Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

Having entirely different moves for each Legend/weapon combo would be cool, but as you say it would take a lot of work on their part. If they can do it, that’s great, but otherwise, I’d settle for the different weapons to have slightly different bonus effects based on Legend, so that each is more viable in all specs, for example Staff 1 generates heal orbs in Ventari mode, but maybe Caltrops in Mallyx, or Protection orbs in Jalis. Same animations, mostly same effect visuals, same core effects, but they would synergize better with every Legend.

This is actually a really cool idea. I think you could even take it a step further and give the abilities slightly different names (and tooltips obviously). That eliminates a lot of the animation/graphic work and puts most of the burden on development, but it’s a great way to give each legend a different “feel”, even with essentially the same kit. Here’s an example:

Staff on Ventari is just as it is now, focusing on healing and damage reduction:

Rapid Swipe -> Forceful Bash -> Rejuvenating Assault: 2 hits, then cleave foes around you with your staff, creating healing orbs for you and your allies.

Punishing Sweep ->Debilitating Slam: Gain access to Debilitating Slam if you interrupt. Imbue your staff with mist energy and slam it down, damaging and weakening nearby foes.

Warding Rift: Create a rift from the mists, warding you from attacks. While the rift is open projectiles will hit nearby foes, blinding them.

Renewing Wave: Send out a wave of mist energy that heals and removes conditions from allies.

Surge of the Mists: Charge forward, knocking back enemies that cross your path.

Staff on Mallyx, however, could be condi-focused, as such:

Rapid Swipe -> Forceful Bash -> Agonizing Assault: 2 hits, then cleave foes around you with your staff, creating orbs that torment foes who touch them.

Punishing Sweep ->Crippling Slam: Gain access to Debilitating Slam if you interrupt. Imbue your staff with mist energy and slam it down, damaging and crippling nearby foes.

Warding Rift: Create a rift from the mists, warding you from attacks. While the rift is open projectiles will hit nearby foes, confusing them.

Vile Wave: Send out a wave of mist energy that damages and poisons foes.

Surge of the Mists: Charge forward, knocking back enemies that cross your path (this one can stay the same, to be honest).

Just an example of how these skills can be changed from one legend to another, without making them completely new from scratch.

Well, we have to keep in mind that even adding 5 new skills probably requires several weeks worth of development and testing. So even adding one second “mode” per weapon is a lot of work. Saying “it’s not difficult” is like casually dismissing the insane amount of work that goes into animations and graphics.

But, I think it would be worth it for the class as a whole. Plus, it would be super cool to watch all 10 skills on your hotbar change at the same time when you switch legends.

A lot of people have mentioned weapon-swapping for the Revenant, and while I think that could be neat, I think it would be even cooler if the different weapons had different weapon skills depending on your equipped legend. I understand this would take more time to develop and test, but I think it would go a long way to making each legend feel more distinct as a playstyle, and wouldn’t require players to swap between legends and weapons at the same time whenever they want a complete swap.

Take Hammer for example. Maybe for one legend it uses ranged attacks and ranged AOE (like it does now), but for, say, Jalis, it turns into a melee bruiser weapon with lots of blocks or CC. For Staff, it keeps its defensive/support skills for Ventari, but turns into a condi-based weapon for Mallyx. That kind of thing.

If that’s too difficult to implement (since we’re talking about 30+ new skills), perhaps just a few skills for each weapon could change. Maybe 1-3 stays the same, but 4-5 changes. Or perhaps 3-5 stays the same, and 1-2 changes. Or maybe even just the autoattack changes based on your current legend.

I think that would be a great way to add some additional distinction to each legend without requiring Revenants to have access to weapon swap.

