Yes, I have pretty much the same thing going on my mes – anything flashy or mystical looking – nothing uncommon there but it works really well with the bio-luminescence.
My warrior, who I play as the polar opposite of my sylvari mes is now done with GS CoF-farmfests is moving back to the much more fun hammer build. To this end, he’s done up in everything spiky heavy-plate and spikes. The Ugly Stick for the hammer (check it out in-game, it’s sweet, charr T3 heavy head, mixed pieces for the body. and I was debating getting a Charr plush backpack for him cause you know, it’s nothing personal, he’s got mouths to feed XD
However for this to work they need to fix conditions first. Even in 5-mans there is all sorts of cap-hitting and over-riding each others conditions.
Unless they want any more than 2 characters that are condition-based to be just waving their arms without actually contributing (or only contributing a small portion of what they should be).
This is a big issue with a core game mechanic. Complex as the solution may be, the devs need to know we are anxiously waiting, feet a-tapping. Bump for Great Justice.
I’d argue that the rifle is pretty engi-like. Of course, engis spend a lot of time using kits instead of a weapon.
A fix would be to allow the legendary effects to carry over to kits.. but of course that is work and I somehow doubt legendary-toting engis form enough of a percentage of the player-base to make it a high priority, sadly.
I think more legendary skins is a good idea, so long as the total number of precursors dropped remains the same. Ie. forging greatswords has the same chance to get a precursor as before but the chance is split between the new and old precursors. Or to get from the new scavenger hunt thing whenever it happens.
This would address two problems:
1. Would retain the rarity of the current legendary tier and prevent the “everyone has a Twilight” syndrome, as new ones are being found/made every day. Legendaries should stay legendary, or few people will hunt for them
2. So long as the new legendaries are as desirable as the old ones, would hopefully not cause the old precursors to skyrocket out of control.
I don’t have any problem with this. The only problem I have with it is the gambling elements regarding to the chests. If they just sell the skins on TP I will be all up for it.
I have mixed feelings on the RNG from bought items. I don’t personally have a problem controlling (read avoiding) buying these items, but there is definitely people who have gambling addiction issues out there.
But to what extent companies are responsible for providing access to products that fuel some individual’s personal weaknesses is a grey area.
Might as well ban alcohol and tobacco too?
Also, sorry for opening this can of worms again – my interest in this topic reopened after reading a player’s gambling issues on cartel packs over in the swtor forums.
So sad there was no sclerite armor set to match the backpiece and weapons. I got all excited when I heard there was going to be an armor vendor for the final event. Was debating stockpiling karka shells – good thing I didn’t.
If you guys aren’t into RNG then do what I did and pick up the consortium harvesting tool. Somewhat useful and arguably cooler than the stuff you get in chests.
I swear I log in just to make that animation happen even if I don’t need what it’s harvesting XD
I still haven’t found another game with the same play value for your buck as this one.
That being said, I keep comparing the living story updates to SAB… that one seems to be hard to top it seems. Didn’t quite enjoy/spend nearly as much time with this update.
Other games: you literally have to grind to see new content or else your gear is not powerful enough to do the content.
GW2: Zero, none, nada need to grind to see all content in the game. Nearly max stat game is extremely easy to get.
Distorting logic that somehow you must grind because the appearance of your gear isn’t the sparkliest of them all is just a bad argument.
Other games just have a different treadmill type, sure you can’t progress through content in other games till you get the stats, but here you can’t progress through sparkles to get the armor/weapon/stat set you want. It’s just a different set of rules. Of course GW2 has both, just not at end game. Try running 80 content in 40 gear.
It’s completely not the same thing.
How can you possibly compare a game where you can’t leave town anymore of all new content areas because you didn’t grind up the power level of your gear… to GW2 where are get to do all the new content, but maybe with your weapons being less shiny?
It’s not even a close comparison so please stop muddying the waters.
Have you tried to do southsun on a level 20? How about fractals level 20 without AR gear? There’s plenty of examples. You’re not going to take a 20 to a level 40 area, etc. There are plenty of examples of the opposite as well, as you point out. No muddy water here.
It’s a different perspective, it’s an end game goal, which keeps getting moved further out by lowered drop rates and increased costs. It’s not rocket science.
Southsun provides at least a hope for a new rewarding GW2, even if it is temporary. Still t6 mats and dust are pretty out of whack.
