Guild Wars 2

Faaris.8013:

MLinni.6109:

In my eyes hordes of botters/cheaters which I witness reduce the value and enjoyment of a game since I believe that to get a reward of any kind, you should play a game.

Where are you playing? I’m at 92% world completion and play in all areas of the world, and only saw berry-necros and pony-engis, and only the latter could be called a “horde”. Maybe you are really looking hard and mistake people who are just afk without farming for "hordes of botters/cheaters.

There are no hordes of botters and cheaters in this game, otherwise people would notice them, right?

Maybe a better question: when do you play? It’s quite possible that those hordes storm the world while I’m asleep. I live in Germany.

So do I But I do like to run around the new zones a lot, and the worst spots for those are indeed Bitterfrost (running around one circle for berries yields AT LEAST 15 afk “farmers” using Necro GS4 on autocast or the ranger torch AoE skill).
Other areas which I frequent are Lake Doric and also a well “frequented” spot is Dry Top.
It is very disheartening to see the same people there for weeks leading to my assumptions that they’re at it sometimes near 24/7.

Another negative consequence of such behaviour is that it may lead to negative QoL changes or even nerfs for classes.
We cannot fix the AFK problem? Uuuuuhhh……let’s let necro pets simply die after a while, they can’t resummon them….if they’re not botting with scripts….yeah.
Or autoloot might go the way of the dodo. Or monsters might not drop any loot for you unless you moved 5 meters from your last loot leading to decreased drops for honest players. Or…..people gain karma via the zone infusions? Why not nerf that rate for everyone so afk farming is less lucrative?

Mavis.1463:

the problem with afk farming is that there is no problem with afk farming

farmers, afk or not, fill a niche in the game economy
most whiny kittens here interpret (afk) farming as a problem and that’s fine, it’s their opinion
objectively, loot drops obtained from regular gameplay aren’t enough to maintain reasonable prices in the trading post, point in case: leather mats

here come farmers, who alleviate the kittened prices by filling the demand for x material

i guess most of these sycophants defending anet would rather spend real money in gems to skip the grind

Oh yes, the very very old “But botters/cheaters/exploiters are actually helpful because they reduce prices!” argument.
Ok, let’s say they have an economic impact to actually affect prices by a noticable margin. What that means is that they’re devalueing all the stuff you have in your bank and are the only ones to actually get gold from it.
What ANET SHOULD do in my opinion is banning those people in droves. But that would require actual manpower (which costs money) and is difficult to verify.

Cue 10000 “Waaah, I just went to the toilet for 5 minutes and just idled on my necro/ranger in some event area and now I’m banned!” posts everywhere.
ANET has said on the forums that AFK farming in that combination with skills on autocast is cheating (and no, I won’t look up the post).

But you can only report so many cheaters before you get tired of the game.
“But you could chill and ignore them!”. Well, suppose I could. In my eyes hordes of botters/cheaters which I witness reduce the value and enjoyment of a game since I believe that to get a reward of any kind, you should play a game. Stuff like that should happen in some low quality asian grinder MMO but not in our game.

While mystic coins are very hard to obtain and only in very limited quantites mostly via login rewards, ectos can at least be freely obtain about everywhere. Even if you need 250 or 500 for a legendary, you can get there at your pace.

They did change it once before, that’s true. Also I’ve seen that the sound sometimes disappears when there’s a lot of people around. Sadly the number of people in a dungeon or fractal is NOT enough to suppress it
Also it would be nice if the only solution to the problem was not to tell other players to turn down one of the volume channels. Some people do love their sound

Hi!

Could you please reduce the whinnying of the Dreamer somewhat? I’m even catching flak from my guild mates, and as far as I remember, even Gaile has been yelled at before. It is such a beautiful weapon, it would do to reduce the whinnying to perhaps every 20th shot or wielding, it doesn’t have to be with every shot during auto fire.
As it stands, it is very much a troll weapon, and it would be nice to be able to use it in normal grouping without being annoying.

Thanks a lot.

