Guild Wars 2

Dark.6083:

Account.9832:

Just being a terminology nazi for a second here:

Camera distance and zoom are different things.

Wait, what? I don’t get it.

On my camera (physical in-real-life camera) there is no difference between me moving closer to my target, or just zooming in via a telescopic lens. Both will result in a larger image (in terms of magnification) with a smaller area captured.

What’s the difference here?

I believe what he meant by “zoom” was effect of focal length on FoV. I will borrow the explanation from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_length): “longer focal length leads to higher magnification and a narrower angle of view; conversely, shorter focal length is associated with a wider angle of view”. In other words, by increasing focal length of a lens, you get magnification effect. IIRC, longer focal lengths tend to change perspective as well, making it sometimes unnatural.

I’m no expert on photography and cameras though, so I could be wrong here.

Sebbern.3894:

Lwd.1264:

Yep – I don’t like idea of far away character which I can’t actually see. If there’ll be an option for zooming – we’ll have to max zoom or we’ll be in great disadvantage considering to other players.

As an example: imagine that someone on DoTa2 championship zooming out so he can see all map, that’ll be cheating and you want such cheating be implanted into game.

I hope you realise that changing your resolution more or less changes the camera distance a lot, right? There exists a fog of war in that game, and it is there for a reason.

Well, I can’t speak for DotA since I don’t have that much experience with it, but changing resolution in 3D game usually doesn’t affect view at all, or it changes only FoV, since you need to compensate for different aspect ratio (going from 4:3 to 16:9 either means you stretch the image, or change FoV accordingly).

Back in 2D games, such as Diablo 2, different resolution meant you could see more, so you’re not entirely wrong. It’s just a little different when you’re dealing with 3D.

I raged a lot in the beginning, but once I had been able to get past initial crowd moments to 1-3 people left standing, I started to enjoy it greatly. I think the crowd part was intentional to make people rush ahead of others.

As someone mentioned though, making everyone same size would probably reduce hate towards Norn/Charr (and, as I heard from them, even they have trouble seeing where to jump because of the size).

Asura 80 elementalist
Sylvari 35 Warrior
Elementalist – Boosts from air attunement (I traited both 10% speed while attuned to air and increased speed for time spent attuned to air, not sure whether they both apply).
Warrior – 10% speed when using melee weapons. I think it doesn’t work though, I wasn’t faster than anyone and weapons seem removed during run anyway.

I’ve been doing it for 6 hours till 2 am, failing constantly. Then next day, I did it twice within 30 minutes … talk about lack of sleep.

I can’t speak for cooking, but I am doing 300-400 on tailoring right now (387 right now I think) and I can assure you, that if you only buy materials, you will spend a few gold (my guess is around 5 with current prices) on this range alone. Not to mention that yesterday, some material (not sure which one now) was completely gone from trading post. I think that once accumulated stocks run out, prices will go up somewhat.

You can’t judge whole crafting based on 0-100 in one profession. Also, aim was never to make things feel like grind here. I haven’t played FFXI, but I am assuming it was similar to Lineage 2 (which I’ve spent several years with) where you could spend a month gathering materials required to craft a weapon (not counting clan support), only to fail a 60% chance recipe. I’m quite sure most people playing GW2 don’t want that.

If you want some really hard things, try making a legendary weapon. There are no known recipes yet (to my knowledge), but some people seem to have estimates and price of materials goes into hundreds of gold (I haven’t had 10 gold cash yet :P ) so that should satisfy need for grind.

NornBearPig.9814:

This is to compensate for the fact that the damage comes slower, giving the opponent more time to deal his own damage or heal up. Two or three players who can stack the dots up really high negate this disadvantage because the opponent gets bursted down like it’s direct damage but much greater potential health loss than normal direct damage.

I beg to disagree on this.

If two direct damage characters attack the same target, we can really talk about “burst” which may catch receiver off-guard and kill him. Condition damage will very likely give him more time to react, even if it deals more damage in it’s overall duration. I don’t think you can burst someone down with conditions unless those condition skills are terribly overpowered. I’m talking “10k dps” overpowered; my condition build does around 70 per stack, which wouldn’t deal 1/5th of that even if I could reach 25 on my own, which I can’t. This was mostly aimed at pvp though.

In pve, I assume event boss HP scales linearly with number of people fighting the boss (it doesn’t make sense to do anything less IMO). It is only natural to expect the same with damage dealt to the boss. And this is pretty much what happens with direct damage builds. You get 2 of them and they deal 2x more damage (not taking gear and stuff into account). Unfortunately, this is not the case for condition damage. With bleed and confusion, dps you can deal is capped at 25 stacks; with burning and poison, dps does not change, only duration increases. In both cases, more people do not necessarily increase damage linearly (usually they don’t), unlike in direct damage case.

