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Deadeye:
-Steal button should be converted to combination mark/ Kneel/stealth button.
-make Rifle five high cost, high damage(rd. Daredevil staff five.) Kits shouldn’t exist within base weapon mechanics- it muddies the water.
-mouse/directional should allow egress from crouch without a jump -jumping is unnecessarily unwieldy.
Other:
PoF elites general-(esp. Weaver and holo)
Streamline PoF elites.
Remove new resources(heat etc.) Tone damage down if needed, but the base prof mechanics(Adren, Init, attun, etc.) are enough.
Add flavour with cosmetics/abilty animations, damage types. Keep Mini games to game world content and OUT of new professions/elites.
Reaction/latency are king in comp modes. High risk high reward is no reward when spending your time downed against less complex, more fluid-playing base/HoT profs.
Potential for fun in comp modes(pvp/wvw -half your game) should sell new professions/content – not drive players to base profs to compete.
Last- Conditions.
Apply diminishing returns to condis, damage reduction to 1/4 for a specified time on removal, as current quickness of condi re-application renders cleanses a waste of a hotbar slot. Even if you shifted cleanses to the ammo system they’re still comparatively useless.
Or-
Allow toughness to mitigate condis as it would physical/base damage. Make the armour type organic to prof choice meaningful.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
there’s a big difference in an elite spec that expands a class’ playstyle and an elite spec that goes absolutely against what a class is designed for.
thief is and has always been in its core, a melee glass cannon, extremely agile and using dirty tricks to get the upper hand, as backstab or poisons.
this spec is absolutely the contrary. you fight from a distance an are 100% static. I never liked the idea of riffle and even less now that I’ve tried it.
No, thieves are about choosing their fights and never playing fair to win- whatever the toolset. Being glass is neither here or there.
You still have base Thief, you still have Daredevil and now you’ve been handed the mother of all hit and fade sniping elites. Deadeye expands your roles: interdiction, diversion, and assassination and does it considerably by giving you a true ranged option.
You have choices now. Deadeye is the latest and none of the others are necessarily bad.
If you ever wonder why there’s little sympathy for thieves, it doesn’t play well complaining about three flavours of awesomeness, when in the other other profession forums most have a single, one-trick spec they all have to run/abuse to be successful.
Over there they’re worrying about being given yet another rubbish elite. Or worse, something that starts off passable and will shortly be nerfed into the ground.
I’d say keep your heads down and your mouths shut and pray that nobody sees how good this elite actually is.
As someone playing against deadeye, I am not upset about the burst, the damage the range. I am upset about the direction players are taking it…
The SA mark stow firing squads are just not enjoyable to encounter…
Ultimately I find it fun to play, just not enjoyable to play against.
Don’t worry. Many here are going to change their tune once they play around with it more.
Scenario- Five Deadeyes coordinating in teamspeak, Specced Critical Strikes, Shadow arts, and Deadeye.
Right side bar:
Hide in shadows, Signet of agility, Smoke Screen, Shadow refuge.
Elite- Basilisk Venom.
Let’s start off by saying yes, you do reach your full potential sniping by kneeling. But you don’t have to kneel. It just makes buttons one-four for rifle better.
In wvw, all five thieves coordinate, each is assigned a number, one through five. This is for calling out who uses shadow refuge and when.
Find a spot not far from a border keep or a well traveled road or along the rout from one to a tower being attacked by your side. When targets are coming SR focus one, when target is in range apply basilisk, All five use Double tap twice.
Long range, insta gib, and the target doesn’t know where it came from and couldn’t have blocked it if they’d wanted to. Next number thief SR for the group- reposition or go for another.
The group could have run along in stealth to get better positioning for the double tap as well- no need to kneel.
You won’t need ascended gear. You won’t need funky exotic gear either- a set of rampagers, assasins, or berserkers will do with travelers runes. Put fire and air on your rifles.
You don’t need to be particularly skilled either. Just coordinate in TS.
Said it before in other threads- Done right, nobody’s going to want to leave a border keep in anything less than a thirty person blob. Otherwise there is no countering this.
It’s everything thieves have wanted in WvW. High range, high damage, you keep your mobility, and instead of just tapping someone and then running away if it gets hot you just end your target from the start, then reposition.
Every anti-stealth ability out there is reactionary at best, short of a prescient Ranger variant or similar squad of thieves running traps along a path you won’t be found out before you take at least one or two of your targets. The rest of the time the enemy will be looking over their shoulders for you.
If that wasn’t tempting enough,- if you don’t want to do that then you still have options with twelve to fifteen hundred range shots. In a blob you’ll still do exceptional damage out of stealth, on the run, and what’s more, you’ll no longer have to be fragile front line melee. This means you actually have a shot at not being kicked from squads.
Let that soak in guys- at least for your own sides you’re not going to be the pariah’s you used to be.
Try and be a little happy for once. It’s still a bit rough, yes, but even so Thieves got dealt a good hand this time around.
Due to the way movement skills work with immobilize, it wouldn’t interrupt or stop them. You’d need to add a short daze to it.
Unevadable would be interesting though, and would suit the flavour of the skill, as you mention.
I’d be all for that then, even if it were only a one or one and half second duration daze. Just to make it something to properly trip an opponent up.
Immob. getting cleared isn’t the fault of the skill. I can and still do make effective use of the rifle net shot. If you want to make it better, advocate to add to the skill. Don’t remove the immob. itself.
I’d actually say the best way to add to it is to widen the net unfurling animation, then make the attack unavoidable- blockable yes- by shields or barriers if applicable, but not evade not even if the target goes into stealth as the attack is executed.
So you just hid in plain sight? Good, but the net still hit you.
So you jumped two feet to the side? Who cares it’s a wide net for a reason.
This makes net shot the interrupt it’s supposed to be. Even if a Daredevil is chok ful of evades they should either eat the interrupt til it expires or have to waste another evade to escape it if specced for that.
Staff didn’t need to be brought down to three hundred range. This comes down to a lack of imagination on the part of those in charge of professions at Anet.
There was a simple way to change this- keep the shotgun as it was or even longer range but to make it the first of a three step auto attack chain.
First press: Shotgun, seven hundred fifty range, frontal cone, but narrow the cone to sixty degrees.
Second press: Staff Sweep- six hundred range, front cleave attack with a light wave animation, one hundred twenty degree arc. Damage applies either short duration vulnerability or weakness.
Third Press: Shockwave- Staff is jabbed downwards into the ground and releases a combination burst of aoe damage and healing similar to the old Empower but stronger(single pulse with a good return on healing power investment for those who go bunker rather than condition.)
Make the chain usable on the move.
It’s essentially giving them a slightly stronger version of engineer’s old healing bombs but on the last strike of the chain.
You don’t have a mindless auto-attack, and you have an actual attack chain befitting a hybrid weapon.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
If you don’t like the game, don’t play it. Simple.
Not attacking you personally here, but this attitude is why we’ve bled so many players. Rather than adhering to the promise of their initial offering, Anet gave their devs a free hand to squander funds on tangential and unnecessary experiments.
GW2 was sold as the ‘game for the rest of us.’ And it delivered. Nothing trying on overland maps. Amazing visuals, puzzles and platforms, a bit of crafting, and all of it with the non-gamebreaking, opt in and out flavour coined by Warhammer. Game modes to please everyone that weren’t ‘necessary’ to take part in to ‘succeed.’
There was a personal story arc and a living world element tying it all together(similar to Lotro’s Books- once they’d been made solo friendly.) The story was woven into the dungeons so there was instant familiarity and a sense of purpose when you played. All of these were good.
HoT broke faith. Rather than saying, ‘Play how and wherever you wish,’ there was one path to mastery and elite spec lines. There was WvW for some, but if neither a WvW player, or a jumping enthusiast, or someone who enjoyed the world boss train you were out of luck. As it was HoT meta maps seemed to be a passive aggressive middle finger to world train crowd who cried when rewards were cut. ‘Love trains? Here’s four maps that are endless trains with steep victory conditions tossed in.’
From the beginning devs have talked out of both sides of their mouths, saying, ‘play as you want,’ in order to sucker us in and then afterwards making punitive changes- either to classes, or to the game modes. GW2 has the more the feeling of a behavioural science experiment, one we’ve somehow failed without even knowing it. Why?
Because apparently we weren’t playing how they wanted us to play as we wanted to play. If that was confusing, good, because it was just as confusing whenever the changes were made. Still is.
They made a brand, built expectations, then broke them by trying to be something they weren’t. Rather than letting us play ala cart, gw2 became a study in ala cart games development. Devs expected customers to pre-purchase based on previously established brand identity/expectations, but in truth they ended up subsidising their failed experiments. You want spoiled? You want entitlement? There you have it.
They had one job: stay the course, deliver an ongoing experience consistent to what came before. They didn’t. And not only did they not deliver, but they aggressively ignored their players in doing so.(Go ahead. Drop the mic again- see how that works.)
That consistency equaled:
-A new, easily navigable, overworld map section divided by mini hubs(hearts).
-A new, story-relevant, dungeon hub with attendant cosmetics for weapons and armours.
-A new, story relevant, wvw map consistent thematically to the newly opened zones.
-A new pvp tournament event.
-A new chapter of living story, furthering the story which came before; with the end goal of eventually besting the world dragons as the zones where their respective domains exist were opened up.
-A new fractal.
And they could have added raids to that. There’s your new addition.
That’s right, raids weren’t the problem either. They have a place in GW2 beside dungeons for providing additional story progression. And as such, they could have been one of many reasons to call friends over from other games- so long as Anet kept consistent with the other modes. They didn’t and it’s that simple.
And this is why it’s so grating whenever players, satisfied with their experiences, feel free to tell others to quit playing. The alienated player base is just as invested. Perhaps even more if it comes down to moneys spent.
