Guild Wars 2

Guhracie.3419:

Stop talking about the manifesto like it applies to this game. It doesn’t. It’s not a thing anymore.

Well, I still hope after 3 years that it is just due to NCSoft forcing GW2 to be released too early and then team having to deal with more urgent matters ignoring the less important… maybe it is stupid… but there are some updates to the game that indicate that the manifesto was intended to be true. Especially that the first zone in HoT was considerably better than what we have now. Far from perfect still… but… who knows…

Also I have nothing against casual games. Let the Guild Wars 2 be a game for everyone. What we have currently is not casual, it is broken. If the intention of designers was to make creatures non-existing they could have removed them. There is no point in their existence now. They serve no purpose but only hinder “casual” players that would like to admire the view.

[Dynamic Events]

I know that Arena Net experiments with event system and new maps added in Living Story and HoT maps are different then core maps. However I’m a big fan of the idea that I can visit any place in the game and have fun, not just the “newest map”.

• Updates – Event system is easily expandable. It was advertised that the maps could change in the future. New content could be added to them. It happened for some maps, allright. But the amount of new events over the course of 3 years is disappointing.
• Quality – Most of the events on most of maps look like they were added quickly due to “OMG release is next month? We have no events yet, let’s add them quickly. Copy-Paste, Copy-Paste, Copy-Paste.” As you remember most of them were not working anyway. It was a big disappointment but I waited hoping for a fix after the release. I’m afraid that I’m still waiting. Recent HoT beta was not encouraging, having the same event problems that the core game had 3 years ago.
• Amount of events – it is too low. For the size of the maps the amount of things that could be happening is large. Also in order for the events to not be repeatable the events should be on a longer timer. This means more events to fill the time-gaps.
• Lore-breaking events – events repeat. Sometimes this makes sense lore-wise (event to gather food-> food is eaten so you need to gather it again) But more often than not it makes no sense.
• Event chains depending on player success. – I liked that the world might go “darker” when players fail events, however due to extremely easy events this leads to most of the content never displaying.
• Event difficulty and scaling – Since there is reward even when players fail an event it should happen sometimes. Also I hoped that scaling problem will be solved now that we are 3 years after the game has released. While there were some updates to end-game events, the rest of the events were not touched.

Possible Solutions

• One of the teams working on balancing and updating the old content. Finishing the unfinished events lore-wise. I understand this is not priority but the quality of content delivered was not exactly on the level it should be at release. Sorry…
• When the event has some effect on the world (and it always should) it should never just “reset” if it does not makes sense lore-wise. Instead some other events should lead to the situation repeating itself. The ‘reset’ should be done gradually. For example if ice statue of Norn in the Grawl cave near Hoelbrak starting area melts, it should be visible gradually. It shouldn’t just dissapear.
• When event ends, there should be an indication to players that finished it (that could be turned off via options menu) where player can go to experience the follow-up. (multiple in case of many follow-ups)
• Add new events to old zones. They don’t have to have something in common with some living story. These can be a simple events or a development of a map’s lore. In queensdale, bandits could discover more ways to disrupt villagers. The swamp is quite empty during the “waiting for Behemoth” period. When centaurs are under control, there is also not much going on around Beetletun. Maybe the lady that recovers destroyed grape vines could finally convince Caduceus to rebuild the vineyard? Or maybe waterworks might want to clean the pipes of slime creatures? What about the asura that has his lab on the hill?
• As for difficulty it depends on creatures and if the issues for them are solved then the difficulty of events could be adjusted. Also some fixes in game mechanics are needed first, like making sure that players power does not increase exponentially while they are standing in same spot. (Due to combo fields, aoe limit and insta-stand-ups).
• Redesign core game champions to use the same mechanics as HoT champions

[PvE Balance]

In this section I intend to post videos of skills or profession mechanics that are both powerfull and easy to pull off. The tricks that make otherwise hard or impossible encounters very easy. While these skills might be balanced in PvP it is something entirely different in PvE where opponents have serious limitations. It might not mean that skill or profession is broken. Maybe the fault is in the encounter design. Anyway I’m posting this here because I still hope that there will be a time when Guild Wars 2 will have meaningful PvE over entire game content, not just the newest zone.

[Thief]

• Pistol 5: Black Powder. – What I do not like here is that it doesn’t require reactive play. My plan for the encounter was: 5555555555 and it worked. Notice how in first encounter I completely ignored what the creature did. I could have interrupted the healing signet but I didn’t have to. Notice how in second encounter I also ignored what the creature did. Actually blind disabled the healing for the Monk. I did not have trait for the skill, but I can imagine a Thief that specializes in perma blind is even better. I’m sure the skill can be used to turn off many more encounters throughout the game.
  SOLUTION: Split for PvE, change functionality of the skill or improve AI so that creatures step out from the cloud.
  SEVERITY: Very High. The fact that it was not fixed 1 day after the game release is for me very disturbing.

Hi,

I’m big fan of Guild Wars and I’m playing since Guild Wars Prophecies. I was very excited about open world content for Guild Wars 2. Dynamic world, events instead of quests, players grouping naturally without a need for party, incentive to play with others etc. Unfortunately I was very dissapointed on release (and I’ll explain why below) and to this day I’m logging in from time to time and checking if maybe there were some patches or updates to remedy the issues. While there were some changes the issues remained. So I decided to make a list of problems how I see them and what possible solutions there might be. The reason I care is that I think that Guild Wars 2 has by far the best open-world experience from the mmos I played. It just misses the few important details…

[Combat]

• Movement. Players can move AND execute skills. Positioning is important. How creatures are dealing with it? Here are encounters with Melee monster and with Ranged monster:
  Carrion Devourer
  Tamini Archer
  As you can see the creatures have problems with hitting players. It was not hard to kill a Devourer using melee weapon without getting hit once. It is even easier to kite him with ranged weapon. This is the core problem with Guild Wars 2. No matter how much ArenaNet developers try to make the creature challenging, the players will be able to counter, by simply walking (which is easily done). Here is another video showing this extends to better designed and harder creatures:
  Risen Putrifier
  Here the creature was upgraded during the 3 years of game release. It has bigger range (or i was lagging.) This is poor solution to the problem as what you see is not what you get The skill animation should indicate what the range of the skill is. Additionally the creature got a ranged attack that puts an immobilize on you. Better, but I was still able to mitigate a lot of damage by walking.
• DPS and Health. I recorded a video where I have no armor and common-white rarity level 80 weapon. I stand still so that I can receive the damage the creatures are supposed to deal. I decided to only use auto attack. Also I have chosen Elementalist because he has lowest toughness and lowest health pool of any profession. It has also quite weak auto attacks compared to other professions. Anyway here are results:
  No equpment tests
  So… The results are that an average Guild Wars 2 creature is designed to be on equal level with most squishy profession in the game, given that player wears no equipment and uses only auto attack while standing still.
• Creature design. Creatures have very poor set of skills. Also the AI is very poor. Let’s take an examples from my videos:
  How creatures are designed:
  Carrion Devourer according to wiki it has 2 attacks that do knockdown. The problem here was that they do not work. Tail Swipe is executed while being still and works only against players that do not move (which is not very realistic.) Tunnel has the same problem. But even if the two skills were working there is not much the creature can do after it succesfully knocks player down. On this level it is a great opportunity to teach new players what is stability and what is Stun Break or evade. The problem is that new players will not even notice because the creature will either die before doing anything or will miss due to player accidentally moving away. Or when it knocks down it still will not do anything and the player will not feel the need to counter that in any way.
  How creatures could be designed:
  Continuing with the example of Carrion Devourer:
  Attack speed is too low.
  Remove Tail Swipe
  Slash should be executed while moving.
  Slash should be used when player is near. Since the creature is slow, when player moves to avoid the Slash damage the creature should use Tunnel.
  Tunnel -> creature should be faster when tunelling and should hit. The attack should be unblockable and should track the target. While evading will still be possible, now players will either evade or put stability. Otherwise they are knocked down. This skill should do small or 0 damage. The knock down should last 5 seconds. This is to give new players the opportunity to use Stun Breaker. New players might not notice the 1s knockdown or might not feel encouraged to use the stun break.
  Devour -> charged skill. Devourer should start charging it as soon as it knocks down player. The charge time should be about 3.5-4 seconds. So that when the knocked down player does nothing and nobody interrupts the creature, the creature hits. The hit should take about 50% of average player health and apply 2 stacks of bleed for enough time that the player is put near death if he does not remove the conditions. This way new player will actually learn the game mechanics.
  BTW: It would be MUCH easier if you knew that lvl 10 player will have x life and y toughness. Now when you design it in a way that warrior looses 50% of HP it is likely that the ability will one-shot an elementalist. Maybe in lower level PvE areas creatures could have certain attacks that are working like agony in fractals and takes a % of health instead of just dealing damage. Devour could be such a skill. The number of bleeds could also be dependent on player HP.
  Anyway, the idea is that every player is still able to beat the creature 1vs1. Even on first attempt. After all it is level 10 creature. But experience makes player dealing with that particular creature better. Finally the player will not loose much hp in this fight but will be forced to actually counter the creature mechanics in some way.

