Yes Olba, gameplay is the interaction with the content designed to be played in the game. Roleplaying is coming up with your own content, inside the game world. They are two different things and roleplay does not affect gameplay.
The term “RPG” refers far more towards a progressive, stat based game set in a fantasy world where you fight monsters. In the same way that JRPG doesn’t literally mean an RPG from Japan.
Roleplaying also happens within the content; making decisions based on what you believe your character would do. Would they want Kiel or Gnashblade on the council? Would they want the fractal researchers to look into the fall of Abaddon and gather more details of human history, or the Thaumanova Reactor explosion that happened relatively recently and may provide critical scientific information?
And there’s the question of Gnashblade offering discounts to buy keys that unlock the chests that his business locked in the first place. But I doubt roleplayers were quite that pedantic.
I maintain that it was an error in judgement to merge a vote on fractals with a vote on living story events, but that was what happened and none of the playerbase has to justify their votes.
I’d love to see the living story make reference to this in-game.
Considering Magnus the Bloody-Handed considers her a daughter, Gnashblade could level accusations of corruption and favouritism on the council.
And considering that Magnus and the rest of the Lionguard obviously favour Kiel, they’ll not appreciate Gnashblade’s failure to accept his defeat.
They could let players investigate the council and look for any evidence of corruption, as well as investigate Gnashblade’s connections to the Ash Legion in search of conflicts of interest within BLTC.
Or, if Gnashblade shows disrespect toward the Zephyrites’ decision, the Zephyrites could set up a rival trade company. They certainly seem to have the resources for it.
So one of the main criticisms of Kiel’s character is that she’s bland (i.e. a ‘default heroic character’). I disagree, but her victory message doesn’t help:
People of Lion’s Arch,
I am deeply honored to take a seat at the Captain’s Council. Your support was crucial in securing the trade deal with the Zephyrites, and I won’t forget the faith you showed in me. Now the real work begins.
I am going to enact the following changes:
*I’ll reduce waypoint travel prices for four weeks’ time
*I’ll support important Fractals of the Mists research into the Thaumanova Reactor explosion by the end of the year
*I’ll introduce a rotating schedule of activities such as Crab Toss and Southsun Survival.
I am ever grateful and humbled by your support.
- Captain Ellen Kiel
That’s terse and robotic. Half of it is rote repetition of her campaign promises, which is fine from a ‘make sure the player is informed’ standpoint, and I realize it’s a political message, but she says exactly the same thing in every in-game speech and website-published lore.
I’ve every confidence that the complaints are being heard, but I’d like to suggest also maybe separating the functional information from the in-character content wherever it impinges on a character’s… character. Some places there’s no facility to add details as a footnote… but on the website there is.
It saddens me that the vote will be a matter of which fractal we want to unlock and which 4 week bonus we prefer, rather than about the characters involved and the direction of the living story.
The chance to unlock a peek at some key moments in Tyrian backstory is overshadowing the fact that we’re shaping Tyrian nowstory.
Please fix that ANet. Please make sure the narrative repercussions of either character getting on the council are foreshadowed well before voting starts. This is the first time you’re giving the players a chance to influence the living story in a direct way, it’s a milestone in the living story and Guild Wars 2 and it’s discouraging to think you guys felt that the story itself wouldn’t be incentive enough for players.
It really is a brilliant piece, and hopefully the Living Story folk will add more adventures for those characters further down the road.
The trouble with the NPCs is, signature move spamming aside, they’re not even subject to the base rules of the game. Water every other turn and things like that. The whole premise of the game (vs humans) is about predicting your opponent’s next move and you use your information of what moves they’ve made before and their personality to inform your prediction. You can’t do that with the NPCs because a) they have no personalities and b) they ignore the rules.
The NPC games are just trial and error slogs where their difficulty is based on the simplicity of their routine.
Trial-and-error isn’t fun, it’s dull as kitten, and the monotony of the process is rubbed in with the incessant voice samples.