This thread is about grinding. If you consider getting a character to max level too much of a grind where every turn of the bend along the way is fresh content, there is no hope for you.
Or is your argument that a 1-day old character should be able to jump right to hard-mode level 80 dungeons?
I think I’m done responding to you, thanks for the “great arguments”.
Other games: you literally have to grind to see new content or else your gear is not powerful enough to do the content.
GW2: Zero, none, nada need to grind to see all content in the game. Nearly max stat game is extremely easy to get.
Distorting logic that somehow you must grind because the appearance of your gear isn’t the sparkliest of them all is just a bad argument.
Other games just have a different treadmill type, sure you can’t progress through content in other games till you get the stats, but here you can’t progress through sparkles to get the armor/weapon/stat set you want. It’s just a different set of rules. Of course GW2 has both, just not at end game. Try running 80 content in 40 gear.
It’s completely not the same thing.
How can you possibly compare a game where you can’t leave town anymore of all new content areas because you didn’t grind up the power level of your gear… to GW2 where are get to do all the new content, but maybe with your weapons being less shiny?
It’s not even a close comparison so please stop muddying the waters.
Much of the problems with farming arise due to the fact that MMO players HATE HATE HATE having access to something, then having it taken away.
If these sort of overly-high spawn locations were better tested in-house before being released there would be much less sadness over farming nerfs (because they wouldn’t be needed).
The devs don’t have nearly as many man-hours available to finding farm spots as the players do.
Fortunately there is this thing called math and statistics which allows content to be designed with appropriate numbers without needing a dev to ASDW-key a character through every inch of designed content
It is of course true that there are frequently differences between theory and practice of course, and as a dev just said, this one was the result of a ‘bug of a bug’.
Much of the problems with farming arise due to the fact that MMO players HATE HATE HATE having access to something, then having it taken away.
If these sort of overly-high spawn locations were better tested in-house before being released there would be much less sadness over farming nerfs (because they wouldn’t be needed).
Agree with nerfing monkey noise. I was excited to get the monkey as to me he is the most iconic of the superpets… but alas I can’t keep him out for more than a couple of minutes before either the frequency of the noise gets tiresome, or someone walks over and starts swinging their weapon at/over him :p
It has to do with the ‘out if reach’ invulnerability. My illusions used to do this in the Svanir fractal when Fractals were first released. They suddenly stopped being immune one day, which probably coincided with the bug that allowed players to exploit ledges.
It still worked as of yesterday. It’s fickle though, I’m guessing the pathing algorithm is having a hard time deciding when the boss is unreachable.
Were your duelists attacking?
Perhaps illusions share same recent anti-exploit with mobs and are invulnerable if can’t reach anything. Saw that on frost fractal elemental boss from dodge clones.
This is possible. When the boss leaves the fight area for the ground AoE attack the duelists are not attacking. Nice plus on this fight at least (while it lasts).
I was running fractals yesterday and I noticed that my illusionary duelists were invulnerable to the large ground AoE on the final boss. I haven’t repeated it yet so I can’t verify that it wasn’t some new bug.
This coupled with the patch notes for underwater fractal stating that the jellyfish boss no longer chases after minions or pets before players makes me think that us mesmers got some nice quality of life changes this patch.
It’s pretty accurate: female = lower center of gravity.
Also, animators like to pick bodypart centric acting (if this makes sense, I studied animation for a while) and again with the female humans it’s often the hips, much in the same way that Asuras are head-centric animation.
Guys have higher center of gravity and often shoulder-centric animation.
Those four stats are not the only ones. Look at what we were able to get before and what we can get now. It’s wrong on so many levels of understanding.
I suspected there were even more. Prec and healing major is mostly what I’m aware of as that affects my characters. It’s even worse than I thought :/
I would certainly not complain about having more skills to work with, especially if they are as fun as the current.
However a lot of people are missing that a lot of the gameplay has been shifted away from sheer number of skills and rather towards timing of skill use, combinations, and character movement, including dodge.
Jeez it even says right in your window when you enter that you only get the reward level for your personal highest fractal if you are going higher. All these people are doing is playing a harder dungeon and getting the lower rewards.
I made a couple of posts about this already. Precision or healing primary stat characters are stuck with no direct upgrade with every ascended realease and devs have not stated why.
Also people are missing some of the familiar exotic stat combinations like knight, cleric, carrion and rampager.
Personally this is a fair sized problem for 2 of my characters.
Once again, characters designed with precision or healing as their dominant stat have no options for an ascended amulet.
