I had enjoyed the melee/mid-ranged style of the rifle before I quit back when ascended gear was about to make its way into the game. The mid-ranged appeal was so that melee couldn’t hit you as much while you could hit them. Avoiding melee attacks while still being able to attack as a close ranged player was the appeal.
When I rejoined sometime after HoT released, hammers took all of that appeal and then some. They can block melee attacks while attacking and reflect ranged attacks with their weapon. It can be used to avoid crowd control and protect allies when they need it the most. It is a really fun weapon to play with in any role of play style.
The rifle for the engineer has no place anymore. It isn’t that the hammer is too powerful, although it is rather powerful. The issue is that the job of the rifle is the same as that of the hammer and flamethrower. If one is more powerful than the others then the others are not worth using. It is time to come up with a new concept for the rifle. Let the flamethrower be what the rifle is trying to be, a mid-ranged weapon. Make the rifle into something that the engineer doesn’t already have.
I’ll come up with something off the top of my head. How about a long ranged rifle that automatically changes the behavior of its spells into that of a cleaving shotgun while their target enters melee range? For example, Overcharged Shot could knock back targets in a line while their target is at a long range, but while their target is in melee it could fire Overcharged Shot in a short ranged cone in front of the engineer. I can’t recall any other weapon that behaves like this in the game yet. I don’t believe that it would overlap with any other weapons that the engineer already has. The versatility of the weapons range would allow for it to exist in WvW, even if it lacked defensive cooldowns and group support. This would also remove the need of the Blunderbuss ability and allow for the GW2 team to come up with a new ability that could help make the weapon do whatever they feel that it needs to do.
On an original GW2 account, not a restricted free to play account, I’d say HoT is only worth getting under level 80 if you know you’ll be playing for awhile and are interested something beyond the standard edition. Other editions come with an additional character slot and some other things that you can use right away.
Players should receive rewards for participating with sportsmanship. Switching and removing pieces from the table when nobody is looking isn’t behavior that should be rewarded.
I haven’t logged into the game for over 2 weeks now. Last time I logged in was around the 19th of November. However, I’m still keeping an eye on the game. I’m observing the game from behind ballistic glass (forums) so it doesn’t blow up in my face. I won’t be hurt if it takes another turn for what I see as the worst.
There’s no doubts about which direction this game is heading.
Yet another prediction of doom based on Xfire numbers. Accepting (generously) 27k players as the max on the graph shown, and 2,000,000 (from official announcements on sales by NCSoft), XFire players at peak represented no more than 1.35% of the total population. While those kinds of numbers might be statistically significant for Neilsen ratings, or political opinion polls, Xfire users do not represent a sufficiently random sample to attain statistical significance.
I agree that the Xfire numbers do not represent doom, but something can be drawn from the trends. The hours played is on a steady decrease, which is to be expected of a game as the content gets older, but look at what happened on the 15th through the 18th. It jumped up pretty high. Now look at what happened after it. The trend continued its normal pace. Ascended gear and dungeon didn’t seem to attract those players into playing any more than they already were.
GW2 doesn’t have a clear identity right now. It is going through some changes with what it sees as the target audience from what I can tell. I know where my friends stand when it comes to video games, but I can’t tell where GW2 stands.
I think people might be more worried about the future because what is happening right now and not what is happening right at this moment. The stats on gear will creep up in power as more pieces of ascended gear get added, unless how gear is distributed changes. Power creep is one of the most common issues within the MMORPG genre. There are multiple downsides to it. Two examples of symptoms of power creep is gated content and dividing players into tiers. There are more problems with power creep, but those two are usually the worst for when it comes to playing with others in an online game. I’ll post a video on power creep below.
I’m currently not actually playing GW2 because I’m waiting to see if the gear further creeps. I heard that the developers are trying to come up with more ways to distribute ascended gear, but actions speak louder than words, so I’m peeking at the forums once in awhile to see what ArenaNet does.
This video explains rather well why the game shouldn’t be limited to being only about having fun.
Here is another video from them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c
More games should appeal to other emotions than fun, but we also need to step away from the skinner box crutch.
I did not attend the event, because I was demotivated to play the game by what I felt was a change in direction for the design of the game. There were other games available that I played that I felt more motivated to play. I would not recommend more one time events if it leaves this hollow shell world content. I would much rather have a world boss chain event. The world content was so hollow that I could not find out why we were at the island fighting crab monsters. Apparently the entire explanation was within the one time event.
