Guild Wars 2

I’m new to the game and a staff ele running full assassin’s with scholar runes and don’t have much of an issue in the new zones. Honestly though, in zones that are group PvE focused, I believe mobs should be tough, and you should have to make a choice, play defensively with defensive gear and wait them out, or become mobile and with high dps, stack might before taking on a vet or two, and pay attention to abilities.

After dying a few times you should know how the mobs react, and short of accidentally pulling a few extras, any class should be able to solo a vet+a normal add or two.

Didn’t Anet post something a couple of days ago about fractal rewards increasing? I’ve seen 10 threads today about gold without a single mention of that.

EDIT: Here ya go! Things are looking up for fractal runners

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Upcoming-Fractal-Changes/first

Devata.6589:

Well your opinion is clearly from a grinders perspective. All your solutions are based on grinding gold so no wonder you like that better in GW2 as that is a good way to get most interesting rewards, in many a cases even the only one.

If grinding gold is a solution to you (what it is for a group of people) then there is not a problem with GW2 at all. But when you are in the group of people that likes to go directly for the items its different.

I never claimed to have a “solution” because the game doesn’t need one, am I wrong or have raids/other content not even been released yet? C’mon.. That being said, I still don’t think that the strongest craftable weapons/armor should be easy to obtain. What is your solution? If it is any easier people will complain that everyone has said items, that is just the nature of the vocal minority that looks to complain.

Devata.6589:

In WoW you could get most companions, mounts and skins by working directly towards them. Yes that sometimes means doing 1 dungeon for one mount 100 times. But then the next mount it’s a quest, the next one it’s defeating some boss, the next one is another dungeon. In GW2 in most cases it’s just grind gold, and there are a few ways to best grind gold.

Sure your example of ashes of al’ar is a bad one where the drop-rate might be way to low, especially for content that is time-gated. But that does not mean locking items this way (with better RNG) is a bad thing.

Grinding is grinding is grinding, no matter how you look at it, the only reason I responded to the WoW comparison posts is they seemed to be based on false truths. The fact is, gearing up in this game without converting gems (buying gold) takes much less time than in WoW, and you can do it alone. [/quote]

Devata.6589:

In fact. “Well the main reason people run old raids are for account bound mounts”. My point.. chasing these type of items is very important in an MMO and it’s something that keeps many people busy. Not if the way to get them is almost always by grinding gold, you will scare off many people. Not the grinders but others.

So yeah, if you take the ashes of al’ar example where you still not have it after consistently doing that raid for 3 years it’s a step back. But if you take that extremely bad RNG / time-gate out of the loop it’s a step forward. It lets people go over the world, do all kinds of content and keeps them playing for a long time. While the grind-way is fine for the grinders, but not for many other players.

This argument makes no sense. WoW is constantly adding time gates for nearly everything.

Also, I will say this once again, comparing this game to WoW in terms of access is just silly in general. This game doesn’t have 10+ years of 10 million players paying a sub to fall back on, and even with that, expansions are still full price, most of the truly “new” mounts outside of the handful that come along with buying a new 60 dollar expansion are sold in the cash shop.

If you compare this game to it’s peers, it is head and shoulders above the rest, and IMO after playing WoW since launch (and I still do, for the record), this game gives it a run for it’s money.

Would you rather it be like ESO? Where a level 30 who just hung on to the right white items with stats can craft the best gear in the game and you literally get NOTHING from doing dungeons or their sad excuse for raids? Where you have to stay subbed or shell out 20 bucks every other month for DLC’s that are so laughably underwhelming its hard to tell if they are serious? Where the post level cap character progression system is so broken that if you open up your wallet and pay for xp boosts your character can unlock permanent stats that make your character tremendously strong and makes PvP pointless unless you have the real life cash to spend along with the time to grind?

My only point with these posts is to say, nothing is perfect in the MMO environment, and frankly, this one is pretty kitten good. We still don’t have the raids yet, and I have a feeling there is other stuff in the works as well.

So wait, it’s hard to farm mats for one of the best weapons in it’s slot and very expensive if you want to circumvent the farm? What a scam! /eyeroll

Yaki.9563:

What’s funny is the people saying this xpac is great because in WoW you’d have tons of stuff to do to get the best gear. Then get to do more of it every 6 months as they release new content. WoW may have issues but the sheer volume of group content is not one of them. In GW2 they’ve basically made all group content obsolete and pointless while adding nothing with the “expansion”. So now it’s some kind of solo story following adventure until you finish the story then it’s game over I guess?

