Guild Wars 2

Here’s what we need…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhcRm4SVLco

Sylent.3165:

Just getting from point a to point b?

Doing events when no one’s around?

Soloing mobs no matter what class you are? (Play as you want to play)

While group content is supposed to be hard? HoT failed because the entire expansion is a group expansion. Nothing at all was aimed for individual players who play an hour or two a day. (Which is individuals with full time jobs, girlfriend, friends)

Raids and fractals are wonderful for people who have time for them. Anymore though the game feels like one giant raid.

Anet….even though a lot of people may like it you truly did fail. Why? Because you killed guild wars for what it’s been from the very start of release. I truly hope the next expansion makes it worth coming back.

Cya in eso till then

Already been said multiple times by tons of players on lots of threads. Falling on deaf ears at this point. Fanboys will defend the new difficulty\forced-grouping\forced-meta-gating model till their dying breath, so don’t bother with them. Just play in the core world. Most of that is still casual friendly.

Susulemon.3204:

Just sell us 5 slots for 700 gems, be nice to your fans. Why capitalize so much money on making your players able to appreciate the game more.

I totally wish they would do this. It would make players extremely happy, especially me. But I’m pretty sure Anet has already run the number projections on this and their strategy seems designed to maximize profits, which makes sense – for them.

Think of it this way: If they did sell the current 5 slots for 700, I’d guesstimate at least 90% of the active players would buy that – Today. That’s a HUGE chuck of gems up front. But, there is little long term gain for them if 90% of the players did that. They could of course increase the max number of these slots to 6, or 7, or 10 etc over time, and sell those “extra” slots for 200 each or something. This actually sounds like a “good” model for the players and Anet, but then you compare it to the current strategy…

You start with sticker shock and single slot pricing that sounds unreasonable. Let players know right away this is a costly thing. The die-hards and casuals with cash will get it anyway and make excuses to justify it, so they’ll snag 10-20% of players right off the bat. The rest will fume and gripe and wait for a better deal later. After a while they do a better “sale” and drop the individual price and group price, which now that time has moved on a bit, seems more appealing to the eager to get these but still on the fence players. So now you get maybe another 20-40% of players to fork over a large amount. More time passes and eventually they come up with the “super deal”, and increase the number of total slots (maybe to 6, or 7 or 10?), and lower the individual cost or group cost of the slots by like 20%-30% or more. Even though the pricing is now closer in line to strategy 1, it’s still far more costly. But at this point the price seems “reasonable” or even a steal. This is the time where all those “THANK YOU ANET!” folks will pop up on the forums and such, saying how much they are feeling the love, how much the company cares, etc. Suddenly that “appreciation” you are talking about will be there and all is forgiven. This is also where the last hold-outs and skeptics will finally cave in.

In the end, the second model is a far better business model than the first. It’s a much better long term strategy. And if I was trying to maximize profits, it’s what I’d do.

mojodamm.6854:

So, it seems the main problem seems to be the price. Do you all jump on the forums of other consumer products and rant and rave about the convenience products they produce that you can’t afford also?

You’re making an assumption that people are complaining about price because they can’t afford it. That’s probably a false assumption. I think the reality is people who spend real money in the gem store do so because they can easily afford to do so in real life. They have real jobs and families so the gem store is a time saver. Buying a time saving device or cool shiny is something they don’t mind doing because they can afford to, and as long as they think the convenience balances out the cost they accept it. They also understand there will be a little gouging here (Anet has to make money after all) and so they grudgingly accept that. What they will NOT stand for though is blatant scamming or gouging.

Seriously though, ANet is going to LOSE money on these slots; no more multiple sets of eternal-thingamajigs being purchased from the market, and I think this convenience item is a great way in deflecting some of that cost.

This is debatable without real metrics. How many people buy a duplicate of each of those items for each of their characters? We don’t really know. The high cost of these slots actually seems to me balance things out. Plus consider this: the people who didn’t buy one of those “eternal” items before because they were not shareable between characters, is now encouraged to buy one along with one of these slots. So suddenly you have a whole new market of people buying gems. I don’t think you have really though through Anet’s strategy and pricing models.

Do I wish it was a little cheaper? Of course; as a consumer I wish EVERYTHING I personally wanted was a little cheaper. But ANet has access to the numbers and we don’t, and there are a lot of people who are looking at this in a simply “what works for ME” mindset. That’s not how consumerism works.

“Cheapness” in consumerism is just one part of the economics. Remember, consumers buy things if they have value and if there is not a better product out there. Quality also matters. Consumers won’t buy something if they feel they are being cheated or it’s overpriced. You can’t prove they are not being cheated anymore than the people feeling cheated can prove they are. Only the market can tell that, and the only comparable market we currently have is what Anet charges for something like bank slots or material storage, things that are already shared among characters. And considering the cost of those upgrades compared to one of these slots, on the surface at least it doesn’t seem to be balanced.

Yeah, unfortunately I have to agree I think this is a bit extreme. Only 1 shared slot for that many gems?

I am already annoyed at the model mechanic that bag slots are only per character. Everything in the game is designed to punish players like me that don’t just have one character but love to play multiple characters with multiple builds and play styles. We already get punished by being forced to buy additional character slots, buy additional bag slots per each character, not having armor that is shareable between characters, etc. The shared slot is only beneficial to us folks, not the ones that play only one character forever. And yet we, the ones that are already help pay Anet’s bills are the ones that get gouged even more.

I could see buying 5 slots for the current gem price they charge for 1, but this model is painful to see.

Kain Francois.4328:

Is Gliding actually a concern? It might be more trivial than we think. Since it uses a downward momentum, it probably wont let us reach anywhere we otherwise couldn’t simply using Ride the Lightning.

It will make some vistas easier in Orr though.

It’s probably more a concern for Anet developers. Depending on how well they scope the gliding and where you can glide. There lots of mountains\hills\high points that are totally inaccessible right now by foot that might become accessible through gliding to that point from another high point. If they did not make sure to provide the character collision code for all those upper areas, a lot of people could end up falling through the world map and\or getting stuck in weird areas. Still, I don’t think that’s going to be a big issue even if it does occur.

I’ve been running ItsFishyTricks “Million Minion” build…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6SjSmcZ580

It’s a lot of fun and incredibly strong for solo pve. It’s only weakness is range dps and mobility, but it’s sustain is incredible and I can solo groups of mobs in HoT better than any other class\build combination I’ve tried so far. Even my ranger can’t take on groups and survive like this build can.

The only additional feature I wish I had with the powerful Rise skill is the ability to explode the risen minions on demand

Really stoked about this. Might actually buy another character slot and create yet another character for 100% map complete just to use this.

I hope however they include a few vertical take off ley lines at most wp’s to get you into the air as soon as you portal to a wp. Gives a benefit a mastery so deep in the mastery tree that is rarely ever used.

Name: Psychotic Episode
Race: Human
Gender: Female

The name comes from the movie Brainstorm with Christopher Walken. In the movie they invent a device that can record your thoughts and everything you see and feel. The government gets a hold of it and uses it for disturbing purposes. One of the recordings they made was called “Psychotic Episode”. Here is the clip from the movie…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_ZtqsFP1Uc

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

I watched his whole video. I think he was a bit too dramatic in some of his complaints, and his incredulity and exasperation was kind of annoying. However, he did actually give a lot of specifics in his critique, and I have to agree with most of it. Particularly about the story. Then again, I’m not sure what he was expecting for the story.

Anet has never been good at the story mechanics. It’s something I’ve always felt they really are lacking in. They don’t seem to really want to put any serious effort into it either. I can understand of course, creating a good, compelling story requires a lot of thought, story boarding, cut scene generation, and cost.

