Guild Wars 2

I suspect we will see mounts added to the gem store.

This game has always suffered from poor choice of items there. Ugly cosmetics and gambling boxes.

If they refuse to put out cosmetics with no butt-flap, they need something to make money with… and mounts will probably be it.

MMO player have an obsession with collecting an item that you can only use one of at a time… so they could add a dozen mounts to the gem store and get half the player base, or more, to buy the majority of them…

And it’s a convenient way to avoid having to make butt-flap-free cosmetics, since this MMO seems paranoid about us seeing our rear ends…

I don’t think they serve any other actual purpose…

Yesterday I had to reformat my harddrive, re-install windows, and start the download/install of my games again.

My setup is a Mac running Windows in bootcamp.
Windows side is only used for gaming. Mac side is work / etc…

When I go to install Guild Wars, it keeps coming back with:

There is no disk in drive F:
and wanting me to add a drive there…

I am baffled as to why it is looking for a drive F… and not just installing to the C: drive…

I cancel this, and it does install to C… but this comes up everytime I close and restart the application…

A lot of things moved into collections tabs over the years – most of my bank tabs filled up with stuff like ‘x bonus XP for y time" consumables, or ’boost one character by x levels’ items – that I avoid throwing away “just in case” I remake a character for some random reason…

That said, I’ve not been playing this game since about 3 months after Heart of Thorns launched… “might” come back with the new expansion finally giving us Elona back (Nightfall was what kept me going during Guild Wars 1)…

As noted, you can fund stuff by converting gold to gems. There are some pretty active podcasters over in WoW by the way that haven’t paid their WoW subs in a year or more because they gold farm and then buy tokens for a sub…

You “can” play a lot of these MMOs free now… it’s just more convenient to put some cash into it.

Consider the argument that finally convinced me an MMO sub was not a waste of money back in 2005… A movie ticket back then was about $8-10 bucks. Add in the popcorn and drinks and you’d bust past $16-20. An MMO sub was about $15.

So for the same price I could spend 90 minutes watching a badly made Hollywood flick and eat unhealthy snacks…

Or spend as many hours as I wanted playing an interactive game with people.

The costs made a lot of sense put that way.

And the MMO is even cheaper these days…

Jjikkeogii.1328:

Anyone know when the Heavy Aetherblade Skin Set is coming back? I really need the top/bottom pieces. Please put the Aetherblade Skin Set in the gem store! Please! Ty

I’ll second this. Would really love to see the Heavy Aetherblade Skin become available again.

I never bought this in the past, I think I thought it was a full set, not something you could mix with other pieces… much to my error.

I’d really like to see it again.

Nothing so fancy. The original was basically a loli-hentai elf in a tinkerbell dress:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Sylvari_concept_art.jpg

Somebody over there who DIDN’T watch anime and play D&D obviously saw it at some point and said “what the cat is this kitten?” and they decided to ‘un-kitten this puppy’…

http://www.merekatcreations.com/gallery/attachment/kristen-perry-on-designing-and-redesigning-the-sylvari__arenanet-blog-2/
Discussed:
http://kotaku.com/5828856/how-do-you-make-a-race-of-intelligent-plant-people-sexy/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/33284-sylvari-redesign-revealed/
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/17472-arenanet-kristen-perry-on-designing-and-redesigning-the-sylvari/

So basically you don’t have any fancy inspiration. Rather you have somebody being put on a fiasco project to ‘un-mess-it-down’… who then just ran with the ‘plant’ theme in various iterations until they found the right balance between plant and ‘iconicly identifiable’ so that players would feel comfortable playing it.

Around launch ArenaNet was touting it as a new original concept for a race, never before done in the history of fantasy. Somebody was THAT unaware of mythology to not even have heard of a Dryad. Let alone that the Sylvarri we have today, has been a playable race in table-top RPGs since the late 1970s and the game Runequest, where this race is what they call ‘elf’ (as such Runequest took a major popularity hit with D&D fans who were looking for something hentai-like).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneQuest
(I used to be a 12-year old boy, decades ago, so I remember that reaction to their plant-elf…)

So OP considers a good player to be someone who buys a few thousands gems on the gemstore. There’s no other way to get the gold needed for the mats to craft Ascended armor & weapons. There used to be – but that just meant someone who farmed CoF and did little else.

I do have some Ascended items – trinkets, amulets, and a weapon. The weapon… that was 200g worth of mats that I got from buying gems… Half of it used to level up the right craft, and half once at 500.

I do consider myself a decent player – but because I’ve been around, done all sorts of varied content in here (I took off from midway through Season 1 of living story until just a few months before HoT, so my experience has a middle gap). That I have any Ascended gear reflects not at all on how good I am at playing the game.

Wahaha.7938:

Good players are more likely to have ascended armor. The correlation goes the other way around. I have found this correlation to be very noticeable.

Also someone with ascended armor is more likely to have good sigils, food.

