Guild Wars 2

All i wanted was for them to fix the left click auto-attack speed while under the effect of quickness so I could enjoy the option as designed…and they don’t seem to have done that

Prothescar.7842:

If they plan to nerf AA and put our damage on other skills then I really hope they also plan to adjust the energy cost of our weaponskills. Utilities cost a ton of energy, and using weaponskills along with them has only been possible up until now because autoattacks are a majority of our “rotation”.

Pushing damage onto other skills is going to be really, really bad if they don’t take this into consideration.

Exactly this. Having most of the damage on auto-attack was actually kind of a clever way to make things work: the damage come from auto for free, and while you’re doing that, you can burn your energy on some, mutually exclusive (because of energy) utility. Pick wisely, because you can’t have it all.

eg: having quickness on quickly means you can’t use the shiro dodge if you’re in a bind.

The execution wasn’t perfect, but the feeling it gave was good. Back in beta, when everything meaningful to do cost energy, it was terrible. If you did damage, you were not doing anything else, most skills went unused (even worse than now), etc.

So if they move damage from auto-attack, they’ll have to seriously give a second look at the energy costs of weapon skills.

The only point of precursor crafting (unless you have fun with doing it for the sake of doing it, which a lot of people do), is to put a cap on how much effort is required to get a precursor, since the mystic forge is so unpredictable.

So if all of a sudden everyone started putting dusks for 10000 golds and ascended materials went to 100 gold, you’d just say “fudge that, I’m going to make it myself”.
They are also an option for people who are just unable to set on that much gold and will spend it…you can just toss it in the collection instead bit by bit.

At current prices though, we’re very far from the point where they’re worth making (even when crafting is cheaper, the time it takes to do all the events, especially the bugged ones or the ones requiring failing, pending fixes, is just not worth it).

That’s fine though, you have an option if that ever changes. HoT made it really easy to get money to buy a precursor though (I made a Bolt just a few weeks after HoT, after failing at making meaningful progress ever since the original game’s launch), so for now its just not necessary.

Ascended armors are more expensive, however, making money is easier, too. Farming the mats overall is easier (its’ raining ectos and stuff to salvage now). I’ve crafted a heck of a lot more ascended stuff now than I have pre-HoT. You need more stuff, but that stuff is handed to you on a silver platter (ok, aside the low level leather, but if it’s the only thing you have to buy…)

While this is definitely broken, do keep in mind the maps don’t close randomly. When a Dragon Stand map closes on you, it’s because someone was told “Hey, the map is about to close in an hour!”, and they’re like “whatever, ignoring this, let’s taxi people in!”

Sure, they may have the expectation that this will “save” the map from closing…so tell them so they know better next time, until it’s fixed.

I’m allergic to grinding, so I never will. Someone said it best earlier: The game is full of long term goals, and people laser focus on a single one, ignoring everything else, and do what’s most efficient to achieve it…making it a grind. That’s almost a “bug” or a “design flaw” more than anything that you can do these things (eg: spider grind), and often those get fixed (and people complain about nerfs, not understanding why they get fixed… They’re basically protecting you from yourself).

I have all the HOT masteries but 2 (bottlenecked on mastery points, not xp) and all of the tyria masteries, and a legendary. My wife is right about to get the H.O.P.E this weekend. Neither of us grinded anything (if grinding is "repeating something over and over to get stuff).

I wanted a legendary and I wanted tyria masteries, so I just did Tyria map completion, where by definition you don’t really repeat anything. Tyria map completion will easily get you enough XP to get all of the tyria masteries. Every so often I’d take a break and go do a Dragon Stand or go kill something in verdant brink I hadn’t killed in a while, would do a chain of fractals, some PvP, go for a round of WvW, then go and work on some mastery points in Auric Bassin and maybe catch the meta. Tried Chak Gerant’s chain a few times pre-tweak, failed it, then would go back to Tyria, and so on.

Eventually got everything, got my Bolt, and during that would go and help my wife with some random events for HOPE or another, or she’s help me, which eventually got her enough lay line sparks and whatsnot for her last step.

No repetition (aside over a long period of time) unless we actually felt like it (the first time I did Dragon Stand i thought it was pretty cool and I wanted to try all 3 lanes, so I did it 3 times in a row).

Now, if you go and are like “OK, first goal now that the expansion is out, HoT map completion and I’m doing nothing else aside prerequisites until I’m done!”, that will be excruciatingly grindy and boring. Don’t do that. The game’s not designed for that.

Elden Arnaas.4870:

Dev A is working on Subroutine 999. He has it “checked out”

Wow, the 90s are calling. They want their SourceSafe and CVS (the source control, not the pharmacy) back.

