Guild Wars 2

LinseyMurdock.4165:

• No Crafted Components. There are simply too many of them and I categorically refuse to add them all. .

Last time I checked… That is what interns are for.

I want to add my voice to the chorus of dissent. I would have pre-purchased the Legendary Edition without a second thought, but the whole principle of the thing has made me decide not to pre-purchase until ArenaNet makes some changes.

The whole ordeal feels like ArenaNet told me and my friends they don’t need our business and to kitten off. The expansion is expensive as is, but asking us to buy another character slot on top of that is an insult to injury. Then to turn around and dangle it in the collectors edition (because you know we need the charcacter slot) was a scumbag move.

On top of that I bought the game as a gift for a number of people because I was told that HoT would require the core game, but then they turn around and include it in the expansion. To make it worse, they claim it’s included free… But where is my extra copy of the guild wars 2 core? So as Far as I’m concerned you lost the high ground in claiming it’s an added bonus. It’s just now HoT is included in the core game and you want all the veteran players to buy it again.

Perhaps its some upper management playing with spreadsheets that brought us to this… Where ArenaNet is asking everybody to buy the game twice, provide no expansion only option, and then nickel and dime us for character slots to play the new class.

Well to that I say ArenaNet needs to take this backlash and use it to fight the management. It doesn’t take much to fix this. Give us an additional character slot with the basic expansion. Acknowledge you asked people to buy core game before buying the expansion, then give everyone who owns the core game like $20 in gems rather than discounting the price.

That is it. That is all you need to do. Give the expansion slot to the Lowest package, and if people already own the game, give them like $20 worth of gems as a “rebate” on already owning the core game. If you do this, I’ll pre-order the Legendary Edition.

If not, there are plenty of games out there that have gone free to play I can move on to.

Thief + Rifle = Sniper

We can dream right?

Vertical Progression Problem
The Advancement rate of vertical progression is fine, but the moment you have to repeat it for any alt’s it becomes miserable (Particularly when the gear has a laurel cost). We need to view GW2 progress on an account basis and repeatedly grinding the same gear on multiple characters isn’t fun.

Vertical Progression Solution
I would like to see Ascended gear essentially “unlock” for an account when it is achieved. Once a piece of gear is “unlocked” either for the account the player should be able to switch between any stat sets they have “unlocked”. This is similar to the way legendaries can change their stat sets out of combat, but ascended can only change between stat sets that have been unlocked (where as legendarily have access to all stat sets.)

So when a player crafts or finds a piece of ascended beserker medium gloves. When they equip it, they can now have any of their level 80 characters that use medium armor switch their gloves to the stat combo of beserker ascended. If they then acquire cleric gloves, they can switch between cleric and beserker for any of their medium armor glove sets. _Players will still have to unlock each stat set for each weapon type, armor piece and class. BUT it gives them a measurable horizontal progression. _ You can additionally apply this to Exotic & Rare gear, so players can pick between the best stat combo and vertical progression they have unlocked.

_Runes/Sigils should also unlock in this way. _This would make for example +10% damage against undead extremely useful, because if you know your going to encounter undead you can swap to the correct Sigil. _This would encourage players to collect all the runes & sigils. _

Armor & Weapon skins could also unlock in this manner.

As an added bonus, Instead of purchasing Laurel Gear for each character (which is particularly miserable if you have alts) you only need to purchase each piece of gear once.

TL:DR Acquiring Armor, Weapons, Runes, Sigils “Unlocks” the ability to swap between them out of combat similar to legendaries, but players only have access to stat combo’s they have unlocked.

Horizontal Progression Problem
I feel the problem we have with horizontal progression in GW2 is there isn’t an opportunity to utilize any of the horizontal progression you make. For example there is little to no point in me building a healing set when I’m a tank, because it requires me to go back to town and respec to get the maximum use out of it. The same thing goes for skills as your essentially locked into your build/role until you rebuild it.

Solution to Horizontal Progression Problems Problems
The solution to this problem being the ability to dual/multi-spec, so players can explore and use multiple roles with the horizontal progression they achieve in both gear and skills.

Ideally this multispec should hold traits, skills, armor/weapon stat combos, armor cosmetic model, and dye pattern.