Buying gems on the gemstore does not make someone a good player. And frankly there’s not really any other way to earn the gold needed to get Ascended Armor.

I’m really tired of having the weird fetishes of modern game developers shoved down my throat.

I’ve been making this rant for a few years now on several different MMOs…

First we had to go through years of giant freak-out shoulders like somebody had watched too many 80’s “power suit” fashion shows and got obsessed with it… We still have that, but after some nasty fighting on the WoW forums years back, they relented and let us hide their freakout… and other games followed suit.

Now its butt-flaps… Somebody watched too many 50s genocide movies (cowboys slaughtering Italians in “native makeup” with buttflaps on)… And now we’ve got some weird kink going on obsessed with flaps… Not just in GW2, it seems to be in all the new MMOs…

Who’s idea of fashion is this?

Somebody needs to get with it on things and move forward…

Its pretty obvious the players don’t like this. Male toons go to great lengths to find some kind of top that doesn’t give them a bad stereotype cover over their crotch or a trenchcoat…

Female toons… almost all wear one of the same 3 or 4 tops with a selection of about 3 pants if on medium, and few if on light or heavy…

Yeah, I’d like a bikini too – if only to get some choice.

We don’t need the weird ‘working-girl’ clothes of games like Tera or Blade and Soul… but some regular pants, shorts, bikinis paired with shirts, halter tops, or even bikini tops… for variety… might be very nice.

Even for plated armor… there’s no need for a butt-flap on EVERYTHING…

This is one thing I like about FFXIV, that game finally relented and added a few non-buttflap choices, and then let people transmog to them… and it even has bikinis, that look normal, and not like you’re “working it” as Tera and etc… do…

Finding a spot on a raid is always difficult in any MMO.

I suspect that in short order GW2 will develop the traditional issue that other MMOs have whereby people willing to tank or heal will have an easier time at it. So one thing you can do is prepare some builds for these roles. If you have stacks of 80s, set aside one as a healer, one as a tank, and maybe one as a dual tank/healer. Or just prep multiple gearsets and put the raiding one somewhere in the bank or bags for that moment when you get to use it.

We will likely need to start thinking about a ‘looking for raid group’ forum… because this is not something you want to do with a quickly LFG tool in game… but a forum for people to post their needs and put together static regular groups.

Raiding is going to actually favor smaller guilds… Human beings can only organize so many things – so while it might be nice to be in a guild of 3 million players that you can pull out 10 and form a raid group… few guilds can manage the social mess of more than 2 or 3 raid rosters at most. Most guilds can barely manage to organize one… Its just too hard to do using a small core of leader and officers – unless you start getting super organized with time tracking, assigned manager tasks, and so on… things perfectly fine for working life, but not the level of ‘work’ most desire in their ‘hobby’.

Yet this is EXACTLY what many adult hobby sports teams do – and then they pay a local league to organize them and schedule games – so before you demand to know why your guild isn’t willing to add another 3 raid groups, consider how much real life money are you will to pay your guild leader so that (s)he can quit her day job and organize that for you. If the answer is nothing, which is a fair and likely answer… then it means its time to get a small guild going so that one person can handle the job without it being a job.

It is unfair if a guild’s selection criteria seems to way too strongly favor a certain clique… and that itself is a good indicator that you’re in a guild that is formed for that clique, and you should consider moving on.

A benefit of being able to be in multiple guilds in GW2 is that you can quickly spin off a guild who’s only purpose is to serve as your static raid group, even as all its members stay in their regular ‘mess around and hang out’ guilds. There is no need to quit your guild of gaming buddies in order to ‘test out’ some new thing ‘random internet guy’ has invited you to.
- In fact you can even use this to organize the raids in a ‘master guild’… Make a series of small guilds that are composed of members of the larger guild, but are just the raid teams… thus making a little easier for people to organize this without it becoming a job.

But… it might be time to ask ArenaNet to give us a forum for organizing these things.

Its been known since launch that toughness is not the only factor…

And here we are, looking at the proof, again…

The reason other tanks don’t have this problem enough to notice it is almost nobody is actually trying to run a sPvP bunker build for a tank – but that’s what we’re seeing here: massive toughness and nothing else.

All the other tank builds try to have ‘just enough toughness’ to pull ahead on threat – and as such are still doing decent damage.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it doesn’t work.

As old as the game itself:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aggro
- How threat is not a simple switch of one stat.

Toughness is a major factor in aggro but not the ONLY factor. But in your build its the only thing you have.

Get you power at or above 2000 and your crit to at least 40-60% – so you’re also delivering some threat…

Well its good to see some thoughts explored out in detail here.

I’ve got all 3 ready at 80. And one Ascended Clerics Staff, plus Ascended Trinkets, to go around between them…

So I’ll have to play around with some builds and see what I can get.

Outside of raiding they have all looked viable – but that’s a whole different scene that doesn’t inform as well.

