Guild Wars 2

• Raptor: Great feel to movement. Lack of strafing and damped turn speed made it feel like more than a cosmetic addition. A little sad that they just poof in and out of existence. I like the design of rapidly mounting and unmounting them, but it’d be nice if they persisted in the world a bit somehow, or at least ran off a bit before they despawned conceivably far enough away to pretend they didn’t just vanish, even if its just a client side effect for just your own mount. Didn’t like the lack of customization, and am afraid you’ll pull a gliders 2.0 and nickel and dime me for customization.

• Events: Indivudally well designed events that didn’t have the copy/paste feel of LS maps. Each felt unique and were fun, but I miss the chain style events that tell a little story. A whole map full of one-off events has personality, but not a lot of heart. I don’t want to return to HoT based meta timer insanity, but I’d like to see a few longer meta-style chains with a bit more story.

• Hearts/vendor system: I actually really like this setup. Enables directed farming for resources, gives a logical reason to recomplete hearts, gear identification costs seem in line with the amount of raw material you’re handing out.

• Casino: Its primitive, but I like that you tried to flavor ecto gambling as more than a blatant gamey mechanic. I am confused at the lack of Belcher’s Bluff, Golem Chess, and other minigames in the casino. I hope to see more in world gambling and more use of the gambling tokens for acquisition/rewards aside from the raptor run event.

• Map design: Overall the only frustrations I had seem to evaporate with the full expansion. I like that there are areas of the map that seems like they can’t be completed without stuff unlocked in later maps. I like that the collectables actually reward a bit of loot so they have value to people who aren’t achievement hunting. I like the way treasure hunting and keys are redesigned to not be reliant on one another.

• Bounties: Fun! I like the random affixes, although the hyena bounty seems a little overtuned with his shadowstep follwed extremely quickly by a high damage spike. Also the time bombs message very poorly. The timer “pie” display is very hard to time effectively for dodges, and the bombs themselves not having an AoE circle is problematic. Consider using the HoT-style “slowly filling circle” for them in stead, as it is much more clear. Also it would be great if the bounties had some unique rewards associated with them individually. Even just a weapon skin or something.

• Rewards: I’m still perplexed at the overall low presence of tangible rewards in postrelease content. Your team has shown capable of pushing out art at a fantastic pace, but it seems that the majority of the weapon/armor art goes in to BL skins or outfits. 80% of all new character customization is microtransactions, and this was one of the worst parts of HoT that you seem to be repeating. This alone is one of the primary reasons I become bored with new content as fast as I do. There are so few rewards for play introduced with new content that it is really unlikely I stick around if the anemic selection isn’t to my liking. Maybe sell a few less skins and outfits and reward a few more for playing the expansion this time?

I too think its a fun spec, but the barriers degen too fast. I messed around with it in wvw as I intended mostly to use it with a pve minion build, and over all it feels good aside from the shields.

Special key – Mount/Unmount Golem
Above the health bar, and used similarly to Beastmode, this ability is used to mount or unmount the golem. The Golemancer may mount the golem from up to 1200 range, and when unmounting my launch himself the same distance (ground targeted) Mounting/unmounting has a shared cooldown of moderate length.

Special rules – Golem suit
Because the Golem can not be healed while being piloted, its base Hp is equal to a substantial multiplier of the pilots HP. In addition, using endurance while piloting does not perform a dodge, and in stead manifests the golem’s shield for 2 seconds (with whichever modifier trait the player has selected)

Leaving the golem, similarly, leaves the pilot damaged to roughly the same degree as the golem was damaged. The golem is a very hardy piece of equipment, but its ability to suck up damage is counterbalanced by the need to exit the suit to keep it repaired.

In addition, due to the confines and design of the suit itself, kits can not be activated while piloting, and all ground targeted abilities in stead become PBAOE abilities.

If the golem is reduced to zero HP while the player is riding it, the player is forcibly ejected at 10% HP.

Utilities – Traps
Heal – Repair bay – When activated, leaves a mechanical ring which pulses healing and quickness.

Missile Trap – When triggered, applies target locks to all enemies that enter its radius for 3 seconds. At the end of this duration, fires a salvo of missiles,at all targeted enemies, dealing more damage for each additional enemy targeted.

Oil Trap – When Triggered, pulses six times. Pulses cripple targets, slow crippled targets, and knock down slowed targets.

Incinerator Trap – When triggered, activates a blast furnace which pulses six times. Targets hit are afflicted with burning and lose a random boon. Projectiles that enter the inferno are destroyed.

Elite – Emergency Protocol – Changes effect depending on state of golem. Long CD.
Dead Golem – Immediately Resets the cooldown of Summon Golem and one random utility.
Piloting Golem – Heals golem for 50% HP
Combat/Omega Protocols – Summons a Second Golem in Combat Protocol which self destructs harmlessly after 15 seconds.
Restoration Protocol – Heals Golem and Engineer for 25% HP instantly.

So Holosmith is pretty cool, but In the interest of fun, I thought I’d take a stab at the ever-popular idea of a golemancer elite. Dunno why, but the current elite specs don’t do it for me, as I really like the idea of the engineer building permanent things,like the core spec’s turrets. The Gyros were cool and all, but they felt, a lot of the time, like less impressive turrets, and the holosmith’s set I’m sure appeals to a lot of people as a very high tech device but it lacks the physicality and feel of the bog standard vanilla kit-and-turret engie.

So here’s my golemancer idea, which is probably bad!

Theme
The golemancer’s primary skillset derives from golem-based excavation.Thematically this translates to a combination of protective golem suit and staff-based explosives. The craft of the golemancer is honed best deep underground, whether by the asura, dwarves, or other races, in places to dangerous to travel alone, a combination of a solid blasting staff and hardy golem will get you pretty far.

Weapon Mastry – Staff
The Golemancer’s staff skills are primarily supportive melee ranged abilities, three of which are heals. However, the Golemancer’s minor passive grants increased healing to the golemancer’s golem with all abilities. The Golemancer’s staff is a complex device, containing both mining equipment and basic tools for golem repair.
1 – Salvaging strike – low damage chain that aoe heals on the last strike
2 – Blasting Staff – A cone blind+damage from one end of the staff.
3 – Cave In – Place the blasting staff on the ground, and fire, blasting the user backward and leaving a pulsing field of damage. Enemies that take all three pulses are knocked down on the last pulse.
4 – Staff throw/Staff return – Throw the staff at a target location. The staff lodges in the ground, then dispenses a restorative mist to allies, removing conditions and granting regeneration. Staff return activates a rocket engine on the staff, striking and crippling enemies in a line on its return path. All staff abilities are disabled until the staff is returned.
5 – Emergency repairs – Channel to lock on to friendly targets. Heals each target for a moderate amount, the first target selected is always your golem. The last target (of seven) is always yourself. Release to launch mini-gyros to all targets, healing them.

Central Mechanic – G.O.L.E.M.
Golemancers lack the toolbelt skills used by other engineers, having traded general knowledge of gadgetry for specialized knowledge of golemancy. In stead, these skill are replaced with a set of skills directly related to the Golemancer’s companion golem. In place of toolbelt skills, the G.O.L.E.M. ‘s 1-3 skills are derived from the golemancer’s equipped utilities, and where possible the golem itself has its appearance modified to reflect this. For instance, if your utility skills, in order, are flame turret, flamethrower kit, oil slick, the golem may have a flamethrower right arm, napalm launcher left arm, and high performance wheeled (oiled) leg locomotion.

The golem’s 4 is always bubble, and the 5 is always golem spin, and both of these abilities count as combo fields.

The Golem is, technically, a golem battlesuit, and as a result is not normally autonamous without the user’s control.

The golem can not be healed by any meanswhile under direct control, However, the toolbelt slot skills offer the golemancer a few commands. These skills are disabled while piloting the golem.