Possible Solution:
1) Upgrading the engine so that creatures in pve better chase players and execute skills while moving that actually hit them. Strafing projectiles should not be possible in PvE. Or creatures should also strafe
2) Introduce the system that increases the raw stats of the creatures the farther they are from “inhabitable” places and patrolled roads. Introduce creature groups in some places of the map. Compose the groups so that they combo with each other. Introduce more healers and rezzers. Introduce chests in such places.
3) Design creatures and group of creatures so that they require reactive play.
4) Overally increase the stats of all creatures in the open-world pve because introducing the ascended gear and new trait system made players more powerfull and accidentally obsoleted the entire game content. Even before ascended the stats were much too lower.

Why it is important:
Because in the long term, the PvE open-world is boring. It has everything it needs to be interesting. The environment is dynamic due to event chains, the area tells some story through it. There are hidden stuff on the maps that give rewards when found. There are jumping puzzles and the maps are amazing looking and quite interesting on themselves. But… my character build is irrelevant. My profession is irrelevant. Creature I’m fighting with is irrelevant. My Gear does not matter much. Because creatures in this game do not fight back. The encounters are boring, and you do not make any interesting choices while fighting nor you have to react to anything. The game became what it was promised it will not be.
Here is the quote from GW2 Manifesto (That can be accessed Here)

Finally, since combat is such a core part of the gameplay of any MMO, we’ve put a lot of emphasis into rethinking combat. So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral. So we’ve put a huge focus on strengthening our combat, giving the player limitless choices, and providing the thrill and joy of being in combat.

Well it is not true for open-world PvE.

I have the same feeling as the OP. However I think the discussion here is heading in wrong direction. What we should be discussing is not if there is or is not an “end-game”. (whatever that is).

If you log into the game and you are having fun, you will want to log in again the next day.

The question is: since the majority of time in GW2, when you actually play the game (not chat with friends) everybody spends on fighting, what makes that activity fun, even after many hours of playtime?

For me: nothing. I expect that for the OP it is the same. So what is left for us?

No matter what kind of “end-game” is developed if it will still require me to turn on my auto attack and watch for incoming one-shots with big telegraph that should be dodged → playing will not be fun. It will feel repetetive and boring. Adding content where in addition I need to listen to the team-speak of my world and stand in “correct” place will not change that.

Combat needs to be fun because it is most basic thing we do in this game. If something is repeated thousands of times in exactly the same way it will stop being fun no matter how much fun it was at first.

The only solution I see for that is providing encounter and build varieties. So that each fight is as different from previous one as possible. And if it will not be enough, players should instantly at no cost (or at a cost they are able to pay before they get bored with previous build) be able to change their build so that they can now play through the same set of encounters and have a different game.

So it is not a content we are lacking. It is the broken mechanics of the game. In theory there is a build variety, but in practice the variety is gated and costs a lot of in-game gold. The AI and skills of enemies are so broken that each build conquers the encounter in exactly same way. So even with existing build variety it doesn’t matter. You end up doing the same no matter what build you play and against what kind of monster you fight. The only thing you care about is dealing max DPS and for some professions there is one correct rotation or maybe even just auto attack or one skill.

I think, the story in GW2 was meant to be good. I’ve read the 2 books before playing GW2, and of course finished GW1 many times. I liked the books.

I like the personal story approach and how it interacts with the open world. The problem is that it is visible that at some point (around lvl 20 that is) the developers had heard that the game is being released in 2 weeks and the rest of the personal story is expected to be ready then (or something like that). So the cool stories were cut (for example the story about the second Pale tree, or White Mantles/Mursaats etc) and we get the crap with the orders which is very low on quality and had (and maybe still has) tons of bugs. The same goes with the rest of the content btw.

Then there is an experiment on living world story. The season 1 was the first try to such approach and the devs playground. It was basically the “living world” alpha. Season 2 is beta, it is much better.

So for me it is hard to judge where the game is going. The story gets better and the quality of it is increasing. I see again the connection of open world with living story instances which i like. I see a lot more lore per 2-weeks than before. The story is more interesting for me and can be replayed which is very important for me. But what about the rest of the lore? Story mode dungeons, fractals and personal stories? I regret that the game was rushed and we are stick with low quality content next to high quality one. I wish the devs would remake the PS along with the possibilities to replay it. Same goes for all the dungeons. But I don’t see that coming. I wonder what about expansion?

I found this recently:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-endgame-reimagined/

Mike Zadorojny

For people who love structured and difficult content, we developed the explorable mode for our eight dungeons. A dungeon’s explorable mode has at least three different paths that players can choose to conquer—and each path is a five-character delve into tough content that we designed to push the limits of teamwork and communication.

I was surprised by what I read because I already lost faith in ArenaNet team being able to provide any difficult content due to an “average player” not knowing what are traits and being forced to provide a content in a way that all customers are happy and currently the most customers (as I read on forums) would like to use just auto-attack and does not like to be forced to use anything else and changing their playstyle. Also most of customers does not want to learn what are traits since this is too complex and they want to be able to wander around without having to worry about combat. At least this is what I understood from developer comments after general whine on Twisted Marionette being too hard.

So my questions are:
1) Is the above article still valid or is it just an old vision of how the game should look like?
2) If the above article is valid then why on earth 1.5 year after release, all dungeons are still having serious bugs and design errors that allow for completing them using simple algorithms without any challenge in very short time? Same question goes for a few skills in the game that allow for making the dungeon content extremally easy.
3) If ArenaNet is still looking for a ways to provide difficult end-game content, what is the progress after over 1 year?

Hello,

I just want to point out that this change:

Power Break also saw an improvement, as it now grants stability to nearby allies.

As it currently works, could be exploited by taking following traits:
Harmonious Mantras (3 charges)
Mantra Mastery (20% recharge)
+100% boon duration

This gives 20s recharge on Mantra of Concentration, while providing 4s of stability per use, which totals to 12s of stability. After taking into consideration that recharge starts after final use, you get about 50% of stability up time.

2x Mesmer = Perm Stability.

Do you really want that?

I noticed a lot of topics throughout entire forum about RNG, drop chances, DR system and MF gear, and how certain players have permanent luck while some are having permanent bad luck.

Entire time, the Arena Net stuff answered that there are no issues/bugs in the system, everything works and RNG is just RNG.

Purpose of my topic is to persuade the developers to re-think the current loot system.
Here are my thoughts:

• For a casual player the existence of something like DR system is a nightmare. Every time I get poor loot I WILL ask myself a question: “Hmm.. is it the bad luck, or maybe it is the DR system bug/feature?” This is because I don’t know how DR system works and it was not explained enough and I understand why and can even agree with it. But it does not change the fact that after my friend gets the second exotic in one day, and I got two during my 1000 hours gameplay, I am asking myself, what am I doing wrong? Maybe my toon was “marked” somehow? Maybe I should start a new character or buy a new account? Then my friend that alwayssy had a bad luck (> 300 fractals without any fractal skin) creates a new character and gets 2 skins after 8 runs. Maybe I should do it too? Or maybe it is the warrior that has a “better chances” at obtaining good loot?
• Magic Find stat and DR system. I heard a reports that you are marked by DR more quickly when you have high magic find? I don’t even know if that is true, but that makes me afraid of putting on MF gear. Now I hear that when I achieve certain amount of arena net points for achievment I’ll get permanent account magic find bonus. OMG, means perma DR for me! I don’t want that “reward”! Maybe what I’m writing here is not true. My fears are not based on any “facts”, just observations that might not be correct. But the thing is -> I have absolutely NO way of finding that out for sure.
• And that is the point -> Gw2 is having a “mythical” DR system that can potentialy do something you don’t know when to your character and alter your drop rates.
• I am defenceless because I don’t even know when it hit me. I’d change toon if it hits me. But I can’t because I don’t know when it did.
• Developers can assure me 1000 times that there are no bugs, but I’m a software developer myself and I know there ARE bugs everywhere. If the code has more than 1 line of code it also has some bugs. I have never heard of any system that has no bugs. Especially that we see the bugs every day even after almost year from release. And especially that there are some bugs with random generators like I recently discovered with elementalist “Burning Precision” trait. 30% for burn on crit. No cooldown. I get more burns with 60% crit chance than I do with 100% consistently. Doing 3 crits per second I get 1 burn per 3 seconds. It was not noticed by developers. If your DR system is checked in the same way you test your traits. Well…. my fears have a background.