You literally do the same thing over and over again to get the best gear. Don’t get me wrong, I play both games and like them both (been playing WoW for almost 11 years, but I’m just pointing out the obvious flaws brought up in the comparisons. Especially seeing as how WoW (like it or not) has and still sets the threshold by which fantasy MMOs are judged.

Tigaseye.2047:

Is that really how they “come off”, or are you just assuming?

How they come off is an opinion. In my opinion that’s how they sound.

Tigaseye.2047:

I’ve done some “real” raiding in WoW – I know how it works.

I doubt it. Maybe flex/normal. Maybe.

Tigaseye.2047:

It’s not worse, at all, IMO.

Then you’re just nit-picking, or trying to justify a return to WoW. Only the blind would make the comparison to WoW as you did without seeing or acknowledging the obvious.

Tigaseye.2047:

The gear gets old, but you just go get some more.

People whine about how the best gear in the game is hard to get. The fact is, anyone can get it in this game by playing alone. It just takes time. In WoW 99% of the player base will never even see Mythic content, let alone get full BiS gear. Even if you get into the raids you have a once a week shot at a chance for a piece of gear to drop. Like I said before, people are just upset that someone can circumvent parts of the game by whipping out a credit card. Show me a piece of gear that isn’t attainable by a decent semi-knowledgeable player who just puts time in.

This is akin to the “You can’t do masteries without grinding a level!!11one!11!! They’re tricking us into buying the expansion and put this limitation in to make us play moar!1!!1!” type of gripe. It’s the nature of MMOs.

Could you imagine if the group of vocal dissenters had to deal with the RNG fest that was the legendary cloak quest? Where you could run everyrthing you needed every week and get one titan runestone and someone in LFR could get four from one LFR wing of a raid? Having to wait possibly months to get the dropped mats?

Tigaseye.2047:

You get it either from the new tier of raids, or from whatever new content comes with the new xpac.

Even though this response is a hilarious response that addressing nothing, it still takes a long time to get the gear, and like I’ve said before, in GW2 you can get the gear in-game.

Tigaseye.2047:

You’re, hopefully, raiding (and playing) for more than just gear, anyway.

You’re, hopefully, raiding (and playing) because you enjoy it.

Some people enjoy character optimization and being good at their class. I don’t quite see how someone chooses to play pertains to this discussion.

Tigaseye.2047:

Yeah, the gear treadmill can seem a little pointless, but it’s not like they’re actually, physically, taking anything away (most of the time).

(Well, I say that, but of course they did take stuff away from [or didn’t add it, as normal to] LFR, which was a huge mistake; but that was only a recent development and is also a very specific case.)

They’ve taken stuff away in many cases, the drop rates on craftable items is always being adjusted, and usually not in the player’s favor. From the days of Benediction in vanilla to the green fire warlock tomes in mists. In fact, many of the coolest old weapons/armor are no longer available or are behind and impossible gold wall, like Benediction, all of Tier 3 gear, and tons of other very rare items.

Tigaseye.2047:

Whereas, if you’re running a certain type of content, in this game, because you enjoy it and then, suddenly, you’re getting fewer rewards for doing that content, what are you supposed to do?

Just suck it up? Or abandon that type of content entirely?

Yes. Suck it up. A marginal decrease in rewards should cause people to lose their minds and create thread after thread describing in detail how getting less gold from dungeons or whatever signals the demise of the game. I mean, for god’s sake there is even a thread that uses in-game examples of what you guys are talking about to describe in detail the eventual end of MMOs in general. Melodrama at it’s finest, but that’s to be expected from official forum communities.

I put it this way to a guildie today, no one has ever been enjoying an MMO. be it EQ, WoW, GW or whatever, and while playing the game stopped and thought to themself, “Hey, I’m going to go make a post about how much I am enjoying things!”

Tigaseye.2047:

Especially as it’s still supposed to be current content and there is nothing new added, of the same type of content , that gives you the same or better rewards.

Look at GW2’s peers in the b2p environment that has come from games living in the shadow of WoW. The “expansion” content from those games (ESO, Wildstar, etc) is laughable in comparison to HoT.

Tigaseye.2047:

“living expenses”

There are none. Unless you need instant gratification or want to keep up with the moron who shells out tons of money to get something faster just to sit on it then come here and complain about having nothing to do in a couple of months.

Tigaseye.2047:

You can make a very decent amount of gold from running older raids.

That was my main point about that.

Might cover your “real raiding” repair costs and an enchant or two.

Tigaseye.2047:

Plus, they may have a low droprate, but most mounts are still there – you can still get them, with enough effort.