Maybe perforce still work that way too? Been too long since i used it.

In my case I’m mainly worried about not getting the chest. (The chest was there, but I could not open it). I wonder if what Lysander is saying was the problem.

I was on a map last night that successfully trashed (the now really easy) Chak Gerent. At the end though, no mistward helm casing (I’m not even sure I could open the big chest), and a lot of people complained about not getting the achievement even though the full King of the Jungle event completed and we were all present from beginning to end.

Some people implied that you had to kill him through all 3 phases (we burned all the lanes so hard, it didn’t have time to get to the third set of phases).

Is it true? We actually have to slow down to kill him to get the full rewards? Or is there something else involved?

Welp, that does it people. It was a good run. Still remember at Pax when they announced raids, right as they were explaining how GW2 had the friendliest community ever.

Thats gone now. We’ll all be yelling at each other while playing our spreadsheet clone. Fun stuff.

These exploits really affected a huge portion of the game direction and its community. Dungeons and fractals, when done “as intended”, are some of the best of any MMO. Just, the vast majority of people haven’t even attempted to look at how to do it without cheesing the content. So it sucks.

Me and my guildies specifically do all the content without abusing glitches. We specifically state so in the LFG, and we -continually- get trolled for it. There’s a very large amount of people who much prefer doing things this way, and it doesn’t take long at all to get a group (often <1 minute), but you have to wade through and kick all the trolls out.

It’s a really sad state that if I put up a LFG for a fractal and don’t say anything, the expectation is that we’ll exploit. Even if we have 4 people from our guild, we put a single one without making it clear in the message, the person will throw a issy fit (apparently, the “majority win” thing only works one way: in favor of exploiters)

There’s plenty of MMOs without gear barriers and horizontal content. GW2 wasn’t even the first one that did it. They just had a better marketing department.

It works just fine. Better really: once you have a lot of raids in the game, since they’re all relevent/accessible with the same gears, you eventually have so many raids to choose from, it gets overwhelming (in a good way).

As opposed to WoW/SWTOR/FF14/etc style raids where there’s only ever a handful of relevant raids at any given point, you have to do those, severely limiting your options when you sit down an evening and go “Hmm…what should I do tonight? Oh wait, there’s only 1 raid I still need stuff from”

Adamantium.3682:

Drayos.8759:

this is because its the Elite Specialization, its built to be the Core of Every proffession.

I feel like a lot of your post is based off of this incorrect assumption. Anet has said that elite specs are supposed to offer another way to play a profession, changing the way they normally work. The elite specs are not supposed to be “the only right option”, and I don’t really think they are except for Herald.

That is what we all wanted/expected, yes. That is also what Anet said. However if that is what they tried to do, they did it wrong.

I expected elite specializations to “add some, lose some”. Add some new things for classes, and remove significant things, thus giving you a different “class” based on the original, with different strengths and weaknesses.

Instead what we got in most (not all, but most) cases, is just stuff on top of the core profession, and the only thing you lose is one normal specialization. So you get a massive boost, an extra weapon, extra utilities, and all around, a ton of extra power, at the cost of a specialization line, often one that wasn’t that important.

In the few cases where the class does give something up (Reaper loses range in Death Shroud), the replacement is almost strictly better by the meta. Elementalist seems to be the only exception, and it’s debatable (and because the core class is broken to begin with).

If ArenaNet wanted Elite specializations to give choices, they needed the tradeoffs to be larger. Things like losing a weapon to gain a weapon, losing the class core mechanic in favor of the new one, having some penalty to go along the bonuses… Some tradeoff. But they didn’t do that. So it’s to be expected that elite specialization end up being one of two things: Either they flat out suck, either they’re mandatory.

A lot of MMOs fell in that trap. Without changing the design to make elite specialization “lose” stuff, they really have 2 paths in the future:

1) add more elite specializations so we have a choice (they said they’ll do that eventually)
2) Make it that you gain something for using 3 core (kind of a “Core elite”). This has been done by several MMOs that did the same thing (eg: DDO)

No matter what time you put these things in you’re going to screw over thousands of people. The window between “when people come back from work” and “when they have to go to bed” is far too narrow, what with people’s schedules all being different.

So the only way you can realistically do it is with sliding windows. ie (and this is just an example, not an actually good implementation), one day its at 5, then 6, then 7, and so on for the 8 hours of that region’s window (times 3), then repeat. Then people can figure out which days work best for them. Now obviously this particular example means certain days will simply not happen (I did say it was a bad example!).

but doing something like shifting the window by 1 hour just means some people who can make it now won’t be able to next time. Even for huge communities that used to be able to get a good group during the spawns, it still meant a lot of people just assumed they’d never be able to do it and dealt with it.

