Guild Wars 2

RDarken.2495:

That is why I say it is ANet doing something nice for players, as they are literally taking money out of their pockets, as opposed to saying “To play HoT you must pay $40 for the base game + $50 for the expansion.”

If you think Arena Net (or any other company) “is taking money out of their pockets”, then you don’t understand how the world works.

First, it’s objectively wrong – they are literally not taking any money out of their pockets. In fact, they’re asking every player to take (at least) $50 out of his or her pocket (which is probably more than they paid for the base game) in exchange for a future expansion that is highly unlikely to double the amount of content.

Second, every company prices its products based on (their prediction of) how to maximise their profits. Virtually no one would pay $90 (your suggestion) for GW2 + an unknown expansion. If Arena Net tried to charge that much, they would make significantly less money, and end up with less players, which would also reduce their long-term profits from the gem store.

Third, saying “the base game is included for free” is just a lame attempt by the marketing department to rephrase “you must buy the base game again even if you’ve already bought it and played through all of it”. It’s frankly insulting to existing players, and shows the same kind of attitude that cost Blizzard several thousand customers (when they started adding “free extras” for new players, and making existing players pay more for them). But even Blizzard had the basic decency of selling stand-alone expansions at a price lower than the “battle chest” (game + expansion package).

If Arena Net really wanted to “be nice to players” (where “players” is defined as people who already play the game, and who have been paying Arena Net’s salaries for the past three years), they’d say something like “for every 100 gems you’ve bought with real money in the past, we take $1 off the cost of the expansion”.

I’ve spent over $300 on GW2, across two accounts (the second of which I was forced to buy because Arena Net disabled the option to group with EU friends from a US account), and, given the respect they show for their current players, I have no intention of spending any more.

Confirmed (Asura Engineer), and still in the game after the last update (yesterday?).

I have to keep going to the character selection screen and picking the same character to clear it. And you have to manually click on the menu icon, because Esc won’t work as long as the arrow is there (it takes keyboard focus).

I wonder if Arena Net has considered actually testing their updates before release. If they don’t have a proper QA department, at least create a PTR “world” and let players who want to be beta testers play there for a week before releasing it into the live servers.

DarkOcean.8746:

The Secret World is amazing. […] While I don’t think The Secret World’s first Halloween was better than Guild Wars 2’s first; I feel TSW has upped their quality where GW2’s has greatly diminished and continues to deteriorate.

For me, TSW was a huge disappointment. It’s a great idea, it has good writers and good voice acting, but it’s a single-player game sold as an MMO. It’s not as horrible as GW2’s “personal story”, but it lacks the things that make GW2 good (dynamic combat, a shared multiplayer world, etc.). Also, they clearly didn’t have enough content at launch so they padded everything with endless “kill 10 zombies” missions.

I do agree it has improved a bit since launch (it was hard not to), while GW2 seems to have lost any sense of direction. The fact that I’ve seen at least six different people described as “GW2 lead designer” is probably a hint – games designed by committee just get progressively watered down, or crack under the stress of being pulled in lots of different (and often contradictory) directions. The introduction of the ascended gear treadmill was a very obvious sign that whoever was responsible for the original design and for Arena Net’s “manifesto” is either no longer there or has been demoted to fetching coffee for the clueless new “lead designers”. WoW at least managed to keep its original designers (and some sense of direction and personality) for four years. GW2 went straight from beta to Cataclysm.

Anyway, regarding Halloween 2014, Konig pretty much covered it. This feels like a “relaunch” of the 2013 version (which was itself significantly worse than the 2012 version) with extra attempts to push people to the gem store. Not really surprising, considering the way things have been going.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

I would like to know why the conversion history was removed.

For the same reason that they don’t display how many people actually sold or bought gems or gold, or the respective amounts. For the same reason that they never explained how, exactly, the exchange rate is calculated. And because some people were starting to notice that certain things didn’t add up.

“Gem refunds”…? So I spent $20 on town clothes that now look horrible and Arena Net graciously allows me to get 1600 “gems” that I can use for… nothing, because the only items I would be interested in no longer work as they should.

Oh well, I guess you live and learn (specifically, you learn which companies’ products to never buy again).

Town clothes converted into a tonic, now taking up space in the inventory, lost my original colouring, can’t apply dies to them, can’t put them on by pressing the “toggle town clothes” key.

I hope this is just (yet another) example of Arena Net’s lack of pre-release testing. If this is deliberate and “working as intended”, I guess they are actively trying to make people quit.

Zerole.7306:

Factotum: Lot’s of assumptions there. A code change is a code change. Just because you deem it very easy and straightforward doesn’t mean it was. I’m not sure where you got the time frame for designing a new character face, either.

From having worked in the games industry for 15 years…

Zerole.7306:

Aeonblade.8709:

It takes no effort to raise item caps for collections from 250 to 1000, just a simple number change.

