Guild Wars 2

Hello Anet,

I’d like to express my worries about the trend you’ve been going on for a while. I’m a dedicated player which has all the professions (8 of them) at level 80. Ever since ascended gear was introduced I had some issues… getting all the gear for my characters takes 8 times longer.

Now sure, some would say I dug my own grave, but my arguments are simple and I don’t consider them to be to greedy or over the top.

I played other mmos, most notably WoW… I’m not asking you to turn into WoW. But wow would allow me to play 8 times as much in order to obtain my gear.

So a brief history of my leveling and adventuring:

1) My first character, a shy little Mesmer discovers the world and gets to 80
2) Experiance as much of the game as possible pve, spvp, tpvp, wvw.
3) Level up all the other professions, learn their play styles (this was surprisingly easy and fast)
4) Ascended gear introduced, run fractals every second of the day get random drops nothing ever fits my builds/gear.
5) Get a total of 5 ascended rings ever.
6) Ascended ring tokens introduced (10 = 1 ring), farm 20 tokens (no drops mind you) finally get rings for main, never do fractals again! my alts can throw themselves of a bridge. Infuse etc. (I got to F30 with 0 agony res)
7) Get back piece with relics, upgrade etc. Same story, I’m not gonna grind so many hours for my alts. (I know I can craft them, but your basically saying more alts = more gold)
8) Amulets introduced, these can only be purchased through Laurels a new currency. Obtained at 1 per day and 20 per monthly. This means you can get 1.6 amulets per month.
9) Accessories introduced, 5 gold and 12 guild tokens. Ignoring that guilds had to level up to get access to all 6 guild tokens a week, that limits you to a month to get 2 accessories for 1 character. Or you can pay 40 Laurels and 50 Ectos, which means 2 months and 20 days + gold for 2 accessories.
10) Celestial gear and the new shards 1/day resource. If I’d wanted to gear a character not only would I need the recipie before hand (which completely over rides the crafting system, as most good looking gear overrides the crafting with the forge), I would only get 1 resource per day considering I got 25 shards.

Conclusion:

I would currently need to run 160 fractals. – Rings
Complete daily and monthly for 5 Months. – Amulets
Complete Guild missions each week for 8 months or complete daily and monthly for 7.1 months + gold – Accessories
And an additional 14800 relics – Back slot

Now you’re saying you want to add new 1/day materials in order to craft ascended armor and weapons. How many months do you want me to play for 48 armor slots that I have to replace +/- weapons I’d like to use.

Problems with this:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this. Which seems awfully counter intuitive seeing as you are selling character slots in the gem shop. (sure people can buy them for pvp, but then again they can just delete a character and make a new profession at lvl 1)
- This makes the idea of having more sets of armor or off-specs even more difficult, the way I’m seeing it now its you either have one character with a lot of armor sets or many characters who fit different roles.
- I mentioned above that the bag piece is the only exception which can also be crafted with gold, but this for me seems very obtrusive towards the idea that a character can be a self contained person and achieve everything on his own. So the choice becomes either waste time and grind gold or waste time and farm fractals with my main who is higher level and can get the relics needed faster. (this is really not a strong point, since it actually lets you grind, but non-the-less…really slow)
- 1/day resources, this will probably be the bane of my existence in gathering the necessary resources to craft 8 sets of armor and 14 sets of weapons. This again will make the chances of a profession having an off-spec almost null.
- Most of the ascended gear works around the crafting system, like most the desired good looking gear in the game, legendary weapons who only slightly dip in there with the gifts.
- Celestial gear completely skips the discovery process of the crafting system, with the requirement of actually needing the recipes as well as some previous event gear.
- Always being scared of that one big nerf that will make all your gear useless and the need of repeating this long and painful process.

Things Anet has done to make this easier:

- First of all adding the ring tokens .Having a RNG on gear, especially on account bound gear is a horrible idea.
- Adding more methods to obtain gear, Laurels and guild commendations can be used for more than 1 type of ascended gear, but this is still impractical seeing as guild commendations need to be exclusively be used on accessories in order to gain the maximum efficiency. And gratz on adding ascended gear to WvW… its not my slice of the pie but at least you get a discount of 10 laurels if I’m not mistaking and also helping the players who almost exclusively play wvw.