These one time events were too important for explaining the reason why we are at this island in the first place. The events were the introduction to the enemy. The events should be converted into a personal story quest chain for story telling purposes. I didn’t do these events, so I was very lost when I first went to the island. New players of this game in the future that explore this content will more than likely be even more lost than I am.
My advice for future events is that one time events shouldn’t be an introduction to a new threat. One time events should be for showing us a threat that has already been explained and will continue to be explained for as long as they are still a threat.
I’m going to quote myself from another thread, because I feel like this is important feedback for future events. It is important for building up content within the game now for new players in the future.
I did not attend any of the one time events, so when I first visited the island my thoughts were:
These spiders aren’t even a threat. It isn’t like they attacked Lion’s Arch or anything.
Why is the Lionguard at this island? They must be helping these other guys build their vacation resort. How nice of them.
What the heck is that empty room with the roasted spider and lava for? Oh well. Doesn’t look too important. I’ve seen plenty of spiders on this island.
I didn’t figure everything out until I visited that one Lost Shores recap webpage. It is a bad idea to have deep ties between introductions to new zones and one time events. The introduction to a zone should be either personal story instances or implied through dynamic events and NPCs out in the world. That way if a new player in the future enters the zone they will know what the heck is going on. I can see this zone becoming a problem to new players down the line. Eventually that Lost Shores webpage will get buried in the internet.
I did not attend any of the one time events, so when I first visited the island my thoughts were:
These spiders aren’t even a threat. It isn’t like they attacked Lion’s Arch or anything.
Why is the Lionguard at this island? They must be helping these other guys build their vacation resort. How nice of them.
What the heck is that empty room with the roasted spider and lava for? Oh well. Doesn’t look too important. I’ve seen plenty of spiders on this island.
I didn’t figure everything out until I visited that one Lost Shores recap webpage. It is a bad idea to have deep ties between introductions to new zones and one time events. The introduction to a zone should be either personal story instances or implied through dynamic events and NPCs out in the world. That way if a new player in the future enters the zone they will know what the heck is going on. I can see this zone becoming a problem to new players down the line. Eventually that Lost Shores webpage will get buried in the internet.
So after my morale was lowered by the news about ascended gear, I’ve kind of decided to spend my time playing other games more often. I missed all of the one time events. I just wasn’t in the mood to play. I’m still kind of struggling to want to play, but Planetside 2 beta is over and I’ve decided to set down Minecraft again, so I decided to check up on GW2. I took the boat to the island and found many spider NPCs and about 4 dynamic events. From my perspective there was nothing that really happened on the island and I didn’t really find any story by just looking around. I saw a roasted spider next to a pool of lava, but thought nothing of it. From my perspective it was like players didn’t really contribute to much, these spiders weren’t an actual threat, and there is not much for me to question when it came to this new part of the world.
With this in mind I would like to ask a few questions:
Should one time events be used as introductions into new content?
If you think that one time events should be used as an introduction to new content, should the one time events feel more or less important to the story for people who hadn’t seen the events?
Would story instancing that lasts forever, such as how we were introduced into Orr and its enemies through the personal story, be a better introduction to new content?
A slight difference in stats doesn’t your exotic gear outdated unless YOU make up your mind that it is. Aside from one endgame dungeon, there’s no content that needs this gear.
ArenaNet provided a wheel for all the hamsters that complained they didn’t have one. That doesn’t mean you HAVE to jump into that wheel.
Boycott all you want, it just means less lag when the event starts.
If there is a 10 stat increase on each piece of gear, such as that ring example ArenaNet gave in their blog post, then that will eventually result in a stat increase over 100 if they keep adding a piece of ascended gear for each gear slot. I wonder if ArenaNet will draw the line so it doesn’t reach that point.
Planetside 2 is coming out this month on the 20th. I’m not going to boycott the event, but having fun shooting faces at the side of my friends does sound better than grinding for gear in PvE content. I might end up absent from the game for a large period of time.
Whatever were they thinking? I’m sure there are people who enjoy these sort of things, but I think a vast majority of us went in there expecting that this was content meant for all of us to enjoy.
Are we having fun? If you call gritting your teeth and shouting obscenities fun… I’ll let you be the judge of that.
Can’t please everyone. But actual gamer’s will most likely love this. It’s just like a mario level. Who didn’t love mario? People who didn’t like video games, that’s who. >:O
I’ve done the clock tower like five times within an hour today. The only complaint I have is that charr can’t stop walking on all fours while doing it. You can’t take out your weapon, because it doesn’t exist, so the charr character goes into a strange animation that is a hybrid between walking on all fours and walking on two legs. I found the clock tower to be a fun, optional, thing to do.
