Guild Wars 2

CalmestChaos.2463:

and indeed, if everyone cooperated, the blix farm would be a paradise. everyone was happy. … then we had 2 guys who had already ruined 4 other instances of the blix farm ruin this one as well by holding off the mobs … specifically to force event completion. then everyone gets mad at them, which is what the trolls want, and then spends forever trying to find a new instance (aka 6 lfgs asking for a blix taxi that sit in the lfg for 5-10 minutes in that case).

So what you’re saying is your fail train is perfectly happy until it doesn’t get what it wants, and then it throws a fit?

You’re right, doesn’t sound toxic or childish at all.

I was running through Cursed shore on my way to Arah yesterday (I like to skip waypoints sometimes) and saw the Pen outpost under attack, so I cleared through there with some other folks and headed south through the tunnel to Shelter to see it in the middle of its defense event. There were about three people standing around outside the blue line just watching.

My first instinct was, of course, to charge in and save the NPCs.

As I go running by, someone said, “don’t go in” “don’t help.” Puzzled, I didn’t reply (busy trying to not die against two waves of risen mashing in at me alone). During the combat, I saw this incredibly befuddling statement:

“If the risen don’t cap the outpost, we don’t win.”

…what? That’s the opposite of how this works, lady. If the risen CAPTURE the outpost, we don’t win. That’s why there’s this event here saying they need us to help defend the place. Does not compute.

By this point I notice the crowd has grown to maybe 15 people. I’m at a loss for why they’re all standing out there. Then someone finally explains what’s going on. “If you let it fail then you can jump on the farm train. You have to fail if you want to farm.”

There were about 40 seconds left on the event timer, a champ coming in with three elites and a bunch of little guys behind them, still just me there in the middle as they’re charging up, but I had a breather before they’d get to me. So what do I tell them? I say the only thing that, to me, makes sense.

“If I wanted to farm, I’d be in a field.”

I fought them to the last. I died alone, but I held out until the 8 second mark. It ticked down before the risen could fully overcome the outpost’s defenses.

To me, that means we won. If you think otherwise, go set up shop in Arah; you’re clearly already on Zhaitan’s side anyway. Maybe he’ll offer you all the gold you want then.

(Thanks to the charr who came out of the crowd and rezzed me after the event was over. I forgot your name, but you’re a solid guy. n.n)

data.4093:

Remember that no one is preventing the completion of the event. We can’t kill other players in pve…

…but you can scale up the event without participating in it, making it difficult to impossible for others to complete the event depending on how many are actually attempting to play the game as intended.

Yeah, it has certain difficulties. Teq turrets are a big vulnerability in that regard, worse than Boss Blitz mob-training since that can at least be dealt with (albeit with great difficulty). There’s not much you can do about Teq constantly stacking his scales and popping bone walls except hope you can out-burn the timer. Fortunately it’s rare to see more than one or two people trying to do this at a time, so I haven’t seen it derail an attempt yet…but it could happen.

The only way I see something like this being manageable is having Squad-restricted participation. By which I mean something like only members of a commander’s squad can use the objects involved in the event and/or damage/draw agro from mobs spawned by the event. That’d also require commanders having a lot more control over who is allowed to join their squad and having the ability to remove players from their squad if needed compared to what they have now – which is basically the ability to take a roll call and nothing else – but I think that’s the direction I’d go to try tackling this problem.

Of course, that proposition would only apply to events that are triggered – guild-specific spawns of Tequatl as compared to the times he appears on his own, for instance – but hey, it’d be a start, right?

zenleto.6179:

You might want to go to the wiki and look up Megaserver. It doesn’t matter what your home world is unless you want to WvW. Put your mates on your Friends list and if that doesn’t help you get onto the same map then they can taxi you in by grouping. Simple.

Considering TC’s position in WvW, that is something of an important consideration if he’s thinking about it and/or his friends enjoy it at all.

DeWolfe.2174:

Please do list any other suggestion? Outside of one person adding to the conversation by mentioning GM’s, the rest of the replies add nothing to the conversation of preventing large socially organized groups from being grieved.

It’s true that there isn’t much way to deal with real griefing going on (easy example: people who take over turrets at Tequatl and refuse to actually use them, just firing into the ground next to their turret throughout the event instead of spearing Teq or clearing poison). Outside of reporting such players, there’s not a whole lot players can do about this kind of thing. Nor should their be; as frustrating as that is to think about, any mechanic that could be added that would enable players to moderate the activity of other players would always, inevitably be used for griefing and trolling more consistently than it would dealing with trolls and griefers. Instead of preventing this kind of behavior it would only enable worse forms of the same.

