Guild Wars 2

Since when did you need to have a maxed out character to participate effectively in anything besides high level fractals?

If you claim to know what you were doing, you probably wouldn’t be wiping as much as you say you are.

It would have been better if it was ‘Burst skills crush boons, removing one and dealing X bonus damage. Cannot occur more than once every 10 seconds per burst skill’ (to keep Sword/LB burst from becoming godmode in one fell swoop) instead of another boring % damage increase that doesn’t even really help.

You say activity is decreasing, but what data points are you basing this on?

Is time of day/week being considered in your observations? Was it around WvW reset time so a large portion of the server’s population would have rushed into WvW in order to get an early advantage in the rankings? What about recent new game releases that would give people cause to take a break from a game that has no subscription fee as an incentive to continue playing to get their ’money’s worth’? How about changes in personal lifestyle or schedule that leaves people with less time to play the game now than they had before? What about people who suddenly find themselves with more free time to sink into the game now? Then there’s always the crowd that waits around until big patches hit, playing for a week or so, then doing something else until the next patch hits. I should know. I’m one of them.

You can’t make the claim that the game is dying as a whole based solely on your relatively isolated subset of data. Sorry that your sphere of activity is seeing a decline, but elsewhere that you aren’t seeing there are likely spikes in activity from other players in areas of the game that you aren’t

Or….they can leave it in and improve it so that it does have it’s place in PvE instead. Damage vs objects is a good starting point, then they can look at stack limits so you don’t get boned by having too many condi specs in one group.

I don’t think that you should imply that berating players new to dungeons is a phenomenon specific to GW2. Played in enough trashy pugs in WoW, both post and pre LFG queues, and a few other MMOs to be certain that its fairly ubiquitous across the genre.

That’s what happens when you roll the dice and form a group with a bunch of random people. There’s always the chance that you’re going to get grouped up with a bunch of jerks, and I don’t think you should be placing the blame on dungeon design or the state of the ingame LFG infrastructure for it.

StriderShinryu.6923:

Things like a demonstration of how traps can be turned off

Just want to touch on this very specific point, but the game already does this in AC story mode within the first 10 or so minutes of the run. There’s a reason why story mode is a prerequisite to being able to start the explorable instance on a character, though I guess newer players just skip that part and piggyback on others who have already completed story mode because they hear that the rewards in story mode are crap and it isn’t worth doing.

Depends.

Dungeon gear you need or dungeon gear you want to look shiny in?

Stuff you need isn’t hard to get since there’s plenty of options and I don’t feel it takes an excessive amount of time.

Stuff you want for cosmetic purposes can take however the hell long Anet feels it should since it isn’t required to participate in any part of the game.

Been my belief from the beginning. There really isn’t anything wrong with the basic setup of GW2’s combat. There just isn’t much if any content or encounters that take advantage of it.

All of the most interesting fights I can recall in WoW were always about the specifically designed mechanics of each encounter and not because of any inherent advantage to the holy trinity paradigm.

If it weren’t for the fact that bosses did this or that because the developers decreed that it be so, every single group encounter in the game would indeed not be very entertaining as the basic gameplay cycle of the trinity is contrived and silly as all hell.

Eleir.9325:

Also I have a quick suggestion. For parts of the dungeon that are most often skipped (Kohler & The troll) Make a reward of 5-10 AC tears for them. It would definitely make people less prone to skip them.

They already drop the goodie bags that give a vial of karma, 3 tokens, and some money. I don’t believe there needs to be much more than that.

Kichwas.7152:

Hobocop.1508:

What’s lacking is the ability to deal with movement impairing conditions like cripple and chill, especially with how spammable those tend to be.

Mending, Shake it Off, Balanced Stance, Dolyak Signet, Battle Standard.

Why would you even bother listing skills that grant stability when stability doesn’t do ANYTHING vs cripple or chill? Battle Standard is a complete joke because its entirely too cumbersome to even use for stability purposes and the stability doesn’t even last long enough to make it worth the effort. They STILL haven’t fixed the tooltip/skill, because the stupid thing doesn’t passively grant stability like the tooltip implies, only swiftness/might/fury.