Just for the record, changing code, even on something you deem so minor, has an associated developmental cost with it. The unlock on item use feature was added and compiled and tested.

The two things aren’t even remotely comparable. Changing a constant into a variable (assuming it wasn’t a variable all along – which it probably was) and recompiling the code takes minutes. The testing required is minimal (unless the original value was hardcoded in a lot of places, and it wasn’t, because Arena Net’s coders aren’t idiots).

When you buy a new face or hairstyle you’re paying for new content that took several days to create, by a group of skilled artists. When you buy a “collection expander” you’re paying to avoid a deliberate inconvenience, created by inflating the amount of materials required for crafting.

Both objectively (in terms of development costs) and conceptually (in terms of new content vs. crippleware / bloat), the two situations are completely different.

About the topic of this thread: I think it’s fine to have extra faces / clothes / dances / hair styles, etc., available at the gem store (I’d rather see them available from in-game NPCs, but apparently GW2 doesn’t support paying gems to NPCs), but we should be able to preview those faces and hair styles before buying the kits.

Mephane.8496:

So they stored the stack counter as a single byte (max value 255, cut off at 250 for a more convenient number), then changed that to two bytes (max value 65536) and sell sections of 250 stack size increments for 10 bucks each. Pure genius.

What makes you think they stored it as a single byte? There’s hardly any advantage, these days, in using integers smaller than 4 bytes. Stacks could have allowed up to 4 billion units without any added costs for Arena Net. The original limit was deliberate, and they spent the last few months inflating crafting (with recipes requiring more than 250 units) to make people pay for this “feature” which is really just a way to negate a deliberate inconvenience.

It’s hardly “genius”, it’s an old (and kind of dirty, one might say) marketing trick.

Imaginos.3756:

One of these years NCSoft/Anet will understand what MICRO in MicroTransaction means…

I doubt it. I get the feeling they weren’t even very sure how the game’s payment model was going to work during development (hence the lack of gem items from in-game vendors).

If they had made haircuts cost 10 gems or so, and made them available directly in-game (ex., from barbers in cities), many players would get them on a daily basis. As it is, a lot of players will never buy a “hair styling kit”, because they think it’s overpriced (and they’re right).

The trick with micro-transactions is making them small enough that people don’t even notice how much they’re spending. In the long run, that’s more profitable.

Anyway, the issue here isn’t the price; the issue is that this kind of thing should not be paid, period. Connecting the publisher’s profits to the desirability of this item means that the company is now encouraged to inflate crafting amounts even more, to increase their sales of “expanders”. When marketing starts to call the shots, design goes down the drain.

TChalla.7146:

I still fail to see the issue.

I would think it would be obvious, but I guess not, so I’ll explain.

Since the sale of this “collectibles expander” is relevant for the company’s profits, the company is under pressure to make people buy it (same as any product). That means making it more desirable. Nothing wrong so far, the same applies to armor skins, mini pets, and so on.

The issue is: how do you make this item more desirable? By inflating the materials required for crafting (which has already been happening, and will get worse). What is the result of that? Inconveniencing every player who doesn’t buy the “expander”.

This isn’t new content, you’re not paying for the development of this “feature”. The “expander” simply changes a variable in the game, removing an artificial limit (that most players considered too low even before crafting became so inflated). You’re paying to avoid a deliberate inconvenience, and that inconvenience has increased (and will continue to increase) because that directly increases the publisher’s profits.

Now do you see the issue?

Seras.5702:

New character customization? Nah, you can’t have that. Unless you pay the gem store.
Want more material space? Gem store.
Special holiday skin? Yep, gem store.
Snow Globe finisher? You guessed it, gem store.

I’m fine with them charging for any new content (new faces, new finishers, etc.). In fact, I’d rather they just gave us X gems when we buy the game, and we’d then buy the faces / town clothes / finishers / etc., that we wanted (preferably though an in-game method – like going into a barbershop, not just using a piece of UI).

But I’m definitely not fine with them charging money to remove an artificial limit, while simultaneously inflating the crafting system to make that stack limit more annoying for everyone. I won’t be spending another cent on GW2.

TChalla.7146:

the last game I played had a max stack size of 20.

And how many items, in that game, required over 700 units of any reagent to craft?

Zylonite.5913:

So what is the point of running dungeons now that ascended armor is introduced?

What is the point? The same as ever: to have fun.

If you don’t find them fun, complain to Arena Net about that (and explain why), don’t “excuse” the lack of good gameplay in exchange for some item with slightly shinier stats. One thing doesn’t make up for the other, and players need to make that clear (to any publisher).

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Wouldn’t it be more fun to explore dungeons together, rather than running through the exact same corridor a dozen times, and having every enemy be in exactly the same spot as before? This sense of exploration is missing, but I feel it is crucial to a dungeon experience.

