Guild Wars 2

Shirlias.8104:

Here in Tyria there are plenty deities… so you must be more specific.
For the love of which God?

Certainly not Balthazar, he’s persona non grata these days.

Miku.6297:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Putting the inmates in charge of the asylum is never a good idea.

True, but we aren’t patients in an asylum, we are players in a game… Big difference.

LA map chat and the PvP lobby sometimes suggest otherwise, lol.

Why would you want people to be ‘cautious’ about their game play? Freedom, even to push boundaries and be a bit of a kitten, is a good thing.

I don’t have an issue with anyone apart from gold sellers and account thieves.

Dungeons did a couple things really well. For one, they let particular classes really shine if they player knew the mechanics, and secondly allowed you to learn the mechanics well enough to run everything smoothly without a hitch. I miss the feeling of control and mastery that came with learning the minutiae of every dungeon.

Fractals have progressively added more and more random elements to the fights that this just isn’t possible for any but the absolute top tier of players. Feels like I’m barely holding on to dear life a lot of the time.

Rising Dusk.2408:

• Better liquid gold and item rewards than dungeons ever gave.

Naw, I disagree. Dungeons in their prime were infinitely more rewarding than fractals could ever be. You could have an entire set of best-in-slot, meta gear in two weeks flat, all the while earning enough gold to convert to gems and buy just about whatever your little heart desired.

You’re probably not missing anything. It’s a matter of taste.

Some players are into ‘twitch’ style gaming. They enjoy mechanically complex encounters and quickly become bored if they don’t feel a rush while playing. Most (if not all) of the highly skilled, seriously dedicated sort that the devs actually collaborate with fall into this category, thus going forward a lot of of the newer PvE content appears to have been designed with their preferences in mind.

There are still lots of others (like me) who really just want something moderately engaging to play with other people at a comfortable pace, but we aren’t the intended audience for fractals and raids.

For example: I really, really enjoyed T4 fractals when Necro was OP and instabilities were basically negligible. You could pug everything everyday with virtually guaranteed success. And for what it’s worth, the rewards were much more satisfying when the content was easier. But, others felt this level of difficulty was a ‘joke’ and so on, so they changed things to be legitimately challenging. So now the hardcore players are satisfied, but now I can hardly stand to bother with ’em.

They simply cannot please everyone, unfortunately.

I gotta applaud anyone who can figure out the mechanics in the clusterkitten that is fractal 100. The first fellow’s alright, but the second boss just has way too much going on at once.

Even on normal mode, she’s actually a fair bit harder than many raid encounters.

Asura and Charr have the same body structure for both males and females, this isn’t the case for the other races. Fundamentally, it would be like designing a new set of armour altogether (and apparently, that is a ton of work for the designers).

This topic has come up often enough that going forward, there has been much less disparity between armour and outfits for each gender, but I wouldn’t hold out hope on any ‘retroactive’ changes

Not so much offended as annoyed. There’s a lot of visual noise in this game and it does detract from the experience for some of us.

Do the dailies, you can get 2g in about 15 minutes.

There’s quite a few people who’re giving WvW a go because of the rewards, yes. It’s currently the best way to farm transmutation charges. Between skirmish chests and two reward tracks, I collected 40 last weekend and had fun along the way.

The thing is my server, Stormbluff Isle, was pretty disorganized for most of that play time and we were dead last, occasionally surpassing Crystal Desert but Maguuma had both our kittens beat by a wide margin.

I can’t say that our server would have been any better off without the rag-tag band of pip farmers randomly flipping camps on maps with the ‘Outnumbered’ buff. Many of the ‘serious’ WvW players just idly hop from map to map looking for a commander to follow, and aren’t much better than those of us who do the same chasing the ‘Outnumbered’ buff.

TexZero.7910:

This makes the entire complaint about it not being alt friendly a bit of a joke. As explained already above you get tons of gold and materials from your “main” and can quite literally buy your way into fractals with your alt.

The cost of a full ascended set bought outright is far from insignificant, though. And also doesn’t factor in the infusions.

It’s definitely do-able, but far less alt friendly than all of the game modes.

ButterPeanut.9746:

I’m sure I can’t be the only one that would do raids weekly even if it had zero loot, zero titles, and zero gold. Simply the fact that I enjoy the content more than I enjoy farming gold.

You’d not be alone, but there would be very few of you.

Loot makes otherwise dull activities ‘fun’. And re-playing scripted encounters gets dull fast.

