Guild Wars 2

Personally I think Anet did a poor job with easing people into the dungeons, they should start off extremely easy with obvious visual cues and simplistic tactics and steadily work up to the harder more subtle, challenging content could always be available with harder modes like explorable or hardcore.

The GW2 dungeon gameplay style is alien to MMO gamers who are used to the trinity style and as someone else stated here the rest of the game does absolutely nothing to prepare you for the dungeon experience.

Many people took to the different gameplay style with relative ease, then again like it or not a lot of people just couldn’t figure out how to adjust.

I fell somewhere in between, as a vet MMO gamer I loved duo’ing AC, then again I found it difficult to try and teach my struggling casual friends how to handle large groups of mobs (as with the basement in CM story or the end boss encounter).

I was struggling to figure out how to handle them myself with no aggro, crowd control or healing…there isn’t an obvious solution.

Which leads me back to my original point, Anet’s dungeon philosophy seems to have been adapt or quit in frustration, either way it’s up to the player to figure it out. Which I think is a shame, the more the merrier is something you should embrace when working towards MMO success.

RedStar.4218:

Morkath.9702:

GW2 Dungeons put up a brick wall if some of the players struggle in fast paced twitch gaming. No amount of coaching, practice and encouragement will help a group with below average skill players through GW2 dungeons.

I doubt you hit a “brick wall” because the fights were fast paced.
Nearly everyone can learn how to do every encounter because there aren’t that many things that happen randomly : Kohler will always strike a rather long pose because pulling you in (which can be reflected or you can use stability), the graveling boss in P1 and P3 will always do the same animation before screaming, leaving you enough time to either move to the side or behind him.
I could talk about the other dungeons, but I don’t know if that would be relevant since most players use AC as their example.

You didn’t hit a brick wall because you didn’t have “twitchy” reflexes but because you probably weren’t correctly geared (at least with gear of your level), you were probably not using skills that could have help in certain situations, and you didn’t really know how to correctly do the encounters. Which is normal because it was your first times.

Well, my other friend and I (the two more experienced gamers) were level 80, one wearing random level 80 blues and I was wearing full T3 culture armour, the other three friends were level appropriate and wearing a mix of green/blue I think.

Ascalonian Catacombs didn’t phase us, in fact we found it quite enjoyable, though my friend and I managed to duo much of it as a test first.

I had to research and re-learn how to play my Guardian to support the group but post nerf it wasn’t enough on its own.

Caudecus’s Manor was a different story, that just seemed like one major zerg fest of mobs and even following what people considered the correct tactics at the time ( I highly doubt they were) it just wasn’t fun, in fact difficulty aside I found the whole dungeon seemed thrown together.

Anyway, our three other friends were so disenchanted with the experience they quit the game, sadly we are a close knit group of real life friends and when they left so did our will to run dungeons.

Just thought I’d post here, even though I’ve barely played since about six weeks after launch, flame away at me all you like, I have excellent hand/eye co-ordination but I had to say goodbye to GW2.

Frankly I play with my friends and three of the five are older less skilled players whom usually the two more experienced players can help carry through dungeons. We’ve played all MMO’s and we’ve raided the hardest content with Raid Groups consisting of both types of players, it has always been fun and challenging but never has it demoralised our friends into quitting the game completely.

GW2 Dungeons put up a brick wall if some of the players struggle in fast paced twitch gaming. No amount of coaching, practice and encouragement will help a group with below average skill players through GW2 dungeons.

So we stopped playing, shame really since I really like 99% of the game, I even like the way the dungeons look but the twitch gaming is brutal on low skill players.

I was really looking forward to seeing how a game could function without the Holy Trinity, the answer is it becomes a fast paced medley of zerg/tactics which in itself is interesting and fun but unfortunately not accessible to everyone.

Tactics, practice and perseverance can carry you through dungeons in most MMO’s, GW2 has an added player skill requirement.

Aye, still get this (loud sonar sound overwriting all GW2 sounds)…almost every large boss DE I get it (Behemoth, Claw of Jormag etc.).