Toolbelt 1 – Golem Charge/Summon Golem
This ability calls your golem to your position from wherever it stands, rocketing toward that position and dealing damage to anything in its path. If the golem is destroyed, or you haven’t summoned one yet, this ability flips to “Summon Golem” calling down the golem from the sky and doing AoE knockback. If the golem is destroyed, “Summon Golem” is placed on a lengthy cooldown while another is prepared by…I guess your factory or wherever they come from. Abandoned golems (golems you get too far away from) rather than sticking around like turrets will activate their rocket boosters and fly up in to the sky to despawn, also flipping the skill to “Summon Golem” but skipping the cooldown so you can summon it again in your next fight.

Toolbelt 2 – Restoration Protocol
When Restoration protocol is activated, the golem will gain a shield, becoming invulnerable, and slowly heal its own HP. The first train line choices add additional effects to this ability. Allowing the shield to destroy projectiles (Hard light Shield), grant pulsing heals to nearby allies (Restorative Shield), or randomly taunt nearby enemies (External Loudspeakers).
Protocol skills deactivate any other active protocol.

Toolbelt 3 – Combat Protocol
Combat protocol allows the golem to fire its 1 and 2 skills automatically while it remains in place. The golem can be struck and damaged while in this state. The second trait line choice allows the golem to heal (Internal Gyros), move(Advanced Actuators), or increased rate of fire (Ammo Reserves) in this state. Protocol skills deactivate any other active protocol.

Toolbelt 4 – Omega Protocol
Omega protocol counts down for three seconds before exploding the golem in a wide AOE (and placing summon golem on cooldown) The Final trait line modified this explosion to apply additional torment+cripple(shrapnel), Healing (Ley Battery), or halved cooldown and additional damage(Streamlined Manufacturing) Protocol skills deactivate any other active protocol.

I’m confused how one would access achievements or masteries.

Also, I’m confused how achievements and masteries don’t qualify as hero tab inclusions. They are arguably more used tabs than the story tab for most people, and used to track (separate) forms of advancement.

Just because it’s account wide advancement to annoy people with alts less doesn’t make it any less something you’d want to keep track of in that panel. Its quite often that you want to use the achievement panel to mark achievements while doing various content, and you’re almost certain to want to mastry panel in the field so you can unlock/switch tracks as soon as you get the XP or mastry point you need.

In stead, I’d move all of the cosmetic tabs to the actual wardrobe, and keep the wardrobe on banks. All that cosmetic nonsense isn’t something players generally need to mess about with in the middle of a field somewhere, though they do often want to change out equipment between encounters or quickly swap a few traits, and those extra cosmetic tabs generally get in the way unless I’m already near a bank anyway.

Grimheart.2853:

You could just take off your medium armor chestpiece to achieve the same results, and expirience the magical feeling behind completely unprotected torso yourself, in practical combat.

The mechanics of the world literally do not care what you’re wearing. Some of the skimpiest chest armor in the game is “heavy armor” and grants more defensive benefits than medium armor.

Also, you can just put on an “outfit” and the entire concept of armor goes out the window anyway. I wear “heavy armor” on my “acrobatic” daredevil all the time thanks to this mechanic.

Also, giant norn and charr in actual heavy armor roll all over the place like olympic gymnasts.

This is not a world where the words “practical” and “combat” should be used in the same sentence.

Ider.1276:

PopeUrban.2578:

How is it insulting? Its not as if the plot of a video game is somehow a personal attack.

Point is, dragons are boring villains. I really don’t want to have to sit through three more expansions of “Monster with similarly flavored model swaps of other mobs tried to kill world.”

It’s just a boring plot that needs to be wrapped up. It has already gone on too long. Hell have the new and less kitten villain kill them off and take their skittles powers, I don’t care.

Elder Dragons are bad villians, but great video game bosses. And GW2 is (surprise) a video game. Mordemoth (in both Dragon stand and personal story) is the best GW2 boss outside of raids. Zhaitan had a poor fight mechanic, but his design was great.
And building up a boss and killing him offscreen is an insult to players who wanted cool and epic boss fight. Even if GW2 was just an interactive film, killing two epic giants off screen would feel even more cheap than a movie with action scenes in complete darkness.

Mordremoth the open world boss is a spectacle, but at the same time, that spectacle isn’t inherantly necessary to have attached to an elder dragon. As a world boss fight, yeah, sure, its great, but its not necessarily moe mechanically impressive or tied to narrative than, say, the triple trouble wurms. The same boss could easily have been a minion of something far more interesting.

Mordremoth the instance fight required dubious narrative gymnastics just to have a mechanically interesting fight… by scaling a massive godzilla monster down in a way that completely removes any sense of scale you’d have fighting that creature.

In fact, in HoT, the boss itself WAS killed offscreen. You’re in an instance killing a mental projection (because reasons) only to be told it can’t actually die like that and then you press F to kill boss. Then it actually dies during a head explosion cutscene.

Point is there’s nothing inherantly interesting about EDs. For all the buildup and voice lines that went in to mordremoth we still got a supremely uninteresting character that amounted to little more than “MUAHAHAHA YOU WILL ALL DIE OR BE SLAVES BECAUSE I AM A DRAGON.” One boss fight that would have made more sense if the antagonist was not a giant godzilla, and another boss fight that relied so heavily on fighting adds that the enemy itself was little more than window dressing.

We’re expected to care about EDs because of the context of their place in the world, but we at no point interact with them meaningfully and they don’t possess a complexity of intent or motive that makes their “schemes” anything more than copy/pastes of the last dragon.

It was acceptable when Zhaitan did it because hey, there was some actual interesting progression and discovery in both figuring out HOW to kill it, and HOW it operated.

Mordremoth? The most interesting thing about the dragon is discovered in the LS leadup, and for the entirety of the storyline its nothing more than tracking down missing party members until a living world assault that has nothing to do with anything, and an instanced battle that just appears out of nowhere to resolve the situation despite nobody involved actually having done anything to set it up.

We move on to the “reveal” that “all dragons have a weakness” and then discover that ‘weakness’ is ultimately pointless while rotating in and out more interesting villains as side stories so we have filler to chew on during LS episodes.

Dragons might make good bosses, but thusfar those boss fights have been less interesting and enjoyable than the various minions they employ in the first place.

Teq is a better boss fight than Zhaitan. The LS2 aspect of Mordremoth is a better boss fight than either of the mordremoth fights. There’s no rational reason for us to be directly confronting enemies that the lore has already set up as things we literally do not have the ability to directly confront due to the massive mismatch in scales between us and them.

The most interesting fights in relation to all of the dragons thusfar have been had with their minions, and those minions could easily be serving much more interesting characters.

By your own admission the raid bosses are already better boss fights, and those are, by design, minor throwaway characters so that raids are necessary to follow the main story thread.

We need to resolve the narrative, sure, but my point is we don’t need to personally kill every remaining dragon because we could easily be fighting more interesting villains in support of that goal. The dragons work best as plot levers rather than characters, as things OTHER character’s motivation revolve around.

Mordremoth wasn’t the most memorable villain in HoT. That honor goes to Faolain who had better dialogue, a more interesting plot thread, and more sensible interactions with the protagonists throughout the expansion.

Ider.1276:

PopeUrban.2578:

I want to see the dragon narrative resolved. You could have EASILY resolved it THIS season by using the silly machine to nuke two dragons, causing some genuinely interesting personal tension between DW and Braham, and leveraging Aurene as an expedient method (having absorbed a large portion of dragon energy) to help us take out Kralk, siege kralk’s power, then go offscreen to go take on bubbles herself.

Well, no. Killing two (or even 3, as you suggest) elder dragons off screen would be the worst and most insulting thing Anet could do to players at this point.
Elder Dragons were the main antagonists of GW2, and killing them off without player to witness and experience it is just lame and anticlimactic.
What we have now is rather bad either (2 dragons were put on the bus, and the players didn’t even see how they really looked). But at least they are put on the bus, not killed, and can potentially return in the future in full glory.

How is it insulting? Its not as if the plot of a video game is somehow a personal attack.