Still, when you see a scene like this from MA3 (nearly 4 years ago), with a different commander, you can really see what a compelling scene with the proper music, camera work, and story boarding can accomplish. Watching it still brings a tear to my eye…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RHg-BCk0g

If only Anet would try a bit harder with story and learn from other game companies. I might be willing to overlook it’s other flaws.

Comparing a single player game story to an MMO story though is probably not the best thing to do. I haven’t really found stories in MMOs generally to compare to games that focus on stories like single player RPGs. Those entire games are designed around stories. MMOs are designed around other things like progression.

The Guild Wars 2 story compares with the story of most, but not all, MMOs I’ve tried. The exception would be SWToR, which was created by a single player company known for their stories. But single player games in general are better at story. It’s the heart of most single player games.

It’s funny I knew somebody would rush to the defense of Anet with the “don’t use a single player example” argument by linking that vid. Saying single player games solely focus on story while mmo’s only focus on progression is a bit of a falacy. They do both have progression. In fact, single player games generally have even more progression, it’s just usually localized to your machine. Yes, mmo’s are a totally different game design and the money spent on the story part is not going to be as heavy. But there are indeed mmo’s out there able to weave good story telling and mechanics into the design. For other mmo’s story telling is a focus, not an afterthought. You mentioned swtor as some kind of exception, it’s really not. Here’s another one, The Secret World…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gewzp9x_3rY

The point is (and the point of linking that vid), is that good story telling CAN rely on a big budget, but what’s more important is understanding what skills are involved in good story telling (story boarding, camera work, pacing, dialog, drawing out emotion, immersion, etc), as WELL as how your story mechanics work. It’s not just science, it’s also art. If you don’t know how to craft a good story and make it compelling then it’s just going to fall flat. Not only that, if you do it BADLY you will turn off your audience.

Here’s a perfect example of how to quickly turn off your audience: throughout the story in HoT, there were multiple times when I would enter a story checkpoint where a dialog scene was to occur. Depending on how I entered the scene, my character would sometimes be locked facing the WRONG direction. So there I am, looking the opposite direction, talking to nobody. Meanwhile the npc I’m supposed to being having this meaningful dialog with is ALSO facing the wrong way. So not only are they behind me, they are facing a spot I supposedly am supposed to be. Or sometimes, depending on entry, the person I am supposed to be talking to is not in the clip at all because of the entry and camera locking. Not only does this speak to poor quality and testing, it’s just plan sloppy. It’s a consequence of bolting on story aspects onto the existing game engine, instead of taking the time to craft a scene for that dialog that is compelling. The end result of this wonky design is that I am left asking the question “If Anet doesn’t really care about story, why should I?”.

GW2 does combat and environments extremely well in my opinion, it’s still an amazing game to me that I play nearly every day, but your argument that their story mechanics should get a pass “because they are an mmo” is wrong. They simply aren’t doing enough in that part of the game, at least compared to what they could be doing.

I’m comparing MMOs to other MMOs and single player games, generally to single player games. As a general rule, MMOs don’t have great stories and there’s a reason for it. Because everything is takes so much time and is so hard to implement. It’s much easy to balance things in a single player game.

Take Skyrim. Good story. But more, everything is geared around you as one guy. You can be the head of every guild all at the same time, making you feel more heroic. That stuff can’t really be done in an MMO because a million people are all the hero. The entire process for writing MMOs is stories is very different.

You can say it doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it not matter. It’s not giving someone a free pass to recognize that MMOs have a plethora of things to deal with that no single player game has. That’s fact.

It’s also fact that MMOs cost more to produce as a whole. It’s more expensive to create and maintain an MMO. So the budget can’t go for voice actors and cinematics, unless you have very VERY deep pockets. SWToR did it and become the most expensive MMO ever made. After which they had to fire a third of their staff.

Yes, MMOs aren’t single player games, they have different problems and different business sensibilities.

That’s a fact.

You totally ignored my mention of The Secret World (on purpose?), which was just one example I used to show compelling story can be applied to mmo’s – if story is made a focus. So that is an mmo to mmo comparison like you say you are trying to use. TSW is not a big budget game like swtor. Sure, even it’s story elements are not to the level of a single player game with a strong story focus like nearly every bioware game. But it’s story crafting and cut scenes do use in game character assets and are done fairly well. It’s not about quantity after all, but quality.

Bottom line, compelling story can be done in an mmo if it’s made a focus, with the right skill set, and the right people involved. As games like TSW show, it is NOT totally about budget.

That’s a fact.

The secret world has a decent story. It’s not a great story, but it is also more centered on story. Unfortunately because it’s centered on story, other aspects of the game fail to capture masses and the game is pretty much up for sale. The CEO of the company walked. The staff was cut in half and now they’re looking for a buyer.

I didn’t ignore your mention of it. You ignored my mention that there are very few MMOs that can afford to focus on story because it’s very expensive to focus on story. TSW focused on story and failed. Failed as in it’s not one of the TOP MMOs, it did not meet expectations, and it’s failed financially.

People say Heart of Thorns failed and I say we have to wait six months to a year to see if that happened.

So let’s recap. Games choose a focus. The focus of this game is obviously the dynamic event system and for some silly reason, esports, which I don’t think is a great move, but maybe it makes them money…I have no idea how. I don’t see that as one of the strengths of this game.

So Anet doesn’t focus on story. The story in this game is a reason to do things. A motivation for world events to move forward. That’s how it was designed. It’s not the focus of the game.

TSW did focus on story, but because everyone has limited resources, they focused on story and failed.

Now we’ve discussed TSW. It’s an MMO who tried to focus on story, didn’t go over well, because they had limited resources and spent them wrong.

I would have loved the story in TSW personally but I ended up being annoyed by the presentation because even though they focused on the story, they saved money by not voicing the main character, so every time I went up to an NPC, it felt like they were talking at me and I wasn’t there at all.

Completely killed the story for me. They should have voiced the main actor, because I don’t really want to listen to a bunch of monologues when I’m questing.

So you’ve shifted the focus from your mmo to mmo story comparison now to an mmo to mmo success or not argument? If you want to keep moving the goal posts to win an argument about if GW2 story has good story or not, fine – I don’t want to argue with someone who is obviously trying to find any excuse to give GW2 a pass on that score. Based on others peoples responses to you also on this thread, it’s pretty obvious there’s a bit too much GW2 fanboy to overcome.

And I’ll repeat from my previous post, I do love a lot of things about GW2, particularly the combat and environments, but still believe story is still their weakest link and they could absolutely do much better.

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

I watched his whole video. I think he was a bit too dramatic in some of his complaints, and his incredulity and exasperation was kind of annoying. However, he did actually give a lot of specifics in his critique, and I have to agree with most of it. Particularly about the story. Then again, I’m not sure what he was expecting for the story.

Anet has never been good at the story mechanics. It’s something I’ve always felt they really are lacking in. They don’t seem to really want to put any serious effort into it either. I can understand of course, creating a good, compelling story requires a lot of thought, story boarding, cut scene generation, and cost.

Still, when you see a scene like this from MA3 (nearly 4 years ago), with a different commander, you can really see what a compelling scene with the proper music, camera work, and story boarding can accomplish. Watching it still brings a tear to my eye…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RHg-BCk0g

If only Anet would try a bit harder with story and learn from other game companies. I might be willing to overlook it’s other flaws.

Comparing a single player game story to an MMO story though is probably not the best thing to do. I haven’t really found stories in MMOs generally to compare to games that focus on stories like single player RPGs. Those entire games are designed around stories. MMOs are designed around other things like progression.

The Guild Wars 2 story compares with the story of most, but not all, MMOs I’ve tried. The exception would be SWToR, which was created by a single player company known for their stories. But single player games in general are better at story. It’s the heart of most single player games.