So that said, I’d probably agree with them, provided Anet refunded them the moneys spent for dyes, toys, cosmetics, pets, and other gems purchases bought with actual world moneys. These were purchased in good faith with the understanding that the GW2 experience going forward would keep consistent. It would be a world they would continue to want to play in. But that wasn’t happening, was it? Nor is it.
Saying, ‘No, you still have them, and you’re free to enjoy them for as long as you stay in Tyria.’ was -and is- a bunch of mealy-mouthed, weasel-worded, coward speak. How does players enjoy themselves if their guild has jumped ship to another game? They don’t.
Anet is irresponsible with the moneys given to them. They need someone more in tune with business and brand consistency riding herd to make certain that what they deliver isn’t going to alienate half or more of a loyal following. Afterwards there needs to be an apology.
And in light of that, the open letter to the community before the preview of PoF was just insulting. Don’t hold a knife to my throat in a blind alley, violate me, then have the gall to paste an open letter on the wall of the alley a year and a half later, whingeing about not having found enough money in my wallet when you’d mugged me afterwards. Telling me not to reflect on the ‘bad times’ but instead to look ahead(possibly to another violation in the making)doesn’t play well. Especially when there wasn’t a sincere apology anywhere within the letter.
Take up painting on your own dime if you want to seek challenge or artistic fulfillment. If your intent is to make money and to have a product that doesn’t end up at the bottom of the heap, then you suck it up, show up every day, leave your ego at the door, and continue to please your customers.
Right now, PoF seems to be another debacle in the making- yet another instance of telling us how to play the way we want. Or rather -‘Play however you want, so long as it’s here and it’s this way.' with nothing but another year or so of silence to follow as the devs go to ground and nurse their wounded egos.
…
Yes there is a bit of a chip. But then nobody wants to be the player told that their preferred mode isn’t important and therefor they aren’t important. Our money spends the same doesn’t it?
As for your personal experiences- yes, I’ve been there. My small, family guild came in with the ‘great mmo migration’ of several years ago. Some of the dungeon groups were terrible but I put that down to raiders not having their game mode yet- similar type A personalities etc treating the dungeons as serious business.
That said, once we knew the ins and outs we had a choice- either to be ‘those guys’ the ones who chewed out anyone even trying to approach dungeons for the first time never knowing they ’shouldn’t wear clerics,’ or they should know to enough that the group wants to skip half the dungeon via shadow refuge etc… The other choice was to go slower, mentor other new players when we ran dungeons and try to have a fun time doing it. We chose the latter. We didn’t speed run, we fought trash, and generally the dungeons were a fun way to pass a couple of hours in an evening.
As we’d only just come up through leveling they were directly more relateable to the outdoor zones and personal story segments we were playing through. Fractals weren’t. Fractals offered all of the toxicity of the current dungeon environment with none of the lore appeal. An unnerving trench run we were glad to be out of but not necessarily happy for having done.
In our opinions if we’d wanted to make an evening’s outing not fun fractals were the way to do it. Even the lure of slightly better loot wasn’t enough of a draw. For us fractals struck similar chords to Wow’s early attempts at heroic dungeons and so we avoided them and still do.
Having emphasis shifted to fractals left us with nowhere to go. That’s not a fun place to be. It’s easy for others whose mode of choice hasn’t been consigned to the rubbish heap to feel good about where the game is going, and to tell those who have been left out to carry on or get out – never minding the feelings of those who’ve been left out. But that’s human nature and that’s the internet for you.
Unfortunately it’s also human nature to fight back and be nasty about it when someone takes pleasure in your misery. Guilty.
Moving on.
No. I just didn’t want to go there. It’s one thing to joke about our profession being lost/persecuted, it’s quite another to make Engineers into the ones carrying out such a ‘solution.’
I’m just waiting for the follow-up to this thread.
Engineer: The Final Solution
Allow us to be healer engineers?
We were- back when everybody kicked you out of instanced game play for doing it. Then our turrets were nerfed, we lost healing bombs, were sold a bill of goods about exploding fields- and the abortion known as the med kit… Then what do you know- now everybody wants healers for instanced content.
No, Engineer: The Final Solution is going to be subject of a leaked, internal Anet memo wherein they discuss plans to place an Engineer-only event portal somewhere within the deserts come PoF; A red-tinged version of the Super Adventure Box portal. Stepping inside the portal leads to an instant character deletion with the ability to roll engineers permanently blocked from that account. Once the last engineer has taken the bait the engineer, and all expansion professions based upon it, will be expunged from all lore and any future product feature listings.
I’m just waiting for the follow-up to this thread.
Engineer: The Final Solution
Most people I know stay away from forums because instead of interesting discussions about builds or strategiy there is only constant whining about everything and all useful informations are elsewhere.
Oh yeah!? Most people I know could beat up most people you know! Why!? Because the Internet™.
To be fair, we used to have discussions about builds and strategy before we were gutted and dumbed down into less than a handful of viable specs before the first/last expansion. Now we talk about new armour stats, about chasing them, crafting them, and then losing all over again after we’ve gotten them.
All joking aside(never mind – I just remembered where I’m posting), Rifle warriors are still better and more focused than Rifle/anything engineers. The moment you equip a kit, save for the laughable mortar kit, you give up any hope of ranged parity and then you lose in melee.
Mortar kit is just an invitation for the enemy to run up and slap you with it. Not to hurt you, but more as an intervention in the hopes that you’ll reroll and continue to log in and provide them with someone to fight against in one of gw2’s flagging competitive game modes. But back to warriors.
When a warriors swap weapons it’s because they’re getting ready to dance on your corpse but want a suitably impressive screen shot with their legendary. Well, that is except for when it’s against an engineer. Winning against an engineer is the gw2 equivalent of winning the special olympics – and nobody bothers screen capturing that.
Silly thing is rifles are just one of many many weapons warriors excel with and seemingly get better with as the game progresses. Engineers, on the other hand, were built around rifles and they’re rubbish with them. That there’s even a comparison to warriors is sad(delusional.) Sadder still is that the class being given rifles in the expansion is going to be better with them out of the gate than we’ve ever been.
As far as crying – that was done with years ago. Now it’s just a shifting back and forth between occasional reflection and morbid curiosity as we circle the drain and wait to see just how low this profession will fall.
If I remember the announcement correctly, ANET stated that they were abandoning dungeons because creating 3 paths and a full gear set for each one was too time-consuming and they’d rather focus on other things.
That’s fine and all, but it also assumes that there have to be 3 paths per and a full gear set. Frankly, I’d absolutely love some new dungeons without full new sets of gear and just 1 path. The issue I have with fractals is that, to date, they have not been used to keep up with current content but rather rehash old content or follow a side-along story that misses out on a ton of potential.
The reason I want dungeons to come back is because they make a great foray into some stories/lore/what have you that fractals can’t reasonably touch. I’ll give you some examples:
They’re greedy and lazy end of story. Everything being mentioned here could have been done. The work certainly has been done. Go to the gem store. Go to the Black Lion Exchange. Look at weapon skins. Look at the amount of Outfits that have been released over the last three years.
Break those up by armour pieces and just give them exotic stats. There’s the dungeon sets we should have been getting. And see, they’re still releasing new exotic/asc stat sets. You just aren’t able to earn them from dungeons.
The truth is they wanted to take content that could have been earned through game play and shift it all to the gem store. If you want the outfit- gems. If you want the weapon set either gems for keys then the gambling game of chests for scraps/tickets, or gems for gold for skins sold on the exchange. They still would have made a goodly sum from selling transmute tokens for new dungeon sets from skinning and reskinning as not everyone plays WvW. But that wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t balance. It wasn’t quality of life.
They’ve abandoned their mission statement. Players -many players and guilds- have abandoned this game(include disillusioned wvw and pvp veterans), and so they want/need to make up for that shortfall by driving gems sales on those still playing.
Raiding and fractals are one of the ways they do this. Just as in World of Warcraft -or any other mmo with a raiding/heroic instance(fractals ARE mini raids) scene- those whales truly dedicated to succeeding and succeeding first rely on having best in slots and on heavy use of consumables.
Food and oils/sharpening stones, item crafting, they all take expensive materials to craft. If there’s one thing players know about gw2 it’s that Anet has gone out of their way to eradicate farming spots by either removing reliable spawns or by making the percentage chance for certain items to drop so insignificant that farming is a wasted effort. And yet – those commodities never seem to run out on the exchange. They’re only pixels after all. Consumables and the scenes that lean heavily on them drive gems sales.
In world of warcraft to keep guilds in flasks and other consumables many top guilds simply went to gold sites to keep themselves stocked. Those treating raids as competitive games modes burned through tons. Yes, once everything was on farm it relaxed somewhat, but for those pushing after world firsts, or just guild firsts every advantage counted -they still do.
Many of the top guilds back then loved to lord it over other guilds when asked how they managed it during rows between casuals and raiders by saying, ‘What- we have lives. We play less than you. We only play ten hours a week tops. We just make them quality hours.’
Which was steaming pile of lies back then and it’s still a steaming pile of lies today, but Blizzard allowed it and allowed them to not be banned for the carnival shill factor of having them set in capital cities with their loot on display in order to drive interest in the game mode. It worked. How well?
So well that they had to come up with account authenticators. Why? Because of course giving your payment/account information to third party sites who probably load your pc down with spyware/keyloggers when you go to buy gold from them are going to attempt to steal your account- after all they DID/DO sell characters/accounts as well. But what a difference a decade makes!
Now most games attempt(not altogether successful) to cut out the third party currency/item brokers by having in-game currency shops provided at launch. All about the money.
So the next time you get the itch to post here about dungeons, take a deep breath or ten, say to yourself, ’won’t happen, it’s all about money.’ And just try to do something more fun than cobble together a post that’s going to get you ridiculed here by the holier-than-thou crowd.
TLDR; It all comes down to gems sales. For the amount of loot dungeons gave(even with the need to farm them for tokens) they just didn’t drive gem sales enough to keep Anet in the black once they drove the majority of the gw2 player base away.