Things other MMOs have done to help this:

- No RNG, Currency for completing dungeons, quests etc.
- RNG, Items are not character/account bound on pickup or if they are bound then a party loot system is usually present in order to get the gear to who needs it.
- Drop and token hybrid, the player performs the necessary task and either gets Good loot on RNG and token, or gets Bad loot on RNG and badges. Badges always serve as a sense of progress towards the players goal in acquiring his end game gear.
- Bound resources not being soul bound, a simple rule of the thumb is if I can’t do anything with an item to affect the game, market or someone else they will not be 1/day. The player should not feel crippled for the effort in maintenance of more than one character, this also applies to having on character with more than one spec.

Final thoughts:

I cannot possibly give a suggestion that would not brake the current system or cause fury to people. So I will just say I’ve been born in a country which 24 years ago was a communist country, and I still hear stories about going to the local supply center and waiting for hours in queue to get your 1/day liter of milk per person and such, I’m not calling ANet communists mind you, I’m only implying the same thing over and over again which is, do not:

- Put player in a queue (wait for daily/weekly/monthly)
- Ask them to put effort in the game (cause the daily/weekly/monthly is not going to solve itself)
- Make the process even slower for more characters and flexible players with more off-specs (Even the commies didn’t ask all of us to present ourselves to the queue , and under the ridiculous constraint of one at a time in the hole queue)

FAQ.

- Didn’t wow also make you grind once a week on raids ?

Yes. But the sense of progress was always there, I could always get off-spec items and by the end of the cycle new content would be available always keeping me in motion, this also caused stronger gear to now become obsolete and easier to acquire (not asking for more gear in gw2). + alt runs were fun!

- Didn’t more characters also require you to farm even more raids ?

Yes. But being a top guild player (not Ensidia/Paragon or anything but top 100), we would clear content pretty fast, raids quickly degraded into farm or alt runs and they were always good for training on the main raid. And lets be serious current content does not require TOP players.

- Ascended gear is end game gear you have to work for it! shouldn’t you?

Yes. But not by forcing players to be in a queue, most MMOs don’t scale the reward of your progress by time spent in the game and even more so by enforcing a set minimum time, and gw2 extends this even more for multi-spec/profession players. This discourages players from playing together since there will be a “time-gap” and the nature of GW2 pve is cooperation. MMOs tend to scale in difficulty instead, requesting the player to present with a lower tier of gear in order to acquire the next one. An easy method for this would be to only allow players with full exotic either by arbitrary decision or adding a stat on all exotic gear which allows the ability to damage Fractal Mobs and lowering the time spent in needing to acquire ascended gear. This creates a slick progression ladder which encourages players to go from whites to blues to greens to oranges and finally purples.

I will gladly ask any questions and would like to encourage discussion on this and civilization on expressing your opinion. Sorry for the long post, I posted this pretty late and expect grammatical errors and bad math.

TL;DR.

A poorly written post late at night about the difficulty in amassing gear for multi-spec/profession players and the current GW2 system which punishes these players + worries for the next tier of ascended gear and time based progression instead of the pinnacles of GW2 which “are”/“should be” skill, effort and dedication.

I play a Mesmer in sPvP and tPvP, if you would log-in on my account right now and open the pvp window you will see a great big ball of purple. I have not played any of the classes and got 100 tpvp games and 200 spvp games roughly under my belt. I have only encountered 3 thieves that could kill me consistently! (meaning 80-90% of the time I’m winning, unless its a 2-3 v 1 which now seriously this is a team game and I expect to die in those situations).

1st Thief: First week of guild wars, I did not understand that my confusion build sucks in pvp
2nd Thief: A thief on in tourneys he played a completely different game from any other rogue I ever encountered, it was backstab but he never missed a hit, he always stopped when needed, kited when needed and basically handed me the beginner manual and sent me back to Mesmer school.
3rd Thief: Is one of my friends, he wins about 75% against me…but if he misses even one skill, I lay the hurt on him. And I watched him play and he is having the worst time just staying alive and running around, thieves without a team are basically crap.

Call me ignorant for not considering thievs op! Last night I was helping my gf with her pvp daily, and we got set in different teams in sPvP and we got 300-0…then I swapped to her team and I still won with 100 point difference… people would just come at me at that point and say mesmers are OP… the guardian on their team actually did that and proceeded in calling my mother a kitten and reported me for playing a mesmer, the rest of his team didn’t share the same opinion since they were 2 mesmers and a thief and I didn’t die once in that game.

It’s sad that people come and complain so so so much on these forums and there is so much hate going around… instead of just playing the game and working around problems and when there is no longer a work around a certain build or tactic than we can call it unbalanced and call nerfs on it.

Enjoy your game people. I know I’ll enjoy it in my ignorance, with the class I chose for GW2 form my experience with GW1.