This is, of course, beside the point when the request is brought about by someone who encourages exploiting a game design flaw for personal gain over playing the game as intended and rather selfishly insists he should be able to remove players who disagree with his philosophy on how to play from the game.

You are exactly the kind of person who should never have powers over another player.

Tequatl is an event that tends to have upwards of 80 players hitting it at a time. Against that kind of zerg, the usual amount of defiance stacks wouldn’t even be noticeable.

moiraine.2753:

Yes i feel the same.In dungeons that is just crappy programming.Not being able to interuppt the bosses inside the dungeon is….. i just don’t have words.In every other MMO that i have played bosses in dungeons have interuptable and non-interuptable spells.Only GW2 is missing that lol.Anet are being slopy.

No.

You may like interrupting bosses, you might enjoy it as a mechanic, but having a restricted window for interruption on champions and above is not sloppy design. It’s intended to reduce chain-CC options.

“But in WoW they have bosses that can’t be CC’d, but you can still interrupt them with things like a Rogue’s Kick skill!”

That’s true. And there’s a reason for that: in WoW’s design, you need to be able to interrupt certain abilities in order to not fail. You need to interrupt that boss casting the This Will Immediately Kill The Tank spell or the tank will be immediately killed and your raid wipes, game over. It’s a necessary mechanic.

In GW2, the “tank” (which actually just means whoever has agro at the time given GW2’s class design) can just roll and avoid the big nasty thing that would have otherwise killed him.

You don’t need interrupt-specific abilities in GW2 because you have evasive options instead. Options that you don’t have in WoW or most games like it. They have passive evasion and parrying and blocking, but if you’re targeted by an ability that can’t be blocked or parried or evaded that way, you need to interrupt it or you’re in trouble. In GW2 these things don’t exist outside of encounter-specific abilities which are usually counteracted by encounter-specific items or environmental things. In other words, in instances where interrupts are necessary, they’re provided.

Most of the time, they’re not necessary.

I would think that, knowing the stance has these drawbacks, you’d use it in situations where those drawbacks aren’t going to interfere with its effectiveness. For instance:

- when you just got stacked up with a massive condition burst; pop Defiant Stance, let all those horrible conditions heal you right up instead of melt you. It’s not like the conditioner can strip them off of you to prevent the heal.

- when you see a telegraphed move flying at your face. Hammer warrior in mid-air and you’re all out of stunbreaks/evasion? Defiant stance. Necro just popped Lich and has some nasty hands coming to tear your face off? Defiant stance. Etc.

All in all it’s a pretty niche buying-time skill, though, compared with healing signet which is basically nice 100% of the time, so…yeah.

nicknamenick.2437:

Why does guards get it incl blind..
Why does rangers have it incl evade..(next patch)
Why does a warrior have this terrible rush??

Because we also have Whirling Attack. Sure, it’s not a leap, but it’s a fast, evading gap-closer. That’s what you’re asking for, right? It’s even on a shorter cooldown than the abilities you mentioned for other classes.

You can’t have everything.

Maybe it’d shave a few seconds, but I mean, Thieves don’t really have good sources of generating the might in the first place. Might on crit with five crit machines isn’t bad, but I don’t think it’d compare to the kind of might stacks some other classes can maintain. But hey, who knows.

On the other hand, would strength runes and sigils kitten them compared with whatever they’d normally use instead (I’m guessing scholar runes? No idea for sigil)?

Ropechef.6192:

simple answer for thieves and other classes.

access to might. specifically high stacks and duration.

Ah yes, of course, might stacks. I always forget about how much impact huge stacks of might have.

IvanTheGrey.2941:

Speed clear lupi. 5 x warriors. If only one of them had attack speed boost and reflections.

Meh

Sort of a sidenote, but to whomever claims or thinks that warriors are top DPS in the game, I’d just like to point out that if you follow Ivan’s link here, you’ll see a video of 5 warriors killing Lupicus in 51 seconds. Not too bad!

…then you look down the rest of that playlist of Lupicus kills.

5x Elementalist: 17 seconds
5x Mesmer: 27 seconds
5x Guardian: 37 seconds (numbers ending in 7 are apparently popular!)
5x Ranger (!): 41 seconds

That’s a lot of classes burning Lupicus down faster than Warriors did by a pretty distinct margin. Hunh.