Mending and Shake it Off help, but not enough in the face of ultra-spammy capability of cripples and chills, not to mention all of the other trash condition spam you have to work through in order to even GET to the ones causing the most problems.

Warriors are plenty mobile as is. What’s lacking is the ability to deal with movement impairing conditions like cripple and chill, especially with how spammable those tend to be.

Really is a kitten take when a cripple/chill completely gimps the distance you’d otherwise gain on any of our mobility skills.

Most of the stuff that inflicts Agony are attacks that you probably should be making an effort to avoid anyway.

Only place where you can’t avoid it outright is on Jade Maw, and in the 10-19 bracket, as long as you’re near full health, you can just use your heal when you’re at about 50% and survive.

Because it takes time to come up with a good solution for the exploit and then implement it. In the meantime, a quick and dirty interim fix prevents further use of the exploit.

On AC, enemies actually have LESS health (besides hatchlings, which were buffed up a little), but are more threatening. I’m not sure having standard gravelings actually do something important besides be bigger than hatchlings is the best choice, but it certainly isn’t any worse than scavengers that will outright kill you if you don’t dodge or their channeled knockdown isn’t interrupted in some way.

My only real concern with AC is how flaky Grast is with his shield that prevents you from being murdered by the cave-in. Hodgins can be random with his fire ring placements, but it’s still up to the players to make sure they have the right positioning to bait adds into them. Colossus Rumblus needs to not be reliant on a do-or-die mechanic initiated by an unreliable NPC.

What’s wrong with adults watching Disney movies?

It’s more interesting than running the cash treadmill in CoF1 for hours.

Nope. This game’s PvE needs better encounter mechanics, and then let the players sort it out from there. The basic framework is very solid, but there just aren’t enough places in the game where it can shine.

Zariuss.2357:

Iehova.9518:

Arenanet should have learned that after their AC exp kittenup.

This is your daily reminder that they only kittened up on two things:
1. Grast going full Leeroy and not being invulnerable throughout the encounter.
2. Doing the ghostbuster part of GE more than once.

Without these two features, AC would still remain the lucrative joke of a dungeon it always was.

AC exp can no longer be done by lvl 35’s as it is supposed to be. That, is very kittene’d up

Nope.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/AC-Ex-35-Run-Video-and-Impressions/first

So what?

Propose a solution.

Don’t just complain about 12 silver that a person who finishes a dungeon run in less than an hour wipes their bum with.

Yes.

If only because of how stupid easy it is to ignore every mechanic in the dungeon.

Why would it show anything else? The trait is only for bleed duration, not all conditions.

It was a PuG in the sense that it was five random people who had never played with each other before forming a group towards a common cause. Isn’t…that what a PuG is? You just pick up whoever happened to be interested at the time.

Morpheus.6401:

Haha not clearing all mobs on scepter pieces I don’t even consider that skipping. I think nobody has ever killed all mobs in that room.
And the girl, she lvled crafting and had never used a staff before, so she had never used the char for fighting before, but still she did really good huh.
What about the lvl 35 PUG, how many times you joined one for AC? Win the lottery is more probable than that.

Why is that not skipping? They’re skipping groups of mobs that they’d otherwise have to kill in order to complete the dungeon, and I know that people killed all of those enemies before they figured out how to evade everything to cherrypick the fragments. I was there. Stop moving the goalposts.

Never having used the staff before doesn’t mean that they had absolutely no idea how the elementalist’s staff functioned on a fundamental level. Doesn’t exactly take a whole lot of effort to figure out how each skill works on a basic level just by reading the description and using it once or twice while unlocking the skills, though the most optimal usage comes with experience.

Honestly, haven’t been in a PuG of at-level characters since launch because people starting farming tokens for the weapon skins on their level 80 characters.

But that isn’t even the point of this video. It was to demonstrate that a group of level 35 characters with level-appropriate equipment that is extremely easy to obtain even for new players can complete the dungeon in it’s revamped state, because the claim was that it wasn’t possible.

Morpheus.6401:

Morpheus.6401:

Seriously, this looks like more a paid advertisement LOL.