I don’t know anything about alts, but my Main character has yet to receive his birthday gift. He was created during the 3-day head start for the digital deluxe edition at the same time as my girlfriends and she already received hers.

Korsbaek.9803:

sorry the laurs gives you the chance for rings, amulets and earings but lets say you get one from guild missions, a amulet from laurs, and the othere earing from laurs and 2 rings from fractals(given the achiemnts point chest and peaks you will have enough laurs for that when you have done fractals for the 2 rings if not before) as there is so many laurs in play now

Indeed there are many Laurels in play, but its still 40 a month, and achi chest granted I personally do have 8500 points will get me a boost. But we are trying to help new and old players alike, and new players are more restricted in that manner, which is okay for a “first character”. The toughest part right now are the accessories (takes up to 8 moths only using guild commendations) which cost a lot more laurels and gold to boot, if your only going to spend laurels your going to run out of them fast.

diamondgirl.6315:

Agreed, Erika (and others) – they want me to log in every day, and artificially structure my gwar acquisition process to ‘encourage’ me to. Well, I’m not going to. Not because I am taking some sort of Stand, but because… Life. So… since I am not shelling out a monthly fee, I am more likely to just go try out a new game. No drama, just their choices informing my choices. And that bums me out, because this is such a pretty game.

The only disappointment here is the first interviews before the game came out. With thousands of quotes such as “The game is free, you can come back at any time and play and you are never left behind, since our intention is not to make the game a gear grind” – that sounds vaguely familiar to me from a lot of the pre-release announcements and media.

anzenketh.3759:

Just a question to get the feel for things. Would time-gating be ok if it was once per day per character?

For me personally that would be perfect, as I said 1 month for gear seems more than decent. I already run dungeons repeatedly on all alts and I did that before bosses dropped additional tokens, and even before that when tokens could only be taken from chests. Less account bound activities more character bound ones.

+1 on all your posts Lafiel

Khyras.8021:

Saulius.8430:

confusion i use as a mesmer:
etherial combo field(4x of those) + projectile finisher => confusion
F2 => confusion
some traits=>confusion

run and hide. run and hide

and about counter. for me its enough to have null field+ cleanse on heal trait. also if i wanted to be team player, i could get condition removing mantra (removes 2 conditions for all allies, 10s cooldown)

What he said proves my point.

Read before giving a seal of approval.

Those are all the skills…no mesmer has them all available at all times.

Ethereal combo fields with confusion and whirl will apply confusion, but we barely have any projectiles skills. And if we do they have no place in a condition build since confusion scales with condition damage. F2 still has a cooldown and shatters all the illusions which again a mesmer also killing of his phantasm dps in the process. And yes some traits apply confusion when you ENTER or LEAVE a 3 different utility skills…which no one mesmer will have on his bar…again only in the rare case he is playing some home brewed condition build.

TL;DR. No mesmer can simultaneously make use of all the above skills in a efficient manner without serious sacrifice in burst damage.

And considering the previous you are basically complaining of a skill that can be avoided and deals less damage over time then other DoTs which condition build classes can apply easily without making combos like mad.

Your only issue here appears that you hate it when someone stacks 8 confusion on you and your attacking with a short bow while using quickness inside a feedback bubble.

Look:

- Clones do not spawn with the same amount of health
- Only spam the first attack
- Attack with a reduced rate of fire
- Do not display titles
- Do not display explorer star next to name
- Do not carry an off hand weapon
- Receive a lot more damage
- Are static if not out of range or Issued a shatter command
- Do not dodge
- Downed clones DO NOT HAVE A BIG RED TRIANGLE on their head

Your pve experience depends on other factors.

If your generally running dungeons with guild mates/friends, it might be best to get your build to suit your overall group. While pugging I generally just encourage to not try any support builds since if your party can’t manage the encounters, no amount of support you give them will help.

I started with a staff/condition build, with sceptre/pistol (before sceptre “buff”), using prec/tough/cond dmg with runes of undead. While playing with my support guardian friend. Boosting parties through dungeons runs was easy with the amount of healing, boons and reflection running around with the both of us, but we did encounter parties which would just die regardless of our efforts.

I had to make a big decision in my final spec when ascended gear was introduced …so I don’t just get gear I would never use, and finally reverted to a berserk shatter build. My final decision was encouraged by the fact that I always PvE with my guard friend, so he can help keep me alive while also stacking vulnerability consistently while supplying a lot of AoE damage.

