics, outside of maybe level 30+ fractals. Even then if you have a high enough AR in your Backpiece and Rings you can make it.
You get 6 slots for AR from your Jewelry, which with just basic +5 will get you to 30 AR which will get you through level 29 fractals with no complications. If you make an Ascended weapon then you can get to 40 AR which gets you all the way through level 39 fractals.
turrets all they needed was to be affected by condies so condi build users could actually counter them but making them critable destroyed them when you consider crit damage % can easily go up to 300%
Everyone stop making 1000 threads whining about the name of the Guardian specialization. It is just going to get merged so you might as well just post in the mega thread.
If it is possible i would like a different type of damage dealers:
High raw damage from power
High crit chance with damage from ferocity and on crit hit procs (fire nova,…)
High condi damage
If possible i would like to split power builds from critical hit builds. There should be some changes then to the internal cooldown on some sigils and traits to increase damage for crit builds to make them equel to the power builds.
A possible way to realize this is to make the difference between the major stat and the minor stats larger in the armor stat. And some for in between.
The fastest way to make condi and normal damage builds is to remove ferocity and make it at +50% normal damage with modifiers from traits and runes.
But for now i will wait for the changes that will come with hot
You cannot make a high damage Power build without focusing on either Crits or Condition damage. You would have to choose some non-damage stat which means your damage should be lower than somebody who has 3 damage stats.
Gear diversity matters because it’s a symptom of play-style diversity, which is inarguably a good thing, of there being more than one way to win in a reasonable fashion.
Except gear doesn’t impact play-style. But that was said a million times and some people just won’t accept it.
When it comes to critical, it does heavily. More so now that traits are losing stats.
With certain gear, you’ll be able to keep 100% ciritcal chance. With other you won’t.
How exactly does that effect play style? Explain how it effects your rotation if your crit chance was dropped by 50%.
At best a change in Precision would do nothing to most of classes, outside of severely negatively impacting classes like Engineer or Mesmer who benefit most from a super high precision.
Certainly it would lower DPS, but that is about it. It might make conditions more viable, but you don’t have to nerf Power damage for that to be the case. They are removing the stacking cap and making conditions like Burning and Poison stack intensity and not duration, which should fix most of the issues with condition damage in PvE.
Now we still don’t know the exact numbers but it certainly seems like ANET is dealing with the problem.
The Breakbar should also make CC more valuable, but then time will tell.
There’s no logical/rational reason to believe it would merely make a different gear-type optimal in the way Zerker is now. If you could make it so Zerker wasn’t optimal, we’d actually be likely to see multiple different gear types be optimal for different builds, and we’d be likely to see some considerable gear diversity.
Why does gear diversity matter? In what possible way does it improve the game?
If Soldier gear became the new Meta and people were wearing it would the game change at all?
I can understand wanting CC to be more important, or Conditions more viable but not just changing the stat combination you’re wearing.
No, the real problem is that going glass cannon does not significantly reduce survivability, but it certainly significantly increases damage dealt. There would have been no problem at all, if offensive, defensive and utility stats were balanced against each other. You’d need to make a meaningful choice then when selecting your stats.
Too bad that the system Anet designed doesn’t really allow for it.
So what is your suggestion?
Should they make mobs do even more damage? Because many bosses already one shot people if they don’t dodge or block their attacks. Adding unavoidable damage to try and force people to build a certain level of defensive stats would just make naturally tankier classes like the warrior the optimal class for dungeons, and naturally squishy classes like the Thief or Elementalist be terrible.
Also I fail to see how changing the stat combos in any way makes the content any better at all. If people were building Soldier and not Berserker the content would still be exactly the same, it would just take longer.
I am all for more interesting and harder content but it is stupid to place blame on a stat combo as if that is a problem.
Engineers have lots of other options, so they can use those in the meantime, while they come up with better solutions for turret abuse.
They do, but bunker is no longer one of them.
Engineer bunker never relied on Turrets to begin with, at least not at any competitive level. In fact Turrets were almost never used at a competitive level at all.
If anything Engineer will be even better bunkers once the Trait changes come in.
Theoretically, condition DoTs could then outpace direct damage, especially as it ignores armor, with the tradeoff that it takes time to do the damage.
It would be awesome to actually have a viable choice between both damage setups. Perhaps introduce another offensive stat linked to conditions that makes applied conditions more difficult to remove? So each condition would have a “resistance” to condi removal skills, and would then be the Precision equivalent for conditions.
At high levels of condition “precision” perhaps trait and utility condi removals wouldn’t work and ONLY the number 6 heal skill could purge them?
The only place that condition removal matters is PvP and condi builds work just fine there. In PVE almost no mobs remove conditions.
Yes I ran healie bombs and an disappointed I have to replace my full cleric ascended set. Any news on if we can armour/weapon trade our now useless healing stat equipment for something more practical ?
So I am trying to make dyes at the cooking station but the thing that I am having trouble with is keeping track of which level of, e.g. red dye, I need to make.
So how do I easily tell if I have unlocked all the Common level red dyes?