So by introducing DR system to save the economy from farmers you introduced a beast that is a nightmare for me (and others too when I look at the forum posts).

And I honestly don’t know what I would prefer. Living with the broken economy by the farmers or living with current DR system.

I don’t know how to solve this issue. I can throw some ideas, but I feel something should be done about this.

1) make DR visible/transparent. This way players can actually test and help you find bugs in it. It also allows players to avoid DR by logging into another toon if theirs was marked by DR.
2) Remove DR. Make farming not worth it by building good reward systems. (Laurels – good. Lodestones – bad)

…
Maybe others can help me and throw in some ideas/suggestions?
Are others happy with current DR system? Is it only me?

Minos.5168:

RakaNishoo.6071:

Encounters are more polished, but IMO more forgiving and overally easier. (At least the ones we did.). However, I’m overally not happy with the change. First of all, I imagined that it would be required to kill Kohler. As well as more exploits closed. I also imagined that you will take a different approach with the dungeon. I hoped for less linearity, more replayability, making use of dynamic events and adding the exploration feel.
…
I’d like the dungeons to go more into the direction of GW1 Underworld or fissure of woe. I feel that you have great engine and you failed to put it to good use. GW2 dungeons are not much different from any other MMO dungeon. Except for combat system of course, but you know what I mean.

I think that GW2 should have difficult content, but I feel that the Fractals currently fulfill that need.

I don’t really know of all that many people that did GW1’s Underworld or FoW (aside from people farming Ecto which wasn’t really all that useful in GW1 outside of obscenely expensive prestige armor art.)

There are a variety of reasons GW2 needs to make dungeons “easier” and “more forgiving.”

First of all, most players aren’t going to be elitists. They’re not going to be willing to try difficult content with a PUG (or even their guild) multiple times if they’re not really getting anything out of it. (i.e. if they end up getting wiped multiple times in the dungeon, so that repair costs skyrocket and outweigh any potential benefit.)

The reason you should care about this: You need other people to keep playing the game to keep it alive. I’m not sure how much (if any) real money you’re putting into the Gem Store, but a company needs cash to keep servers running and to pay developers to come up with new content.

Ascalonian Catacombs are the FIRST dungeon. The main purpose should be introducing players to dungeoning.

It’s a level 30/35 dungeon. At those recommended levels, players are just unlocking their first Elite skill. They also are limited in what traits they have available to them.

If players at level 30/35 decide to try their first dungeon and played what existed before the recent patches, they may very well decide that GW2 isn’t for them.

Dungeons were TOO DIFFICULT for your average player. You need people playing to keep the game alive. Those are the facts.

That’s probably why other MMOs succeed with their “easier” dungeons. Because it’s fun and enjoyable content for the majority of players.

Hardcore elitists are always going to be difficult to please. I mean, that’s arguably why the Fractals (and Ascended gear) were introduced.

In my post I was not saying I expected harder content. I expected something different. It is not related to hard content. Please read it.

AC was not in line with other dungeons becaus it was as hard or harder than many others. I can live with first dungeon in the game being easier if it was more fun to do. (Read my post).

I completely agree with AC story difficulty (Although it could be a little bit tougher so that it is not soloable with a lvl 30 character. )

As for your arguments that dungeons should be easy I’ll say this:
1) As you said, you want more ppl playing the game, which is exactly the reason why you need to introduce hard content. Most of my friends left the game because there is nothing challenging. They are watching. And waiting. I’d even risk to say that there are more such ppl than currently players that like easy content. Demon’s Souls just in NA sold 500 000 copies until 2010. There is huge demand for hard games.
2) You have a lot of skills in this game, yet there is no content that encourages you using them. Just spam 100b and you’re good. If that was the intention of developers they would not waste so many hours developing this combat system. We would have press 1 button to rule them all combat system, like in many other easy MMO’s.
3) Dungeons explorable mode are great for being hard. This is due to them having easy story version. So players that don’t like gw2 combat system and don’t like to learn it can still enjoy the dungeon.
4) Guild Wars had already a huge fan base that was used to hard content. GW2 should pick this up but at the same time make the game more accessible to new players no matter what their gaming experience is. This is not done by eliminating hard content but having good learning process and nice increase in difficulty from easier areas to much harder ones. Right now the game encounters are teaching to play badly, for example standing still and auto attacking works very well. Then you go to the dungeon and die.

Jski.6180:

RakaNishoo.6071:

My feedback on guild missions:

You introduced the content that requires UNLOCK. This is going 10 years backwards in MMO design. And that unlock is done in the worst possible way I can imagine. You can actually buy it for real money. Or do something I would rather not do -> joining big guild.

I still hope I’ll be able to participate in these events that are started by other guilds and actually earn the same rewards, but from what I read on the wiki, it is not the case.

So here goes another crappy design: rewarding players for doing the same content differently. Absurd situations where players help guild find the NPC for guild bounty and get much lower reward for actually making it much easier for the guild to do their mission…

Mmorpgs have always been like this even GW1 you had to do some level of prep work to get to new content. Do you have a small guild are you a leader of one what do you call a small guild i think your in an inactive guild or a relativity new one. Small guilds are not the problem its the inactive guild and inactive members who only play 3 days out of a month just to see updates. It dose take time to build up the prep work for these events but every thing good comes in time and the level of these events should not be just simply handed to inactive players. At best players like this would become frustrated with the level of team work that is need for these events that an inactive guild cant hope to do.

They need to add in a way to see ppl last time played for both in game and out of game. I think we may have ppl who are not all they seem to be.

Vanilla WoW was like this where you had attunements for instances. What kind of content in GW1 resembles that? I don’t know of any. I hope you see the difference in unlocking the content and leveling your character or simply walking into some place?

There is huge difference between providing group content, that is too hard for small number of players and thus not accessible to small guilds, and by placing a fixed lock. I’m not against working together as a guild towards something, the only problem is when that something is a game content.

Design error. And very basic one.

I have a mixed feelings about dailies.

Good things:

• They are a roadmap for ppl who maybe are not sure what to do or where to go. A starting point (For example do events in ascalon, or kill mobs in kryta. )
• By wandering in pve zone, exploring, killling stuff, fighting and doing dynamic events you will complete them. Or complete 80% of them, while having a last one very simple, requiring to just go to some place. While something like visit a laurel vendor or craft some items might be annoying I also understand that this helps some ppl get know some stuff. For example for the OP it helps learning what the Keg Brawl is.
• They reward players for playing the game in the best possible way currently. They don’t reward farming or grinding.

Bad things:

• You feel forced to do them, even if you don’t have time. For example I have just 1h and my friends are going to a dugneon. Obviously I’ll go with them, but I feel i missed on reward today. Very bad.
• Not all cool activities in the game reward with those. For example I can imagine it is hard to do a daily in WvW as well as it is not possible if you would like to do dugneons.
• If you have limited play time for given day, you stop just playing and start grinding/farming dailies because it is faster and you don’t know if you make it by normal play.
• For these reasons dailies broke me and my friends playing together. We play together AFTER we do daily. It doesn’t seem logical but it turned out this way… We log in at differnt times, some of us needs gathering while some of us already did gathering and needs something else, we have limited time. Everybody now is in the rush of optimizing they gameplay by looking at the daily.

My feedback on guild missions:

You introduced the content that requires UNLOCK. This is going 10 years backwards in MMO design. And that unlock is done in the worst possible way I can imagine. You can actually buy it for real money. Or do something I would rather not do → joining big guild.

I still hope I’ll be able to participate in these events that are started by other guilds and actually earn the same rewards, but from what I read on the wiki, it is not the case.

So here goes another crappy design: rewarding players for doing the same content differently. Absurd situations where players help guild find the NPC for guild bounty and get much lower reward for actually making it much easier for the guild to do their mission…

zeromius.1604:

So Raka, where were you when people were constantly complaining about how world bosses drop horrible loot and demanded a fix? Maybe you were actually one of them? That would be ironic now wouldn’t it? Let’s just assume you’re not. You should have spoken out against these people who obviously didn’t see what the end result would be.

I don’t read every post in the forums and especially not in stupid threads that demand stupid things

The world bosses were already bad. The drop “fix” was final nail to the coffin. It is most ridiculous idea ever. My feedback here is not only targeted at loot but at the entire events. And entire idea of rewards.

What should be rewarded in the game? Now grinding and farming is rewarded. I expected ANet to go into direction of rewarding for completing challanges. I guess that’s not what is going to happen.