Arenanet could sell Additional spec slots that can be swapped at a gem cost, I’d probably pay 800-2000 gems to have that ability.

TL:DR Arenanet needs to add dual/multispec in order to make horizontal progression desirable.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

1.) How important is it to see your squad members as a different color and always visible on your map like party?

This is a very useful feature, but I can’t argue it’s essential. If you have two squads that split up for example, being able to track them visually with color coding is super useful. Callout such as “Green” squad needs more Elementalists help red squad with DPS or Drop healing on Blue Squad. This allows a huge amount of information to be conveyed with fewer words and quicker more accurate responses. Just think how much easier it is to find your guild members in lions arch with their gold name text.

2) I’ve always felt the best commander organization tool would be the ability to create events. Like drop a siege and the commander can set this is a build event then everyone gets Ui like build this flame ram 0/50 supply needed. Or Destroy this gate <show gate health bar>. Lets assume for this discussion there are no rewards to the events just a communication tool. Thoughts on commander created events?

What if commanders gained a “spendable” XP pool when they complete events, (IE flipping keeps, capturing supply centers, killing enemies). This xp is scalable based on squad size (IE 10 Squad members 100xp for capturing tower, but 100 squad members 1,000xp for tower cap), then when Commanders create an event such as “build flame ram here”, they can assign XP to the completion that is paid out of their “spendable pool” earned from objectives. XP can be rewards from event completion could be divided up between participants based on contribution or shared evenly. This could even let you return XP rewards to things like killing dolyaks by taking it out of the command pool.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

3) A guild gating system would be clean but require all commanders to be in a fairly active guild is this a fair gating system?

I think you should really consider separate Commander tags for separate areas of the game. 1 for WvW (Honor tokens), 1 for PVE (Gold), 1 for Guilds (Guild points). Each tag is only visible to the group it is bought for, so If you have a guild tag only guild members can see it. If you bought a WvW tag, it could only be used in WvW areas and not PVE.
These tags could be visibility traits just like color, IE visable to WvW/PVE/Guild/Squad. Each has to be unlocked in a separate way. This way Rich PVE Merchants don’t walk into WVW flip on their Commander Tag without earning it.

4) What did I miss on this list

Having different tags for different areas of the game as I already mentioned in 3, other than that your list gets me pretty excited to see what you guys come up with.

Some things I’d really like to see for the WvW Commander system are…

1. The ability to mark the world map with drawings, markers, and text notes that are visible only by people in your squad. These should remain on the map until removed

2. I’d like to see active commanders show up on the HUD with a short message of what they are doing and if they are LFM. This way when you join a map you can instantly see at a glance the active commanders, what they are doing, and if they need more people. This is useful for PVP and PVE; Example “Commander Bob – Tequatl DPS group – LFM” or “Commander Sara – Flipping Supply Camps – Full”

3. I’d like to see the ability to join commander squads added to the LFG tool.

4. I’d like to see a drawback for having an excessive group for certain objectives. For example Supply Camps could have a max cap rate of 10, for every friendly player over the cap rate in a radius from the cap add 30 seconds to cap time. This would encourage small roaving havoc groups to peel off from the main zerg for smaller objectives and discourage the zerge from going out of their way to cap smaller objectives.

5. I’d like to see commander tags divided between areas of the game. So there would be a WvW Commander Tag(works on in WvW bought for Honor Tokens), a Guild Commander Tag (works only for guild bought for Guild currency), and a PVE Commander Tag (Works only in PVE bought for gold)

As much as I’d like to see a progression system for leveling up commander, I know it’s a bad idea from a game design standpoint. To use an example Planetside 1 had a progression system for abilities and command. When PS1 launched there were few commanders because leveling up command meant not leveling up your character progression. Then once people started hitting their progression cap, suddenly everybody wanted to command to continue their progression, but most of these people had no actual interest in commanding. These individuals just wanted to continue to progress their character and the whole game suffered.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

How big do you expect a squad to be?

I expect a squad to be between 10 -20 people, anymore than that and you start to get a breakdown in mechanics.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

What kind of content is a PvE commander most useful?