We’ve seen this time and time again, as far back as the ‘CoF P1. Four warriors and a mesmer’ days. The devs are constantly making changes because when players find that sweet spot you’d be hard pressed to get ’em to do much else.

Ain’t nobody doin’ squat in this game for no loot. Lol.

Perhaps a larger percentage of the PoF raids will be a bit less intense so that both types of players can have their niche. Would be nice to have one chill wing to play right through every week.

Agreed, the FX aren’t impressive enough on their own to warrant the change (like the Reaper’s shroud, for example)

Get rid of this and the icons under your character when channelling Glint as a Herald.

AR is only really a gold-gate at this point. Someone with enough coin can pay for everything needed outright, without ever setting foot into a fractal. It’s annoying.

Come to think of it, probably working as intended. Lol.

I don’t see the issue. If you’re annoyed by seeing these issues mentioned in-game, avoid those guilds.

Live and let live, eh. We’re pretty much all hypocrites in some way.

Ashen.2907:

What do you mean?

People pre-ordered, based on the announced launch date. Putting that off by four months would result in a lot of angry gamers. I don’t know the refund policy but I imagine a lot of people would request one.

Also, that would leave us with nothing new to do. A four month content drought would also be dreadful at this stage.

Ashen.2907:

Ive been hoping that ANet would consider delaying PoF’s release by a month or two (at least) to iron out some of the elite spec concerns. Perhaps a January 2018 release?

Are you serious? You cannot be serious.

The original connotation of the word Minstrel is so light-hearted and fun though. It even sounds whimsical and airy. Seriously, say it out loud.

Most gamers associate that word with a dude in tights and a pageboy haircut, not an unfortunately racist period of US history. I can dig that it’s bothering you but you seem to be in the minority here, and this change is not likely to happen.

Nah, it’s just pixels. I’m generally in the opposite camp as the OP on this, I don’t care about exclusivity as I am creative enough to make my characters unique and interesting regardless. It’s players in ugly gear who can’t afford nice skins that make me sadder than anything else. Lol.

Overall I think it’s much better for things to be available to those who’re willing to do what it takes to get them, than completely removed from the game after a time.

Bandrell.4357:

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who wants easy fractals. I’m not very good at the game, and I won’t ever pretend to be. But I like group content, and these new fractals just kick my behind all the time. It’s stopped being fun, and there’s no other group content for me that’s as visually impressive and storied as this.

Naw, you aren’t. Not by a long shot. This forum generally doesn’t welcome such views, and many other like-minded players opt not to speak up and face ridicule, or may simply have lost interest in the game.

Murdock.6547:

There have to be hard systems put in place that somehow teach people how to raid. Not mechanically; but the mindset.
The fact that you must do legwork to be useful. That you must read boss fights to understand. That you must have some semblance of a rotation, or bring valuable group utility to be desired.
None of that is enforced or even implied before someone is allowed to walk into the aerodrome and queue up, and so the community makes things up and enforces it themselves… often with frustrating results for all involved.

The community has done a superb job of compiling all of the necessary information, to be honest. We have build, gear and rotation guides on metabattle. Countless videos on youtube and text instructions on the forums and third party websites.

As with most things in life, it’s not knowing what to do…. it is getting it done that poses a problem. To paraphrase Paul Mooney …‘Everybody wanna raid but nobody wanna be a raider.’

Yep. There are posts over four years old suggesting the same things here.

At this point, it’s almost a deal breaker for me. Not too interested in this expansion unless this is included.

Agreed. Nightmare and Chaos both have unique skin rewards. Was expecting something similar for this one, at the very least, as it is not only a part of the same story arc but decidedly the most challenging.

Feanor.2358:

It does serve a purpose, however. Identifying it isn’t required, you can simply salvage it. Which reduces the inventory clutter dramatically. No more Unusable Weapon of Uselessness polluting your inventory with Minor Sigils of Inadequateness.

Lol, exactly. Saves space and is kind of a neat throwback, I like it.

Rich starts whenever you can afford the corresponding title (it costs 1k gold) without making any sacrifices to your regular spending and activities.

So I’d say, at around 10K in liquid gold.

I’m mostly hoping the elite specs are at least decent for my main classes, and interesting enough that I’d want to play the others more.

Warrior and Revenant are my least played classes in any content. Never really got much of a feel for Warrior, despite it being a strong class across the board. Revenant was just underwhelming and as a nitpick I hate the Glint symbol that stays under you when you run that legend.