It’s funny I knew somebody would rush to the defense of Anet with the “don’t use a single player example” argument by linking that vid. Saying single player games solely focus on story while mmo’s only focus on progression is a bit of a falacy. They do both have progression. In fact, single player games generally have even more progression, it’s just usually localized to your machine. Yes, mmo’s are a totally different game design and the money spent on the story part is not going to be as heavy. But there are indeed mmo’s out there able to weave good story telling and mechanics into the design. For other mmo’s story telling is a focus, not an afterthought. You mentioned swtor as some kind of exception, it’s really not. Here’s another one, The Secret World…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gewzp9x_3rY

The point is (and the point of linking that vid), is that good story telling CAN rely on a big budget, but what’s more important is understanding what skills are involved in good story telling (story boarding, camera work, pacing, dialog, drawing out emotion, immersion, etc), as WELL as how your story mechanics work. It’s not just science, it’s also art. If you don’t know how to craft a good story and make it compelling then it’s just going to fall flat. Not only that, if you do it BADLY you will turn off your audience.

Here’s a perfect example of how to quickly turn off your audience: throughout the story in HoT, there were multiple times when I would enter a story checkpoint where a dialog scene was to occur. Depending on how I entered the scene, my character would sometimes be locked facing the WRONG direction. So there I am, looking the opposite direction, talking to nobody. Meanwhile the npc I’m supposed to being having this meaningful dialog with is ALSO facing the wrong way. So not only are they behind me, they are facing a spot I supposedly am supposed to be. Or sometimes, depending on entry, the person I am supposed to be talking to is not in the clip at all because of the entry and camera locking. Not only does this speak to poor quality and testing, it’s just plan sloppy. It’s a consequence of bolting on story aspects onto the existing game engine, instead of taking the time to craft a scene for that dialog that is compelling. The end result of this wonky design is that I am left asking the question “If Anet doesn’t really care about story, why should I?”.

GW2 does combat and environments extremely well in my opinion, it’s still an amazing game to me that I play nearly every day, but your argument that their story mechanics should get a pass “because they are an mmo” is wrong. They simply aren’t doing enough in that part of the game, at least compared to what they could be doing.

I’m comparing MMOs to other MMOs and single player games, generally to single player games. As a general rule, MMOs don’t have great stories and there’s a reason for it. Because everything is takes so much time and is so hard to implement. It’s much easy to balance things in a single player game.

Take Skyrim. Good story. But more, everything is geared around you as one guy. You can be the head of every guild all at the same time, making you feel more heroic. That stuff can’t really be done in an MMO because a million people are all the hero. The entire process for writing MMOs is stories is very different.

You can say it doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it not matter. It’s not giving someone a free pass to recognize that MMOs have a plethora of things to deal with that no single player game has. That’s fact.

It’s also fact that MMOs cost more to produce as a whole. It’s more expensive to create and maintain an MMO. So the budget can’t go for voice actors and cinematics, unless you have very VERY deep pockets. SWToR did it and become the most expensive MMO ever made. After which they had to fire a third of their staff.

Yes, MMOs aren’t single player games, they have different problems and different business sensibilities.

That’s a fact.

You totally ignored my mention of The Secret World (on purpose?), which was just one example I used to show compelling story can be applied to mmo’s – if story is made a focus. So that is an mmo to mmo comparison like you say you are trying to use. TSW is not a big budget game like swtor. Sure, even it’s story elements are not to the level of a single player game with a strong story focus like nearly every bioware game. But it’s story crafting and cut scenes do use in game character assets and are done fairly well. It’s not about quantity after all, but quality.

Bottom line, compelling story can be done in an mmo if it’s made a focus, with the right skill set, and the right people involved. As games like TSW show, it is NOT totally about budget.

That’s a fact.

Yeah, they need to add more ley line gliding areas to make it worth it. Other than Dragons Stand I haven’t found any real use for it.

They should add gliding to core tyria, and vertical ley lines that spring up on the wp’s. Then you can use the wp’s to get into the air on the ley lines and glide across the maps. That would be cool.

Vayne.8563:

Ghostwind.4380:

I watched his whole video. I think he was a bit too dramatic in some of his complaints, and his incredulity and exasperation was kind of annoying. However, he did actually give a lot of specifics in his critique, and I have to agree with most of it. Particularly about the story. Then again, I’m not sure what he was expecting for the story.

Anet has never been good at the story mechanics. It’s something I’ve always felt they really are lacking in. They don’t seem to really want to put any serious effort into it either. I can understand of course, creating a good, compelling story requires a lot of thought, story boarding, cut scene generation, and cost.

Still, when you see a scene like this from MA3 (nearly 4 years ago), with a different commander, you can really see what a compelling scene with the proper music, camera work, and story boarding can accomplish. Watching it still brings a tear to my eye…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RHg-BCk0g

If only Anet would try a bit harder with story and learn from other game companies. I might be willing to overlook it’s other flaws.

Comparing a single player game story to an MMO story though is probably not the best thing to do. I haven’t really found stories in MMOs generally to compare to games that focus on stories like single player RPGs. Those entire games are designed around stories. MMOs are designed around other things like progression.

The Guild Wars 2 story compares with the story of most, but not all, MMOs I’ve tried. The exception would be SWToR, which was created by a single player company known for their stories. But single player games in general are better at story. It’s the heart of most single player games.

It’s funny I knew somebody would rush to the defense of Anet with the “don’t use a single player example” argument by linking that vid. Saying single player games solely focus on story while mmo’s only focus on progression is a bit of a falacy. They do both have progression. In fact, single player games generally have even more progression, it’s just usually localized to your machine. Yes, mmo’s are a totally different game design and the money spent on the story part is not going to be as heavy. But there are indeed mmo’s out there able to weave good story telling and mechanics into the design. For other mmo’s story telling is a focus, not an afterthought. You mentioned swtor as some kind of exception, it’s really not. Here’s another one, The Secret World…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gewzp9x_3rY

The point is (and the point of linking that vid), is that good story telling CAN rely on a big budget, but what’s more important is understanding what skills are involved in good story telling (story boarding, camera work, pacing, dialog, drawing out emotion, immersion, etc), as WELL as how your story mechanics work. It’s not just science, it’s also art. If you don’t know how to craft a good story and make it compelling then it’s just going to fall flat. Not only that, if you do it BADLY you will turn off your audience.

Here’s a perfect example of how to quickly turn off your audience: throughout the story in HoT, there were multiple times when I would enter a story checkpoint where a dialog scene was to occur. Depending on how I entered the scene, my character would sometimes be locked facing the WRONG direction. So there I am, looking the opposite direction, talking to nobody. Meanwhile the npc I’m supposed to being having this meaningful dialog with is ALSO facing the wrong way. So not only are they behind me, they are facing a spot I supposedly am supposed to be. Or sometimes, depending on entry, the person I am supposed to be talking to is not in the clip at all because of the entry and camera locking. Not only does this speak to poor quality and testing, it’s just plan sloppy. It’s a consequence of bolting on story aspects onto the existing game engine, instead of taking the time to craft a scene for that dialog that is compelling. The end result of this wonky design is that I am left asking the question “If Anet doesn’t really care about story, why should I?”.

GW2 does combat and environments extremely well in my opinion, it’s still an amazing game to me that I play nearly every day, but your argument that their story mechanics should get a pass “because they are an mmo” is wrong. They simply aren’t doing enough in that part of the game, at least compared to what they could be doing.

I watched his whole video. I think he was a bit too dramatic in some of his complaints, and his incredulity and exasperation was kind of annoying. However, he did actually give a lot of specifics in his critique, and I have to agree with most of it. Particularly about the story. Then again, I’m not sure what he was expecting for the story.

Anet has never been good at the story mechanics. It’s something I’ve always felt they really are lacking in. They don’t seem to really want to put any serious effort into it either. I can understand of course, creating a good, compelling story requires a lot of thought, story boarding, cut scene generation, and cost.