I’m not against rewards for world bosses BUT ONLY AFTER the bosses are redesigned so they are scaling to maximum number of players, culling issues and lag is fixed, and boss encounters are difficult.

Aristio.2784:

RakaNishoo.6071:

JemL.3501:

Whats the problem with people now going to do those events. Are they your personal pets for use when you want?

The new loot system is far better than getting a pile of cats, and events boses are fine…since you cant even get proper farm..because you cant even farm in this game in the open world, literally, 3 hours of orr or malchors leap, were leading to nothing..because everything was nerfed or removed or not working as intended or etc…this new chest loots is far better and helps, and make people go to the events.

It makes people go to the very few events in the game. World Boss events. And that’s it.

It also let’s people coordinate their play time in the best way they can. Only an hour to play? Check the timer and see if you’re within window.

How about I spent that hour having fun? I know it’s crazy idea.

darkace.8925:

RakaNishoo.6071:

I don’t know exactly what was the intention of providing such content, the idea seems good, but in reality it turned out terrible grind/zerg fest with no fun at all.

The only grind pertaining to world bosses is a self-imposed one and if they’re not at all fun you’re completely within your rights to forgo participation.

While having fun in the game, I’d also like to get closer and closer to making my character look very good. I have now two paths:
a) continue having fun and having my character look good after several months or years, and I don’t know if i’ll play that long,
b) spend part of my play time to do something stupid, but rewarding.

Aristio.2784:

RakaNishoo.6071:

Why player who logs in and hits a boss once, gets better loot than player who is doing many events over the entire zone?

RNG gonna’ RNG.

You don’t get it do you? Your only chance to get Final Rest, worth 100g, is to go to kill Behemoth. Plus, latest patch improved that RNG on very few specific chests. Killing world bosses is the fastest and easiest way to get a chance on expensive item. This is why ppl farm world bosses and don’t farm jumping puzzles.

JemL.3501:

Whats the problem with people now going to do those events. Are they your personal pets for use when you want?

The new loot system is far better than getting a pile of cats, and events boses are fine…since you cant even get proper farm..because you cant even farm in this game in the open world, literally, 3 hours of orr or malchors leap, were leading to nothing..because everything was nerfed or removed or not working as intended or etc…this new chest loots is far better and helps, and make people go to the events.

It makes people go to the very few events in the game. World Boss events. And that’s it.

SneakyErvin.3056:

“You get the best reward for playing the easiest and most boring part of the game.”

We get ascended gear from dragons? When did they implement that?

Oh or are you refering to rare items? Yeah they are far from the best. Nice silver, but thats about it. Still have to remember, ectos are RNG.

ascended items are for free, I refer best “money” reward. A chance to get 100g. If you could sell ascended items they wouldn’t be worth that much. Yesterday 2 or 3 players got Final Rest after the Behemoth event.

Horrorscope.7632:

I wanted to say I don’t really agree with the OP. I think the open world is where the game should mainly be played at and the loot in the open world should be as good as anywhere else. There are plenty of bosses all over the place to find less common one’s if someone hates the crowds. There are also other servers to guest on.

The issue is the best loot wasn’t in the open world, so too many flocked to those alternatives. The pattern we see is wherever the best loot is, that is where the people in numbers are going. That seems indisputable.

This is the issue, the game is not played in open world. Ppl check timer on the net, log in with parked characters, do a cofee waiting for a world boss to spawn and then press auto attack. I wouldn’t call that “playing” the game. Smarter players already have bots, that you will never detect, because they just log in once per day. Number of bosses = number of character slots.

I’m not against players playing in the open world and doing events together. The problem is now, there are only few events that players are doing. The ones that have the best reward → world bosses. Why player who logs in and hits a boss once, gets better loot than player who is doing many events over the entire zone?

I’d like to express my feelings about the world bosses and how recent changes broke the game for me.

I don’t know exactly what was the intention of providing such content, the idea seems good, but in reality it turned out terrible grind/zerg fest with no fun at all.

Right now, everybody that has a lvl 80 character wants to do these events, and that is for a bad reason -> good loot. Since the events are not fun at all, this is the only reason. There is an event window, and everybody zerg up when the boss shows up. The boss stands no chance. There are huge performance/culling issues. You are not able to hit the mobs they die so fast. The boss is down in extremally low time. There is no strategy, no player skill required. Sound is not working. Players are not rendering. Damage you do is invisible. You stand still, shoot with ranged weapon and after couple seconds you get a chest with super cool items and a good chance on highly valuable exotic gear. There are even UNIQUE skins obtainable from these events! currently Final rest that you get from Behemoth is worht over 100g!!! Who doesn’t want to earn 100g in 5 minutes? Anyway these are now additional daily that you would really like to do. The only problem is that it is currently the biggest crap that I’ve seen.

My biggest problem is how ArenaNet rewards players. You get the best reward for playing the easiest and most boring part of the game. Doing jumping puzzles is much harder, and longer, and yet, no reward for doing those.

I also hate the way these bosses are triggered -> time window. I think such events should be put into the entire zone and made more immersive. There should be events leading to appearence of the boss for several days and finally a boss that would change the entire location. Getting rid of the boss should also be hard and not possible to do quickly. I like the Lyssa fight idea, where synchronization of players over larger area and more separate dynamic events is needed. Such events would require a commanders. Rewards should be given in a totally different way than they are now.

I tried new AC with friend. We were just 2. We both are lvl 80.
He went on his Thief (Full berserker, armor exotic, jewels green).
I went on my Guardian(Exotic berserker armor, Eye of Janthir, Ancient Karka Shell, and the of jewelery is Knight exotic).
I used the newly fixed trait pure of voice to test it (conditon → boon when I use shout.)
We played quite badly and did not cooperate at all. We did not use any voice communication. It was late and we made a lot of errors.

Feedback:
1) new breeder is soloable. Even if you don’t interrupt. He is no longer doing any meaningfull damage, and his minions go away when he dies. You can run in circles around him and the minions will never hit you. Of course when you interrupt, you can stand in 1 place and auto attack. We were already able to solo the old breeders, but these were much harder. Why such change?
2) same goes for burrow. If you circle run the burrow the gravelings will never hit you. Soloable again.
3) little spiders → I like the change. Now they actually mean something. We did the mistake of summoning all of them with a spider queen so we wiped several times. Wall of Reflection saved the day. Little spiders still kill themselves on the wall. You should improve their AI so that they are aware of the wall and go into melee range instead of killing themselves. Right now solo guardian can clear the room from hatchlings.
4) spider queen. We wiped once. Pure of Voice worked very well on her, breaking immobilize and allowing us get rid of poison. Combined with some regen, aegis, protection and swiftness it made the encounter not so hard. Anyway, the encounter now seems more polished and the difficulty increased, so I like the change.
5) gravelings in the corridor → we just destroyed them. I did not have any chance of see what were they doing but it seemed like nothing important. I soloed breeder while my friend got aggro from the rest of gravelings. When I finished witht he breeder I helped him finish off the graveling that he targeted. From then we just killed the rest. The champion was not doing anything. Very poor encounter.
6) Stone heads shooting with fire → I did a test, and stood still, and auto attacked one of them with scepter. Both heads were hitting me. I had burn. I destroyed both without moving. I had to use my heal once. I think these should force me to move and dodge roll since I’m not a tank. Very poor.
7) New Kohler → we were able to kill his adds, and bring him down to 75%. Then another group of adds spawned and we made several mistakes and were low on hp so we wiped. I like that new adds are spawning. Our record was to bring him down to 50% but then, necro showed up and destroyed me. One thing I noticed is that the aegis no longer works on his pull which is lame. I hope it is a bug. There is no reason why aegis should not block his projectile… I think he is now a nice challenge for 1-2 ppl. You should maybe consider adjusting him to be a challenge for a full group?

As I said it was late and we were not in a condition to beat the Kohler. I think we would also struggle with the burrows without an ele. Anyway my overall impressions with a change are:

Encounters are more polished, but IMO more forgiving and overally easier. (At least the ones we did.). However, I’m overally not happy with the change. First of all, I imagined that it would be required to kill Kohler. As well as more exploits closed. I also imagined that you will take a different approach with the dungeon. I hoped for less linearity, more replayability, making use of dynamic events and adding the exploration feel.