Hopefully next time ANet make a minigame like this they’ll not break it while forlornly trying to make it work with a procedural AI.
Instead maybe just hand out PvP kits for a much lower price, or set up stations to play the game at like the RC Golem game in the Asura starting area, so that people can actually enjoy the game without draining their silver.
I can see myself enjoying it with friends. Playing it with an NPC that reduces the mechanics to pot-luck is not enjoyable.
The Dredge may be ugly, but they’re also ridiculously cool and far more fun to explore and antagonize than most MMO enemies. And their Soviet styling is a huge part of the reason for that.
I think GW2’s engine is proprietary.
I’ve had an Eyefinity set up for quite some time (I actually got it set up in anticipation of GW2 when I saw how gorgeous it was in beta), and I can attest that every game I’ve played since suffers distortion at the extreme sides if it’s a 3D engine.
You get used to it very quickly, I find.
And I know this sounds tongue-in-cheek, but have you tried sitting closer to the screen so that the sides do reach your peripheral vision? I really prefer the wraparound sensation.
How about an actual Ghillie Suit skill? One that actually applies the foliage to your character when you have it slotted. Activating it causes your character to drop prone, stow the pet, apply the current ground texture to the suit fibres, and your nameplate vanishes outside of 600 range (Large enough for you to be found when sweeping a contested area in WvW or PvP, small enough to get the jump on someone with Axe, Bow or GS#3).
It remains until deactivated with non-walking movement or an attack, and when it deactivates it grants boons suitable for an ambush that might also stack on Opening Strike.
…
Or you could blend it into the Spirits line: Spirit of Shrubbery: removes nameplates from itself and nearby allied players and covers them in foliage. Has a 35% chance on attack that your character will shout ‘Ni!’ which causes the attack to become an interrupt.
Are we citing our preference of fantasy tropes or preferred historical/contemporary military use of the word?
If so, then I say that the role of the Ranger is to be dark and broody and reluctant to claim any birthrights while protecting hobbits.
Apart from the pets’ AI, The main issue with Rangers in dungeons is that the dungeons are designed to favour professions that focus on one job.
There is huge potential for creative, responsive and versatile tactics in the Ranger, both through the pet and through utility skills, but it’s potential that doesn’t get fulfilled anywhere in the current game beyond being able to have your pet attack something while you revive an ally or operate machinery. Not just in Dungeons but in the whole game.
It’s like having a Swiss Army Knife in a world with no corks, no cans and no bottlecaps.
I see complaints about the dreamer more often than I see the dreamer itself. Of the two, one is substantially more annoying than the other.
It’s all relative. Being able to remove a condition on dodge is hugely useful, but if you take it you have to give up traits that are far more useful.
From what I’d read, I was expecting phases to have at least some sort of looping event chain that told a part of the story. Something like this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes , which when I saw it was one of the main reasons I got so stoked for GW2 and pre-purchased it months in advance. The game world is rich with these kinds of event chains, and while the community has eventually dissected them to find the fastest way to get to events that drop more loot, the stories are still there for us to discover. Those stories are tiny works of art that make the game world more than just a patchwork quilt of themed mob farms.
I spent ages trudging around the Wayfarer foothills looking for something like that, maybe aiding a particular cadre of refugees along a series of difficulties or helping one of the ‘star’ living story NPCs to secure the route to Hoelbak. Didn’t realize that the signposts and other ambient activity was it. The content was fine in and of itself, but the individual teaser was promoted like it was something richer and more involving than events already happening in the world. That’s only true in that the events taking place will have permanent effects on the world, as opposed to the current ‘groundhog day’ event loops. On their own merits, they’re barely stories, though I imagine we’ll appreciate these phases more once we’ve seen how they tessellate into the longer story arc that’s planned.