Still, when you see a scene like this from MA3 (nearly 4 years ago), with a different commander, you can really see what a compelling scene with the proper music, camera work, and story boarding can accomplish. Watching it still brings a tear to my eye…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6RHg-BCk0g

If only Anet would try a bit harder with story and learn from other game companies. I might be willing to overlook it’s other flaws.

No No No – please do not nerf the smoke scale. I do mainly pve, and generally solo. The smoke scale is the pet I can rely on to help me handle most content and take out some of the more difficult HoT mobs. Without it I would have had a much harder time getting 100% map complete on all the HoT maps and finishing the story. Do not nerf this excellent pet and deny it’s usefulness to new rangers out there wanting to do the same thing.

Some flavor ideas around pets that might be interesting …

Pet Corral
- ability to have a place to see and interact with all your pets in your home instance.
- each pet has it’s own stall.
- ability to train your pets at the corral to do tricks (sit, roll-over, play dead, dance, etc).
- ability to customize your pet’s appearance (see next section).

Pet Customization
- ability to adjust pet color and size.
- ability to equip pet special outfits and skins (mini-holo wings, mini-halo’s, mini-santa hats, footsteps, etc).
- ability to use a Mini as a pet skin (can use any mini you have unlocked in place of your pet – treated as an outfit).

Pet functionality
- ability to permanently stow pets (been asked for forever).
- ability to play with or feed your pet in the wild (doing so gives them a small floating hearts effect for a short while).
- ability to have your pet do tricks on it’s own when idle, or by command (learned at pet corral).

Starbreaker.6507:

I feel a little saddened by what I’m seeing across the board in this forum…

I was an FTP up until a few weeks ago and bouncing around on different race/profession combos until I decided to play Guardian.

I really fell in love with the style as a whole and from what I’ve toyed around with in PvP (unranked mind you) I’ve enjoyed Dragonhunter.

I’ve yet to get to 80 and do ‘end game’ stuff, but a lot of the posts I’m reading paints a pretty bleak picture. Would you recommend I stick it out and see what/if I can do at 80, or should I really be looking to jump ship (well…techincally not board it since I’m still new)?

I have a character for each profession at 80 and all specializations unlocked. I really don’t think Dragon Hunter is as bad as people claim, at least not for solo\group pve exploration. If you are dead set on pvp and on raiding then yeah some other classes in the current meta are going to do better\be more optimal. But if you just want to enjoy the story, do events in the new HoT zones, explore, unlock hp’s and mastery points, etc, the Guard will do just fine. I’ve found DH to be an extremely fun way to play Guard, with bow coupled with strong traps.

Don’t let the min maxing deter you too much. I’ve been playing since release and almost every profession has it’s day in sun or shadow for some aspect of the game. Not surprisingly the classes that are at the most extremes are almost always considered part of the meta. Warrior for example because it does insane dps and can wear heavy armor – yet still has crappy support and frankly is pretty boring to me. And Mezmer now because it has extreme support with alacrity, but has terrible dps.

Instead of mounts, give us the ability to use our gliders outside of Maguuma. I’m so used to hitting my space bar every time I jump it’s now pavlovian. There is no greater disappointment now then when I go back to core tyria and jump off a hill or bridge and hit my space bar and have…nothing…happen, other than me falling like a brick.

I think much of the hate directed at Traherne was more a consequence of bad personal story design for the player’s character than for Traherne himself. There’s nothing wrong with Traherne as a character. Or any of the other hero NPC’s for that matter. The problem is that YOU are not much of a character. The NPC’s have far more emotional\dynamic relationships than you do. You are “the commander”, someone of importance in the macro sense, but you personally have little to no depth.

How about giving us a real love interest? How about personal tragedy? When do we fall into darkness and despair but subsequently rise through extreme sacrifice? Where’s the cut scenes with our character weeping, yelling a fierce battle call, making love, or doing anything to make us feel our character is supposed to be important to us and and has depth? It’s not there.

It’s ok for us to take a back seat in the story if we are invested in our own characters. That can be done with giving us some control over our complexity. We can have quirks and flaws. We can be humorous. We can be pure. We can be deceitful. Something to make us less one-dimensional. Something to draw us into our characters.

If we’re just watching the NPC TV channel, while our characters just sit on the virtual couch, you can see how folks can get resentful pretty fast of any NPC that takes over the spotlight.

Sollunad.9780:

Please remember that playing with your elite spec is optional unless you want to complete some collections. Therefore you’re not forced to get the HPs with every character.

Sorry this is a pretty poor statement. That’s like saying it’s optional to stay at level 1 and not bother to unlock any other skills or utilities, just run around streaking. Every skill is and specialization is “optional” using that logic.

Elites are not some special case. They are another specialization in your characters vertical progression, just like your other specializations your character is supposed to unlock in order to give build variety. That’s why it takes one of your specialization slots.

TheSwede.9512:

This isn’t some kinda design fault, this is purely on the players.

7-8 Challenges in Verdant Brink are Solo’able.
4-5 Challenges in Auric Basin are Solo’able.
6 Challenges in Tangled Depths are Solo’able.
All 3 Tower Challenges in Dragon’s Stand are Solo’able.

In total, at Optimal Conditions, 24 Solo’able challenges, you need 25 in order to fully develop an Elite Spec. Gathering 10 SP in core Tyria is so easy you could fall asleep doing it, it’s all 8 in Queensdale + 2 in Ebonhawke for humans. Takes you what, 10 minutes tops to get done. Even if you miss the one in Auric and the 3 in DS because of Meta Event requirements, you’re still 200 HP into your Elite spec, 80% Done.

If you leveled entirely through Tomes and have absolutely 0 remaining Hero Points at 80 well guess what? Tough luck. You took the easy way up, and now you’ve got the hard way further. Fair’s fair, deal with it.

Funny how the people who have already completed everything say it’s “easy”. I’ve fully unlocked all the maps\story in core on about 4 characters. Fully explored HoT and story on one character, and fully unlocked the elite specs on 6 characters. There is nothing “easy” about fully unlocking the elite specs on a character. Particularly if you did not do full map complete in core before going into Hot.

Here’s my main issue with this whole thing: hero points are part of VERTICAL progression. You need them to fully unlock your core elite skill set. It’s not like some weapon skin, or some achievement, or some stupid title, or some barely better stat item. It’s part of your characters abilities. That’s why from 1-80 Anet just GIVES them to you. Because really, you shouldn’t have to find a group every time you want to learn a new skill right? That’s why they made it easy. They only started to dribble them out during 1-80 leveling to help ease in new players in the game from being overloaded.

The concept though of unlocking your own skills was fundamentally changed with elite specs. Elite specs REQUIRE getting hero points outside of standard experience and level gain. Yes, you can gain about 40% of your elite skill progression by doing all the hero points outside of HoT (like I did by having full core map complete on 4 prior to HoT), but that still leaves around 60% that need to come from HoT. If you did full map complete first, you have the option to short-cut and seek out all the non-group\soloable hero points. But if you didn’t have full map complete prior to HoT, you will be FORCED to find a group at some point to unlock your own character’s skills. If that’s “not a design fault” as you claim, then it’s a total change in their vertical progression philosophy to date.

I’ll just go ahead and link the post I made about this the other day…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/HoT-final-story-too-long-spoilers/first#post5847708

Vayne.8563:

Apolo.5942:

xarallei.4279:

I love VB. It’s probably my favorite map. Certainly the most polished of all the new maps. And yeah, if you dislike VB you are going to violently hate TD.

you are indeed correct, i despise maguma to such extent that i decided to burn my “Christmas money” on HearthStone pacs rather than upgrading account here.

I wander what are they going to do when in a couple of months people get fed up with maguma and the content required is essentially unsoloable.

I wonder what you’re going to do when you find out you’re mistaken. There are plenty of people who don’t like Maguuma. There are plenty of people who love it. By plenty I mean a lot. Enough to fill a zone certainly and that’s all you really need.

