Guild Wars 2

Wethospu.6437:

Sometimes it means that they are looking for someone to carry them.

Probably more than half (experience on NA) of the groups who ask for “melee lupi” in LFG can’t handle it when there’s no mesmer. Didn’t run enough pug on EU to meaningfully compare, but I’d be surprised if it was different.

I’ve cleared the room before lupi enough times in groups that had one afk and got bored (mostly when we still cared about getting fast times on lupi and trying stuff) waiting to know that it isn’t particularly interesting to do that, and skipping is in fact a lot more challenging since any fail during a skip can aggro too much in the wrong place and the dude who failed the skip or who’s getting all the backaggro is going for a world of hurt, while actively clearing them allows you to focus fire them quickly a few at a time, which, with the whole group dps, doesn’t make them last for long.

Trash mobs are neither rewarding, nor particularly fun to kill. I also think the vast majority of people who whine about this just don’t have enough experience doing dungeons, and would in fact, get bored very quickly after a few more runs with 100% clears. Certainly I can’t imagine them holding the same ideals after doing 100% clears of P1 and P4 more than a few times. There’s a reason why all attempts at making guilds for “no skip” run failed. People who complain about skipping.. tend to drop the complaining after they’ve gotten enough of it and join the rest of us Borg.

Some trash groups in arah have interesting mechanics, but they just melt too quickly for anyone to notice much. You only notice anything when you fail a skip, not when you actually fight and melt them down in a few seconds.

Andred.1087:

JoshuaRAWR.4653:

When people are running dungeons for the 100th time, they don’t want to have to wait on people watching the cutscenes for the first time

If they’re doing it for the 100th time, why the hell are they doing story mode? There’s no reason for this.

A hundred times is obvious hyperbole, but a lot of people have ran story dungeons multiple times for cumulative reasons such as :
1/unlocking dungeons on alts
2/running it for friends/guildies (I’ve ran story dungeons I already did on current characters for other people, and other people did the same for me when I made a new alt)
3/bored after a dungeon tour
4/has sometimes been part of the daily

The last thing most people have on their mind after a few years of playing gw2 is to watch the kitten cutscenes. That’s even more so true for explorable, but it’s still valid for story modes. Unless you’re running with 4 other new players, chances are, no one wants to sit and watch them.

But even new players might not want to watch them either. I never bothered watching the cutscenes even when people were still willing to sit through them when I started playing, I just didn’t care to watch that cringe dialogue. GW2 is no Planescape Torment when it comes to game writing. When people were watching them I just alt tabbed and browsed the web.

Thaddeus.4891:

Arkinos.7245:

Scholar if you only run perfectly organised groups.

Pack, Ogre or Ranger if you dont.

Ranger don’t work anymore for Warrior.

And rune of the ogre will get you kicked even from PHIW pugs because there’s not a lot of people with high tolerance for summons causing pain in dungeons.

Kronos.2560:

heck even dodging heals guards..

Stability on dodge that Revenant get is far more useful though, letting them dodge out of things like ring of warding, line of warding, ele staff CC etc. If they don’t give it an ICD it will be among the most useful “on dodge” traits.

Thothkepara.2539:

You must be a guardian or warrior in a bunker build. Me, I play thief bait, a mesmer, and those “troll builds” can burst me in literally two seconds flat, even in my most defensive builds.

What makes thieves overpowered is the sustainability the stealth mechanic allows them. It is unparalleled. A thief can easily survive the burst of every other profession with one click into stealth, then turn around for their own burst, then have two more in the same time it takes for everyone else to go off CD.

I almost solely play engineer on a great variety of builds (I’ve pretty much done all possible variations depending on my mood, from condi to glass canon SD burst to soldier/melandru set for zerguing). On the occasion that I do die, it’s because I was outplayed, not because they had a build that was OP against mine. If a thief kills me, I’d say job well done, and I’d be happier to see that than the great variety of troll thiefs who go in and out without ever truly bothering to fight.
I can understand your frustration because you main mesmer, but all builds/classes have something that shut them down well. For mesmers, since they kinda get shut down without a target, stealth is obviously a problem, but that also means that PU mesmers would give you just as much pain as a thief would if you don’t run PU yourself.

