Guild Wars 2

Shootsfoot.9276:

Nuka Cola.8520:

Mirta.5029:

Nuka Cola.8520:

Mirta.5029:

Nuka Cola.8520:

Aeonblade.8709:

Nuka Cola.8520:

Heijincks.9267:

Lowering resolution helps too.

lol you’re suggesting to lower rez (from only 1080p) in 2013 o.O . I’m not playing on a Dell pc from bestbuy lol lowering rez should NEVER be an option.

Most people still don’t even have a high definition monitor with their PC’s, you do realize this? If your computer can’t handle the resolution, I would say it IS an option :P

No lol i can handle games like metro 2033 (without DoF) or TW2 (without ubersampling) maxed out, gw2 shouldn’t even be a question. The large majority of people using their pc’s to game are on 1080p screens.

metro 2033 is an old game. My laptop can handle it O_o. Can you handle high performance games that came out this year? Lara Croft? Crysis 3? Because Guild Wars 2 has highly improved graphics and is an MMO which in itself is very demanding. It also came out in 2012, not in 2010 (which is when metro came out). Then compare it to other MMOs that came out on the same year – how well can you run, for example, Terra?
edit: what game is TW2? I googled it, I don’t have it on my steam and have no idea what it is. I’m curious.

Are you serious? Metro 2033 is in the top three most demanding games out now, yes, 2013… Tomb Raider all maxed without stupid stressfx runs at 50fps+ (this is far from a demanding game lol this is a console port…), crysis 3 maxed (shaders/shadows on high instead of Ultra tho) ran at 43-60 fps. TW2 is The Witcher 2, best looking third person game available in 2013 even though is a 2010 game (looks a gen ahead of crappy tomb raider 2013). I’m playing with a gtx570@ core 920 and i5 2500k@4.3… i shouldn’t be playing gw2 at ~15fps on the lowest possible settings in wvw.

it must be one of those glitches I was talking about then. When PC is far beyond the requirements, but for some reason game runs slower than it would on a calculator. I don’t really think that such hardware miss-matches will be fixed though.

There’s no such things. It could happen when your drivers are outdated, that’s it. Mine aren’t and the reason why gw2 runs so poorly is because its almost 100% cpu dependent, which is extremely stupid and the reason why the game runs at same fps (in zergs) no matter what settings your game is at. This is what needs to be addressed and in 8 months we got absolutely nothing, nothing to the point of not even mentioning later this year optimization.

LOL @ “almost 100% cpu dependent.”

Apparently my GPU is running at 80% because I have Internet Explorer open in the background, then.

With IE I wouldn’t actually doubt it.

Mightylink.3816:

Damage or completing an objective as far as I know, if your just buffing or healing you won’t get anything.

Sadly I figured this might be the case. Very disappointing, makes events even more mindless when anything beyond smacking things goes unrewarded. Spam that 1 key as hard as possible or leave, sigh seems like every time I look into something that seems great about this game I’m met with the realization that it was only done kitten.

lordkrall.7241:

So, why would your way of saying be more correct?
Why assume that everyone in Tyria would speak with lets say an american accent?

g?l?m

According to the dictionary this is the correct pronunciation.

Thread topic, I’m curious what actually qualifies you for credit in large group events (such as the “Repair the Bridge” centaur event loop). Is it purely based on damage done to enemies? Or does reviving/buffing and healing people around you also count towards credit for event completion?

I picked up a gaurdian alt, curious what stats I should be going for with it. at the moment I’ ve just been doing pure power.

I’m level 34 at the moment, tried hammer recently just for the heck of it and find I really quite like its art assets and animations. It clearly seems more of a 1v1 or pvp weapon but I’m curious if one could spec in such a way that using it in pve leveling would not be massively gimping ones self compared to a more damage oriented GS.

Side note, I’ve cleaned out the majority of skill point nodes in the areas available to me and have 31 spare points available. I was going to use them to unlock one of the elite skills – zooka or rampage, but from what I’ve read they are both.. well awful. Any suggestions? I have all signets unlocked I think and several other abilities, anything specific I should definitely have?

Note this is for pve pretty much exclusively. I may try pvp again eventually, but I’ve never much cared for mmorpg pvp, especially with tab target combat, and the zergs I saw in wvw didn’t do much to change that feeling.

TheKillerAngel.3596:

I have a long history of playing StarCraft and in that game, stealth for the Terran Ghost is an energy based ability. You stay in stealth as long as you have the energy reserves to sustain it.