(One gets the impression that the living story may have been over-promoted to ensure that the wider world and its media would have no chance to accuse GW2 of losing steam on content creation. If that’s true, then it’s sad but understandable.)
I think the information about what there is to do in each phase should be a lot more clear cut. I appreciate the information being conveyed through in-character speech and narrative, and the idea of rekindling the desire to explore and discover these stories. However phases 1 and 2 didn’t rekindle that desire because I was still exploring the same maps I’d already explored, just with ant trails of signposts and injured people stitched through them, and thus the search for information wasn’t as enjoyable or appealing as it could have been. Maybe there’s a better way to balance how much explicit information is given and how much exploring is encouraged.
I remain optimistic, of course, because I’ve seen both how skilled ANet are at telling stories, and how quickly they adapt to player feedback. And I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t curious about how the story will pan out, even if what I’ve seen so far has been underwhelming.
When I /dance, my spirits /dance with me.
I’d use spirits if that were true.
Other than that, the skill’s benefit just needs to be far more apparent and reliable. No one is going to feel like they’re turning the tide of battle with a 1-second cast time to create an extremely squishy npc that imbues a miniscule area with a negligible chance for an attack to grant an insignificant buff that barely lasts long enough for you to finish being surprised that it procced. I mean if you trait them, they start to look like they could compete with food buffs.
Some people have weird ideas about the definition of ‘grind’. I’m just glad that ANet and the majority of players agree on the definition and hate grinding.
Hmmm… I think I found an exploit then, because when I kill Vile Maw, the fractal ends!
Yup, the fractal ends!
And when it ends, you’re 1/∞ closer to completing Fractals of the Mists.
(edited by Munrock.3092)
The way I see it, and sorry if anyone’s already done the metaphor (didn’t read through the whole thread), is that it’s like a buffet: one can pick and choose what one wants to eat, and they give a little badge to anyone who eats all the dishes. The existence of the little badge shouldn’t make anyone feel compelled to eat all the dishes, and frankly if one turns up to a buffet aiming to win the little badge instead of enjoying one’s meal then it’s not the restaurant that needs to be having an introspective reassessment of its motives.
Meanwhile, the 5-man dungeon at the end of the personal story is like serving chicken wings in a posh Asian restaurant where you’re expected to only use chopsticks. The Koreans can probably handle it solo but everyone else is SOL.
If I can’t guest across regions then you can put guesting back in the box for all I care.
I was looking forward to guesting for two reasons: some of my friends are in Europe, and my own time zone is in Asia which means the US server I play on is dead quiet for half of my prime playing times.
So whatever. As far as I’m concerned that’s another feature you were trumpeting about pre-launch that hasn’t transpired.
Oh almost forgot, only hits a maximum of 5 people (and those 5 targets will change all the time as the arrows fall).
All skills only affect a maximum of 5 people.
Unless you happen to play exclusively with people who stand still at optimum range with their flanks exposed, the mathcraft is worth kittenpoop.
Try them both and decide for yourself. Asking a forum for a definitive ‘better’ weapon in a game where weapon choice was designed to be a matter of taste is a massive waste of the internet’s bandwidth, especially if it’s been asked thousands of times already.
Bwahaha. Rebel scum. Disobeying the crown is treason!
Seriously, there are MMOs out there with little good-evil meters that let you go all the way into the red by doing horrible, horrible things to people who didn’t even look at you funny. Meanwhile in Guild Wars 2 if you want your character to stop spouting bleeding-heart platitudes in every other conversation, you’d have to hack the audio files and it’d probably get you suspended or banned. And yet Guild Wars 2 is wanting for moral rectitude?
I think someone’s been reading the Daily Mail too much.
I’ll just leave this here:
So here’s the thing about this example: it’s a valid justification that no one should take for granted the idea that there are no bugs in the RNG maths, but this kind of situation is unlikely to happen under ANet’s nose when it comes to loot.