Right now a PvE commander is most useful for things like Scarlets Invasion where many objectives are on the map, but large numbers of players would be completely uncoordinated. After that they are useful for adventures like the tower of nightmares where content is somewhat gated by group size, it currently lets groups build up a “critical mass” to keep going.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Is money a good enough gate for commander tags?

I’d say no, I think it should be higher. At launch it was fine, but the economy has shifted and 100 gold is much too easy to get.

So these are my thoughts on Living Story.

Overall I like the concept, and have been back and forth on it’s execution. My favorite LS arc is still the Karka Events, they expanded the game world, the lore, and they let us take part in the worlds growth. There is also an artifact left for us to tell new players about it, so when we go to Southsun Cove I can tell them how “back in my day” there wasn’t no stinking hotel, how we settled the island, and how we battled the original Karka Queen.

I also think the living story doesn’t focus enough on the dragons. As a result, the threat of the elder dragons becomes trivialized. Yes, the threat of the molten alliance is serious, but it is made more serious by diverting resources from the fight with the elder dragons. Not enough emphasis is placed on why these “internal” threats such as scarlet endanger the efforts of the Pact.

I’d like to see the 4 living story teams each permanently take a different region. One team for Maguma and the Jungle Dragon, One Team for the Ocean and the Water Dragon, One team for the North and Jormag, and One Team for internal affairs such as scarlet or the molten alliance. Each LS should expand the the world and at the end of each year, every team should have added a zone as fully developed as any other in the game. This way the pact is pushing all fronts against the dragons and every year the game is bigger than the previous year.

I also feel much of the living story content should be added to the end of a players personal story so that all new players can experience it. Also the player needs to be the hero in the events, It was lame being Trahearne sidekick. It’s lame being Bran, Rox’s, Ellen Kiel, or anybody elses Sidekick. I should not be going to help these characters, they should be coming to me FOR help.

Rewards for the living story should be easiest to attain when they go live, but remain available for players at a later date. I’ve seen more than one new or returning player quit GW2 when they discovered an item they wanted was unattainable.

Last, I feel that living story achievements (and meta rewards) need to take into account that not all players can log in every day. A dedicated player should be able to get the meta-achievement after playing a weekend and not be required to log in everyday to gain 1 or 2 daily achievements.

P.S. Kill scarlet off, she is too much a cartoon villain and doesn’t fit the setting.

Problems as I see it

1. No incentives to join lower population servers. If you are on a high population server or new to the game there is no real incentive to move to one of the lower pop server. There are more benefits to drawbacks on being on a high pop server. Even if you have longer ques for WvW you still typically get better bonuses for being there.
1A. I’d like to see free transfers to lower population servers, and boosts to leveling like XP, Karma, Magic Find boosts. So If you are a new player or a player on a high pop server, moving to a lower “destination” server could give you a 20% boost for lets say 80 hours of play time.

2. Need to Increase Server & Zone Capacity. Tequatl has made it somewhat obvious to me that zone capacity is not high enough especially for large scale events like tequatl. Overflow is great, but when you need 50+ people for an event overflow becomes an automatic fail. Which results in people camping zones and having large number of nonparticipating players when the event does pop.

3. Need to merge servers. I just don’t think we need the huge number of servers we currently have, I’d like to see the mid pop servers merged with the low pop servers.

4. Refocus of Overflow technology to reduce “empty” zones. When Gw2 first launched all the zones were full, but now the zone population on almost all zones is practically non-existent. I’d like to see players from all servers or perhaps groups of servers go to a shared zone similar to overflow. So lets say people from several (or all) servers share common PVE zone what does this mean? In example say people from the servers Stormbluff Island, Fort Aspenwood, and Far Shiverpeaks all share a PVE world, so whenever you enter Kessex Hills it will be populated by people from all 3 of those servers.

Trahearne is by far the worst idea that went into GW2. We start building up the epic story for our characters and BAM sidelined and turned into a sidekick for a nobody in a moment.

Whose idea was it? It seems like a rookie mistake to make the player a sidekick in their own PERSONAL Story.

Honestly you should set up a world ending scenario and kill him off in the middle of it Red Wedding Style and let the Player take his place as the hero snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

It’s not 2 runs, its 2 runs x 5 people (which is 10 runs.) It was also also a drastically noticeable change. Have you guys run the high level fractals and disagree, or are you just posting RNG?