It needs to be more dynamic than that.

The no grinding thing has been abandoned a long time ago. Used to be you only grinded for cosmetics. Now you grind for top gear and for content, as well as to ungate some content.

GW2 is far grindier than the MMOs they were making fun of at/before launch.

Here’s the problem. The game was advertised as being different from the average WoW-clone, yes? Play your way, easy to stay relevant, and while they originally said “you can have the carrot”, let just stick with their recent claims of only having a shallow vertical curve.

Ok. Now as a point of reference. Before i played this, I played a ton of other MMOs, the most recent being (ugh…) SWTOR.

At the time i played, you could get blackhole gear from dailies/monthlies (dungeon finder) that you could spread over several days/months (they didnt reset) AND/or wrapping together a group of 8 people and opening chests in a raid, even if you didn’t finish it.

Then you had campaign gear that had the exact same stat budget but shuffled around. My guild (of 8 people!) had server first on getting full campaign sets, and we didn’t use most of it because blackhole often had better stat distribution.

That was SWTOR. That game was almost universally proclaimed to totally suck because of its crazy grind, stupid ways of acquiring gears, boring dailies and screwing over people who weren’t in progression guild.

Comes GW2, that is supposed to fix all that. Yet, as a mostly solitary player with a very small guild, who didn’t want to do dailies all day, I was able to not only get full blackhole gear (which would have been on the same level as campaign), but also full campaign (which was just an alternate set), in just a few weeks. In GW2, it would take me something like 6 months, if i never skip a daily, since my guild cannot do all the content. The “quick easy to get” (exotic) set is also quite a few percentage point weaker than the best (ascended). Only a few pieces of ascended (rings) are quick to get.

So to max out a character in GW2, I need to grind more, i need a bigger guild, I need a greater commitment, to get gear that has a greater impact. There’s also more significant gear gating (Maw will eventually just 1 shot you a few seconds into the fight if you don’t have ascended, no matter what, as opposed to enrage timers). If SWTOR sucked (it did…terrible game), then that means GW2….?

My 8 person guild in SWTOR had to grind less to get full top gear (campaign at the time i played…, INCLUDING the weapon) than we do in this. This game was supposed to be different.

Gear is now in the same territory as it was in FFXI. Join a big guild and/or wait forever.

Oh and don’t come in saying “its to reward big guild for their organization!!”. People who randomly join a zerg guild with no leadership will still get their gear. No organization needed.

That was always the issue with fractals. People glitched/cheesed them from level 1 all the way up so no one knew how to do it. Having pugged while refusing to use any kind of exploit or near-exploit (cheese) in my groups, its laughable how many people have never even SEEN some of these fractals done fair and square.

Those who did handle them just fine though. Even without a thief. Its not that hard

As usual, what people fail to understand is the expectation setting the devs did. The game was advertised one way. Some people didn’t like it, devs made no effort to correct the impression, and continued going the way they advertised it.

Then at some point a patch landed that did a 180 degree. A large portion of people who didnt leave (because they were the correct target audience) flipped out. The devs made a lot of posts explaining how they made a mistake and they’d fix it, to not worry, blah blah blah.

Some patches come and bring the game slightly back in the original direction, giving the impression they were going back toward what they advertised before launch.

Then bang, back squarely in the 180 degree territory. Misrepresentation and false advertising always make people go nuts on the internet.

What they did to the game isn’t all that bad. You could argue its actually pretty cool. They just largely got rid of the audience that would have appreciated it, so of course you’ll hear a lot of loud complains from whats left.

The fact is those dungeons are scaled for way higher

No, no they’re not The first time i did AC explorable, we did all 3 paths with a random pug group the first weekend after launch at level 30 (well, it was higher by the end of the third path since we leveled while doing it) in all blue gear/green gear. It was easy then, its still easy today. Being level 80 means you can do it with 2-3 people if you try hard enough, and its still gonna be easier than flashpoints in LOLCASUAL Old Republic.

But at the end of the day, because ArenaNet never banned people for exploiting/glitching in those dungeons, the vast majority of people running them are terrible, even now that most (but unfortunately not all) glitches are fixed. So you’re stuck in “omg level 80 exotic/ascended only speed run skip everything glitch what we can” run that actually take far, far longer and are more tedious than a group of 5 semi-competent pugs in random gear/random level doing things the “optimal” (but no glitch/stupid tricks) way.

I use gw2lfg (and whatever group finder they put in the game should be similar. Thats what Dungeons & Dragons Online had, and it worked BEAUTIFULLY without ruinning the community….here it will be even better since you dont need healers), and advertise all my groups as newbie friendly non-speed run no glitch/no skip, any level… And on average they are much, much faster runs than other typical speedrun pugs.