Examples of what I mean:
You enter the dungeon and meet the Durmand Priory encampment which is the only safe zone. You have several options and several location you can go. Each of these contains some encounters and some random dynamic events, and you secure that location. NPC are moving in and researching eventually opening new possibilities of progressing. Depending on your success or failure with various events and activities and maybe on some random things the differnt things can happen. Finally you unlock a boss. I imagined NPCs with gear for tears will be inside the dungeon, hidden. I imagined more hidden optional stuff. Etc. I’d like the dungeons to go more into the direction of GW1 Underworld or fissure of woe. I feel that you have great engine and you failed to put it to good use. GW2 dungeons are not much different from any other MMO dungeon. Except for combat system of course, but you know what I mean.

JungleNin.8379:

RakaNishoo.6071:

Erm…
Story Mode = Normal Mode
Explorable Mode = Hard Mode

You can earn exotic items in this game without going to explorable mode dungeon.
Dungeon exotics are cosmetic reward for players that would like a challenge and a token of their success. The game failed on providing hard content due to many reasons but mostly class unbalance, poor AI and exploits. Now players think that explorable mode dungeon is a place where new player can easily earn their exotics… Please let the devs do their work and fix explorable dungeons…

If they were cosmetic, they would have exactly the same stats as you could acquire from crafting. But they don’t. So they aren’t.

What is hard for some is easy for others. Making content exclusive to one skillset gives the idea of an elitist section of players and doesn’t make for a very good community.

I don’t agree.
First, they ARE cosmetic, because the unique stats you are refering to are not required to play the game. More than that -> nobody uses them I believe. And crafting is not the only source of gear. There are some unique combinations you can achieve from karma vendors as well as WvW. Finally there are items you get from world drops. Sure, it would be better if these items were just skins that you need to put on armor. Anyway I believe most players are using dungeons instead of crafting to gain same stats (Berserker?) because it is cheaper and faster!

Second, what is hard for some will be easy over time. I completely disagree that introducing an optional challenging activity has any negative influence on community. It is NOT the additional content in the sense of something new. Story mode of the dungeon is the way to go for players that don’t wan’t challenge and would like to do content. It is currently better, more interesting and in case of AC much easier. Putting harder to kill and harder hitting mobs in the EXACLTY the same location is only ADDITIONAL content in a way that it adds a difficulty and challenge element to the existing content. Your way of thinking leads to statement that entire game MUST be very very easy so that no matter how bad a player plays the game and no matter how many errors player makes he/she MUST succeed for the first time. This way of thinking leads to the game where you get bored to death very fast because you will learn to play no matter what. IMO You can’t just play the game and not getting better at it. So, you will be in a place where more experienced players are now -> you will have no content to play. This is why the game needs to have various activities of various level of play experience required.

Explorable dungeons (at least how I think they should be) are content in which you need to LEARN the encounters by failing them, THINK of a strategy, TEST and TRY your strategy and finally OVERCOME a difficulty. It does not require MAGICAL UBER MYTHICAL ELITE SKILLZ. The harder the challenge, the greater fun and the MORE content, because the more time you need to learn it and overcome it. I like to think of them as a riddle that when solved it is finished. There is no way you can have as much fun solving the same riddle for the second time.

Take a look at Demon Souls and Dark Souls series. You can complete the entire game in 90 minutes. But only after you spent countless hours practicing. This means that it has extremally large amount of gameplay hours because you will spend that hours improving your play. Only people that do not want to improve on purpose and are stubborn in that, and mentally disabled people can’t learn. Nobody here is mentally disabled, therefore everybody can improve. I play the dungeons with my wife and my father and I see how they improve they gameplay. At first they died in every encounter, now they are able to stay alive for the most of the time.

Finally, it takes months of development to put an update to a dungeon and I would expect that it will result in months of content for the players. Currently it takes 30minutes to “solve” the dungeon and that’s it. It is much better for the game and the players when developers are able to deliever more content in a shorter periods of time and this is the one way they can achieve that. To deliever the content that is so hard that players will need quite amount of time to solve.

Sadly the current state of the dungeons is that I have only once had a pug party that did not eventually complete the dungeon and the dungeon was pre-nerf SE path 1. Unfortunately we did complete this dungeon with a little more organized party after build change. This means that no matter how badly the group of players play, it is not possible to fail the dungeon. It is only the matter of how long it takes and how many times you die. Sure, the party can disband due to frustration, but that’s it.

Ohoni.6057:

Creating, improving and playing with your build is part of the game. I completely understand about only having a few hours a week to play, but why can’t those who DO have that time have an activity that they can work hard at?

You should. There should be “hard mode” content in the game. It just shouldn’t give rewards that you can;t get through “not hard mode” content. If all dungeons are converted into “hard mode” content then that means that many players will be unable to earn dungeon tokens at all, and that’s unreasonable. Basic dungeon explorer mode should not be “hard.” It should present a reasonable amount of challenge, it should not be completely trivial, but neither should it require absolutely hardcore expert skill, and it definitely shouldn’t require pinpoint coordination between multiple players.

If they want to add hard mode, one where it’s harder to complete than the existing dungeons, then that’s fine, but they should leave the existing dungeons as options, not make “hard mode” the new default.

Erm…
Story Mode = Normal Mode
Explorable Mode = Hard Mode

You can earn exotic items in this game without going to explorable mode dungeon.
Dungeon exotics are cosmetic reward for players that would like a challenge and a token of their success. The game failed on providing hard content due to many reasons but mostly class unbalance, poor AI and exploits. Now players think that explorable mode dungeon is a place where new player can easily earn their exotics… Please let the devs do their work and fix explorable dungeons…

Thedenofsin.7340:

I challenge the designers to spec out a group of 5 level 35 characters with random world blues and greens and complete these paths without an excessive number of wipes.

Explorable mode most certainly is not dialed in to level 35 players.

I would gladly do this. Except random world blues and greens since that part makes no sense. You need to gear up when you go to the hard mode (explorable) dungeon. At lvl 35 there is rare gear available. There is no reason not to have this gear when you go into explorable mode dungeon.

I have a warrior on lvl 35 in full rare gear and I compared them to a lvl 80 elementalist geared in full exotic(my friend).

I had more power, more condition dmg, more armor and more health. He had more crit dmg which is much worse than condiiton dmg on lvl 35 since it is downscaled from 80 to 15%.

It means the only difference between rare geared lvl 35 and exotic geared 80 are traits, not stats.

Do you really think that the dungeon is doable only when you have access to certain traits? I dont’ think so. Anyway I’m up for a party of lvl 35 that would like to run the ac explo.

Event name: Assault on Svanir’s Dome (META EVENT)
Sub-Event: Help Rezztif Sunderfoe capture the east tower

Problem:
Sons of Svanir are attacking in extremally low numbers and very long intervals. If there are more players there is not enough sons of svanir for everybody. And morale bar seems scaled so it is depleted very slowly. It looks like scaling just affects morale bar and the number of sons of svanir that players need to kill, while not affecting the spawn rate.
The reason may also be that sons are spawning in many locations but are immediately killed by players and don’t manage to run into event area, and morale bar is not affected by such kills.

Anyway I have whitnessed this 3 or 4 times now and it is quite annoying.

Wethospu.6437:

They should just make every explorable level 80 and implement up-scaling. Or make that entry-level dungeons have worse rewards than “real” dungeons. Yeah, no good money mobs, no tokens and so on.

I’m well aware that most of you guys suck, some even so horribly that they don’t try to improve. Still, if I can solo something (and quite easily btw) it should give some hint about the real difficulty.
It really boils down to how one thinks how dungeons should be. On my solo-journeys I have noticed that I will do much better and get stuff done much faster when I just walk to enemy and see what it does, intentionally let it hit me and try figure out how to avoid that. This is exactly what I love to see more. It doesn’t take special skill to research monsters, reset and prepare accordingly (not even for current AC).
On the other hand, some (you?) want them to be like you can just go unprepared without needing to learn mechanics/bosses (this is what I refer with facerolling) and still win. And this is the very reason we are seeing so many complaints.
I realize it’s not nice that everyone can’t do it and I think there should be better learning curve (generally). But truth is, I’m all up for a challenge and that’s design I will support.

And I have noticed that when an encounter forces people to learn and analyze it they rather find exploits (arah p3 lanterns anyone?, ac stairs?, list goes on), and yes, usually get huge problems if they have to do it properly.

100% agreed with everything you say.

Yesterday I tried to solo ac explo on my lvl 35 warrior. I was able to kill a breeder on my first try. It required interrupt and that’s it. No kiting, no special setup. Just 1 utility interrupt and auto atak. On ther other hand, if you don’t interrupt, you are dead. This is good change.

But this makes me think that it is absolutely possible to do that dungeon with a group of lvl 35 characters. (Although having full rare gear is a big help).