It only affects the game client, teamspeak and video/music from other applications still work even though they can barely be heard with the siren/sonar blaring.

Only solution is to restart client.

Soundblaster Xfi Fatality Prof on windows 7 64bit, latest drivers (though being creative they probably haven’t updated them since Win7 launched).

Tarkaroshe.8370:

I know there’s some coming in the coming weeks, but I don’t think you can ever have enough in the game. Ranging from the “small” ones (e.g. escorting DE’s etc) to the “Claw of Jormag” type ones.

Whilst I know they mentioned sometime ago they were launching with something like 100 DE’s per zone and intended to keep sneaking them in until they had around 300 I concur with the sentiment, some of these places are pretty devoid of activity/things to do when the main events aren’t going on…Cursed Shore springs to mind. Sure there are mobs around but this game doesn’t reward farming so there’s little reason to be there if the DE’s are dormant.

Tarkaroshe.8370:

I don’t know about anyone else but I think the Claw fight is probably the best dragon fight of the three…..the rewards however, well that’s a different matter. I think the rewards of those type of events need to be better (not just a random assortment of greens and blues with the odd yellow thrown in every now and then).

Claw of Jormag is also my favourite DE, probably the best world boss fight I’ve seen in my 12 years of MMO gaming, though I agree with it throwing blues and greens at me every time I do events like that I am losing the will to do it…the experience alone won’t hold a lot of replayability (though it does better than most).

Tarkaroshe.8370:

Btw, why not have some DE’s in the cities? You could have non-combat ones if necessary e.g. finding items, escorting dignitaries, crafting DE’s, etc, etc.

I want to see DE’s in the city, a little like Ebonhawke but maybe less disruptive so people aren’t getting killed when they are just loitering….fun stuff.

Like a very fast thief running through the streets that if you manage to catch him before he slips away (down a backstreet or into a house) you get a reward of some kind.

Though I suspect a lot of the Divinity’s Reach Carnival areas will start to work at some point, there’s a few of those dotted around.

On the subject of the Caudecus’s Manor head sculpture the first time I wandered in (on my own) I just sat down and stared at it for a while…nice piece of work.

Yup, this just seems unnecessarily harsh.

3 GS whirlwinds in such a small room is pure evil for story mode, dodging all three of them without room to manoeuvre doesn’t seem very likely since dodges are finite and meant to be used at critical times, but with three Whirlwinds that’s pretty much all the time.

Milennin.4825:

Well, dungeons were advertised as the high-end PvE content, so it only makes sense an inexperienced player running a glasscannon build gets shattered.
The dungeons are a lot harder if you do them at the minimum level requirements, but still do-able in a decent team (a lot easier to find now with more people being level 80). Luckily you can do them at any level, so if you struggle with them, level up some more and try again later.

Even though I agree with the sentiment, honestly I don’t believe that is the case, I know because I’ve followed GW2 for a long time that they are intended to be an end game activity as well but the very act of making the first one available at level 30 suggests to everyone that they aren’t purely end game content.

Milennin.4825:

Now I haven’t checked dungeon guides, but you can’t blame the guides of having every little detail in them. It’s just not practical with so many possible professions, traits, skillsets, weapon combos. And generally encounters are dealt with better through experience than watching it on a video.

Well I’m not expecting every little detail but most of them seem to cover the really obvious stuff and skip what I and my team find to be the most difficult content, the trash. Maybe others find the bosses harder.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favour of decreasing difficulty of the dungeons, they seem quite fun, I’m in favour of educated, improving the learning curve on them, quite simply the vast majority of MMO players aren’t going to take to a completely new style of dungeon gameplay without a little help.

Honestly I think the problem is that GW2’s dungeons are so radically different from the norm that most players don’t have a sodding clue how to play them. That and personally I think Anet did a very poor job of educating people on how to play their new style of dungeon play.

So all those who generally research every aspect of their class and their enemy fall into the “It’s fun and after a while gets a bit easy.” category.

All those who don’t normally analyse every single aspect fall into the “This is utter chaos, what the hell are we supposed to do here?” category.