Spellbreaker looks like it’ll be fun as hell though. May not make the PVE meta, but I’m gonna run it anyway. Dagger has always been one of my favourite weapons. As for Renegade… ehhh, I’m not keen on the charr summons as my Rev is sylvari, but shortbow should be a nice addition for a condi build.

I main Ranger, Mesmer and Ele. Perfectly happy with what I’ve seen of their new elite specs so far. Soulbeast looks like it’ll finally offer a decent melee option, Mirage is potentially OP as hell and Weaver is going to be amazing. Nothing is cooler to me than a magic user with a sword.

Chadramar.8156:

JTGuevara.9018:

Raids are unfriendly by definition and design.

Sadly, yeah. They don’t have to be, there’s absolutely no reason why there couldn’t be easy raids. But as it is they are “endgame” by design … and anything “endgame” will be hostile because of the egos and status-jockeying attached to it. That’s why there’s usually a lot of angry pushback to the idea of making “endgame” more accessible, as if higher-difficulty content is somehow diminished by having a lower-difficulty version as well.

A lot of the pushback is garden-variety elitism. The raid rewards would seem less prestigious if the rank and file were also able to access them.

But a lot of it is due to the relatively small pool of dev resources. A lot of basic features have yet to added (*cough build templates) and many other things we used to take for granted are rarely added (armor sets, for example). Compared to other MMOs we have very little instanced content, with very long wait periods between releases. Many believe that altering raids to be more inclusive would significantly increase the time it takes to release them. And of course those who have no need of easier options will oppose their addition.

saeleth.3915:

Am I missing that much if I don’t get to experience raiding?

If you’re into instanced group PVE, then yes you’d be missing out on a lot.

Unless you’re naturally a very intuitive and highly skilled player raiding will require a lot of time and commitment but it can be a very rewarding feeling when you finally clear your first boss after hours of wiping.

Just prepare yourself properly. Learn as much as you can before even attempting to train, and brace yourself for some inevitable disappointment. It’s definitely going to be rough at times. If you can manage T4 fractals comfortably though, then you should be able to clear most of the raid encounters.

And of course, if possible, find yourself a training guild that’s a good fit for you.

FrostDraco.8306:

Thats still a problem with you, NOT the AR system. Either learn to be more selective about which toons you do fractals on or suffer the consequences of someone that doesn’t.

You’ve missed my point entirely.

I was saying that I liked dungeons better because I…

Actually noooooope. Nevermind.

Sometimes I really get the sense that many of the posters in this sub-forum don’t respond intending to further the discussion, so much as to be snarky towards others who are even a little bit critical of the content.

But, back to the topic at hand. Here’s a pretty neat video that sums up everything that made dungeons great.

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned. The issue is the change in direction. Instanced PVE group content is becoming increasingly complex and challenging. Players who were able to enjoy it before find it less and less to their tastes.

Nothing in the open world not even comes close to offering the same type of experience as dungeon and fractal running.

zealex.9410:

Raids bosses. Can be killed. Without weapons. Theres has never been anything as rediculous as that in any game that takes “raiding” srsly. Could you pls at least beat your head against w4 after you practiced and do the content? It’s not hard.

This is not logical at all. I can accept you want a niche to yourselves. I can accept if you want to to be too hard for most people. I can even accept you lording your success over those who’ve failed.

But please, stop saying something can be done by anyone because others have done it. Nothing in the history of things has ever worked this way.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Fade.5904:

Hope they add more plainer, realistic looking weapons too

There’s already dozens of them in the game, nobody ever uses them precisely because they’re boring to look at.

I don’t find this set to be particularly plain or boring, they’re perfectly appropriate for the setting imo.

Which is why I’m disappointed that they’re trying to make them so exclusive. I’d argue that there are more than enough rare, costly and hard to get skins and a set like this I’d put on the same level as the Plated or Auric set from HoT. These should be acquired through tokens, crafting or as story rewards.

Sylent.3165:

1. Dungeons aren’t worth it. Really no point other then getting skins and the gold rewards really bad and you can make more doing other things.

2. Group content. Due to the fact you need a group to do many of them it’s hard too get a group together all willing to do it for such a small reward.

3. Why? Why bother with dungeons when we have raids!!*

I remember doing dungeons near release and they were truly a blast. I truly feel the rewards from dungeons are lackluster.

I have to disagree with all of this.