I’m a little surprised thieves were behind (73s). Maybe hard to backstab him against the wall? Too much time spent trying not to die? Both? They didn’t shine in this little experiment, in any case. Necros came in at 118s. Engineers managed a 69s run. That puts Warriors pretty much dead center in the middle of the pack.

Edit: obviously against a boss who can’t be nuke-reflected as hard as Lupicus these numbers would likely be very different (particularly the Mesmer count, as Lupi just BLOWS UP when they feedback him), but hey, damage is damage.

The group stacking thing really is the main hindrance. Even if condition builds did comparable damage to berserker builds – even if they did MORE damage than berserker builds – in an isolated setting, they’d still suffer in group situations because of the cap issue. If condition builds were the way to go for optimum dps, you’d end up only being able to have one person running such a build in your party since having more than one would start overlapping damage sources that don’t efficiently stack, holding back the group as a whole even if the builds individually would be superior.

Just doesn’t work out in condi’s favor. Which sucks, as I like DoT mechanics and often prefer classes who favor them in MMORPGs. I’d be running s/s on my warrior all the time if I could, but it just…doesn’t hold up compared to better options.

(That said, I’m on condi crew for wurm all the time to get my DoT fix in. )

Dean Calaway.9718:

Really? No offence but that kind of warrior is the type that shouts for people in AC to stack for spider (even tough it doesn’t work anymore) then gets all frustrated and joins the fight in the open thinking “bunch of noobs” so he jumps on the spider like its a trash mob, no condi clear, no healing, no dodging, basically doing is normal rotation until he just dies.
Now he’s really mad, after all the only way he’s dead on the ground is because everyone else sucks because he’s playing “optimal”, he then uses his free time to complain in chat, possibly picking the lowest AP person and trying to kick that person.

Or, just like a Guardian did a few days ago in CE, come out with the remark “is everyone here under 500 AP?”
Never mind she had 2k while everyone else had 4k+, just because she died in the Alpha AoE because she can’t dodge, others are to blame, she was optimal!

Pretty sure you mean “that kind of PLAYER,” not warrior. Any class can be played by bad ragekids. For instance, the pug I joined last week which wiped on the spider queen twice (once on each path we did) and both times blamed one of the party’s elementalists for not dropping an FGS in time. The person crying loudest? Another elementalist. I, on my warrior, survived to kill the queen solo on one path and duo (another warrior also had the sense to get out of the poison) on the other.

Then I got kicked from the party for pointing out the guy who was crying so much could’ve just, y’know. Not died. Like we did.

Baddies come in all flavors.

Except that /team exists in wvw and pvp most likely by communicating to friendly players on the map. In a pve setting, all players on the map are friendly, regardless of which server they’re on, so I don’t think it’d be as easy as just enabling /team there.

Zaxares.5419:

Tip: Don’t join groups that have AP requirements. Those groups usually end up failing miserably.

While I haven’t found the second part of this post to be true, I’d endorse the first.

Those LFG ads that state 4k+ AP required? Idiots at the helm.

Dual.8953:

I’m sorry. I had to start laughing when you said warrior’s have the best DPS. Do Elementalists, Thieves and Guardians not exist now?
Eles make Warriors look like pillow fighters with their Staff and Conjures.

This, at least in part. I don’t know how they compare to Thieves, and I’m skeptical about Guardians outdamaging Warriors 1 for 1, but NOTHING wrecks as hard as an Elementalist whose target is shoved into a corner. Not even close.

Personally, I’m really enjoying my Warrior all the same. I started with Thief, played pretty much nothing but Thief for a long time – dabbled in other classes but never really liked them (and re-grinding through the same content hurts my soul). When I started playing again a couple months ago, though, I was determined to level up some other class and just rode the EotM karma train for the last 30 levels or so to get it over with faster and, well…I just like the overall usefulness of the class. They don’t have a lot of the niche tricks you need for some things – no big reflects or absorbs, no healbombs, no real manipulative options, just effective damage and group support.

Honestly the class feels, in some ways, as much like a Bard as a Warrior: yeah, you bring some solid damage and you’re sturdy, but you also bring a bunch of buff options to fill out the rest of your party and make everyone more effective. Are you the best at it? Eh, probably not, depending on context, but there aren’t a lot of situations where you look at a task and think, “Well, I definitely don’t want a warrior’s help with this.”