There are conditions where global cap makes sense. One example being Vulnerability, since that affects all incoming damage and thus improves effectiveness with number of attackers.

I personally don’t care whether 25 stack cap goes altogether, or is changed to per-player. I do think, though, that it needs change and that GUI should show only stacks inflicted by my character (seeing 120 stacks isn’t as useful for me).

PS: I have no idea how damage is calculated with multiple stacks from different sources/players (whether with stacked duration or intensity) so that could affect reasoning here.

I would personally like to see bigger impact of distance on price. Right now, I avoid using waypoints when moving around single area, since the price feels too high. I don’t mind paying say 5 or more silver for going from Orr to Lion’s Arch, but paying up to 2 silver for moving around single area just puts me off and I rather run a little. Lower cost would make me use the option more and I would probably end up spending more in the long run (micro-transactions, anyone? ).

TLDR: Long distance travel price feels OK (I can handle worse), short distance feels discouraging.

Abra.5230:

It’s either weapon presets for everyone or nothing at all.

Agreed. (though I would prefer those weapon presets over nothing :P )

We already have more skills with single weapon set than other classes with two weapon sets. And it comes at the expense of having less freedom to choose these skills, so I believe this is nothing to whine about.

The only nuisance is related to changing weapons outside combat, especially when you have a lot of similarly looking items in your bags. And this is something other classes suffer from as well.

So, what you really want is for “stow away” button to keep pet hidden in fight as well, so that you can play the way you want? That sounds more like a suggestion for improvement, rather than complaint about class design and doesn’t seem like anything bad.

For the record, warriors can also use rifles and thieves can also use pistols, so they are not limited to single ranged weapon.

I’ve just finished personal story on my elementalist today so a few things I used. For weapons, I use either staff, or scepter/dagger with traits in earth and water (vitality+toughness for survival, condition damage for bleeds/burns). I use elementals in harder fights, since they manage to attract attention of mobs quite often (at least thats my impression) and they are priceless against veterans.

In fight, I usually try to just keep monsters bleeding/burning while running. Early on, I used a lot of staff fire skills. Monsters tend to run through Burning retreat; Lava Font combined with Arcane Wave gives combo field effect and deals really high damage if monsters stand in it; Flame Burst and Fireball do some extra damage and, if situation allows and mobs ignore you, Meteor Shower spices things up. With enough condition damage, Eruption on staff earth has turned into my favorite attack, as most normal monsters die after 2 of them (assuming they get hit by both and you survive till they bleed to death). Other skills used mostly for CC and healing.

With scepter/dagger, Stone shards and Churning earth were a powerful combination (even Stone shards alone can do a lot, if you let them stack up). Having 2 burst heals (Cleansing wave and Water Trident) can save you in tough situations and on fire you have some of the most damaging abilities (Dragon’s tooth when it drops on the mob, Phoenix when it hits 3 times, and Fire grab when target is burning, which he will due to Flamestrike). Scepter/dagger has turned out to be my favorite single target combination for tough bosses.

It all comes down to having someone (earth elemental, NPCs) who keeps monsters in one spot. With toughness/vitality gear, you could probably take a lot of beating yourself, but tanking 3 or more mobs would usually be out of question. Also, I believe you can have some friends join personal story instance with you. I think they need to be in the same area and meet level requirements though.

Or, just make a place in Mists designated for dueling. Mists are just a few clicks away at all times.
In any case, I would like this added as well.

One thing I personally noticed, is that many players (mostly new players in low level areas) don’t try to help downed people get up before they die. Getting 1 or 2-shotted is fine, as long as someone helps you get up before you die for real. On our first run in dungeon story mode, we kept wiping until we made helping people get up high priority. It makes all the difference. Unfortunately, this is not as common with open world boss fights. Also, it is not entirely fault of players. Often, dead NPCs get in the way as well.

Another thing to realize, is that many people have offensive setups when they go to melee, especially when they come from questing to some dynamic event champion. If boss is scaled to say 50 people, getting 1-shot feels like a natural thing to do. There are many people that can help you get up.

Edit @Qelris:
I’ve been to dungeon with a guy who kept getting downed a lot and when we helped him get up, he was always apologizing for the trouble. I really didn’t feel like he needed to, and I think most players have this mindset (I haven’t met anyone who would complain so far). I don’t think you should be worried about it.