I don’t want particularly want to create an Excel spreadsheet (this is not EVE online lol), just to track when I have completed all the red Common dyes just so I can continue on to the red Master dyes, and then on to the red Rare dyes.
Thanks for helping a noob out.
It is not cost effective at all to make dyes through cooking.
For the 25 strawberries it takes to make a Unidentified red dye you can buy about half the common dyes it could make from the TP. You could buy most of the common dyes for around the same price you would get from just selling 25 strawberries.
In open world I think Celestial works quite well. If Silverwastes are anything to go by then Conditions are starting to be half decent and being able to not die to getting terragriffed in the back is really useful. The healing power is also useful to keep the zerg alive which helps not failing the big meta events. Obviously your own DPS won’t be as good but Engineers have never been DPS heavy anyways.
In dungeons it is absolutely not worth it. The defensive stats aren’t useful, healing power is completely unnecessary and without the high crit chance of Zerk/Assassins you won’t be stacking Vuln like you should, which is one of the biggest things that an Engineer brings to dungeons.
Why on earth would ANET releases their expansion at one of the worst times of the year? Late December and January are the lowest selling months of the year, it is why games rarely if ever come out during that time period.
ANET will try there hardest to release between August and November, which is the best window for releasing games. The only thing they might do is try to avoid another games launch time but there are not any MMOs coming out of note this year that would compete.
Would make Zerker even better and defensive stats even worse. Would also make conditions even worse because they only even out over longer fight duration. Also nobody is arguing for conditions not being better in PvE, but all that would do is add Sinister to the meta.
Replace high health with counterable passive/active defense and better AI/pathfinding.
Wouldn’t make defensive or support stats any better because CC isn’t bound to stats. The only way to make defensive stats better is to add so much unavoidable damage that people can’t run Zerker and that just makes classes that are innately squishy be horrible.[/quote]
Add more constant pressure an player damage mitigation, but counterable, to encounters.
CC has nothing to do with stat distributions so it wouldn’t change anything and like I have said already would make classes that are innately squishy bad.
Explain me how your question is even related to what I said in the quoted post?
Because you are implying that people who are wearing full Zerker want easy dungeons while those in Soldier or Knights want harder ones, even though by wearing Zerker the dungeon is harder than it would be if you were wearing Soldier or Knights.
You are quick at making false claims. All I said is AI and dungeons need to be harder. If you think you can’t kill the bosses I cited as examples if they remove the exploits than the problem is not the gear, is you defending an easy time for zerkers.
In a boss that requires no dodge how exactly is zerker harder than nomads? The skill involved at jumping on a rock/beam or walking 2 steps to the side must be very high.
I don’t see how pointing out exploits has anything to do with Zerker vs other stat combinations.
They should definitely fix exploits and make harder bosses, but that won’t change the fact that Zerker is the meta and I haven’t seen anyone saying they want easy bosses and exploits so I am not sure who exactly you are talking to when you say “people complaining about making AI better and content harder”.
Explain me how your question is even related to what I said in the quoted post?
Because you are implying that people who are wearing full Zerker want easy dungeons while those in Soldier or Knights want harder ones, even though by wearing Zerker the dungeon is harder than it would be if you were wearing Soldier or Knights.
Lol people complaining about making AI better and content harder.
Right now there are bosses that you don’t even need to dodge on full zerker because you can just walk 2 steps to the sides and avoid all dmg. The most common example is ac p1 final boss.
Some other bosses are so underpowered that a simple wall or reflection makes the boss do less dmg than some elite mobs. Example: CM p1 first boss
Also several cheap mechanics like Frost from CM where you can avoid almost all the dmg jumping on the beam or rock. SE p3 carier where people can sit on the ledge and range it…..
Explain to me how having to build defense makes the game more challenging, because defense is passive and is easier by far because it doesn’t require you to do anything.
Can you at least recognize that conditions need to be fixed,zerker is optimal due to weak AI/encounters and you can boost other stats usefulness while still keeping zerker optimal?? Can you?
Absolutely nobody is arguing that they don’t want conditions to work better in dungeons/fractals.
Yes, I do realize what I’m trying to make happen with these suggestions; reduce the time difference between 5 glass cannon and bulkier team compositions on a particular path. Increasing mob passive defense and damage (which is what ANet has currently done to increase dungeon difficulty) won’t manage that, but rather further enforce zerker dominance.
Depending on the tuning, yes, it is quite possible that a bulkier set of builds becomes the meta for that path. With even more precise tuning, 5-zerk will still be optimal for the path but will not be the meta anymore, as only the best players will be able to complete the content quickly that way.
It is quite possible to make an average run time of a path be 15 minutes for soldier’s, 17 minutes for bad-average zerkers, and 12 minutes for the best (requiring high level coordination). So, what do you think will remain optimal, and what would become meta?
And no, not all zerks would leave that content, even if zerk were no longer optimal. Quite a few players run Zerk with no care for speedrunning, so they would still be running it. Others would run it for personal challenge (perhaps there is some tactic involving lesser-used skills that once again makes zerk optimal). Even if neither happened, there would still be other dungeon paths where zerk remains optimal and probably even meta.