Point is, dragons are boring villains. I really don’t want to have to sit through three more expansions of “Monster with similarly flavored model swaps of other mobs tried to kill world.”

It’s just a boring plot that needs to be wrapped up. It has already gone on too long. Hell have the new and less kitten villain kill them off and take their skittles powers, I don’t care.

Riot Alice
Because she is my best friend ever and I hope she’s doing OK. If you don’t know Riot Alice, I implore you to go do the human streetrat story so you too can become best friends with her.

Agent Zrii or whatever the whispers Asura is named.
I remember her being a blast to hang out with, and not using technobabble for literally everything.

Evon Gnashblade
We’re going to need a money guy, and I feel like he’s about due a conviction for something that results in a community service sentance. I like the idea of Evon being forced to be there and us holding him to his obligations through financial threat. The “I will die for my fortune” approach to this guy would be pretty great.

Canach
Canach gets kitten done, and as Commander we have a long and complicated personal history with him, having been both enemies and allies. His voice actor is also fantastic.

One of those misbehaving Norn kids from the heart where you throw snowballs at them because they JUST WON’T LEAVE DAD ALONE.
We need a precocious youth to sneak in to small spaces and occasionally get kidnapped, and I’d prefer it be a legitimately horrible child that is in no way grateful, admiring, or even likable. I also think the potential for Norn Dad jokes and having Norn Dad tell us how the horrible things we put this child through are “Building his Legend” is a hilariously Norn world view. Let’s call this kid Bjargle and make him important to have in the guild because we’re doing a favor for his dad.

My Dragon’s watch will solve problems through ingenuity, bribery, violence, and comical luck, because it’s more entertaining than throwaway romances, research, and OMG MORE DEAD PARENTS.

Chadramar.8156:

I’d like an older norn shaman companion/friend/mentor, because I’m kinda tired of the brutish brawler/young hothead stereotype and would like to explore the spirituality of their people more instead. That would also give us another source of insight into the world instead of just the “asura magitech this, asura magitech that” spiel that we’re being beaten over the head with this season. (That, as I said before, is something the PS did much better, and even in LS2 we went to multiple sources.)

The best thing they could do for the plot at this point would be to let some magic cataclysm happen that just turned off all asuran magitech, or at the very least made it impossible to create more and moved it to a “powerful but rare” status.

It was an interesting component of their race initially, but it has become extremely overused in the story and narrative at this point. I’d like the Charr’s military might to get a chance to shine, or human perserverence, or Norn self sufficiency and boldness. Despite not having yet had an expansion SPECIFICALLY about the Asura, ever since the launch of the game Asuran magitech has been the literal only plot lever that has been used (unless you count suddenly mind-battling Mordremoth)

Omadd’s machine was reponsible for scarlett, who used asuran magitech to wake up mordremoth. Then taimi used asuran magitech (the SAME tech) to bing about the “final solution” to dragons… which she found… in a lab full of asuran magitech. You know, despite having a Tarir full of living witnesses to history that were leveraged as nothing more than glorified babysitters for aurene.

Fractals? Asuran Magitech.

Waypoints? Magitech.

Long distance communication? Magitech.

Literally everything useful is Asuran magitech.

Remind me again why we even needed to form the Pact in the first place. Did we actually need Krait orbs and Charr metalworking and searing cauldron and a magic tree sword, or did we just do all that stuff so people that aren’t Asuran inventors could feel like they were helping?

forums bug fifteen characters

I rather like the idea of revisiting the most primal forces of Tyria from the first game, and TBH when the initial stuff about GW2 started coming out I was filled with disappointment that they just took all of that interesting lore about the origina of the gods, mursaaat, seers, etc. off the table and replaced them with the laziest of fantasy tropes; Dragons. Glint was interesting in GW1 because, like the few other dragons in the universe at the time, she was a rarity and had a story function other than “evil monster that wants to destroy it all”

Then they got started on GW2 and decided that, yeah, in stead of the interesting questions regarding the nature of the mists, the mysterious war between the mursaat and seers, and all of these other fresh ideas they’d just add a variety flavor pack of godzillas and call it a day.

However!

The Dragon narrative exists. Arenanet created it. It has been running for two expansions now. It needs to be resolved. As much as I want to explore the nature of the human gods, seers, mursaat, and all that interesting stuff, simply tossing balthazar back in the mix in a role other than involvement in actually resolving that plot just needlessly drops a plot thread.

I want to see the dragon narrative resolved. You could have EASILY resolved it THIS season by using the silly machine to nuke two dragons, causing some genuinely interesting personal tension between DW and Braham, and leveraging Aurene as an expedient method (having absorbed a large portion of dragon energy) to help us take out Kralk, siege kralk’s power, then go offscreen to go take on bubbles herself.

At this point you cleanly sidestep the issue of the deep sea dragon, thus not subjecting us to the horrors of a failed underwater combat revamp, and you can leave aurene as a hanging thread only to re-emerge later much older and wiser with real earned loyalty to the players, and having earned respect from Tyria the same way Glint held respect in GW1 , only as a Protector and Warrior rather than a Seer.

This would mean you effectively have the Dragon plotline cleanly tied up next expansion, and do so in a satisfying manner that lets us ride around on a dragon. And there THERE is where it would be appropriate to start addressing these primal cosmic forces, after having given us a believable ally against them in the form of Aurene, the “World Dragon” that possesses the immense power gained from all other dragons (possibly kept from exploding the world through devices crafted by The Pact, giving us a nice symbiotic relationship and having Aurene rely on us as much as we do on her)

Or have us make a pact WITH the remaining dragons somehow, using aurene as an intermediary THIS EXPANSION.

In stead we got what appears to be either a rogue god, or a civil war between the gods, while still backburnering the dragon plot.

I know there’s a dragon on the 2 and everything but come on. “Massive evil monster who just wants to destroy everything” is a boring villain. Having to slog through that same villain in difference ice cream flavors five times is just tiresome. Can we just get it over with?

Dragons were boring antagonists when you wrote them in to the world and they’re even more boring now. However, I’d like one more climactic balls to the wall battle to finally put this plot to rest and move on to more interesting things.

FrizzFreston.5290:

It will get a higher cap when ArenaNet thinks it’s possible and within spec parameters they are happy with for the whole customer base.

That’s just the way it is. No matter how much you argue that it should be one thing or the other. I think pretty much everyone wants a higher cap.

Just saying, “just ignore those minimum spec people!” isn’t very compelling at all.

I disagree.

Guild halls are private spaces, and players choose which guilds to join and thus which halls to enter.

In my mind, having a hall that causes some players in a guild to be a bit laggy would be a guild issue rather than a total player base issue, assuming the primary consideration is end user performance rather than something on the back end like server performance.

Allowing guilds comprised of people not playing on potato machines to actually use the power of that rig is a no brainer as far as I’m concerned, the same way that graphics options are a no brainer.

Players have the option to choose whether or not to enter and use halls with higher performance costs the same way players have a choice whether to use expecive post processing or anti aliasing effects.

If you can’t efficiently walk around your guild hall because of the decorations, I feel like that’s between you and the guild. If the guild cares about your concerns then they should be designing decorations to accommodate that. However, if you’re in a guild where people are running recommended or higher spec rigs and its not an issue for the server I don’t see why a higher cap isn’t available.

GW2 has taken the approach to only implement quests when the narrative it worth having that sort of linear structure, and for the most part decided that quests themselves are personal, solo offerings.

Events ARE good replacement for “busywork” quests in the open world. They’re less of a hassle for players to interact with and and some dynamism to the world in contrast the the generally more static nature of traditional quests. Pointing out that some events are more boring than others doesn’t change that fact.

Historically, adding VOIP to PC games has seldom shown to be worth the cost. Unlike consoles, in which its a natural fit due to the limited stock controller interface and built by default in to the user’s expections at this point, the PC platform has a pretty long history of extremely low user adoption of voice chat features. In fact, in most cases, the users prefer to use their own voice chat rooms even when they are made avaliable due to the larger degree of control and greater reliability afforded by a separate process. (e.g. your VOIP works even when you’re in a loading screen, or if your game crashes)

Combine that with the fact that VOIP is free technology for PC users, and you see why it is uncommon for PC games to implement this functionality. It’s not worth the effort required to implement and update a feature which doesn’t add anything compelling to your core gameplay experience, and which most users who want it already have a superior third party implementation of.