Suppose stealth was an ability actively toggled by the user as an F2 skill, as opposed to being a buff gained by abilities. Instead of having a fixed duration, stealth drains your initiative (1 second per tick of initiative, cost can be decreased with traits). The more initiative you have, the longer you can stay in stealth. Breaking stealth with an attack gives you a damage bonus that can be increased via traits, and reactivating the stealth ability has a fixed cooldown that can be reduced via traits, something like Tactical Cloak from Mass Effect.

Something like this would of course, be a radical overhaul that would require redesigning many of the thief’s abilities. I’m just interested in it from a theoretical perspective.

could be interesting, though honestly I’d rather have the WoW rogue stealth model, at least in pve. its currently gimmicky and nearly useless in pve, it doesn’t even stop things attacking you 90% of the time.

Well it’s good to see theres hope eventually, I’ll keep plucking away at it and see what happens.

I suppose I was hoping they would be used in PvE for distracting the mobs, instead of standing there as I circle strafe just like almost any other class in between shatter CDs. Still that bugs me less then the simple fact both types poof on death of current target instead of when combat ends.

Leveling a new Mesmer to try it out, I do quite like the class but the clone mechanic seems really odd. Mostly how fast they vanish, I imagine it’s partly because I’m low level but my clones seen to poof if sneezed on. Even if I make sure to have beaten on a mob several times before using a Phantasm skill they will still often go right for after its first attack and nearly insta-gib it. This leaves me running in circles with 1-3 clones doing very little to actually keep me alive and seem to serve no purpose beyond shatter fodder.

I see there are many skills to increase their health later on, so maybe this gets better but my biggest gripe with clones is really the fact they vanish as soon as my current target dies. I can understand them poofing after combat ends but seeing them vanish when I’m still fighting mobs and still in danger feels really weak.

It just seems very.. clunky, even more so when Phantasms do the same thing.

Karizee.8076:

I mentioned the difficulty since I saw you’d posted just yesterday that you were having a bit of trouble with mobs in the open world that were at your level.

Quxudais.5142:

As a fellow new player I have to second this, I’ve found leveling to be more often then not a frustrating experience on most of the classes I’ve tried.

Ranged Mobs seem to be massively over powered, it’s like they were designed with full action combat in mind – the idea that a good player could avoid 90% or more of their damage. But GW2 is not full action, it’s a hybrid between old hotbar mmo combat and new actiony combat.

On my thief I routinely come upon ranged enemies my level or even a level or two lower that can take off nearly 1/3rd of my health in one or two basic auto-attacks, which most spam once a secondish for what I’ve fought.

Melee mobs are nearly as bad but they can be kited, though it would be nice not to have to run in endless circles just to kill standard mobs.

The whole damage system seems really overtuned at low levels and it’s severely limiting my desire to even try getting certain classes up despite the fact I enjoy them.

The mobs and bosses in the dungeons are more like Champions in the open world. But if you’ve got a handle on things since then – great! Jump on in and don’t look twice

The dungeons are a lot of fun, especially the Fractals.

It’s more that having support from other players plus more abilities by 30 yourself makes it easier it seems (and my main as an engineer seems to have the utility to make up for the games poor balance so far). I still feel that from a solo perspective damage models are greatly overtuned for this games avoidance methods (slow recharge dodges and a handful of utility skills). It makes the leveling experience early on feel decidedly uneven across classes as the OP of that particular thread was saying.

From what I can tell, the game has no avoidance stats – no parry or block buffs – you are meant to take the damage you can’t escape via a dodge or avoid/absorb via weapon/class skill (aside from very specific projectile attacks that can be faked out via strafing) and that’s fine. But if you have that kind of mechanic, you can’t make the standard auto attack a ranged mob does once a second hit like a truck, as the games very nature means you cannot avoid every hit. This is especially true at low levels when you do not have the needed tools, it makes for a frustrating starting experience.

At the time I made that post I was trying a thief alt in the plant people starting zone, fighting nightmare court bow users – their standard arrow shot seems to only be dodge-able via ability use, you can’t avoid it just by movement and you don’t have enough abilities to not take any hits under 10. It didn’t feel difficult so much as tedious and unenjoyable.

Jski.6180:

Quxudais.5142:

Karizee.8076:

There is a LFG function on your Friends List, but it’s not very good.

Everyone that isn’t running with guildmates or friends is using http://gw2lfg.com/
Excellent site, over 3.6 million groups have formed over the last couple months using it.

Generally takes a minute or two to get a group.

Thanks for the link, I suppose that’s something at least. Though the idea of having to resort to third party websites for what should be a basic in-game utility is really really jarring in 2013..

Just feels like a really glaring oversight.

I cant even think of a reason to play an online game if you do not talk to any one during events.

