Guild Wars 2

A difficulty system is not unheard of in mmos, however the games that use them are instance based. In large open world maps, this is impractical. At best difficulties could be added to dungeons, not the core game. You would be asking people to buy one of three versions of the game only to find that it may not be the one for them. This would also divide the population of the game further, which would leave the mmo feeling even less populated. Then you would have to have devs balance those three versions. The work load as well as costs would be three times what it is now. From a business standpoint I don’t see it as worth it. In regards to difficulty throttling for dungeons, often the case this difficulty is artificial, and really doesn’t change the game itself. It may add a monster or two but more than likely inflate or deflate numbers. For some that is the difficulty the want, for others the want new mechanics and puzzles to be the definition of harder. When you are trying to make a game that appeals to a large audience you have to take these things into consideration. Its not realistic to try to please everyone, so sometimes you go with what you know works.

Elementalist conjured weapons – Turn them into spirit weapons, still limited uses, but now they change their skills according to the element they are in. Remove the ability for other people to pick them up. Give the ability to use spirit axe and/or spirit shield with a tangible main/offhand weapon.

vesica tempestas.1563:

I hate summoned weapons, you instantly lose access to 20 spells to gain access to 5 ultimately similar spells. Less choice is dull.

So what if … just think about it … what if those weapons were “spirit weapons” that were still temporary, but had different elemental abilities in whatever element you were in? Then you just nerf the fact that other people can pick them up, because who the heck wants to use your crumby conjured weapons anyway? Right?! They would still be conjured weapons, but with more utility! See? More options = more cool!

That’s what I meant by “fixing” them.

Then just give us the longsword for an expansion.

If they went trinity for business reasons I would respect that but I would stop playing the game. Some people would just rather all information and roles be spoonfed to them without need for thought or creativity. Fine. I have played those. I will say that there are other trinity games out there with different genres that I like (scifi/superhero) that I would be more into. One of the selling points of this game for me was that I could build to the specific to the role you want to play with the style of play I liked the most. Its not perfect, but it works. I will even forgive the trinity light aspects of the game to an extent. With my Elementalist I can go tanky, supporty or DPS.. I’m not great at one but I can be respectable with the other two. I have my options when I am playing with friends or by myself. The guild will lay down the law when I choose to play with them. However if it got shoehorned into only DPS or only Support, with no choice, I would be done with this game. Like I said, there would be other genre specific games that already use a straight trinity system that I would rather play if this game went strict trinity.

You can summon a greatsword, and a axe, and a hammer, and a shortbow…
I would rather they do something to make the conjured weapons relevant again.
I would also like it if you could wield the axe with one hand and the shield in the support slot (which honestly is how i thought they were going to work until i was sorely disappointed.) Now the addition of longswords would be AWESOME! I would get on that hype train. That way i could swap out foci, horn or dagger. More dual wield options is always welcome (to me.) Heck, dual wielding scepters sounds awesome as sin!

What about bosses or boss like createures in starting zones? You think they would be possible without a few people with high end gear? What about an event that has you and you friends grossly outnumbered and outgunned? A veteran could have helped you out with those. Coming from games that were highly competitive for loot and mob exp, GW2 does not have these same issues. Spawns are fast, exp is done on tag, and the loot is so evenly distributed between story quests and random grinding i barely notice. Heck, once you start getting a steady steam of tomes of knowledge, you wont even need to leave the first zone to get to level 80. I like the level cap system as it. It is a fine enough restriction to make sure high levels aren’t being total jerks, they can still get overwhelmed (rarely, but its happend to me so…). I encourage you to explore other areas in the same zone, you might find more hero points, exp and treasure chests in caves.

There is one other thing the current system encourages as well, all of your areas have people in them of one variety or the other, grinding out dailies or otherwise. This keeps your world from feeling empty and keeps zones feeling relevant. Giving high levels no reason to be in low level areas would make the game like so many others, the only places you would find people would be in endgame zones, and then you would have lowbies posting complaints about how they cant find anyone in low level areas.

My suggestion is to try talking to poachers, or even asking them for help. If they ignore you or harass you, block em or report them; by no means do I want to see the world mechanic change to push people from populating all the zones as any given point in time. That’s what makes this game feel populated and that’s a good thing.

Sylvari – Elementalist – Auramancer

Fire breathing, condition cleansing, rapid healing, tanky, zombie immune, cabbage man of the pale tree. Sign me up.

VaLee.5102:

TLDR; What makes GW2 different than any other generic MMO right now?