Ranger is the ONLY class in the game that right now has a guaranteed spot in raids…

Its probably more worth having a ready ranger on hand than its ever been in GW2’s lifespan. Until they get the other two healer options, Chronomancer and Revenant, to be considered “in the meta”… the Ranger basically owns raiding.

I spent a few hours with it, gave up, bought some gems to buy 200 gold, and crafted a cleric’s staff…

I am willing to put time in to PLAY a game, but not to sit there and grind one mob…

I mixed Zealot’s with Clerics. But not the same way as Dulfy did.

I feel your build might be losing too much healing power. This is already a problem with Zealot’s gear – its even more of a problem with using so much Berserker’s gear.

http://de.gw2skills.net/editor/?vNEQJAWRn0rCFsi1sCmsCEtiFPBDelGTrpO9tOVK7JxFASYV8RN-TRDBABX8AA0a/BxUeswFAYQdABpSAAHCAYVCOlSsUV3pFNBPYiLgjAQAgDg3XPAY4hHOkCwplRA-e

My own thinking is that I want to be able to swap to my other weapon and go solo PvE without having to keep up a second gear set. But I also want solid enough healing. AND… I’m a bit partial to being tank-ready. I’ve never played to meta, and have thus far been able to run through fractals and dungeons on a prior build that was very high on toughness:
https://40.media.tumblr.com/2783221c064efe0bc1799123bc4b13ff/tumblr_ny0x90evE91uy6q2bo2_1280.png
- So I’m transitioning out of that and into the build above.

IF you’r starting with Zealot’s as your guide, but wanting to get rid of it… I’d get rid of it in favor of clerics or magi. I personally don’t like Magi gear so that’s not the route I took.

I would not go Berserkers unless I knew my group was strong in self heals and that my healing was only there to pad them out a little…

This is my Ranger / Druid at present:

The Sword in the stats image is Knights, the Staff is Clerics – so that changes things up a bit.

I’m a bit in mid redesign to try and boost up healing. But the outfit is set.

roamzero.9486:

Rangers are the red headed step child of the game that have been riddled with bad design decisions and unwarranted nerfs throughout their history. It took a massive outcry and giant forum CDI thread just to get them somewhat up to par.

During the entire period that Ranger was thought of as weak I was playing a sword/torch axe/axe ranger, using carrion crawler pets, with a high toughness and hybrid direct & condition damage build and more or less tanking Dungeons with it while matching damage of my teammates.

It was bad back then in terms of being bad at what people thought the class was: A WoW Hunter.

But if you went “off the rails” it played pretty well.

I suppose that era is over with now though – and my ranger is now very different than she used to be (but still not an archer).

I agree though on poor design choices as the ranger seems to have an inconsistent design.

The Druid spec here is a dedicated healer spec off of the Ranger.
So /jedihandwave these might not be the Druids you are seeking…

For an archer class… You have more choices than many people think.

Most people think “ranger, that’s like range right, so the bow guy?” But ranger here is more like an Army Ranger – special forces ops. And I find their strongest DPS build is actually melee with sword and whatever.

For archers, I used to like warrior a lot. But there is also Thief and once you hit 80, Guardian gains a powerful archer as well.

The downside of the Guardian Archer is you only get access to it in the elite spec – so you need to be a fast leveler or open to playing something that is not an archer for a while.

The downside of thief is everything is an area targeting ability and you might not like that playstyle.

The downside of warrior is that you’re so awesome everyone else needs to wear shades or um… er… I don’t know… I’m sure there’s a downside in there somewhere.

The downside of ranger is… everybody does it. You are BORG… But… its probably on par as a choice with warrior, except you also have pets that you have to manage as well.

Another problem for Ranger and Druid is that they are the same class… so you’ll both end up playing a similar character for a while until you hit 80 and one of you goes druid, while the other… either does nothing or also goes druid…

So… my archer, is my warrior…
But a LOT of people keep saying they like the Guardian’s archer. I just didn’t enjoy it so much but that may be because I’m not usually a fan of archers and much prefer playing my guardian with a big hammer and a huge stack of mobs all around me…

Thank goodness there is no looking for raid.

Raids are on a weekly set if I recall right. They’re meant to be an organized form of play.

If you put that into some automated PUGing tool, you need to then make it content doable by disorganized PUGs. That means you have to make the challenge bar rather low…

and that then somewhat kills the ability to have a diverse range of content in the game.

LFR has not served WoW well. Just look at how little effort goes into the design of anything outside of their raids now – all other content is more or less dead, and raiding itself ends up a quick burnout because once you’ve seen the content, why bother trying to see the exact same content again at a higher difficulty?

Yes we’ve already lost any new dungeons here it appears, and Fractals don’t seem to be getting the attention I’d desire given what’s occurred with Dungeons… Lets not ALSO lose the open world story content by basically shoving the entire player base into an LFR queue…

My dreams? What dreams? Try to be intelligent and post some information please. Why post if only to reveal that you lack an intelligent thought?

I have no bias or preference in this, just trying to figure out which of these choices is what, when and where, if at all.