I wrote a rather long piece about the NPE in that thread, but the short of it is that I’ve introduced GW2 to several of my friends and co-workers who have never played before, and their experience is extremely (frustratingly) different from mine when I was leveling from 1-80 for the first time two years ago. While most of this stems from our dissatisfaction with the NPE, Traits are definitely an issue. Here are my notes and suggestions:

The Bad:

- 14 points / unlocking Trait Tiers: As a veteran player, having only 14 trait points instead of 70 is actually more helpful than bad, because it means switching builds around is very easy. But for newer players, it leads to a sense that your character is not progressing at a steady rate. Instead of making a decision about where to spend 1 trait point every level past level 10, players must first reach level 30, and then only get to spend a new trait point every 6 levels. When they spend that point it is more impactful, but it’s a real bummer to have to wait that long to even start. Waiting until level 30 to begin really customizing your character to suit your play style is frankly awful. I really can’t say this loud enough. Level 30 is far too long to begin unlocking traits. And what’s worse, you have to wait until 60 to get the next tier. That’s 5 trait points that you are forced to spread out between only 10 spots. I understand the desire to give levels 30-80 an interesting progression. But forcing players to wait all the way to level 60 before they really feel like they can customize their character is not good at all.

- Unlocking traits: Okay, so as a new player, I’ve just gotten to level 36. I’ve unlocked my first major trait. But wait, I can’t apply it; it’s greyed out on my screen. It says I have to unlock it by performing (X) event / task. I have no idea what that is or how to complete it. I’ve already leveled a character all the way up to level 36. Shouldn’t this Trait be my reward for leveling? For new players, this is a really feel-bad moment. They can’t experiment with new builds because they have no traits. For veteran players, this is even worse – traits aren’t unlocked account-wide and have the same tasks for each character, so it means either spending a ton of money to bypass the tasks, or spending a ton of time doing the same tasks on each new character.

The Good:

- The concept of unlocking “new” traits: I like the idea that when new traits are added to the game, veteran players have something new to experience and something they look forward to unlocking as a result. Unfortunately, only 1 new trait for each trait line has been released since the game began, so this isn’t necessarily relevant right now, but if new traits were ever released, I wouldn’t mind them being added in this way.

- Allowing players to respec instantly: This promotes experimentation, which is something I think Traits do very well.

- No books: These just didn’t seem necessary. Glad they’re gone.

Suggestions:

- “Unlocked” traits are unlocked account-wide. This should be a given. If I’ve done something once for one character and gotten a reward, give that reward to all my characters so I don’t have to run through that event again for every single one of my alts. This isn’t just good for veteran players. New players often make new characters repeatedly, too – if they feel rewarded for their past accomplishments, that’s a good thing.

- “Core” traits are always unlocked; use an “unlock” system for new traits introduced in expansions. By core traits, I mean all or most of the ones in the original GW2 game. If new traits are added via living story, feature pack or expansion updates, I have no particular problem with those needing to be unlocked. In fact, I think it would be a great way to give veteran players something to do, and new players something to look forward to unlocking later. However, I really feel that the core traits should be unlocked from the beginning. New players need something to actually APPLY when they level up. That’s their reward! Alternatively, if you really feel the need to keep some core traits locked, make the Grandmaster traits the ones that are locked. New players don’t unlock those until level 80 anyway – that gives them something to do once they’ve reached max level (trait hunting). (Although I still don’t like those unlocking all the way at level 80.)

TL;DR:
- Core traits should be unlocked to encourage more experimentation and customization at early levels. Unlocking should be reserved for new or rare traits.
- Players should unlock traits and tiers earlier and more frequently. Unlocking at level 10 and gaining 1 point per level was perfect for the game, and just made sense (it’s almost like the game was designed that way). Waiting until level 30 and then only getting a trait point every 6 levels feels awful for new players. (Source: I have new players telling me this exact phrase.)

Thanks for your time.

Warning: incoming long post.

I’ve been ranting about how great Guild Wars 2 is at work for months now, and after the expansion was announced, I managed to convince several of my friends and co-workers to pick up the game.

Playing with new players used to be easy. It was a great way to show them the ropes, explaining things along the way while my character is leveled down to their content. Now, it’s a hassle, because I have no idea what the game has explained, what the game has explained poorly, and what the game hasn’t even tried to explain because it’s level-gated.

I.E. this situation: “What’s this?” “Oh, it’s a skill challenge. If you go up to this thing and complete a challenge, you get a skill point which you can spend to unlock new skills.” Then we go over to it and 3 people all tell me nothing happens when they click on it, because it turns out they haven’t unlocked skill points yet.