TLDR: in the PC market, integrating voice chat is a waste of developer time and money in the modern age.

Cascabel.5806:

K THEN.5162:

I personally always think of this song whenever I play this little guy

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

I’m crying of laughter and terror at the same time. Thank.

PopeUrban.2578:

As the chief financier, Thief, and leader of a largely broke and decidedly less than elite guild…

Jungle – Busy Earnin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcsfftwLUf0

Oh hey, that song is nice.
______________________________________
k now it’s my turn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yODLkaF8F-Y

The face of a winner.

That’s good stuff right there.

The guild portal. It’s pretty cool. it goes places and saves a little bit of waypoint money.

What it doesn’t do, however, is incentivize using the guild hall as a jumping off point for content that isn’t guild missions.

While the “nearest waypoint” functions for certain guild missions is pretty cool, the other group content in the game doesn’t really interact with it. I think it should.

We built this expensive totally awesome magic portal, yet we can’t use it to go to most of the places a group (guild) of players would normally want quick access to: Raids, Fractals, and Dungeons.

I’d like to see a set of upgrades for the portal so that it can move us directly to these instances. This interaction wouldn’t have a “go to” entry, and in stead would only be avaliable with the “open portal” button so that it can work in the same manner as the existing instance portals.

These upgrades would all require as a prerequisite max level guild waypoint discount upgrades and guild mission slot upgrades as well a 5-10 teleport to friend items each.

[Fractal Attunement]
This upgrades allows the guild portal to be activated to take players directly to the FOTM lobby. Costs Agony infusions, gold fractal relics, and fractal research pages.

[Dungeon Attunement]
Each dungeon has its own entry on this list. Allows the portal to be activated to take players that enter directly to the dungeon in question. Requires a stack of the dungeon’s runes and several of the dungeon’s unique tonic, as well as resonating shards.

[Raid Attunement]
One entry for each of the portals found in the LA lobby. Requires 10 of the wing’s boss trophy (so you’d deposit the trophy item rather than turning it in to the decoration vendor.

[World Boss Attunement]
Nearest waypoint to the Guild Event activation. Requires “Guild World Bosses” research and 20 of the world boss’s trophy. Only applies to world event on which the guild world boss item can be used.

[Capital City Attunement]
One for each racial capital. Requires a full set of racial weapons (vendor and drop versions) and one of all three tiers/weights of racial armor shoulders.

[Event Attunements]
For seasonal events. These would require the particular event’s currency (e.g. Super adventure clouds, pumpkins, etc.) and open the portal directly to the event’s main lobby/entrace.

zealex.9410:

PopeUrban.2578:

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

Masteries are the endgame progression…….

ehhh if only it was what they marketed it as, character progression passed lvl 80

It is absolutely character progression. Just like adding new skills and title unlocks was character progression in GW1. If you removed the broken and overpowered title skills added in EOTN, the title track bonuses were very similar to mastry tracks. They were a form of progression that gave you specific advantages.

What they’re not is an endless pile of numbers that just adds meaningless power to characters that necessitate every new bit of content also having higher numbers. That’s the model a lot of games use, and its boring. “progressing” in to +400 more DPS only to fight enemies with 400 DPS more damage mitigation doesn’t add anything to gameplay. It just adds bigger number to combat logs.

Playing Dialbo 3 with more paragon levels doesn’t appreciabley add anything to gameplay. You just stack bigger numbers so you can fight enemies with bigger numbers, but its still the same repetitive content.

While not every mastry is amazing, Mastries are meaningful progression that actually adds new functionality to the character by accessing new content or new methods to interact with old content. That’s a lot more fun than 2% more armor or 5% more crit chance.

no… masteries are acount progression character progression is something i have personal to my each and every character. Something that i can do on one and i have for all is acount progression hence not character progression.

This is absolutely a fair criticism of the system and one I personally agree with. However, the team moved a LOT of stuff to “account bound” to quell the “BUT I HAVE 42 ALTS crowd”

You know, the same crowd that still complains heavily that they actually have to play their alts to get hero points in order to progress those alts.

Personally I’d be fine with mastries being a character rather than an account system, and functionally they serve that role. They just happen to more directly buff alts than some of the other built in twinking methods (for instance, ascended drops from fractals making it far easier to gear out alts)

I doubt they’d about face on it at this point, and from the lens of a guy that basically doesn’t play alts (other than to abuse them for resource gathering or the rare instance of needing something “meta”) they do the job pretty well though.

And really, lets face facts here, the question of alts is really the only place that matters, and its a basic fact that having an existing and established character in every system short circuits progression in any sort of character progression system. In Diablo your higher level guy is often providing loot or currency to the lower level one. This just sort of streamlines that interaction. I don’t think that alone is enough to break the system or invalidate it any more than actually having alts benefit from a “main” does in any other respect.

flog.3485:

PopeUrban.2578:

flog.3485:

In term of progression, I think that a system more similar to Guild Wars would a good addition. We could for example have utility skills tied to a mastery added (only in PvE) so that the higher we push the mastery, the more powerful that utility skill becomes.

Please no.

The title skills in EOTN literally broke the game in several ways, and the only reason they were implemented in the first place was because of the dead end balance quagmire GW1’s skill design eventually created.

Consumables and literally grinding for skills explicitly broke the game and trivialized a lot of its content because Arenanet decided to pivot to advertising GW2.

On top of that, Mastries already approximate the actual good parts of that system. Rank up a progression track, get some benefits in its respective areas.

Elite specs already do a good job of approximating the style of nonlinear character progression that GW1 used without creating the eventual balancing problems that GW1 had.

Stuff like heroes and title skills were horrible additions to GW1 and we don’t need to emulate them in GW2, as they were hasty and ill considered additions that took away complexity and community from the game and replaced them with ‘grind more to trivialize content’

We don’t need to emulate the worst features of GW1. We don’t need some endless power creep or more focus on NPCs playing the game against other NPCs while the players watch and refuse to group up because its less efficient.

You raised some pretty reasonable concerns that I did not think about. I guess I was feeling a bit nostalgic about it since what you call “emulating the worst features of GW1” is something that was already implemented when I started playing it and so I did not see the game become worse from your POV.

To be fair, I don’t think EVERYTHING was bad. Title grinds were actually lots of fun from the lens of the shrine buffs (where you got the random buffs that worked like an enhanced version of morale) and the way night fall (Junundu) and EOTN (Siege Destroyers) approached the concept of mounts was really cool. Individually the PVE skills where good additions to the game, the problem was really that they replaced “real” skills and invalidated a lot of considerations players would usually have to make about the game.

As far as heroes, I liked what they did for narrative (Recruit a party like a single player RPG) but their ability to be as good or better than humans combined with the number you could bring shot the community in the foot.

That said Heroes NOW in GW1 are solid system and make sense in a game with the low population you’d expect from a game that has been placed in maintenance mode, but at the time allowing 2 players to fill out a party of 8 in a game balanced primarily around doing stuff in parties of 8 felt like a mistake, and I saw a serious downturn in PUGs and general community opinion of players in a lot of content. Heroes would have made sense as an EOTN addition, as the team knew this would be the last expansion and thus they needed to “future proof” the game against lower population. At the release of nightfall though, it felt like a mistake to me. I always felt that henchmen were supposed to kind of suck compared to a player to incentivize players to actually group up.

As the chief financier, Thief, and leader of a largely broke and decidedly less than elite guild…

Jungle – Busy Earnin

Because the maintenence of a gold plated cave might not be full of the most epic heroes… but hey, at least we earned it.