How would you convince a WoW player for example to come and play GW2 today? Because I can’t think of anything else but “well it’s like WoW, but different…it has asuras instead of gnomes, and you don’t need 100 addons to be able to get into a raid…yet”

I never played WoW, never cared for WoW.
I came from Korean grind fests, Japanese Lobby games, and a long line of failed/canned western Superhero and Horror MMOs. With those games everything came to a crashing halt at end game. You NEEDED a guild, which inevitably lead to scheduling raid dates, having to deal with other peoples personal drama and so on. You wound up spending all your time and effort to get prepared for the hope that one day your lucky number was drawn and you would get a piece of loot that was going to be obsolete when the next update came. If you missed your chance you did it all again to the point of tedium. Months and even years of my time were dedicated to a ton of drama and stress, all in efforts to keep my characters up to date. I just wanted to play the darn game, but those games became my job away from my job.

GW2 is a different beast. It offers me the experience of going off on my own to explore without needing a party to go with me. I always enjoy meeting new people just by showing up to a monster icon or event icon, not having to sit in a town and shout for 3 hours to get a party to do something. I can obtain all of my gear fairly easily and while there is some (small by my definition) grind I don’t have the dread that my gear will be out of date in a few months. For as much as people complain about Elite grinding, for me its a cake walk. I sit down for a few hours here and there and am able to knock out a 10th to a quarter of a wheel. That is super casual for me.

If I get bored of one game mode I can play another, there is always something to do. There has been no other game that has given me what I have been looking for in regars to PvP. I enjoy WvW as well, but understand a bit where the old timers are coming from that it needs some work or new content. PvE LFG is no where annoying as other games I have played. I haven’t once been unable to complete a dungeon because it was abandoned by players (or devs.) GW2 has delivered what it advertised for me, I pay one time and can play hours of content hassle free. I can play Fashion Wars without having to jump through a crap ton of hoops. I can log in, set a goal, get that goal done and log for the night and not feel like everyone is leaving me behind.

Sure I have run into a handful of elitist jerks, but they are in every game. I can honestly say in GW2 I have never had to PUT UP WITH and STOMACH those elitist jerks, I have never NEEDED them to complete any content, and that feels good.

That’s my not-so-elevator pitch. I came into this game with very low expectations, and pleasantly had them all exceeded.

I plan on having one of every class in the end (I started about 2 months ago) but unless something changes I will be focusing primarily on my Elementalist and occasionally my Engineer. Part of the reason is that I want to educate myself what each class is capable of, the second reason is because they operate as extra storage space i don’t have to pay gems for (and i like to dress them up.) Elementalist is the class I am most satisfied with, Engineer has a ton of options and I like tooling around with it to see what I can accomplish. So I would say, I could play only one class, but whats the point when its so easy to bring up all your other classes after you have leveled on to 80? With the “ease” of book grinding (I cam from a long line of Korean MMOs, its easy, trust me) you are almost encouraged to play more that one class.

My Sylvari Elementalist is a bit more “Sunny,” I was inspired by a particular nightmare court character that didn’t look ghostly or dark and brooding at all, they were actually quite colorful .. So here he is, hes pretty much my main, although I think my new (norn female) engineer will be competing for that spot eventually.

hrmmm.. I see it as an alternative, but it won’t get me to abandon my auramancer build(s.) But it’s nice we have options regardless.

I’m one month new.
I keep meeting new people in every area I explore.
I keep meeting people who are as new as I am or newer.
So if there is still an influx of new blood and still plenty of vets playing the game, to me it all looks very promising. I think the game is doing very well. The only times things seem “dead” is when WvW is changing shifts from daytime players to nighttime players. PVE is always full (at least that’s my perception, and I’m on a lower pop server.)

AliamRationem.5172:

Ghoststeel.6098:

I’m confused as to why pigeonholing (forcing) people into a defensive playstyle will be a good thing? I thought options were a selling point in this game. I thought “No holy trinity” was also a selling point of this game. I’m new, so I seriously do not understand why removing options will make this game better. Or I just might not know something sucks yet because I am too new.

I believe what they’re saying is that it’s a false choice. I’ll be the first to tell you that if you’re playing solo in open world you can find plenty of challenge to make more defensive stat sets useful (also true in PvP/WvW), albeit with no additional reward over following the zerg. However, in PvE content that matters (i.e. group content such as raids and fractals), organized groups want damage, damage, damage!

So, although my celestial earth/air/tempest elementalist is super fun to play and can do things that glass elementalists can’t (like solo the champion of balthazar or the mushroom queen), there’s really nobody who wants to bring my elementalist along to raids when they could instead bring an elementalist that deals more damage and still survives because the group is organized and healers help cover the more fragile builds so they can do what they do best: damage!

Then again, maybe this is a side-effect of the obsessive focus with the meta? I mean, how much time do players really spend raiding or running fractals vs. open world? How much time do they spend solo? I meet players all the time who didn’t think a <insert X class here> could do that because they only run the meta builds that focus on maximizing group efficiency. Are survival stats truly useless in that case?