And no, many players do speedruns for the challenge, not the loot. If they were doing it for the loot, they wouldn’t blow 15 minutes organizing the group for a single dungeon and have the same overall completion time as a non-speedrun group. Interestingly, the good speedrun folks would end up being least affected by what I propose.
So basically you want to increase the difficulty of the content to the point that you have to build defense to not die unless you are the best of the best.
Explain to me how that would be a good thing, because all it would do is restrict the meta even more by making Warriors the best class in the game.
It is possible to design content where no single build is optimal, and the recognized meta contains several builds for every class, that are all at a level so relatively close to each other, that experience with a specific build is more important than slight differences that could (or could not) be proved by math.
Case in point – GW1 meta. Yes, there were good builds and bad builds, but there were no single build that could blow all others out of the water. Well, not after Ursan nerf anyway.
GW1 had healers, so it is worlds of difference between GW1 and GW2. You had to have healers in GW1, outside of running cheesy builds like perma SF or 55hp monk. In fact you basically needed two healers in GW1, at least past Prophecies.
And? Did that somehow invalidate what i said? Was it the presence of healers that suddenly made possible for multitude of builds in non-healer roles to exist (in healer roles as well)?
I don’t think so.
Yes, it invalidates what you said because GW1 was much to different to GW2 to compare the way builds work. It isn’t a good example because it is comparing apples to oranges.
The only way to make Zerker not the most optimal choice is to either invalidate the fact that Zerker does more damage or to fundamentally change the way active defense works to make passive defense required.
Now there is plenty of room to expand builds by improving weapon skills and adding more utilities. What you can’t do is make armor with passive defense or healing power do the same damage as Zerker without breaking the game.
Elixir X should become something else entirely and not a random ult from other classes. It can even be a transformation ult, just not random and not one from other classes.
Also get rid of Mortar and make an Elite kit, make it a cannon that does basically the same thing as mortar but you carry it around and even make it no cool down to switch to and people might actually use it.
It is possible to design content where no single build is optimal, and the recognized meta contains several builds for every class, that are all at a level so relatively close to each other, that experience with a specific build is more important than slight differences that could (or could not) be proved by math.
Case in point – GW1 meta. Yes, there were good builds and bad builds, but there were no single build that could blow all others out of the water. Well, not after Ursan nerf anyway.
GW1 had healers, so it is worlds of difference between GW1 and GW2. You had to have healers in GW1, outside of running cheesy builds like perma SF or 55hp monk. In fact you basically needed two healers in GW1, at least past Prophecies.
I would love for there to be more optimal builds in GW2, but outside of making condition damage better people are still going to run Zerker/Assassins in dungeons/fractals. The only way to make “full support” builds optimal is to make them required. The only way to make “tanky” builds optimal is to make them required, and even then without real aggro mechanics it doesn’t really matter how tanky you are if you can’t protect your DPS. If a group running all Zerker/Assassins can succeed then it will always be the most optimal because they will get it done quicker.
At no point can you ever make the full damage builds not the most optimal. The only way that is feasible is by instituting what is basically a minimum health or armor tax that would negatively impact lighter armored and health classes.
Why do people say that? I mentioned in THIS VERY THREAD having a fight with a clock that cannot be shortened by hitting things harder.
That’s all it takes.
That’s why certain people hate the first Dredge fractal puzzle so much – killing the Dredge doesn’t make a difference, they just respawn. The fight tests your survivability, not your DPS.
Use some imagination before declaring what can’t be done. Especially when it’s already been done in game.
Exactly, people hate what basically becomes a run away from the enemy for a set period of time until they die fight. You are not even fighting the enemy at that point, just avoiding red circles.
Also even the Dredge fractal is still done in Zerker, because even if you were wearing Soldier gear your still going to die if you stand in the fire.
What happened to “play the way you want”? When ppl use meta, they play the way they want. Those who don’t use the meta, they play the way they want.
If players want to take their time, they shouldn’t expect to have the same rewards as those who practice and speedrun them every night.
While the content could’ve been designed better, right now it’s not. The ppl who cry about the zerker meta, they will cry about the next meta as well.
Players are not forced to play the zerker meta, but on the flip side, they must also reap what they sow, a slower pace.
People are being continually pressured to play a particular style, this isn’t optimal for that theory.
And for the umpteenth time, nobody left in this discussion is saying they should make zerker suck or directly nerf it, they just want more variety of styles to be optimal depending on the fight. Every question having the same answer is boring.
At no point can you ever make the full damage builds not the most optimal. The only way that is feasible is by instituting what is basically a minimum health or armor tax that would negatively impact lighter armored and health classes.
Even if they make condition damage on par with power based damage there would still be no reason to run anything outside of Zerker or Sinister unless there is unavoidable damage and then that just makes classes like Warrior flat out better because they can afford to build for more damage. Who would take something like a Mesmer when they have to build defense and health just to not die when you can take another Warrior who can pump out more damage?
