Guild Wars 2

Etien.4601:

I do feel ya. People who probably left because of solid arguments like yours, made me feel that some of them were right. As you are in this case. For example, some ppl predicted what would become of this game 1 year ago, and today they are totaly right. That’s why from a regular paying customer, I’ve become a casual player. I still hold my breath for “the miracle” to happen, cause this game “has it” It’s like quoting Frankie Wilde “Ibiza is dot dot dot”. Even after this disastrous feature pack I still hold some breath. In the mean time, I got other new games to play.

Thank you for your comments. I agree that at its core this is still a good game and i’m sure many people still find it enjoyable. It is just very upsetting to me to see what I consider such wasted potential so far in its life.

Conncept.7638:

You forgot that they also stated there would be varying methods of obtaining ascended gear released within the same time frame. Still one single method for armor, weapons, and, accessories; even trinkets and rings, which have more than one, are at a whopping two.

This is a good point. I also forgot to add that the scavenget hunt never materialized which your post just reminded me of.

I wanted to comment that ArenaNet has done spectacular communication in the past.
The name? Josh Foreman, the creator of everyone’s favorite release that we can no longer play.

Also, from what I have read, he was actually reprimanded for being so active with the community and is now no longer able to post freely because of it. What’s with this?

Sure, he may have said things that not everyone liked or agreed with, but this is because he is human. As a human and the designer of Super Adventure Box he could not please everyone. But he did listen greatly to feedback and show a passionate human side to the company that I and many players deeply appreciated.

If you want some pointers on how to have a great conversation with us, just go ask Josh. And please, for the love of Trahearne, get him his posting priveleges back.

With the introduction of the upcoming glorious hero’s armor, only the people who win pvp tournaments will have access to this armor set. This means you are restricting an exclusive armor set to less than 1% of your player base.

I initially joined this game because I loved how it was different from other games. You didn’t have to be in the top raiding guilds and schedule your life around raids to get the best looking gear, nor did you have to place top in ‘arena teams’ to get the best looking pvp gear. At the beginning, you could pretty much play how you want and gain xp towards your level or earn loot towards crafting a legendary.

Sure, there were more efficient ways than others to earn coin or xp, but you could still play how you wanted and enjoy knowing you were still working towards a goal.

But now you have chosen to cater an armor set solely to the ‘1%’ crowd that feels they need to show off to the rest of the player base. This means you are excluding 99% of your playerbase from an armor set just so the 1% can feel special.

Quite frankly I thought ArenaNet was above this sort of design. Why did this change?

Ryan.9387:

Please try to understand Smith’s explanation.

If you still don’t think that flipping is beneficial you are clearly incapable or unwilling to understand the economics and should just stop complaining here.

This isn’t about whether or not it is beneficial to the efficiency of the overall game’s economy.

This is about whether or not playing the trading post should be the most profitable means of playing an action-adventure mmorpg video game.

I don’t disagree with John’s statements at all, but whenever I read his posts in response to threads like this, I feel like he always misses the point or the big picture. People are not upset about how well the economy is working. People are upset about Wallstreet Simulator being the most rewarding way to play the game.

That being said, I don’t know that this is John’s responsibility to fix, rather than a game developer/designer.

First of all, thank you all for the great responses and criticisms!

To clarify what I meant by ‘defensive’ build in my first post, I meant having active defense through multiple dodges and passive heals from signet of blood / assassin’s reward. The rest of the build is indeed glassy with some good damage. This explains part of the reason I have difficulty with D/P thieves — if I dodge skillfully I have no problem with defense against every other class in the game. But with thieves, especially D/P thieves, it is much more difficult to avoid attacks with active defense due to stealth and not knowing when an attack is coming. This makes them very frustrating to play against.

I did also want to mention that utilizing black powder and pistol whip’s evade are great ideas as well. I haven’t been utilizing black powder much with my build and often do not think to rely on pistol whip for a defensive evade.

I am not necessarily going for a full on roaming build. I do a lot of siege attack / defense in large groups, and I primarily use shortbow as I have fun playing with it. I only really switch to my secondary set if in a 1v1 situation or when burst is needed. This is also why I have hide in shadows over withdraw because while although I really like withdraw it can be difficult to position myself and use it in a pinch on keep walls and make sure I don’t fall off the side. The stealth from HiS seems really good when in a circumstance when needing to retreat from a zerg as well.