Oh it was great, oh it went so smooth, oh I made new friends.

This was my first post, it was a joke. But then I started to think … How many times you joined a random group for AC and there was only lvl 35 players? For me NEVER! And I ran that dungeon hundreds of times, not once I had all 35’s on a group. And all different classes! Are you kidding me?! No way! If they had said it was a test or something ok, but they said it was a PUG. NO WAY!

Other thing, the Ele girl, she was lvl 35 but had all staff skills locked, how come? Possible but not probable. And still she knew perfectly how to use each and every staff skills. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! LOL

And they all knew, despite being lvl 35, exactly what to do in every step of the way. That ok, could all be alts of very experienced players, because the Ele just discovered the area when she got in the dungeon so she had never been there before (not on that char). But … After the other aspects I noticed I have to say, LIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS FIXED GUYS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Too much coincidence, a lvl 35 PUG right after the changes, not skipping anything, the perfect run for Anet.

HAHAHA IT’S A TRAP!

Shame on you

Now I have to tell everyone about this.

Your tinfoil hat is showing.

The elementalist leveled to 35 by crafting, and in no way made ‘perfect’ use out of ALL of the staff skills. Mainly stayed in fire or water attunement, rarely dabbled in air, and almost never used earth at all.

And they skipped clearing most of the groups for the scepter pieces event which throws your claim of not skipping anything out the window. . If you had actually watched the video, you’d know this.

As it probably should be, to be honest. The hardest part about HotW is not falling asleep on any of the bosses, since they have way too much health and overstay their welcome.

Should be even more amusing once they rework both of those dungeons.

I just think that there’s a lot of other things on the table right now with higher priority.

Like culling, performance improvements to make culling a thing of the past, rekindling the sPvP scene with better infrastructure, fixing the problem of condition stack limits getting in the way of groups with high condition damage, among other things.

The combination of gw2lfg.com, spamming in Lion’s Arch, waypointing to dungeon entrances to look for group members and now guesting works well enough at the moment.

Leo G.4501:

Hobocop.1508:

It’s good that it’s a little rough around the edges. Proves that you don’t need to have perfect play in order to complete the dungeon.

Rough around the edges? That was a pretty smooth run, IMO. Perhaps you’re used to speedruns where everyone performs scripted tactics?

Several times we stopped, it was for external reasons like tuning the volume of a mic or discussing if skipping was an option.

Not that I’m trying to argue the run was perfect, but give us some credit.

Emphasis being on the word ‘little’. It was a smooth run overall, though mistakes were made, and that’s fine, because it debunks the claims of a few around here that you need to play perfectly in order to finish the new AC. Besides, making mistakes is one of the strongest tools for learning, both for the players and those watching.

It also shows how despite getting caught by some of the deadlier telegraphed attacks that it is possible to recover and finish the fight.

It’s good that it’s a little rough around the edges. Proves that you don’t need to have perfect play in order to complete the dungeon.

I’m confused. I was always under the impression from the very start since the game has been in beta that story mode was the beginner run to get people used to how dungeons worked and to learn how to play in an organized group environment, and explorables were always reserved for more experienced players.

Zeldain.5710:

Wanderer.3248:

In GW2 the outcome of a fight is not decided on a spreadsheet before you even log in.

And with that, all of the depth of Quake.

Grats.

I don’t think you know enough about competitive FPSes to imply that Quake is a shallow game.

Pretty much better than the original in every single way, barring the bugs.

The buildup to each final boss actually has a purpose now; Hodgin’s scepters actually DO something, the traps in Path 2 have a purpose besides window dressing, and there’s actually a reason why you’d be enlisting Grast’s aid for Colossus Rumblus.

Each final boss feels unique in their own way compared to Howling King and Colossus Rumblus feeling incredibly samey besides one single attack being different, and Ghost Eater just being bad in general.

Path 2’s mechanics took me all of two attempts to figure out with a PuG group who had never done the new path 2 before. A little communication went a long way. Having one person calling targets and lifting, and just having everyone else pull the called target makes it very simple.

