Guild Wars 2

Berk.8561:

A general observation:

“It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.” – Colin Johanson on Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead

(https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/)

Allie Murdock has, throughout this thread, stated that the design philosophy of the Ranger is slow and steady damage rather than burst damage and that the pet is integral to the class concept. I just want to make sure it’s not lost that based on the player comments, this clearly clashes with the way many people want to play their Ranger. So this should raise the question of why the game won’t let people play their Rangers the way many clearly want to. Specifically (these have been mentioned again and again in this thread)
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^THIS. I cannot +1 this enough. I’ve been lurking on this thread for a few days now, having left GW2 in December after the “rebalance,” and THIS post gets to WHY I left. My PvE main was ele, sPvP ranger, (WvW was just never my cup of tea; if you love it, more power to you! ) Since ele was another potential target class for this thread, I’ll use it as an example, too. I was running 10, 5, 5, 25(?), 30 on ele, and that build was great for me for eight months. I was playing MY character the way that I wanted to. Now, unless the class were rolled back to its state at Thanksgiving, I’ll never, ever be able to play ele the way I want to again; she’d effectively remain in forced-retirement. Sure there’s your might-stacking fire builds, etc., but those never appealed to me, and I’d sooner NOT play a class than allow the developers to force me to play it in a way that I don’t want. Same for ranger. When dodging and vigor were nerfed, I could no longer play my ranger the way I wanted to. I have 0 in BM because I never found even one point in there to be worth it; now I’m being told that that’s key to ranger and screw you if you don’t like it. I also want to second, third, fourth, whatever those who said ranger doesn’t have a broken 2×4; there’s cracks in the foundation and toxic mold in the walls.

I’d argue that, before ANet should be allowed to change a class, especially substantially, spend four months, yes, months, maining that class, and I mean at least 10 hours a week. Spend a month on PvE, and I mean Living Story (reload Canach’s dungeon and play a ranger; have fun!) explorable paths of Arah, CM, CoE, Teq, Wurm, Fire ele, map clearing, etc. Spend a month in sPvP, and find out how fun that is under the mess its “roadmap” is for those of us who just did it for kicks. Then spend a month in WvW, and I mean on a T1 server, SoR, JQ, TC, etc. And, on and off during this time, also spend time in mapchat in a huge place like LA, pop your ANet tag, and talk to players about how we play the game. When I’m seeing substantial changes to my medium and light classes from a company where seeing them as a non-heavy class is a NOTEWORTHY event among players… When Chesterton talked about reformers, the one he held up as an ideal would not allow his companion to remove a fence for which she saw no use until his friend SAW the use for the fence. A similar philosophy here would likely diffuse a LOT of player anger.

This thread is, ultimately, a test for ArenaNet; will they simply use it to justify controversial changes that they had ALREADY decided to make? That’s where I’d put my money. Or will they actually listen and be willing to eat crow if need be? I’m not holding my breath, but if they prove me wrong, I’ll eat crow until I choke on it. At this point, even if I did start playing again, I’d main my warrior and level up my guardian; those classes, from ANet’s perspective, are immune.

In the case of LS specifically, maybe when the ranger rezzes in, “Do you want to stow your pet for the duration of this event?” A band-aid like that would’ve made Canach a lot easier.

*Profession-based dailies. Yes, I have one of every class, but I also paid RL $ for the gems to do that; not everyone can and it’s not fair to them if they can’t get daily because of it. To say nothing of being unbalanced.
*No more hot-join Play Now button where I’m just automagically matched with people at my sPvP level. While, yes, every now and again it might do me some good to see how someone of Dragon rank does their schtuff, too many dailies and achieves are tied to WINNING, and I can’t. I also don’t want to BE that OP person to someone just starting out =-\
*The old daily system (think over a year and a half ago, when we still had Glory and all that,) was easy, you could get in and out, done. The new system is almost impossible to get unless you manage to beat bots as one of the “profession of the day” classes or join a server and happen to be the right class on the right side just as that team wins two seconds after you load in.
*BOTTERS!!!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS SHINY AND ON FIRE! I used to PvP all the time, but now it’s just not worth the headaches. I can’t win against someone’s CPU, period. (Seriously, anet; check my pre-2015 win/lose ratio to now.)
*I PERSONALLY hate spectator mode; too open to cheating. Anyone can stalk someone when they have a guildie spectating and reporting over TS or gchat.
*Almost impossible to find an open server, as in <10 people so you can actually PLAY, after reset; NEVER had this problem before—WTH?! Maybe set up dedicated public servers for dailies and don’t allow accounts on them that have finished those dailies?
*I’m consistently told that arenas are the only “real” place to play now, though botters exist there, too, but I just don’t like arenas. What happened to just being able to PLAY????

And all of that’s just off of the top of my head right after work. I’m sure once I get home and try to play, I’ll remember other things… About the ONLY thing to like about sPvP right now vs. my other MMO addiction, SWTOR, is that, for hot-join, there’s no queue. Otherwise? Forget it

sablephoenix.1593:

Speaking as someone who only does PvP casually for the achievements involved and, yes, the rank involved, removing rank progression and the earning of new finishers is a horrible idea.

I hate ladders, and no matter what I’m certain I’ll completely ignore whatever form of ladder you eventually put in the game. I would hate the ladder even more if it took away a form of reward which I can actually look forward to playing PvP for.

^ That
I’ve liked sPvP precisely because it was 100% divorced from PvE, and now that’s going away, and if Skill Points will have ANY part of it, well thank you, ArenaNet, for punishing me for my sPvP main not being my PvE main. (Map-clearing is just about the most boring mechanic I’ve ever found in a game, and that I’d have to do so to get my sPvP main extra skill points ticks me off; I don’t use her in PvE enough to get them through leveling, either.) I played sPvP on my lunch breaks at work, and I liked it because it rewarded persistence and dailies and monthlies could be slowly worked on in that hour timeframe. The leaderboards were something I could happily ignore, since nothing about them affected me in-game anyway.

I’ve only been playing since April, not launch or beta, and I didn’t start doing sPvP until a now-former guildmate introduced me to it, and I didn’t start sPvPing too regularly until I created my ranger. (Elementalist is hard as is, and in sPvP where I’m not up against some idiot AI, I was going squish more often than not.) I main the ele in PvE, but ranger in sPvP and since it all went into one big account-based pool, it didn’t matter on which toons I sPvP’d or how often, and I could use a toon who wasn’t even high enough level to HAVE skill points in PvE with no penalty. The second you introduce any PvE skill points, though, that separation, for me the strongest “sell” of sPvP, is violated. So I feel that I’m being “punished” in various ways for not playing PvE in a certain way and from not being in the game since launch.

If players have been farming Skyhammer, and I have no idea how they would (this thread is the first I’ve heard of it,) punish them and them alone and leave me out of it. I’d also like to throw out there that punishing EVERYONE for the behavior of a few gives me little initiative to report someone I DO see exploiting the system; if I report them, I’ll be punished in your next patch even though I didn’t do anything wrong.

This whole sPvP “roadmap” is one unmitigated disaster after another and after the December 10th patch starts the train, I’m leaving GW2. Thank you, ArenaNet, for ruining it; the Scarlet cancer had already mostly ruined PvE for me, y’all let her infect WvW, also, and sPvP was the only thing I really “had left.” (The PvE “rebalance” destroying my builds didn’t help, either.)

I’m inclined to think that the core of the issue is who makes decisions for ranger vs. who plays rangers; they’re not the same.