I also loved to finally have a build where you could play a “pet necromancer” without the totally useless utility pets. But people abuse healing horrors in raids and BAM nerfed to crap.
Thanks a lot, balance team, you really sucked the joy out of my necromancer.
I’m HIGHLY disappointed with that patch. And now it’s waiting for 2-3 months at least until something might get fixed. Yay.
What I’d suggest as a fix would be making the Mark of Horrors its own elite skill like mentioned above with a much much shorter cooldown. And the horrors should last at LEAST a full minute. 30s with 5 horrors on a 3 minute cooldown is completely subpar.
“We feel necromancer is in a pretty good spot.” – Bug fixed.

First of all, I agree with MatthewGuba that it is a very disrespectful post. Not everything in life which you don’t like “sucks” or “blows” or is even of low quality. Real people develop that content and are putting their hearts into it. Please be a bit more considerate.

Marthew.6140:

… But to make people play WvW and PvP in order to make one is absolute garbage. I HATE WvW and your PvP system has a lot not going for it. If you don’t want to play either you can drop a buttload of gold down for the missing items which in turn pretty much means you punish players that don’t want to partake in every aspect of your game….

But isn’t that how ANY crafting works? You don’t have the materials? You’ll have to buy them, regardless where anything is coming from. If I for example would hate PvE, I would have to buy a ton of stuff with gold. And the stuff you need from PvP and WvW is miniscule in cost compared to the rest. Even the gift of battle can be easily obtained by doing non combative WvW dailies like Big Spender or Master of Monuments for a few weeks.

Also you’ve failed to provide an alternative legendary crafting process. Even if legendaries would need NO materials to craft and just “legendary deeds” or whatever, they’ll have to be situated in one game mode. If it was “Slay the Legendary World Boss”, PvP and WvW only players would complain having to do “content they hated to do.”
You CANNOT get around that in my opinion.

The commander did NOT “roll with it”. S/he told Lazarus to get lost, then Marjory jumped onto the idea and latched onto Lazarus for whatever necromantic reason she had, even being all “you’re not the boss of me!” to the commander when s/he objects.

I still believe Lazarus is harboring ulterior motives. A magical race probably needs some backup when magic eating dragons are around so he offers at least a reasonable explanation.
He DID talk about “higher goals” already when Caudecus was involved. Perhaps he’s collecting magical energy to revive his people somehow and needs the stored energies of the dragons to get closer to acquire the needed power to pull it off.

The art team has done such a wonderful job with the legendary reworks. Kudos. The new bowstring of The Dreamer and the new footfalls and arm/draw effects of The Minstrel are very awesome to watch.

It would be nice though if The Dreamer’s whinnying would restricted a bit to play only for every 10th shot or when drawn. Then it would be perfect. Just not during every shot

Thank you SO much! Very well done!

It probably depends on luck if you happen on the wrong people who only slavishly adhere to the “recommended” section of Metabattle.
While I can see the problems of both “n00bs” and “elitists” (exaggerating both extremes), I think the problem mostly stems from the conflicting design goals of ANET.

Most “elitists” would probably take more people along if there wasn’t a hard cap on time.
I do remember the mic drop thing in the HoT developers’ video announcing “the berserker meta to be dead”. But then they design encounters where you are pressed for time and thus HAVE to bring the party compositions which crank out the most ye olde DPS or fail.
What do these guys want really? Unless they’re sure what direction they want to build in, I guess the controversy like this will never be able to be resolved.

I have never seen many people at crafting stations at a time, yet a ton of people idling out the reward track until participation drops to 0%.
I cannot see that loss of convenience as anything other than “buy airship/pavillion passes, plz.” If borderland queues are really the problem, please add crafting stations to the EOTM entrances. No problem with queuing there.

In my opinion changeable runes should not be a functionality of the legendary armors. They already get enough with stats swapping. Why not let JEWELERS craft legendary runes and sigils which can be changed on the fly?
Jewelers need something nice to craft at 500 anyway, and this way exotic and ascended armor wearers could benefit as well.

Mostly the lore and stories.

I am not a fan of raids, but several factors in their presentation have made me hate and detest them.
While I acknowledge the great work the developers have done on them both art wise and mechanics wise I believe their introduction like it has been to be full of glaring errors.