I just see one problem with the dungeons in this game. It is far too easy for a half-decent party of glass cannons to group up mobs and perm stun lock them for an easy aoe nuke and instant win. This trivializes some part of the content very much. This is why I prefer doing dungoens with friends that are not very good and don’t know about exploits than in PUG :/ Even if that means running the dungeon with fewer ppl and doing it much longer. I hope anet solves that problem somehow…

Rising Dusk.2408:

Well, it’s a figure of speech and not actually a comparison of SB to ALSKs. The point of the analogy is the design process involved, not what the design process was applied to.

To 25/90 something is to make it utterly unusable because the development team cannot discern a better approach. In that case, Izzy decided it was better to not allow the skill at all than to properly balance the skill (or even change the mechanics of the skill, which had been done with many skills prior). In this case, Rob decided that he didn’t like ALSKs and that they were a detriment to the game, and instead of trying to find a healthy balance rendered them useless. In both cases, the end result is that the target of the developers was made valueless because they didn’t think through the balancing process and didn’t want to.

Actually that item (and similar ones) should have never existed in dungeons. Removing them completely is a valid option, but was probably harder to accomplish than just increasing cd. These items role is to have a fancy cool feature in open world pve not necessarily increasing your power/performance and should not make it easier to run a dungeon. That’s my opinion and I hope and expect that ANET will eventually ban all of these in explorable mode dungeons.

Don’t want more dissapointments, don’t use them?
I mean there is even no interface to use consumables like these during an encounters. I doubt it was desired functionality and I would even go as far as considering bringing any of those into a dungeon an exploit.

Anyway I’m happy that this item is removed.

Juice McJuicey.3098:

All you did to AC exp is make it harder for newer players. No more money for you from me.

It shouldn’t be harder, it should be undoable for new players!
First: Learn to play (Story Mode), then do explorable mode dungeons.

Don’t let the current bugs/poor AI/poor design leading to a lot of exploits in other explorable modes fool you. It is meant to be hard, it was advertised as hard for experienced players and a lot (I hope) of players, me & my guild including are waiting for it to be HARD…

What else do you do in the game where you completed every explorable dungeon? Grind it and fast run it for gear that you don’t really need? Eh…

Numenor.3280:

The point is not whether people get use to it or not. The point is this game lacks interesting features to keep people interested and changes like the ones made to AC makes it less enjoyable and overly long.

I am pretty sure people wanna see something along the lines of:

Short, fun and challenging.
Long, fun, challenging and rewarding.

Not hard, boring, and long.

How on earth a content can be hard and boring at the same time???
For me hard = fun and interesting.

Looking forward to trying this out on my lvl 35 warrior

Erm… the only problem is that retaliation does not stack in intensity, so you can always have only 1 stack of retaliation. If there is a way to increase the damage from retaliation (like 5 times) I’d really like to know how?

Could anybody explain what exactly does it mean?

Reduced the number of maximum of stacks of Retaliation allowed to five (was 25). Duration still stacks.

IMO the problems are 2:

1) This is not explained in the game enough – some ppl don’t know that it exists.
2) There is questionable gain for a bigger effort than just spamming damage skills. – others are ignoring it on purpose, or wasting the cc in order to be able to spam dmg skills instead of using cc to interrupt.

ANet needs to change boss encounters so that there is an advantage from CC.
One example would be → boss healing to full hp every 30s unless interrupted.
I think it is ok to start requiring smart use of CC since every single profession has an easy access to some CC. (changing weapons or taking a utility) and effective CC does not require a stats change.

As for the posts that state the mechanics is bad → it is not.
Also it is not hard to pull off in PUG.

Everyone needs to follow a very simple rules:
a) If you see a defiant stack on a boss → use CC
b) If there is no defiant stack on a boss → DON’T use CC
c) If boss is about to perform a move that your party wants to interrupt, use CC.

The coordination is only needed if your group has very little CC and every wasted CC matters.

• Don’t agree with dungeon finder requests. It is anti-social tool that strips games of it’s content: namely open world pve. It can change an open world mmo to GW1 instance based multiplayer (5 ppl) game. That said, finding party should be made easier/more fluent by introducing other mechanisms. I like the idea that players must complete DE in order to unlock dungeon. This immediately results in having a group of players near the instance entrance. And because of the fact that grouping in GW2 is easy due to no healer/tank/dps roles, it is enough. There should be more of this. Dungeons should be either opened for short periods of time, or should be hidden/change locations. This way, if I want to go to AC, I need to spend some time doing dynamic events in Plains of Ashford and since some players will also want to do AC I’ll meet them and form a group as we go. Of course there needs to be more and more interesting DE so that they don’t feel unnecesarry grind before unlocking an instance. So my idea would be give dungeons as a reward for playing with group of ppl in the open world.

• DE inside dungeons!!! You had that idea, and I don’t understand why it is not in there. DE’s would make each dungeon run unique.

• Hidden optional stuff in dungeons unlocking bonus encounters with bonus reward.

• Less linear. UW from GW1 is a good example.

• Never-ending due to cyclical nature of some dynamic events and harder the more time you are in there. reward scaling too. Final reward after final boss if you manage to nail it down, but after that, why not staying there a little longer, make some side-DE and find some secrets/crafting recipies/npcs?

• Measure team progress and accomplishments in Dungeons and make DE outside the dungeon based on the team results. For example: after 75% of teams fails certain de in the dungeon, the boss with his army emerges from the dungeon entrance and starts a meta-event.

• Dungeon rewards could use a new system → exchanging tokens with NPC is boring. Using dungeon specific materials and hidden npc’s / locations in the dungeon as well as hidden recipies to create fun items are more interesting.

• Hard mode boss encounters launched by players doing some additional stuff (Stealing Glinth’s Egg in GW1 example).

• No bugs and exploits?

• No waypoint runs. If we wipe on some Dynamic Event or boss encounter, the event should fail and we now do something different in the dungeon. If we play really badly and fail many easy DE’s there should be kick from the dungeon. Many kicks can result in meta event outside and dungeon becoming innaccessible, then after re-capturing dung it gets easier and less rewarding. Many parties doing very well result in the Metaevent that will make dungeon completed and innaccessible for a time. And dung gets harder next time it appears.

Just couple of ideas that are not necessarily well-thought, but that is your job as game designers

While looking at gallery of weapons and looking for sword skins I found this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Jormag's_Breath

I liked it very much and decided to craft myself this one. I already have a skill points to buy Eldrich scroll and mystic coins from daily/monthly achievments.
I have weaponsmith on 400 so just need 600 orichalcum ore to craft 300 orichalcum ingots and craft 100 blades from them. Given the current prices 600 orichalcum costs 14g 30s Expensive but playing casually and going to some dungeons, completing some events, I think in one month I’ll have the gold and/or orichalcum.

This leaves me with one last item on the list:
50 corrupted lodestones.

If I wanted to buy them -> 50 gold. This means for me, next several months. Not an option. Besides, what’s the fun? I mean -> somebody sells them, so they must drop from something. So I went to frostgorge sound, where jormag’s servants are, found a lot of them in the corner and started killing them. I figured out that magic find gear should help. From time to time I visit this location and was able to get 4 Corrupted lodestones until today.

Today, I was killing mobs and no lodestones dropped for me for an hour. I decided that I’ll buy magic find food and try different location. I did. I also started noting my drops. Here is what I got:

I had +129% Magic Find on my gear.
I killed 50 creatures lvl 79 (Can’t find better ones). solo.
37 of them dropped nothing.
1 dropped 76 copper
4 dropped 2 Ice Stones (16 copper per stone)
2 dropped 1 Ice Stone (16 copper…)
2 dropped Valuable Metal Scraps, that gave Mirthrill Ore from salvage
1 dropped Vicious Fang (T6 matz worth 3s)
2 dropped Large Claws (T5 matz)
3 dropped gear:

• lvl 78 Masterwork Sword
• lvl 76 Common Heavy Chest piece
• lvl 76 Common Warhorn

Now please tell me this is a joke. This is after patch that was supposed to give us better drops?

What is the thought on obtaining good looking exotic weapons in guild wars 2? What should I do to obtain such weapon and have fun on the way? Because currently I don’t see the way… other than spending 150 euro in cash shop.

@Warskull:
I don’t understand why you listed SE1/2 as bugged. These are the only dungeons that are not bugged currently. SE1 has a minor issue with mobs spawning after you kill second boss, but on the other hand, why not?

Path 3 of SE is bugged because it is exploitable and faceroll-easy, requres nothing from the player. Why design an encounter in the dungeon if it doesn’t matter what you do and if you know the boss abilities? You could as well just put the same mobs that are outside and just scale them up a bit. All paths of all dungeons sffer from this except very few → Namely SE path 1, and final encounter in path 2.