That’s been my experience with every PVE event in GW2 up to this point across multiple characters =/ no one talks, they just zerg in one direction or another.

Its why I was looking forward to small group dungeon play.

As for the dungeons being hard, doesn’t bother me. My other true MMO is TERA, dungeons will turn you into paste if you dont have the reflexes to dodge out of attacks (nearly full action game combat).

My first MMO i really dedicated time to was FFXI, which required (at the time) a group of 6 people to do anything after level 12ish for 90% of the classes – including just leveling. As a result I’ve really craved the truly social aspects of the games I’ve played since, though I’ve never found one that really had its level of community forming.

Still, new game or not – not having an LFG feature of any kind is really really strange. Saying it’s low priority is even stranger honestly. Seems pretty integral to me, but I don’t have any friends that play this game regularly enough to care about dungeons.

Karizee.8076:

There is a LFG function on your Friends List, but it’s not very good.

Everyone that isn’t running with guildmates or friends is using http://gw2lfg.com/
Excellent site, over 3.6 million groups have formed over the last couple months using it.

Generally takes a minute or two to get a group.

Thanks for the link, I suppose that’s something at least. Though the idea of having to resort to third party websites for what should be a basic in-game utility is really really jarring in 2013..

Just feels like a really glaring oversight.

I just hit 31 on my highest character and was pretty eager to do the first dungeon. I’ve been a dungeon rat for a very long time, it’s one of my favorite things to do in any mmorpg. So I figured when I didn’t see any UI element for finding groups that it was simply not available until you were elegible for the first dungeon.

Well I’m there now, nothing popped up so I went poking about google to figure it out (something that shouldn’t be neccisary for a new player really) only to find out that 1 – a random mail I got from an NPC was actually my introduction to dungeons, though nothing about that letters contents gave any hint of that and 2 the only way to get groups for dungeons seems to be shouting in area chat or posting on third party forums.

I was really taken aback by number 2, that’s something I haven’t seen in years and it feels really really out of place in a modern game. It’s clunky, it’s time consuming, and it ensures that only the most popular content is doable in a reasonable time frame.

Is there really not even a way to search for people flagged for wanting to do a particular dungeon or any dungeon? even on your own server? Is spamming chat and praying really the best they could come up with?

I’m not asking for cross-server-queueing a la WoW (though I think that systems fine if its server specific instead of cross server), but even just a way to search for people interested in the content would be nice – a basic LFG system. Even my first MMO over a decade ago had that.

Perhaps I’m just missing something?

Baeyne.9584:

Starbird.4029:

Baeyne.9584:

Starbird.4029:

Baeyne.9584:

There is also the fact that you are not limited to a single weapon set through out your gaming experience in GW2.

set is an assest in this game. In fact, it is a …

-snip-

There is no “white damage” in GW2. All your weapon skills do “yellow damage”. The only advantage is you can set one of your skills to auto-cast.

My Guardian can -snip- me want to punch a kitten. It’s clunky, unfun, and dilutes a lot of the thematic strength of playing a pistols thief versus a dagger thief.

And that is exactly the reason why you are having trouble with the thief profession. Utilizing different weapons sets for different situations is one of the core gameplay of a thief.

-snip-

you can really enjoy GW2.

If one profession takes significantly more focus and effort than another for the same performance, something is squiffy.

Because professions are ment to be played differently, and not homogenized across the board?

If you study closely the weapon skills of your thief. You will find out that as early as level 5, you will already be able to “tank” mutiple melee mobs using D/P without seeing you HP globe dip below 90%. S/P offers the same tankiness, with your sword MH doing cleave damage, you can mow down multiple mobs quickly.You are also able to do massive AoE damage AND apply AoE weakness with your shortbow combo. You can also do single target RANGE damage with P/P.

So you see, it’s not a matter of the leveling exerience per se that is different. It’s actually the same but handled differently depending on what profession you are using.

I am also sure that other classes can do the same at level 5 with their respective weapon sets.

Yes you can, but its entirely reliant on spamming a single skill – black powder – and auto attacking. If you don’t keep BP up 100% against more then 2 mobs you are toast, stealth is virtually useless at the lowest levels since it does not drop your aggro.

I found this method, and while it felt significantly more stable then my previous means of leveling, it also felt gimmicky and decidely not fun. Flipping around using Death Blossom and dual daggers is fun, but any single auto attack hitting you results in massive health loss and this game is not set up for action game avoidance.

Honestly I think GW2 would be massively more enjoyable if it had a combat system closer to a game like TERA, instead of being 50% hot key tab targeting and 50% action based.

I’ve felt all along that if someone melded GW2s world and questing styles with Teras combat and Tors story telling they’d have the perfect mmorpg.