Over the weeks of WvW I’ve played, I’ve noticed that the beasts pit is now the standard of camping the Eternal Battlegrounds jumping puzzle. It is the obvious area of choice to pick as a camper of the puzzle to face the least resistance as long as you have a mesmer to pick players that fall back up. That part of the puzzle naturally divides and conquers the players that enter the beast pits. There are classes that can’t make the jumps because they don’t have enough swiftness to make up for the running speed lost while in combat. There are builds that don’t accept using stability abilities that well for when a knockback are used on a player once they finally reach the top.
For every day I’ve attended the jumping puzzle there has been a group waiting on top of the beast pits. My strategy to getting around them is now avoidance, not PvP. I now peek at the rooftop of the beast pit before I even journey into the puzzle. If there are too many for me to climb the wall, there are too many to climb the wall. It is an easy thing to avoid if it is visible enough. The thing is that I don’t want to need to do that. I want to fight the players within the puzzle. I don’t to avoid fighting just because my ally Steve the necromancer can’t make a single jump in the puzzle without Spectral Walk to reach the enemy on the platforms above. Something about this puzzle should change.
Waste it on alternative characters that you are leveling up.
I do use the basic stones on gear for alts, but what I’m saying is that I never use either of the two transmutation stones on level 80 gear unless it is exotic. I’d like to use the basic stones on my alts once they reach level 80 and are using rare level 80 armor.
Right now Basic Transmutation Stone can only be used on loot that is under level 80. With a new level 80 I craft a full set of rares to start them off, but never spend Fine Transmutation Stones on rares. I only use them on exotics. I’m sure there are others like me. This isn’t really an important suggestion, it is about vanity, but I feel like Basic Transmutation Stones should work on all non-exotic gear. This way people like me can change the appearance of rare items at level 80 instead of just waiting until they are in exotics to use the Fine Transmutation Stones.
Darkhaven is seeming to have a bit more trouble with the night this match tonight. As long as NSP and Maguuma hogs enough bases Darkhaven might not get too far ahead.
Right now I think there is a way to force stealthed players out of stealth, but it requires AoE boon removal abilities. Only mesmers and necromancers have those from what I know.
Right now I’m having an issue on my necromancer alt where floating text tells me my Spectral Grasp gets obstructed in the most random of areas or no floating text appears at all and nothing happens. I mostly like to PvP. It is where I tried out the ability the most. This happens even if my target doesn’t go into the dodge animation, so I’m wondering if enemies can just strafe to dodge it or if it is just a stubborn bug that causes the ability to fail often.
Last match us Northern Shiverpeakers fought, the teams didn’t even reach a 10k point difference between each other from what I remember. A10k difference can be a crazy amount if the enemy is making just as much as you during large parts of the day.
Your right, if every battle was exactly the same as your last one then you would be correct, 10k would be huge. My whole point anyway was the fact that people were giving up too soon b/c who knows what the week days have to bring. 10k may not be all that much with DH’s week day schedule, but hey if you wanna QQ now, server transfers are still free I hear.
Other servers have come back from much more than 10k points to take the lead again.
The point I’m trying to make is that Darkhaven owns the night alone. In order to compete with that we will need to maintain as much during the day as they do during the night to keep up with how much Darkhaven is earning. Right now we are keeping around 50% during the day, but that isn’t enough to shorten the difference between our scores before the night comes.
I’ll play WvW regardless of the scoreboard. The score doesn’t motivate me to play or not to play WvW. The only thing that I feel the score influences that impacts me directly is what teams we fight next match. It is a little depressing that we might not be able to try to keep up with the score of Darkhaven as things are currently going, but I’ll still fight.
lol what you talking about undermine? Blue owns more than green and red combined. I’d really like to see Anet step up and create a better way these match ups work, the bracket system currently is a horrible system and can be exploited by simply transferring servers. At night, ebay server is literally dead, probably less than 50 people in WvW. I really question the population each server has, its not changed in a long time so either, its broken ~ Or Anet is doing something underhanded.
I checked several parsing websites for people playing Guild Wars 2 and its been in a signficant decline since Mid Sept – so I’m pretty sure, alot of servers really have low – medium populations. Ebay after 1am EST definately has a low population.