That is what we were promised, remember?

Three totally different paths plus random events, surprise bosses, you never knew what you’d encounter. Yeah, right…

The only real uncertainty in all of GW2’s dungeons is where (out of 4 or 5 locations) the AC troll will be.

Even the spider queen, which was originally marked as a “bonus event” is now just a fixed chore, present in every path.

I guess fixing the dungeons isn’t as simple or profitable as adding items to the gem store to “uncripple” the artificially limited stack sizes…

cranked.3812:

When you pull enemies to a stacked position you are not tanking them, you are bursting them down with fast DPS.

If that was the case, stacking would be irrelevant; as long as everyone was casting their abilities on the boss (ex., standing around it), they would achieve the same effect. But they don’t. And even a group of unskilled and low DPS players can last for a long time simply through the “magic” of stacking (that’s why so many groups of unskilled players do it).

Stacking does enable you to “tank” (most) enemies much better, because every party member’s short-radius fields affect everyone, giving more boons, clearing conditions faster, etc., and because the boss’s attacks tend to affect only one (more or less random) player of the bunch, so incoming heals and outgoing damage increase, while incoming damage does not (and it also makes reviving faster, etc.).

cranked.3812:

I don’t see anet adding any kind of AI. Their idea of harder content is making bigger damage sponges, more of them and silly mechanics that do nothing but make fights longer and more boring.

Unfortunately, I suspect you’re right.

And they’re also busy adding crippleware-style “upgrades” to the gem store now…

EverythingXen.1835:

I like it when the Anet engineers really earn that paycheck.

You mean the ones who artificially limited the stack counter to 250 in the first place, so they could then charge extra for the “feature” of removing that artificial limit?

I suspect you should be “praising” the marketing department, not the engineers.

GW2 has officially become crippleware.

I can’t find anything about this in any patch notes, either, but I’m sure the button existed, and I think it did work at some point.

Chris RJ.1843:

if they did remove that corner, she would still be 100% melee-able but rather would require folks to stay on top of her….like every other boss you encounter in a speed run. Don’t think removing that corner will prevent her from melting.

The issue isn’t the room geometry (except in rooms where you can get through walls, etc.). The issue is the boss AI (and abilities) are so badly implemented. If a great big spider got 5 tiny players trapped between her mandibles and a wall, the players should be in trouble. Instead, the opposite happens.

It’s just dumb.

By all means leave the corners there, but change the AI and boss abilities to make things behave in a logical fashion (i.e., players should try to avoid being trapped in corners, not do it deliberately due to it being so beneficial).

Fungalfoot.7213:

How does that make any sense whatsoever? Are players supposed to rely on complete and utter guesswork to get anywhere in this game now?

You must be new here.

It’s a free hair cut, 350 gem’s worth of… er… pure value. You’re welcome.

Final Rest not dropping was also not considered a bug until the day when they fixed it.

But they insisted (for months) that one wasn’t bugged and could drop. At least for this one they acknowledge it doesn’t. I guess that’s an improvement of sorts.

cranked.3812:

Stacking and LoS is common in all dungeons.

Yes, I know. And while LoS pulls make perfect sense (to get the enemies in a bunch and maximize your party’s own AoE), what doesn’t make any sense is that standing there (right on top of the enemy) makes things so much easier instead of harder.

Remember when they used to say “you won’t be able to just stand there and tank the enemies” ?

Simply adding some I (intelligence) to the AI, and making them try to move out of player AoE would make things more realistic and a bit less silly.

Gsjlink.4673:

I’m sure the developers are well aware of the sad dungeon state. Possibly lacking here is time, manpower, monetary resources, and decisional authority.

I think you’re right about the latter. I’ve seen lots of people described as “GW2 lead designer”. Too many cooks tend to spoil the broth. Dungeons are somewhat separate so they can have its own “sub designer”, but they do need to be designed / overseen by someone with vision, imagination, and a good notion of fun and fairness.

I get the feeling the actual dungeons where designed by (at least) three separate groups of people (one creating the geometry, another coding the creature behavior, and another deciding where to put each creature), and that those three groups never really communicated with each other, let alone with the playtesters.

A good example of this is all the creatures that just stand in a single spot, and basically behave like turrets, but use humanoid models. It’s as if there wasn’t even any attempt to create the dungeon as a believable whole.

DonQuack.9025:

Youre imagining a fairy tail mmo, where grinders/exploiters arent in the dungeons.

No, I’m imagining an MMO where a lot of players intersecting in a corner and blindly casting random spells isn’t so efficient.

Make the fights actually require teamwork and positional awareness, improve the bosses’ AI (and give them multiple abilities to choose from), and suddenly things become a lot less exploitable and repetitive.