- Legendary armor and hiding it behind raids:
In my opinion the option to switch stats is vital to be able to enjoy different builds on the fly. So I have my berserker armor and an interesting condi build appeals to me? Nah, too much work to make another armor set.
Give raiders exclusive skins but not exclusive functionality! Let them their glowy armors of ultimate archievement. But do introduce alternate ways to gain legendary armor, be they horribly grindy.
Reading that the original plan for the fractal backpieces was to lock the final stage behind a leaderboard was dropped due to “time constraints” is at least an indication that the developers have realized that this would have been yet another kittenstorm waiting to happen and they hurriedly backpedaled.

- Story, missing out on lore:
GW2 has always been a lore intensive game. There is a lot of players (like me) who hungrily devour every bit of story thrown at them. Hiding story bits behind activities where the target audience is usually not known for being interested in lore AT ALL but more in bragging rights (“LOL! WORLD FIRST!”) is one of the worst kicks to the shin for me.

- Timing of the raid releases:
Considering I am not interested in PvP and only play WvW and PvE it has been a long time since any meaningful general population PvE releases. I have maxed out on all the HoT masteries, I am not getting XP for anything, I have played each HoT meta event and all event chains several times and finished the story on a lot of alts and unlocked all elite specializations? Now what? And the solution to this problem should not be: “Just take a break for a few months, you are clearly burnt out.” I am not. I like to play GW2.

- Finally: Do we need 10 people raids?
In my opinion, no we don’t. What we do need in my opinion is variable scaling activities. I would like to see such instances for 3-10 people. Especially in small guilds with varying attendance you often happen upon 6 people on at the same time. Now what? The current solution is one unhappy person dropping out. He barely logs in anymore.
There should be dungeon and raid instances which can encompass a wide variety of player numbers. Of course this would require developers to put a bit of work into the old dungeons and new raids. But I would think it would hit a huge demand for scaling stuff.
Also the action oriented and SFX rich game of GW2 doesn’t lend itself well to a tactical 10 player game anyway in my opinion. I doubt there’s much more depth possible than with 5.

Imo the easiest solution for the closing adventures would be putting them into different small instanced areas. Sure, you would lose out on map participation, but that would by far not be as annoying than being kicked out from or having to wait for adventures opening. They could be open all the time.
Of course it would require some dev work to create all the instances.

What many people are totally forgetting is that skills have cast time delays. So even if the CD reduction of alacrity was 10000% it wouldn’t be a 10000% damage increase. That’s why that “Mesmers increase everyone’s DPS by 66%” is a horrible oversimplification anyways.
You can only use so many skills in a given time regardless of your cooldown.

In my opinion raids are not a good idea in many ways. I suspect them and even the term “raid” were chosen to skim some players from the hordes of leaving WoW players.
The chaotic action based combat system of GW2 does not lend itself well to larger groups of people where it is often difficult to spot any tells in the myriad of effects. And no, I’m not asking for further visual nerfs, thank you very much.

Raids are a type of content not many people do get to experience, be it from not being in large guilds, having only exotic armors, playing unwanted classes or preferring to play with friends who “suck” according to elitists. Even the larger guilds I’m part of nearly never get any raids together.

Considering the limited resources for new content I consider raids to be a collossal waste of dev time. While it may be financially sound and really attract the most new players I certainly hope that the development focus will shift in the near future and stuff like raids will be abandoned for things most people can enjoy.

I do not mind some skins and shinies hidden behind raids. What I do mind is the functionality of legendary armors, being able to switch stats. Sure, give raiders a nice unique legendary armor, but also introduce others for PvE and PvP players which can be obtained in other ways.

One of the worst things for build diversity in GW2 is not being able to switch from a power to say a condi build because most people cannot really be expected to have two sets of ascended armors, especially not now.

Yes, it can be a bit frustrating. I needed like 70-80 corals until I had my 10 vials. Mostly there is only 1 coral node per lake in the 50+ zones. But I did find 4 nodes around the POI south of Old Sledge Site WP. There’s always 4 per character, though their location changes each hour apparently. Swim in a spiral pattern with the POI at the center and you should find them on each character you bring.

Regarding the Shatterer: Bring a high toughness character, I’ve read they get targetted more often by that attack. I stood close to its right foot between its legs and moved a bit under it when it did its purple lightning storm attackittenpt taking damage, was encased.