There is, and always has been, a demand for group content. Raids, and even fractals to an extent, have much higher barriers to entry than vanilla dungeons. The time it takes a typical pug to clear a single raid boss is greater than what it would have taken to complete three or four dungeons back in the day.

Dungeons no longer seem worthwhile because they were allowed to stagnate. If dungeons received a little attention, if there were new rewards added to the vendors, new titles and/or achievements or new uses for dungeon tokens… far more people would still be running them.

They’re quite buggy for sure, but offer a completely different experience than that of fractals and raids. They’re far less gimmicky and mechanically complex, and allow for more varied tactics.

xarallei.4279:

I’m not happy with those two sets. But I’m hoping those are just two of many. Like I said, it’s fine to offer both full cover and skimpy options.

This would be the perfect opportunity to introduce Dervish and Paragon inspired sets. That one sunspear outfit is paragon-like, but I would definitely like to see more.

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Dervish_Elite_Sunspear_armor_f.jpg
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Dervish_Elonian_armor_f.jpg

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Paragon_Ancient_armor_f.jpg

God, yes. Dervish armour has always been one of my favourites. The set on the left is quite close to it, imo. And very traditionally Elonian. The other seems to be inspired by Balthazar’s minions and I’m not much feeling it either, but I’m certain some of the pieces can be combined with older sets to create something amazing.

That’s always been the beauty of armour skins: Even the mankiest looking sets will have at least one great piece.

As for gender differences I have a very unpopular opinion in that I actually prefer when there’s a significant difference. The Phalanx heavy armour is a perfect example of this. It’s like getting two different sets for the price of one.

FrostDraco.8306:

Not hundreds. At most 150.

I have a lot of alts. Lol.

And yes I have swapped the infusions around quite a bit but it’s tedious to have to do each item manually.

‘What else can you bring?’
‘I have x,y and z’
‘Ok, switch.’

Works in dungeons and raids, but not fractals.

In fairness, we’re lucky to get any armour sets at all. As Panda said, removing the differences will simply mean that most sets are designed to be traditionally masculine looking, with full coverage. Most players can accept dowdy looking females more readily than effeminate males. There aren’t many ways to reveal male skin while still appealing to mainstream tastes.

What do you lot think about the armour sets that have been teased so far?

flog.3485:

Well the best solution for Anet would be not make meta events in PoF start at the same time as HoT meta events imo . However PoF meta events should cover some of core game meta events.

No, the best solution would be to allow players to start the meta events as we did in Silverwastes and do away with the timers entirely.

Nothing was worse than missing out on the full DS maps and sitting around waiting two hours for the next one.

I really had my heart set on that Griffon mount from the leaks. Would much rather have that for my jumps than that jacked-up rabbitoid.

Actually, I would have preferred one mastery line for all the movement skills and have the different varieties of mounts be entirely cosmetic.

Linken.6345:

Well since fractals are in the mists they can be past present or future or even possible futures.
So I see no reason why your two examples cant be inside a fractal.

The current agony system makes fractals uncomfortably restrictive, though. One of my favourite things about dungeons is the ability to take all of my alts though to see which ones fit each path best. It’d cost hundreds of gold just for enough agony infusions to do the same in fractals.

Dungeons could be made as hard as they like. It’s probably more an issue of wanting to take a completely new approach and have people adjust their expectations accordingly, as they have done with raids. Players would want new armour and weapon skins from a dungeon and that just isn’t going to happen.

It would have been nice to have at least a couple level 80 paths added to some of the existing dungeons though. There’s definitely enough assets and appropriate lore to justify a White Mantle path in CM, for example. Maybe a ghost or Branded path in AC. Just re-do the existing weapons for each dungeon set and have them as random drops, as is the case in the Aetherblade path of TA.

Unlikely, but it’s a nice thought.

NikeEU.7690:

The fact that fractals has tiered difficulty with progressive rewards and people don’t use them but rather QQ about the top tier being too hard says a lot about what easy mode raids would look like.

The issue is that Tier 4 of fractals used to be much easier. Players invested in ascended gear and infusions with reasonable expectations to be able to continue playing the content at that level of difficulty.

I believe the bottom line for most of issues low and middling skilled players have with instanced PvE group content is risk vs reward.

We got too used to low risk (risk being defined as chance of raging teammates, party wipes and absolute failure to complete the instance) and high reward (gold, tokens and drops) activity. Now that the overall design seems to be shifting towards high risk and low-moderate rewards, some people are displeased. This is natural.