This happened over 20 times throughout the course of the night. Skill points. Rallying. Underwater combat. Even salvaging! It was honestly very frustrating for my friends who were told Guild Wars 2 was this rich, immersive experience, and now they feel like the game is treating them like an idiot because the game doesn’t think that they’ll “get it”.

Meanwhile, once they’ve unlocked something by leveling up enough, the game just says, “hey, you’ve unlocked this thing,” and that’s IT. Barely any explanation, and they’re left scratching their heads going “… okay?” When veteran players were traveling around learning new things it was very natural and very immersive. We saw a thing we didn’t understand, we investigated or learned through action. Now the game has a big pop-up that says “Hey, by the way, now all of a sudden when you die there’s this downed state and you can rally. Have fun!” and players are just left confused.

Now there are certain things that I do like about the NPE. I like that they’re getting loot every time they level up. That’s a nice touch that they seemed to appreciate. I like that it’s telling them they’re getting stat increases, or unlocking things like utility skill slots. But when you put huge parts of the game behind a level gate, it creates the illusion that there’s nothing going on in the game. No personal story until level 10 means that for the first few hours of the game players legitimately think the game has no story at all. Things I overheard with my new group: “Is this (renown hearts) all we do?” “What happened with that stuff from my intro?” No major game systems like traits or skill points creates the illusion that players have absolutely no choice over their abilities. “… So I have 3 abilities, is that it?” “When do I get to level up? (said by somebody at level 8)”

Meanwhile, my only response to these kinds of comments is “Keep playing! It gets better.” And it does, truthfully. But you have to hold a new player’s attention all the way until level 31 for them to unlock every major thing the game has to offer, and honestly that’s a long kitten time to try to convince a new player that your game is good. I am prodding my friends to keep playing until the game “gets great”, but I’m left wondering – why did this even need to happen? When I turned on Guild Wars 2 for the first time I thought it was great from moment 1. Now it’s a game that “gets better” after you play it for 10 hours.

Thanks for reading. I hope this feedback from my real-life experiences with new players helps to drive Guild Wars 2 to become an even better game. We’re going to have a LOT of new players with news of an expansion, and if we want to keep them, I think changes need to be made.

TL;DR: Brought some friends into the fold. The NPE doesn’t help to explain anything to them and only serves to frustrate them (and me) by gating major systems – including the kitten plot – behind a level wall, forcing them to play for many hours before the game actually becomes fun. It should just be fun right out of the gate, like it used to be.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Now that the HOT is out of the bag, we’re able to update this thread with more details. With the introduction of the new account based mastery system for end-game progression and growth in PvE, we’ll also be re-evaluating our other systems of character progression to ensure they match our over-all pillars and goals for Gw2.

In doing so: we’re going to be removing the current trait unlocking system currently on live and replacing it with a more simplified system that supports where skills-traits-specializations are going in the future. We’ll go into more details between now and the release of HOT on how skills, traits, and specializations will work in the new Gw2 world.

Thank you for all your passionate feedback on this topic – it not only helped our dev team lead to this decision, but has played a large role in helping us define how to build our exciting new account based mastery system for end-game progression in PvE as well.

Awesome! Now, could you also remove the “new player experience” that makes all of my friends who just bought GW2 based on the imminent expansion confused, angry and frustrated? That would be great!

This is pretty spectacular. I especially love the Lore Journal, LFG, and the website redesign.

If a Lore Journal like this was implemented into the game I think it would be amazing. Great job!

Unfortunately adding CoherentUI, GW, or even the entire guild wars 2 folder to the “exceptions” list of both my windows firewall and my anti-malware program doesn’t seem to do anything. I’ve even tried playing with my firewall turned off completely, and it still doesn’t work.

Please help! I haven’t been able to play GW2 for almost two weeks now!

Hi,

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 for years and have never encountered an issue like this in the past. Every time I try to boot the patch client to play Echoes of the Past (which hasn’t successfully updated into my client yet), the patcher almost immediately crashes. It boots, says “Downloading 0kb (0kb/sec)” and then crashes literally less than a second later.

Here are some of the logs from the crash (excluding my system info, if you want more please tell me):

I’ve heard that there was some stuff with CoherentUI.exe that makes the client crash, so I whitelisted it on both my firewall and my anti-malware, but that hasn’t seemed to fix anything. Please help, I want to play Echoes! =(

Chris,

Here are my notes / suggestions. Note that while I am an experienced player I have introduced many friends to Guild Wars 2 in recent weeks and I was very concerned with their experiences as new players.