The reason the whole Wi-Flagged thing went unnoticed was because time spent under aggro isn’t something that would get logged. Staff assigned to game balancing might be seeing statistics like death rates, skill usage rates… all sorts of data from the combat logs but having more aggro from the RNG isn’t easy to spot; you might notice it if the same subset of players were being targeted by enemy skills all the time but that could be down to poor aggro management by those players, or any number of explanations.
When it comes to loot drops, you can expect* that is something Arenanet are monitoring very closely. Not only do their economists want to see how much is entering the system via loot, but they want to see the distribution of it. They want to monitor the effectiveness of magic find to ensure it’s weighted at a fair opportunity cost to other gear statistics. They also want to check that their algorithms are distributing loot randomly but in a way that isn’t creating massively lucky or unlucky players except in those few places where it’s supposed to feel like a lottery (and if some people are disproportionately and repeatedly winning those lotteries, you can bet they’d notice), and they very likely want an ideal situation where some people feel lucky, but no-one feels unlucky.
I’m not saying it’s not important to call out if you’re under the perception that luck in this game appears to be skewed, because perception is exactly what they want to be managing. Just don’t put too much stock into the idea of a loot distribution bug. It’s more likely loot distribution tuning if anything.
*Please note that I said expect, not assume.
It dropped for me on level 1, and I doubt you’ll have any problem with builds. You can run fractals level 1 with level 40 characters.
The kicking system is far too open to abuse for it to be worthwhile in its current state. The vast majority of cases for its justification involves pugs (with guilds or friend groups it’s nowhere near needed as much), so if it’s creating a paradigm where pugging becomes untenably risky then the kicking system is failing its design objectives.
If you see someone with a commander icon on in a town, you can right-click their portrait and choose ‘join squad’. They can’t kick you out of the squad.
You can then chat in the squad channel with /squad. Get a friend to join the squad too, and chat away… but make sure you don’t break any rules about spam or harassment.
After all, until ANet make some changes, commanders have every right to turn on their commander icons in towns. You might as well make use of your right to join their squad and chat to squad mates. I’m sure your squad commander would appreciate this mutual assertion of rights and it wouldn’t annoy them at all.
It’d be useful. A couple more buttons next to the ‘dye remover’ and ‘undo all changes’ buttons to store and recall different colour schemes, perhaps?
I fully support this, as long as it doesn’t allow people to track targets in PvP situations.
Speaking of PvP situations, if the called target system does get overhauled then please consider letting commanders mark more than one target, like how they can place more than one squad waypoint.
A Norn ranger/sculptor with confidence issues, a big black wolf, a lovesick but stoic Sylvari thief, an ill-tempered Asura golemancer, a guilt-ridden Human Seraph Captain, and a brooding Charr warrior walk into a bar at the same time.
The bartender says, “what is this, some kind of joke?”
Considering that the mission is a one-off occurrence and that the order choice is permanent, it’s obvious what your basis for the decision should be. However you are still forced to amalgamate your choice of which order you want to join with the decision about which order is the best tool for the job in that one situation.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that a player should always have the same answer to those two questions.
Maybe an option to change Orders once the Order section of the storyline is complete might work?
Option 1 is to pick and test some new values. Satisfies 98% of the player base, with zero dev-time, goes out as soon as we’re comfortable with the values.
Option 2 is to make a slider/drop down, pick acceptable ranges (not trivial), localize text, and update the UI. Requires new tech, and waiting for text to get localized. This satisfies 100% of the player base at the cost of time and slowly complicating the game.
I’ve been in the neglected 2% of option 1 before. Not for this issue but others, a couple of times in this game and a few times in some others.
You might think ‘neglected’ is too strong a word for it, and I know you’re a lot less willing to take option 1 if it makes the game unplayable for that 2%… but don’t underestimate how snubbed that 2% are going to feel, even if it’s a little thing.