The problem again, is people got used to the “default” being the speed/glitch runs with 5 × 80s, so they don’t mention it. When you start asking people individually, you quickly find out that the majority of the player base HATE it, they just never challenge the status quo. Pick 5 random people, and ask them what they rather… most of the time only 1 or 2 will say they prefer doing it the “speed run way”.

I mean, at the end of the day, if you don’t enjoy the content, this is just work, is it not? You do something just for the end reward, that you, rather not do. Its probably better looking for another game at this point.

The funniest part is that in GW1, even though the vast majority of groups were speedrun (since the game had been out so long…), people still specified in their group callouts -exactly- what they wanted if it was such a group, instead of just shouting a generic LFM and kicking people they don’t like. Even though it was always a speed run, people still specified it, every single time.

The prices are skyrocketing, but farming them (on average) is way easier. You get tons of bags that drop them like candies, and all kinds too instead of just ancient bones all the time.

The only real issue the game has is that everyone needs ALL of the materials because of the gift of fortune.

It wouldn’t be nearly as bad if we only needed some of them (let say, 3 stacks of 2 different kinds instead of 1 stack of each kind).

Then it wouldn’t matter: you’d be selling some and buying some, instead of just sitting on EVERYTHING. Can’t make money if you can’t sell anything because you need every…single…thing.

Its like ectos. They would be an amazing way of making money (like in GW1), if not EVERYONE needed stacks after stacks after stacks of ectos since so many darn recipes need them and all legendaries need roughly 2 stacks…

What is happening is all the other requirements of the legendaries have been made significantly easier (in some case, trivialized, relatively speaking to what they used to be), except the precursor which has only been made slightly easier.

So all the time and resources are being put to purchase just those, instead of split among many separate things.

Honestly, if I hadn’t stopped playing when they introduced ascended gear (I came back recently since they fixed a fair chunk of what i disliked), I probably would have had most of it, except for the precursor by now. Look at the price of tier 6 materials (which grow on trees now, you get a bazillion of them just by running in Orr for half an hour), sell all of that at current price, extrapolate how long it takes to make 500g+… its WAY easier than it was a few months back.

There’s just (almost) no reason to put money in anything else, so it all goes there. Once (if?) they make precursors easier to obtain without gold, other things will probably go up in price.

So for sure part of why the price is so high is the difficulty of getting it legitimately isn’t TOO high. Remember games like Lineage 2 and FFXI. Those games were dominated by RTM, but there was still a very large amount of people getting items that made GW2 legendaries look like commodities, and did it legitimately, so its not surprising that something way easier, like a precursor in GW2, is so expensive.

On the other hand, a precursor’s gold price on the RTM is not that expensive… 100-300 bucks depending on where you look. There were not-that-great items in Diablo 3 that went for that much, countless of times per day. In GW2, legendaries are the ultimate reward…. so even if you add up the non-precursor requirements and say its 500-600 bucks, I’d be very surprised if less than a third of people who have legendaries didn’t buy them with $$$, just by looking at other games.

mosspit.8936:

I just started using my guardian on Fotm and got to lvl 7 in a 3 days. Granted it is harder than before but it is still doable. As for gw2lfg, if you are really concerned bout the security aspect, you can just view the listings without posting for one. It does track IP addresses but it needs that to enable ppl to delete fulfilled lfg requests.

The problem isn’t that its not doable. The problem is that its the same “game” all other “normal” MMOs are: keep up or climb up. This wasn’t what GW2 was supposed to be. Aside for the (very short) climb to 80, you were supposed to get up to par very easily, and then just be able to do whatever and play with anyone.

I’ve done the whole “hardcore progression guild” thing, with great success in other games. Still hate it. Its not that people aren’t willing to go back down. Its that if you help everyone, you’ll spend hundred of hours going back down and never go up (unless the guild is totally static), especially as new players come in and old players leave. In the short term its fine, in a few months it gets old fast and forces you to play 10x more than you normally would. The game worked so well (to its original target audience) until this stuff came up…

So, people who got disconnected get a chest with a guranted precursor?
While many who looted the actual event chest got exotic crap only useful for salvaging (about 5g value). I and people in my group only got crap excluding the guranted 20slot bag and trinket.

I wish I got about 3 gold worth of stuff (very crappy exotics) from the chest I got by mail.

Still, I wanted the 20 slot box and the earring, and now i have them. Good enough.