As for guardians, they don’t need to run bunker builds to fight well against thieves either. Mediguards burst builds are strong against most thieves builds, although it might possibly be a problem against P/D, but not because they’re thieves, it’s because the build is weak against condition.

Also, if we’re talking about personal distaste for a particular type of opponent, I’d rather fight a billion thieves than PU condi mesmers. I usually just don’t bother and get out of their range. Being that most of my abilities will trigger AoE that will kill their clones (and trigger all that nastiness and constant cripple), and them being difficult to directly target and their sustain able to deal with the few single target things I can do, it’s almost never worth the bother, just outrun them.

Paulie.6215:

Sorry about your anger.

Every class has it’s ‘perks’. This is the thief’s perk.

I think it’s kind of absurd that necros can add 18k HPs to themselves with death shroud. Or how rangers have just as much burst at 1500 range than I do in melee range.

It all works out.

A necro who has lost to you just cannot flee. It doesn’t matter how much HP they have, it’s literally impossible for a necro to flee. That second HP bar doesn’t buy them that, that second HP bar is an alternative for a class that has no access to other survival skills, such as vigor for more dodge, or invulns, blocks etc. Anyone who thinks necro is OP based on that bar doesn’t know what necro don’t have access to and don’t understand the role of such a bar.
That initial burst from rangers isn’t very difficult to avoid. Most classes will be content just dodging or blocking through it while closing the gap.
The real and only problem with thieves isn’t something like being OP in actual combat. They’re not. The problem is the trolling with troll builds. Thieves can be built in such a way in wvwvw that they can pretty much harass you across the whole map and there is nothing you can do about it. They won’t kill you because they’re bad and the troll builds made to be highly resilient can’t kill anything but every time they see they’re losing against you they can just disengage into getting out of combat, wait for all their cd, initiative etc and then come back and harass again, and again, and again. It’s never interesting to fight the same losing idiot over and over and over while roaming around.
I’ve had it happen a few times for 10+ minutes where the same thief would engage me again, and again, and again, and lose every time, disengage, I’d see on my bar that I’m out of combat so they were ooc too and then they come back and continue that pointless harassment again.

It’s not a problem in TPVP because anyone who’d run one of those troll builds, or just run with anything in SA is such a detriment to their team that you don’t even need to pay attention to them.

Conditions aren’t important only for condi builds. There are a lot of burst build traits in this game that rely on conditions. For roaming mediguards Fiery Wrath isn’t a bad pick for well timed bursts following a burn to on the enemy for example. It boosts your raw damage by 10% on foes that have been inflicted with the condition.
Nerfing burning is not only a nerf to condition builds from engineers, dhuum necro or cele ele. It’s a nerf on a lot of more offensive builds.

Conditions in this game are not only used for their own damage, they can also just be enhancing the rest of your build through other means.

Broom.2561:

Fermi.2409:

Broom.2561:

.And 200 miliseconds is still a REALLY REALLY short time.

In the grand scheme of things, sure, but when it comes to online gaming 200 ms of latency is huge. Honestly, that’s well into the unplayable level imo.

Like I’ve already said a dozen times, I am a PVPer. A serious one. And I’ve been playing with a 200+ ping for YEARS without issue in dozens of game.

Not so serious then.
200+ ping isn’t too noticeable in gw2 compared to, say, games like Counter Strike (where having anything over 80ms is highly detrimental) but it’s still very much a problem on classes like engi where skill activation has to go through two passes, going from a kit to another all the time, it adds up and anyone who has played on both US and EU servers and has a good ping on one of them would think the same. When your much needed skill is only one key press away, like on most classes, it’s not much of a problem, but it’s very noticeable when you’re pressing kitswap and quickly pressing the skill you wanted from the kitswap but it doesn’t go off with the right timing (such as getting a block off). Or worse, when you want to cancel the jump from a skill like acid bomb through kit swapping action, it’s easy to get with decent ping and much harder to reliably do with 200+ ping. With 200+ ping you absolutely have to give a small delay to your 2nd keypress whenever you do something like kitswapping because it just won’t go off the way it should and would when you’re playing at low ping.
I don’t play ele in pvp, but I’d imagine it’d also be annoying. At least on classes where you’re not constantly swapping the content of your skillbar it’s not as problematic in terms of the reaction delay before the skill you want actually activates.