Please try to make sure that whenever you take an option 1 that that minority knows the decision isn’t taken lightly. It’s just words, but you guys spend a lot of effort earning good will from players and so the words will count.
I don’t think it’s high on their priority list of things to fix. Every time you do this trick to gain access to a skin you wouldn’t normally get, you use a stone to ‘unlock’ the skin and another stone to apply it to armour that’s actually useful. Using up transmutation stones is something they want us to do, so it’s a win-win bug (edit: if it’s even a bug at all).
I think if this could move it’d be OP. The dual role it plays as ranged defense and melee AoE isn’t confusing/inefficient/nonsense at all, it means the skill always has a use no matter what type of opponent you’re facing.
…but if you want to be a trinity healer, go water ele.
Not sure this is sound advice… telling people this will just turn ineffective guardians into ineffective elementalists!
If you want to be a trinity healer, go different game.
The solution you suggest is not the simplest solution to the problems you indicate.
If you feel it’s difficult to find the guild to which an emblem/banner belongs to, the problem there is that the emblems and banners need to also indicate the name of the guild leader(s) or vice-leader(s) connected to them.
“/Find” is not an appropriate solution. In my opinion, it’s actually kind of creepy.
We already have a contact system which allows anyone you encounter to track you for all eternity. -shivers- That at least lets me know through my “follower” system.I don’t want a system that lets anyone track me whenever they please without my knowledge. Only my closest bubbly friends are allowed to do that.
Your issue is that the game needs more privacy control options. Unless I’m misunderstanding you, if GW2 had appropriate privacy control then features like /find and /whois wouldn’t be a problem for you.
The intention is obviously that once you drop down from your home base, you shouldn’t be able to return to it unless it’s through a designated base entrance. Even if it doesn’t fit the precise definition of ‘bug’, it clearly isn’t working as intended.
In a game where one of the core design philosophies is to enable players to help players, where kill stealing and loot ninjaing are gone and players don’t have to party to benefit from each others’ presence and dependence on particular classes is muted to the point of being negligible…
Players start kittening at each other for not helping each other enough.
Brilliant.
It’s an early, initial customization option. Choosing the first pet is a more valuable initial customization as it affects your effectiveness a lot more than the other custom gear does. The trade-off is you don’t get any unique armour (unique insofar as 1/3 of the profession population has it), and if you’re particularly sweet on a thief or engineer unique item you can always cross-transmute something across.
1. Use your roots elite.
2 a). Run away (see shochinhwa’s above post for details) , or
2 b). Attack the one that escapes the roots.
Healing Spring’s forte isn’t from standing still in it… that only happens when you’re playing at extreme range where it’s no good to anyone who needs it anyway. Its power is in the combo bonuses from other people or from your own leaps or the kittenload of projectile finishers you’re capable of producing.
There are a lot of ways a Ranger can provide team play. As much as healing spring is useful, I find entangling enemies when a party member is getting swarmed or using multiple sources of quickness to speed-res people happen more often than any other life-saving actions, but maybe that’s just my loadout.
Necromancer as someone that raises skeletons and zombies to fight for them is a relatively new use of the word.
You do know that signet of locus + 15% run speed with dagger main-hand allows you to cap 33% running speed without ever using a skill? Same goes with 10% offhand or 15% while in death shroud. And who in his right mind would waste rune slots for a 6/6 centaur set!?
Locust and the dagger trait stack?
It really depends on your own play style and preference, but if you’re looking for dps/crit with decent survivability and mainly in PvE, I’d recommend retraiting to 30/30/x/x/x and seeing how it works out, and if it doesn’t you can move points back into WS/BM until you get to a level that you feel meets your requirement for ‘decent’ survivability.
It’s only 3.50s or something to retrait. A good investment to find the build that suits you best.
Glass cannon in PvE is not viable in dungeons get torn apart in later dungeon although if you only run AC/TA should be fine.