Why do we need to gimp our characters by getting an amulet (not to mention rings and back) that has a lesser allocation to our primary stat? Isn’t ascended supposed to be an upgrade?
So what exactly is the solution that some people here want?
Do you want:
Legendaries and rare items to be easier to get (hence no longer rare)? Would you be happy if a lot of people were toting around the same legendary skin? Would it still be legendary, and would it still be a goal worth pursuing?
More content? Do you expect most steps of your trip to a legendary or expensive armor set to be fresh content? Do you think it’s possible for a development team to develop content faster than a goal-oriented person can consume it? Is the current monthly content update not enough?
Please no unrealistic answers like redesign the game from scratch to be sandbox.
I didn’t accuse you of whining. I did accuse you of twisting logic. So we have both got out of our systems that WvW gear is overly expensive. If there was no alternatives to the WvW set I would agree your argument supports that this game is grindy.
But the game provides a lot of alternatives, better ones too, thus your case doesn’t support your conclusion.
Which is irrelevant. This particular aspect, the one you argued with me, was that WvW skins were acceptable in their present form. Thankfully you seem to have come back down here with the rest of us as you realized that their prices really aren’t as perfect as they seem, so we have no reason to contend this point further.
I maintain that this is an easily solved issue, simply up the drop rates on BoH in combat. This solves the problem well, and also cuts down on the protests that the JPs provide a more reliable BoH return rate than actual WvW play.;
My statement about cost was that exotics overall are not expensive. You mistook it that I was referring to WvW exotics specifically. You can get full exotics to be fully competitive without a grind.
The fact that there are alternatives to getting exotics with as good stats as WvW set is completely relevant because that means the grind you are complaining about is unnecessary, thus your argument falls short on this topic.
Unless you consider a purely cosmetic grind for this armor necessary, which few people will agree with. That is the topic at hand.
Again, I’m not opposed to lowering the cost of this set.
I’m glad you admit that their prices are outrageous by comparison to similar articles in the game, and I accept your apology for accusing me of whining about something that is actually a legitimate issue.
I didn’t accuse you of whining. I did accuse you of twisting logic. So we have both got out of our systems that WvW gear is overly expensive. If there was no alternatives to the WvW set I would agree your argument supports that this game is grindy.
But the game provides a lot of alternatives, better ones too, thus your case doesn’t support your conclusion.
If this thread was titled " WvW skins are too expensive!" I’d totally agree (and of course since we are talking about skins, even that argument is subjective). One thing does not imply the other. Your argument doesn’t support that the game is grindy as a whole.
[Edit] Thought I’d throw in, perhaps being a WvW player where there has been less updates than the rest of the world, you are feeling the grind more than the average player which is understandable. They did say additions for WvW are underway.
WvW utilizes a (broken) reward system with the Badges of Honor (better known as Badges of Jumping), a key component in legendary items and for buying any of the best gear. We were originally told that you could level from 1 to 80 and get all the gear you needed in WvW, yet to obtain this max exotic gear through WvW play alone requires 1889 Badges of Honor. That’s a minimum of almost 2k kills,though likely more if you’re unlucky like me (I have under 250 badges despite 1.1k kills to my name). Guess what that is? A grind.
Aaaand we have someone now complaining that exotic gear is too hard to get.
Exotic WvW gear is ridiculous. AND it’s second rate gear at that.
Have you purchased a WvW Exotic piece of gear?
I have issues when people use obtuse logic like utterly ignoring the fact that you also get karma and gold for WvWing which should net you whatever exotics you want. Easily too.
There is a valid argument that more stat combinations should be available with badges but that was not his argument.
Except WvW exotics.
Look, WvW exotics are skins. It is a cosmetic grind. It really doesn’t bother me for it to be just slightly out of reach without a bit of focused effort.
But his point does stand. Exotic WvW gear is FAR beyond what most other Exotic gear requires.
Well if you’re talking about SKINS and not exotics for stats, the point is subjective. There are skins that are much harder to get in PvE than the WvW skins.
It maybe that WvW skins are overly expensive. So now we have some overly expensive skins with bad stats, to which there are plenty of cheaper, better statted and likely better looking alternatives that you are free to pursue. Does that make the game grindy?