You also basically have no idea of what you’re speaking by the way if you’ve never experienced low ping at all (for eg if your internet is bad). You truly, sincerely don’t know what impact having a high ping has because anyone who has experienced both a solid low latency and bad internet wouldn’t even debate this.

Lorgus.6148:

tweeve.3782:

As someone who has run many many dungeons and even lead many as well. I have do not care what people run when they run with me. I have taken just about every combination out there and still beat every dungeon. Sure some times it is harder when you dont have a dedicated tank or run a bunch of people who cant do a lot of dps. But it has never stopped me from trying. But I do at time swap characters out and in if we are having difficulty with a section. One or two of the group might have to switch to another character that they might have but I leave this up to the person, or I do it myself.

Knowing the dungeon well and your character well, you can 2 or 3 man most of not all the dungeons. They just take time to do.

I bet you wouldn’t be so sure that every dungeon is completeable with any party setup if TAFU or pre-nerf Simin were still a thing.

I did TAFU runs where we kitten ed around with things like running condi on my engie for the lulz because of all the whine that path generated at the time. Even with mediocre to non existent dps rotation and very badly timed reflect in said party (guard cast WoR before the fight even truly began, much less spiders spawn) the end boss was still easy to destroy in a 4man. I’ve also seen a youtube video at some point of a party that dealt with it with necro heals. I’m not sure what they did, I don’t play necro, but they ran healing builds and just tanked through it without any reflect in their group.
Any party composition could do TAFU. It was just a matter of having a coordinated party. If your party lacked in dps and reflect, it could still make up for it in some other way. I wouldn’t support doing something like cleric/healing builds, but they could also deal with that in a reasonable manner, taking more time to kill though.
TAFU made people whine because the path required a party willing to actually coordinate things. As opposed to be a bunch of random people thrown together running like headless chicken.

Pre-nerf Simin on the other hand was very dps-checky, so I’d be inclined to agree.

Zenith.7301:

and no group will run without one simply because of banner of discipline.

That is true of optimized speedrun groups, but take that sentence in the other way, it also means that no one will let a second warrior join their group because it’s an incredible loss once you already have the banners, while people will be far more likely to let more than one thief, or an engie player, in casual speedruns. And most serious speedrun groups almost always have two ele, it is the real gold standard, hell there are records that were done without warriors but none were done without eles. While not having a war’s banners is a loss for the group, not having eles would be far worse than not having warriors and I consider the class to be mostly disposable for casual runs, while I wouldn’t really want to run without any ele.

As for pugging.. I’ve seen both side of the equations. The banner buffs from my warrior didn’t contribute as much as the sheer personal dps of my ele in 99% of pugs. Pugged runs become noticeably faster when I play on my ele, as opposed to anything else. This is very particularly true for dungeons that are icebow friendly like AC and TA, if you have both an ele and a war character and chose to bring your warrior in pugs you must really love wasting your time. Buffing pugs is not as worthwhile as bringing the top dps.

Fashion Mage.3712:

Nikaido.3457:

Revenant looks like it’s going to be what condition guardian should have been.

A demonic-themed build that inflicts conditions on itself and then manipulates and spreads them? Certainly doesn’t sound like what a condition guardian should be to me.

You’re talking about theme/lore related things, I’m talking about gameplay and combat mechanics.

Revenant is a class that brings a lot of similar utilities, such as reflection, group stability, blast finishers, group condition removal and control/CC. It literally fits all the roles a guardian would in a party while being condition focused. In terms of role in a group it’s taking what a condition guardian would if condition guardian actually existed (it doesn’t).

The idea of a burn/condition focused guardian will look even more ridiculous once this expac hits the market.