So you’re willing to put in the “effort” for what is, ostensibly, a mount skin but don’t want to do the same for a legendary weapon just because someone can convert gems to gold and buy mats? Okie dokie.

fellyn.5083:

Jayllyfish.3489:

Tigaseye.2047:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Of course there is not much in core game, that’s what expansions do. Where do you guys come from. First MMO or what?

I come from WoW.

Expansions don’t, generally, strip the content/rewards from the core game, there.

OK, admittedly, they have recently been going down the shady path of removing mounts and stuff from old content.

Which I don’t approve of, either – even (especially) in the case of mounts I managed to get in current content.

Everyone should have a chance to get everything, in an MMO, sooner or later.

But, overall, WoW doesn’t remove stuff.

What happens there is that stuff eventually gets outlevelled/outgeared and the rewards seem less, due to inflation.

But, actually, as people are soloing old content, rather than doing it in a large group, they are generally getting more rewards than they can in current content and certainly more than they were previously, when that older content was current.

In this game, you don’t outlevel stuff, so everything is supposed to be current and yet, almost all older/existing content’s rewards have been nerfed.

Including things that were never particularly rewarding and simple things, like levelling guilds, which are now impossible to level on your own.

This is not normal, typical, or good.

First of all, it takes months and months of VERY hardcore raiding in a great guild to acquire the best gear in WoW, and when every expansion is released, the gear becomes worse than quest greens and is useless. That’s much worse than getting a few less gold for content than you got a month and a half ago.

Sure you can go back and solo old raids, but if you think that is a significant way to gain anything of substance outside of achievement rewards then you are sorely mistaken. The items like mounts have an atrociously low drop rate (I would know, I have 259 mounts) and are almost always account bound, and the pets you get were only very valuable for a short time in MoP. On a high pop server you are lucky to see 2 people while leveling through a zone, look at WoD right now, even the “current” content is barren and mounts in the xpack are a dime a dozen.

The only thing that sets you apart is your gear, and guess what, not only do they make it useless to 99% of the players each expansion, they make it useless almost every patch.

Frankly, if everything in gw2 was as it is now, minus the cash shop, I would feel like things are a little too accessible. it takes maybe 60 hours to level to 80 with only the boosts they GIVE you, and it took me maybe an hour and a half after hitting 80 to get masteries and gliding unlocked. Not to mention just from salvaging and harvesting nodes I was able to level two crafting profs to kitten near max.

This game has a lot of things going for it, I truly believe people just get hung up on minutiae when there are ways to get things that involves paying real life money. Because honestly, take away the cash shop, and in my opinion, it’s too easy to get really good stuff.

I can’t imagine how badly people would rage if they couldn’t even touch the best stuff in the game without 19 other incredible players and hundreds of thousands of gold.

All of the complaints here aren’t invalid, they just come off to people who have been playing MMOs for years as the incoherent ramblings of people who either haven’t played an MMO before, or someone who dabbled in the past and never stuck with one long enough to see the nature of MMO end game.

Unless they’ve changed it in the last 6 months you can get a lot of gold from doing older raids in WoW.

And as you know, you can now buy play time with gold in WoW. So it’s wrong saying you don’t get anything out of playing older content in that particular game.

I’m not sure you know what “a lot of gold is” in that game. making the ~25k it takes to buy a token (which is, by the way, a system that literally allows the buying of gold) is silly easy. But if you think you’re going to make enough money to buy rare mounts or fund what it takes to make a strong push in Mythic content by running DS, ICC, or Sunwell once a week then you obviously played a different game. Running old raids for gold in WoW is one of the most inefficient ways to make gold. The only real gold reward of significance from doing those was pets, but now that doing pet battles is just an achievement dump pet prices have dropped immensely.

I also hear a lot of mention about how “grindy” GW2 is for rewards. Well the main reason people run old raids are for account bound mounts, and as someone who has run sunwell every week for 3 years and still doesn’t have ashes of al’ar all I have to say is take a step back and stop getting caught in the “grass is always greener” trap.

Tigaseye.2047:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Of course there is not much in core game, that’s what expansions do. Where do you guys come from. First MMO or what?

I come from WoW.

Expansions don’t, generally, strip the content/rewards from the core game, there.

OK, admittedly, they have recently been going down the shady path of removing mounts and stuff from old content.

Which I don’t approve of, either – even (especially) in the case of mounts I managed to get in current content.

Everyone should have a chance to get everything, in an MMO, sooner or later.

But, overall, WoW doesn’t remove stuff.

What happens there is that stuff eventually gets outlevelled/outgeared and the rewards seem less, due to inflation.