Thank you Vince for posting that video! It was very useful to watch a good dueling video to see some effective tactics. I did not think of using cloak and dagger defensively against a thief that was already stealthed. Do you think if I switched from S/P to S/D this would be an effective tactic to use as well? I like S/D’s gameplay style better as it seems to synergize very well with the evasive maneuvering on the shortbow.

I’ve always felt that the sword skills are very slow and disjointed feeling in comparison to the rest of our weapon sets.

Then I made a ranger that used S/D and fell in love with the skills due to how thief-like they felt. I really wish I could swap those for our S/D skills.

I wanted to know if I could please get some help with my build and / or strategies.

Basically I wanted to make a build with SB + S/P that is very mobile and dodge based. I wanted to be able to dodge around and plink away with the Shortbow, then, if needed or faced with a 1v1, have the secondary weaponset be something I can switch to for a quick burst of damage as Shortbow seems to be lacking in burst.

Here is my build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fZAQNAV8alsMp7plOxzJ0PNhOBt9ACQB4KFdXk4GEA-TlhFwAAuIAG3fU+ZS9nL6GE8EAqqEMAACAX3mH9mH9mBA-w

I seem to do pretty well in sPvP, but whenever I step foot into WvW it always seems like P/D thieves shadowshot up to me for 1k, mug for 1K, heartseeker stealth, then backstab me for 6k, doing over half of my health in damage in literally a matter of seconds. Any attempt to fight back fails due to being blinded and the stealth causing my attack to target a different nearby enemy. By the time I can retarget I am faced with another backstab or a few heartseekers which destroy my remaining health in a matter of seconds as well.

I intended this build to be fairly defensive and I do not seem to have problems with any other class. However, D/P thieves literally kill me in a matter of seconds with me being unable to retaliate in any meaningful manner.

I chose S/P as my off-hand set in my build to switch and pistol whip for sudden burst when needed, but would S/D be better as the dual skill adds more evades? It just seems like it wouldn’t matter because of the black powder field + blind.

Any advice / help is appreciated!

Just logged in to say:

Thank you ArenaNet for capping dailies and monthlies!!!

Now I don’t feel like I will never possibly catch up because of missing a day or two due to work/life. I didn’t feel like the main source of achievement points should be dailies or monthlies anyways.

Enjoyed the video, it was entertaining.

Would be curious to know what build you run — I have a full zerk setup that goes all the way into both precision tree and acrobatics, and I don’t remember sword hitting for as hard as I saw in the video. Though to be fair it has been a while since I have used sword.

What about finally getting carrion ascended trinkets? Been waiting over a year for this one in what I could imagine to be only a few lines of code copy / pasta.

I remember an anet rep stated on the forums that they would come with the “next update to ascended gear” nearly a year ago. While it is true that the ascended weapon and armor update allows carrion, the trinkets never got added.

1. Thief
2. Ranger
3. Necromancer

I think across the board though the medium armor classes in general feel like the red-headed step children of the game.

Spicyhash.7605:

http://i.imgur.com/qonvcYw.jpg

Oh, so you went to the ninja parade too? I go every year to not see the ninjas!

Thanks for the replies, these are all helpful!

So you are saying that p/p just looks like better single target dps than shortbow, but actually isn’t?

Hi fellow thieves,

So I am struggling to decide what weapons to use for my build. I run full berserk gear, and definitely know I want to use a shortbow — but I am unsure what to use for my second weapon.

I was considering using P/P as I have always loved the set. Shortbow does great AoE damage, so I need something that does great single target damage in case I need to burst down an individual target.

I was thinking that P/P is supposed to be geared towards single target dps with unload, but after using it for some time I can’t actually tell if it is really better than shortbow. The auto-attack is slow and is half cond, and when I use unload it feels like targets go down at roughly the same speed as just using shortbow auto-attack or cluster bomb.

Am I just incorrectly perceiving this, or is it really the case that shortbow does both better AoE and single target damage? I feel like I should just carry d/d around instead, but I like the idea of P/P better and would prefer to stay at range due to squishy-ness.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

I agree, but to be ever-so-slightly more specific than the OP…

-We could use more minigames. Not just PvP minigames, but possible PvE minigames. A vanilla example could be – - holding a fort against waves of pve mobs. scavenging loot / items to build barricades and siege weaponry or turrets to help fend them off. Loot chest at the end / progress working towards a unique item or aesthetic gear set specific to that minigame.