One of my favorite aspects of Guild Wars 2 was the world itself, and how Arena Net was innovating quests (“hearts”) by giving them all kinds of new and unique tasks besides find X things or kill X enemies. I am talking about stuff like the farm outside Queensdale, the Sylvan Hounds in Caledon, etc. The fact that I could walk up to a pail of water, pick it up, see my skill bar change, and actually use that pail of water to water plants. Or pick up food and feed the cows. Transform into a hound and run around doing hound things. In addition to being very unique, these were FUN. And seriously, they’re not hard for a new player to understand. They’re really, really not. Worst case scenario, there’s an NPC standing right there – just have him give a more thorough tutorial on how the heart works. I was appalled when I heard one of my friends say he walked up to a cow and pressed F, then walked up to a plant and pressed F instead of the unique and interesting interactions that were there before.

Second, I am concerned with the way that some features have been ‘gated’ behind levels. While I completely understand that players learn systems better when they are introduced slowly over time, I think that the NPE is a huge over-correction in the wrong direction, in this regard. There are two negative factors at work here. One is that if you progress too slowly, players get bored or feel like the game is treating them like a dummy. Many new players in Guild Wars 2 are going to be proficient in the core systems of RPGs or adventure games. They are being completely alienated by the NPE, which is shutting out major game systems – some for a short period of time, and some for much longer periods of time. The other negative factor is that many of these changes conflict with the original design and direction of GW2, and then when they are re-integrated at higher levels, it’s actually far more confusing and complex than it could have been. One of my friends who I introduced GW2 to was extremely confused that falling to 0 hp in the tutorial instance killed her, while falling to 0 hp later on triggered the downed state. She had no idea that was even a feature of the game, and it threw her off completely. Little bait-and-switch moments like these create a lot of confusion. She thought, “Did I die because I was in a story instance?” and then thought, “Or maybe I just got hit so hard that I died?”

In any event, I think the biggest issue here – and the reason why most experienced players are upset at these changes – is the strange disconnect between the developers and the players. Ever since launch, GW2 has had issues players would have loved to see changed. Some were, some weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, GW2 is a fantastic game and my favorite MMO of all time, but any player or critical review will tell you what things are wrong with the game and need fixing. In NONE of these reviews or forum posts have I ever seen anybody complaining that early levels (1-20) are confusing or complex, or that new players tried the game and felt it was too complicated for them. In fact, in contrast to other MMOs, GW2 is extremely simple and easy to understand. You have far less skills taking up your screen, the UI is clean and simple, enemies have clear attack indicators, and tooltips are all over the place. I feel that the NPE is a huge mis-step for the above reasons, and that it is actually hindering the experience for both new and experienced players, rather than aiding in players’ understanding of GW2’s relatively simple systems and mechanics. I am not adverse to the concept of a new player experience, but levels 1-30 at launch were much easier to understand as a new player, and more importantly, far more fun.

Thank you for reading and I hope the design team takes these points into account.

How was opening your character panel, looking at the 5 options, choosing one and clicking a + button complicated for new players before? It’s literally opening a panel and clicking a button. RPG players are used to assigning points when they level up. It’s ingrained in the entire RPG philosophy. Sure, sometimes you make a choice that you later realized was wrong for your character build, but that’s what respec is there for.

What’s not simple for new players to understand is when they open their traits panel and can’t assign a trait because they have to unlock it first, and when they look at how to unlock it, it’s either vague or far too time-consuming. Most new players aren’t going to know what these world events and big event chains are.

I have a friend who just started playing GW2 not too long ago. I was talking to a co-worker about my character’s traits and we asked my friend what traits he’s unlocked so far, and he replied: “What are traits?” Because the trait system was pushed back all the way to level 30, he didn’t even realize he’d started unlocking trait points. He’d already figured out the “pattern” of how leveling up in GW2 plays out. When we started unlocking traits much earlier, we figured it out very easily, because it was shown to us up front at an early level. You knew it was a big part of the game.