That trait in itself was pointless even if it was working, condition guardian just can’t become a thing unless they add more condition application to the class.

Revenant looks like it’s going to be what condition guardian should have been.

Tukaram.7920:

Plus the fact that dungeons are not exactly hight priority in Anets bug-tracker (Alphard “surprise” bombing anyone?).

At least it made the encounter a bit more interesting. It was a positive bug and if anet had any sense, like other game developers (such as how strafe-jumping in FPS games started as a bug in Quake and ended up being seen as a positive feature to remain, influencing other games and being deliberately put into the physics of movements of these games), they would have kept the bug and turned it into the feature.

Bugs that really kitten me off like Detha breaking at the end of the run in AC p2 still haven’t been fixed since release.

Lorgus.6148:

Looks like anet didn’t really think through these new stability changes and how they would affect existing content.

Since when have they thought about anything concerning old content whenever they made changes to the game? The balance changes the game went through turned most low level dungeons into cakewalks where even uncoordinated pugs can easily do things like burning AC p2’s end boss in a single trap. IMHO, low level dungeons are in a dire need of a balance pass at the moment. Which is probably never going to happen, as they’re all focused on the expac and don’t really have a dungeon team anymore.

It’s also more sustained might stacking which is very useful in pugs where things don’t die too fast (although the prestack of might you can do in AC is enough to go staff ele).
Scepter is useful for prestacking might but it doesn’t sustain it well and has horrible dps. It’s only used in conjunction with LH builds, and LH players only really sustain might if someone else puts out fire fields.
Aaaaand.. to be honest, the fun rotation has a lot to do with the appeal of that build. It’s one of the only two DPS rotations in this game that are actually somewhat involved and fun, the other one being rifle kit engineer.

Suggesting dual banner warrior as an alternative to that.. it’s like going from high quality single malt whiskey to boring run of the mill blends. Some people don’t want to fall asleep on their keyboard while playing their character.

Easy, constant access to a smoke field (blind is one of the strongest support against trash mobs). Blast finishers. For pugging, they’re also one of the classes that can bring a projectile absorb which is always nice to have in random group composition from LFGing.
One of the strongest ability to peel off defiance from a boss, through pistol 4 allowing for another icebow deep freeze.
And, as you said, the sheer dps. It’s in the top tier right next to ele.

How can you think rangers have more of a place than thieves?

pepper.6179:

i believe the stab changes were for pvp. Why not make the stab changes exclusively for pvp?

I highly doubt it because PVP is the least affected game mode. Consider the amount of stacks granted by stability, and the typical number of opponents on pvp nodes. Do you think anyone would waste all of their CC cooldown in the hope of getting ONE cc instead of just waiting out for stability to end (or boon rip it) and THEN using all the CC you can to lockdown someone? wasting all CC to break through stability stacks in PVP in the hope of getting one last bit of CC is just not worth it at all.

WvWvW is by far the most affected, PVE not so much for experienced players, but it’ll probably be noticeable against groups of mobs for less experienced ones. On the other hand, the stability change literally did nothing to PVP, so I can’t see it as being done for the purpose of PVP alone.

phys.7689:

Nikaido.3457:

Nyx.7342:

The reason why they chose not to do that was they didnt want to exclude anyone’s playstyle, meaning you should be able to get any weapon regardless of how and what you play

That’s ridiculous because there is only one reasonable way of getting weapons that require gold, such as all those skins obtained either through RNG gambling crap or buying them outright on the TP: farming gold through dungeon tours. Anything else would take so much time it isn’t even funny.

actually farming gold through dungeon runs isnt the best way

TP playing is probably number one
And though i havent run the numbers in awhile, effecient open world farming is probably number 2

ok looking at it, with close to record runs on every path, it would still take you 180 minutes to run all paths, im guessing the record runs dont include loading transit, cutscenes etc,
running every path would give you 36 gold,

so 12 gold an hour, but only if your a doing record times on every path.
now, if your just above average, you will probably take twice as long. (whens the last time you did a path in under 3 minutes?)

which puts it at 6 gold an hour, which isnt really a lot.