-We could use houses — something the player could build, customize, show off achievements in, and sink money into. I would love to be able to design my own home and waste all of my gold in it, it would be fun and help the economy.

-We could use just more non-combat oriented content in general. Maybe new skills — fishing, carpentry to make house items, or even reworking existing skills.

-We could use player-owned shops. Nothing fancy, maybe just a little stand you can setup and players can browse it to see all of your listings you have on the TP. You can support specific players on your server that way.

I don’t know, just some ideas. I would really love to have some form of meaningful progression and content that is not combat-oriented for once. It doesn’t have to have combat to be fun.

I currently play a very similar build.

In solo PvE, it is pretty effective.

In open world PvE such as world events, it is pretty useless as the bleed cap is hit quickly and minimizes your dps.

In dungeon PvE, it is ‘ok’, but not as good as other sets as the majority of enemies will die before your full bleed duration can go through.

In sPvP, it is decent for holding a capture point, but pretty bad everywhere else — most classes have plenty of condition removal, and some even have passive condition removal, completely removing all of your dps.

In WvW, it is pretty much useless, as death blossoming into a zerg is just asking for death, and the pistol only has the short 900 range.

These are my thoughts, which are of course subjective.

LOL @ that second pic.

“I wear shoulder pads the size of my torso, kitten kitten .”

Wow, thanks for posting this. While although the changes may not be popular, I respect that you posted this thread as an open forum discussing why such changes were made.

Also, @Chris and Anet.

For what it’s worth, Guild Wars is the only MMO I’ve ever played where I actively see changes based on community request, discussions with the community, and company staff actively playing the game.

So while although some of my prior posts may have been critical, it is because I care about the game, and I want you to know that the efforts you have made are appreciated.

Finnway.2183:

Faowri.4159:

I feel pressured to complete the achievements ASAP so I can get on with the content I would rather be playing,

This summarizes how I feel about achievements in the living story.

I think there should be less achievements (like 5-6) for the meta, and have a separate achievement category for doing LS dailies to earn a bi-weekly chest (just of like dailies and monthlies). This way, players who like to grind will still be rewarded, and players who only have 5 hours to spend can still complete the meta.

I totally agree with this. This way achievement grinders can still have lots of achievements to earn, and people with less time to play can still get involved and earn the limited-time rewards without feeling rushed and pressured.

I’m not sure I can call this discussion ‘collaborative’ if mid-way through the thread a dev says cadence is non-negotiable.

Spent roughly around 400G in the forge, using all level 80 rares. No precursor, probably about 15 exotics, highest valued one being around 10G.

I really hate the Living World concept on many levels.

Firstly, as a player with a busy life, every 2 weeks I log on and see new content that I feel I must stress out about where I am going to fit the time into my schedule to complete the achievements required for the event. This is because I know if I don’t in this short timespan, I will never be able to see the content again and will have missed out, and also that I will never be able to acquire the items that are given as a reward for it.

This actually ends up discouraging me from playing the game. I was sold on this game on the idea that it is not a p2p and I can pick it up and play it for a couple of hours for one evening and enjoy the content and feel like I accomplished something and still be able to put it back down and pick it up from where I left off in the near future.

However, I know that if I log in for an hour and do a few Living World achievements, all progress will have been meaningless and lost if I do not get them done within that time frame. Constantly I am tempted to just throw in the towel and quit the game as I do not enjoy being left behind by all of the content and never being able to get those items ever again just because I do not have a life that allows me to play more frequently.

Secondly, I have friends that played this game in the beginning that took a break. They ask me about all of the things that have been added since they left — I tell them about it, but then tell them that it was all temporary and they will never get to see any of this awesome content. And that if they were to start today, almost the only new content they would see is whatever is current. This discourages them from even picking the game back up.

Thirdly, I do not feel the storyline for the ‘Living Story’ has been meaningful or connected enough to justify it all being temporary. I do not see why you could not leave the dungeons, quests, achievements, etc. in the game. If it is a timeline problem then require them to be done in a certain order. But thus far, the connection has been loose at best. (E.G. Molten Alliance and Aetherblades randomly and rather unbelievably siding with Scarlet).