Like I said, I can’t really blame the players for trying to find the easiest way to win fights (that’s what being intelligent means). But I can blame the developers for making such dumb / boring bosses, and for taking so long to fix exploits.

Dungeon gameplay seems to rank somewhere below grass animation in Arena Net’s priority list.

DonQuack.9025:

you see you are still assuming people have the basic intelligence to kite or to recognize a long hammer swing or to run away and heal when low instead of stopping infront of the boss.

I’m not assuming anything. I made a new character (thief) and decided to level from scratch (no crafting), doing mainly dungeons (since I’ve already done all the open-world content several times, while leveling my old L80 characters).

As a result, I’ve done AC story mode about ten times in the last three days, and have been doing it with level 30(ish) players, many of whom are there for the first time.

They don’t seem to have any problem understanding the mechanics of any boss (at least after being downed a couple of times). They keep dying at the troll without any idea of what killed them (ex., because they were around a corner, reviving someone else, and couldn’t even see the troll, but were still targeted).

The troll’s “signature” attack (the stomp) is pretty easy to figure out (well, there’s always some warrior straight from WoW who thinks he’s going to “tank” it, but it’s obvious and “fair” for most players). One-hit 110% damage coming through walls isn’t.

And that attack (along with the bouncing beam) was not there at launch (or when I played before). It seems to have been added to make the troll more challenging for sidekicked L80 players in AC explorable, but was also enabled in AC story, where it just “trolls” new players and makes them lose interest in GW2 dungeons in general.

DonQuack.9025:

I did them last night with said group of 30-40

So you’re leveling a new character too?

DonQuack.9025:

depending on the group he is the maybe 3rd easiest. 1st and second being ranger and Mad king cole.

So you think the troll is easier than Kasha (who just stands still, tickling you with AoE that does about 1% damage per second) ? Or the Gatekeeper and the Captain, who basically limp after players and raise their hammers for ten seconds before actually hitting anything?

DonQuack.9025:

I run ac enough daily to encounter him once or twice.

You run AC story mode daily, with level 30 players? What for?

DonQuack.9025:

Hardest being the lovers.

I’m guessing you haven’t done AC story mode in a long time. The lovers now stay apart for the entire fight, basically you just need to move out of the AoE, kill the little ghosts with some AoE or a bouncing attack, and avoid attacking if you have confusion. No real need to worry about splitting them after the start, which was the only bit that required some party coordination.

DonQuack.9025:

Perhaps bug report the walls that it goes through.

Yeah, that’ll work. Because it’s not as if the ones I reported 16 months ago (because Kholer’s harpoons go through them too) aren’t still bugged. Oh, wait…

Anyway, I’ve been hit several times by the troll’s shockwave through walls and pillars that Kholer’s harpoons don’t go through, so I doubt the bug is in the walls, it’s probably a separate one that only affects the troll (or maybe shockwave spells in general). Or maybe it’s deliberate, I have no idea. What I do know is that when a new player gets killed by something that he didn’t even see, which came through a wall, he’s not going to find the game very enjoyable.

DonQuack.9025:

Eitherway los and you will be fine

You won’t. The bouncing attack can bounce from other players to you (even if you’re out of the troll’s LoS – or even if you’re cloaked), and the shockwave frequently goes through walls and pillars. Might be deliberate, might be a bug, but the fact is it happens a lot.

DonQuack.9025:

The troll is easy!! Comparable to other ac story mode bosses? You mean explorable?

I think the words “story mode” (both in the thread title and the post you just quoted) make it pretty clear that I don’t mean explorable…?

DonQuack.9025:

Personally I think they should put kholer as the story mode LT. in the middle. I coulda sworn he was there at launch.

You would be wrong. He wasn’t.

Kholer is actually a good example of a challenging, interesting, fun and fair boss. By far my favorite boss in AC, possibly in all GW2 dungeons.

DonQuack.9025:

Queensdale would be full no matter what. The size of the zerg will simply burn out everything. It was happening at launch too.

It was happening at launch because everyone was leveling their characters. Now half the people you see there are level 80s in full exotics.

I started on a pretty high population server, anyway (pre-launch), and Shadow Behemoth fights (for example), tended to have 3-10 players. Now they have 50. And, three months after launch, cave troll fights tended to have 1-5 players. Now they have 50.

Things have changed. Maybe it’s because crafting and ascended weapons encourage farming, or maybe it’s just because the altered sidekicking coefficients make starter zones so easy, but things have definitely changed. Maybe the change was gradual and you didn’t notice it (or maybe you weren’t playing at the start), but I was away for about a year, and I definitely notice it.

Dub.1273:

All in all, the [AC story mode] troll is […] very easy.

You must be playing a completely different game (or, more likely, haven’t done AC in a real level-30 group in ages) if you think the troll is comparable to other AC story mode bosses or to anything else that new players are likely to encounter before level 30.