For one, there’s the huge chunk they take from any transaction on the BLE. Farmers/gold sellers are just going to factor that chunk in as a cost of doing business whereas regular players lose out big.
Then on top of that there’s the even larger chunk of currency that vanishes down a deep, dark hole every time you either convert gems to gold or gold to gems. Whichever you’re converting the part they skim is excessive. Skimming anything at all is excessive-
In spite of what Anet claims, they do create gold and gems out of nothing- innocent enough on the surface as it’s the nature of bits and pixels.
Still, in a market where gems are bought with actual world money, taking a chunk off the top for an in-game exchange for some sort of dubious VAT before anything(weapons, armour, crafting mats etc.) is purchased is essentially daylight robbery. Particularly when the rate of exchange of gems to gold fluctuates wildly based on nothing they’ve(Anet) ever been transparent about.
There used to be a graph but even that was dubious as it’s still possible to manipulate currency rates, still possible to dump materials or other commodities onto the trading post as there isn’t a way of knowing who you’ve bought from or who has bought from you. It’s all still bits and pixels. We still have only their word that the rates are based on player activity.
In other fields of businesses that would be called shady -misrepresentation and fraud have to be proven and that’s nigh impossible here. Players are essentially being shaken down at the door for more money after having bought a ticket to go inside. And this- considering players are often taxed on credit card transactions by the local governments wherever they live.
Given the seemingly random fluctuation(manipulation) of their currency prices as opposed to say… the set retail pricing of a boxed product- there’s enough of a grey area there where you could call purchases of gems from Anet with a credit card more of a gambling event. This, in turn, SHOULD subject Anet to having to file for state/provincial gambling/gaming licenses wherever they do business if laws for such are on the books. Even if they did this- particularly if we go by the above paragraphs- there’s still the matter of their running a dirty game(rigging the tables with fluctuating exchange rates.)
The least Anet could do is have a flag for where gems come from(whether exchanged for gold earned through pve, playing the exchange, or actual world money purchases) so that gold bought with gems coming from a credit card purchase from Anet isn’t subjected to that exchange fee for the first gold conversion(in order to keep it in line with a boxed product purchase.) That, or allow players on point of purchase to select whether they want their actual world currency to purchase a flat amount of gems OR gold(not subject to in game exchange rates- again a boxed product) straight off. By not doing either they essentially guarantee business for third party sites.
But this in turn brings up the possibility(some woudl say tin foil hattery) that they’re stakeholders(or owners) of those third party operations -something which is again virtually impossible to prove even if it’s true.
But if all that weren’t enough there’s the refusal, thus far, of allowing players to purchase expansion packs with gems. It comes across as Anet having its cake, eating it, and then charging players another price of admission to watch them do it.
As a player I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, if only for the sake and love of my hobby, and suggest they just haven’t known any better -that what they’ve been doing is wrong(regardless of hiding behind a EULA.) Even so, it’s difficult to believe they haven’t had some sort of representation advising them all along about keeping their practices just this side of the bleeding edge of what does or doesn’t cross legal lines.
It’s quite a lot to ponder -even before the crying over whatever pet features players have wanted, delivered or not, from expansion content has begun.
TLDR; Trust matters and it’s difficult to trust Anet right now.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
Honestly, I believe as of currently the Anet team does not quite know how to develop Engineer into something that provide decent amount of utility due to its “Jack of All Trade but Master of None” nature from its Core Profession
^^ And this is the problem. We were sold as a jack of all trades class. But with every update it seems the focused classes have been given more hats to wear while still remaining focused and best at something.
Meanwhile it’s going to be two expansions in and we’re still going to be worst at everything. You don’t have to be a programmer or a mathematician or a genius of any stripe to see the disparity there- and why it’s no fun to play.
Nobody wants to be an underdog all the time. Contrary to popular belief it doesn’t make victory any sweeter. All it means is you had to wear your try-hard pants and the other guy had to try to lose against you.
Anet’s handling of engineer hasn’t just been neglectful, it’s been aggressively stupid. Less incompetent and more mean-spirited than anything. Most of the time we don’t even know who’s in charge of our development. We’re probably just cobbled together at the last minute from remainders.
It’s why whenever you keep bringing up the word, ‘paranoia’ what keeps running through my mind regarding engineers is the line from ‘Catch 22’, ‘just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’
Most likely, because everyone that was interested in it has bought it already, and there’s not enough new players to make a visible impact on sales.
I see this a lot as an argument but I don’t get it. Why was Guild Wars 2: Heroic Edition selling at Q4 2014 (before the announcement of Heart of Thorns in January) so well, for a game that was already old by mmorpg standards AND it was during a period of a terrible content drought (last content update was in August 2014)
Why was the Heroic Edition of GW2 outselling Heart of Thorns so long after the release of the game?
To offer some actual data :
Guild Wars 2 gem cards are ranked #3071 on Amazon
In late 2014 (September) it was ranked around #3,465Heart of Thorns is ranked #4415 on Amazon
Guild Wars 2 Heroic Edition was ranked #1,697 in late 2014 (pre Heart of Thorns announcement)You can see the vast difference right there. I know it’s only Amazon rankings, they change a lot, new games are added, older games are removed and so on, and it’s only one retailer. However it’s more than clear that the Heroic Edition was doing FAR better than the gem cards, while in the current situation Heart of Thorns is doing much worse than the gem cards. And also, the ranking of gem cards can be called stable, while the box sales are terrible.
So shouldn’t the argument of “everyone who wanted to buy Heart of Thorns, already did” be applied to the Heroic Edition as well? Why was the Heroic Edition still selling 2+ years after release, and Heart of Thorns is struggling less than 2 years after release?
Going out on a limb here, patience. Free accounts are severely restricted as with chat and mailing. Upgraded core accounts are not. You don’t need a HoT expansion to play all regular content. You don’t need one for world versus world, you don’t need one for pvp and you don’t need one for playing dungeons or fractals or for overland world bosses(Tequatle etc.)
To take it further you don’t need one for materials gathering or for amassing gold the old, hard way and either converting it to gems or simply holding onto it. This means core upgrade accounts are still valuable to third party website online gold/character/legendary weapon sellers for a variety of reasons.
-For leveling characters to max(possibly with hero points maxed to prep them for instant elite specs prior to an account purchase followed by an ex-pac purchase to sell them for money.
-For constructing legendary weapons to sell them for money.
-Market manipulation in order to sell materials and to transfer gold in-game via the auction system(if you’ve ever just perused the auction system across the board and then encountered strange sale items – green, non-rare, low-level items selling in the hundred or thousands of golds chances are that was a gold selling transaction.
-For use as disposable, dummy accounts for the purposes of spam pm’ing or broad channel advertising in game for those third party sites. Free accounts are limited on chat usage, a purchased account isn’t.
It doesn’t seem logical to spend that sort of money for the things above but given how ubiquitous the sight of legendary items is now, given Anet’s anti-farming stance(basically finding any instance of regularly farmable materials for just about anything being nerfed into the ground) again- chances are good that these third party sites are/were still making enough money from transactions to offset the overhead of churning through upgraded core game accounts. At least for the times you linked.
Does it mean a lot of the people with low AP sporting legendary weapons purchased them either with straight weapon purchases from a site or with gold purchased from those sites? Don’t know. Not an argument I want to get into here but it’s worth mentioning.
OP what should engi’s theme be? Because judging by your post you want rifle to be the theme.
It should be… wait for it… wait for it… WINNING. At least some of the time, WINNING!
Engi is a profession that’s innovating, using the tools around him to help him succeed. Engi is an inventor, a machinist, an alchymist, a physicist and a scientist. Scrapper fits engi perfectly thematically. This time we got asura tech based spec. Personally, I’d rather give engi mace, which seems more fitting but I don’t see problem with sword.
Which is awesome if your only aspiration in gw2 is to play outdated dungeons or the odd snowflake scenario featuring a static fight.
If it were Asuran we’d be getting a huge, honking robot- a GIANT ROBOT- that either follows us around or allows us to ride on its shoulder _ALL THE TIME- (not on a long cooldown) and which beats the literal snot out of anyone who gets near us. We’re not getting that.
And apart from that he’s talking about WvW and in WvW Engineers are garbage. Thematically they’re my absolute favourite profession for the reasons you stated. But that said they’re still garbage. It’s taken the devs several years to make it that way but they’ve finally succeeded. Now we’re walking garbage with mecha legs, a hammer, and a kittened elite drone that’s slower than us on average and doesn’t have the decency to include itself in its own stealth field.
Holosmith will be more of the same except shiny garbage with mecha legs.
They still won’t be tops in anything- apart from failing. The light show is going to more than make certain players know when to avoid them. And- it’s melee range, And – it’s glass without any proper escape. High risk no reward.
He’s right to go thief or any other class that has a proper developer who not only plays the class they’re assigned to improve but who actually cares about the players of that profession and doesn’t spend what time they have to communicate with the player base on reddit hoping to have their ego stroked.
In wvw expect to see five man snipe squads going rifle/ shortbow, staggering use of shadow refuge, and simply pressing ‘1’ in unison to decap targets. Everyone complained before about thieves who just Steal engaged and ran away to harass groups. Now they’ll no longer need to Steal to work you over before running or resetting the fight. If you’re bunker they might have to press ‘1’ twice.
Yes, rifles are a projectile weapon and there’s plenty of projectile hate in the form of reflects and absorb shields. You have to expect them, having some sort of sixth sense, which is just inane and doesn’t happen. Barring that you have to see them coming and have the latency and reaction time to bring up a reflect/absorb/evade.
How many times do you see a steal coming? On average you don’t. Five auto shots(and every weapon out there has to have an auto attack to make it viable in ‘teh pve’) from stealth at 1200 range- they don’t have to be special abilities or even subject to whatever flukey mechanic will come with Deadeye.