What are some thoughts on the choices for raid healers.

I’m likely to start putting myself into the role of healing raids – and I have all three of the listed choices as classes I could get ready for the role.

My guild’s members have noted Druid and Tempest, but I’ve seen comments to the effect that Ventari Revenants are also meant for this role… and that has me wondering…

Are all three classes equally or nearly equally viable choices? Am I missing a choice? Is a choice even needed or is the idea of bringing a dedicated healer ‘overstated’?

And how do they compare in terms of what they each bring to the situation?

It might be on pet change… I didn’t precisely try to figure this out, I just noticed I kept losing the pet.

But I’ve also recently been messing around a lot with my choices trying to find the best for a new playstyle, what with Druid and all.

So it is on pet change, but not pet swap – right?

I’ll look for that now, and I guess just set some names on the pets I go with once I settle down my build…

Thanks for pointing that out.

I had thought this ancient bug had been fixed in the year I was away from the game and my ranger…

But I’m still seeing pet names revert back to juvenille something after every relog.

Is there a way to get a pet’s name to ‘stick’ that I have missed?

I’d long ago given up on this, but it would be nice to actually be able to name them…

Putting together a healing build for a druid and trying to pick between these two:

Cultivated Synergy
Using a healing skill heals allies around you and your pet.

Healing Healing: 1,000 (0.2)?
Miscellaneous effect.png Number of Allied Targets: 5
Radius.png Radius: 300

Primal Echoes
Reduces recharge of staff skills. Daze nearby foes when you swap to staff.

Unable to activate skills; stacks duration.[sic] Daze: 1s
Miscellaneous effect.png Number of Targets: 5
Recharge Recharge Reduced: 20%
Radius.png Radius: 240
Miscellaneous effect.png Combat Only

Any thoughts? My instinct tells me Primal Echoes 20% reduction is likely to pay off more than a ‘bonus heal’ on my ‘6’ skill. But I could be wrong.

sephiroth.4217:

I’m curious why it’s offensive?

I know there’s been a few stink ups already over politically incorrect terms that people manage to find offensive and tags like [NGR].

Not all of us are Klan members BTW…

Land of Cheese.2584:

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

This was NEVER the goal of GW2. You just have to watch what they were saying about the model for the game before launch. All those dev talks and hype we were buying into because GW1 actually delivered what it claimed.

It became the state of things that players locked onto due to flaws in the design that the devs were unwilling or unable to put resources into fixing. Flaws that frankly, should not be too complicated to fix.

What’re you’re seeing now with HoT is their first after 3 years attempt to address this… by trying to return to the model of Guild Wars 1: the duality of DPS + healer.

Whether or not they can deliver… I kind of lack confidence in at this point. I strongly suspect the people who gave us the design of GW1 no longer work there, or have moved on in their game design theory and no longer possess the creative spark they once did.

But the meta we have had for the last 3 years… is not there intentionally.

And this is why so many of us “don’t get it” and “miss” the goal… but we know it was never the goal to begin with – which is an aside from whether or not it is actually a valid meta… I do concede its valid, just not that its the only valid meta.

Duke Nukem.6783:

esports? the gw2 competative combat is literally the worst fighting in an mmo i have ever seen
esports in gw2? give up anet

Well…

eSports was lined up big time before launch. But left before the first week of the live game was wrapped up.

GW1 had a very solid PvP scene, and was considered a great option at the time – so people naturally expected GW2 to improve upon that.

And I can see that Arena Net might still be wondering why they lost the magic on this one… and still be thinking they can recapture their glory days…

But outside of updated graphics, nonhuman characters, and the ability to jump… there’s very little in GW2 that is better than GW1…

Its like they canned the entire team that made a great game a decade ago, and hired who knows who to develop the sequel… I like GW2, but it just doesn’t have that special something GW1 did. Sadly GW1 now looks and feels too dated to go back…

Its wanted now, because suddenly healing gear is useful whereas it was considered a bad choice beforehand. But the price hasn’t moved.

Which only means, expect the price to go UP. Now is the time to get one of the home node for those sprockets and start mining it so you can sell them on the TP.

I kitted up my ranger for Druid healing, and just decided to ‘bite it’ and ate about 50-60 gold getting the mats for Zealot. On the positive side I’ve been behind in getting crafting up past 400, so this was a good boost to get my mind back on that.

MauricioCezar.2673:

Nothing against it, and should be in-game IMHO.

If you want to be part of a hardcore …

I had no idea Ron Jeremy played MMOs.

But also, looking at the screenshot, why are they looking for Tanks? For Guild Wars 2?

This is not a design issue, it is a player skill issue. Look to upping your game.

I’m coming back from healing in Wildstar where mobility is a constant mad dash for your entire raid, the map is full of crazy shifting red patterns, and your heal is a short beam aoe about as thin as the Druid 1 skill but as an instant, not channeled. And yet that class, the spellslinger, is a top choice healer. People there just learned to deal with healing I chaos because it is not easy like WoW or GW2.