What are you talking about, DH only has a 10k point lead and the weekend is coming to an end. The real fight hasn’t even begun yet, the week days are going to determine how this fight turns out. Currently even though we have half the map, it is still a close battle, 10k isn’t a crazy amount to catch up to. GL NSP and EBay, it has been a great fight so far!
Last match us Northern Shiverpeakers fought, the teams didn’t even reach a 10k point difference between each other from what I remember. A10k difference can be a crazy amount if the enemy is making just as much as you during large parts of the day.
I actually use the invisible bag to store stuff I want to put on the trading post, because everything I use is already soulbound and all my crafting materials are in the bank. If they make invisible bag get ignored by trading post then I think there should be a trading post bag that works the same way as the current invisible bag.
I’m guessing you are trying to keep your mini-pets safe? All weapons I’ve seen get soulbound when you use them, so alternate weapons shouldn’t be a problem.
The tier 1 leather charr racial helmet, called the Drover Helm, is one of my favorite pieces of armor in the game. It is an awesome piece of armor for a charr. It lets us show off our horns while also being one of the few leather helmets that covers our face and neck at the same time. The problem with it is that it clips through just about every leather coat model in the game. It clips through every dungeon coat piece and it clipped through every piece of leatherworking armor that I had worn with it while leveling up, which was when I was level 50 to 80. So far the only rare through exotic coats I’ve found that don’t get clipped by the helmet are the racial coats of the charr and the Order of Whispers coat.
All of the clipping issues are caused by the neck guard of the helmet being slightly too long. My suggestion is to shorten the neck guard length a little so that it stops clipping through armor that charr players might want to mix with their racial helmet.
In the attachment, I’ve dyed the neck guard pink and the neck of the coat I’m currently using light blue.
I’ve just gotten word that this group that is camping the beast pit in the Eternal Battlegrounds puzzle with siege weapons has been doing it for about 5 to 6 hours. I think they know that this strategy gives people a very hard time because of the pug nature of the puzzle combined with the lack of ability to reach them. This group of enemies actually have mesmers that teleport their group up to fund their siege weapons with more supplies. That is how serious they are treating this camping. Most serious groups of players on my team are too busy having fun on the surface fighting for things that actually reward the team. They don’t have time to help fight them.
I know of a counter, but I’d need about 10 people. 10 people that are already busy actually fighting for important objectives. The strategy involves a trebuchet. You can see where I’m going with how overboard the requirement to counter them would be. Most of the time a single treb is worth half the amount of the rewards within the chest at the end of the puzzle. It would be a gamble of my time, my team’s time, and my resources to try and actually destroy their weapons.
Right now it is possible to build siege weapons at choke points within the WvW Eternal Battleground jumping puzzle. A group of players can easily prevent players from jumping through the only path in the puzzle if they don’t have swiftness up, while at the same time an arrow cart eats at their health bar as they wait for their swiftness cooldowns to refresh to make a few jumps. This makes the circular room with the beast cages next to impossible to get through. Arrow carts can hit a player from anywhere within that room if they are placed at the very top platform. I feel like we need ways to flank the enemy at locations like this. It would make the jumping puzzle more fun than the meat grinder that players sometimes make it be.
So basically. You’d feel better if magic find went from buffing only you to buffing those around you, meaning that now everyone runs exclusively full magic find and kicks people without at least X magic find out since it prevents them from getting max magic find?
Depends. Take my example for example. One person geared out in +100% magic find would cap out the magic find buff to 25.
What if magic find geared players buffed nearby allies around themselves with a fraction of the magic find that player has? Obviously there would need to be a cap to prevent an overload of magic find, but it would it would make people like me feel more comfortable with magic find in parties. For an example, maybe for every +5% of magic find a player has allies around the magic find person get a buff for +1% magic find, but the buff only stacks to 25.
I think I remember something about a developer talking about this. It used to be that you had to run up and loot the bags in beta and then they made it so the bags came to us. It brought up the question why we didn’t just auto-loot everything and I think a guy from ArenaNet tried to explain that there was an issue they had with putting it in. Anyways, I think ArenaNet does want to come up with a better loot system.
No no and no. Enough of this mount talk please. ArenaNet would be the biggest fools to ever add mounts to this game.
I’m not suggesting they add mounts. I don’t really want mounts either. I’m only suggesting a way mounts could behave, because I don’t think the entire world is designed properly for mounts. That way if ArenaNet did want to add mounts then it could possibly be in a way that minimizes any friction between mounting and the kind of exploration it feels GW2 is going for.