I guess whenever someone posts a thread about anything, some people will invariably feel the need to reply with some variation of “that’s extremely easy, you guys just suck”, as some kind of ego boost.

I can kill the troll, anyway (I’ve done it hundreds of times on my old characters and probably about a dozen on the new one). But not in a party of new players in real level 30 characters. And that’s what the lowest-level dungeon in its easiest mode should be tuned for.

It puts off people who have no flexibility.

It’s not about flexibility. Read what I wrote. I’ve been playing since beta and have done every dungeon on nearly every class. This is about the way a specific boss in AC story mode is (now) clearly imbalanced for the kind of players likely to be doing a level 30 story mode dungeon.

That wasn’t the case before I stopped playing (about one year ago); the troll used to be in line with other story mode bosses.

1-30 open world is so mindnumbingly easy.

1-20 has to be easy because it’s tuned for players who might be completely new to MMOs, or even to computer games in general.

After that, I think the main problem is that sidekicking is broken. Going to a level 30 area with a level 27 character is quite hard (well, in some areas). Doing it with a level 29 to 31 character feels about right. Doing it with a level 80 player (sidekicked down to 31) is ridiculously easy.

I’m pretty sure Arena Net messed up the sidekicking coefficients at some point (I didn’t play GW2 for several months), because I don’t remember low level areas feeling this easy for high level characters.

And that’s probably the reason why Queensdale is now full of level 80 players farming champions.

It really depends on who else you play with.

Having two mesmers in a party is not twice as good as having one, but having one is extremely useful, so if the people you normally play with don’t play mesmer (it’s probably the rarest of the classes you mention, along with engineer), go with that.

Elementalists and guardians are generally the most team-oriented classes (in terms of giving buffs, being able to save players in risk of dying, etc.), so those are great too. I feel more “in control” with those two classes than any other.

Stealth is a bit broken in PvE (some mobs keep attacking cloaked players for several seconds), so thieves aren’t as good as they sound on paper, but they’re still pretty useful when you need to revive a downed player or skip some mobs.

Engineers lack a bit of focus right now. They have a lot of different viable builds, but none of them is amazingly good, and, in combat, they feel less versatile than elementalists (because you need to change your traits to suit your choice of kits, while elementalists can use more generic trait builds).

Ultimately, it’s really more a matter of complementing and (I hate this word) synergizing with the rest of the party than the qualities of any individual class.

DonQuack.9025:

I wonder what people did at launch…

We dodged, kited, and so on. Early players were playing for fun. These days, they seem to be playing because they need 3 billion of some item to craft some pink junk, so it’s all about repeating the same thing over and over, with minimal effort. Fun is not a goal, let alone a requirement. And if other players’ fun interferes with your grinding, you let them die or kick them.

It’s easy to blame players, but really, if the encounter design and combat system wasn’t so exploitable, the game’s population wouldn’t be shifting so much towards exploiters and grinders (or, at least, it would keep that kind of player out of the dungeons).

The giant jump into the air is “matched” to the red circle around the troll. It’s a typical animation for a circular knockback (which he also casts), not for a linear shockwave.

Anyway, the shockwave would be fine if it didn’t:

a) instantly kill (nearly all) level 35 players it touches (and sometimes even players who dodge it – possibly due to lag)
b) go through walls (so if you’re reviving a player around a corner you get killed without any idea of what hit you)
c) require seeing which way the troll is facing, when the troll loves backing into walls and pillars, making most of its body invisible, especially with player spell effects rendered on top of it
d) come so soon after the extremely frequent bouncing blue beam attack that forces players to use up their endurance (or lose 50% of their health with each hit)

This is the lowest level dungeon in its lowest level mode, and “greeting” new players with instant kills through walls is a great way to make them go back to WoW. It’s not challenge through complexity or teamwork requirements, it’s just cheap difficulty through big numbers.

IMO, the troll should lose its “caster” attacks (blue beam and linear shockwave) and gain an attack where, after the circular stomp, he points at one player, roars, and jumps onto him, knocks him down and keeps pummeling that player (doing, let’s say, 15-20% HP damage per second) until one of the other players uses a CC ability (like fear, pull, knockback, etc.). He would never be immune to CC while casting his “pummel”, so effectively teammates would always be able to “save” the targeted player.

That would be a lot more “troll-like” and would be useful in teaching new players about teamwork and CC.

The current weird mix of “necromancer elementalist troll” makes no sense and just puts off new players (it even puts off old players, because it shows how GW2’s dungeon design is getting worse instead of better).

Spiky Muffin.9180:

dungeons are part of the endgame.

Why label AC explorable as level 35, then? If it’s a level 35 zone, and if all players (supposedly) get leveled down to 35 upon entering, then it should be tuned for level 35 characters.