What people don’t seem to understand is that their opinion doesn’t mean everyone or even most people feel that way. My opinion certainly doesn’t mean it.

I prefer the expansion maps to the original maps, yes, even Tangled Depths. But I don’t prefer them all the time. When I want to relax, I go to lower level zones.

Last night I logged in to Verdant Brink, usually one of the most populated maps. Basically it went like this.

Enter zone, spend about 10-15 minutes working events to get participation bonus, at about 40% bonus, server notice “You will be moved to another more populated server in 59 minutes or can volunteer”. Ok, so I lose my participation and choose the option to move. Guess not enough people are on this map or left it.

Choose option to move and enter VB map again, spend another 10-20 minutes working events to get participation, at about 50% participation bonus, server notice again “You will be moved to another more populated server… blah blah blah”. Sigh, ok so I have to lose my bonus again because not enough people on the map.

Choose option to move and enter new VB map again, spend about 40 minutes, at about 125% bonus, yep here it comes again “You will be moved to another more populated server…”

That happened about 5 times. After the 5th time I simply finished the event I was working on and logged off, didn’t even bother to wait for the day\night cycle because my bonus would not be at 200%.

This is the consequence of the new map systems in HoT.

You could say it’s a mega-server bug, but I think the real problem is these maps are getting less and less populated. Meaning this notice is popping up more and more. Losing your participation bonus that they STILL have not fixed to allow carrying over to the same map is not only annoying but unacceptable. The maps are simply not sustainable without significant population active in the map, and this problem will only get worse over time.

Daddicus.6128:

Let me preface this by saying I hate HoT. Not a fan-boy.

But, to those who are complaining that there are “only 4 maps”, please reconsider:

• HoT maps have many levels that are mostly populated.
• HoT maps are much larger than the maps in the rest of Tyria.
• HoT maps require a great deal of effort to fully map.
• HoT maps are all level 80. Thus, no need for newbie maps.

I don’t think it’s fair to say “only 4 maps” as if that means there isn’t much map-type content (i.e. by comparing to the 28 maps in the rest of the world). It’s closer to 20 maps worth of material.

Now back to complaining about HoT …

Well, according to my exploration, there’s about about 12 semi-distinct levels in “general” among all 4 maps. This is totally up to opinion of course, since most of these levels don’t require a hard transition from one level to another. I’ve also felt there is a distinct difference in difficulty and complexity between the maps. I’ve tried to rate that between 1-10 complexity.

Verdant Brink (3 “levels” – Complexity 5)
- Upper canopy level
- Middle camps level
- Lower roots level

Auric Basin (4 “levels” – Complexity 6)
- Upper level (Tarnished Treetop, Burnisher Quarry)
- Middle camp level (camps, pylons, entraces to forgotten city)
- Forgotten city first level
- Forgotten city lower level

Tangled Depths (4 “levels” – Complexity 10)
- Upper level (Orge Camp, Teku Nohoch)
- Mid level (entrance area from AB, Undergrowth area, troll hp area, etc)
- Lower Chak level
- Underwater level

Dragons Stand (1 “level” – Complexity 3)
- Most of DS is actually pretty flat other than the island area, just spread out. Yet even in the island area there’s only one tiny upper area that’s barely of any significant size to be considered a distinct level.

In regards to this statement…

“HoT maps are much larger than the maps in the rest of Tyria.”

I’m not too sure about that. Considering just the cities in the core world, which are the smallest maps, one city is equivalent in size to many of the upper or lower levels on the HoT maps, particularly if you are talking actual walkable ground, and core world has 6 of those maps, some with their own levels. Start counting all the maps around them, something like 29 maps, and you are well beyond the the size of all the other mid and lower levels within the 4 maps combined.

What makes the maps “feel” bigger is the verticality and open air between levels. If you were to take the air contained between all the levels on each map somehow, then yes, the volume might likely equate to something larger. But not sure that counts necessarly as larger.

The one I don’t understand why it’s triggered:
- “May Lyssa confound you!”

Yeah this one was confusing. I think though it’s triggered when you evade an attack? I noticed sometimes it happens when I’m running and manage to avoid\dodge a ranged attack. Could be totally wrong though.

That’s not necessarily ‘bad’ — I loved the original Star Wars even though the story is every bit as naive and simplistic (with too many “exact” parallels to the author’s life).

Although the story was in general the typical zero to hero arch, there was a lot of character development and emotional emphasis in the original. The personalities and emotions\drama mattered to make it success, not only the technology.

When Luke comes back to see his home in ruins and the corpses of his aunt and uncle burning, you feel his loss. When Ben sacrifices his life to give Han, Leia and Luke a chance to escape and he cries “No!!!!” and goes on a temporary rampage trying to kill as many troopers as possible, you feel the anguish and despair. When Han and Leia bicker and finally kiss you see the chemistry and get drawn in even if you think it an odd match. When the Xwings are being systemically shot down one by one on the final run on the Death Star, you feel the tension and hopelessness, but still cling and hope for the hero rise to the challenge (even if in the back of your mind you know he will regardless).

On paper the story might seem bland, but the implementation was amazing in its emotional pull. Music also plays a tremendous role in helping trigger our emotions. It’s possible to capture this in games as well, even with a simply story arch, but it takes much more effort in planning and execution. It’s not impossible, it just needs the right mind-set and resources applied.

Although I love the combat and graphics of this game, I’m sad to say the personal story mechanics, writing, and overall direction is GW2’s weakest element. Take a look at some top tier story game designers out there, and you understand how far below the bar GW2 is in terms of story craft. Bioware (almost any game), ESO, The Secret World, even WoW, are far more invested in story than GW2. Bioware in particular are masters of story craft and understand what makes stories compelling.

In terms of writing and plot, one of the core things Gw2 hasn’t really grasped in making stories compelling are the concepts of relationships and crisis for your character. When we face crisis and fail, we must redeem ourselves. When we build relationships and are betrayed or loved, it affects us deeply and draws us in. When we make a choice that causes terrible consequence, it shouldn’t simply be a “Oh that sucks. Let’s move on” type of deal, it should be painful, it should be emotional. Otherwise it’s noise.

Unfortunately these concepts and how to implement them in story have not really pushed hard by Gw2 for our characters. We see relationships and crisis for OTHER characters, like Trahearne and the heroes in Destiny’s Edge. But we the player character are simply “The Commander”. A cardboard cut-out with no real personal investment or loss.

It’s a bit hard to overhaul the whole system, but there are some minor things that could be done in the future to improve the story. One is simply to allow the players to have an actual relationship with an npc. Building relationships takes time and effort, but carefully done you can have a love interest or an enemy (or both!). That will give the personal story more heft. The other idea is to bring real tragedy and allow the player to face crisis. Maybe they fail a mission no matter what they do, and subsequently turn dark for a period of time, believing there is no goodness in the world. It takes a real sacrifice from somebody close to them to pull them back to the light. That kind of thing.

Obviously all this emotional drama does not work with simple in game chat dialog. You need some cut-scenes that show your character in real distress by these choices, or real joy\hatred when building that relationship. It’s the little things added to these moments that make all the difference.

GW2 seems to have a great grasp of the macro picture and history of it’s world. What they lack is the personal touch. That only comes with real investment, not as an afterthought. They would be well served by poaching somebody from bioware for the next expansion, at least to get someone to help them with thinking in this direction.

Revenant is a lot of fun. If you are buying the expansion mainly for rev and the new elite specifications, as well as some of the qualify of life improvements, I’d say you made the right descision and likely won’t be disappointed.

If you are buying expecting the new HoT areas to be as accessible as the core world, you are in for a rude awakening. HoT is pretty unforgiving for the casual player. Soloing is very difficult (unless you pick the right class like Ranger or Necro). You will be forced group grinding events for a long while, since unlocking masteries is required to fully explore the maps, and that will take a significant amount of hours. The forced grouping can be pretty spectacular though when things all work right. If you are prepared for the good and bad this mechanic involves you may enjoy the new HoT areas.