If you took a bit more of an objective view of these matters, I’m certain you can understand that although you’ve gained the sort of instanced content you enjoy others have not.

I’m hoping a couple of them are ‘OP’ (I’m talking low risk/high DPS like the old Viper horror Necro) so that scrubs like me can start raiding again, or at least blaze through fractals with little hassle.

Well, gliding was a new mechanic while mounts really seem to be built on the Zephyrite movement skills we had since Dry Top (jump extra high, dash forward etc). I would rather have masteries that allowed us to use those indefinitely to get around instead of mounts.

As things are I like gliding because for the most part gliders are convenient and not too obtrusive, and there’s a decent array of skins to choose from.

Mounts I’m not too keen on because you can’t just choose the one you like best and stick to it – you’ll have to use them all situationally. There’s a couple that just won’t fit with my aesthetic and it’d annoy me every time I have to use them. I’m imagining that there will be some skins in the gem store (maybe even in-game) to remedy this, at least.

Lalainnia.3598:

It’s brand new and people are asking for a nerf like wth….Do people truly want nothing but an outright steam roll? It doesn’t need to be touched losing and not even completing it on day one is 100% fine try again tomorrow and the next day and so on

For fractals? Yes. Rolling through an instance and laying waste to everything in front of you is extremely satisfying. Moreso than the wipe-res-repeat that characterizes raiding.

Yeah, they’ve been trying a little too hard to get us to play ‘their way’ as of late. Pretty much everything that players genuinely enjoy – from the good old dungeon farming days right down to the AB multi map – seems to be at odds with their design goals (and probably revenue stream).

It’s probably a big part of why MMOs aren’t as successful as they used to be. Since the sub-based model is no longer as viable, developers have been making their games suck just enough that you need to spend cash to really enjoy them, but not so much that you want to quit. It’s a fine line.

TexZero.7910:

I’d like to call shenanigans (for lack of a better word here) on these statements.

We have had 1 raid roughly every 6 months.
General PvE gets 2 story updates in that same time frame which comes with the following amount of instanced content
- Atleast 2 if not 3 story instances per update (6 instances there alone)
- Potentially more if there’s also a fractal update
- A guaranteed new MAP. Meaning 2 per raid update cycle.

The “casual” crowd has plenty to do with content and that’s even before touching the near 50 achievements they get in that same time frame.

Additionally, i have to entirely disagree about raids being designed to “Shut Out” people. They have a minimum barrier to entry that is, be geared and know your specific role. This is literally the same barrier used for open world PvE.

In this context I’m referring to repeatable small group instanced PvE content. Dungeons and Fractals. Perhaps I could have been clearer. As such, the story doesn’t count and neither do any of the open world maps.

There is, or at least used to be a sizeable player base I would describe as ‘moderate’. We’re the ones who did a bit of everything but primarily focused on daily dungeon tours and the occasional mid level fractals. You know, content that’s more engaging than the open world but isn’t so demanding that you can’t just join a pug and figure things out along the way.

maddoctor.2738:

Jahroots.6791:

Your first statement’s incorrect. There were eight fractals in the initial introduction, followed by five in the ‘fractured’ release a year or so later.

Fractured added 1 new fractal (Thaumanova) the other 4 were parts of the LS1 dungeons.

If we’re going to include reworks, Chaos and Nightmare, I think those other 4 are relevant.

Miellyn.6847:

We got more fractals and fractal reworks since raid development started than we got the entire time before.

It is also plain stupid that legendary weapons require mostly open world, but that seems fine because you play it right? How does your WvW player completes a HoT legendary?

…

Yes it it perfectly fine that a part of the team creates more challenging content as another part of ArenaNet creates less challenging content like open world. Not everything in this game has to cater to your needs.

Your first statement’s incorrect. There were eight fractals in the initial introduction, followed by five in the ‘fractured’ release a year or so later.

There’s also still a full set of legendary weapons and precursors you can straight up buy without much hassle. Opinion on this vary but I’m sure a lot of people appreciate the option.

Man, it’s never been about being catered to. It’s about not being shut out. Raids were intentionally designed so that many players would not be able to enjoy or even complete them. Other game modes have their niche as well, without being so designed that they’d be a pain in the kitten for players who aren’t necessarily a part of it to take part.

And of course most people accept that this is typical of raids across MMOs, but it’s an issue because casual and moderate players aren’t offered fresh instanced content in equal or at least similar measures.