Lastly, I feel you do your game developers a great disservice with the concept as a whole. Who would truly be motivated to spend weeks — even months — on great works of art and design, when they know that it will all be discarded after 2-4 weeks and never be seen again? This is a tragedy that you expect your devs to commit to this, and you should not be surprised if they do not seem to be motivated to tap into their full potential and create a masterpiece.

Even though the rest of the game was pretty terrible, I really loved the player housing system in Runescape and think it would be awesome and great fun if they could do something similar in guild wars.

Even though it may not be considered something important, I strongly believe a good variety of environment-based music is needed for truly great immersion in MMOs. I also feel GW2 is greatly lacking in this department.

The music in this game is decent, but there just isn’t enough of it. In that other mmo which cannot be mentioned, every zone had it’s own music that fit the theme of the zone.

Dark scary zone? Dark scary music. Grand epic city? Grand epic music.

Just the other day I heard the music from that other mmo, and I was instantly reminded of the feeling of being in that zone it played in.

Yet I get no such feeling from GW2.

Anyone else agree/disagree?

Galtrix.7369:

Berelious.3290:

Nike.2631:

Will people STOP THROWING AROUND THE WORD ‘PROMISE’. Please? They just said ‘we will have all the stat combos’. Its not a marriage agreement. Its not a binding contract. Its a conversation.

In this case its almost certainly a bug. One of about 420 introduced in this patch (a.k.a. about par for the course). Report it in the bug forums and give them a day or two to fix it.

Not only this, but I don’t seem to recall them giving an actual time frame for WHEN they’d be adding it. Don’t jump to conclusions.

My goodness. You’re actually defending a company that said this would be added. No, they did not give a time frame, but Carrion Ascended is something that should’ve been released along with all the other ascended equipment. Failure to do so would obviously result in a backlash of angry customers, and it has resulted that way. It’s getting tiring seeing all of the white knights defending Anet from criticism they need to hear, and frankly, your defense does not help improve this game one bit. 6 months is unacceptable and it shouldn’t take more than a week at most to implement. There is no excuse as to why this hasn’t been implemented yet.

Exactly this. It should have been implemented from the beginning. It shouldn’t take a year to add.

And for the record, the last official post was that they would be added ‘in the next batch’ of ascended — yet, we got the weapons batch, but the carrion/other stat trinkets were not added. Hence the thread.

Maesk.8753:

Here’s an idea! Take the bleeding from DB, and put it on unload. And then, are you ready for this? You take the damage from unload and you put it on DB.

Now you have one full power set, and one full condi set.

This would make logical sense.

Then again, it would also make logical sense for them to have Carrion Ascended Trinkets for us, but they have not after a year.

Sadly still no word on when / if this will ever be resolved.

I would love to have an area in-game like a giant library that contains these stories and a timeline of events that have occured in the Living Story so that we may view and read about what has happened in the past for the years going forward.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Reading how adamant some players are about this makes me curious: do a lot of you actually run the exact same stat combo on 100% of your equipment?(or in this case, wish that you could?)

You can reach very similar total stats by combining several types, usually leading to much more well-rounded builds.

Yes, I do use carrion on all of my equipment. As a condition d/d deathblossom thief — precision is not useful as conditions don’t crit, toughness is not so useful due to our low health pool, healing isn’t so useful as we are limited in heals — but power, vitality, cond damage hit our needed stats perfectly.

Bump for more opinions please

I hate raids because they require you to schedule your life around the game.

If a system like WoW’s LFR was added, I would be ok with it. But not if it was implemented in exactly the same way, as WoW penalizes you by giving you worse gear for using that system instead of committing your life to making a schedule for raids.

This is how I feel. Except, that XMas never came at all.

My class and build benefits most from Carrion gear. Ascended Carrion accessories do not exist.

So here I site, with 150+ laurels, waiting over 7 months for them to add something which would take 5 minutes to do.

I’ve always felt ArenaNet’s participation both in-forum and in-game was leagues better than that of any other game company I have seen.

That being said, would you please stop posting things exclusively to stupid social media sites and actually add them to your official site or forums as well?

Thanks! ^.^

Something that happened to me personally that may be impacting you —

I had the frame limiter set to 60fps to prevent unecessary use of resources after that. I usually didn’t get close to 60 though and typically got 35-40 fps.

The other day I turned off the frame limiter, and started getting 55-60 fps. So even though I was getting below 60, it seems to have been limiting how much fps I was getting even below that.

Nothing for returning players.