Up your own skill. HoT is meant to be harder and more active.

Lol all you want, but self analyze before you blame the game. I too played City of Heroes for years and… Checkers is a harder game than CoH was… CoH was visually fun but had all the challenge of a 1st grade math exam, and player characters were obscenely overpowered.

L2P is not always meant as an insult. I mean it as a challenge. Learn to self reflect rather than blame, and take on the challenge of beer more difficult content.

Personally I just can’t manage to work with the staff – too many skills are area targeted and that cuts down on my mobility a lot. I’m the sort of player who is always mobile, usually circle strafing or kiting through to the other side of things.

Too much Wildstar play in me – where everything is area, but in cones and shapes projecting from you.

The area targets in Guild Wars are just difficult to place down when being highly mobile.

It looks like opinions are split on Axe. I gave it a try after seeing that here on the first day of this thread – and I’ve managed to get my Necromancer from just started in HoT to having unlocked the full Reaper spec by running around the first two zones with Greatsword and Axe/Horn.

Not yet sure on it, but it seemed ‘viable enough’ as a swap to option when forced out of melee.

I don’t do either PvP or WvW so I have no perspective to give there. I’m mostly a dungeon person, but have yet to try this in a Dungeon. Its actually been a while since my Necromancer saw a dungeon period (and not because I stick to the meta or whatever… Its more random ‘what toon today’…)

Whether or not its effective, Greatsword and Axe/Horn look like they might be fun in Dungeons. So I hope they turn out viable enough…

Nemesis.8593:

It’s a very sticky situation… but i still think elitism is better then delusional elitism which we had for over 2 years now.

but without a damage meter it will go over people’s heads… and they’ll just use a single build/comp everywhere, just like in the last 2 years…

Having a meter would not solve the problem of people expecting others to follow the ‘meta’ posted on randomGuy’s blog…

It would just change what meta got posted on that blog.

I’ve been playing against the meta in this game since the prelaunch event. I run a variety of somewhat tanky builds with a lot of toughness but also as much damage as I can put in there. I try to balance offense and defense. I’ve been able to run content alongside others this whole time with any issues only being my given skill on that day.

If I am doing less damage nobody has noticed or said anything – where the other’s spend a lot of time dodging I can power through many hits. This balances out…

Maybe not perfectly, but enough. And of course without any meter neither I nor they can prove who has the most final DPS when you factor both the raw number and one’s uptime on delivering that number.

A LOT more goes into the final result than the build. What a meter will reveal is what build best matches a given player’s style… and that is not a universal constant.

But what will occur is that whatever playstyle works best for the most popular blogger, will get declared the ideal one for everyone… it likely will NOT be the current meta… but it will be a meta nonetheless.

I see in the wiki that Axe got a 10% boost on Sept 29th.

Is it any good as a weapon now?

I’m trying to put together a Reaper using mostly power/precision and a greatsword, so I’m looking for ideal choices for the weapon swap when I am forced to use range…

Scepter is all about conditions.

Staff is all about support and has area targeted wells which, for me, impacts my ability to stay mobile or target if this ranged situation is occurring in the open world. I just personally suck at things like circle strafing while also laying out area targets…

dulfy long ago posted on a necromancer guide that Axe is basically non-viable:
http://dulfy.net/2014/06/30/gw2-necromancer-pve-guide-by-spoj/#Axe

But that was June of 2014, and the weapon has since been boosted.

Any opinions?

(Hmmm… even after adding a thread with ‘axe’ in the title, searching the forum on the word ‘axe’ says no results found for me…)

Swift.1930:

flman.6057:

More skins, armor sets, hair and faces, rework lazy reused animation, be less european, be less zergish, revive dungeons, make condi builds viable. And I will tell everyone that GW2 is the best for me and probably for them.
Until now it is korean p2p BnS, which really isn’t so bad for Arena, since NCSoft owns them.

I’m actually glad Guild Wars 2 is European; that’s what’s held me to it so long, as quite a few MMOs are Asian in style and content.

GW2 Is American developed. Not European.
And the world of Guild Wars has a full diversity to it already established as Canon since 2005. The theme here should be more global – as that is what is in the Canon.

We’re actually, predominately, in Kryta, which is NOT a Caucasian region… but somehow “became that” in GW2 despite the Ascalonians still being a separate ethnic group from the Krytans. The best ‘earth like’ description for a Krytan would probably be a Polynesian or South Asian – they seemed a hybrid of this originally.

This is…

My number 3 preferred MMO.

Which bothers me because the lore of Guild Wars is my favorite.