So as far as PvE goes, if you have friends and guild it might be worth researching what role you fit best in your groups. If your a solo pug and feel that you can handel a glass cannon go for berserk.

Side-note: Many people, myself NOT included, consider WvW to be the current end game. And you might want to follow Nordic Natedog’s advice in getting Knights and Cavalier’s since it will allow for some survivability, I personally ran my condition build until confusion was nerfed in WvW, now I run with my normal Berserk Shatter build and I don’t feel the difference since if I get targeted by 10 people I’m gonna die regardless of how much extra survivability I have, but there are conflicting opinions on this as well.

Kahzee I suggest reading Tentonhammr and Sleel’s posts. You say your fine with “not having your hand held and having gear handed to you”, yet that is what we are saying as well. Limiting access to content on a time base mechanic screams “hand holding” at me more than anything.

And Anet does give you 5 character slots and sells you additional character slots, are you actually saying Anet is not encouraging multiple playthroughs of their game ? And its the fault of people who actually use or buy those extra slots, that the gear progression is so long and tedious ?

Even if I had only used the standard 5 character slots, it would still take me 5 months to progress. With a 2-week new content release schedule…. Imagine how much the game can change until I find out that Rabid gear is no longer the optimal choice for my “insert profession here” happens?

I don’t even mind the time-based progression, Like I stated. WoW and other MMOs I played did this as well, but they allowed me to complete dailies on all my characters, only lock down raids/dungeons for characters that played in said raid/dungeon (very similar to what gw is doing in its dungeons).

I know gw2 had a bot-ing problem so a lot of content is on DR, but these currencies are non-marketable, cannot be salvaged or sold to vendors.

Fact of the matter is that player should progress in a manner in which “they chose to play the game” as ANet’s policy stated. I would have liked to be able to complete dailies with all my characters during this past weekend. Go to guild missions tomorrow and complete 2 dailies and then go to guild missions with my 2nd guild the next day and skip dailies cause I don’t feel like it and not feel bad about it because I know I worked extra hard this past weekend.

I’m not asking to allow me to grind everything in 1 day or less, I don’t mind getting my ascended gear (as currently present in the game) in 1 month, that is a reasonable time limit to me. But let me simultaneously progress on all of my characters and stop holding my hand!

HuntsForge.3260:

The problem as I see it at least, isnt the difficulty the difficulty is fine. It is the fact that it’s temporary and I if I dont want to do hard content at the moment I miss out.

Temporary content should be challenging but accessible, hard content should be there all the time for players to enjoy in their own time.

+1 to you good sir

kahzee.6042:

Still don’t see anything wrong with the way we get gear. It should take a while.

Kahzee this is your 2nd post, saying nothing is wrong with the system. While people are continuing to add arguments to their statements, being fair to the opinions of everyone. I really do want to understand your logic and train of thoughts but you’re not helping me. Maybe we are in the wrong, explain it to us. Thank you for your dedication and continued presence in this thread.

falchion.3652:

Agree with OP.
Effort shouldn’t be reduced to having to do time gated activities.
If I play 1hr a day for a month, or the same 30hrs in a week, the effort is not treated the same.
What seems weird is more and more content rewards are shifted towards time limitations. I understand it for holidays, events – but for it to become the new game motto is terrible. Time limited grinds are the worst – let me play at my own pace.

The dungeon token system is a nice hybrid of both. Max tokens once per char per day but can be circumvented with alts or a penalty of DR for tokens if someone wishes to get their gear faster than a daily allotment.

I can agree and relate to this. I didn’t think about covering this, but while I have 8 characters I can get 8 times the tokens by running 8 times the more dungeons! The ratio of time spent, effort put into the game and reward is perfect across the board.

But currency such as laurels and guild tokens can only be obtained by 1 character per insert arbitrary time limit. Which cripples the behavior I stated above, players with more than 1 character or people who just experience the game through more than one class or method of play.

kahzee.6042:

Don’t see Nything wrong with thiz. You should not be instantly geared. If you were where would the fun be

I think the 3rd question in my FAQ answers this quite nicely or at least partially. I do agree you should not be instantly geared, but I currently need 8 moths of game time to gear my characters. I mean I literally only need to log in one hour per day, for 8 months, face book mechanics are not a really good approach when trying to play an MMO, since MMOs thrive on player activity and not encouraging user to go off-line because they cannot progress any more that day.