Just finished final story last night. Have to say it was pretty exhausting. I didn’t read any guides or anything before trying it, which is why it took me at least 6 or 7 tries to finish. Literally spent hours. Even on a perfect play through (not going to happen unless you read a guide or have done it a few times), from start to finish I can’t imagine anyone not spending at least an hour or more to complete the whole thing.

The problem for me is the extremely long length of the Mordremoth fight, and if you die during the glide phase (because it bugs or you don't know how to get into the air) you MUST start at the very beginning of the fight and start all over again. Seriously, this part takes waaaaaayyyy too long. How is an average casual player supposed to figure this out and complete it (and not die at least once), along with the next part which is also a bit tough, in any kind of decent time period?

Other than the way too overly long Mordremoth fight, the rest of the mission seemed great, aside from a bug or two. I definitely appreciate the work put into the player choices before going into the dream and the dream transition videos and artwork which were amazing.

I don’t expect the final story to be easy, but I’d rather it be challenging and SHORT, instead of overly long.

Smokescale and Bristleback are absolutely great pets. I use them all the time in HoT. Smokescale is very tough, keeps aggro well. Bristleback is great for boss fights and solid range dps.

Smokescale and Bristleback are absolutely great pets. I use them all the time in HoT. Smokescale is very tough, keeps aggro well. Bristleback is great for boss fights and solid range dps.

Still waiting for a space hamster to tame so I can name him Boo and create a macro for “Go for the Eyes Boo! Go for the Eyyyeeeesss!”

Absolutely and totally agree. I would strongly suggest however you make this post on Reddit. I don’t think anyone at Anet reads the HoT forums anymore. They do appear to read Reddit since rarely anyone complains there (Devs don’t respond to complaints or want to read them, just human nature right?). But this is a good quality of life suggestion and I think it would be good for them to see it.

One other thing to consider is the “least amount of effort” factor.

In my humble opinion, Ranger really is the winner here. You can pretty much just stick to longbow and occasional pet swapping and tackle most content pretty easily. Obviously if you build to optimize you would swap pets more often and use utilities wisely, but simply bare bones the longbow Ranger is pretty forgiving and allows you to just do damage without having to think too much. Other classes require more effort to make the same progress. Mezmer is a fun class to play, but lots of times the mobs ignore the illusions and go straight for you. Mezmer pets are temporary, designed to shatter for best effect, so requires more mental thought and skilled play. With Ranger you have the option to simply be on cruise control and let your pet do a lot of heavy lifting for you.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m only saying Ranger because your question was specific to which class I thought was optimal to solo with, not necessarily which is the most fun, which is very subjective. My personal favorite right now is Dragon Hunter, not Ranger. Having a blast with him! I also had a ton of fun with the Reaper and Chrono. But for just plain soloing HoT content, my Ranger so far has had the easiest time with the least amount of effort.

Ranger, absolutely. Having a pet to help take aggro (so you can focus on damage or escape) cannot be understated. With a pet (and swapping to another one when that one is about to die) you have great sustain for long fights. This alone allows you to solo a lot of the champions you can’t really solo on other classes. Plus you have two passive speed buffs, lower level one at 25% w signet, and then with Druid natural stride giving a whooping 33%. That will help you get around the HoT maps quickly and even avoid a lot of the pack mobs.

I run mainly solo as well. I would recommend Traveler. It’s helped me alot in HoT to run around\past mobs plus get to areas faster. I like my utilities all devoted to traps.

JohnReaper.4058:

i am about ready to start leveling me another alt to 80. I have everything to 80 other than Mez ,Thief ,Engi, and Rev. Looking for opinions on what i should get to 80 next. I play pve most of the time .

So you have Necro, War, Guard, and Ranger to 80? Just curious, do you have HoT and have you completely unlocked the elite specs on each of those? They can add another dimension to the characters and another chance to enjoy them. If you have not tried Reaper and Dragon Hunter elite specs I would highly recommend first unlocking those and take them out for a spin – very fun elite specs to play!

Personally I would avoid Engi and Ele unless you really like their concepts. Both require a lot of button mashing to do what other classes can do with simpler\less complicated rotations. I just finished getting my Engi to 80 last week, and only class I have left now is my Ele which is 54. Frankly both are extremely painful to level compared to other classes in my experience. Engi flamethrower is just crap in HoT, which is sad since I had a lot of fun with it in the core world.

Revenant is a lot of fun and very straight forward. Easy to level (because dps is crazy with Shiro aspect) and when you unlock it’s elite spec after 80 it becomes even more fun as a boon generator class. Some people don’t like the circle aura on the ground when in dragon aspect, but I personally think it’s cool!

Mezmer is actually a lot of fun as well and I would recommend that as a second choice, just keep in mind it’s playstyle is very different for most other classes. I really enjoyed bringing it from 1-80 because of that. It’s a class that requires you to spawn clones and phantasms and then kill them off (temp pets). Once you get the idea and hang of it it’s a really powerful class. Unfortunately I’m not a real fan of it’s elite the chronomancer.

DieHarD.3649:

Hi guys!

So, I stopped playing GW2 in february, and now, with this new expansion, I was wondering if it would be worth to buy it and start playing again. I only played for 5 months, and got a thief and ranger to lvl 80(but im still a noob =p).

Im a little bit worried, because I saw a lot of people saying that raids(which was something I was really looking forward to) are killing the game, making it too much “grindy”(even though i dont care too much about grinding).

So, what do you guys think?

Honestly if you are a casual type player then I wouldn’t recommend HoT unless you really want to try out the new elite specs and like the mastery type system which is a bit more of a horizontal progression system. The HoT area and zones are not meant for the casual player – no matter what anybody says. Raids require you to be decently geared and know your character, so if that interests you might want to be prepared to invest some time in game gearing up and prepping and finding a good group\guild before you jump into it.

If you really like a challenge though and are willing to deal with lots of grinding you may enjoy HoT content.

Just keep in mind that in order to fully unlock your elite spec you will be forced to do some HoT content, but once you’ve unlocked your elite you can go back to the core game.

Obtena.7952:

The bottom line is that Core GW2 is for scrubs … ANYONE can play it. That made everyone think they were good at the game, especially with a certain group of people telling them that using zerkers armor made them ‘good players’. Now something comes out that makes those people fail, they don’t believe it’s because they are bad since they are so pro at Core GW2. They just think it’s the game being too hard.

Not every area of the core game is for “scrubs”. Have you actually gone to Straits of Dev or Orr lately? They are pretty empty maps now, and because of that it’s pretty hard to get around let alone solo stuff. Its possible, but certainly not easy or “scrub” like. Dungeons and high level fractals are not for “scrubs” either. If you weren’t geared right and knew how to play people noticed, and it was just mostly fail. Spvp is not for scrubs. WvW might be considered for scrubs if you simply follow the herd. Really the only place(s) that would be considered “scrub” (bad word btw – would say casual), are mainly the open word zones excluding Straits and Orr (because risen are just that much of a pita). But there are quite a few open world zones, and they scale from super easy to pretty hard, so casual gamers can still enjoy a significant amount of content and progress their characters without forced grouping.

HoT does not really scale, and does not take into account low pop, like most of the core open world zones. VB starts at an Orr +1 difficulty and things just get more annoying from there. Maps require lots of players and coordination to successfully complete the metas, or some areas stay locked (note – this is very different than Orr, where areas held by an enemy at worst prevented getting a vendor with a skin. There were still ways to sneak in\run past those enemies and get that poi\vista\hero point if you were determined). Hero points are usually guarded by a champion that can’t be soloed. None of this is a huge problem if the population is high. But once people unlock that mastery or hero point they rarely going back. Why should they? This means newer players\casual players are pretty screwed unless they can and are willing to get a group to help, or are lucky enough to be on when a map meta is complete that unlocks an area for them. That’s a real shift compared to the core open world game mechanics, which did not flat out stop character progression without a high pop. And this has nothing to do with being a “scrub”. Anyone that does not see a sustainability problem with the HoT maps is not really thinking about the future.