At launch I was in here with Vayne defending everything about this game and promoting it here and all over my social media and blogs…

But the game mechanics are not complex enough. They had all the indications at launch that they would be, and that you didn’t need a trinity system to have complex group MMO combat. GW1 even did it with a duality, and they hired a D&D dev: a game that in tabletop had complexity without a trinity since at least 2000, while other table top games have had it since the 1970s… So there is no reason for this failure other than… failure to address what popped up soon after launch as critical bugs in the system allowing people to kitten mechanics, stack, glitch through walls, and so many other things that either were never fixed or took more than a year to fix (like the old CoF wall glitch to skip most of the dungeon).
… They just dropped the ball on patching issues in their system. Leaving combat here “OK”, but not even as dynamic as WoW’s tab target and cycle a rotation system.

They have not been faithful to the lore of their world. They have neglected 2/3rds of the core world, acting as if it doesn’t even exist. In what few nods to the world’s lore we have gotten, its been in stereotyped like references such as they was Shiro is handled for Revenant, or that the only Asian female character in the game thus far is basically the classic “dragon lady” racial stereotype from Hollywood. Makes me darn right scared to see how badly the current team would mess up an NPC from Elona… They’d probably put him in a purple suit with a fedora, a gold cane, and elevator shoes with goldfish inside… They have completely lost the amazing ability they had in GW1 to do diverse cultures filled with individuals rather than stereotypes, and it just frustrates me…
… Its almost as if they have D&D writers doing their lore now… all ethnic stereotypes and no depth…

They have given up on developing good organized small team instanced play… Dungeons. I asked for a citation to this in another thread and need to go back and see if anyone provided it… but even without proof the evidence seems there: no new Dungeons or Fractals in HoT, and old dungeons sitting lately unpatched for their known exploits.
Open world PvE has essentially embraced the same zerg that WvW embraced… WvW got this from, in my opinion, design flaws that made the idea of small tactical units inefficient… PvE has had Zergs from day one, but was only recently actually designed to favor them…
The current model favors playing alone in a crowd… You with a hundred other players you don’t know, don’t talk to, and don’t bother with. If you want to group… you are actually better off staying to pre-HoT and pre-Silverwastes/Drytop content.

But its still up to number 3 because despite the above there are things that I love still in the game, and the play, while simple and easy to master, is catching.

My top two choices would be Wildstar and then FFXIV… But Wildstar, also an NCSoft game, was horribly mismanaged and is now just coming off of lifesupport. If that patient lives is still an unknown. And FFXIV… is just too slow… thanks to supporting console players actions have slow-ups on them and it feels like you’re a “keyboard turner mouse clicking through molasses” when you play it – If FFXIV could survive cutting off its console players it’d be a great game…

I’m sure my list above reads like I hate this place or am trolling it… But I actually do love this game, and am rather constantly coming back and hoping some of my concerns could get addressed and fixed so I could bump GW2 up to the spot in my choices that was once held by GW1.

1. staff is amazingly great if they are up against a wall. You slam them into the wall a half dozen times, and they fall over dead.

But yeah on a ledge – you taking flying lessons.

That said – the more you use it the easier it gets to line up. I stay mobile, run to a side of the mob, and then do it.

Something that is true for both Staff and Mace/Axe wielders of Revenant, but for different reasons – is that the Dungeon meta of stacking really hurts the class. These two types of Revenants need mobility. The staff user wants to be dancing around the mobs to line up #5, the Mace/Axe user needs to be kiting the enemy to get Torment to have maximum effect.

Put these in many a dungeon run where you team wants to stack in a corner, and you’re effectiveness falls through the floor.

Mercurias.1826:

I’m leveling two revs currently. One of them is a Corruption spec with mace and Mallyx. The other is a Salvation spec with Ventari and the staff.

Of the two, the most survivable in prolonged fights is absolutely the Ventari rev.

This is what I felt as well.

I kept trying to find reasons to use any weapon other than staff – but I just keep coming back to that weapon because I find it so amazingly effective.

And likewise my go-to stances are Dwarf and Ventari.

Ventari is just really nice to have around when you find yourself in the middle of a large group of people doing an event. Doing almost any large zone event in HoT content, I end up seeing a couple of tablets moving around the battle map.

Ventari is not a spike up heal, like your typical ‘6 button utility skill’ – its a slow ‘heal over time’ skill – and its burst up on the 7 key, is mild… You use it to keep pressure off your team, not to recover from “oops, I dodged into the fire…”
- Once you master moving it around, its quite effective… but its different.

Playing a Revenant with Staff and Ventari reminds me a bit of playing WoW’s Druid back during their original game and first expansion… I suspect once we get raids in this game, we will want teams that have one staff Revenant and one Druid Ranger. Though the Staff Revenant will probably be on Dragon and not Centaur… If only because Dragon probably needs a nerf…

Conceptually I see no problems with Ventari. If it needs improvement, I would just argue for upping some of the numbers. Give players who have unlocked Dragon a reason to ever use anything other than just Dragon…

As much as I like this new class, I have to agree that they failed us with underwater.

No utility skills at all for the two stances that I consider the core ‘go-to’ stances in the current game’s style… is a serious failing.