Behellagh.1468:

It’s paintball without the welts. How is it not fun?

This might explain might dislike of it since I greatly prefer Airsoft over paintball.

Starbird.4029:

So I got the game a few weeks ago and have been faffing around trying to settle on a character.

Now one thing I like about WoW, for all it’s failings, is that whatever class I want to level, the early experience is going to be pretty consistent. Difficult or easy, the classes are balanced in such a way that nothing is a horror to level early anymore and most dps specs require a similar amount of effort and time to level with.

GW2 on the other hand…well, I really would love to level my thief, but I’m so insanely squishy that I have to jump around like a grasshopper on yellowjackets to survive 2+ of even similar level mobs.
On the other hand, my guardian or Warrior can just kerplode enemies endlessly, even if he is a few levels below them.

Since the early game experience is really important (first impressions on new players and all that) and can be so vastly different depending on what you choose to play first, I really think that some attention should be given to the fairly long period of time between starting and getting fully traited out and skilled up.

Perhaps the armor/mitigation/healing differential between the classes could be smoothed out early (and diverge more sharply later), and key survive-ability traits unlocked sooner? This would be a simple matter of changing a few numbers around.

Thoughts?

EDIT: For clarity. Also, please read this before jumping in with “L2P”. This isn’t a matter of the game being too hard. It’s more about certain classes/builds relying on tools that are not unlocked until late, versus others who have a solid kit from the get-go.

As a fellow new player I have to second this, I’ve found leveling to be more often then not a frustrating experience on most of the classes I’ve tried.

Ranged Mobs seem to be massively over powered, it’s like they were designed with full action combat in mind – the idea that a good player could avoid 90% or more of their damage. But GW2 is not full action, it’s a hybrid between old hotbar mmo combat and new actiony combat.

On my thief I routinely come upon ranged enemies my level or even a level or two lower that can take off nearly 1/3rd of my health in one or two basic auto-attacks, which most spam once a secondish for what I’ve fought.

Melee mobs are nearly as bad but they can be kited, though it would be nice not to have to run in endless circles just to kill standard mobs.

The whole damage system seems really overtuned at low levels and it’s severely limiting my desire to even try getting certain classes up despite the fact I enjoy them.

So I’m a fairly new player, only level 26 but I figured I’d try out the games PvP WvWvW mode. I’d heard a lot about it, read a lot about it and it seemed interesting. Having played a tiny bit of it however, I just really can’t see the point.

It’s one massive blob of players against another, from all I can tell whoever wins is determined by who has more people and nothing else. The game tanks in performance (my machine isn’t great admittedly) and most of the time I go down to conditions and I can’t even tell when I’m being targeted by something in the sea of red names. There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason to what goes on, it’s just like two schools of red and green fish roaming around randomly.

I came in I guess expecting a much better version of WoW’s world pvp zones, or old Alterac Valley, but honestly it just seems like there are way to many people for the game modes own good.

I was on both sides of the “zergs”, winning and losing and I just could not find a single thing compelling about either one. Either I’m dying to things I can’t even see, or I’m doing so little I feel like I might as well not even be there. Some of that is probably due to me only being 26, I know I get level boosted to 80 but I can’t see how you’d still be anything but a massive free kill to anyone that’s actually 80 and fully traited with real gear.

Still I just feel like I must be missing something, as I can’t really see why this type of PvP would be appealing even if I was at level cap with all the right resources. It just seems so mindless and to be honest, pointless.

I’m only a level 14 Engineer, and have played the game for about a week just to get that out of the way. So far I’m loving engineer despite some obvious issues, when I first unlocked the FT kit I instantly loved it mostly due to it’s art assets, however I was also rather disappointed in its actual functionality. It seems very weak, I’m pretty sure my rifle is actually a better weapon, and it did not have the properties I would have expected. Note, damage numbers are taken from what my skills currently say.

So with that said, here are some things I would change if I could with no idea how it would work out in later game PvE (and not really caring about PvP):

Flame Jet: Damage 10x, Burning 1 second 64 damage, 5 attacks per second, range 425.

The art for this attack is great, it’s awesome but it’s more then underwhelming in effect. It inexplicably misses all the time despite bathing the target in flames, it applies a pitiful 1 second burning dot and the cumulative damage is not that great.

I’d rework it, leave its ticking damage the same (10x) but massively boost it’s DoT. Instead of a laughable 1 second (feels like .5 seconds really) burning dot that is only applied with the final tic of the attack – every tic causes DoT burning, every tic refreshes the dot and the dot stacks up to 5×. This feels far more like how a flame thrower should function, it’s not just a jet of fire – it’s a stream of flaming liquid that sticks to any surface. The strength of the DoT would give you much greater sustained damage and allow kiting kills similar to other classes that can bleed kite.

