Guild Wars 2

Kain.9167:

Looking at CoF path 1 prepatch – it was a nightmare. If the boss didn’t bug out, which was a big if mind you, the last 25% were impossible, yes I said it, bloody impossible for some groups. That is not fun, that is not fair, and that is reliance on roles which I thought this game was trying not to do. I couldn’t disagree more that people should have to join a guild led by some guy, be forced to deal with their politics and fighting, and have to sign up for dungeon times to be able to run with people on a teamspeak server or something.

If leveling was easy and fun, getting into PvP is easy and fun, crafting comes naturally and is rewarding – why should this one aspect of the game be a huge chore and extremely difficult? It’s a grindfest at best with the number of tokens needed to get a set of full exotics, so why should each run take ages and come with huge repair bills? For flaming armor that has no stats bonuses over any other exotic? No sir. That is stupid and is like the WoW gear treadmill minus the better stats! I am amazed anyone buys into that formula at all because it is INSANELY moronic! You have zero idea what fun is if you think it is running a static, difficult dungeon 100 times over for some digital plate is fun, and you should not be allowed to be on these forums at all. Dungeons need to be doable, rewarding, and not take forever. Like it or not Guild Wars 2 ends at one point or another and cutting people off right when they are starting to have fun because you want 30% more damage on mobs to fulfill you is idiotic.

If you think the cosmetic gear upgrades aren’t worth it, then don’t grind for them! Do each dungeon once just to see the content, and call it a day! This might sound like a rehashed answer, but I really don’t understand why you complain that there is a grind, and then complain that the grind isn’t worth it in the same breath.
I farmed the full CM explorable light armor set because I thought it looked great. The first few runs were very annoying and time-consuming; I thought that any route besides the Seraph route was a complete time-waste because of the rooms with 4958943 mobs and Sure-Shot Seamus. While doing it, I mastered the dungeon literally; worked out best ways to overcome mechanics, pulled better and better, recognized troublesome mobs amongst a pack; I managed to streamline every route to approximately 30 minutes, and guess what? Despite the ‘farm’, every other run was an experience; whether it was watching someone who hadn’t done it before die to spikes in the pillow room as I typed the warning out, ending a run with two people in their underwear, people commenting at the end that that particular run was the best they have ever done, or getting friend requests at the end, dungeon runs don’t always have to be mindless token drones. Take them for what they are: 5 guys doing a tough dungeon together.

Also, yes, Guild Wars 2 does ‘end’ at some point, but ‘when they are starting to have fun’ is debatable. Does that mean you were only just starting to have fun at 80? And no one is being cut off from dungeons because they do 30% less damage to mobs; I don’t really understand your source of frustration at the end of your post.

“anymore” being the key phrase; maybe this popular streamer is what made them think that this isn’t how they want things to go? I mean, they can’t just go to him and take all the karma back, so it’s pretty much what’s done is done.

I only wanted to highlight what they probably wanted to do, and even said so myself that the DR system currently in place feels very forced and unnatural.

As far as I can see, the point of DR is to bring everyone on the same level. They want the guy wandering around the world and/or doing explorables to not have to think ‘ah crap, everyone else was farming, and now I am way behind; gonna have to start farming myself’. Essentially, I believe they don’t want to force people to do something they don’t want to in order to not fall behind; it was probably much more efficient to stay in Orr all day and farm gold/karma for exotics than it was to run dungeons.

It does feel like a rushed solution to what may not even be a real problem, however, and it really is something that I’m surprised they didn’t think about before, if what I think their vision for the game is true.

Shukran: I really didn’t want to make any comment as to whether the class was OP or UP, as I mentioned in my final paragraph. I only want to discuss the mechanics and clear them up, as many people are severely misinformed and making baseless statements. I understand that in small spaces, it is easier to take all shatters to the face if you are stunned or MOA’ed (as you can’t roll), but isn’t that more to the credit of the mesmer player, rather than the class? It might be elementary, but he still needed to summon illusions, cc, shatter, then summon phantasms/weapon swap so that they can do damage while shatter is on CD. I also mentioned that ‘phantasms’ are what need to be killed; you can afford to take an extra condition to take out an important source of dps for the mesmer.
I am in no way, shape, or form, saying that mesmers suck, or can be countered extremely easily. In fact, I feel they do take a lot more work and thinking to kill than other professions, which in other people’s eyes may be the definition of ‘OP’.