You get a lot more than 36 gold with dungeon tours if you sell your drops and mat. I sell all exotic/rare drops, salvage the rest, sell the mat at the end of the tours. Also record runs aren’t meant for gold farming. Killing things like the little mobs in CoE p2/p3 is well worth doing for example. Core/lodestones drops in that dungeon are common.
TP playing is number one only when you already have enough gold to invest and even then it isn’t particularly accessible to people without business acumen. You can’t make money with the TP if you don’t already have a lot of money.

And then if you have dungeon recipes you also make money from the token earned. If you don’t, you still can add a small amount of money through salvaging dungeon gear. Salvaging will get you globs of ecto and sometimes things like insignia which fetch a nice amount of gold on the TP.

Nyx.7342:

The reason why they chose not to do that was they didnt want to exclude anyone’s playstyle, meaning you should be able to get any weapon regardless of how and what you play

That’s ridiculous because there is only one reasonable way of getting weapons that require gold, such as all those skins obtained either through RNG gambling crap or buying them outright on the TP: farming gold through dungeon tours. Anything else would take so much time it isn’t even funny.

Nyx.7342:

who was running shout heal sword warhorn longbow […] whirlwinding

wat

IllegalChocolate.6938:

I’m sorry what cleric guardian uses AH?

Get some reading comprehension? I never said AH builds ran cleric. I said cleric was useless because there was superior tank-ish builds that didn’t need a single piece of it.

phys.7689:

not sure why some are opposed to even attempting this just to get some numbers for the records.
Knowledge is knowledge?

You do realize a lot of us used to run with AH guardians knight/zerk hybrids ? Meaning we do have a decent idea of the difference in runs between full zerk parties and a more tank oriented guard. I actually can’t see this build as being better because AH guardians tanks just as well (the self-heals of AH are amazing.. as a crutch.), maintains aggro just as well while not losing every single bit of dps the way this cleric does. AH doesn’t even need a single piece of healing gear because it doesn’t scale with that at all, while being able to give out massive sustain to the guardian.
Cleric doesn’t even benefit half of the heals used in that cleric build. Selfless daring and virtue of resolve benefit the most, but the guard tries very hard not to dodge so the first one is almost never used. Symbol heals don’t scale well with healing power. Healing Breeze is still strong even on a zerker build.

This issue is a basic “been there, done that, moved on”. AH build became a thing when we were still somewhat ignorant because it was the better compromise. There is no point in cleric builds. If you’re gonna need a tankier player to rez up people who down or to facetank bosses for some time AH does the job just fine.

And it was dropped because we realized we could play without and the game was also more fun that way.
Plus, elementalist earth elementals pretty much do the same thing as that without losing a party member.

NoTrigger.8396:

i would make challenging content like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qIVkFINBSQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3NRt8Mse3o

and tweak the numbers so tanks arent needed.

I forgot that a large scale fight could actually exist without turning into a particle effet potato mash. The dumb things you get used to with GW2..

“Balanced paths”? But 90% of the content in this game is too easy, if anything is “unbalanced” it’s the lack of challenging content outside of high level fractals.

> And it’s quite frustrating that best part of the game is locked out from me like this…

You hate it, but it’s the “best part of the game”. What? if they changed it to your liking, it wouldn’t be “the best part of the game” anymore, it wouldn’t be any different from open world trash. We don’t want dungeons to be all like CoF p1, thank you very much.

If by best part, what you meant is earning gold, farming silverwastes should be enough reward for you.

PierPiero.9142:

the problem is the run ,stacking way of making dungeon … ok you make them fast but there is no satisfaction …. stay stacked and spamming skills is something that does not seem fighting to me …. only button smashing …

If you think there’s nothing going on during runs beside just spamming skills in stacks you’ve been massively carried by your groups. Try running with 4 other players who really think like you. Fraps it and upload on youtube for our entertainment’s sake too.

I can’t even.

Message Body length must at least be 15.