Personally I’m a mix of both, after over a decade of raid MT I know how to play my class but the way GW2’s dungeons play out is very different to everything I’ve experienced.

There are other problems as well, glass cannon no vit/toughness builds/gearing works perfectly fine out in Tyria so people go with it, they walk into a dungeon like that and get splattered.

At the levels you are actually supposed to do the dungeons you only have two stats on a piece of armour so it’s not unusual to find players without vit or toughness, if it’s required for dungeons there shouldn’t be a single piece of amour at the pre three stat armour pieces that is glass cannon, it should all have either vit or toughness on it.

Most defensive/support abilities are so subtle (so as not to make any one

class a dedicated tank or healer) that it’s not particularly obvious what their benefits are to average skilled players, let alone below average skill players.

People say read the guides but in general they are utterly useless, they skip all the really important details mainly because I suspect most of the authors (not all, there must be some good ones out there somewhere) generally don’t know the real way to deal with them, they just sort of wing it by playing to the best of their abilities and hoping everyone else does the same. Others use minor exploits/tricks and some relied extensively on heavily nerfed builds/abilites that no longer function as well (Guard

Retliation/Line of Warding pre nerf). Not to mention they are generally kitted out in full exotics at level 80, which regardless of scaling does make a difference, especially versus a level 30 in poor gear (bearing in mind it’s not obvious what gear should be used in a dungeon).

Ironically the hardest part my group of real life friends found in the dungeons was and still is to some degree learning how to deal with large groups of trash mobs, we find bosses to be a challenge but nothing we find alien, they play much the same as bosses do in other games with more doding required, trash however can’t be effectively CC’d like in other games.

As a result we had relatively little trouble with AC, instead we found Caudecus’s Manor to be far more chaotic and frustrating due to the tight spaces and large groups of trash.

With no effective crowd control you use every little thing you have in a mass melee that you try and brawl your way through, standing still because snipers do massive amounts of damage/knockdowns to moving players, dodging and moving because the Bomber’s AoE’s are lethal all the while being chased around by melee bosses/mobs.

It’s not that it’s badly designed, it’s that nobody for one second thought…

“What if new players don’t instinctively know what to do?”

“Maybe we should train them up a little, gradually until they get the hang of it?”.

We are adjusting, two of us (the more experienced of our group) two manned our way through large sections of the Explorable modes (not all of course) paying close attention to what the mobs do so we can figure out what to do when the chaos of an inexperienced group encounter isn’t getting in the way.

The lack of defensive stats on gear is probably a major contributing factor to how difficult we first found it, but as stated previously it isn’t needed out in the rest of the game so it’s inevitable that players are going to end up in dungeons as glass cannons when they start out and wonder why it’s all going to hell.

This bug is still persisting, after putting a few items up for sale it spams me with the error, shutting down the BLT window gives me a breather for a few items until it happens again.

Takes forever to sell if you have quite few items to put on.

Couldn’t find mention of this bugged on google or via forum search.

As above, achievement is stuck on 927/1000, it’s been like that for at least three weeks…with over 500 hours played reviving all downed players I come across.

No matter how many I revive it’s stuck at 927.

Genev.2450:

I’m currently working on my legendary. I do not have the precursor

I’m taking it easy, collecting as i go along, and it feels like i’m making real progress. I do really want it, and I will get it, but i know i won’t get it tomorrow, it will likely take me a few more months, and in that time, so much can happen. Including me getting the precursor.
With the attitude i’m seeing it, if i would have 3 out of 4 parts of the Legendary, i wouldn’t be all like “OMG SO MUCH WORK AND NOW I HAVE TO RELY ON kittenING RNG!” I would go “Omg! So close! Only 1 more item! /happydance”

Have you ever considered taking on that attitude?

Edit: Fail, it didn’t put “kitten” in all caps

A very possible and reasonable outcome, myself being one of those people that just defies the laws of probability in the worst possible way I’d probably have all of the components ready and would still not have the precursor after years of throwing swords in the forge.