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

Masteries are the endgame progression…….

ehhh if only it was what they marketed it as, character progression passed lvl 80

It is absolutely character progression. Just like adding new skills and title unlocks was character progression in GW1. If you removed the broken and overpowered title skills added in EOTN, the title track bonuses were very similar to mastry tracks. They were a form of progression that gave you specific advantages.

What they’re not is an endless pile of numbers that just adds meaningless power to characters that necessitate every new bit of content also having higher numbers. That’s the model a lot of games use, and its boring. “progressing” in to +400 more DPS only to fight enemies with 400 DPS more damage mitigation doesn’t add anything to gameplay. It just adds bigger number to combat logs.

Playing Dialbo 3 with more paragon levels doesn’t appreciabley add anything to gameplay. You just stack bigger numbers so you can fight enemies with bigger numbers, but its still the same repetitive content.

While not every mastry is amazing, Mastries are meaningful progression that actually adds new functionality to the character by accessing new content or new methods to interact with old content. That’s a lot more fun than 2% more armor or 5% more crit chance.

flog.3485:

In term of progression, I think that a system more similar to Guild Wars would a good addition. We could for example have utility skills tied to a mastery added (only in PvE) so that the higher we push the mastery, the more powerful that utility skill becomes.

Please no.

The title skills in EOTN literally broke the game in several ways, and the only reason they were implemented in the first place was because of the dead end balance quagmire GW1’s skill design eventually created.

Consumables and literally grinding for skills explicitly broke the game and trivialized a lot of its content because Arenanet decided to pivot to advertising GW2.

On top of that, Mastries already approximate the actual good parts of that system. Rank up a progression track, get some benefits in its respective areas.

Elite specs already do a good job of approximating the style of nonlinear character progression that GW1 used without creating the eventual balancing problems that GW1 had.

Stuff like heroes and title skills were horrible additions to GW1 and we don’t need to emulate them in GW2, as they were hasty and ill considered additions that took away complexity and community from the game and replaced them with ‘grind more to trivialize content’

We don’t need to emulate the worst features of GW1. We don’t need some endless power creep or more focus on NPCs playing the game against other NPCs while the players watch and refuse to group up because its less efficient.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Every new raid wing has unique skins, minis, and sometimes infusions to acquire. Those are the ever-expanding rewards you’re looking for, whereas legendary armor is the ultimate reward that you can earn from all raids.

This.

The Armor is the “Legendary Collection”

All the other stuff that the raids offer (including pieces for guild hall trophies, which are a major incentive for a lot of people) will be new for new raids.

Also, you’d be silly to think that no other set of legendary armor will exist ever. Certainly not once per expansion, but you can virtually guarantee that at some point in the future there will be more sets of the stuff one way or the other.

Linken.6345:

PopeUrban.2578:

Ardid.7203:

Why “raid people” has to get anything “special” for them? Because raids are hard? Why isn’t there something special for people who discover JP routes, then? Or for people who do the “ironman mode”? Or for good WvW commanders? There are lots of hard tasks in the game, some I would argue harder than raiding. Why are raiders treated with such privilege?

Completing JPs awards achievements and titles.

“Ironman” and “being a good commander” are not game systems.

Ironman is a system that Anet could quantify and I’d be all for there being special rewards for that.

“Being a good commander” isn’t something Anet can exactly quantify but the WvW rewards systems in place do in fact have mechanisms to reward effective WvW play. That’s why they revamped WvW rewards.

Being the fist to complete a piece of content is something they could quantify with specific rewards, but those systems are a bad use of resources because unlike raids, those rewards could only ever be gained once by a single person, unlike raids or dungeons or high level fractals which are sitting there waiting to be taken on and completed by every player regardless of when they join the game.

Well since Jp awards achievements and titles + a box with 2 blues and a green shouldent raid award achievements and titles + a box with 2 yellows and a orange then?

Raids are significantly more challenging than JPs, require a high degree of teamwork, in addition to having a much longer cooldown for reward acquisition between completions.

Whether you believe this additional challenge merits the specific level of rewards raids pay out is subjective. I think its fine. Anet seems to think its fine.

However, a unique set of skins for collecting JP achievements would be really neat. Of course then someone would find a way to complain about it because they don’t like doing JPs.

It is impossible to adjust reward equity for personal player preference. Adjusting it for how farmable the content is, however, is the metric by which most games assign the rarity of rewards. Raids are, specifically, the least farmable content in the game due to their overall difficulty, party composition requirements, and week long reward cooldown.

The entire point isn’t to make raids attractive to every player. The point is to make raids feel rewarding for the people completing them. Its the same reason world boss chests were updated.

Arguments about ‘reward equity’ are ridiculous because it is an impossible goal to achieve due to the subjective nature of player content preference. The fact is that, in terms of strict equity, open world farming or buying gems produces the largest portion of rewards, and is capable of reaching, with far less effort invested, every benefit that raid rewards do.

And that’s unique to GW2 because it does in fact care that raiders aren’t functionally better at all other content on virtue of having inflated gear stats.

Ardid.7203:

Why “raid people” has to get anything “special” for them? Because raids are hard? Why isn’t there something special for people who discover JP routes, then? Or for people who do the “ironman mode”? Or for good WvW commanders? There are lots of hard tasks in the game, some I would argue harder than raiding. Why are raiders treated with such privilege?

Completing JPs awards achievements and titles.

“Ironman” and “being a good commander” are not game systems.

Ironman is a system that Anet could quantify and I’d be all for there being special rewards for that.

“Being a good commander” isn’t something Anet can exactly quantify but the WvW rewards systems in place do in fact have mechanisms to reward effective WvW play. That’s why they revamped WvW rewards.

Being the fist to complete a piece of content is something they could quantify with specific rewards, but those systems are a bad use of resources because unlike raids, those rewards could only ever be gained once by a single person, unlike raids or dungeons or high level fractals which are sitting there waiting to be taken on and completed by every player regardless of when they join the game.

Hyper Cutter.9376:

PopeUrban.2578:

My personal opinion is that challenging content should be rewarded with more impressive loot than less challenging content.

The people who begged Anet for challenging content claimed that it was the challenge itself they wanted, so therefore the challenge is the better reward.

(those people were lying, of course, as seen by their reactions in topics like this. They don’t care about the challenge, they just want something they can lord over the “unwashed masses”)

I don’t think anyone is “lording” the skins from the S3 zones over each other, despite the fact that they’re rewarded for specific content. I don’t think anyone is “lording” dungeon skins or legendary fractal packs over anyone.

It isn’t a desire to “lord” things over other players. It is a desire to feel that the rewards gained from specific challenges be reflective of those challenges.

People aren’t lying when they say that. You’re making the issue about you. Do you really think people log in every day to go “oh man, I’m gonna strut around in my legendaries and make people soooo jealous!”

No, people log in and go “I wonder what new stuff I can do.” or “I’m gonna get that thing I’ve been wanting!”

The lack of a satisfactory reward mechanism makes engaging in content less fun for the majority of players.

You mistakenly assume that rewards intended for specific content you may not enjoy is somehow about you. It isn’t about you. People aren’t raiding or acquiring legendary armor just to “lord it over you”

The fact that you feel this way is a larger reflection of your own sense of entitlement than an objective view of the player base at large. It is the mirror image of the small subset of legitimately rude players that you seem to think are the majority of those participating in this kind of content.

You are projecting your own antisocial attitude on to others where it most often does not exist.

Tabootrinket.2631:

However though (and I don’t know how badly it would break the class balancing), I definitely wouldn’t be against being able to keep weapons from previously unlocked specializations.

I’d guess this won’t happen because at some point you’re going to run out of weapon types. It seems unrealistic to expect that once they get to the point every class has a spec for every weapon that they’ll churn out weapons with enough skin variation to keep seeding new ones (not to mention it would really be an economic disaster to release an expansion where, say, every class’s new spec all used the same new weapon type.)

I’m guessing the weapon options are locked in to specs so that once they reach that point they have the option of granting you the same weapon as another spec, but with a different skill bar. Functionally its the same amount of combat design, but it would allow them to leverage all the existing art and ensure that adding weapon skins in future expansions are still attractive and usable for people still playing the older specs.