GW2 is very close to being a pure action game. Are you really asking how action based games can be challenging? GW2 is all about active abilities: dodge, blocks, invuln, blind etc. Challenging content should then test the players on their responsiveness. GW2 needs more encounters with multiple enemies during boss fights, and phased bosses that show different behavior during different phases. Lupicus and Grawl are good examples, but they could do more to fully make it feel necessary to have a competent group and not just one or two decent players in a party of 5. An encounter like Lupicus, but with sidebosses spawning during each phases would do a lot for the game.

Holy trinity games are not challenging, they’re more like puzzles, and once the “puzzle” has been solved (the right rotation and party setup) it turns into a banal routine.

Even if they didn’t want to address this and thought it wasn’t worth “fixing”, surely it is obvious that it wasn’t intended and could have been considered a game bug (thus, using it is technically an exploit). Of course, that doesn’t mean I oppose doing this in any way whatsoever, we’re just arguing semantics here.

Truthfully they should just remove the jade maw. They added two real end bosses to fractals, they’ve shown that they’re not reluctant toward removing content from the game, can we even consider the Jade Maw to be content at all? it’s just a boring time gate, I wouldn’t mind the end boss roll be between molten and mai only, if they didn’t replace the maw with another new frac which is also another possibility.

Btw, if there’s any anet dev looking out for end boss ideas.. fractals are about revisiting the past and alternate dimensions, so how about a fight with Giganticus Lupicus before he became undead? :> Or rather, before they became undead.. hah.

Ele, Thief, Engie. Everything else is opt.

Just by doing glyph in air and then pressing icebow 5 and 4 he’d already contribute 300% more than anything he could dream with an engi at range.

Falados.7165:

Yeah but what if someone with disabilities hmm ? i choose Engineer cause of Flamethrower and love watching mobs get burnt and it’s simple for me #1 then #2 on CD if mobs comes close #3 and then #2 again

Well, you asked for something laidback, I’m giving you the advice that there are classes far more suited to the task, what you end up doing is up to you.
Asking for an engi build that could contribute anything to a run while still ranging and being laidback (so, no nade) is like asking to see a mythical unicorn. That doesn’t exist.

Yes, the flamethrower looks cool. So do many other weapons that are pretty useless in PVE. One of the first, counter intuitive thing a warrior player learns in this game is that he can’t use sword main hand and has to use the more barbarian axe, not to mention the even more bizarre fact that sword off hand is a better defensive tool than a shield. You either adapt or play with the knowledge that you’re using things that are bad. “Cool” doesn’t make for good gameplay.

Also blunderbuss does more damage in close range, and then the fact that grenades will miss from time to time if you’re making things move around too much.

It doesn’t look like trying to convince you to melee will do anything so, if you absolutely have to insist on a ranged playstyle, you should make an ele or ranger. They are far more suited for what you are looking for. Despite the lack of true melee weapons (well, beside.. ahem.. toolkit.. ugh) engineers aren’t well suited for a truly ranged build. With an ele you could at least contribute a little something. Ranger LB isn’t too horrible either.

You want something easy and laidback, but that’s not what you can get with engi. Even if you really insisted on ranging, nades are a skill shot and getting them to hit all the time on mobs that will be moving around back and forth a lot in a party that doesn’t full melee will make you rage. And camping rifle autoattack would be like having one less party member since your contribution might as well be non existent.

The problem with the idea of a “1 healer 4 zerkers” party setup is that the healer can only really be useful and help zerkers avoid dodging and stuff in the easy dungeons only. The idea of using a healer for zerkers breaks in content like Arah and high level FOTM. Your healer can, indeed, keep zerkers from dodging out of something like Bridgette’s retal symbol. It won’t help zerkers on something like Lupicus or Archdiviner. For that the whole party needs to be tanky, which makes run last much longer.

Basically, the only point of a 1healer 4 zerker party setup is to trivialize.. content that is already trivial to begin with. It doesn’t trivialize the more interesting dungeons at all. The net contribution of a healer on something like Lupicus is zero. If someone messed up dodging there on a zerker build, down they’ll go.
That looks rather pointless to me.