They have indeed created a lot of content since you left. But it was all temporary and removed after 2-4 weeks. And those who missed it will never be able to play it again.

This dead horse needs beating.

I play a dd/pp death blossom bleed thief. I know it’s not the most effective set altogether, but it is the one I have the most fun with so I try to optimize it as best I can.

Except that it has been a year now and Anet still has not released Carrion ascended accessories, despite them saying on the forums that the last ascended release would include them.

Which brings me to this point: I have over 150 laurels, and I am tired of just watching them sit there and rot. I have been considering keeping the rest of my gear Carrion and buying all Berserk accessories.

It would decrease the dps output of my death blossom, caltrops, and pistol auto attack — but it would increase dps of dagger auto attack, heartseeker, and unload.

I wanted some opinions on whether or not this would be more effective than just keeping Exotic Carrion, or if I should just say the heck with it and blow it all on the endless cat tonic.

I actually made my first toons on Devona’s Rest.

After leveling to 80 and spending several months on it — someone suggested I try guesting to Tarnished Coast.

Lo and behold on TC there were hundreds of players EVERYWHERE! This was during the southsun event, and I had so much fun playing the events with so many people.

Then, I went back to Devona’s Rest, and it was a ghost town.

A month later when the slot came open I bought the gems to transfer to TC. Goodbye Devona’s Rest

Yep. Done it 6 times, each time been in overflow. And each time gotten absolutely zero loot. No point in wasting the time if you don’t even get any loot for being there.

Long Levels

Instakill darts

I still enjoy SAB. I really love the idea and the art and design quite a lot.

But I must honestly say world 2 was not fun for me. The main thing was the instakill darts and having to run through 4 floors of them in that one dojo — then having to run with the gong out of it, too. One failure meant doing it all over again, and it felt more like sadism rather than fun level design. It was at that point I threw in the towel and don’t feel like going back.

I’ve done it before, but I just can’t see doing it again. I would be maybe ok with it if it was just 2 floors of them even, but to have 4 where making one slight mistake makes you start all over is just infuriating.

Very unhappy with this. But also not unexpected.

I feel then it would be more transparent to call this client a makeshift or hobby client, rather than a ‘Beta’ client.

Beta seems to imply it is something that will get past this stage into an improved final release. Well, as we can see, that is not the case, at least not in the near-future.

I’ve already given up on the client. I would love to be able to play it on mac os, but in bootcamp I get consistently 30 fps more on even higher settings.

I’m glad to see that you are considering reworking one of the pistol main-hand skills for thief.

While although that is important, I personally feel it would be more important to focus on improving balance and usefulness of pistol/pistol for thief. It is fun to use, but it is very lackluster and does not synergize very well. It has no access to stealth on its own from weapon skills, and thus the sneak attack is not very useful.

For a Thief, having main d/p and secondary p/d synergizes very well together. I think it would be great and encourage diversity if p/p also synergized well with d/d. Perhaps by changing unload to some form of condition-based attach to match d/d’s deathblossom which is condition based.

As it is now, the main auto-attack for P/P is condition-based, but the dual skill unload is not. Changing it to be condition-based would be more consistent and useful rather than being mediocre at either #1 or #3 or both.

Just my 2 cents

I can’t really say I understand the argumentative nature of some of these responses of this thread. Picking apart semantics of the title, etc.

As just posted by Eredeliel, the Dev stated that they would be sure to have Carrion and Valkyrie added in the next batch of Ascended — referring to the trinkets and amulets as that was all we had at the time of the discussion well over 6 months ago.

Having these stats added to the ascended trinket list would be only beneficial to the players and I fail to see why one would argue against or dismiss it.

While although I disagree with many of the design decisions in World 2 of SAB, I just wanted to give a shoutout and kudos for listening to player feedback and making changes accordingly.

Many times I have played games from other companies, and content will be either very imbalanced or improperly designed to the point of causing player uproar — and yet, these companies, will go months on end without ever addressing it, or even replying to the feedback whatsoever. There are games I used to play and quit 2 years ago, and I return to those forums and still see the same complaints yet complete silence from the company.

So, for what it’s worth, thank you SAB Dev team for re-balancing some of the SAB and listening to feedback.! :-)

They did indeed add it to the weapons, this makes it even more unlikely that they do not want the player base to have access to these stats. But then, why do the trinkets still not exist?