So either make friends with someone who runs nonstop blobs, or spend gems to go to a high tier server that runs them even without tags, or – never leave the walls of a portal keep or tower solo or small group ever again. It happened with stealth wars in DAoC and is probably going to happen here for a long while after launch until players either get sick of being free bags or the hipster contrarian thieves get sick of sniping and try to make ganking in melee range a badge of honour again(who’s kidding, it’s the thief/snipe community.)
HoT was trash. Instead of ‘Quality of Life’ development we got ’Ain’t it cool?‘. Now, with PoF, Anet’s at it again. The community has been shouting, ‘HELP ME!!! HELP ME, PLEASE!?!?! I’M DROWNING!!!’
And the devs in turn have just said, ‘K. Here ya go. Now you get to play a watered-down necro/druid Scarlet Briar wannabe. luls.’ And then drops mic -because nerds appropriating rap culture and dropping the mic was ultra ironic cool once(it actually wasn’t. Just don’t tell the nerd who did it that. They still believe you were laughing with them.)
Quit giving engineers false hopes by enumerating qualities which were, at best, ideals which now have nothing to do with how terrible they actually perform in practice. Let them abandon the profession if they want to. It’s time for another profession to be resident punching bag for a while.
They’re entitled to not be overwhelmed by the hype. It isn’t as though this sort of negativity hasn’t been waiting in the wings for the last couple of years.
Game world was never large enough nor felt large enough to justify mounts and I question the value of wasting resources on them as well. But of course they’re locking off content behind them. Joy.
And it isn’t a though there aren’t enough things from last expansion still not sorted. I only wonder what features of HoT will be cut/gutted in the service of making this next coming iteration of gw2 into a try-hard, mock-off, World of Warcraft clone.
As far as the jungle- yeah, we’re getting out of the jungle and going to… Wait for it. The desert. Another fecking desert… Yay?
So now, rather than working toward the fights with the dragons, which many were eagerly awaiting, they’ve dropped whatever story telling potential from those parts and given us Gw2’s version of ‘Burning Crusade.’ “Guild Wars 2: Path of Fecklessness.”
So now it’s about hunting down this setting’s version of Illidan which we probably won’t see outside of yet another raid. We won’t have a separate new profession, and we still won’t have a new player race. But mounts!
If they were going to rip off of an expansion from a competitor could they have at least chosen one of the better ones?
Now I better understand the context of message to the players last week – telling us to not look back, to not care about all the broken promises, mismanaged prioritisation of time and resources, and all the slimy misdirection and backpedaling that followed. Telling the community instead to look forward while in the same breath passive aggressively pillorying certain segments of it, now and for the past as well as in advance of this coming failure for daring to hold them to account for their wrongs.
Now I see the subext, ‘All you had to do was keep mum about our terrible business practices and everything would have been great! This is all your fault, you bunch of entitled whingebags! You expected what was on the box/point of purchase pages(which we tried and failed to edit without players catching us) to actually be delivered? Gosh! Nobody does that anymore. It’s the wave of the future! You were supposed to keep with the times and laud us for our flexibility with your money, but no! This is why we don’t have nice things. YOU are why we’ll never have nice things. Hope you’re happy!’
There has to be a consequence for the Wimpy school of games development -the, ’I’ll gladly implement the feature you didn’t want or pay for -whenever I feel I want… That being never or Soon™! Yes, Soon™! That’s the ticket- for your money spent today.’
Save yourselves some money this year. There’s another game out there with a coming expansion. It also has mounts, mounted combat, excessive lag, a failing pvp/world versus world scene, dated graphics, bad dungeons, badly implemented raids and is nominally free to play with a misguided focus on development for its in-game cash shop. It’s called Lord of the Rings Online and it’s going to Mordor.
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Figures this would be a necro thread. Still, Ventari should have been the first and the easiest transition. Just treat it the way engineer turrets were treated underwater- have the stone spawn on top of the player. To move it the player has to swim to a destination first and then click the move button again to have the stone travel wherever they are. It should – still heal whatever friendlies it passes through. What more, all the other buttons are point blank area effect abilities centred around the stone so that shouldn’t be a problem either.
First delete the profession.
Next give everyone with a level fifty or higher engineer a new elite skill: ‘Corps of Engineers,’
On activation of CoE one to five engineers of randomly assigned races spawn and then together cry a river, build a bridge, and get over it before it collapses behind them(perhaps with some still on it.) The collapse is considered a pulsing blast finisher called, ‘Disaster Area,’ with a ten second duration and radius of six hundred units. The pulses come every half second and will blast finish any field executed within the specified area including those of enemy players so it’s possible to top yourself using this if you aren’t careful. Afterwards the engineers will pack up their tools and despawn as a bicycle horn plays them out(HONK! HONK!)
The ability has a two second channel time. And in addition to the disaster area grants a two second application of regeneration and one stack of torment to the player, applying to up a maximum of five friendly players as well. All surrounding enemies receive a one second Daze and a three second Confusion stack.
Because we dont have any decent condi ranged weapon i would suggest to change Field of the mists on hammer to be a icefield to have synergy with abyssal chill.
For what it’s worth I kitted out a rev and traited Malyx, Shiro, Glint and did well enough. Just rampagers exotics, berserker runes, and a few pieces of condi ascended jewelry I’d had lying around from playing other professions(coudl have got by with rampagers or some other set for the accessories and probably the weapons as well). The weapons were crafted exotic Sinister(two swords one hammer).
I used Superior sigils of blood and superior sigils of frailty for the dual sword set up and then superior sigil of Ice and superior sigil of frailty on hammer.
Superior Sharpening stone and Plate of Orrian Steak Frittes.
Ice triggered regularly enough on hammer to get the second torment proc off. Frailty(with a ten second duration proc on low cooldown) did a better job than crit procs of keeping the life leeching from Shiro up and running. Between the food, the runes, a little self might, and the other kit there was well in excess of 2300 power or better. With Glint aura’s up there was over seventy percent to crit. That’s more than enough to do respectable power and condi damage at range and that – apart from the runes(24 gold giver or take these days) was done on the cheap.
Sword number two proc’d chill so that was easy too. It wasn’t a world beater but on a rev what is? The big drawback was condition cleansing but that’s a rev problem no matter what. I ran with Glint and Ventari for legends. Ventari for light group support/projectile blocking, and sporadic condi cleanse, but admittedly I hate the stone and even though I’ve grown proficient with it I still find it too fiddly to want to use it as opposed to needing to use it.
That said, I could see why you’d want an organic chill on the hammer for pvp where gear is restricted but that’s about the only instance. Otherwise having organic chill with the ability to go for a blood or another damage sigil(fire or Air) on the hammer would be nearly having our cake and eating it, but that’s just my opinion.
How do I not suck as an Engineer?
Not knowing you I’ll preface this in stating that what I’m about to say isn’t meant to disparage your ability as a player in any fashion.
Now that’s out of the way, the solution is simple. Don’t play as an Engineer.
You want some quick and dirty changes that will keep Guardian semi-unique? Won’t be a perfect fix for all our problems, but here you go.
First drastically increase the contribution of plus healing equipment to the delve of their healing and regeneration effects.
Second, alter the symbols. Increase the radius of symbols or at least normalise the minimum and maximum radius for all of them. Remove the ability to make any symbol ground targeted.
All symbols become point blank area effect and are changed to ‘auras’ or ‘wards’ and travel with the guardian as per the mobile Berserker fire aura. This is the biggest one- guardian should never be a back line fighter- even as a dragon hunter. They should be front line and have the ability to apply pressure on an enemy while supporting their team.
Symbol/aura/ward talents which previously only lengthened duration, instead lower their cooldowns and this stacks with talents which lower the cooldowns on specific weapons.
In addition talents which apply additional damage to a weapon set apply that extra damage to the damage ticks of the symbols/auras/wards applied by those respective weapon sets.
Every main hand weapon or two hand weapon keeps one symbol ability, at least. And I could see a future addition of short bow giving more than one.
Yes, it could be potentially abused, but no more or less than a group of players Berserker bombing currently in wvw.
With those changes you’d get more healing, you get some much needed mobility to keep that healing on your team where it belongs, and you get to keep a variety of choices for the weapon sets you take.
Which… Is probably why we’ll never get that sort of change.
It would be terrible. Particularly in light of the changes to turrets. Hammer as currently implemented needs the scrapper line around it. Largely due to sustain.
Hammer isn’t a kit. So you won’t have the benefit of that trait from alchemy. Without that it falls to the scrapper line – the regeneration synergy between firearms and scrapper are your main source of sustain. Take that away and you’re stuck with either heal over time food, dolyak runes, or the now anemic healing turret. Without even a little organic regen on a melee profession that’s tough going.
To illustrate, go get your engineer, play it with rifle in melee range only and go fight monsters in a level eighty map. See how your health suffers. Even healing turret will have trouble keeping up. FIght more than one at a time and it gets worse. Then go play against a non AI opponent. It just goes further and further downhill. This with little change whether you use a power, a condition, or even a bunkery set of gear. It’s just too squishy to support the playstyle.
Unless something happens to change the talent in alchemy to give us passive regen regardless of kits or base weapons equipped it won’t be much fun. And if there was a chance of it happening, there are plenty of players here who would argue there’s enough in Alchemy’s favour right now without making it even more of a must-have trait line.
When I look at engineer this is what I see.
-Rifle- Mid range, low damage, slow, single target and a projectile weapon.
-Flamethrower- good in pve but in pvp or wvw – against any opponent with a brain- isn’t. The king of fire that doesn’t set things on fire.
-Elixr rifle- See above with rifle save that it’s low condition damage. Still a projectile and(as with rifle) also knocks us on our backs.
-Grenade kit- good damage but it’s ground target only rather than targeted(unless underwater). Low range.
-Mortar kit, slow, predictable, avoidable, reflectable. Doesn’t work well in wvw against walls or in targetting the tops of walls. Not worth it apart from guaranteed point blank blasting of fields.