However I wouldn’t be suprised to see specializations at some point that gave/forced armor classes rather than weapons. You could get some good balance mileage out of that and it would be a pretty cool feature if it was packed in with a suitably interesting change to the class’s base mechanics.

I’m still waiting for the day my thief can dual wield shields.

Dang kids. Back in my day we leveled by killin’ stuff. Didn’t have none of this fancy book learnin. Didn’t have TIME to read books. Too busy walkin’ everywhere so’s to kill evil and defend Tyria so little whippersnappers like you could grow up to learn adventurin’ from books and ruin all my sunshine with yer flyin whatsits!

Why I remember when we fought champions SOLO in EXOTIC gear! You hear me Youngin’? EXOTIC! And we was HAPPY to have it too! Weren’t none of that fancy pink infused nonsense. Just good old fashioned, metal, cloth, and leather with gemstones jammed in to it at regular intervals.

If’n you wanted one o’ them fancy legendary swords you had to indiscriminately purge every living thing within’ yer field of view until you found the one what had yer precursor!

And then ya had to go world complete in the durn mists, where whole ARMIES was out to get ya!

I tell ya. Darn kids don’t appreciate nuthin’

<grumble grumble durn kids grumble>

;)

Shortage.5427:

Also it’s a MMORPG game. There is no MMORPG without some type of grinding or gear progression.

There was this game called Guild Wars where you were stat capped at the end of the tutorial and all of your progression was acquiring more build options. I heard it was successful enough to spawn a sequel!

Its almost like the same people that make this game made that one!

People’s tastes change over time. If you’re looking for a gear progression game, this isn’t that game. They do a lot of marketing to make sure to tell people that a lack of gear grind is something that differentiates this product from its competitors because the goal is to draw people in that want to play this game, not people that are already playing a different kind of game.

GW1 was extremely successful specifically because of how unlike it was in a crowded field of everquest clones. GW2 is following that same philosophy. While i don’t agree with everything they do here, I don’t think that endless vertical progression that makes you contantly throw out your “elite” gear every year because its now worse than common drops in the new expansion is something I would consider a Guild Wars game.

GW2 has a very long history of tying rewards to specific content, and that’s not going to change. The majority of time spent on that armor, as I understand it, was really figuring out how to make it work from a technical standpoint, as well as developing art guidelines for armor transformations to avoid the worst clipping issues when designing it.

That means that the hard part is done.

However, whether ArenaNet intends to offer legendary armor outside of raids is another matter.

My personal opinion is that challenging content should be rewarded with more impressive loot than less challenging content. I still don’t agree with the way most legendary weapons are implemented, as they don’t rewards anything particularly difficult. They just reward investment in tedium. The idea that everyone should have access to everything for doing whatever they want is not now, nor has it ever been the reward philosophy of the game. The people who heard “play what you want” and assumed it meant “Get everything you want” weren’t paying attention to the game at release (You know, where the endgame instances awarded special armor and weapons) nor were they paying attention to the design philosophy ArenaNet themselves stated:

That Rare items should be desirable because they are rare, difficult to obtain, or look cool, but that items of that rarity scale should not also grant their wielders mechanical power.

Legenadary armor, just like weapons and backpacks, falls squarely in line with that philosophy. It is shiny. It is rare. It has a feature that’s useful, but isn’t any more powerful than ascended gear anyone can get by doing literally any content they want and investing some gold in to the process.

This idea that people deserve rare loot for doing whatever they want, if made a reality, would futher damage a loot economy already on its last legs due to Anet’s over-use of microtransaction skins in a game where the primary reward for playing the game is skins. I don’t want to play a game where everything drops gold and I got to a vendor and just buy whatever I want. I want to play a game where I get cool loot for doing cool stuff.

I think PvP is awful in this game. Thus I must also be comfortable with never owning the PvP backpack. I am absolutely okay with that. I rather enjoy knowing that when I see it, I know something about its owner and the things they’ve done in their GW2 career. Just like I know when someone sees my guild armor that I have a very nice gold plated cave. Just like when I see someone with a bloodstone backpack I know they spent quite a bit of time fighting white mantle to get it. The game needs more of that kind of loot. Not less.

The point of elite specs was never that you’d become more powerful the more you collected. The point was that you would eventually have a large breadth of build options for any class, similar to the first game, where most classes have viable builds for many different roles and playstyles.

If your complain is that “all my effort is wasted” the answer is pretty obvious. Don’t use the new spec. That’s the intention. That eventually every class has access to a broad range of elites.

Though technically core builds are supposed to remain viable, that was always an unrealistic ideal. The way Thief was handled is a perfect example. They couldn’t have acrobatics be top tier at endurance regen and evade traits because its a core spec, and thus stackable with an elite. The design isn’t about maintaining parity between core and elite specs because the whole point of using elite specs is to avoid the balance problems the first game acquired after several expansions, having to constantly rebalance old stuff around new stuff.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Everything people don’t understand about elite specs is Anet’s fault because Anet designed the system for elite specs to be attractive options compared to one another, but in the first release of the system only offered one option. This led people to believe that they were intended to be on even footing with core specs, and created expectations of future power creep.

The entire point of the trait revamp was to attempt to “future proof” core specs and get them to a place where they don’t need to be balanced again so they can be used as the baseline around which all future elite specs are balanced.

Anet was pretty clear about this when they started revealing the system. Elite specs are built so Anet only ever has to make sure elite specs are balanced against the 5 core spec lines. They learned a hard lesson in GW1, as they were adding a ton of skills per expansion, which was fun, and not a big deal with factions, as you just balance factions skills against prophecies. Then they released nightfall and realized that now they had twice as many skills to balance against. Then eye of the north had far fewer skills because now they had to balance it against three times as many skills. Over time, that creates a situation where every time you add new skills (or in GW2’s case, specializations) it takes longer to design them because every time you add something makes adding the next thing more complex.

Elite specs get around that by being a combination of secondary class and skill expansion that doesn’t affect the balancing of the next elite spec.

If Anet has spent all the resources used to shoehorn the completely unnecessary Revnant class in to the game and released HoT with 2 specs for each class (and the Rev’s legends, with very few changes, could have easily been those specs) we wouldn’t be having this conversation, or the conversation about how core builds should be “brought up” to compete with elites. I think a lot of people still really misunderstand the system because Anet released it half finished for its intended design. With the next xpack you’ll start seeing the real point of elites, that they’re meant to be build options, not straight upgrades, and that anet’s design is that players are generally expected to be using an elite spec, with “core” builds being just part of the new player learning experience that gets replaced with a more complex system once they’re familiar with the game, the same way leveling gets replaced with mastries.

Loot balance in GW2 is a natural result of anet’s “zero scarcity” economic model.

Because there is no competition for loot or crafting material sources, it inevitably results in a massive amount of excess unless you do exactly what anet did and make the economy about acquiring quantity rather than quality.

Loot is mostly massive amounts of low value items in GW2 because if it were not the entire economy would break down. This is also why virtually every post-release item of significant value is either ridiculously rare, account bound, or requires a corresponding sink of a massive amount of crafting materials from the market to acquire.

While in some games the AH is an optional way to offload your extra stuff or buy a few extra units of the material you need, GW2’s economy is purposely designed around providing players with massive amounts of stuff they don’t need while simultaneously requiring them to acquire massive amounts of stuff they don’t have in order to suck gold out of the ecnomy through AH fees as the primary currency sink, and the massive amount of crafting materials that result from the “everyone gets a drop” loot system are sunk in to crafting by requiring a correspondingly massive amount of material.

Those blues and greens HAVE to be the majority of loot for loot to work at all in such a system.

Who promised you it would be cheaper than buying a drop?

Nobody said it would be cheaper. They said you’d have the option of crafting it yourself over time in stead of having to save up a giant chunk of gold and rely on someone else to get lucky enough to both get it as a drop, and not need it enough they’re willing to sell it.