I’m not an elite player by any means, but I’ve been doing pretty well in HoT with DH. It’s not nearly as easy as Ranger w pet, but still quite powerful and very fun. Until you mostly unlock the DH traps, it won’t be as powerful, so getting all the hero points unlocked first is a priority. If you can’t reach some of them yet due to flight\shroom masteries, can also move onto Tangled Depths and try to hit some of the easier ones (though not many “easy” ones to be honest).

I went in initially in HoT with all PVT gear and two-handed sword and found that I struggled quite a bit. Mobs simply hit too hard in HoT, have FAR too many cripple\knockdowns\poisons\condis crap, and basically are a serious pain in the kitten . Toughness is not as important I found than simply killing them quickly and having a bigger health pool to deal with the condi damage. Having good condi-cleanse and movement is extremely helpful. Once I unlocked enough of DH and got most of the traps, things really started to click. Killing from range is a huge advantage in HoT, and the traps are great insurance and mandatory for the vets and stronger creatures that take a while to bring down.

For most vets and champs trap dropping is key to success. Stay at range until they do their unique move, run or dodge in close, f3 on LB to blind, drop traps, switch to sword, blind, burn, dodge out. Switch back to LB, stay at range until traps reset, and then repeat.

The f3 LB blind doesn’t always hit what you have targeted for some reason, so pretty much have to be right in their face to get it to hit.

My gear is almost all Rampager\Carrion now since I am using a mostly burn\condition build. I found this armor mix to be pretty survivable, especially with the LB play style. You can take most stuff down at range pretty easily and stay out of danger. When things get hairy or I want to end things quick, I move in and drop my traps (or tag them and lead them to the traps), switch to sword\torch once they are in the traps, and to do blind teleport\torch burn\condi-cleanse, dodge out and watch them melt. The traps are so strong it’s not even funny. Tagging those annoying pocket raptors, laying your traps down and watching them all cry in anguish is soooo satisfying

I’m sure there are better builds, but this is the one I am running. I’m sure it’s not totally optimized…
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vVAQNAT8fn8cCVdiFdCekittendil4BrKAslKAyFw+XC0KE8CeUA-T5gAABBcBAIc/BAeAAAA

I am running the Purification trap heal. It’s very tricky to use. Basically unless the mob triggers it you only get a tiny crappy heal. But if you can get a mob to trigger it you will be completely healed back up to full. I like it, but I’m a bit of a gambler.

I am using rune of the traveler because I want to have high base movement, I find it’s much easier to escape stuff that way and simply explore in general.

They already tweaked the staff last year, increasing it’s projectile speed slightly after so many complaints. If you think it’s slow now you should have seen it then!

I doubt they will tweak staff any further. The reason is that on paper it seems to do lots of things: damage, pierce, life force gen, and 20% chance combo finisher. That’s why they gave it such low damage and speed. Unfortunately things on paper don’t always pan out when used in the field against actual moving targets.

Personally I’d rather they completely remove the pierce and combo finisher aspects. The pierce is far too impractical to hit multiple enemies (let alone the max 5!) with such a slow projectile speed – in fact it’s almost impossible unless they are a grove of angry trees. For bows, guns, and pistols, pierce makes sense, but not for something so terribly slow. And the combo finisher is a bit meh. 20% chance for something that already struggles to hit? So really staff 1 is a bit of a throw away\something to do while you use marks.

Since it’s a control weapon, I wouldn’t mind if they kept the slow speed but removed the pierce and combo finisher for a small control aoe like a chill or blind. Hard to land, but when it does it slows enemies down. Or remove the aoe and increase it’s speed a lot and add a stronger control on a single target. That would fit more in line with the it’s control utility.

Arshay Duskbrow.1306:

The Zerk vs. Sin debate is a contentious issue. Basicially – I believe – Zerk is better if you’re alone and not counting on optimal boosts like 25 Might, banners, etc. and Sin is better in a group invironment where you can rely on having those bonuses. But really, it’s only a slight difference, and either one is fine, although I’ve never gone wrong with all Zerk myself. It’s just simpler, too.

Do you use mostly zerk in HoT? Just wondering since I’ve read zerk is mainly to be avoided in HoT (although I run full zerk on my ranger and do just fine).

Also, is a power build better for mesmer solo in HoT than a condi-build? I’ve run mostly condi-build with staff with good success, but maybe power is better?

I also leveled my Rev from 1-80 and have unlocked about 3/4 of Herald. I don’t feel quite the same as you, particularly when comparing the rev to other professions. My baseline is how well I can solo content in HoT. I’ve taken each of my lvl 80’s through VB, and some into the next map. Here’s my personal opinion of how rev ranks in my list:

1: Ranger – Hands down no contest for me. Ranger (particularly bow ranger) is simply the easiest solo class, for any area, including HoT. The pet is the main reason. The pet helps both with aggro management, condi-management, and dps, and is simply too big an advantage when dealing with hard creatures. Dps from range also keeps your main char out of most trouble. It’s a boring way to play sometimes and a bit of a one-trick pony, but that pony rides over everything with ease.

2: Necro – very, very close second to Ranger. Necro is a powerhouse, particularly Reaper. Necro can also be speced for pets, but I always run it in melee bouncing between staff and two-hander sword. Necro’s biggest advantage is powerful condi management, which is a huge advantage in HoT. Necro also has amazing aoe and single target dps, unlike most professions which have to focus on one or the other. Just a great profession all-around.

For me, the rest are much, MUCH farther down the chain in terms of ease of soloing content in HoT. The first two can solo content and some champions without breaking a sweat. These others I occassionaly need help or a group to tackle the same content.

3: Revenant – Their range attacks are slow and pretty much suck compared to ranger. But they have some good movement, and the ability to burst melee dps like nobodys buisness with shiro. They are also able to switch back and forth from a dps mode to a tank mode within a fight, which gives good versatility and survivability. Revs biggest disadvantage though is no good condi cleanse, which matters a lot in HoT.

4: Mesmer – Clones, Phantasms, Confusion, these are awesome when dealing with tough mobs in HoT. It’s takes the pressure off tremendously to have some illusions out. Unfortunately they don’t have a lot of condi-cleanse either, and I find my mesmer damage overall is too slow. I found the chronomancer not as survivable as the rev or necro, and against large groups the mesmer gets in trouble fast. The staff condi-build I’ve found the most success with.

5: Guardian and Warrior – I put both of these at the same level. I found both to be pretty limited in that you really have to pick up front if you are going to be more dps or tanky, and can’t really switch after that even with skills, unlike the rev, which can bounce back and forth mid-fight using the same gear and skills. Both have the option to go range (kind weird in my opinion – but hey it works). Berserker and Dragon hunter are both pretty lackluster in my opinion though. I struggled with both of them however.

6: Thief – For me thief requires far too much positional awareness meta-gameplay. Unlike necro or rev, thief needs to constantly be in motion and positioning correctly to make the most of things. It’s a lot of overhead. Its fun, but can get annoying. They are also far too fragile. I spent more time running and avoiding fights rather than taking them on cause I could like with the necro or ranger, or even rev.

Elementalist, Engineer – Only two professions I have not fully leveled to 80. Both are at 50ish. Probably because both are a pain in the kitten and require so much micro-management to be effective. I’ve heard they do good in HoT, but frankly I have my doubts just playing to mid-level in the base game.