The dying and running repeatedly part I guess just depends who you group with… even in pugs its really rare for me to die, aside in like, Arah, and even then only a few times and only with less than stellar parties. I never had issue with people not helping downed players…

For the rest, what you dislike is what most people who like it find enjoyable about it: you do dungeons because you like them, not because you HAVE to do complete your character (well, it was the idea before ascended popped in…hopefully will be true again once they “complete their vision” or whatever that means…)

A lot of dungeons have heavy anti-range abilities. Take the Howling King in AC. If you range him, he has a cone AOE that can 1 shot you. Sure, most people still range him and do fine, but it takes a lot more effort (and they don’t realize this). Staying square behind him in melee range makes him far easier to avoid and you will do much more damage on most classes.

My primary classes are warrior and elementalist. On my warrior, I used to run Axe/Horn and Longbow (or sometimes rifle). Now I run Axe/Horn and Greatsword, swapping between the two while waiting on cooldown of their stronger abilities. There just isn’t all that many fights in the game that favor range. There’s a LOT that favor melee, and for those that don’t favor either, melee does more damage (aside for like, Rangers and Engineers).

First of all: They DID say what their intentions for the game were, and you should really read Mike O’s answers. They came out and took the time to tell us where the game is going. That was due and very appreciated.
I suggest you guys read EVERY answer by them before you claim they say something they didn’t or reducing this to a PR spin and the other words people are spurting so often that they’re losing their meaning.
Chris:
http://www.reddit.com/user/ArenaNetTeam
Mike O:
http://www.reddit.com/user/Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet
To people believing there’s no treadmill: They already said the level cap will increase at some point, probably in expansions. Guess what? gear stats will increase too. Chris was also VERY careful and made a disclaimer every time so people don’t call him liar later. Stats WILL increase, rarity tiers will not increase FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. Wake up!

Yes, and this is important.

More generally, I hope we’ve been clear that GW2 is not a game with virtually no stat progression in it like GW1 was

(make sure to go back and read the quote in context). Thats from Mike clarifying his original quote. They plan to have a “shallow” stat progression and currently believe they’re doing that. There WILL be a stat progression however. So if you don’t want one (and i guess I had misunderstood back then…and no one was correcting us at launch when all the WoW people were going berserk on the forums from the lack of vertical progression and quitting one after the other), this game isn’t for you.

I’m saddened personally. I really like this game, but guess i only liked it over a misunderstanding, as they “never intended to have no stat progression”.

Oh well. Any developer out there working on a replacement, since the market obviously exists?

What I get from this AMA, and from Chris’ posts on the forums is: “Its easier to ask for forgiveness than permission”.

The way he’s like “Whoops, sorry! We should have seen this coming, we’ll fix it, promise!!” is just silly. You design a dungeon around community fracturing and two way gating (both with gear and with run count), and then…it fracture the community. Who would have thought! And then go “Oh sorry guys!”, like if it wasn’t expected.

It was -by design-. They push this in fully expecting to have to apologize for it. They just didn’t expect how the PR stunt to get the community to eat it wouldn’t work.

I pretty much stopped. The progression content makes GW2 redundant. It has a few minor interesting things other games don’t have, but overall the flat stats/non-stat oriented progression (aside for what was there at launch) was the niche, killer feature of the game. Without it, a lot of other games do what this one is trying to do better. The gear progression isn’t too big a deal (its only a few pieces, and aside for one, they’re easy to get), but the artifical content gating, omg >.> I can’t play with my friends anymore unless I want to repeat fractal level 1-2 over and over for every single ones of them.

So i just peek around forums looking at what people are saying, and waiting to see if Anet will turn around (though I don’t have my hopes up…but who knows, after all, they already did it).

There’s millions over millions of gamers who avoid MMORPGs because of the type of mindset you need to play a progression/gate oriented game, many of which didn’t even know there was a new one that didn’t have that, but Anet killed it before it even reached their ears, deciding to fight with all the others over the 20 or so million players who actively (and very vocally) seek the current standard.

Its just a shame that we’re denied variety/choice (though gaming is far from being the only industry where it happens, so its not surprising). Maybe someone will make an indie game with the concepts this one had, someday. Or just a newer GW1 clone maybe.

Until then, back to playing Monster Hunter (if i want gear progression, Ill play a game that does it well)

And when you finally have your backpiece and progress through…get ready for the 250 ectos you need to increase its agony resistance!

no, you do 3 fractals in a row, or 4 every other run.

Doing a “set” of fractals isn’t very long. Under an hour i think?

Even in a guild. If nothing else its worse, because the people who are farther will keep having to go back over and over to help their friends or new members. I remember in SWTOR where to do the harder content, we kept having to go back, gear people up, then go forward. It quickly ended that we spent more time gearing people up than “progressing”. Thats why I personally had sworn off MMOs with gated content/carrots on a stick. GW2 was perfect on that front. WAS.