As has been noted in many recent threads, the era of Dungeons in GW2 seems to be past. So the whole idea of running around with a pure DPS mentality and no defensive abilities is, IMO, no longer a wise meta. You need some defense and support to handle yourself and keep all those fools around you still wearing zerker from spending 90% of the fight for that zone-event group thingy in the downed state…

As such I’m noticing a LOT of revenants spending the bulk of their time in Dwarf and Centaur. At least until they unlock Dragon. Not so much in Demon and Asian-Guy (because yeah, once again American techies treat us as a stereotype – gone is everything from GW1 that would have made him more).

At the very least… Dwarf and Centaur should have had basic self-heals in the utility area – even if it meant just copy pasting the utils of Demon and Asian-Guy into their stances…

But given how Demon and Asian-Guy basic use their land based util in the water… I see no reason why this could not be copied into Dwarf And Centaur…

Possible challenges exist in how to control moving the tablet, and with laying out the glowing brick road for Dorothy… But don’t we already have some area based utils on other options that work in water?

So I’m baffled as to why this happened. I just have to think this is some major bug in the live code that somehow ArenaNet has not yet noticed… Because the idea that it was intentional seems an epic failure in design…

As noted above – it is likely to prevent cities from emptying out.

One of the major reasons people left MMOs like Wildstar was the perception that people had left… Likewise everytime WoW hits a downward spiral a LOT of it is driven by perception.

But even as Wildstar was emptying out, the “zone” chat channel for the private player housing – which was shared across all houses on a faction – remained buzzing with activity.

Likewise, many people started feeling WoW was empty, when in reality it just had 103% of the playerbase hiding in their Garrisons.

Guild Halls are great – but they need to be done in a way that makes them a temporary spot to visit, for things like guild gatherings, and NOT a place to hang out for hours on end.

As much as we love places to hang out for hours on end… they make the game feel empty and run the risk of creating a panic among people who falsely believe everybody else “quit” the game…

I suspect this is why FFXIV’s housing / guild hall system is not instanced… which resulted in a mile long list of other more severe problems… but at least it left people thinking the game was active…

(In fact, since the reason your epic FFXIV guild, top on the server, already raiding the bosses the devs haven’t even made yet, cannot buy a guild hall, is because they are ALL already sold to solo players that left the game… the place actually looks a LOT more active than it is… :P )

One sign that ArenaNet is thinking about things in terms of this kind of perception is that Lion’s Arch has only one bank and one trading post. The previous version had 73 of each…

Timbersword.9014:

My beefs with GW2 are many, but nit picky in most cases I’ll admit.

Unless you already have a level 80 that has run a few dungeons and don’t mind blowing wads of cash on transmutation stones, low level characters are going to be wearing the same looking garbage for at least 30-40 levels. They could have done with armor what they did with weapons and have had regional themed armors drop instead of the generic looking $#!%, but they didn’t.

Actually they do have themed leveling armor, but most people ignore it. The karma vendors from the low level heart completion – I use some of that gear on my 80s.

And the situation on this point, while I don’t like it either because cosmetics should be something with game coin in my opinion, could be a LOT worse. In FFXIV, you are not allowed to use the transmog system at all until you hit max level…

FFXIV has very limited body sliders, Wildstar has none – so the lack of them here is not all that dated. Its pretty common. Sure I’d like them, but your criticizing it from the wrong angle.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

I expected GW1 with major mmo bling.

On this part I agree. I was hoping for a telling of the world of Guild Wars 1, some 250 years later.

We are still missing 2/3rds of the core world… so they missed the boat on that one, and big. We’re missing Elona and Kaening. And because of how GW1 was done, as 3 stand alone games – these are core places in the lore.

Instead we got things like the Aetherblades and those sky people that… really… make no sense in the lore. It is quite obvious that the people making Guild Wars 2 have very little connection left to the masterminds that brought us Guild Wars 1. If they are physically the same people – something pretty drastic happened in their creative lives over the past decade.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

and social justice warriors..

Your Klan rally is over there —-—→

Seriously I have to wonder, why do bigots so love to use catchphrases that announce themselves all over the internet in places that are NOT radical right wing political websites or hate groups?

Keep that stupidity out please, this is not a political forum.

Why should ‘zerging’ be a protected playstyle that gets more advantages than other playstyles?

To the people who say its unfair to take away the ability to zerg, what about the unfairness the rest of us suffered in the core game from having everything cater to zergs?

Why does the ‘zerg’ playstyle deserve privilege that the rest of us are not entitled to?

Zergers had their day, now others get to play.

Dante.1763:

Im fine with 250, more than happy, and i have 14 alts to get it on.

I have 9 alts. Why do you have the 5 extra? I ran out of classes to make toons for at 9.

I still have 1 unused character slot… so I’m actually curious here rather than critical.

fellyn.5083:

I think they had difficulty balancing them. Which I blame the down level system for. I don’t think the gold rewards had anything to do with it. After the first 2 or 3 times down a path in a day you weren’t getting anything worthwhile.