If it’s tuned for level 80 characters effectively “sidekicked” to L50 or so (in terms of EHP / DPS), then simply label it as level 50 (and downlevel L80 players properly, so it remains challenging). Or just make all explorable dungeons level 80.

As it is, the “level N” dungeons are too hard for players of that level and too easy for max-level players. They need to fix the sidekicking, and then tune the dungeon to be challenging but fun for actual “level N” characters (by increasing the skill / teamwork / awareness requirements and decreasing the reliance on numeric stats). A few encounters are like that, but most are just DPS checks.

Of course, some players might whine because they’re used to letting their stats do all the work for them (probably the same ones who, at level 80, spend all day farming level 15 champions).

Spiky Muffin.9180:

i have a strong feeling that discussing with you is pointless

If your argument boils down to “level 35 dungeons are fine because level 80 players can do them blindfolded”, then yeah, I guess it is pointless.

If you think there’s not a significant difference between a real level 35 character and a level 80 character sidekicked down to 35, then you clearly haven’t leveled any new characters recently. And if you think there is a significant difference between the two, then you’re agreeing with me that the sidekicking coefficients aren’t realistic, and are throwing dungeon balance out of whack (both for players at the dungeons’ level and the ones at max level).

Ravenmoon.5318:

Account bound!

Irrelevant distinction (I tend to think of “soulbound” as bound to the player anyway, not the character – which would be “character bound”, although some games do use “soul” to mean the character instead of the player controlling it).

The fact is tokens are supposed to be a reward for fighting your way through the dungeon, but in reality they’re just a reward for being in the party when the final pop-up appears, easily tradable through the LFG system.

Ravenmoon.5318:

nobody is forcing you to stack.

Actually, pretty much every player you meet in LFG these days is forcing you to stack, and guildies aren’t always available or interested in doing the same dungeons you are.

The fact that stacking is so advantageous shows how badly designed some encounters are.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Without stacking queen spider is a very challenging boss. You should try it

I have “tried” it. Dozens (possibly hundreds) of times, over one year ago, before the stackmania kicked in. And no, she’s not a very challenging boss. The only vague “challenge” is seeing which way she’s pointing when she decides to back 80% of her body into a wall.

DivineSlayer.5039:

Every class brings something to the table, except maybe necro’s

Competent necromancers provide interrupts, a lot of AoE damage, a lot of AoE healing, and possibly the best “ohbugger!” skill in the game (plague with the blind skill).

Incompetent necromancers provide a ton of uncontrollable minions that mess up every pull and make everyone else in the party wish they were dead, until they realize the necro would probably just bring them back as a minion and make things even worse.

Spiky Muffin.9180:

ac is perfectly doable with lvl 35 characters.

Get 5 new players, make them all play mesmer (or any class, really, just make sure they don’t have elementalist conjured weapons). Let them play the game until their characters reach level 35. Put them into AC explorable and tell them to do path 1 or 3, with no exploits.

Then come back here and post the results.

The issue isn’t challenge (Kholer, for example, is a challenging fight). The issue is that several encounters in AC (especially in paths 1 and 3) rely on character stats (specifically, DPS), and not on player skill or teamwork.

If you think doing AC with downleveled 80s is even remotely comparable to doing it on “real” level 35 characters, then I’m guessing you haven’t leveled any character (or haven’t done AC on an all-level-35 group) recently.

I agree they are extremely easy and boring (once you reach level 80), precisely because they need so little skill, awareness or teamwork. Basically, stacking in a corner + relying on your level 80 stats and gear makes most encounters trivial (and it’s only going to get worse as ascended gear pushes the stats even higher).

Noah.4756:

Factotum.2093:

Yes, because it’s not like there are literally millions of them at the trading post or anything.

Don’t you hate it when people use the word literally when they don’t literally mean it?

Actually, “literally” just means “as it is written”, and I wrote it, so there.

Noah.4756:

There are currently around 30,000 soft wood logs available

Really? When I try to sell them the UI tells me there are 1.4 million orders for logs, plus 28k for planks. Plus 2.7 million for iron ore and 30k for ingots.

Even assuming that includes both buy and sell orders, if I add up the ones that appear explicitly listed when I try to buy them, I get over 75k (I stopped counting at that point – it’s probably closer to 100k, just for logs).

Nobody wants to farm 720 soft wood logs to create an ascended staff.

Then don’t…?

I agree ascended gear should not be something that’s easily available, but things like soft wood logs force you too much towards farming.

I’m pretty sure no one forces you to do that. Even playing GW2 is optional. And while the game does “force” you to do some things (ex., play through the first part of the personal story, and a few other things), crafting weapons is completely voluntary.

If you find it a grind and still choose to do it, you’re basically punishing yourself.