Managers are silly. They see the 12~ million WoW fans, and are like “wow, i want that market”.

Fact is, 12-15 million is pretty much everyone who likes threadmills, infinite grind, and thinks numbers going up on a character sheet is awesome among people willing to shell 60 bucks on a new game.

WoW, SWTOR, Rift…they share a player base, and it is only a small fraction of the gaming community (just look at League of Legends to see what happens when you’re not targeting a niche…). Any game trying to copy EQ or WoW is just cannibalizing from the others who tried the same.

GW2 was after an even smaller, but -separate- subset of players. They could get 1-2 million people without fighting with the other games.

And they they changed their mind i guess…

I like how this was supposed to close the gap to legendaries.

You know that progress you were making toward your legendary? Time to toss it in the forge and (partially) start over!

So we heard you liked treadmills and gated contents….

This is one of the craziest form of gated content/threadmill I’ve seen since FFXI. Fracturing the community in tiny little pools of players forcing people to run this douzens and douzens of times (or more) if they want to help others to catch up, on top of crazy expensive gears to be able to venture deeper in.

And you thought WoW and SWTOR were bad with it…

Also to note is the effect on existing dungeons. The difference between a level 35 in blue/green gear doing AC and a level 80 in full exotic was huge. While i personally loved doing the dungeon at level, the game was full of people refusing to do it with anything but level 80s.

Now you’re significantly increasing the gap between the two. Thats not gonna be fun to watch. Once they’re done adding the rest, the old dungeons will have to all be upped (screwing over anyone without ascended), or be made obsolete/trivialized to anyone with the gear. Fun!

There’s a bazillion MMOs around. Most of them revolve around more or less the same thing (even if you include old MUDs and stuff). Level up, get loot, do harder stuff to get more loot to do harder stuff.

There’s a few exceptions, most of them very niche/unknown. GW1 was an exception to that. GW2 was adding to that concept.

I was disappointed with the rare/exotics and the 80 levels. In GW1, leveling was basically just the tutorial and was very short, and you would just go up to the shop and could almost immediately get top gear in most of the slots. In GW2, you needed a little more time for exotics, but it was still quick. Not perfect, but it still fit in the niche.

Now, GW2 is the same thing as every other MMOs, except with a bigger bot problems (compared to other “current” MMOs. Older ones had bigger bot problems), and more bugs. What made it unique, the part where it was very very quick to max out a character and then you just did whatever, is going away….

If its no longer unique, I’ll play something else

Its silly. Position yourself as a “no gear grind” game. A large amount of people who WANT one quit, leaving a large concentration of people who don’t.

Then add a gear grind. A few (but very few, as they already moved on) people come back. What happen to the rest?

Dungeons without 1-2 supports are freakin painful. Everything stacks conditions until you can’t do anything. Personally I like playing a warrior with soldier runes (remove conditions with shouts), have 3 shouts, offhand horn with the trait that makes horn convert condition into boons, and the trait to make shouts heal. You never have conditions, and quickly end up stacked with 6-8 boons on the entire party, as well as spamming thousands of healing points on everyone. Since in several dungeons, conditions are the only dangerous thing, it makes things way easier.

Engineers with bombs traited to heal and elixirs to remove conditions is great too. Go in melee range, get everyone else to do the same, and spam heals on them while removing their conditions. Teamed up with the above warrior, and with Knight gear (for a nice balance of damage and defense), you can virtually straight up tank anything in the game, and so can the rest of your party.

Bonus point if you have a thief with smoke or an elementalist with lightning hammer spamming blinds on everything.

Kamahl.3621:

I’ve been speedclearing AC for the past few days.

Only one group was able to skip the spider queen successfully. We had some kitten screwing it up for us every time because he’d aggro the spiders that trigger the queen spawn one way or another.

First time? He walked to the left instead of hugging the right wall.
Second time? His flesh golem aggroed them.
Third time? His staff auto attack went through one mob and aggroed the trigger mob.

I do get pretty irritated at that. I didn’t call him out on it directly, but I did whisper the other persons in the group why I was so rage-mode. 2 agreed.

IMO very very few bosses are skippable by design, and its bordering on exploits (or at least, gray area) in quite a few cases. A lot of groups won’t skip them on that account (kohler is one of the few bosses that is so skippable you can skip him without even knowing he exists there in some of the paths. Happened my first time through the Howling King path.). So raging because someone isn’t skipping it properly, even during a speedrun, is a bit much IMO.

Thats why the GW1 model was better. Get max level in an afternoon, then start having fun.

But people whined WAY too much about the lack of leveling. So they put a compromise in this. It worked for the most part, but its not perfect.