Good luck with your collection!

Yes, there’s a bug with the ordering of the paths in the archievements. You have to do path 3 with the destroyer and you’ll get the archievement for path 1 (Fergg). A guildie had the same problem.

Would be nice if the sound didn’t fire during EACH auto attack. Perhaps when unsheathing or very rarely.
I do love the new graphics effects though. Very well done!

Yes indeed. My favorite classes are mesmer and elementalist. The fireballs have lost so much volume that they barely look like attacks. The mesmer phantasms are looking very much faded, the wells barely noticable depending on the ground you place them on.

Please PLEASE make an option to revert the changes back for personal use of powers at least. GW2 for me is so much about look and character style and powers that it’s a serious detriment from the game for me.

Indeed, I’ve always loved exploring the world you have provided for us.
HoT has a TON of new mechanics, movement, new classes, innovative new story missions.
I’m loving every moment of it. Thanks for reducing the requirements for the elite specializations a bit so I can finally play them at least with my world completion characters

I highly doubt this is a bug.
“/me would like you to buy tons of gold from my stupid gold seller service!!!!11!”, anyone?
If you have to keep those guys from map chat, you also have to keep them from emotes.
Perhaps it might be nice to allow it in secluded areas like home instances to help F2P roleplayers.

Edgar, I disagree with you when you compare being in a small guild to “does not like to play with others in an MMO”. I PUG with peoples everyday, but being in a 500 person guild would be no different than shouting “LFG!” in the LA town square.

Nobody (at least not me) is asking to dumb down any content. But even in multiplayer games there are people who are shy or introverted. If they don’t want to be in a big guild, why not let them play the game as they want.

The personal story was changed because it well….is supposed to be personal, and while I can choose to have friends accompagny me, I should be able to do it alone if I’d so choose. And no, I usually do these with other people as well

I also prefer the new specializations system over the old trait system.
You aren’t forced to unlock each trait for each character now by hunting down the end of event chains which rare ever happen. You actually get GM traits before level 80 now!

A couple of guildies and I are leveling a group of characters, and it was SUCH a change suddenly having traits. Before I could not even get any traits short of buying them because noone wanted to go out of their ways to unlock one certain trait.
IMO it was a vital change to reinvigorate the game as a whole. I cannot stress this enough.

Kudos to the devs here, this will bring me back to leveling a ton of alts!

Small guild here as well, I guess at most we could muster 10 people. Yet we have been friends mostly for 8+ years. To be able to claim our own guild hall with our own hands even if it takes hours would be an awesome personal thing without having to ask for external help.

And does small guilds being able to claim a guild hall really detract from a 500 person guild’s enjoyment of zerging over everything?
The current guild system already shafts small guilds. We are only able to do Guild Bounty Hunt trainings so we are not able to gain merits. With all people on with have once done a Guild Bounty Tier 1.
Why are activities like Guild Rush which is just some people rushing over a course limited to big guilds?
We are not asking for free handouts, we are willing to put in as much effort if not more than big guilds.
Words like “then join a bigger guild!” or “just invite more people!” or “you shouldn’t be able to get anything at all!” make me sick to my core. Let’s leave guild halls out of that competitive mindset please. We are not 1337 3l173 r41d1ng guilds here with “world first guild halls”.

The current trait system forces people to waste 20-30 hours to get all traits or a ton of skill points and gold to buy everything.
How can anyone say the upcoming system will be worse? 95% of level 80 characters will probably have been leveled in the open world and will probably have close to enough “hero” points to unlock everything instantly.
In the current system you have to bear with unlocking each trait on EACH character. I have totally stopped leveling characters since it was introduced. The new system will be very altist friendly.
And if you’re one of the 5% of “Duh, I level my character in EoTM only by running in a circle for hundreds of hours.” characters, is it really that bad to spend perhaps two hours to get those hero points and never have to bother with them again?
What would interest me the most though is when you get to unlock traits/lines. The move from 10→30, 40→60, 60→80 in trait tiers was one of the worst changes of last year in my opinion.

My biggest problems with the NPE are changing the story to full ten level blocks.
Getting a new story every 2-3 levels really used to break up the hearts and events monotony when you were doing the same level content on your tenth character.