Flame Blast: 88 Damage, 206 Blast Damage, 240 radius, 600 range.

This ability seems fine for the most part, however I would add utility to it. The Flame Thrower kit is close range, yet engineers are not exactly the toughest out there – thus it seems like the kit is in bad need of crowd control. There are several ways to go about this, I’m not sure which is best but Ill just list the ones I’ve thought of here:

Add a short duration AoE stun to the detonation portion of Flame Blast, this one seems the least fun to me but possibly the better balanced and gives the kit a ranged interrupt. Alternatively it could apply a slightly longer duration cripple effect, slowing enemies but not stunning or interrupting them.

Napalm: 1s Burning per pulse: 64 damage, 10s duration, 600 range.

I would change this abilities effect from a very thin wall to a larger rectangular shape, reduce it’s damage (potentially, don’t know how hard this hits really at higher levels) and give it a snare effect – any mobs moving through the napalm would be crippled while also having any burning stacks refreshed (making this ability a fire themed variant of thief caltrops essentially).

Air Blast and Smoke Vent seem fine if a bit dull, the only other thing I’d change is the toolbelt ability Incendiary ammo, just because a few seconds of burning dot seems kind of dull for a kit special ability. Especially since, in my new player opinion, burning DoT should be a massive focus of this kit instead of the seemingly incidental side effect that it is.

Thoughts, opinions, flames? Again I’m a new player, I just also happen to love fire and while the art assets of the FT are awesome – most of it’s actual effects seem weaksauce. (unrelated topic, I also feel like the sound assets to most of our explosions are very very anemic, I have fireworks with more oomph to them then our bomb kit).

Gungnir Grimm.7123:

you do eventually get ways to get longer stealths than 3 seconds, but the point of stealth in this game is quick maneuvers. we dance in and out of stealth over the course of a fight. it can also be made (for thieves) to heal us, cure conditions and restore initiative. in PvE it isn’t that great unless you put points into shadow arts, 30 preferably which requires level 60.

for leveling dual daggers with condition damage gear and using death blossom and caltrops to bleed and kite things to death, or sword/pistol with power gear to evade/blind tank things are far more efficient than most stealth setups.

Edit: stealth is far more useful in WvW and PvP. it can be used to sneak groups to enemy siege, or avoid enemy zergs as example. it also confuses the crap out of people who don’t know how to react to it.

I see, I guess I was hoping it would be a more integral part of the class. Given it’s aparnt limited use in PvE, what healing skill is the better idea? Is vanish still useful or would another perhaps be a better choice. I am using D/D and S/P in my weapons at the moment.

I’ve played other MMOs where in the stealth class had limited duration stealth, but never one that had such a short timer. Perhaps I’m simply not high enough level yet, but it seems none of my stealth triggering abilities grant more then 3 seconds, and several require I actually hit something to go into stealth in the first place (which honestly seems a bit counter intuitive, shouldn’t it be the other way around?).

As a result I’m having a hard time figuring out what I’m supposed to be doing with this aspect of the class. (note I’m primarily talking about from a leveling PvE perspective). I can’t use stealth to engage, as my only ability to trigger stealth without hitting something is also my heal button (and there seems to be no benefit to engaging from stealth anyway), 3 seconds isn’t enough time to scout out an area, or avoid more dangerous mob packs to get to safer targets.

It doesn’t work well as an escape either since best I can tell anything you agro immediately attacks you again as soon as those 3 seconds are up, and most of the time I take at least one additional hit after stealthing before it registers. While I hate to make the comparison, so far it simply feels like – in the aspect of being a stealth based class – my GW2 thief feels like a severely kitten wow rogue, with both wows stealth mechanics and vanish (despite its own long standing buggyness in that game) being much better implementations of the same skill concepts.

I rolled a thief to try it out, I love the weapon skills and the abilities seem interesting but I can’t seem to take any hits at all. I’m only level 9 granted, but it seems fighting most things even just one on one ends with me at half health at best if I melee.

I use my dodges, I use my evasive attacks, but it seems I run out of any way to evade things well before I kill my target and anything with a ranged attack just eats me alive since you can’t avoid projectiles without using “dodge”. Even ones that clearly miss as far as the animation goes seem to hit unless a dodge is used.

I also play Tera, so perhaps I’m simply to used to actively being able to avoid things by actually getting out of the way rather then having avoiding attacks be completely reliant on abilities. That said, it just feels so very clunky I figure I must be missing something.

I’m currently using sword/dagger and shortbow.