As a mesmer, I’ll put in my two cents, and clear up some mechanics. Please correct any errors, but only if you know for sure.
Firstly, mesmers can only have 3 illusions up at one time. When they shatter, they have to walk up to you and explode. Daze doesn’t seem to work as optimally as it should, as sometimes I’ve not even seen the debuff icon come up, but that’s a different issue. The point is, you can see the daze+cripple coming. Mesmers can only cripple when an illusion is killed/shattered (if traited), or with the wall. In other words, the ‘real’ mesmer can NOT unavoidably cripple you.

All illusions do NOT do damage; only phantasms (and staff clones, because they add conditions) deal damage, and these have a 10+ second cooldowns (I can’t remember duelist or swordsman cooldown, but the rest are 10+, warden going to 15-20!). Phantasms look and behave completely different from the real mesmer; the mesmer has no animation resembling any of these phantasms’ animations. these are what you can destroy.
A mesmer cannot daze and damage with shatter at the same time. The daze has no damage, and has a moderate cooldown (15-20). Shatters stack confusion on trait only; single stack per illusion. Note that because of cooldown, every shatter cannot daze you. They can, however, cripple and/or confuse if traited.
You cannot rotate 3 different phantasms. Each weapon set has only 1 phantasm. Offhands and 2 handers produce phantasms. Every phantasm has an AA cooldown of about 4-5 seconds traited, except warden which seems to be attacking far more often than intended, but is PBAOE does not move while doing so.

Also, clones will stand stock-still, and will attempt to attack from maximum range.

Moa morph is very powerful. HOWEVER, there is no slow attached. You can run and LOS as a bird (-.-); mesmers have a stun on signet, stun on OH pistol, crippling wall on OH wall, and crippling-on-shatter illusions that run at base movespeed (you can run away forever). As you can imagine, a mesmer can’t have all of these at the same time, so they have some trouble catching people, so you can run away. Also, the mesmer e cannot move while casting moa, and it has a distinct animation which clones will never do. It can also be roll-dodged. The cast time is 2 seconds, interruptable to put into FULL CD (I have never seen it go into reduced cd), that being 3 minutes.

The mesmer is completely based on mind-games; don’t get suckered into the mesmer’s pace. You need to get a feel for the various tricks a mesmer will try to play with you. I am not saying you will never lose to a mesmer, and that confusing illusion cheese vs 2 mesmers is not incredibly annoying, but I hope that clearing up some mechanics will make it easier to develop counter-play. After a while, when everykitten starts playing mesmer and these bad players give good players ideas as to how they can work around mesmer tricks (like warrior charge as soon as a staff mesmer phase retreats; the clone dies instantly, and the real mesmer will be right there), they will be able to use that against the good mesmer players as well.

The main point people forget is that most of these things are cosmetic. You can easily get exotics crafted, and that’s the BEST gear in the game, fullstop. You can literally uninstall the game, and tell your buddies later that ‘guys pls, when I stopped playing I had the best gear in the game’. All this other stuff is to make your character look better; in other words, there is no need to play any more to catch up to anyone if they release another dungeon, for example. You have essentially ‘finished’ an (MMO)RPG, and the things you mentioned are ‘side quests’. If you don’t like to grind for them (in other words, cannot summon the motivation to do so, thus don’t care about the looks enough), level an alt, take a break, or PVP.

Oh, and about the commander book, I’d expect it to be in the hands of someone part of a w3 guild, who want a member/guild leader to have it and lead people easily, so I would imagine the whole guild pitching in for that.

As far as I know, completing (not starting) the puzzle sometimes makes you find a place (“something discovered”, like a normal place). These count towards the explorer achievements as part of the zone. So, I think that these achievements are what count towards the age in the character select screen.
In other words. discovering all the small areas on the map (including puzzles/secret places) will give you the full achievements, and then 100 (I am not super sure, but I think this is how it works)…

No, it can’t be WvWvW, because he says that it says 100% for him. It also says that for me, but in character select, mousing over the medal is giving me 98% (despite me having the star by my character’s name in-game). I think that the secret areas (jumping puzzles etc) count towards this as well ‘greater’ percentage as well.

I guess you could try relogging then…I remember it being grayed out but not telling me I had a full inventory, thus my suggestion.

Check your inventory space.

I’ve had more trouble with wool than jute, and back then there was no TP either…what I would suggest is salvaging each and everything you get, be it greens, blues, or otherwise useless salvage items. You won’t be rolling in cash as a result, but that’s an active decision you’re making: sacrificing money for crafting. You’ll have enough to repair and waypoint from vendoring junk and event gold. This will pretty much solve your mats problems if you stick with this philosophy, no matter what level (except max level, which is when you’ll be trying to make more money instead of salvaging). As someone mentioned earlier, the bottleneck then becomes fine crafting materials (scales, venom sacs etc).