All dungeons aside for a select few paths that are much harder than the rest are easily doable at level, and since, with a few exceptions, the amount of time you bang on the boss isn’t a big bottleneck, it doesn’t significantly slow down runs. You won’t do a 20 minute AC run, but 30-35 minute is possible. And if you have 4 people level 80 in full exotic and a single level 35 in there, you won’t really notice the difference. But yes, a full group of 80 will be faster, so for speedruns, thats what people will go for.

What I feel is the bigger problem is, is people losing track of why they’re playing for. You’ll have people that, in the same breath, will say they don’t care about grinding for cosmetics, and want to speedrun dungeons to get it over with. If the dungeons are that boring, is it really worth doing speedrun grinds for…cosmetics? I mean, a few people REALLY want those cosmetics, but chatting with people in game it seems to be a minority. The majority fall in 2 groups: people who genuinely enjoy the experience (so speedrunning shouldn’t be that important), and people who play because they feel they have to because they spent 60 bucks on this. The later group probably would be better off cutting their loss.

I know i know, someone is reading this about to hit the reply button to say “Im a unique snowflake and don’t fit in this generalization”. I’m not talking about you, no need to hit the reply button just to say that

For death zerging: While stuff like Magg’s Path is done by zerging by most player, it is NOT the most efficient way to do it, and honestly, it makes that path not worth it. My groups, even pugs, always do it “legit”, and its much faster/cheaper. Its just a barrier of entry thing: easy to do, hard to master. And in this case, master is “make it worth your time”.

For the enrage timers: no, just no. What i find funny is you start with how you’re a veteran MMO player, then go on to “Most MMOs do…” and talk about a mechanic most MMOs do NOT incorporate. The big name mainstream ones that are clones of each other with different graphics do, and a few on the side, but historically, very few MMOS or MMO-like games had enrage.

Why? Because it doesn’t add challenge, it only streamlines it. An MMO with enrage that isn’t too easy falls down to being a DDR/Rockband clone where if your partner screws up, you screw up. To stay challenging, enrage timer encounters have to be mathematically tuned, and have to be extremely predictable to avoid randomly being “impossible”. So the encounter will do roughly the same thing, with the same pattern, and thus have to be controllable.

Basically, in the end, its a dance: “1…2..3 step right! 4..5..6 step left!”. “Push button 1…now 3…. now 9…now 1 again!”. Its challenging, but only in the “I’m having a hard time doing Panic Attack in Rockband on Expert” can of way, and drastically limit the creativity and party composition players are allowed to use. If the encounter is calculated precisely so 4 perfect damage dealers and 1 support with perfect gear have a 15 second buffer in a 5 minute encounter to succeed without hitting enrage, then that means you HAVE to have that party composition.

Enrage was always a gimmick to balance the demand between healers/support and damage dealers (because in games like Lineage 2, healers would find a group in 0.1 second, and damage dealers were benching all night). In GW2, since no one gets benched for not wanting to heal, you don’t need enrage. It was never about challenge.

All you’re probably missing is a small scene, and potentially a short cosmetic event to announce the beginning of the end.

You are -not- missing Act 3. Just its opening.

The game is new, and has mechanics unfamiliar to a lot of MMO players because most of the more recent MMOs were all clone of each other (there used to be a lot more variety, FFXI, DDO, Lineage…they weren’t all good, but they were not carbon copy of each other. WoW, Rift, SWTOR however….).

Guardians and Warriors have very low barrier for entry. If you can’t read skill descriptions and just randomly mash your keyboard, you’ll have more success with them. During the beta I tried every class one by one, and leveled them all to 30 (yeah, I didn’t have a life for a while). I picked up warrior because it felt like the best by far. Now that I’m leveling other classes and understand the subtleties in the combo system, in all the debuffs and support options, etc, I can now see, warrior is good. Its awesome even…but its not the end all be all.

Elementalist’s control and healing options can easily surpass a hammer/mace warrior or a shout healer warrior. And the armor difference is honestly not that big unless warrior spec full defense. The damage output of hundred blade is cute until you look at the cooldown or you take a ton of damage from not moving during the cast. Switching between dual axe and greatsword is great but you then have limited ranged option.

Even when i’m partying on my warrior (I’ve done pretty much every path of every dungeon or almost…definately did all the hard ones aside for the hardest arah path), I’m definately not just looking for heavy armor classes. They’re good, but all classes are good =P

mesmer timewarp anyone?

There’s almost always tricks to these. We farm CM day in day out and its really rare to see a death, aside maybe in the seraph path, and even that one isn’t too hard. Those huge groups of enemies can either be totally avoided if you’re sneaky, or you can pull them and spam blind/knockdown/etc, or in one instance, you pull and kill them faster than they reach you by stacking up.