Straylight.7529:

DoctorDing.5890:

I don’t believe it was “well known” that the expansion was going to be harder than the core game. It was well known only to the minority who followed the various pre-release announcements. Most people don’t follow the forums and don’t read press releases. I think most players would assume that the expansion was more of the same. “Hey, I like this game and now there is more of it to buy. Cool!”. So it’s hardly surprising that a bunch of players are now shocked at the difficulty level. Telling someone who has paid for the expansion that they should stick to the non-expansion stuff if they can’t cope is, frankly, absurd.

Anet have missed the sweet spot imo.

That only a minority followed the announcements is completely irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is the fact that the information about the increase in difficulty was made openly available by Arenanet for nine months prior to launch. There is no excuse for not knowing that HoT was going to be more difficult. If you wanted to find out, you could find out.

If advertising their own expansion as more challenging than the original Guild Wars 2 is not enough.. then what is enough? If someone can’t even be bothered to inform him/herself before the purchase of a product then I guess the next step would be Arenanet starting to distribute personalized newsletters by email to make sure that each and every player gets the memo.

No excuse? Irrelevant? That’s a pretty black and white view. You may to take a look at the marketing materials again, maybe from not such a hyper-legaleeze perspective. Here’s the current Anet website regarding HoT http://heartofthorns.guildwars2.com/game/#maguuma.

Nothing in there immediately screams to me “you will not be able to explore\play the same why you have before”.

It’s pretty obvious the primary marketing was feature push: the new elite specs, the new revenant class, the new mastery system, pvp, wvw, etc. The new zone was icing on the cake, and a big draw to try out the new specs\class.

I’m not saying they couldn’t have known or found out, you are absolutely right about that, but to be fair wasn’t really obvious either, at least not in the marketing materials. The fine print isn’t found out until you actually play HoT.

Totally agree. with you OP. Well said.

So just hit 80 on my rev last night (my 7th lvl 80 char!), and was seeing if anyone had any suggestions on a general “all purpose” rev solo HoT build, mainly for exploring and map completion. I have not fully unlocked Herald yet obviously, so won’t be running that for a while until I get enough hero points in HoT.

Looking for suggestions on build and armor. For armor I can only afford exotic (haven’t unlocked the ascended recipes yet, plus it’s probably too expensive from what I hear anyway).

My first thought was a mix of soldiers and knight, since HoT is pretty condition heavy and mobs hit very hard (completed first map on my ranger, and most of second map). For weapons I thought maybe beserkers to get some power and precision to hurt stuff. For amulets, rings, trinkets? Not really sure there.

I’ve been running sword\axe with hammer for range. For build was thinking something like this, which was what I was running so far, but not really sure how it will hold up for HoT…
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlAQNAsXinXNuNSqJ7JR/kVlsgyrS4QZWJYrcskFPlQN99udIoIN6KE-TJBBABAcIAEc/BKOBAF8EAAA

Was going to run rune of the traveler on armor for the perm 25% movement (since tired of using Impossible Odds all the time, also in HoT it’s probably not good to drain energy unless you absolutely have to.

Would appreciate any ideas

Draknar.5748:

Everything is hard until you adapt to it.

Tequatl used to be impossible when it first came out. Then it became farm mode. Then they made it “harder” and everyone said it was impossible. Now it is farm mode.

HoT is no different. Once you get used to the mobs and their abilities, it is easy.

I think some people got used to rolling through Queensdale (or pretty much any core Tyria zone)on their level 80s and being able to take down giant swarms of enemies and decided to continue that playstyle into HoT, with terrible results.

I think there is a subjective element though to gameplay that GW2 missed for what is “fun” for people, especially for casuals that got used to the base game. Some people love the more meta\elite game play. Some don’t.

Take the flight simulator type game example: Some people just want to jump into the kittenpit, have the bare minimum buttons\controls to push, and fly arcade style blasting away enemies by the score without having to think too much about it. That’s fun to them. Others what to have to do a pre-flight checklist, fuel management, weather check, have to know and master all the mechanical details of the plane, and fly with realistic flight characteristics where your biggest challenge is simply staying in the air, let alone trying to fight someone. Those are two very different kinds of fun, for two very different kinds of people.

The problem with HoT is it was built assuming everyone was like the latter – people who have and are compable of mastering most if not all aspects of the more elite gameplay (understanding build and skill synergies, all the condition types and condition management, identifying mobs telegraph moves – one of the hardest things to see compared to other games that make telegraphs obvious, etc). This makes some sense, since these are lvl 80 maps after all. But by completely excluding the former player base, they turned off quite a few people, particularly those coming back to the game after a break hoping to have some fun but instead found frustration.

They really think they should have made the areas scale in difficulty to make the transition less jarring. There would still be frustration at the final map(s), but at least the whole place wouldn’t be so in your face “you suck, deal with it or leave” right as you enter the area.

PopeUrban.2578:

Ghostwind.4380:

I generally play solo, but this item bugs the crap out of me. Why make teleport to a friend require a consumable that you can’t craft in game and must obtain from the store or drop in the first place? That is terribad design in my opinion. If you’re lucky enough to have friends online and want to play with them it should be made as easy as possible to get together. It just makes for a better game in general to let players get together quickly. If Anet doesn’t want to make it a standard ability you unlock at a certain level (what they should have done in the first place), then at least make it a money sink consumable you can buy at a vendor once you are a certain level.

Because a large part of they game’s content revolves around personally exploring to unlock waypoints, reach chests, and otherwise get yourself to certain places. I’m still amazed the haven’t nerfed mesmer portals TBH.

The low RNG of these items is by design. They’re not something anet wants people to be using all the time as it kills a large part of their content, the same as boosters and other such things. It’s not something you’re really intended to me using all the time, but only occasionally.

Yeah, I’ve been playing since beta and have 7 lvl 80’s that were all leveled from 1-80. 4 of them have full 100% map complete and story complete (except HoT). I know how the maps work and how they are content gated. I fully understand the progression having done it on so many characters.

To all of which I reply – so what? So what if someone wants to “bypass” the hard parts of the map by having a friend help them “cheese” through everything? If someone wants to short-cut their own exploration and story experience by having a friend teleport them to every waypoint, poi, and portal (which would be a serious undertaking and pretty boring), what do I care? They are only “cheating” themselves after all. A person who didn’t earn it gets to share my little world exploration star next to their name but still doesn’t know much about the game itself is supposed to upset me? Not really.

The game is already too time consuming to transverse most maps, even if you could jump to every spot (which is not possible since a lot are contested with dynamic events). Especially on a char that doesn’t have a speed passive.

If I had a friend join tomorrow, I’d love to be able to get to him or her at any time. If they were in trouble I would love to be able to come to their aid. The stones don’t let you teleport into an instance or dungeon so that solves most issues. Make it not usable next to puzzle treasure chests if that is a concern, but otherwise let people together quickly. Without mounts you are still hoofing it on foot for the most part anyway, even if you get together quickly.

I generally play solo, but this item bugs the crap out of me. Why make teleport to a friend require a consumable that you can’t craft in game and must obtain from the store or drop in the first place? That is terribad design in my opinion. If you’re lucky enough to have friends online and want to play with them it should be made as easy as possible to get together. It just makes for a better game in general to let players get together quickly. If Anet doesn’t want to make it a standard ability you unlock at a certain level (what they should have done in the first place), then at least make it a money sink consumable you can buy at a vendor once you are a certain level.

I agree, it’s bit steep for players with multiple characters. I have 8 characters so far. I’ve purchased the additional slots on a few of them. Would love it if they made it account bound.

And to the person who said Anet would owe you money if they did that, not sure I agree. Why would I expect them to compensate me because I was impatient to get extra bag space for pure convenience, and paid for it when that was the only option at the time? It’s not a requirement to have all slots after all, just a nice to have.

Id rather they made the change for the betterment of everyone. Forcing them to compensate you will just make them less willing to make the change since that’s a much greater effort and cost for them.