Erasculio.2914:

Hastur.6231:

- Not only are you taxing more dedicated players here, your actually limiting their ability to “grind” this

That’s a great thing. Considering how “dedicated players” is usually how people talk about grinders, limiting the grinders’ ability of receiving more rewards than other players by doing mindless, easy content for 18+ hours per day is a very good idea.

Regarding your point about alts being somewhat punished due to the “1 per day per account” limit, I agree. While I’m sure people would abuse the system if it could be used by level 1 characters, it wouldn’t hurt if the Quartz node in the personal instance was availble daily for each level 80 character in a given account. I doubt this would happen, though.

I agree whit almost all you said, but with the limiting factor. I don’t see why you would limit gear progression on ascended items seeing as they cannot be sold, salvaged or affect the economy of the game in any way, this is also pve gear so my progression on account bound, non-marketable items does not affect other players in any way, and as stated above 8 moths is slightly over doing it in terms of limitations.

On WvW side of things, It can be a bother some to some people but arguments against that are:

- Dungeon running gear is not really the most efficient way of gearing for WvW, palyers who want to WvW and need off-spec armor are also affected by the issues above
- Having some extra stats would help me survive or deal more damage in a 1v1, 5v5 maybe even a 10v10. But current tactics of WvW still make ascended gear a negligible advantage when the enemy still has superior numbers in his blob.
- Allowing me to gear all my characters will not disadvantage servers, seeing as I cannot simultaneously play all my 8 characters (which would be silly), but if I attempt to swap to another character to adapt to a situation, I would be stuck in a queue for 1 hour, until I’ll be back in wvw…I’ll just probably need to swap back to my main.

Thank you for all your replies and participation in this discussion. I would also like to point out SSalp’s post. Legendaries, exotic gear, dungeon tokens and even gold are grindable resources. Making an account bound, non marketable resource limited on account (not character mind you) is just silly.

Brother Grimm, Thank you for taking your time and contributing.

“This is not about TOTAL playing time, but how much time you spend on EACH character” – Brother Grimm – July/22/2013

You say that, yet the rest of your arguments seems contradictory to that statement. If I complete a daily on my main in 1 hour and then play 7 more hours on my alts. I’m not going to acquire additional laurels, which means I have spent and equal amount on all characters yet received progress only for one.

To clarify this even further, again. If I log in right now and complete the following:

- 1 Laurel from daily

I can play the rest of my 23 hours on any character. Yet I cannot gain any more progress regardless of what character I choose to spend my time on.

So in trend with your argument: “This is not about TOTAL playing time, neither about how much time you spend on EACH character, but on how much ANet ALLOWS you to progress.” – Hastur – July/22/2013

Which currently is 1 month per character, which totals to 8 moths for all classes with no off-specs and the chance that in one of the bi-weekly patches Anet will just introduce a better stat comkittenfs/buffs a class or/and adds new skills/traits which break the meta your original gear was intended for.

BuahahaXD.5014:

Well, there are lots of builds out there. How can I know which are good for what purposes? I need a general build for PvE so I think it should be quite balanced. What should I be looking for?

Considering armor: should I buy some general exotic items and upgrade them with runes or buy a preset one? Is it worth to buy karma armor (is it better/worse)?

All the builds in the list are sorted by game area and general aspect of build (mantras/shatter/phantasms etc.). You can buy or craft your own armor once you make a clear decision on your gear… all armor stat combinations can be found on wiki with general information from where you can acquire them (crafting/karma/dungeons).

All exotic armors regardless of acquisition method (craft/karma/dungons) share the same stat values if they are of the same rarity (exotic karma = exotic crafted = exotic dungeon).

As for runes, I don’t know any specific builds that use the defaul rune setup of any armor. But as a general fact runes are chosen in order to further enhance your build:

- Getting 6 runes of the same type. Generally shows that you really want the 6th bonus on an armor set. From my above post I said I’m using the Undead runes for “5% toughness is converted to condition damage” since I was using a armor stat combo which grants a decent amount of toughness + 25 points in chaos for another “5% toughness converted to condition damage” while using atunment crystal for another “6% Toughness in condition damage”.
- Mix and match runes from various sets. Is usually a method for maximizing a specific stat, for example boon heavy guardians use “Two Superior Monk and two Superior Water then two Major Water or two Major Monk” in order to get 40% extra boon duration which no other rune combination will grant unless used in this specific combination.
- Orbs. Orbs even though are of rare quality (blue) when stacked on all 6 armor pieces will grant more stats in one category than any rune set available. Quite a few berserk specs (full damage) use ruby orbs since its easy on the money while granting stats just as if you would be wearing a 7th piece of armor.