Btw, I’ve played DDO. A lot. And while this game doesn’t have the difficulty setting, the different paths are different in difficulty, so it evens out somewhat. Almost all dungeons have an easy path, an average path, and a hard path…and the hard paths are almost always easier than the harder mode in DDO (even if you include epic). The difference is that in DDO, people figure out all the tricks long ago

Quick question. I ran the teleport part of CoE what feels like a million times…it was always trivial. 4 people stack up in front of him and never get hit by the spikes, and his other attacks hit someone who’s ranging him. Repeat 2 more time, dungeon is done. Easy peasy.

Last 2 times I’ve done it with pugs though…ice always targeted people who were meleeing him, or worse, would target 2 people at the same time (the ranged, and someone in the stacked up group). End result: dead. No easy way to figure out who’s being targeted by ice to tell them to range before its too late.

Is there a trick to this I’ve done 20 times without noticing, and now doesn’t work anymore or something? Thanks!

While the dungeons should be better designed so trash can’t be skipped as easily, I feel a problem here is the people who “automatically assume” everyone feels the same way as them.

There are some of those on both camps, but the speed runner-types can force it unto others without saying anything. They just start running through, and then even if all 4 other players want to fight, they’re short 1 player.

Even worse when there are actual exploits (pre-patch Magg path). We were pugging one person, and they’d go straight for the exploits before even asking or saying anything even when we made it clear when inviting them that we were doing things the hard way and they agreed to it. And that happened with -countless- people. Its crazy.

I don’t mind people having the option to skip, or people who prefer to do it that way (though i think the dungeons should be designed as to not just be a “run and spam dodge!” to be optimal). What I do mind is people assuming everyone wants that or flat out lying about what they intend to do.

Note: I’ve done dungeons way more than “20 times”, and since the rewards are only cosmetics in this game, there’s no way I’d run them that many times, not even speed running, if I didn’t have fun. Dungeons are like half of the non-PvP content of this game… why bother if you don’t find them fun? You’ll get your armor set…then what? Complain on forums there’s nothing fun to do?

They very well may end up tweaking the encounter eventually. The sample size of like, 10 people who had ever TRIED doing it legitimately didn’t give them much data to go by, what with all the exploiters =P Though its not THAT hard, and while its more reliable to send people one by one, if you send everyone in at the same time and help raise each other and stuff, you can make it with very few deaths.

Kevin: even focusing mobs down one by one with 5 people in full min-maxed exotics I’ve never seen mobs go down anywhere close to fast enough for that. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I feel lucky to be able to kill 3 before it becomes overwhelming.

Edit: Didn’t see the video before posting. Ill be d….. Ok, so its doable, and doesn’t even seem that hard. No need for tweaking.

Axe support variations are pretty much the absolute best build for PvE and even WvW if you don’t want to change builds all the time to match what you’re doing (mace/shield for example is arguably better in some dungeons)

I run a similar build (almost the same traits) but use horn offhand and +damage per boon along with the convert condition to boon. Awesome since so few people run reliable condition removals. Axe mainhand is just amazing though.

The shout heal is really where its at. They can do 1000-1200 per shout with no special gear. So when in trouble, you just chain cast all 3 shouts, and thats over 3000 hp on everyone. That usually make people last long enough to heal up, and before you know it, everyone’s full.

Actually made a thread about this, but I just got kicked from a group when I saw them jump through the gate and said something about it. This is exactly how it happened:
group jumps through gate
Me: I thought Anet fixed this.
Me: Really guys?
kicked from group
Just that fast. And now I have no tokens to show for it. Just because I did not want to exploit.

Its just as bad the other way around too. My guild was doing this the other day, we had 4 people, so we pug the last. Before we even reach the room, the pug dude had already glitched through it. We tell him we’re not going to exploit it. After hearing a big rant and several cuss words from him, we attempt it, and our first time fails.

He tries to get us to do a DIFFERENT exploit. And then another. When we refuse, another rant full of every cuss words in the book. We kick him, and someone from the party goes to pug someone else in Lion’s Arch to finish.

After asking the person if they were ok to do it legitimately, they HESITANTLY accept. We get to the room, they go “Oh, lets just do it <insert obvious exploit here>”. Seriously? Finally we managed to do it 2-3 tries later, but not without a lot of complains from the one pug.

Since there’s no banning threat, people are totally open about it. LFM shouts in lion arch specifically ask for the classes that can exploit it, even describing the exploit.

There’s a reason CoF armor is the most common dungeon armor in the game right now. It really cheapens the experience. Sure, Anet should fix it much much faster, but on the other hand, its pretty sad that 99% of the CoF running player base is exploiting it right now.