Zenith.7301:

s lack of damage will wipe you in any PvE in this game because the mobs WILL overwhelm your healing capacity if you let them live too long.

That isn’t true. You can even facetank lupicus and unbind the dodge key. Lack of damage isn’t what wipes pugs who don’t run berserker builds, what wipes them is that they don’t use good tank builds either (I know, it feels like an oxymoron to speak “good” and “tank” together but still). Pug builds = random garbage. A mass of randomly cobbled up together trait selections, runes and gear. A lack of any decent rotation. Also remember, just because you’re running tank doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use skills such as blind on trash mobs. Tank builds mean that you don’t have to dodge as much, and sometimes not even once, but they don’t mean you should stop using your skills and just mash the 1 button.

We don’t need healing builds in this game PVE, but, if we ever did, pugs would still wipe not because healing builds are bad at healing, but because the pugs themselves just don’t know what they are doing. Sustain builds are very good at what they’re doing, they’re just not needed.

Anyone who remembers what they promised for dungeons during the AC revamp would be sour and not trust anything from anet. They couldn’t keep even one tenth of their original promise, why should we expect anything if they can’t even throw a single bone or two now? all dungeons in this game by now would’ve seen a revamp had they stayed true to their word. And seeing the result of the AC revamp, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing, as all AC encounters were imho vastly improved over the originals, and there’s a lot of dungeons that would benefit from that treatment.

The first 30 levels of fractal don’t even need to exist, not in their current implementation. The first levels are incredibly boring, I would even rate 1-10 as being easier than most dungeon content in this game, do fractals really need anything like this? Not in my opinion.

I’ve already levelled to 50, so it doesn’t matter to me in a personal manner. I wouldn’t want to do it again though. Before it became account bound I’d take alts to higher level FOTM even if it meant slower levelling than just rushing through mindnumbing thing that FOTM 1-10 is.

Have the current 30 to 50 serve as the level 1 to 20 then have the rest of the progression influenced by nike’s ideas and views of higher level content.

I’ve seen a few lfg asking for thieves for some arah paths. They’re not the majority, but depending on the way this change affects skipping, you can bet it would become most LFG and people would go on and on on the forums about the “toxicity” of class elitism. Particularly as, apart from using stealth, classes with access to invuln/block skills would still have a much easier time to get through this.

Chris Cleary.8017:

WTFast runs through shared service VPNs like most tunneling services. Unfortunately when they change servers or providers, our systems detect a large quantities of accounts suddenly being accessed by a different network. Standard preventative measures dictate that we close access to these accounts to try to insure that the account’s holdings remain secure.

As we currently don’t have an “account identity lock” system, we rely on preventative banning in this case. We are working on a better solution for this, but this type of issue doesn’t happen very often, and when it does it can quickly and easily be fixed.

In this case it looks like this hit WTFast VPNs running out of Frankfurt, Germany which was brought to our attention because of high GoldSeller activity on it along with a flux of accounts hitting the same and new network at the same time.

Sorry for the inconvenience, I am still looking into this issue.

Thanks for lifting the ban, but unfortunately a decent VPN service like WTFast is essential to being even able to enjoy the game at all depending on the time of the day here so I’ll have to ask: can we use it again in good conscience?

Iris Ng.9845:

Yeah, it’s said in the ToS agreement.

Just because it’s in the ToS doesn’t make it valid. I could make a ToS where I write that you have to agree to be my slave but that still wouldn’t be valid in any way.
If they took my money and didn’t give the service they owed it doesn’t matter what they put in their ToS, some countries have laws that protect the customer more than others. If they have anything that is operated in my country I wouldn’t be so pessimistic about the end results, France is not a country where you can take people’s money and act like you owe nothing.
Hell, the very concept of software EULA even in the US is quite often in debate, with some jurisdictions going against them, some supporting it :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-user_license_agreement
No one should just outright submit to the things written in license agreements. It doesn’t work that way.

The issue is resolved though, the ban is lifted. Being vocal helps, I think, because I seriously doubt anything would’ve been done that fast if it didn’t start to pop up on reddit and the like.