It also REALLY hurts groups leveling characters together. When we’re done with a full block of stories, nobody wants to do hearts for the like 7-8 remaining levels.
It’s usually “Let’s just do an Ascalon Catacombs and quit.” See you next week.

Also the early stories really used to get people invested in the story. Hey, I’ll just create an Asura to show you the wacky ideas they come up at a science fair. Actually, now I don’t. People get thrown into the world and have to run around for hours aimlessly before the story even starts.
This is not what I understand as ‘newbie friendly’.

Also, I cannot understand why some of the colorful starter hearts were destroyed. Feeding cows, dousing fires, golem chess, those always served as an example when I got new people into the game: You don’t have to kill X centaurs to finish a quest. Except you now have to more than at release. This makes me really, really sad.

And finally, of course, traits. Exploring traits in classes and experimenting with builds always used to be a highlight when leveling. Level 60 gave you Grandmaster traits which really opened up the pinnacle of classes. Not anymore.
With traits moved to 30, 60, 80, I got bored of my engineer before I ever got to test out what that profession might be capable of. Nowadays he sadly sits on a Jumping Puzzle chest, forgotten and shelved.

I must say the new Moot effects are really awesome
The dancing lights, the added brightness and shiny really stand out.
Really well done, arts team!

It could use a few more effects. Making the notes more visible would be a start, they’re mostly invisible in a lot of lighting scenarios. Also the dirty green gold frame would be so much better in the illumination or some neutral metallic color.

I would really appreciate a little change in the AP system so you wouldn’t be forced to take set parts you don’t want as well. Now we have more items to get, so one every 3K would be really really appreciated.
To avoid people who have already reached 12+K AP being shafted, the chosen items so far could be reset.

I have to agree. Content as awesome as the Molten Weapons Facility should be a permanent addition to the game. Even if the Molten Alliance will be wiped out sooner or later, a few of them might always try to ….rekindle…. their efforts to make everyone’s lives a molten hell.
Change the dialogue of Braham and Rox in the beginning a bit so they work out of the F&F context and they’ll be Molten Facility destroyers forever.
I certainly don’t hope to see a condensed version of this dungeon as a fractal. It’s too good on its own. And two weeks for all the developer effort are a waste of all that time.

Norn are mostly solitary people. If you remember GW1 there’s rarely more than a few in a hamlet in the wilderness.
Also the background story they posted on the GW2 webpage sheds a different light on their relationship. Braham’s dying father expressively forbids his son telling Eir about his death because having to care for Braham might distract her from a bigger destiny (i.e. killing Zhaitan). Eir clearly left Braham in his father’s care to pursue the quest to liberate Tyria from the dragons.
For a norn, being immortalised in song and story is more important than being alive. Also Eir clearly worries about Braham (you can see that in the cutscenes at Hoelbrak when talking to Knut Whitebear before and after the mission).
Norn culture emphasizes independence, so most norn who are able to be adventurers won’t stay at home but set out and make a name for themselves. On the negative side, it usually makes them hesistant to seek aid when they need it.
It certainly does not make Eir a bad mother. Even if norns seem to be “big humans”, you cannot compare their norms to ours.

What I like about dungeons is seeing the reactions of friends who experience the content for the first time. Since we have a few new people in our guild, the whole experience of running a dungeon is so much magnified by running it with other people.
I even PUGged a few runs, and people were nice and relaxed. Give it a try! What’s the point of having experiences like this if you don’t share them?
“Uh, Zhaitan? Sure, killed him by my lil’ lonesome. Next on my list is Jormag. He’ll fall to my mighty blade.”…. Yay.
What I dislike a bit is the missing scaling. Every dungeon HAS to be 5 people. If you wind up with 6 people on an evening, one person has to be left out in the cold. But having a range on dungeons (like 3-7 players) would be an awesome addition.

I really had fun in this new dungeon, it’s so frantic and wild and you’re always kept on your toes. Also it included new mechanics like jumping over shockwaves. It showed a lot inspiration and was very exciting.
If you HAVE to remove it, please reintroduce it as a kind of “Flashback Mode” in a later update. Kudos to the developers.