Spider Queen’s poison actually feels like a threat instead of some slightly offensive perfume someone happened to use at the time. Her mechanics strike a decent balance between her beta state where the poison and spiderlings were just stupid, to AC before the update, where they were trivial nuisances.

Stalkers are a great idea to reinforce the importance of dodging, punishing players for not dodging properly without just taking damage as a punishment. Scavengers were toned down as they were over-the-top before, and other gravelings were made more threatening. Now, the balance may not be quite right, but I don’t believe the old AC’s graveling balance was any better.

Troll is actually semi-interesting, if a little annoying now. He’s actually a threat outside of melee range and his one AoE knockback.

Kholher is also a little more dynamic and interesting with constantly spawning adds, though the basic mechanics remain the same. Funny part now is that if you get Khohler and the troll to fight, the troll loses when he would win in old AC.

Most of the smaller enemies have actually had their health and damage reduced from what they were before, especially the champion gravelings and the ascalon ghosts. I remember fighting the champion scavenger on the way to path 2 before, and it was always a horrendous slog because of how much health it had, and how the old scavenger leap worked. Now, its much more palatable.

You watch. Once everyone learns how the new AC works and they fix the bugs, it’ll be easy and old hat again.

And, again, that’s not a problem with dungeon design itself, but inflexible players. Barring bugs, nothing in the new AC is broken or over-the-top difficult assuming players are willing to be flexible with their options. The ‘glass cannon’ Warrior build is tailor-made for a very specific set of situations in one dungeon path, and taking that outside of that very specific area creates problems.

I said no such thing. Only debunking your statement that ‘glass cannon’ warriors have no way to clear conditions, which is 100% false.

Even with my tanky DPS build, I can’t be in the poison AoE for much longer than a few seconds, so I do the sensible thing of stopping damage and getting out of the poison before clearing conditions, then WAIT for the right moment before going back in. Not difficult to do. Either spin out with GS 3, or detarget and use GS 5, then use whichever one you didn’t use to get out to run back in when its safe. It’s not a race like CoF 1 has turned into, sorry to say.

Glass cannon Warriors can’t slot Shake it Off, Signet of Stamina or Mending?

They can’t swap out one of two major traits in Discipline for Mobile Strikes for two minutes to avoid web death?

What is so important that you can’t sub at least one of these in for a single fight?

I think there’s more of a problem with inflexible players than dungeon design.

SwiftDeths.9706:

Hobocop.1508:

Spekingur.1062:

Howling King. (Path 1 Boss) It is lacking the fun factor. Also, why is fire involved?

Because the narrative of the entire path revolves around Hodgins rebuilding magical flaming scepters because they might be useful in handling what he deems as the most pressing threat to the Priory expedition. And now they are useful (he’s the one creating those fires), and the events preceding the final boss actually have relevance and appropriate context.

Your suggestion basically changes it back to being too similar to Colossus Rumblus.

Best part is the fire still spawns even if Hodgins dies.

Them ancient scepters truly are ‘great weapons of the past’. They even work when the wielder isn’t.

Spekingur.1062:

Howling King. (Path 1 Boss) It is lacking the fun factor. Also, why is fire involved?

Because the narrative of the entire path revolves around Hodgins rebuilding magical flaming scepters because they might be useful in handling what he deems as the most pressing threat to the Priory expedition. And now they are useful (he’s the one creating those fires), and the events preceding the final boss actually have relevance and appropriate context.

Your suggestion basically changes it back to being too similar to Colossus Rumblus.

I wouldn’t exactly call AC perfectly fine the way it was before. There was certainly room for improvement.

Spider Queen’s poison AoE from beta was overnerfed into a trivial trickle of damage and you could very well stand in it for the most of the duration, pop a condi clear then heal to full. Not threatening at all. Her spiderlings were also made very, very trivial in comparison to beta where they were just too much. The new version is so much better because this attack actually means something, and the added pressure of the web and spiderlings that strike a good balance between beta and the old live version is icing.

Path 1 and 3 final bosses were carbon copies of each other with one single mechanical difference. The new versions make them more distinct from each other.