You tell me. Would you run a weird survival build like celestial ele or marauder thief for solo open world? Or is just not worth your time when you could get the job done faster by bringing friends or running with the zerg? Because somehow I doubt glass builds are soloing a lot of the champions in HoT (okay, maybe necro or ranger can but the so-called squishy classes?). Am I wrong here? Or is it just that it straight doesn’t matter enough to people to register the value of survival stats in these scenarios?

Thanks for the clarification by the way. thumbs up

So I chalk this up to a “community” issue then, or “the fun police.” People telling other people how to play, because some peer group dictates the rules of what is good and bad. No getting away from it either, it’s in every game. The moment you have rules, you have metas. The only way to change a meta is to change the rules. So I guess the “solution” to some people is to counter-brow-beat people into playing the way they want to play via game mechanics or whatever; Aka nerf this, buff that, change game mechanic X. Honestly I like this game for its flexibility, there are a lot of things to do and several “game modes” to do them in. Thats an awesome selling point to me. If it ever stops doing that that then I will look for other games that fit that niche. Until then if people don’t like my playstyle then I will either solo or make some friends who don’t care about such things. Then again, I’m not a Vet, I am still 1 month new to this game so i don’t know how “realistic” this mindset is. I will just say I haven’t enjoyed myself this much for a while.. Its a nice change from past disappointments.

I’m confused as to why pigeonholing (forcing) people into a defensive playstyle will be a good thing? I thought options were a selling point in this game. I thought “No holy trinity” was also a selling point of this game. I’m new, so I seriously do not understand why removing options will make this game better. Or I just might not know something sucks yet because I am too new.

ToK are awesome for people who are always making/remaking alts. (Just throwing that out there.) Not so much if you aren’t an altaholic/have all the classes/races anyway and/or don’t want more.

Like several people have already said, I think the problem is again (not all) people feel that there are not enough “worthwhile” things to spend spirit shards on. I wouldn’t be surprised if ANet has pretty much abandoned spirit shards at this point. The existing recipes help to fill the cosmetic niche to some (albeit small) degree, but there are quite a few people who have never leveled their crafts high enough to bother. Adding more worthwhile things to the spirit shard list would help fix this issue:

Consumables
- Food
- Karma drops
- High level salvage and harvesting tools
- Temporary toys would eat up some of those shards I’m sure.

Cosmetic
- A hand full of dyes shouldn’t hurt
- Another cultural costume tier purchasable via spirit shards
- Transumation charges … seriously, vets have a ton of these anyway, they won’t hurt anything.

Actual Hero Progress
- If you can buy Heroic points in WvW why can’t you exchange multiple shards for hero points in PvE? Its still grinding! If you are worried about the ease of PvE grinding then for goodness sake increase the cost.
- Why can’t you exchange spirit shards for other preexisting currencies in the game? (I shudder to think of adding more currencies, I have been in several MMOs where that got out of hand.)

In closing:
Originally I thought spirit shards were a way to progress my characters development, and accepted the fact the game was “balanced” around keeping everything level 80. Spirit shards right now feel like a “why bother if you aren’t a crafter” sort of thing which is a shame.

Anyway, that’s my two bits. I’m sure no one cares and none of my comments matter, so I’ll leave you all to it. I just wanted to get that out. Good vibes and much love to you all.

Am I missing something about the torch?

Anyway.

I would say if you are leaning toward mesmer, go mesmer. Go with what feels right, mesmer has a lot to offer, in that regard I have my big three that i play the game with:

Revenant: From 1-80, things are kind of a cumbersome slog. You will get frustrated on those rare moments where you keep dying and ask yourself why you are bothering leveling this class at all. Once you get herald everything changes, farming and exploring on my herald is a breeze. Regen, Swiftness, and other little benefits make it worth it. You still feel like a brick and utterly useless in water however.

Ranger: This is a breeze… No, seriously, farming is easy on my Ranger. In PvE it is rare to have my health bar wiggle below 95%, if at all. You have a lot going for you, range, stealth, a pet to tank for you. On land, under water, your really cant go wrong. If you use them right some of your melee attacks come in useful traversing some maps. Out of my big three, ranger has been super casual for me.

Elementalist: My true main, I do everything with this guy … Staff is my go to farming weapon. I can burn down lots of things very quickly, so farming for me is fast. Let me say also my elementalist is my fastest character on passive, you have like 3++ ways to increase your movement speed. My elementalist rarely gets boring, because I’m always moving. Lastly having abilities that flat out allow you to ignore damage is great for those panic moments. Add on temporary pets, conjure weapons and more; all of it makes sure you have a tool for every occasion. Elementalist may be “squish,” but I rarely notice it unless I’m fighting champions.

My point in all this is that soloing and ease of soloing can be subjective. I like soloing on my elementalist, other people will despise it. If Mesmer feels right for you, go mesmer.