I agree that building complexity slowly over time is the correct way to ease new players into a complicated system, but I really don’t think traits are a complicated enough system to warrant easing players into them this slowly, and I think it’s actually hurting their ability to understand what traits are about. Also, while there’s definitely the risk of new players becoming overwhelmed, there’s an equally large risk of new players becoming bored and seeing their character progression as stale and unrewarding.

Yamsandjams.3267:

I would hold onto all of them right now for the aforementioned merchant.

Furthermore, consider this to simply be a sound policy going forward, even if it does cram up your bank space.

The reason? Well, during the election event for the LS, tons of people tossed away unused voting tickets after the election was closed. However, a short while later, they allowed you to vendor the items for a sizeable amount, meaning people literally tossed away hundreds of gold (a function that is not normally possible in the game, I might add).

So it’s just an application of Murphy’s Law. If you toss some of the stuff away, you are almost certain to miss out on a very desirable reward. If you keep it, you may receive a pittance after the fact, or nothing at all.

Thanks for the advice. I was not aware they’d be adding a merchant to take some of the old LS currencies; I’ll be on the lookout for him.

My problem right now is that it’s taking up such a gigantic chunk of my inventory that I am literally unable to play the game with my main as of current writing. Every single drop is just another thing I can’t carry. My bank is completely full and I really don’t want to spend RL money just to get additional bank or bag tabs, especially just to make room for EVEN MORE LS currencies and tokens to fill those spots.

Honestly, if they’re going to keep introducing more and more and more currencies, especially if they expect players to hold onto them indefinitely, it would be really great if they just included them as actual wallet currencies. Why not? They’re basically like dungeon tokens as it is.

Hey guys,

I’ve been playing on/off for quite some time, generally logging on for a few days at the beginning of each new living story update, playing through its story for some time, and never quite accruing enough tokens / currencies / whatever to actually purchase any of the higher-level stuff from the new update. I know many events rotate (like Wintersday and SAB), so I’ve been hanging on to basically every single thing I’ve ever found from LS. Now my inventory is clogged with stuff like Baubles, wintersday hats/socks, Found Belongings, Scarlet’s keys, power nodes…. Just all kinds of stuff.

I have a couple questions that I was hoping the forums could answer.

1) Is there a merchant somewhere that I’m missing who can just take all of these? Or does each LS update have its own person to talk to?

2) Of the LS tokens/currencies, which of them should I hold onto and which should I just get rid of?

As an aside, it would be really helpful if this was communicated better to the player. I rarely log into the forums and I don’t want to have to fish for information; I’d much rather just log on and have the game let me know what the deal is. Why can’t we get some of these tokens in wallet form like dungeon tokens (SAB baubles for example?) Or even just a tooltip for old LS items that will never be used again, saying “This item is useless now” would be very very helpful for a player like me.

Thanks.

Please implement this or at least allow us to use it! It would make combat so much more fun!

Nebilim, I hear what you’re saying, but I’m not sure it would be as easy as you say. Look on the Dungeon forums. There’s a ton of threads saying “X is impossible” or “Y is impossible”, and this is without any buffs. If they made it even harder than it is now, while it would be easier for the top % of players, it would be even more difficult for most of the players, but obtainable with enough skill, rather than with enough time.

I’d much rather try and try and try again against a difficult dungeon, only to finally succeed once for my big reward, then win and win and win repeatedly for little itty bits of reward at a time (AKA grind).

Yeah. Best thing about Nine-Tailed is if you don’t get hit during it, you get all the initiative back. Since it’s pretty much instant-cast you can use it when an enemy is about to attack, and if you mess up and they weren’t attacking you, just tap it again and you have all your initiative again, attack for a couple seconds with 1, and when they’re about to attack again, bam, Nine-Tailed Strike. Amazing.

Wow, an ArenaNet response first thing. Nice. =)

Edit: Thanks Robert, sounds great. Keep up the good work!

I agree with this 100%.

Thumbs up.

Yeah, the medium armor set for humans just looks like somebody took a bunch of tattered scraps of leather and draped it over my character’s body. It’s a huge disappointment.

I will say, I agree with your assessment about the Elite skills, though. It would be nice if I could use some of my other Elites while underwater.