-Bomb kit, fun in pve but still a novelty weapon. Easily avoided by players when kiting.
-Tool kit- between scrapper hammer and the new turrets that wrench repairs what again? Certainly not our dignity. We’ve offhand shields and a kit which mimicks this but precludes us from benefiting from our shield traits when it’s equipped. It’s that bad.
-Healing kit. A passive aggressive finger to those who’d asked for more support ability? Lose even a shred of offence for something your team has to run over to use. Ground targeted. Trash. How trash is it?
Go full magi on an Ele, trait earth, water and temp. Take off autotarget, attune water, then spam staff at the ground near your team. There you are -Healing kit, but with a better two through five.
If ninety percent of our mechanical successes in competitive game modes are contingent on our opponents being either AI or stupid, there’s a problem.
How would I fix it? Keep gadgets/elixrs other base skills and get rid of Turrets/kits. I’ll be first to miss them but they won’t get any better, ever. The future of GW2 lays in giving profs access to new weapons hung on gimmicks and calling it a day.
Why not just give us the Ele treatment. Call it “Modes” and base them round the weapon currently equipped.
-Flamethrower, a mode of the rifle based off of the flame turret.
Blunderbuss, a rifle to shotgun mode specialised in concussion and applying bleeds- pulled from the thumper.
Fumigator/Acid/poison blaster, a condition mode for rifles taken from the angry half of elixr gun.
Frost thrower,(similar to caudecus boss) a water mode for rifle pulling from healing turret/kit. The last tick of the channel inflicts chill to enemies and a low healing tick to friends. Throws a circular healing condition clearing field(elixr gun) which applies chill to enemies.
Bazooka(Charrzooka)- rifle mode part bombs, grenades, missile turret, and mortar kit. Benefits from explosive traits. Regular arcing auto attack(mortar). A fire shot, a poison shot, a frost shot, and a high damage, longish cool down number five with two modes similar to thief shortbow; Homing shot(missile turret) with a chance for knockdown if allowed to travel to target. Tap the button twice while in flight to convert into MIRV -leaves behind a mine field.
Get rid of tool kit. Have its shield abilities overwrite those of base shield and give access to maces. ’Fix’r Upper’ was made for engineers.
This is the treatment we need going forward- so that as new weapons are given we’re actually able to use them/show them off while having more of a techno/engineer flavour. This rather than equipping and pasting a kit right over so that they’re little more than glorified stat sticks.
We don’t need tool belt skills. The right side bar should be our tool belt bar. Our current tool belt bar should be the “mode” bar for the weapon we’ve equipped. If this loses some wanted belt skills then either add them as base skills or make some of them stronger and turn them into elites.
This keeps it neat. If not traited Scrapper, no hammer. If not traited for the new elite then that weapons isn’t equipped. Weapon/trait line choice is important again. It’s either rifle, pistol – pistol(follows base rifle template- perhaps with a grapple where if traited has a ground/wall target for climbing ala deployable turrets/batman), pistol shield, or mace shield.
Suddenly we’re combatants again but at the same time we’re not kept from using fun engineer abilities and elites on the right side bar.
No weapon swaps. Equip one weapon set unless swapped out of combat. Just make the respective weapons and their modes viable options.
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Posted in another thread – they could have added a smaller bar above the right side for respective destruct buttons for turrets and gyros. Problem sorted.
You get to use belt abilities, deploy and overcharge, and destruct or pickup as you want. Five lousy buttons with no other purpose than to have the little yellow destruct button. Was it so difficult?
Apparently ui elements are hard for this team… Oops! There is no team. I forgot we don’t even have representation for the engineer.
So much rubbish. If they’d wanted to make everyone happy the solution was simple-
Our bars aren’t cluttered. They never have been. They could have simply added a UI element above the right bar with a smaller bar for respective turret/gyro destruction buttons. You still get to overcharge or activate on demand. You still have the option to pick up or destroy turrets and then you’d still have the use of the belt skills. Is that so bloody difficult?
As for making it so that players drop them and destroy them we already had a similar/better ability before.
Remember having healing bombs? Where you had access to all those conditions, and healing, and damage? Yeah. They took that away for a mechanic(blasting fields) which ended up being much more fiddly and inconsistent to use. Why? Because reasons apparently.
They could have changed healing bombs to healing explosions and we would have had solid point blank support, ranged support via grenades, and better ranged support via mortar kit. But no. Too easy.
What’s the point of this change without removal of the old turret traits and giving us something new in their place? What good is having more health on a turret you’re going to destroy straight off? What good is the damage shield for the same reasoning? What good is the inventions tree? Go live with the fail, then leave in faulty traits as the parting insult? Grand.
When ‘holo-mancer’ comes with the next ex-pack they should change it to hollow-mancer to reflect there being all of twenty or less active engineers to use it.
Thanks guys!
What they’ve done is take away the uniqueness of turrets. Now, what we have is essentially a poor man’s signet with not one, but two lousy actives. Guardians get to have signets and virtues.
By tying our belt skills to turrets on the right bar it means that we have changeable virtues but otherwise have a button on the right we’ll never use, providing nothing but taking up a slot for another ability we would otherwise want to use- this until we deploy it, it automatically overcharges, and then is exploded(and who in hell is going to want to do that?).
Due to this change, rather than increasing use, Anet is making certain Turrets will feel even more wonky to use and become even more vestigial. Especially healing turret. Making us pay with two slots for having one dubiously marginal ability on the belt bar isn’t an improvement. Even slotting a kit you never use, even all buttons as kits, is at least as beneficial as this and that’s wrong.
Normally I wouldn’t want to have to compare our abilities with other professions(signets) but it seems right here. What we now have seems to be the unwanted child of virtues, signets, and necromancer wells and marks but with terrible timing and no way of making the damage or effects from them unblockable. Yay?
It’s similar to the old Xzibit memes- where ANet says, ‘Yo dog, we heard you loved turrets. SO… After we ruined them the first time so you put them on your bar more for the belt skills and only sometimes deployed the turrets – Check this… Now we’ve ruined them even more so you only use the belt skills and never deploy the turrets!’
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I don’t want server mergers. Our guild has been on Devona’s Rest from the beginning and we’re happy there.
We go out, we have fun in WvW, and spend quite a bit building and crafting superior engines and taking objectives to help our teammates. You wouldn’t know that though. Many of the smaller community groups just keep their heads down and their mouths shut thanks to the environment your WvW has created for us.
What’s insulting is hearing host servers run on about server pride -when many of them are just a conglomerate of server hoppers(many aren’t, of course ). You mention you’re from DR, or another ‘insignificant’ server community, and you’re dumped on in map chat. You’re told to just shut up or that you don’t do anything or that you should just be merged into their communities.
Let me tell you on that score it’s been hit and miss. I’ll fight for them, I’ll help them and do my best but I don;t want to be part of their communities. Some of the ‘host’ servers are kinder, yes, but some are absolute nightmares to where you don’t want to log in or lift a finger to help them.
What makes it worse is that by the time you actually begin to want to help or that you’re making acquaintances/allies you get grouped again with a differing host server. That has to end.
We don’t want to leave DR. We won’t unless you take it from us. Why should players from ours and similar realms be made to feel as though we’re poorer relations and orphans to boot? It felt better in the days when we were consistently stuck at the bottom of the heap but with teammates and opponents we knew, cared about, and cared about hating. The action wasn’t as consistent, but it was what it was. It was comfortable at least- a rhythm to the battlefield.
Do a better job of grouping servers again. Be consistent, please? Make a separate league for the over populated servers, and then one for the rest of us. Those overpopulated realms are the exceptions that actually prove the rule. At least to me.
Suggestions for borderlands
-Give us new colour designations in w v w; Red, Green, and Blue text over our heads respective of what team/position we’re on that match/week. Name the server we’re actually from(Believe it or not we’re actually proud to be from DR and not to have server hopped.) Just make certain your red, green, and blue are distinctive enough for the colour blind.
Revamp the three sides again
-Give us a third borderland, tropical coast- part jungle part beach with bits of flotsam and ship wreck lying about- as though it’s just outside of Lion’s arch.
-Name the borderlands not for the teams but for regions of the world where the veil is thin.
a)Tropical coast,- ‘Bloodtide Archipelago.’ Architecture/obj a combination of salvaged ships and stone gathered from the rubble of old lion’s arch. Rickety wood to begin with. Then stone and metal trimmings when fortified. Lowlands in EB.
b)Alpine – ‘Shiverpeaks Steppes.’ Towers keeps built of ice and snow inspired by the of kodan and the norn who follow Jormag. Bricks of ice to begin and then thicker, darker ice topped with a heavy coating of snow and hoar when fortified. Overlook in EB.
c)Desert – ‘Maguuma Wastes.’ Sandstone fortresses shading into jungle stone buildings/towers. Much as it is now. Valley in EB.
c)Eternal Battlegrounds – ‘Stonemist Battleground.’ Have the entrance keeps for each borderland reflect their biomes/architecture respectively and then as you drive toward Stonemist castle they each bleed into the temperate biome/traditional Ascalonian/Krytan architecture at the heart of the battleground.
In the end we should keep our identity, and the battlegrounds should keep a connection to the lands without- wherever they’re tied to where the veil is thin.
Thanks.
Don’t know if this has been posted before- but as the title mentions- Is there any chance for Dragon hunters to get a permanent spirit weapon of their choice with an option for the current traits associated with spirit weapons to make them heartier/more survivable rather than adding to duration?
I was sort of puzzled that they allowed for longbows and traps but didn’t do anything to address the pet side of hunters when they merged kits to make Dragonhunters.
But whatever. Just throwing that out there.
Giving a ‘Mea Culpa,’(though they take pains not to openly admit wrongdoing or to apologise) or a ‘what=we’re=going=to=do-to-right-the-ship=now’ list doesn’t absolve one from the responsibility for potentially committing(as I hope they still might make this right rather than leaving the mess they’ve done in the original posting)fraud.