But, actually, as people are soloing old content, rather than doing it in a large group, they are generally getting more rewards than they can in current content and certainly more than they were previously, when that older content was current.

In this game, you don’t outlevel stuff, so everything is supposed to be current and yet, almost all older/existing content’s rewards have been nerfed.

Including things that were never particularly rewarding and simple things, like levelling guilds, which are now impossible to level on your own.

This is not normal, typical, or good.

First of all, it takes months and months of VERY hardcore raiding in a great guild to acquire the best gear in WoW, and when every expansion is released, the gear becomes worse than quest greens and is useless. That’s much worse than getting a few less gold for content than you got a month and a half ago.

Sure you can go back and solo old raids, but if you think that is a significant way to gain anything of substance outside of achievement rewards then you are sorely mistaken. The items like mounts have an atrociously low drop rate (I would know, I have 259 mounts) and are almost always account bound, and the pets you get were only very valuable for a short time in MoP. On a high pop server you are lucky to see 2 people while leveling through a zone, look at WoD right now, even the “current” content is barren and mounts in the xpack are a dime a dozen.

The only thing that sets you apart is your gear, and guess what, not only do they make it useless to 99% of the players each expansion, they make it useless almost every patch.

Frankly, if everything in gw2 was as it is now, minus the cash shop, I would feel like things are a little too accessible. it takes maybe 60 hours to level to 80 with only the boosts they GIVE you, and it took me maybe an hour and a half after hitting 80 to get masteries and gliding unlocked. Not to mention just from salvaging and harvesting nodes I was able to level two crafting profs to kitten near max.

This game has a lot of things going for it, I truly believe people just get hung up on minutiae when there are ways to get things that involves paying real life money. Because honestly, take away the cash shop, and in my opinion, it’s too easy to get really good stuff.

I can’t imagine how badly people would rage if they couldn’t even touch the best stuff in the game without 19 other incredible players and hundreds of thousands of gold.

All of the complaints here aren’t invalid, they just come off to people who have been playing MMOs for years as the incoherent ramblings of people who either haven’t played an MMO before, or someone who dabbled in the past and never stuck with one long enough to see the nature of MMO end game.

Senario.2038:

SeriousSituation.3462:

Tempest ele is great at support. I’m currently running in full clerics gear and I am traited to not only heal a ton, but I can give my party infinite protection and share auras. It’s pretty sweet. Great for full DPS pugs where no one knows how to dodge.

At that point wouldn’t you just be better off running druid with full clerics? The only real benefit to that is protection not to mention you do no damage. Protection is great and all but if they don’t dodge they will still die even with protection. Protection just gives them slightly more leway on what they can get away with. Ideally people shouldn’t be getting hit if they are so squish they need protection from a buddy.

I mean this with all due respect, and I am only asking out of pure ignorance of this game’s community but is it common for folks to just say, “Well for this situation wouldn’t it be better if you had a different max level character with the HP to fully unlock it’s elite spec?”

I mean, it sounds like a druid might do certain things better, but obviously this guy like to be able to support and heal when the situation calls for it on his Ele.

I’ve experimented with Staff, D/F, and D/D and really like them all. I love the staff nuke damage, but I also really enjoy actively controlling and manipulating my toon with the Dagger builds. I feel like the skill cap is higher with the daggers, and as an experienced MMO’r that appeals to me as I enjoy playing a challenging playstyle, but really getting proficient with the staff priorities (ultilizing frost bow, swapping for glyph of storms, and anticipating mob movement with the placement of fire abilities) is also fun. I really enjoy the class as a whole, but I really just want to make sure that when I’m 80 I will be able to prove myself an asset in tough PvE content.

I still have a lot to learn as I feel I could do more to meld with a group, but for now getting good at pewpewing without being a liability (dead) is my focus.

Hey, I recently tried out the free version of GW2 and enjoyed it so much that I picked up HoT. I’ve been playing MMOs for a long time and am more of a PvE focused player, with PvP more as a distraction. I’ve played a few professions to around 25-30, but so far, Ele has been my favorite by a pretty wide margin, but I am wondering about Tempest. I’ve heard many are underwhelmed with the elite spec, and from the videos and streams I’ve watched, I think it’s a playstyle I wouldn’t enjoy as much as vanilla Ele.

My question is, would vanilla ele be viable in PvE situations? Would it be able to hold it’s own when I venture into WvW and other PvP situations? Am I going to be missing out on an important part of the game by not utilizing elite specializations? And finally, would I be better suited to choose a different profession as my main?

Thanks a bunch guys/gals.