I’d of bought it.

If you want them, buy them and you won’t have to worry about it.

I too would have bought the weapon skins 3-4 had they not been RNG. In fact I bought the mace, shield, and quiver. I would of also bought a fused armor set.

These Drop rates are bullkitten, your RNG boxes are basically theft or a bait & switch.

I would speculate that when the molten alliance returns in future living story events.. so will the fused weapon tickets, flame & frost dyes, and molten pick with new goodies.

Just like they will reuse the holiday events and resell the skins during the holiday. I doubt they will make anything that limited that can only be acquired once in the whole lifespan of the game.

I’ve run 2 fractals since the south sun cove patch went live. Myself and everybody I’ve run with has noticed a major decrease in the drop rate after southsun cove that was not documented in the patch.

Has anybody else noticed this? Is it intentional or a bug?

I’ve bought these RNG chests and everytime I walk away burned and disliking ArenaNet more and more as a company. I much prefer the straight up buy it to get it method, I don’t mind spending 5 or 10 bucks on something, but asking me to drop hundreds of dollars for the CHANCE to get what I want is absurd. It’s just not fun and it makes people quit your game. I’ve seen 4 friends quit the game over a random number generated item.

IF you want to keep doing these RNG items take a page from magic the gather booster packs, 4 common items (boosters), 3 Uncommon Items, 1 rare or super rare.

Take another page from Star Trek Online and put tickets in every RNG box you open that can be redeemed for items, so if you are going to make up open a hundred of these, at least let us earn enough tickets to get what we want.

I really liked the fused, and the halloween skins. The super rare loot at the .01% is just too exclusive. The Molten Weapon Facility and the Jetpack and Firestorm pet are a great example. Don’t make things that rare. The tickets were a step in the right direction, but It’s really upsetting I couldn’t get the items I wanted. I don’t mind making them limited time, but don’t make them limited time AND RNG.

Bas.7406:

My recommendation – check out Nemesis’ youtube videos, the SOACGaming podcasts, and CHIPS amazing encyclopedia of Necromancer abilities. For pure axe damage I would recommend Tak and kitteno’s Zerker build. It’s personally my favorite non-minion Necromancer build.

Don’t suppose you have a link to these handy?

I Hit 80 on my Necro last night and I tried looking through the “post your build thread”, but its a little chaotic. I’m wanted to know what builds people have been using for the necros for Dungeons, WvW, and PVP (and more importantly why). What are the popular builds now, what do you recommend and why. Are people stacking Crit/Power or Condition Damage/Duration? How are you using your Necro Solo vs Grouped? What are good places to look at builds besides this forum?

Storm of the Ages.9076:

This reminds me of the diablo MF “fix” and I am not a fan. The only thing this system would accomplish would be to further cripple the casual player which is not part of Anet’s agenda.

please elaborate how you believe it cripples a casual gamer rather than rewards them for playing.

Suggestion
So I want to recommend that a magic find bonus be attached to the account achievement score. I believe this has a number of benefits and I can’t think of any drawbacks. It would be easy to implement and have a large payout in terms of benefit to players.

The Problem
The current implementation of Magic Find is rather obnoxious for players to deal with as they must sacrifice an entire stat pool to get better loot. Even worse it severely limiting on what builds a player can use as they are limited to choosing between (power/precision/magic find) or (power/condition damage/magic find) gear. Outside of pure farming, it is incredible hard to justify equipping magic find gear for anything as it doesn’t affect chests or the mystic forge. Between the sacrifice of an entire stat pool and the limitations on build optimizations; the current implementation of magic find just isn’t “fun,” in fact it’s large detrimental to the amount of fun a player is having.

The Solution
If we were to give a magic find stat to players derived from a players achievement score, we can remove the magic find armor set from the game and gain a number of immediate and long term benefits.

The Benefits
*First players now have incentive to explore the world of GW2 more thoroughly to gain achievement score.
*Achievement hunting becomes a worthwhile activity and increases the lifetime of the game and the play time of the player. Players are hence encouraged to experience more content in the process of achievement hunting, thus making them play longer and burn out slower.
*Daily, Monthly, and Event Rewards gain similar boon to their appeal as players complete them they gain their small magic find bonus.
*Over time a player’s achievement score begins to act as a veteran reward, the longer a player plays the larger the magic find bonus they acquire.
*Real Money Traders and Chinese Gold Farmers are similarly hindered as their accounts are often banned keeping their magic find significantly reduced compared to real players.
*As players build up their achievement score the pressure to equip magic find gear diminishes allowing them to equip and play their characters however they want.