This suggestion isn’t for me as much as it is for the people who want to travel without waypoints. Personally, I don’t think mounts should be in the game, but if they had to I think this suggestion might be a good way to have them work.
Roads in MMORPGs are commonly used as faster ways to travel around without interruptions from enemy NPCs. Sometimes within Guild Wars 2 there are events such as roadblocks, but overall there is hardly ever any exploration involved in them except for getting to towns. I feel that this could make roads some middle ground between the people who want mounts and people who don’t.
Most MMORPGs don’t really need to worry about mounting vs exploration because they restrict most or all of their adventurous exploration to running through caves, buildings, or instanced areas and by not involving the jump key too often outside of those areas. It feels like other MMORPGs took mounting into consideration when designing their world by restricting exploration to places where they could easily force players off of mounts. Guild Wars 2 has things like Vistas and jumping puzzles that don’t always take place in areas where there is as clear of an excuse to dismount a player. There are also some zones in this game that have very rugged terrain that involves lots of jumping. Guild Wars 2 does not seem like it was designed to handle mounting. It just doesn’t look right or seem practical to have mounts jumping to exploration objectives with how much jumping is involved.
Thinking of that gave me an idea. Because the game did not restrict exploration to areas of the world to only where mounts couldn’t possibly be used, why not restrict mounts to roads? This way the game keeps players exploring on foot yet also offers a faster way to travel between two points.
Right now my Drover Helm, which is the first tier leather armor helm for charr, is just a little too long on the neck. It keeps clipping through every leather armor that has something covering the neck, which is a ton of stuff.
My coat has a pocket on it that looks like it is supposed to store a laptop.
I don’t feel like this game should have mounts. I found myself using the jump button in this game more than any other MMORPG I’ve played. It feels like an adventure game. When I think of mounts in GW2 I think of mounts jumping everywhere a mount probably shouldn’t be. Vistas and jumping puzzles come to mind. There are also other areas of exploration, such as a few skill points and points of interest, that might be silly watching mounted players get to.
I’d like to see a feature like this. It could only help people. A suggestion to solving the problem Frvwfr presented would be to remove the ability to refund from an item after it is equipped.
In WvW it is important to retreat for health when seriously injured. When a player leaves combat for more health the combat music fades almost immediately. The default WvW combat music is somewhat okay for this, but right now I’m using a customized music playlist and it is obvious when the music fades away after getting more health. I suggest making the music last for some seconds after combat ends. This way a player has a chance to return to combat before the music disappears.
It was suggested before, but it is a great idea so many people are probably thinking the same thing. However, the suggestion I read suggested to swap out the outmanned buff to give the combat stats and give the magic find and other stuff to the orb, so the outmanned buff supports the outmanned team in combat.
I wouldn’t care if players could switch to any class with just one character, but I think players would have an issue of inventory space if they needed to have the armor of all these classes and builds.
Have you ever played SWTOR and been to their forums when the game launched? That was the most obnoxious community in an MMORPG. The fanatics of that game steered the developers into not taking action on the problems the game had until it was too late. I even saw people report a player for posting a link to the unsubscribe page while unsubscribe button was broken! That is obnoxious defense. Actually willing to get in the way of other gamers just to stop them from quitting the game.
But that doesn’t excuse the hostility on this forum, it only gives an example of what can happen if people defend even the flaws of a game.
How is something a grind if the grind part is hidden? When something is a grind it means it is a laborious task. If people don’t see it as a laborious task, because the feeling of labor feels hidden, can we still consider it a grind?
Good thing the leather Charr armor skins get progressively worse looking, making tier 1 the best looking yet the cheapest. Yay! Unfairness is on my side.
All of our options for our personal story have been recorded in our “My Story” tabs. Maybe ArenaNet could so something like put a button on that tab that mails us our starter item?
I was playing Planetside 2 beta today and it felt great not having to worry about repair costs all the time, yet I still acted the way I do in GW2 WvW. I would follow a small group around to make sure I didn’t die so often. Repair costs are supposed to discourage certain actions. Right now they discourage trying to fight an enemy that outnumbers your team and encourage super sized zerg groups that outnumbered teams cannot stop. For those reasons I think they should be removed.
However, I can see the need for a gold sink for people who don’t contribute to their team’s effort in keeping control of bases. I usually see things like supply camps without any upgrades purchased for them. The only way I can think of to promote that gold sink while removing this one would be to make it so people who buy a base upgrade get no armor damage in WvW for a certain amount of time. Maybe that would be a good way to hit two birds with one stone?