SE1 was the first dungeon in ages that we actually wiped several times before completing. I don’t understand why the dungeons should be doable by absolutely anyone without any deaths on first approach.

@Robert
Good to hear. Finally!

@Nonlinear
Maybe you should try to take some party members that deal damage? Sorry, couldn’t help myself, but if you did the final boss fight for 20 minutes you did something wrong.

Pros:

• Fractals solve many design issues other dungeons have.
• New island is harder than other high-end locations → good direction, I expect even harder content in the open world in the future.
• One time events that change the world are cool idea.

Cons:

• Because of the event you made no progress on 8 dungeons which are completely broken.
• New crafting resources and no collection’s bank tab?
• New crafting resources not in-line with old ones?
• How it is possible, that there are sigils and traits in the game that don’t work, and yet you add new island? How it is possible that most of the areas in the game lacks content or has content that is broken, and you add dynamic events to newly developed zone?
• Your execution of one time event was pathetic. Both technically and design-wise. I agree with most of the complaits you see on forum on this subject. Currently WoW which is static old fashioned quest based game, does the stuff better with phasing. You need to re-think your approach on this subject. One example: Explain me this: Why after 400h of play, doing dozens of really hard jumping puzzles, finishing most paths in your dungeons and finishing personal story, having 3 crafting disciplines on 400 and generally exploring a lot of the locations in the world and doing generally speaking the hardest content you have available in the game I got less rewards overall, than standing and doing nothing for 2h during the event (I got such huge lags that I couldn’t even execute my skills). (Earring and Bag are most valuable items I currently have on my character).

I expect that you finish the game. No more adding major content before the game shines. Bugfixes section of the patch notes was pathetic! Guild Wars 2 was not ready for the release and you made some promises that you did not fulfill. I’d recommend you start working on that because I’m quitting the game if next patch notes look similar to the last ones.

@Eveningstar -> the problem of my “overpowered” traits is that by taking them all you become really strong. And taking all of them requires so much trait points, that other traits (for example Right Hand Strength) don’t fit. You can’t exchange any of these with Right Hand Strength because you will end up having worse build. RHS is cool, and there are a lot of other cool traits. The problem is that IMO there is no place for them in the ultimate build. Of course thats only the problem in pve when you have allies. So for example dungeons.

I’m afraid what will happen if I have access to combat gear, since now I’m overpowered in Magic Find gear.

I’m really struggling to find another build that is at least comparable in power…

BTW we already saw that there were no significant changes in patch apart of buffing staff which I used from the begining of the game and can’t force myself to replace it with any other weapon :/
Maybe next month?

@garm
Please elaborate a little and help make this thread better then.
Which things are not true? What points you don’t agree with? Why?

@Hateborne
Same thing -> which ones you don’t agree with and why?

@Pragmatist
I’ll check your build and compare it with mine in term of effectiveness on pve. I’ll take on 4-5 mobs in orr and measure time it takes me to kill them and how much hp I have left. My current problem is that I don’t have access to Power/toughness/vitality :/ so this might take some time.

Well, dynamic events that happen only once and change the world forever are one of the greatest features of this game. It gives you the feeling of persistance. If you are there or not, the world evolves.

That said, the current implementation could be improved a lot.
1) Of course we know that technical problems generally ruined this event. This can’t happen in future.
2) Rewards. Giving an item that can’t be gained otherwise in the game (exotic accessory) and items that are generally expensive (20 slot bag and 2 named exotics) is a big punishment for all those that couldn’t participate. The event wasn’t so hard or time consuming (if not for technical problems that is) that it is viable to give such loot to ppl. Some jumping puzzles are harder, yet less rewarding. I don’t like that.
3) ppl that paid for the game are missing content if they don’t log in for a specific time. While it already happened in other games (WoW during release of new expansion) we can see that people don’t like to miss on content.

I don’t understand why arena net is so much against phasing. You already have overflows which somewhat defeat the world persistancy. You already have problems meeting friends on different overflows. Why not 2 versions of each location? Before some event and after some event? Those from after the event can travel back in time, by clicking the join in the past button on their party members.

This simple thing that you probably already have mostly implemented by having overflows will solve the current problems with locations: They don’t fit my personal story. Example: I defeated Zhaitan, why so many undead in orr? Because of me the pact between human and charr was made. Why there are still dynamic events near ebonhawke that indicate the pact has not yet been made?

This also would solve the problem of one-time events that you can later replay by for example talking with NPC that witnessed what happened. Ok, there are some problems like event scaling. It should be huge which means you need a lot of players, but if such NPC told the story only once in a while and you could subscribe, then problem solved.

I haven’t found any encounter in PVE in this game that would REQUIRE VOIP.

If you pay attention to what is going on you can minimize the amount of communication needed to radar PINGS/DRAWING and chat. And even that only when you do the encounter for the first time.

Keep in mind that not everybody can use voice communication. Giving it in game might result in parties not wantint to take such ppl. That would be bad.

Fractals of the Mists solve for me the most riddiculous and absurd mechanic in all other dungeons → waypoint runs and skipping encounters.

For me → if you don’t change other dungeons to be just like Fractals → you can just delete them from the game. I’m not doing them anymore until that is fixed.

That said, There are 2 extremally annoying issues in the fractals:

1) Crash and Disconnect means game over for entire party.
2) You fall. You die in an unreachable place. There is no fight currently going on. Your party has 2 options → continue on their own or commit a suicide. In case your party continues → you get no reward from the chest. In case they commit a suicide, they might get one more armor part damaged which means one less deaths since there is no repair mechanism. Not to mention they lose money. There should be an option to teleport your corpse to the last checkpoint. Or an option for the party to restart from checkpoint at will.

And that is exactly the reason why ANET needs to start fixing bugs instead of adding cool new content that is bugged in the same way that the rest of the game is.

Pathetic…

Hello, I figured out that I’ll write something positive after I just finished Arah story mode for the first time.

To ArenaNet -> very good job so far. It will be a blast when you finish it.
When exactly can I expect the release?

@KensaiZen
Hey, I never said we are not the strong class. In fact I think we have some builds that are too strong. I list both issues, with traits that are underpowered and traits that are overpowered.

I created the list in the first place for the reason that I like to change builds. I like to experiment. And I encountered some traits or even whole trait line that were so weak compared to what I used to play, that I immediately became 2 or 3 times weaker by just taking them. I don’t want to go back to GW1, where you have 1 or 2 valid builds. Or where most of the skills are just not used. That would be boring.

@Ganzo:

• Binding Jeopardy → I understand your concerns and share them. However I don’t want to jump into conclusions. During testing it turned out that it applied 3 stacks of vulnerability for 5 seconds. Since this line is about empowering scepter I believe this trait was meant for scepter. Since Scepter immobilize also applies vulnerability you get 6 stacks from 1 skill. Also it is possible that you have both scepter and hammer and took a utility signet. This means you can apply 12 stacks of vulnerability and if geared correctly maybe up to 10? seconds of immobilize. Also Zealot’s Embrace is piercing and has low recharge that can be further lowered by traits.

• Shattered Aegis → Think about what happens when you have full party of allies. Or mesmer friend with clones. Each will AoE burn for 2s. In perfect circumstances this means 10s burn on each enemy per aegis. Even if you apply it once per fight, it might be nice. With Retreat and Renewed Focus you can apply 3. With traits more.

• Greatsword Power → Agreed. First of all, this is not fun trait at all. Additionally it works only 50% of time unless you give up on weapon swap and that doesn’t seem like a good option. And finally 5% increase? Sure that’s always something but meh…

• Inner fire → I’m not sure I understand your concern. Burn is something that hurts guardian especially when applied constantly and can’t be removed (elementalist’s auto attack?) Gaining fury every time you are burned is a little counter to that. You have an opportunity to kill opponent faster to get rid of burn. In PvE I used it for example on mortar fire fields to stack fury before entering battle in Sorrow’s Embrace.

• searing flame → useless in PvE. At least I don’t know of any situation where that could be usefull. Unless it removes all stacks of defiant from the boss. I guess it is pvp trait. I don’t like that fact. If something is not usefull in PvE it should be split. As for the cooldown → I have no idea. I’m not a PvP veteran.

• Writ’s → I don’t know, both are quite good and I’m using them. Much better on Hammer/Mace though than on staff and greatsword.

• Unscathed Contender → I think the idea behind this is scepter? Cast a lot of slow moving projectiles, immobilzie, AoE dmg. For melee, it is useless and since we have 1.5 ranged weapon, it seems to fall in line with traits empowering just one weapon.