Who said ‘glass cannon’? You can stack enough defense via your equipment, and I run 30/30/5/0/5 in all dungeons just fine like that. My advice to OP is it’s up to him to decide how much defense is enough for sufficient defense, and to not listen to people who tell him what is and isn’t ‘viable’ based on their own play style instead of his.
How do you think my current build will hold up in later dungeons (I’ve only done a couple so far)
It’ll be fine, seriously. Just don’t gauge your build’s performance on the first run (because everything is new). You’ll find that when things get you, it’s because of a bad decision about when to use melee, or bad timing on a dodge with a boss’ damage spike. The dungeons don’t punish you for the traits you pick.
(edited by Munrock.3092)
It really depends on your own play style and preference, but if you’re looking for dps/crit with decent survivability and mainly in PvE, I’d recommend retraiting to 30/30/x/x/x and seeing how it works out, and if it doesn’t you can move points back into WS/BM until you get to a level that you feel meets your requirement for ‘decent’ survivability.
It’s only 3.50s or something to retrait. A good investment to find the build that suits you best.
A perfect example of an event that is not labeled as a [Group Event] but can’t be done solo is the event in Malchor’s Leap to retake the Eastern Colonnade.
That event seems to have some issues. I have solo’d it before where the mobs didn’t respawn, or at least, respawned much slower.
It’s also possible to solo it with the fast respawns however, it just takes a lot of effort, which you’re not rewarded for, but you’re not rewarded for soloing anyways. Basically, you have to rez all NPCs to 99%, while killing everything. When they’re all at 99%, you kill everything, then rez every NPC. You then guard the engineers only, keeping them alive as long as possible and rezzing them when you have a break. You must also kill any enemies attacking the structures since them damaging the structures will push back the progress. The other NPCs are just a buffer so you can ignore them. Also note it is possible to build the camp with just 1 engineer. If a veteran abomination happened to spawn, deal with it, since it will rage and wipe out everything as it attacks the group of NPCs and gets faster with every hit.
You can sort of cheat it by aggroing all the mobs and running to the back then jumping on the rock. This is a safe spot where the enemies will enter evade mode. You can then jump off and on to get them to run back and forth. I think you can prevent the mobs from spawning by keeping at least one of the mobs from the previous group alive.
For the average player however, the event is definitely unfair. Even when you kill the catapults, the servants spawn instantly and begin repairing it and as soon as you kill them, they respawn only to finish rebuilding it.
I do think it’s bugged though, as in someone forgot to put a delay inbetween groups, like every other event has.
Summary Version:
1. Do meticulous, elaborate and contrived things to account for the fact that this event is extremely difficult.
2. ???
3. There is a high chance that you will have to go back to step 1.
4. Small profit.
The game doesn’t really teach players how to use their skills defensively. The system in place currently that involves slowly unlocking skills on weapons and unlocking utilities even slower might help people learn what each skill does, but it does nothing to teach people how to use them. Especially the defensive ones.
There needs to be something inserted into the story missions that teaches players how to use the skills that aren’t pure DPS skills. The militia training activities in Claypool teach you to time a block, but there needs to be more than just that. Things to demonstrate explicitly what blindness does and how much damage you avoid by using weakness on opponents and on to more nuanced stuff like deciding when to use a dodge and when to take an attack on the chin.
On a second character (that can leech off the income of the first), definitely buy.
TP stuff is so cheap at lower levels that you can buy at asking prices, and for higher levels you can put in purchase orders at lower prices while your character is still low-level, and the purchase orders will be fulfilled before you get to the level needed to use them.
Plan ahead like that and profit. Save crafting for the end of your levelling so you can get the last several levels in LA and not bore yourself to death in Orr.
You should also take into account your class mechanics, for example traits that consider health in %ages. They tend to trigger/activate at very low or high thresholds, and vitality affects how large the margins are between those thresholds and death/full health.
There’s also the beginnings of a race track and starting gate on the Eastern sides of Lion’s Arch.