What I personally feel is the disconnect here -and what in turn has inspired such vitriol on the part of the community in the majority of postings here- is the circumstance and the timing of this announcement – a time when it seems they know how deep in the hole they were going to be in with this issue whether they spoke up or not. It speaks volumes.
I couldn’t care less for legendary weapons, but as others have said principle counts for something. It doesn’t score any points that one of the only times Anet has chosen to set down and talk to us is when they knew they were going to be caught out and clearly in the wrong by not making good on a bill of goods they sold.
Transparency, trust, and good communication aren’t things mentioned in passing in order to make them so. They’re something developed and then maintained over a long period of time with others.
Turning their back on this community, going over to Reddit where they’ve known- or at least have known til now -that for the longest time they’d be in a safe space, surrounded by willing sockpuppets- isn’t proper or professional communication.
They -You, Anet/Mo- didn’t want to be bothered/pestered by the unwashed masses that play your game. Now, it seems you’re having to for form’s sake. And it isn’t pleasant. It literally comes off in waves how distasteful it is for them to be posting here- even if that wasn’t necessarily the intent of their post. That’s trouble.
It’s what so many are having trouble with here. The original post doesn’t come off as an attempt at transparency. It comes off as a hackneyed attempt at CYA/damage control for a situation that was going to explode no matter what.
It’s an insult to the intelligence of everyone here- one heaped on top of injury. If just feels slimy.
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A jet scrander backpack for my Asura Engineer- based on the one from Mazinger Z that uses the base bladed backpack as the centre and then has riveted wings that telescope out of the sides when you begin gliding.
That and an awesome shout emote to go with it whenever you begin gliding with it or whenever you lean to gain forward speed.
Something along the lines of this;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CORicxRBiws
And:
http://mazingerzgreatkaiser.wikia.com/wiki/Mazinger_Z
Just scroll down to the section for the Jet Scrander.
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Tried sigil of water and one, it’s not reliable. Two, why should we have to use a terrible sigil on a guardian to make a poor man’s support weapon when other classes enjoy better organic support capabilities on their weapons whilst keeping the option for better sigils?
And for mace I agree – it’s terrible and for a couple of reasons- it’s slow in chambering to get to the heal proc, and secondly for the same reasons that symbols/wells are so terrible for support- try getting players to not kneejerk themselves out of them in some sort of group play raid/dungeon/wvw etc. It’s all static and in a game that has progressively been steered away from static/stacking fights.
It’s no wonder some, if not all, of our best support abilities are shouts. We’re able to use them on the move. But then we come around to the gulfs between shout availability.
As with druid staff, adding a healing component to the blast on guardian staff auto attack we’d at least have something reliable that allows us to apply that support to others by keeping them in our front arc as we fight.
Keep in mind, the druid staff has a much less fluky two skill, a four that allows for condition clearing and damage in one go, and pets that while garbage in many respects are nowhere near as rubbish as our summons – given that they’re robustness allows them to keep distance and actually do respectable damage with that staff if built for it. All while keeping mobile.
If I’m honest, I’d willingly give up having more than one spirit weapon to have just one out permanently. It would be a world of difference having something standing between me and my terrible armour and health pool – neither of which are adequate protection in the newest maps- for longer than twenty seconds.
Guardian staff four was sort of novel back in dungeons where static fights allowed us to help in might stacking. But now, given how the game has evolved, any ability that forces us to plant ourselves for that long, while something is eating/has eaten our faces off in the interim, just feels anachronistic. It’s doesn’t help that many classes have easier/more consistent access to might without us.
While running about with my Dragonhunter is something of a welcome change there’s still a part of me that feels wrong having to kite or just plain run away more than half the time.
I agree that number two staff doesn’t work for me either. Placement and execution are often hampered by latency. Sort of useful when it all comes together. But even so, evenw hen in healing centric equipment it doesn’t do that much -and for the longish cooldown and the travel time it feels clumsy. I keep feeling there are better things I could be doing with the weapon or even another weapon altogether and there probably are.
What I’d love for two would be a ‘god ray’ coming down from a point and fanning out and down at an oblique angle. Those standing in the ‘light circle’ would be burned -a five second duration burning stack- if hostile and healed if friendly.
For the autoattack a little healing is all I’d want for. Just the cone- doesn’t have to heal the caster(me) at all. It’s more about supporting others, particularly during those gulfs between right hand bar skills, but that’s only my opinion over it.
Don’t even want to quibble over the healing scalability as right now -just as was said- something would be better than nothing. Heck, even if it only bestowed a one or two second duration regeneration effect rather than a flat amount of healing- anything… something.
Add a healing component to the staff auto attack similar to druid staff; Every friendly within the cone of the ‘shotgun spread’ is healed for a small amount scalable with healing power.
Doesn’t have to be a high amount but something to fill the void between shouts or other right hand bar support abilities.
And there you just described much of the new HoT maps. /shrug
How? How is it inflation? Why? Just on the basis of Anet saying so?
The term “inflation” originally referred to increases in the amount of money in circulation,29 and some economists still use the word in this way. However, most economists today use the term “inflation” to refer to a rise in the price level. An increase in the money supply may be called monetary inflation, to distinguish it from rising prices, which may also for clarity be called “price inflation”.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation
Increasing the gold gained via dungeons causes straight up monetary inflation. No need to be a rocket scientist to understand this.
Selling things on the tradin post or buying gems, causes no such inflation since the gold you gain has been generated by another player. On the contrary, the taxation here actually reduces the total amount of gold ingame.
Until we have player account names beside every entry for scrap of every commodity available for purchase on the BLTP, for every bit of in game gold being sold, and until every gold exchange is followed up by an in game mail receipt to the player -seeing as how actual moneys are enterring this economy from outside and making gems/gold from ‘thin air’-
Good news, for most of this I can tell you straigth off the bat that they ahve nothing to do with inflation. Unless arenanet put up ghost items, which is highly unlikely since they can just alter drop rates. But hey, maybe they do.
Second, you can be assured, arenanet has absolut 100% correct values on how much money enters the economy and via which source and how much exits via gold sinks. They have ALL the data and access to even more.
You could argue that the gold from dungeons would be insignificant compared to other gold generation, which no one could argue against except arenanet since all we can do is speculate. But going by the market reaction and the specific targeting of gold rewards, again we can deduce that dungeon gold was significant.
Which leads me back to my original point, increasing gold rewards would cause monetary inflation and very likely increase prices accross the board and no one would be better off.
See? There you are, being pedantic, making my points for me… again. Yes, perceived value, supply and demand – blah blah blah. The economy you mention, the market, all are completely within Anet’s power to manipulate without a bit of transparency- even the alleged reaction of the market you mention.
Any deduction you’re making is faulty. Any reaction shown is faulty. There is no paper trail. There is no causality. Nothing other than Anet’s say-so.
We could just as easily deduce or infer that the reaction and the shift people are perceiving is Anet cooking the books.
I’m coming from a position of, "We have none of the facts, but what we are being fed.’ I want to know that I’m right or wrong -there’s no shame in either- but I want something more than, ‘Cause we say so.’ to proove it.
You and others of the same stripe are arguing from a position of, ‘Everything Anet’s saying about inflation in the fake, non-trasparent economy they manage must be true because we should infer from the datas presented by the trading post(datas which might have been manipulated to support Anet’s assertions) that Anet’s assertions must be true.’
Okay…
What we’re come back to with the inflation argument is which gold out of thin air is bad?
Does Anet want all gold out of thin air gone? Do they only want gold from thin air gone from dungeons? Is it gold from thin air from fractals? From raids?
They couldn’t possibly want the gold out of thin air that is actual moneys converted to gems – then converted to gold- gone, could they? But in the end it’s all gold created out of thin air. And in the end they’re being anything but forthcoming about it.
What are they transparent about? Well, if we’re talking about obvious things which drive the prices of commodities higher they’ve certainly done nothing to lower their take of gold from trading post exchanges. If you’re buying gems and converting to gold then that’s money right out of your pocket for absolutely nothing -cause reasons.
But back to, ‘out of thin air.’ It’s a bit insulting to players that the gold from dungeons – gold come from participating in the contents provided is dubbed, ‘gold out of thin air,’ no? Out of thin air, as though effort and time spent count for nothing. As though to imply that the reward for victory is somehow actually… charity?
There has to be a give and take. There has to be something to show for time spent. Time is a currency we all spend here, but if we spend time in game, dungeons specifically, and come away with less and less due to an arbitrary decision to incentivise or disincentivise certain contents then what Anet’s saying to one segment of the player base is, ‘Your time is worth less than this other segment’s time.’
Hello?
For those who once played dungeons not only for fun, but as a way of making ends meet(no, not the flyers who spent the majority of a day doing every single path once) in game – they feel they’re getting it taken out of them coming and going- and they are.
You don’t need a doctorate in economics to know your wallet’s lighter, your backside hurts, and you’re walking funny all of a sudden. Nor do you need one to know that such a model -heavy on cost light on content- isn’t sustainable.
There’s nothing wrong with a healthy amount of greed to keep the wheels turning. There is overhead for server upkeep and bandwidth hosting packages. That’s what box/and later on gem sales were intended for.
There’s everything wrong, however, with the recent round of economic changes. Changes which are not only greedy, but shortsighted and self-destructive as well. How long is the game going to be supported when those dissatisfied with being marginalised either quit, or worse -worse for Anet’s bottom line- continue playing, eating bandwidth but in turn quit purchasing gems to support that overhead?
The whales alone won’t keep this game running.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
Keep the current rewards as is.
Add in dungeon vanquishing, as a selectable route (alternative to explorable) that makes you clear all paths and mobs before being rewarded would give gold relative to the scale of the dungeon ex AC vanquish 1.5g with a full Arah being around 10g.