Anyway, if you think crafting of high-level items in GW2 is grindy and nonsensical (I agree – it’s idiotic that a staff requires more wood than would be necessary to make a full ship), maybe ask / pressure Arena Net to improve it (and turn it into something that requires skill and gameplay, not just hoarding), instead of going even further down that road and asking them to increase the amount of drops (thus enabling / reinforcing the grindy design).

Like I said, i didn’t play for a long time (after they decided to add ascended gear and the agony resist grind).

I assume the reason why you don’t see people outside dungeons is they’re using LFG (which, by the way, gives a great picture of how sad dungeons in GW2 have become – it’s just people posting insults and selling supposedly “soulbound” tokens for gold).

Chris RJ.1843:

Suggesting a difficulty nerf (of an already nerfed dungeon) would be akin to saying university exams should be easier because middle schoolers are having trouble passing them.

Your logic is flawed. AC Explorable is (according to Arena Net) a level 35 dungeon. It should be doable by level 35 players.

So it’s not “middle schoolers doing university exams”, it’s second-graders doing a second grade exam. If they want explorable mode to be a level 80 (or 60, or whatever) dungeon, then label it as such. Currently, it’s a level 35 dungeon, and should be designed to be challenging (but doable, and fun) by a group of players who have reached level 35. And it would be, if the encounters focused on learning actual mechanics and working as a team, and not on pure DPS races, as they do.

The way AC becomes so much easier as you level up (despite the fact that everyone officially gets leveled down to 35 when they enter) suggests the sidekicking system isn’t working properly, either.

Arena Net should change the encounters to make gear / player stats less relevant, and make more complex mechanics that reward players with more skill, better awareness, and better sense of teamwork. Wasn’t that what they promised us before release?

I suspect a major problem is that they test their dungeons with sidekicked level 80 characters (instead of using characters of the actual dungeon level), and so the badly tuned sidekicking system is screwing up the balancing of the dungeons.

If they tested the dungeons with “real” level 35 characters, and / or if they fixed the sidekicking system to level characters down properly (so that a level 80 “feels like” a level 35 inside AC), the flaws in the dungeon design and balance would become a lot more obvious.

But I guess they’re too busy adding another tier of gear that no one wants (making the stat imbalance problem even worse) to actually fix the dungeons.

I hadn’t played GW2 in ages and decided to check what’s new and start a new character.

Besides finding that most of the bugs I reported over one year ago are still there (even some typos – how long can it take to fix that?) and that stealth is now seriously broken in PvE, I’ve now leveled my character high enough to do dungeons.

And it seems Arena Net went to the trouble of changing them (AC, at least), but somehow managed to make them even worse.

In AC story:

• The troll is now insanely imbalanced for level 30 players (1-shot kills, attacks that go through walls and ignore stealth, etc.).
• The “punchbag” bosses that just stood there (Kasha, Adelbern, etc.) still do just that (if anything, they seem to have been nerfed; you can now stand inside their AoE for ages). They really highlight the need for a /yawn emote.
• The boulders now magically disappear every time they hit someone (they were the only thing that made the punchbag bosses fun – you know, fun, that thing people play games for?)
• Ralena and Vassar no longer run to each other at 50% (the only part of the fight that required some awareness and tactics – now you just have to keep looking at the UI to see if you have confusion, and make sure someone has a bouncing attack to kill the little ghosts)

In AC explorable:

• Half the encounters are now doable simply by stacking in some corner and casting randomly at the ground (sometimes without even seeing the enemy, due to the way the camera still gets stuck in walls). Blind spam wins the day 9 times out of 10.
• The burrows in paths 1 and 3 are still DPS races, and having an elementalist with a frost bow still means instant win (while having five mesmers still means almost guaranteed fail). No wonder LFG is full of people asking for specific classes and pure DPS builds.
• The only thing that seems to have been made more interesting was the final boss in path 2 (ghost eater / patriarch), but the new mechanics effectively make it into a DPS race as well (because players tend to just charge the three traps before pulling, and restart if the boss doesn’t die before those run out of charge); a much better design would be to have just one trap and encourage players to alternate between damaging the boss and recharging the trap.

I won’t say it’s as bad as what Blizzard did to the Deadmines in Cataclysm (because the original Deadmines were a lot more fun than any GW2 dungeon), but it’s pretty depressing to come back one year later and find that things moved backwards. Maybe the other dungeons have been improved, but I have a feeling that won’t be the case.

In addition to that, players still get booted from dungeons if the first one to enter has to leave (or gets disconnected, or decides to be a jerk), players still get almost no rewards if they leave (or get disconnected, or kicked) before the chest pop-up at the end, and players who join just before that pop-up still get the full reward (even if they don’t participate in the dungeon at all – no wonder LFG is full of people basically selling dungeon tokens).

Even assuming their in-house testing was horrible and they hadn’t spotted any of these things before release, surely they must be aware of them by now. How can it take a year and a half to fix this?