• Vengeful → I don’t understand retaliation yet. If the mob in the dungeons deals for example 5k damage and has 50k life? what does the 300 dmg mean? I’d rather avoid being hit and deal 300 damage less. Wall of Reflection? That’s totally different thing. I’d like retaliation to either decrease the dmg I’m taking or reflect % of incoming dmg, not flat amount. At least for PvE. But maybe it is just me and the fact I never tried it…

• Permeating Wrah → You can combine both of them for even better effect. AoE burn every 4th attack? And by attack I mean even a tick from AoE symbol? Whirling wrath → 2s AoE burn? Seems powerfull, but I never tested it. I’ll give it a try.

Reserved for future updates…

3) Traits

[General]

• There are traits that strongly affect and empower each other giving/creating combo effect that I feel is so powerfull (At least in PvE) that no other traits can compete with.
  Here is the list:
  a) Justice is Blind
  b) Renewed Justice
  c) Altruistic Healing
  d) Vigorous Precision
  e) Inspired Virtue
  I feel ArenaNet either needs to make other traits more powerfull or nerf these 5.

[Zeal]

• Going into zeal gives me automatically: Improved symbols (5% more dmg and each tick does vulnerability for 3s? and auto symbol when i have 25% hp), But at the same time improves my greatsword, focus and scepter. Where is synergy? Scepter and Focus have nothing to do with symbols. Greatsword was nerfed and has symbol once per 20s.
• Grandmaster major traits are extremally weak. As was mentioned, greatsword heals can be ignored. Spirit weapon deal 10% more damage? Half of spirit weapons don’t do any dmg at all. This leaves 2 spirit weapons which swing once per 3s dealing dmg comparable to my auto attack only 6 times less frequent. If there was a DPS dummy in the game, we could test it, but I assume the damage increase from this trait will be around 1 or 2 % and only when both of my spirit weapons are active, which happens rarely. I believe author of the trait wanted to write 100% more dmg instead?
• Greatsword Power/Scepter Power -> boring traits affecting only one weapon with small improvement.
• Symbolic Power -> 5% boost in damage for symbols. Only a small part of dmg comes from our symbols and 5% of that is like 0.5%? of our overall damage? Again, boring trait.

[Radiance]

• Searing Flames -> What use it has on PvE?
• Powerful Blades -> Same problem as with zeal traits. 5% improvement to one weapon. Boring. Does it really make any difference? Or changes your playstyle?
• Perfect Inscriptions -> I guess it is bugged. Suffers from all issues that the sygnets have (more on that in utility skills section).

[Valor]

• Strength in numbers -> 30 toughness. No idea how much dmg reduction this is, but I guess not noticable amount. 1.5%? Unless this would be 30 toughness to each ally for each other ally in range
• Mace of Justice -> Same issue as with other traits empowering single weapon by 5%
• Glacial Heart -> Already mentioned in hammer section. However it is much better than if hammer gained 5% dmg increase instead

[Honor]

• Both grandmaster traits bugged at the moment?

[Virtues]

• Power of the Virtuous -> to get 10% dmg increase you need to have 10 boons. If you have 10 boons, you don’t need 10% dmg increase Well, maybe it would be overpowered to give us more dmg increase in so advantageous situation, but then I’d like this trait replaced with something different.
• A lot of retaliation improving traits and retaliation is something I don’t understand. See general section
• Unscathed Contender -> usefull only for ranged weapons? Is it meant to be that way?

2) Weapons

[Greatsword]

• After recent changes, it has a symbol with 20s recharge. This makes it extremally underpowered in combination with traits that improve on symbols. Since you can have only 2 symbols available, in order to justify the trait choice, you will naturally want to take symbols that have smallest recharge times. After all if trait improves symbol dmg by 5%, you really want to keep at least one symbol up.
• Problem is that Greatsword is improved by Zeal trait line, which also automatically improves symbols.
• Zealous Blade seems extremally underpowered (heals for 25 and doesn’t scale with healing power). I expect that this trait will fill the defense gap I have while using greatsword, while now it is completely worhtless.
• I figured that the purpose of this weapon is to deal dmg to as large number of enemies as possible. (You get might for each opponent hit and multiply your dmg). Binding Blade/Pull is great because it makes hitting more opponents much easier. It is really a game breaker if pull doesn’t work. And as we know, this happens…
• Whirling Wrath -> projectiles are not powerfull despite the description. Hitting somebody with projectile from whirling wrath requires luck. Combo finisher whirl on the skill is very weak. It creates very small number (sometimes even 1) of combo projectiles that also fly in random direction. Hitting an ally with a projectile from whirling wrath executed while standing in Symbol of Wrath… well, it never happened for me. Hitting an ally that actually has a condition on him? Hmm….

[Staff]

• Wave of Wrath -> Hitting through the walls enables large number of exploits. It is also annoying when it aggroes several mobs from another rooms.
• Orb of Light -> When targetting large monster (Giant) it flies up. This means it will hit only a single target. Also the healing can not reach allies that are on the ground.
• Line of Warding -> I’ve seen normal mobs (without stability) passing through the line. Either animation is displayed longer than the actual duration, or after the first KD, mob becomes immune to the line. This happens often in the dungeons. I feel that the duration of the skill in PvE should be increased or cd reduced. Or functionality changed. Right now the usage of this skill in the dungeons is mostly offensive to line up mobs for some AoE at the begining of the fight. In the middle of the fight and chaos, it is hard to make a good use of this, other than retreating.

[Hammer]

• Can’t interrupt auto attack with roll. Roll is cancelled, endurance lost, and you attack faster, which ppl start to abuse. Annoying and riddiculous.
• Glacial Heart -> 45s cooldown on randomly applying 4s chill seems cruel. The only way guardian can apply chill and unreliable. Especially useless in PvE.

[Sword]

• Flashing Blade -> skill wasted if target is not selected or on higher/lower elevation. It would be cool if this skill could be used as a movement enhancer, like leaps or elementalists Ride The Lightning. Instead you just waste time and remain in place.
• Zealot’s Defense -> A lot of ppl complains about not being able to move during execution or not being able to hit strafing target with it.

[Scepter]

• Quite boring. No combo fields, No finishers. I find little synergy between skills.
• I find its slow projectiles amusing in PvE, but is it possible to hit somebody with them in PvP?

Hey, I saw such list for Necromancer, and thought that it would be nice to have this for guardians too.

I’ll start with listing problems I have noticed, and will try to add to the list while others post.

Here it goes:

1) General issues

• Guardian and ranged combat. Sure, we have a scepter. But what If I don’t like it? Then I go with 2 melee weapons or melee and staff. Then I go into the dungeon and we have a boss, that if you get close -> you die. Or you need to roll out of the way very often. The highes DPS weapon for that is of course scepter. If I don’t have it, I’m crippled. Sure I can still use orb of light once per 3 seconds and cast empower/symbol of swiftness. It is boring, not fun and not effective. If I don’t have a staff nor scepter, then I can usually just place a combo field fire under the allies projectiles and virtue of justice them. There is always an option of /dance…
• Guardians and Condition Duration/Condition Damage stats. Because of small amount of various conditions guardians deal, and the way burn stacks, it seems very weak to invest in those stats. I feel I don’t get as much from these as other professions. Maybe I’m not right, but from my testing it seems that I kill much faster if going into Power/Precision/CritDmg than replacing any of these with Conditon Dmg/duration. Ok, Condition Duration does make my immobilize (which is on 3 skills) better, but in PvE I don’t see much use for this. Especially that other professions (Engineer?) can immobilize MUCH better.
• Guardians and Aegis -> I feel this boon is core of the guardian profession. Yet there is only 1 utility skill and 0 weapon skills that grant this boon. Seems weird.
• Guardians and elite skills -> Underwater -> just 1 elite, and that means 0 customization when it comes to elite skills underwater. Also Renewed Focus is great, but the way it looks is a little bit dissapointing. Elite should be something that my friends look at and say: WOW!. Transforms, mass invisibility, tornado, lich form are all examples of WOW! skills. Compared to that my guardian gets a little glow effect for 3s.
• Guardians and retaliation -> around 300-400 dmg per hit you get. Great answer for AoE damage in which you and your party stand, that deals low dmg per tick. Maybe good in some guardian builds that focus on healing and high toughness. Naturally overpowered in WvW, I don’t notice any difference in PvE. Sure we could use it on spider queen if entire party was having good toughness and I could heal them with mace for example. Maybe it would be fun to watch spider queen dying from retaliation. But what’s the point in this other than annoying elementalists in WvW? I especially didn’t like the change on greatsword for PvE. I would love to have retaliation removed if I could keep old recharges. Maybe I just don’t understand retaliation, but after few hundred hours playing guardian, I’d expect I will.

Does Perfect Inscriptions works? Last time I checked it didn’t have any noticable effect on my signets…