I disagree completely. I’ve used a handful of professions and toyed around with their underwater skills and I find the thief’s spear set to be the most fun in the entire game. With Nine-Tailed Strike you have an instant-cast block that does a TON of damage, two different evasive attacks, one of which lasts almost two full seconds (!), a pulling attack that is great for PvP, and an auto-attack that poisons every 3rd hit. I find it to be a great skill set. It has good offense and absolutely fantastic defensive capabilities. If you’re good enough, you can take on Veteran mobs without even taking damage. It’s very engaging because you have to be actively watching your enemy to know when to use Nine-Tailed Strike or Flanking Strike for the best effectiveness. Shadow Assault is probably one of my favorite skills in the entire game. Watching my thief dance around for a few seconds, hitting everybody around me while evading every attack is very satisfying, especially in PvP where I can hold my own against as many as three enemies at the same time.

Basically, thief spear owns underwater.

Secondary note: While I agree with the high token cost for exotic dungeon armor – it’s cosmetic and should be very difficult to obtain – I don’t think there is any incentive to run dungeons on a per-run basis. You get very little money (especially with such high repair costs), awful loot, and maybe a couple salvage ingredients every now and then. Not counting the tokens, there’s very little reason to go through a dungeon (other than in story mode for the experience of it), and with level 35 “dungeon armor” being worthless, there is no reason to have tokens unless you plan on doing a hundred runs of the same dungeon, which most people don’t ever intend to do.

I shouldn’t be able to obtain the same amount of experience and money doing one or two events as in an entire dungeon run. Dungeons are extremely difficult and often quite long, and the reward should relate according to this length and difficulty.

Most of all though, please make level 35 dungeon armor worthwhile so that those of us who don’t plan on making a hundred dungeon runs can have an actual reward for trying explorable mode. It’s okay if it’s not AS good as the exotic armor, but it should at least be comparable.

After clearing Ascalonian Catacombs in Story mode, I elected to go back and spend a few days collecting tokens so I could start getting dungeon armor as my level 39 thief. Unaware of the change to Rare dungeon armor, I spent about 12 hours trying to collect tokens so I could get the Chestguard. When I went to the vendor in Lion’s Arch and previewed the armor, I thought something was off, so I went and looked at the exotic version. Lo and behold, it was the actual armor set. I was surprised to find that not only was the rare dungeon armor the same for every dungeon, but was also REALLY bland. I later found out that this change was made to make the dungeon armor more difficult to obtain.

This is a serious disappointment. I understand that the exotic dungeon armor should be hard to get, but over one hundred runs for an entire set of dungeon armor is absolutely ridiculous. There’s no way I’m going to do that, and since the rare armor looks bland as hell, there’s no way I’m going to even bother collecting 150+ tokens for that, either. In addition to feeling like I wasted 12 hours of my life, I also know I’m probably never going to run dungeons in exploration mode ever again, which is a real shame, because a lot of work was put into them. There’s just no incentive to do it.

PLEASE make the rare dungeon armor actually look like the dungeon armor for the exotics. I know that the high price for the exotic versions is there for a reason, but isn’t there something else you guys can do to make those versions more desirable? How about giving them a special rune or slightly different appearance that would make the top players want to get them? Like a glow or hue, or something unique? Don’t just make the easy to obtain armor look like scraps of leather, all that does is punish the people who don’t want to do 100+ runs of the same dungeon, AKA 99.9% of players. I’m by no means a casual player, but I just have no incentive to do dungeons anymore, which sucks because I was really excited about dungeons during beta.

Please, I’m begging you guys. I know I’m not the only person in this boat because in-game I hear people outside of dungeons complaining about their “dungeon armor” not actually being dungeon armor. This needs to be fixed.

I said this during Beta and I’ll say it again. It needs something, whether it’s a shorter cooldown, more healing, or better yet, some kind of mechanic to make it more interesting. All of the other healing skills in the game have some kind of interesting mechanic or flavor to them. Prayer to Dwayna is boring, weak and a waste of skill points. Please add something to it to make it at least useful. It doesn’t even have to be equally powerful, but it should at least be interesting. As a thief, Hide in Shadows does nearly the same amount of healing, at the same cooldown, and also removes a bunch of conditions and stealths.