Path 2’s final boss mechanics (mortars) were useless trash that didn’t influence the fight in the slightest and you were better off ignoring it completely and just doing the damages. Now, I haven’t actually done the new path 2 yet, but I’m fairly certain that when it works, its a lot more interesting than just being Howling King without a cone scream and slightly different adds.

Scavengers were over-the-top and the rest of the ‘veteran’ gravelings were just so much chaff. Perhaps the new balance of power isn’t the right one, but the original certainly isn’t much better. Stalkers in particular gaining evasion when they hit someone with their burrowstrike is something relatively unique in that it suitably punishes players for not dodging properly in a way that doesn’t result in terrible, terrible damage to those who were hit. The game needs more mechanics like that.

Bugs aside, the new AC I feel is a better experience overall. New players will learn the same way we did when the game first came out; experimentation and some trial and error. Hopefully with a helping hand from those who are willing to show them the ropes.

At least 30-35 and enough skill points so you have an elite skill available, I’d say.

Banners are very good if a little unwieldly. Standouts are Discipline and Tactics, as they provide long-lasting benefits that you can’t easily get through utilities elsewhere. You can easily trait to have near-100% uptime with minimal investment. They can also be traited to provide an extremely easy fire-and-forget source of group-wide regeneration, but that requires significantly more trait points.

Shouts are also pretty good, as most of them are on a relatively short CD compared to the shouts other professions have access to. Sinking 30 points into Tactics to make shouts heal, and using 6 Superior Runes of the Soldier to make them remove conditions is a fairly common support build, but 1-2 of them are worth taking regardless, even for damage oriented builds.

I have no issues with the AC revamp other than the rampant framerate drops. Wasn’t even bothered by the knockbacks, since I run with a short CD stun break and two separate sources of constant health regeneration. Just have to get used to the fact that gravelings other than scavengers are actually a threat.

CrazyDuck.4610:

Again, a single PVP server.. Really? Didn’t you read posts, PVP alone is 40% population on WoW and I have seen population over that at certain times, so by those standards we would need alot more than one. Why cut out half the customer base? That’s like telling mcdonalds, you should only sell in USA forget about the UK.

That’s a nice number, but in no way relevant to the demand for an open PvP server in this game.

Even if that were an accurate number, there’s no way of knowing how many of those people actually engage in open world PvP in a significant fashion. Hardly solid ground to warrant the inclusion of such a ruleset into this game.

Wait…people actually spend MONEY on the infusion slots for non-infused ascended rings? When you can go run like…two levels of Fractals and get one for virtually free?

Nope. There isn’t any game on the market that justifies a recurring subscription in my book anymore. And likely won’t be any in the future after seeing what developers can do with other business models.

Didn’t know it was impossible to res people in combat without consumables.

Oh, wait.

Dante.1508:

Vayne.8563:

Dante.1508:

I want Stats Variations like GW 1 so the game does not have a treadmill.
I want loot to be casually found and made like GW 1 through every aspect of the game
I’d like end game “skins” to be the final grind not overpowered crap
The Cash shop full of Armor set weapon set skins.
Story Quest Gives an Epic or Legendary Item, as per GW1 (not a rare)
Story Quests can be redone
Dungeons Scaleable to level and group size in difficulty..
I want Skills Capture and a lot more skills than we currently have as per GW1

I’d just like Guildwars 2 to follow its roots better and appeal to its original fans more, i guess that’s too much to ask.
(my opinion)

I was a Guild Wars 1 player too. The welfare greens that we got by finishing campaigns were terrible. They may have had max stats, but they were generally bad. This is particularly true in Factions. No other mission in the game had item rewards.

The drops in Guild Wars 1, after you maxed out, were pointless, except for holiday drops and your chance of getting a black dye. If you wanted something really good, like a voltaic spear, or a celestial compass, you had to run the dungeons you needed to get them, buy them off the trading post, or get very very lucky with a Z chest.

You’re talking about Guild Wars 1 like it was the be all and end all. It wasn’t. There were flaws with how it was laid out, just like there are flaws with how Guild Wars 2 is laid out. But the welfare greens you got at the end of the adventures? Meaningless, because everyone had them, and you wanted something better anyway.