The How
There is between 3500-4000 Achievement points in the game at the moment (before counting daily and monthly rewards). The Average player has about 1200 achievement points and the more hardcore players have around 2000 achievement points.

If each point of Achievement Score gave a .01% bonus to magic find, then players would gain an immediate magic find boost of 12-22% and could get up to about a 40% bonus if they did every achievement in the game (before monthlies and dailies). At that level it’s a nice freebie, but it’s not a huge help to players trying to free themselves from the burden of magic find.

If you’re looking at the long term were talking about players being able to earn a 3% magic find bonus a month or 37% a year if you did your daily and monthly every day for a year.

Daily and Monthly Reward Calculations
Monthly Achievement Score: 44 points (Average)
Daily Reward: 9 pts x 30 days = 270
Monthly Total 314 pts = 3.14% Magic find bonus
Yearly Total 3768 pts = 37.68%

Now if we made the first 1000 achievement points worth .1% and the subsequent achievement points worth .01% we end up with players gaining an immediate 100-110% Magic find boost, which roughly replaces the current magic find bonus accumulated by Armor, Jewelry, and Runes.

Current Magic Find Bonus
Armor 3% x 6 =18%
Weapon = 3%
Jewelry 7% x 5 = 30%
Runes (Pirate, Noble, Scavenger, Traveler) = 50%
Total 101%

This would allow us to remove the stat bonus from armor, but maintain it for Food, Boosts, Banners, WvW Bonus, and Guild Bonus.

End Result
You’re looking at removing the magic find stat from existing armor and the average active player gaining the relevant equivalent bonus immediately. Overtime you’re looking at active players getting about a 15-30% magic boost a year. Players could then gear and spec as they pleased without worrying about stacking magic find.

Current Achievement Points in the game…
Slayer – 622
Hero – 395
PVP Conqueror – 662 + Several nobody has unlocked
Explorer – 430, +(4) Legendary achievements nobody has unlocked
Fashion – 64 + 20 +(3) Emperor’s New Wardrobe Achievements nobody has unlocked
Weapon master – 209
Community – 237
Hall Of Monuments – 20
WvW – 496 +(16) est 15 each (240)
Activities – 179
Jumping Puzzles – 420
Special Events/Halloween – 126
Bosses – 80pts

This Mad King Chest is infuriating, it takes 2 things that are useful from you and gives you nothing in return. Its a load of BS and ArenaNet had lead me to believe they were smarter company than that.

I don’t mind paying for things. I actually like the micro transaction model, but the drop rate in these chests are atrocious. Your just asking us to give you money and your giving us nothing in return but disappointment. Unless you change the drop rate on the chests, you can expect that I and Most of the other players will never pay for them. Overall your looking at lost revenue and majority of unhappy players.

At least have the boxes give tokens we can collect to buy the rare drops. IE 5 Black Lion Tokens per chest and let us buy for example the GreatSword Saw Skin for say 200 tokens. Then at least you have a high end price control for people who open 40 boxes and get Jack kitten. You could make the tokens trade-able and have a black lion chest economy or you can make them account bound to force individuals to pay the item they want in full.

Look at the model for Magic Cards*: 5 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare or ultra rare. That is what your boxes should look like. Check out Star Trek Online’s model for their random item boxes, they do a great job.

Your Black Lion Chests are a box of disappointment with every purchase.

*I have no idea what the actual distribution currently is, I haven’t played those games for 10 years.

Myself and My friends keep running into this bug on a regular basis, but haven’t been able to pinpoint a trigger. During play all visual effects and particle effects such as water, auras, ground targeting, attack effects, ect ect disappear and cannot be restored by changing settings or restarting the client.

Has anybody else run into this bug and have you come across any solutions?

While it doesn’t render the game unplayable, it does somewhat ruin the experience when the NPC your suppose to attack is invisible, or you can’t tell where the water begins and land ends.