I wanted to name it Barbara

Electro.4173:

Daris.1253:

I’m feeling we can meet Braham.I play charr,however I’m happy we are going to the north.I don’t get one thing…..why our characters are called ’’Commander’’?.In episode 1 they’re leaving The Pact.Now time for Jormag….interesting.

Right after your character says they’re leaving the Pact, Almora says its a “title for life” and you’re welcome to keep using it. So that’s the lore explanation.

The game-mechanics explanation is that your character has to be called something generic (since they can’t have the voice-acted NPCs calling you by your actual character name), and Commander seems to be the one most people like. They tried using “Boss” for a while in Season 2 and I remember a fair number of people complaining about that one.

Yeah, it’s kinda like a retired general or president. Most people, out of respect, still call them “General” or “President” in recognition of the work they did before they retired.

Amaimon.7823:

Well, I for one enjoy this new shield. If I can put a quaggan between myself and a dragon blast, I’ll be happy. Heck, why can’t we just give the quaggans boms and make them run to the elder dragons. Swap, two flies with one stone.. bomb

We did exactly that a few years ago.

It doesn’t matter if you guy the item with gold.

Arenanet ges the same exact amount of money either way.

Those itmes you bought with gold had to first be bought with gems, which were bought with money. Those gems you bought with gold had to first be bought with real money.

That’s why the gems/gold exchange rate fluctuates. It is adjusted based upon a fixed pool of gold and gems. Those gems don’t exist in the market untik they’ve already been paid for.

When gold>gem prices go up, it’s because more people are trading for gems than buying them. When they go down its because more people are selling the gems than there are buying them with gold.

and next patch it’ll be another class, and so on.

Basing balance on LFG is a special kind of dumb. Consider the actual utility for clearing content, not the utility of classes for speed clearing content. No game developer balances around optimal clear times because it is patently impossible to make every option equally viable. There will always be a mathematically superior option and players will find it extremely quickly.

What is important from a balance standpoint is whether or not there’s enough wiggle room between “optimal” and “acceptable”

LFG will ALWAYS be looking for “optimal” but in reality GW2, and every other game isn’t balanced around optimal. It’s balanced around “acceptable” and only players stubborn enough to ignore the meta will even know the difference.

So, basically, don’t complain about the meta changing and invalidating your meta build if all you do is run meta parties. If you expect optimal clear times, you must also accept that means always rolling optimal builds.

afrocrusade.4253:

DeceiverX.8361:

[pedantry intensifies]

Running into a raid with 10 engineers should not work for obvious reasons.

The need for healing and dedicated healing is present. A need for buffs that make a certain class viable is also present.

The fact roles exist and some classes fail to fit that role is not a lack of diversity, it’s simply stupid. Raids were not “play how you want” they were “play the best strategically.” Raids have a great deal of diversity. The nullification of two, three more classes from the raid scene, or simply making them even weaker than they were, is nothing short of dumbness.

Having a healer thief with an engineer pulling aggro in cleric’s gear while you have 5 nomad warriors and 3 soldier’s necromancers should not get you through raids. Sorry.

I honestly think it should.

But ONLY through the creation of viable specializations for those roles. Healer gear on existing thief specs? No. Stop. healing gear on a thief spec designed for healing? Yes. Please.

Every class should absolutely have build options to adequately fill every role. That’s the entire point.

Before HoT you’d have said a ranger healer was dumb. Now its meta, and that ranger didn’t have to roll a new character, collect new skins, etc. At worst he had to play a character he already liked to learn some new tricks, and maybe buy some new gear for a character he already liked. So he got to “roll a healer” without actually having to put his favorite character away and make a new one. He in stead got to add a new role to the one he liked already. He can still go play the old DPS role, but he now has the option of playing the healer role as well.

That’s where diversity should come from. If you need to fill the healer role, or the tank role, or the DPS role, etc. the end goal really should be that any class can competantly fill that role, assuming that you’ve brought the proper build and gear to do so.

GW2 is set up at its core on this basic principal. That build, not class is the primary determining factor of what role a given player fills in a group.

The problem was that the elite spec system was rolled out in an anemic state. in stead of addressing each classes’ core failings in filling various roles, they added meaningful role adjustments to two classes and just slapped some nonsense on the others because it looked cool because they decided the game needed another class more than it needed actual options in elite specs, a system that was specifically designed to let them design wildly variant roles and playstyles for the classes that already existed.

What did you expect?

They were really clear way before release that they wanted to idiot-proof and stress-proof the MMO formula for GW2.

That meant removing a lot of the potential points of failure for players.

Like it or not, that is the core design philosophy of GW2. You shouldn’t be required to work for anything that isn’t optional, and you shouldn’t be free enough to make yourself awful.

Because you, the player, are simply not smart enough, and do not have the patience required for a more complex or difficult game.

Once run around the forums should tell you that this forumla attracted exactly the community Anet was after. People who find other MMOs too hard, too complicated, too grindy, or too “annoying” and in most ways that’s a near-captive market for GW2 at this point.

These are the people complaining you have to do a thing FOR AN HOUR to get pet X or item Y, or that they can’t have LITERALLY EVERYTHING by doing LITERALLY WHATEVER THEY WANT.

This is not the game you come to for interesting choices and meaningful player interaction. This is the game you come to to relax and take it easy.

When you figure out relaxing isn’t a long term goal for a lot of people, that’s fine. They also designed the payment model to support not playing. You will never fall behind the curve by just not logging in until the next expansion/episode.

They don’t want to show you a full transaction history. If they did it would make it easier to become shocked at how much you’ve spent and decide to spend less.

This is pretty standard microtransaction stuff, alongside fake currency to obfuscate real money value and gambling boxes to increase the mean price of items beyond that which players would normally pay for them via rarity adjustments.

A large part of microtransaction marketing is making it as difficult as possible to see exactly how much real money you’re spending while encouraging you to spend as much as possible per transaction with “bonus” currency and intentionally pricing items so you always have a little left over to trick you in to thinking you’re “saving money” when you spend more money for more pseudocurrency.

Welcome to 2016. If you’re a consumer and haven’t looked in to the methods used to market things to you at this point, you’re asking to be abused.

Submitted a report ingame on this as well.

I used Fion the decoration vendor in our hall to buy several fragments of the solid ocean at once (used the listbox to select 10 or 11 or howmany ever I had relics for)

Fion only delivered 1 to guild storage, but happily took all of the relics.

So, I figured whatever, I’ll use the 2 we have (one on the floor, which I picked up, and the one I just bought) to scribe a solid ocean chunk. Used the decoration table like usual, it reported the result was sent to the assembler like usual. I went over to the assembler to start the thing crafting, and there’s no plan on the table. It just ate all of my crafting mats and gave me nothing.

So now I have less decorations and materials than when I started with nothing to show for it

Please fix this, and if its possible it would be rad if I at least got back my stuff that Fion and the crafting table stole from me.

Short answer: Don’t forget the island pretty much exploded every volcano at the end of prophecies, killing most indigenous species. Karka ate what was left over when they showed up.

Karka will eat anything, and they’re as smart as people, possibly smarter. Hydra fireballs versus karka shells didn’t end well for the hydras when they were outnumbered like crazy.

Moira Shalaar.5620:

Blipp.5206:

I have never had a single crash on dragon stand myself, nor have I ever heard a big outcry, about such an issue existing.
What client are you using? Do you still use the 32bit client? If so, I would advice to download the 64bit for which you can find the link when you go into ‘My Account’. Before using it I had a crash here and there (Still can’t remember to have ever crashed on DS), but ever since downloading it I haven’t had a single one.

If you have the 64bit client and the game keeps crashing repeatedly for you, perhaps it would be best to fill up a ticket to support, describing the issue you have in detail. That way it will yell much more attention from Anet, then posting about it here in General Discussion.

Good luck!

PS. Also I believe you should -really- change the head title of your topic.