@Dub : if there is a third time for you (I hope it really won’t. Getting banned a second time would probably make me leave the game for good. Being banned twice and stuck with it for 3 weeks each time? Lord.) be vocal, spread PR disaster on reddit etc.
Anet reads reddit more than they read their support tickets and forums.
I’m not vocal just out of rage. I’m vocal because I firmly believe it does something. Corporations only move when they smell potential PR disasters.

By week two I will definitely be starting a lawsuit here. Although I’m not sure if it’ll lead to anything being in France and anet being in the US.

I very much doubt an account hack. There’s been no suspicious activity in my account and I haven’t ever received a confirmation mail that wasn’t tied to me launching the game.

The only thing I could suspect is anet banning all accounts that used the wtfast VPN, which would be insanely idiotic.

I want an explanation, because I absolutely did no such a thing.

This must be a bad joke.. what the kitten.. anet? Refund me. Everything. kittens.

If nothing is done about this and you don’t refund me all I’ve put into this game I’ll see about a lawsuit considering I’ve never done anything like buying or selling gold.

> They however didnt intentionally design a weaponset/classes not to be used ever.

Well, I wouldn’t say they intended for a class (like necro) to be close to uselessness in a game mode, but I do remember them saying that weapons do not have to be as good in all game modes, that is, if something is good in PVP it doesn’t have to be great in PVE.

If you think that they’re designing classes/builds/weapon sets around the idea of being equally good in PVE I have a bridge to sell you. If anything, their N°1 target for balance would have to be PVP. PVP is why warrior has become so bad and only worth bringing as bannerbot.

Non critable bosses is the most idiotic thing. All that means is that you can play the exact same build (trait selection, runes, sigils), with the exact same trait set, and have the exact same amount of damage as a zerker glass canon with soldier gear, but making the game easier for you by not being a glass canon. What’s the point? If you made a lot of things non critable, all you do is push people toward gear that allows them to take more hit, while not really changing builds etc.

I would be okay with events to open dungeons if they were at the same level of difficulty of the concerned dungeon. At the moment you’re asking people who want to do dungeons to do events that require little more than mashing the one button. Even doing something like making alpha spawn in front of the gate would be better than what we currently have.

Jerus.4350:

I have faith that they’ll do something for them in PVE, jsut what’s been shown hasn’t really been good, but there’s still stuff left to be seen

They never really got around fixing necromancer for PVE (it might have decent personal DPS, but it’ll never become desirable), they don’t really balance this game around PVE, they screwed with warrior enough that it is now barely tolerable to have for the sake of the banners and nothing else. I wouldn’t be so optimistic about the class. They’re still pushing for espatz. Revenant looks highly tuned toward what they want for espatz.

Heck, for that matter, I’m not very optimistic about the class specializations. They might also be highly tuned toward things that might not fit the current dungeons/PVE.

dlonie.6547:

Nikaido.3457:

During the burrow phase, the thief went to kill the mobs spamming death blossoms.

Oh man. That was me when I first started playing — Dire d/d thief, spamming caltrops and death blossoms, with traited caltrops on dodge. And oh yeah, I used my dodges purely for the caltrops. GUYS LOOK AT ALL THE BLEEDING. I could kill a risen abomination in Orr in only 15 seconds. Such pride.

I didn’t do dungeons back then (thankfully), but it was fun to stealth and ninja spike 90s of cripple on people during friendly guild PvP matches >.> So much rage in TS, it was glorious.

(Most) of us wouldn’t be proud of what we did when we started the game. I wouldn’t have screenshoted that party if they were new players with low AP, I never pay any mind to what new players do as it wouldn’t be fair to them since we’ve all had our funny goof ups. But they were people who spent enough time (AP + the skins they had) in the game to know better than stack 3 condition builds in a dungeon party while focusing the mobs instead of killing the burrows. If at this point they didn’t learn, chances are, they never will. It’s not like it was 3 random phiw who happened to hit bad luck by filling the party with conditioners. It’s a guild group.