They had to make all but Arah so that they scaled with different levels and it just wasn’t working. If you went in too early you were going to have a really rough time. And at max level they were face roll easy.

FFXIV and Wildstar both downscale effectively. And City of Heroes figured out scaling both up and down a decade ago (though CoH dungeons broke for another reason – they added vertical progression in a few years later and then waited another 2-3 years to go back and retune the content for it…).

So downscaling is not a new thing. I don’t think it broke GW2 dungeons – they actually downscale fairly decently.

fellyn.5083:

That and they spread themselves too thin with all the living story crap.

This I can agree on. The story writing of that stuff started to get really thin as its pace shot up, and then they backed off to the seasons idea… all other MMOs with similar plans to have super fast paced content drops backed off and decided not to go down that rabbit hole.

Cbomb.4310:

Kichwas.7152:

Where is there a link … to the statement that the Dungeon team was disbanded?

The statement was actually years ago at this point. Its such common knowledge its not something you really need to cite anymore.

Except I am now asking for a cite, because in this game that is only about 2 and a half years old, not “years”, I missed that one. I was not around for the second half of season 1 of living story through to most of season 2…

I recall them actually amping up the dungeon team midway through season 1 of Living Story – the molten dungeon and the karka dungeon and the aetherblade dungeon for example.

So I’d love to see where they actually said this.

Just because you presume something is known, does not excuse making a grand statement without backing it up.

Prototypemind.4026:

And by we, I mean the western players who were the demographic of choice when the game launched. The biggest complaint when Guild Wars 2 hit China was that players burned through the content in no time.

It’s quite possible that we are the scraps. Players made it clear that what’s come with HoT was not what they were wanting from the outset, but we got it anyway. There has been little to no response from Anet about it. Some bought HoT blindly and in general Anet probably got the revenue they were wanting, perhaps just icing on the cake, and they now have a design that will continue to hold up better in the Chinese market in the future. Just a thought that I had. Feel free to add yours.

…

So, multiple stereotyped generalizations all up in there…

A basic lesson: Not everyone in ‘the west’ is like you. Not everyone in ‘the East’ is unlike you, nor even in China.

I actually have all of one complaint about HoT and I don’t see it as a concern met by either of your two stereotypes:

I wanted 8 more dungeons, I got 0.

Otherwise I don’t see any flaws in the way HoT was done.

Ok, from a lore perspective I am annoyed – I want to return to Elona… Elona is what kept me interested in Guild Wars a decade ago. But as to how they did the content that they did… I don’t get your concern at all.

This is the only MMO among those I play that has ever done an expansion with no new dungeons (though one of my MMOs of choice has not had an expansion so we will see if this is a trend or just ArenaNet – but that MMO had a fully voice acted cutscene filled solo scaleable to group dungeon for Halloween that was new this year, so they might be thinking differently than here).

Revenant in Dwarf Stance: Toggle Hammer Time on (your ‘death knight bone shield’ effect) and just walk back and forth in the middle of zergs, then collect your loot.

Revenant in Centaur stance – specc’d to auto regen allies near your tablet: Just press you heal to lay out a tablet, and keep moving it to the middle of the zerg. Then collect your loot.

For weapons:

Hammer for range. Toggle on auto attack on the number 1 skill.

Staff for everything else. When moving use ‘5’ on cooldown to look you’re putting in effort by zipping ahead every so often. Use 4 in combats to heal folks and because it will make you look important.

- Mind you, you can also play these effectively. But the above will ’get you in the pack and able to follow along and actually be useful…

Qugi.2653:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Royal_Guard_Outfit

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/play-for-free-today/

Went away for a few months. Wondered where that outfit came from. I used it on my Asura Revenant before she had exotics I will willing to use transmog on – and kept wondering what I’d done to get it that I couldn’t remember…

It looks really nice on an Asura too.

ReaperStriker.1982:

Why does it say “elite” in the first place when it doesn’t give me the edge in combat, you know like an “elite”, someone on another level?

They were going to call them “Super Dimension Hyper-Galvanizing-Robo-Transformation-X” specializations, and have all toons enter them by floating in the air in a spinning nude-pixelizated scene with a tiara and a scepter…

But the art team was slow on delivering the assets.

Blame the art team.

ragnarokda.1805:

People already get to places they shouldn’t be. And i can’t imagine why it would be that difficult to disable it near a JP. This really isn’t that far fetched. lol

The real problem is people escaping the map. Being able to glide literally right out of the game – where you’ll start seeing things like the edges of the texture files used to decorate the ground, or odd polygons, or things like a sideways slice of a terrain map…

Just google up various posts people have made from assorted games when they manage to find a bug and fall through the world map…

When Blizzard added flying to their old world, they only did it after they remade all the old zones – because they had to go back and fill in all of these spots, and make sure they didn’t have any gaps that players could ‘fall through’…

(and I recall submitting a few bugs about my toon falling through stuff…)