You are most fortunate. If you are unfamiliar with this as an issue, let me raise your awareness (from these forums):
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Dragon-s-Stand-Client-crash-or-disconnect

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Fix-Dragon-s-Stand-This-is-unacceptable

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Crashed-with-Dragon-s-Stand-nearly-Completed

And lest you think that this issue has been resolved here is something from reddit quite recently:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4yvua1/dragons_stand_lockout/

I use the Mac client. Yes, it is 32 bit. No, I am not going to spend $120 (that isn’t in my entertainment budget) to install windows as a dual boot. Yes, I know they are working on a native client. No, it will not be done soon.

I have heard each of those pointless arguments/suggestions but those all focus on the wrong problem. I think it is wonderful that the 64bit client fixed crashes for the 99% of GW2 gamers that play on windows. That STILL does not address the fact that ANET has not created any sort of failsafe for when crashes DO happen to permit players who have disconnected for whatever reason, whether crash or network failure, to reconnect to the map they were on, and receive the rewards for which they had been working. Dragon Stand is egregious because the game design DELIBERATELY locks players out, by design. I know this is to prevent leeching but it also punishes players who experience a crash and cannot reconnect.

There is a basic principle in life: things go wrong sometimes. I have heard it called murphy’s law and several other things less savory. It is a simple concept and one game designers must know. In fact ANY developer already understands that they have to account for when things go wrong, and build code in to handle failures. So why is it that there is no design for handling the failure when it comes to being disconnected from a map, particularly when they have intentionally built rewards around staying in a specific map/ip?

And finally: Robbery is the crime of stealing from a person in their presence by force. I, like so many before me, earned those rewards but was denied those rewards not by my choice. They were taken from me against my will. Dragon stand was both the location and by game design the culprit. I might be willing to adjust my title to Mega-Server still robs players. I will refrain form saying ANET still robs players. So if you are suggesting I change my title, how would you suggest I change it that will still convey the anger, the frustration and yes, the blame I have towards those who have failed in this significant aspect of game design?

Unless I’m mistaken the Mac still isn’t officially supported, and that client is still technically “beta” right?

Likely because they know it has problems.

If you bought a game that never claimed to fully support macs and you’re upset it doesn’t fully support macs yet I don’t know what to tell you. The Mac client is there for people who use both platforms to test. It’s not there to be used as a consumer product. The fact that it doesn’t work right is exactly why

The problem is that those crashes affect a relatively small number of users overall. Couple that with the fact that putting time and effort in to a system that does nothing to fix the crashes actually takes very real engineering time away from the engineers who are in charge of actually fixing the crash in the first place. if its not a pandemic affecting the vast majority of users, its just not worth switching gears to put a band aid on something you’re already doing surgery on.

That’s the tradeoff with alts really.

GW2 is probably the most alt friendly MMO out there, but as these games are generally about some form of character advancement, its only logical that playing one character means you can’t keep playing the other, and that investing gold one way means its not getting used another way. The only reason you have extra character slots in most cases is so that people with multiple accounts don’t have too much of an advantage, and so that there’s something to monetize for people that like creating alts.

Just figure out your overall goals and figure out how you can use your alts to achieve stuff for your main. I found that although I don’t play alts a lot, after using scrolls and such to level a character to 80 there’s plenty of stuff my alt can do that is more efficient that way, like getting rewards for story and map completion and other once per character stuff that pays out rewards that are per character.

You were a terrible commander long before that.

You literally left the pact to prance around tyria collecting new best friends while they were doing the important work of culling the remaining risen in Orr, despite knowin good and well that there were MULTIPLE other dragons at least equally as dangerous, and that you only had a limited time to clean up your first mess before a new one decided to get all un-sleepy.

I mean what WERE you doing? Trying to check out this rad new vacation spot, fixing road signs, rigging elections, and going to the queen’s jamboree to gawk at clockwork ladies? It’s fortunate you completely accidentally stumbled on an agent of the next dragon while you were attending a fancy dress party as your soldiers continued in their life and death struggle against the millions of still active undead in Orr.

You’re basically the Forrest Gump of the Pact.

I’ve decided, after lots of careful consideration and research to name my next character Darp Haramabe Herpson.

Remainder of LS3: We are in competition with Lazarus for the plot mcguffin we need to fight Primordus. This means some time spent figuring out a critical weakness in Lazarus. Lazarus finally strike a Palawa-Joko style deal with us. He can kill Primordus with the widget, but we won’t give it to him because we know better. End of LS3 he swoops in to save us because our mundane abilities, even with the widget, can’t take on Primordus. Agrees to help us kill Mordremoth so that he himself isn’t killed by the dragon when we fail.

Next expansion: Super awesome team up with Lazarus. We learn interesting lore facts about the Mursaat. Lazarus is painted as a sympathetic character who just wants to bring back his people from the brink of extinction. Maybe they have some sad origin story and we get to give a speech about how subjugating lesser races isn’t the only way to bring back the Mursaat. We definately give another speech about teamwork and unity against the dragons and other such stuff. We bond with Lazarus and save each other’s bacon a lot. Lazarus tries to sacrifice himself just before the final battle but we don’t let him because we’re bros now. Together with our new underground dwarf bros and assorted other races Anet has invented for the expansion we finally take down Primordus. Lazarus betrays us and gloats about how easy it was to gain our trust as he takes the magic widget. He prepares to destroy us but we are saved at the last minute by Kyle the Egg Dragon, who uses fancy crystal magic to absorb the attack and all the remaining ley line energy to become Kyle the Ley Dragon. Kyle is conveniently about the same size as our character so he can join our team of NPCs. Taking the blast makes him weak like a regular dude.

LS4: TENGU EVERYWHERE. After the defeat of Primordus, the Tengu don’t have as many problem on their home turf, and feel their honor is besmirched by not joining us in the fight. In a move that surprises no one they join the pact and finally open their cities to the world. The rumblings of the next dragon start and we head to the desert to confront Kyle’s crystalline granddaddy.

Third Expansion: Plot twist. Lazarus hooks up with Palawa Joko and some Junundu and annihilates the dragon within the first two missions. We end up fighting lots of Joko-zombie’d Mursaat. Joko is a sub boss. Killing him un-zombies all those Mursaat leaving us to face off against Dragon-Powered Lazarus in a scripted battle involving a lot of crystal Junundu. He gets the Junundu and we get to ride around on suddenly full size Kyle like the never ending story. We defeat Lazarus and Kyle sucks up all that Ley Energy. We ditch the airships for shiny blue new crystal dragons from that point forward. They call the expansion shattered mirror or dark mirror or something else with mirror in it. The logo has two dragons on it.

Future expansion boss fights are always giant set pieces where Kyle gets to do the heavy lifting while we watch him murder the other three dragons while we fight some adds and flip some plot critical switches. If they decide to can the game early they just lump however remaining dragons are left in to one fight to end the series.

Anet goes on to invent a new IP. Probably something with spaceships.

I’d use three clones to backstab with a greatsword.

And then I’d shatter the clones.

Alternately: They could make higher value expansions and rely less on the gem store because the expansions sell better.

The argument that people are “paying twice” is only applicable if those players were paying some kind of subscription. In GW2 they were not. If you bought the game and played it for any length of time, every time you logged in you were getting a return on that purchase in the form of the servers actually working.

If you bought gems you were not donating to Anet out of good will. You were buying a specific product at a specific price, which you received.

Players that feel they are owed a discount on an expansion because it is now free are like people barging in to a store and asking for the latest iPhone or Galaxy or whatever at a discount because they bought one three years ago and “already had access” to previous versions of the operating system and services.

Expansions aren’t upgrades. They’re new iterative products. Just like your phone. Just like your phone, when you get the new one nobody charges you for all the R&D that went in to refining its software and components despite that software simply being a newer version of what you already have.

The expansion model Anet landed on is built specifically so that existing AND new users pay the same amount of money for the same product on the day of release. Making the previous product part of the bundle does not invalidate the months or years of service you already received.

Making the previous product fee because they have moved to a new, more lucratvie revenue source also does not invalidate your previously received service. Especially when both products share a service architecture.