In any event, the skill system in Guild Wars 1, which was a lot of fun, is part of what killed the game for people in the first place. 200 skills per profession and you could make a zillion builds, twelve of which were viable.

The balance problems due to the dual classing and number of skills were completely impossible to solve. That’s why rits destroyed the game. Everyone could just take rit heros, a minion master, and content became meaningless.

You want some of the very things in this game that prevented that game from growing.

For the record, I do agree that you should be able to get max stat items more easily than no exists in Guild Wars 2, however, I play the game without max stat items and do everything in the game. The gold weapon you get as a reward for finishing your personal story is worth as much as the greens you got from finishing a campaign.

Oh, one more thing. When Prophecies launched, you didn’t get that green. They added the Prophecies gear reward far later. I know this because I had to go back and finish Hell’s Precipice a second time to get it on my earlier characters.

In fact, the high end stuff like obby armor, six months after Prophecies launched was almost as out of reach to most people as the Legendaries are here. You’re just not remembering that.

The fact is, you’re comparing 4 seven year old games (or a series of games that came out over a 7 year period anyway) with a six month old game. But Guild Wars 2 has more in common with Guild Wars 1 at six months than it does with Guild Wars 1 now.

There were less skills, because no expansions. No PVe skills. And there were a couple of effective builds. The best gear was hard to get. And you didn’t get epics or anything great for finishing Prophecies.

I disagree with a lot here i had more than 12 viable builds, may not have suited PvP but i didn’t PvP!

I came to Guildwars one during prophecies and was into it as Factions dropped, i loved the Factions gear (greens etc) i had multiple sets of Armor, multiple weapons, and multiple builds, i never found weapons “welfare” and the final Factions weapons were awesome to me looks great and were top class (better than guildwars 2 skins any day)..
Obviously we saw Guildwars very differently, the whole game mechanics played ten times better than Guildwars 2 ever do, i played Guildwars for many years before i became bored, Guildwars 2 im bored what four or five months into it, that’s saying something broken right there..

GW2 is a completely different game from GW1.

You don’t personally enjoy the combination of mechanics in GW2 compared to GW1.

That doesn’t make GW2 a poor quality game because it doesn’t suit your tastes.

Assyrian.4827:

Vayne.8563:

I really can’t believe people feel they NEED to hold aggro to finish a dungeon. My advice, and I’ve repeated this often, is find a guild with people who play like you do and learn to play with them.

My guild has done dungeons since the change, and yeah, they’re a bit harder. Sometimes it takes a while to get someone back up. You start rezzing them a bit, dodge away, wait for an opportunity, someone else dances in adds a bit of rez, and then they get back up. And you know, it works.

But I could imagine that with pugging all this stuff seems like weird science. There are plenty of ways to get around this change, including several skills that people can take to help up downed players before they actually die.

It’s just that people would rather complain than figure out how the stuff is supposed to be done.

Edit: Oh yeah, it helps if you’re all in mumble, vent or teamspeak, since you can say I need rez, instead of trying to type it and hoping someone reads it in time.

have you ever been hit by the strongest creature in GW2 it is the Graveling scavenger after you are bing hit nothing will help you and if another player tries to rez you he/she will be down too.
off topic. also there are plenty of vetrans that are 1000 time stronger than Zahitan the poor dragon because they have speed and hit hard (shark is one example).

Nothing will save you short of a stun break+quick dodge, stability prior to being hit, or a ranged CC/interrupt from your teammates.

Oh well, guess that isn’t nothing.

Less chat =/= less friendly. It’s pretty difficult during normal play to hold a conversation through text chat while not taking it in the kitten

Also depends on your server and the time of day more than the community in general not being friendly enough.

You try to get ascended items in the 10-19 bracket. They’re not even needed until 20+, and even then it’s doable as long as someone in the group has some AR to pick up those without when they go down from Jade Maw’s agony.

I agree. Some of those in the so-called ‘casual’ camp (whatever that means anymore) are getting to be just as bad as the supposed ‘elitists’.

I don’t play all that often, and I haven’t had many issues aside from the obvious stage where I didn’t know what I was doing and was still learning how things worked. The most important step is realizing that there is always something to learn.