I’d throw 1000 swords in over a period of 6 months if I was sure it wouldn’t be a colossal waste of my life, as it is there’s a possibility it will be, the end result of which would be my inevitable and irrational distaste for GW2 and it’s developers. There are better ways than RNG if only you just used your imagination.

So the lucky few can keep their Legendary weapons and I’ll go play something else since one of GW2’s primary PVE end game activities is heavily reliant on a 0.2% success rate 1g a try lottery.

Well frankly for me this has killed a large portion of the end game.

I’ve worked up enough money to get the full T3 culture set, my next goal was the Legendary but I can’t stand RNG, I despise the very concept since in my 12 years of MMO gaming not once have I ever been “lucky”, once I ran a dungeon 50 times for a regular set item that refused to drop, If not for dungeon tokens I’d have stopped playing MMO’s by now. So instead of relying on RNG I put in a serious amount of effort in every other aspect of the game to get what I want.

I solo farmed all of the materials in vanilla WoW to create the legendary weapon Thunderfury, thats 5000 golds worth of materials at time when people said it was only possible for guilds to afford, I got the first half of the prison from the raid dungeon and the second half didn’t drop in over a year, at which point i gave up on it.

I’ve thrown in an excessive amount of rare level 80 Greatswords already and gotten a single exotic one back, I did it because I hoped I might get lucky, well I didn’t and I sure as hell won’t waste more time on it. RNG is considered by myself and pretty much all of my friends to be a complete lack of imagination on the part of the devs.

Should Legendaries be easy to get? no of course not, but RNG means that some people have to work their backsides off whereas others just get lucky, that might be Anet and some players idea of fun but it sure as hell ain’t mine. At present I don;t look at a Legendary weapon wielder and think “They must have put in a lot of effort”, instead I look at them and think “Someone probably won the Mystic lottery”.

So…I’ll play out the rest of the dungeons with my still levelling friends and probably end up shelving GW2 until they put some real non RNG based PVE end game content in.

Here’s hoping they don’t keep nerfing the living daylights out of PVE Guardians for the sake of PVP, I’ve seen that happen before and since Guardian is the ONLY class I actually want to play if they continue to nerf it I’m going to feel very jaded, change it by all means but balance it for crying out loud.

Try giving us something back when you take something away, is that really too much to ask?

Don’t like retaliation? replace it, don’t just nerf it and the ability it is attached to.

I’ve probably mined over 20,000 copper since game start, more because it held a decent price and I find mining and helping newbies whilst watching movies in between playing the Market to be fairly relaxing.

They have a very long reset timer, not sure on the exact numbers but it’s not more than once or twice a day.

They always yield the correct amount unless you mined it but didn’t finish it off. I’ve done this a couple of times, it seems if you don’t deplete it then it will remain in a near depleted state for the next time you return unless there has been a downtime.

In truth I find the people who blurt out things like “It’s not WoW” to be far more disruptive than those who make innocent and sometimes (not always) naive comparisons.

I’ve been playing MMO’s for going on 14 years now and I wish to the heavens people would stop making such a big deal out of comparisons, so what if someone compares the latest MMO to the most successful MMO ever made, no need to get your knickers in a twist, it’s making mountains out of mole hills and will only ever end when people stop letting it get to them.

I agree with this, the 10% sales tax needs listing, then all the….well, lets call them “not particularly astute” sellers could stop putting sales up for 1 copper more than vendor prices, after deducting the 15% fees they are losing money.

Which affects everyone since we can’t list items at a profit if there are thousands of players selling items at a loss.

Sairenkao.6485:

Even though you stop “channeling” the shield and the bubble visually disappears, I have noticed that it still absorbs projectiles for a bit afterwards.

It’s possible that the absorption does last the full 4 seconds, but without a buff or the blocking/spell animation it’s not very easy to tell.

If the absorption does last then it’s less of a problem but it is still a problem and most people are under the impression it isn’t working correctly, here’s hoping it will be addressed at some point in the future.

Sounds pretty bad…

I’m curious though, does your Shield of Absorption actually work?

I play a Norn Guardian and my SoA lasts an almost useless 2 seconds as opposed to the stated 4 seconds, though now at least I’m able to detonate it.