WvW utilizes a (broken) reward system with the Badges of Honor (better known as Badges of Jumping), a key component in legendary items and for buying any of the best gear. We were originally told that you could level from 1 to 80 and get all the gear you needed in WvW, yet to obtain this max exotic gear through WvW play alone requires 1889 Badges of Honor. That’s a minimum of almost 2k kills,though likely more if you’re unlucky like me (I have under 250 badges despite 1.1k kills to my name). Guess what that is? A grind.
Aaaand we have someone now complaining that exotic gear is too hard to get.
Exotic WvW gear is ridiculous. AND it’s second rate gear at that.
Have you purchased a WvW Exotic piece of gear?
I have issues when people use obtuse logic like utterly ignoring the fact that you also get karma, gold and mats for WvWing which should net you whatever exotics you want. Easily too.
There is a valid argument that more stat combinations should be available with badges but that was not his argument.
WvW utilizes a (broken) reward system with the Badges of Honor (better known as Badges of Jumping), a key component in legendary items and for buying any of the best gear. We were originally told that you could level from 1 to 80 and get all the gear you needed in WvW, yet to obtain this max exotic gear through WvW play alone requires 1889 Badges of Honor. That’s a minimum of almost 2k kills,though likely more if you’re unlucky like me (I have under 250 badges despite 1.1k kills to my name). Guess what that is? A grind.
Aaaand we have someone now complaining that exotic gear is too hard to get.
So far, 10 daily tokens (pristine) for rings is a very tiny time investment for top tier items in comparison to other MMOs.
If you find you are in a rush to get a legendary or simply must have your fractal backpack glowy then you will find the game can feel grindy.
Unfortunately the technology doesn’t yet exist to make endlessly new content for each and every hour of play on the way to a legendary. But you’ll find if you relax and just have fun on your way to a there, then GW2 feels like it has a ton of content that is not grindy.
All the same these high end goals are required to be in existence for people to look forward to.
Don’t take offense, but I find the best way of describing your post as a vague “truth” followed by a “subjective opinion”
No we don’t have the technology for endless content in the manner I’m going to have to ASSUME you mean which is slightly unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean that the differing opinions on the item acquisition is less valid, if that makes sense?
Every post in this thread is an opinion. If someone has appropriate alternative acquisition method I have yet to read it. Scavenger hunt is in the works for legendaries so we’ll just have to see how that plays out. Until then, I’m personally pretty satisfied with the content turn out for a FTP game.
As to the player made content suggestion – do you realistically see this game going sandbox? It’s pretty successful being story-based. Also being sandbox certainly does not eliminate grind. EVE online has many people grinding up the level 4 missions for ISK pretty frequently.
So far, 10 daily tokens (pristine) for rings is a very tiny time investment for top tier items in comparison to other MMOs.
If you find you are in a rush to get a legendary or simply must have your fractal backpack glowy then you will find the game can feel grindy.
Unfortunately the technology doesn’t yet exist to make endlessly new content for each and every hour of play on the way to a legendary. You will be able to play content faster than people can make it if you are pushing hard. But you’ll find if you relax and just have fun on your way to a there, then GW2 feels like it has a ton of content that is not grindy.
All the same these high end goals are required to be in existence for people to look forward to.
I think the lack of healing stats is a bit more jarring. There are roughly 20 ascended items with significant precision stats (+68 precision at most). This drastically outweighs Anet’s emphasis on healing stats. Sure, precision stats may not have the focus you want, however; with the current diversity of precision stats, I anticipate future releases to offer primary precision.
I am a more concerned with the blatant lack of ANY healing stats currently offered (maximum of +39 on only 4 rings and no backpieces), and fear that this may be a trend of future ascended items.
I agree not having a back piece with healing stat at all is a more glaring issue for your build. That does not mean I should be any more satisfied with gimping my build by not having any rampager equivalents, or precision primary gear at all.
Regardless our argument shares commonalities, which is why we shouldn’t waste space butting heads.
It’s pretty clear that people have become accustomed to working with the exotic stat sets for the past half year, I’m not sure why they would pull the rug out from under so many people’s playstyles.
If Anet wants to encourage build diversity that’s fine and well but these new stat combinations need to be in addition to the ones that our characters are built around, not instead of.
Minimally the devs should tell us if the stats we are used to will be released sometime soon or a reason why they won’t be so we don’t go blowing 250 ectos + trying to shoehorn the wrong backs and rings into our current builds.
This is also a big problem for me with my main character being precision based. There is currently no ascended gear that uses precision as a primary stat (a few with it as secondary). There is no Rampager’s equivalent in the ascended items.