I’m rambling. All I’m trying to say: Warriors are useful and have more to offer than just DEEPS all the time, but they’re far from being the be-all, end-all of the game. If I didn’t loathe the level grind so much I’d be working on a Guardian and a Mesmer right now to fill those gaps my Warrior can’t. And maybe an Ele, but eh. Ehhh. Maybe.

MikaHR.1978:

Not much worse=better. Its kinda definition of the word.

Uh…no. No, that statement is completely false.

Not much worse = worse, just not much worse.

Better = better.

Fungalfoot.7213:

That you’d actually argue that playing the trading post and playing the game are both equally disinteresting propositions says a whole lot about the current state of things. Not that I’m disagreeing, mind you.

That’s actually not what I said at all. I said that I, as a third party, am equally disinterested in how the two of you (Fungalfoot and Smooth Penguin) get your legendaries. That you feel yours has a “story” and his doesn’t doesn’t matter to me because your story is only interesting to you.

My first experience with a quest for legendary weapons in an MMO was the class legendaries from Everquest, involving an inane list of fetch quests that generally culminated in not one but a series of raid-required dragon kills for loot that wasn’t guaranteed to drop in raids that weren’t instanced, meaning you had to get into a guild that hit them when they respawned on their one-week timer to even have a chance at a chance of getting the thing you wanted, and it certainly didn’t feel like an effort you yourself were putting in to accomplish much.

Frankly, I don’t see GW2’s model as being much worse in terms of difficulty or obnoxiousness for acquiring legendaries. It’s just a more naked, overt grind with gold involved rather than a social media grind of getting in good with the right people on your server to be allowed to join the right raids when you needed them.

tl;dr – MMOs are not where you should look for your legendary story quests. They are almost universally bad at delivering that experience.

Fungalfoot.7213:

It gives the object a story to it. Would Excalibur truly be worthy of legend had Arthur bought it from the local blacksmith?

You think it’s more interesting because someone gave it to him instead of his having to buy it? Either way he didn’t find it in a loot bag himself. Someone handed it to him.

Unless you’re going with one of the varieties of King Arthur story in which the sword in the stone and Excalibur are considered to be the same sword (which is not always true), in which case you’re saying it’s more interesting that he was the only person who could pull a sword out of a rock instead of being the only merchant shrewd enough to buy the most unique sword on the market amidst heavy competition.

You’re arguing a point of view. For you it might be true, but that doesn’t make it objectively so. I care equally little about how much you farmed a dungeon to get your sword as I do about how much flipping Penguin did to buy his. They’re equally disinteresting to me; the end result and what you do with it matters far more, from my perspective.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Paying a high price for a limited edition Murakami Louis Vuitton bag that no one else in your city has, doesn’t cheapen it. Just as paying 2500 Gold for an item from the TP that’s ultra rare. It’s a status symbol that shows you own something that very few have. Whether you found it or paid for it, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you own it.

But that is no longer about being special. That’s just about flaunting affluence. Unless you sincerely believe that having a lot of money somehow makes you a more interesting and special person?

And at the end of the day it’s just a bag. There is no story to it and it has no real meaning beyond the price tag somebody slapped on it. It’s not like you beat down the doors of a vampire castle and staked its master for it or anything. It’s just a bag. A bag you bought.

So having tons of virtual gold doesn’t make you an interesting and special person, but winning a virtual sword from playing a game does?

I don’t particularly like the way the wealth seems to be currently balanced and prioritized in GW2’s market, but your argument here is nonsensical. At the end of the day beating down the fictional doors of a non-existent vampire castle to stake its master – as is being done by thousands of other players in the same game at the same time – has no “real” meaning either.

mtpelion.4562:

Megis.9264:

Only because a few people manipulate it up to those prices.

They haven’t manipulated anything, they have bought and sold goods at prices that other players were happy to receive and spend.

The fact that those prices were higher than what you can afford is not manipulation, it is a result of supply and demand.

Not exactly.

It’s not a result of supply and demand with regard to the items being flipped. It’s a result of the supply of gold being highly imbalanced, making gold itself less valuable to those who have more of it, if that makes sense.

The flippers aren’t listing buy/sell orders for 1300/2500g (in this example) because that’s what the market has determined the item is worth; they’re doing it because they can, regardless of whatever the item’s value might be. And why can they do this?