It seems Arena Net spent all this time adding temporary content (which new and returning players can’t even see) and adding a new and incredibly grindy tier of gear (which no one wanted – most people who came to GW2 from other games left those games precisely because they were tired of “stat upgrade” grinds), instead of fixing bugs and design flaws. And when they finally decide to change a dungeon, they make it worse.

How can a company get its pre-release “manifestos” so right and then get the execution so wrong? Were the guys who left to form Undead Labs the ones who had that original (inspired and inspiring) vision? Also, how hard can it be to hire someone with a clue (i.e., imagination and an understanding of fun) about dungeon design?

Noah.4756:

I’d like to see more soft wood planks and iron ingots from Ascalonian Catacombs.

Yes, because it’s not like there are literally millions of them at the trading post or anything.

People have been complaining about this since beta.

Apparently no one at Arena Net has ever played other MMOs or seen how parties / dungeons work there, and probably doesn’t play them much in GW2 either.

The whole dungeon system (hosting, rewards being detached from actual participation, exploits, boring bosses, camera constantly bouncing into things, etc.) in GW2 was (and still is, more than one year later) a huge disappointment. I doubt it’ll ever improve, they’re too busy screwing up the rest of the game with “ascended” gear (which the vast majority of players said they didn’t want as soon as they announced it).

I realize he’s a troll, and therefore meant to troll players, but…

The troll in AC story mode is insanely OP now (he was already pretty hard at release, but meanwhile it seems someone taught him magic). Not only does he cast a bouncing attack with an apparently unlimited range that goes through pillars, ignores stealth, and hits for about 50% of the HP of a level 30 character, but he also casts a huge AoE fear (which often causes players to fall off and die instantly if they land on a platform instead of the water) and a shockwave that hits for about… 100% of the HP of a level 30 character (i.e., 1-shot kill for anyone not wearing heavy armor + full toughness & vitality build). The shockwave “obviously” goes through walls and pillars, too, so you can get killed instantly if you’re trying to revive someone and don’t have LoS to the troll.

And yet his “tooltip” still says just “regenerates health, AoE knockback” (i.e., the two least relevant of his abilities).

Yes, I know he’s avoidable (and killable, by a competent party), but what’s the point of having such an imbalanced boss in story mode? It’s just putting off new players (which are the ones doing story), adding another entry to the (long) list of mistakes in GW2’s dungeon design.

A long time ago, I remember there was a “+” button in the crafting interface, next to each component, supposedly to craft those components automatically. It didn’t do anything.

Not quite so long ago, I saw a video where someone was using that button, and the game automatically crafted the sub-component.

Now I decided to give GW2 another try, and the button doesn’t even appear.

Any idea what happened to that button?

GW2’s crafting UI is a mess, with a huge spaghetti list that you need to keep going up and down to craft each component. It’s bad enough that we can’t get a “bill of materials” for an item, but at least if there was a button to craft components we wouldn’t need to scroll up and down so much.

Yamagawa.5941:

As to enemies holding aggro on you while stealthed, that was part of a change to prevent them from healing to full the moment you entered stealth

That didn’t even happen in beta, and it certainly didn’t happen in the months after release. If you stealthed, the enemy would hang around for a while (5 seconds at least, possibly more), and then started healing about 10% per second, while heading back to its original position. If you hit it again, it would stop healing.

They never “healed to full the moment you entered stealth”.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

That’s odd. When I use stealth on my Ranger, the mobs always turn their attention to someone else, or turn back to yellow. I don’t seem to have a problem with my Thief, either, but I play it a bit less.

Turning their attention to someone else is hard when there’s no one else around. And I seriously doubt any aggroed creature “turns back to yellow” before it resets completely (lots of creatures are never yellow anyway).

I just checked this again, and I even see some creatures tracking (and firing) for the entire duration of shadow refuge, while my character is (visually) stealthed. It’s as if stealth is just a graphic effect now, with no influence on the AI.

No, this is the new model. It was the best way Arena Net found to make skins that are:

a) Different from the human cultural armor.
b) Very fast to model.
c) Guaranteed to be popular.

I hadn’t played in a long time, and recently decided to check GW2 again.

The first thing I noticed was that stealth is now almost completely useless against NPCs. They continue to track, shoot and hit me even if I stealth for 3 or 4 seconds (and change direction during the stealth). It seems to take at least 5 seconds of stealth to make them stop shooting / chasing and, even then, they “automagically” know where I am, even if there is no LoS between their position and the place where I unstealthed.

This was definitely not the case about one year ago.

I tested it with all kinds of creatures, and I have no lag, so that’s not the issue. My character does become cloaked, but the mobs simply ignore it.

Is this a recent bug, or has Arena Net decided to make stealth PvP only (maybe the mobs complained) ?