Which part of direct gold rewards causing inflation do people not understand?
Arenanet don’t want high amounts of gold to enter the game. Also all this would lead to, ocne again, is a small fraction of the playerbase speedclearing the dungeons while the rest are forced into long dungeon runs.
You keep using inflation for justification for having a product that has no real attraction value and you’ll notice that the only thing being deflated is the player base.
I still haven’t heard any counter argument to inflation.
If players get more gold across the board, inflation will make prices rise, and no one will be better off.
Are they disadvantaging dungeons? Sure, because they want to shift to fractals.
Have they increased fractal rewards even though they stated they would (direct gold and drops)? No. This has to be corrected.
If you want dungeons buffed, the most sensible way is to think of rewards that are NOT tied to liquid (direct) gold rewards and asking for those. Hence my suggestion to make them more appealing for the collection achievement while at the same time providing more materials for the TP (all via higher token rewards). The one thing most of us can expect, is arenanet not to give gold back to dungeons. The content is dead. If you think they’ll let people speedrun dungeons for gold rewards again, you are deluding yourself.
How? How is it inflation? Why? Just on the basis of Anet saying so?
Auctions are utterly anonymous so you never see who is selling what, in how many lots, and for how much. This leaves Anet free to keep commodities artificially high or low at the base depending on how much they want to manipulate scarcity to influence pricing.
The same carries for the currencies themselves. You never see how many are selling gems or exchanging gold for gems. Anet controls the exchange rate based on… Oh right. Nobody knows. So how is it that you or any of the other ‘economic experts’ are able to claim inflation or deflation either way?
Your arguments make sense, logically -in the same fashion as saying that stepping off of a ship deck and into the waves of a turbulent sea when you don’t know how to swim is potentially life threatening. They hold a certain sort of truth in practicality. But that’s as far as they go. After that you’re all using logic, hitting people over the head by pedantically explaining the underpinnings of economics to try and uphold what are essentially faith based arguments in which you ‘believe’ that it’s inflation because it could be x, x, and y -‘after all John Smith said so.’ This, due to the lack of transparency which Anet have intentionally built the system on. Save your breath.
Until we have player account names beside every entry for scrap of every commodity available for purchase on the BLTP, for every bit of in game gold being sold, and until every gold exchange is followed up by an in game mail receipt to the player -seeing as how actual moneys are enterring this economy from outside and making gems/gold from ‘thin air’-
Until those happen then any assertions Anet makes are to be taken with a heavy chunk of salt tempered with the knowledge that of all the probabilities being discussed- the most probable is that they are fabricating their datas.
As was said above they don’t want players in dungeons. The economy is a convenient, if flimsy, scapegoat.
ANET did this intentionally.
They needed to do it from their business model perspective.
Why?
Too much gold was being held by players on the sidelines and those amounts where growing based on what the dungeons, Fractals, and Bosses where dishing out.
This also impacted negatively the amount of Jewels bought by gold rather than using actual cash currency.
Remember that ANET makes 90% of their money off the TP. Recirculating gold earned in the game into jewels by players gives them Zero Income.
I agree with most that this strategy has failed and has only driven more players AWAY from the game.
However, as with most companies, trying to convince them that their decision was wrong and that they should institute a correction is a pipe dream.
These types of companies would rather sink with the ship than admit failure.
Which is why they never should have listened to John Smith. Potential losses of revenues to the gem store due to gold accretion were only that – potentials, a fantasy cooked up in a sterile theory crafting environment.
And never mind that the folks who were capable of spending enough time per day to earn fifty gold each day via dungeoning were as small a percentage of the populace as those who’re able to dedicate themselves to hardcore raiding(just as an example).
Most others split time(or did) between dungeoning, fractals, pvp, wvw, world bosses or exploring with friends for world completion. Dungeoning might consist of two or three paths a day- assuming they played every day(not all do.) That gold might add up over time and be converted to gems yet it would still be dwarfed by the moneys spent via game cards or credit cards to make impulse purchases on ‘limited time only items.’
Yet Smith or someone over him spun a tale of how all of that fantasy lucre would be magically converted to actual credit card sales, after a short term of upheaval, if they just made a shortfall of gold earned in game.
It’s the same rhetoric the Paiz’s were bandying about when lotro was criticised for over monetisation, that ‘players would complain but otherwise would keep playing and paying.’ That, rather than -oh I don’t know- feeling cheated, duped, taken for granted and quitting, and so in turn with what ever spending they’d done in the store.
The history is there, of eroding promises, of systems such as organised raiding, dungeoning, and pvp(the ettenmoors, lotro’s wvw/pvp) being left to wither on the vine in favour of experimental gambles(war steeds, mounted combat, Big Battles as well as fiddling with the fundamentals of how player characters are crafted trait trees etc.)and of the resultant eroding of the player base and following server consolidation. Lotro is only just trying and hoping to climb out of that hole but now has the added obstacle of being an outdated game built on an outdated engine. Is any of this sounding familiar? It should.
And yet somehow, in spite of so many examples only a click away, Smith and co have sold Anet this line, guaranteed success on little more it seems than instructing them to stick their fingers in their ears and chant incessantly, ‘That was them but it won’t be us.’ Even more improbably, Anet seems to have bought into it.
Revenue for any product is bound to taper off over time as the novelty wears off, the goal is to draw that out somehow rather than hasten it.
But the sudden changes to traits, the gating, the grinding and the ‘disincentivising’ – a slimy word if ever there was one- smack of cutting the roots in hopes of saving the tree. That they’d even entertain such a notion says enough to me about what’s changed and what hasn’t and where Anet is heading. Nowhere good.
1) The new HoT guild system seems to encourages players to join big guilds for the benefits.
I do feel like the scribing and guild hall upgrading systems are intended to “encourage” the joining of large guilds and the abandonment of small guilds, yeah.
So this was why Destiny’s Edge failed so much. Only five-ish strong and it’s all about the guild hall. Who knew?
Informed with what? What blog posts?
Anet issued a pre-purchase campaign base on…. Right – little to nothing to go on but innuendo.
We had several beta weekends through which they willingly omitted salient facts about how certain aspects of coming contents were meant to be attained -waiting til nearly the eleventh hour to be open about any of it.
If we’re being honest, Anet went out of their way to make it nigh impossible to make anything even remotely resembling an informed purchase for Hot.
Building hype with little to no pertinent information with which to make an informed decision? That is sort of the point… when you’re trying to con someone.
The raid was designed for organized groups of highly experienced and geared players to have a challenge. Anyone who complains about the raid being inaccessible is missing the point.
Oh. That so? Then let that sort of content be developed in future(assuming there is one)with the funds coming only from that percent of the player base. Then see how good it is.
The folks left setting out in the cold here have a right to feel cheated- seeing as how the moneys they’ve invested into the game – capital which should have been earmarked in this expansion to keep them happy, playing, and paying through gem store purchases- has been spent on something they won’t be able to participate in due to either limited time or to their being excluded from participating due to changes in the culture made not only to appease that small percent, but then through the elitism subsequently introduced by that small percent.
It’s about priorities and Anet doesn’t seem to have a sound set of them at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for letting players play how they want, but robbing Peter to pay Paul wasn’t a good way to go here-(dungeons, fractals, wvw etc.) particularly now that Paul’s(raiders/megaguilds) have begun rubbing Peter’s(everybody else) nose in it and the thieves(Anet)just look on and laugh whilst still within earshot.
Someone here a few weeks back said roughly, ‘this(HoT) is how a game company commits suicide.’ I was on the fence back then, but as the weeks have passed I’ve slowly come around to that point of view myself.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
I was talking about penalizing for quitting a party mid instanced.
It’s not the “best way” sPvP, it’s the laziest way. The only reason dungeons are “not” anymore by some is because tokens were the secondary motivation to run them, the primary was the big chunk of liquid rewards. It’s gone now and not coming back and if you still want tokens why not just run the dungeon without the some slave master driving you get it done so the party can get to the next path.
I know what you were saying but that’s sort of the point. Before they’d utterly gutted the rewards it wasn’t such a worry having to find another random through the LFG -plenty of players to choose from.
There’s better ways to draw players to other content- such as incentivising the newer contents by making their rewards even better.
Have levelling experience set to its original values from dungeons, and then once a player is eighty and working on masteries a flag is triggered which sets dungeon completion experience rewards to the new setting. Players are then free to choose what they want to play(they’ve spent for HoT right?)but won’t necessarily feel cheated for their time. Everyone’s happy. Everybody wins.
But now? What we have now is an abandonment of contents in a game that professed to never have obsolete contents. /shrug
Just going to paste from an older post I’d made in another thread:
Using the preexisting environments within the dungeons, why not add bookend story/exploration wing chapters to them?
Ascalonian Catacombs – something mist themed to do with finding clues to Rytlocke’s disappearance. Perhaps utilising that hidden room with the invisible bridges accessed via the staircase above the Howling King’s chambers? Find residual energies from the ritual – perhaps when Rytlocke fell through tot he mists a shade of something or someone from Ascalon’s past escaped and found its way into the catacombs.
Caudecus Manour – a battle within the grounds where the floating statue in the garden and other hoarded magical inventions within the estate have attracted the attention of mordrem.
Twilight Arbour – Strange, carnivorous tendrils and pods have begun sprouting throughout what of late was believed to be the abandoned Aether complex.
Sorrows Embrace – more reports of strange plant activity that have come about due to the Dredge and/or the Inquest’s ‘delving too deeply.’ Something akin to Moria but with a Mordrem theme.
Citadel of Flame – Attracted by the magics employed during Gaheron Baelfire’s attempt at ascension, a Mordrem behemoth has tunneled to the citadel leaving a path behind it for Destroyer beasts to follow it through – the breach must be contained.
Honour of the Waves – Something deep below the waves has breached the ocean’s floor and is warming the waters. The ice is beginning to melt, the glacier ships are calving and and if something isn’t done, the Kodan way of life will be threatened. Perhaps a cameo by one or two Norn heroes who as yet are not convinced of the enormity of the Mordrem threat.