Because of their previous successful speculation.

It’s a cyclical problem that keeps a minority of the playerbase isolated from the majority; they’re operating on two completely separate scales of supply and demand.

Avead.5760:

Well he is a memser ..He doesnt need to press skills to do damage he has phantasms and kitten :P
Very good and informative video but very poor sound

Sure, but he was giving advice in an all-classes way at times as well. Maybe he can do some free damage just by jumping around, but the warrior he was advising to jump up on the rocks at the quarry probably doesn’t.

It’s nitpicking, but…most of this isn’t about kiting. Unless you’re playing a class that can keep up some kind of consistent damage while you’re ninja-flipping around the rocks, this is mostly a video about how to effectively run away. Running away, by itself, isn’t kiting. For instance, in the bit where you were demonstrating how to escape the guardian pounding on your face, you did a great job of getting away from him…but not so much hurting him in the process.

Kiting is offensive retreating, not just retreating.

Still, nice video for showing some good parkour spots.

timmyf.1490:

First, to nitpick…
As far as what it’s missing, it depends on the person. My friends left because there was no obvious gear treadmill. They went back to Rift. I don’t get it – they always complain that “X MMO we are playing is sooooo grindy” but they quit GW2 because it wasn’t grindy enough.

It’s not that it’s not grindy enough; there’s way too much grind in GW2 for any endgame target (given the “endgame targets” consist of legendaries, ascended gear and WvW/PvP achievements/rank, pretty much).

It’s that there’s nothing meaningful to do. Key word there: meaningful. There’s a lot of things you can do in GW2, and that’s great! Y’know. Until you’ve done them. And then…well. Why would you keep doing them? You’ve figured out that annoying jumping puzzle. You’ve killed everything involved in these world events (likely several times while leveling up). You’ve done a couple circuits on the WvW maps. Unless you’re a competitive player who’s into PvP, what else is there to do at that point?

Answer: not a whole lot. You could RP if you want, sure, but you can do that anywhere; it’s not really part of the game (and the tiny chat buffer sucks for it). Living Story additions just emphasize this problem rather than alleviate it, I’d say, since when one of them pops up you’re drawn back to areas you’ve already done many times over and given an opportunity to marvel at how very little has changed except for this one tiny sliver where something new was dropped on top of all the old, having minimal impact if any.

The exception, of course, is the recent business with Lion’s Arch. Or, rather, that would be the exception if it really had any impact beyond the run between portals and bank/TP in the main “hub” city more convenient since they’re now closer together. Beyond LA itself that tremendous event seems to have done…next to nothing, at least that I’ve noticed. That was a major city! Where are the refugees? Why hasn’t the world economy seen significant impact? How can one of the largest hubs of activity in the world have been blown apart without world-spanning effects?

That’s easy: it happened in Guild Wars 2.

Oh, well, nevermind then, of course nothing would change in that case.

I went off on a tangent. tl;dr – GW2 has grind, just not the right kind, nor an appealing setup for it.

If the fight didn’t have so much RNG attached to it I’d have been less frustrated trying to beat Liadri.

My build’s not optimal for solo work against high-health targets or surviving consistent damage, fine, I can work around that. I can rebuild and deal with stat-related challenges. Fine. But the RNG of where the light wells and phantoms appear relative to where the AE pie-slices and pull-orbs appear (as well as the RNG of whether I’ll even be able to hit an orb to rally or whether it will just spam OBSTRUCTED OBSTRUCTED, whee) making the length of the first phase anywhere from “reasonable” to “impractically protracted” and, worst of all, the blind effect. I can’t tell what causes it, sometimes it happens rapidly, sometimes just once in a blue moon (pretty sure I got the blind color smear effect about three times in 40 seconds on one attempt), and it makes it impossible to deal with the rest of the fight when you’re randomly unable to see anything.

No. It’s not that the fight is too hard to beat. It’s that the fight just isn’t fun. It’s a dome full of luck-based gimmicks that have no margin for error (or for lag, which is a whole other ball of wax) and, while I’m sure that’s fun for some people, it’s just not for me.

It’s particularly disappointing as I was looking forward to this event when I read about it. Events that are intended to be solo challenges in games like this are pretty much my favorite thing. Then I find out it’s not really much of a combat challenge at all; it’s basically the combat version of a jumping puzzle. Which is to say, gimmicky, awkward, unsatisfying and not particularly skill-based.