I’ve managed to get by for now as I do like to have a couple of all-stat items (Solaria, Lunaria) but I certainly don’t want to continue that trend for all my gear.
I can’t imagine there is a dev resource issue in getting these items on the vendor. How much additional programming would it take? Why were these stats neglected when putting out the ascended gear?
Somehow Anet misinterpreted that we want more endgame content into that we want the gear treadmill.
It’s against everything Anet has stated about it’s design philosophy and what we expected when we bought this game.
Please just give us challenging content with new and interesting mechanics and playmodes – new conditions and work arounds are fine but NOT by putting in a new gear tier.
Get those artists working on new skins and digital shinies as rewards. There must be limitless possibilities there. We don’t want the stat treadmill.
Agreed, there are so many times I need to use an offhand in a ranged situation and I just dread whipping out the confusion based scepter (to fill the other hand) in PvE.
Yes this playstyle works well at 80 as well. You may also want to grab the 3% bonus damage and 3% damage reduction per illusion traits due to the high uptime on illusions. You can still use mind wrack too but as more of a finisher than primary damage.
this brings me to an important point that many people asking for gearing advice don’t understand. the only way for anyone to definitively find out which armor set gives the most dps, you’d have to draw up a complete build, runes, weapon sets, traits, jewels, etc. theres no way you can come to a conclusions without knowing all the variables.
This is -exactly- it. I also agree that this debate is starting to read like a book as well hence it’s hard to jump in. I didn’t start that trend though
You can’t just pull a formula out of nowhere and call it a “mathematical truth”.
If someone says:
(3 – 1 ) + 2 = 1 + 2
You can certainly say, but wait!
3 – 1 = 1 is wrong, it should be 3 – 1 = 2.
It doesn’t matter if the first equation is about damage equations, flying pigs or purple chipmunks. The second equation is about none of those things… it is only there to show how subtraction works. Get it?
What you just did was say I’m wrong in the correction because I left out the + 2 and it’s not about flying pigs anymore… hence: Whoosh!
Anyways we are side tracking – I’d love to hear more people’s experiences with either set.
Actually, with regards to power, it kinda does. Damage scales linearly with Power, so you get the same DPS increase per point of Power regardless of where you start. It’s not that they “cancel each other out on both sides of the equation”, but rather the starting value goes away when we take the first derivative of the damage function with respect to Power.
Very simply: You are allowed to isolate the power on just sets and say Zerk’s has X% more power than Ramp’s (provided you get the set stats right at least).
You are not allowed to then include said X% into a damage calculation with an isolated crit rate which intrinsically requires character’s full stats to derive how much more direct damage a character does with a set. It’s a plain old boo boo and leads to erroneous results.
I don’t know how much more clearly it can be stated than that.
There’s two problems with your math. First, your damage formula is incorrect. The correct damage formula is damage = C*Power*(1+CritRate*(.5+CritDamage/100)), where C is a constant depending on the target’s armor, the skill you are using, and your weapon damage (if applicable). Second, you’ve ignored the fact that it takes 21 Precision to increase your critical rate by 1%. The difference of a 40% critical rate should be compared with 840 Power, not just 30. Allow me to fix that for you:
“red gear” damage = C(1000+20)(1+.5*.5) = 1275 C
“green gear” damage = C(1000+860)(1+.1*.5) = 1953 C
Whoosh. I said very clearly this particular example of hypothetical red gear versus green gear only has a basis in demonstrating a basic mathematical truth, and has no relation to the world of GW2’s 21 prec = 1% crit, and so on so forth. Perhaps had I made the same demonstration saying pile of apples versus pile of peaches it wouldn’t have thrown you off. Small tip: it had nothing to do with whether or not prec or pow is better.
Sorry you didn’t read it right but I certainly did explain that. For all the real gear set calculations I certainly did use the expected damage formula as listed by Anet on GW2W.
Also Warkeeper, I’m not offended but I do wish the reading comprehension here was a little higher. Ultimately it won’t be life-changing to take Rampager’s over Berserkers but people will have to man up to their errors and understand that Anet is not incompetent when it comes to stat weighting for dps sets – they are much closer in performance than some like to think.
I had always been curious to try a mantra build with vampire runes. Life steal after every heal… more life and more damage x3 mantra heals? I’m not sure what the exact amount is but someone said 900ish flat damage/heal. I’ll get around to it one day.