Crucible of Eternity – A distress call was received by the council in Rata Sum, but from the Inquest! Parts of the Crucible complex have blacked out. Something has begun to drain power from the infinite coil reactor, and worse -test subjects once believed to be well locked away in the depths of the complex have escaped. If that wasn’t bad enough, many of them appear to have further mutated, with strange plant/spore outgrowths and horrifying new abilities.
The Ruined City of Arah – Druids deployed with Pact forces left behind to garrison the ruined city as it and the lands around it recover have detected a disturbance. The the flow from the ancient healing spring beneath Orr has begun to slow. The creatures and the plant life that had slowly begun to return to the land after the Pact’s victory over Zhaitan, have become aggressive, feeding on everything -whether living or unliving- and no one is safe. Wander the once believed lost path to the Underheart beneath the ancient city with help from a Druid and a Revenant -the returned spirit of Orr’s last King- and solve the mystery together.
A bit of scripting, some additional voice works if they need it, but in other words dungeons that build upon what we have and which help bridge the older contents to the newer in HoT.
As to level requirement mid sixties to eighty depending on whatever the cap of the respective instance is so that each is still something of a progression for players playing them through in order.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
Penalise them even more? As if that should have them clamoring to play dungeons. All they’ve done(Anet) leading up to the hot mess which is HoT is penalise players in one fashion or another to coerce them into playing how they want.
How about not reinventing the wheel and simply undoing the rewards changes? Then -I don’t know- give players the freedom of how they wish to spend their time in the game again -The whole selling point that led so many of us to abandon our other, more outdated mmos to begin with.
ProtoGunner.4953:You still can make money with farming SW etc. No, it was nerfed be cause it generated money out of thin air. Not money that was already in circulation which happens if you get mats and sell it on the TP.
You can still run the dungeons and use the tokens to buy exotic gear.
Tom Gore.4035This guy gets it. Dungeon runs were generating way too much gold into the system. That’s why they were nerfed. Why they didn’t just turn the rewards into more resources that you can use or trade beats me.
No, you don’t necessarily get it. Guild Wars Two is a fantasy economy Anet have created and one in which they actively manipulate the exchange rates as well as the availability of commodities in circulation in order to facilitate the purchase of Gems with actual world money.
The majority of players -casuals in particular- who enjoyed dungeons did indeed do them partly for the gold but that wasn’t the whole story. Most of those players don’t/didn’t do fifty gold per day full dungeons tours- I’d argue that the players who did those were in a minority. Loss leaders as most hard core players, just as an example -not to single them out- are when it comes to development dollars(raids being the least run contents with the highest required Q&A and balancing) as well as bandwidth costs.
What that little bit of gold from dungeons did do was pay for incidentals. Minor things such as foods, grind stones, or powerful potions of slaying which I used in -guess what- dungeons!
But if a new item on the Black Lion Gem Store appeared -a toy or some other cosmetic item- was introduced and I, who for my four dungeons paths run per day, didn’t have the gold saved then I, as a casual, often spent money on gems as an impulse purchase to augment what I’d collected. In the end Anet gets everything.
Tote up the pretend money which hasn’t been introduced into the pretend economy(keep in mind they’d printing all of it) and then ask Mr. Smith how many players who out of disgust at these changes have just quit spending on Gems and Gem Store purchases. It’s false economy.
Guild Wars Two’s Economy is a Company Store. You spend in game gold(scrip) to defray gem store purchases but you NEVER earn enough to buy that ‘OMG BUY NOW IT’S HERE FOR ONLY A LIMITED TIME’ item. You want to impulse buy? You buy gems. There is no refund for gems. Once bought they never again leave the economy as actual world currency. When this game is shut down whatever has been bought is lost to the ether. It’s pure profit for Anet and don’t pretend it’s anything more or less.
Yes, you could wave the -You’re not an economist- flag about. And I’ll answer with this- Ever heard of spending a little(and by a little I mean absolutely nothing -as again, it’s Anet printing fake money for their online game) to make a whole lot more? Apparently John Smith hasn’t either.
This is greed. Greed on top of greed. They’ve been making money by printing fake money and now they want even more. Golden goose, anybody?
Nobody mentions the gold or revenues lost to the gold selling outfits who still spam us in capital cities. If anybody has an incentive to do fifty gold per day runs, but moreover to participate in endless SW trains, sell you the gold to buy the items they’ve sold from there and then sell you the gold all over again, it’s them.
They’ll certainly undercut Anet and that gold might be converted to gems or spent on the trading post. Even so, lowering dungeon gold rewards isn’t a healthy solution to gold sellers. It’s a path of least resistance effort, every bit as impotent and in the long run costly as DRM; being that it’s too expensive to try and track seller behaviour, as even if admins have the archival datas to sift through, they’d need to be pointed toward offenders and that isn’t efficient. What more, those on the buying end aren’t liable to snitch on their suppliers.
In the long run these measures hurt all players. And in the end the sellers won’t go away, only the insulted/disgruntled legitimate customers.
I won’t deny that if gold rewards were left as is that they might have lead to a loss of a few cents per player over a year(a lot when aggregated, I know, but I still don’t believe it- read; company store). But players won’t necessarily make up for that shortfall. And in the long term the player trust and good will that have been lost are beyond priceless.
Edit: And as an additional point- not only is the lowering rewards detrimental to the in game economy, but players such as myself and my guild, who would have been more than happy to achieve Tyrian masteries through a continuation of our regular daily play styles have either abandoned those playstyles(dungeons) or have resorted to things such as CoF path one farming. This, in the long run, will also negatively impact Anet as it will not only undermine the spirit in which HoT is meant to be enjoyed, but in so doing will shorten the intended life of the expansion. And yes, less players logging in(those who’ve ground out masteries quickly, found themselves at loose ends, and have left) is less impulse purchases on the Gem Store.
(edited by Iozeph.5617)
zaxziakohl.5243Would everyone be happier if all the influence they ever spent was refunded to spend on favor? Or just turned into favor directly?
Just curious. This would obviously help large guilds as well, not just small ones.
No. Why? They’d still find a way to screw the community over by making it a non negotiable exchange rate of one favour to every one hundred or more influence.
They’d leave guilds in the same wrecked state they are now but would have touted the exchange as a feature and a courtesy -no matter how twisted or skewed the result.
Given the quality of their decision making of late I have to wonder why Anet didn’t do just that.
Doctor.5068The hypocrisy, it is real. The small guilds crying on the forums are the vocal minority. Just like everything else you see on the forums. People that are happy with how things are running are not going to say so on the forums. That is why every post on the forum is someone crying about something. I agree with OP about GH. People that CHOOSE not to be in a large guild need to accept that they won’t have the same access as those who do.
Much of the complaining I’ve read is that small guilds which had -prior to the launch of Heart of Thorns- unlocked and were enjoying/sharing the benefits of having leveled their guilds have now had many of those features taken and locked behind the new guild hall system.
And that now, following the path of least resistance as many players do, some are jumping ship from smaller guilds to larger less personal guilds in order to continue receiving those benefits- thus gutting the smaller communities even further.
I don’t know about you, but where I come from that’s something worthy of complaining about as it has deprecated their efforts – gold, influence, hours/days played etc. I don’t know of any game, or activity in life for that matter, where people appreciate having their achievements and the monuments to those achievements destroyed in such an arbitrary fashion.
This isn’t about the poor man wanting what the rich man has. It’s about the poor man who’s worked hard for what he has, then having it taken. And what has been given in turn is something akin to this;
‘We never intended for you to have an even chance. Of course, you’ve put in the time and effort but that wasn’t our fault. You see, we’d explained but your intelligence is such that we should have explained better how sorry your lot in life actually is so that you could in turn understand and know your place. We’re sorry for your inadequacies, but that’s just how the cookie crumbles. Forthwith, we’re taking your accrued and ill-gotten benefits.
We know there will be a period of upheaval as your inferior intellects strain to comprehend the grandiosity of our new business model. Don’t worry. We’ll wait for you. Guild Wars Two isn’t going anywhere.
Finished reading? All done cogitating? Good!
Now, we aren’t utterly heartless. We know your prior efforts and expenditures, however misguided and misinformed, have benefited us in the past, and to mark that appreciation -if you’ll take a moment to come over here- you’ll see that we’ve added some new products to our company store(the benefits we’ve just taken from you) as a courtesy and convenience to you, our loyal citizenry!
It’s a rougher road, a longer path, but what fun is life without goals? Right?
So turn that frown upside down, campers! Dwelling in the past just gives you an unbecoming, frowny face. And nobody wants that, do they? Happy days are ahead! Now get out there and earn, earn, earn! That jungle won’t liberate itself!’
At best, it’s just another remarkably short sighted decision by Anet. At worst it’s a calculated and malicious attempt(as with the changes to dungeons and fractals) to take one more bit of personal agency away from a user experience that in the past was lauded for giving the players the freedom to pursue adventure and reward however they wished.
To say it even simpler; Guild Wars Two has devolved from
‘Have fun! Play how you want! It’s a big, wide gloriously beautiful world!’
to
‘Go where we say or don’t. It’s your choice.<shove> But, don’t make the ‘wrong’ one. And don’t cry to us after you do and we say that we told you so.’
From what I’d gathered the Elite weren’t being billed as the progression. It was the masteries. So why wouldn’t players want to have their dubiously-named elite skills in order to pursue the masteries? The notion being that the content was so enjoyable that exploration of the new lands and the following discoveries, as well as the furtherance of the story – would be their own rewards. Then there are the new crafting recipe drops.
But skills? As it is, you could play the whole of the four new maps and never set a single point into an elite skill(for many professions this is preferable) so where is the progression there?
TLDR; Elite skills are skills. Masteries, the living story elements, and new crafting recipes showcase progression.
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