Guild Wars 2

Mikuchan.7261:

Basically they went on a journey to the the park with a bunch of guys where they were supposed to walk. They however took a car instead just to get there first and now they’re complaining that people aren’t there yet to play with them.

God, how unbelievably broken they system must be if “playing with your buddies” is an unpardonable offense.

style.6173:

Go ahead and tell me that you think this is a DPS meta. It is not. It is all about sustain.

I think you guys are talking about completely different things. A lot of people are learning how to really play their classes and are realizing how fast you can get skills to come out when you do it in the right order. Things like that are satisfying to pull off on a player level, but they are terrible for spectators.

This is a game of big splashy particle effects attached to meaningless abilities and little to no animation for quite a few of the things that actually down people…

Crossaber.8934:

Salute to the design concept, can’t wait to try Daredevil.

Impacting Disruption:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bthNfim8vCA

:)

Eponet.4829:

Silentsins.3726:

Eponet.4829:

Silentsins.3726:

Eponet.4829:

Rauderi.8706:

B-But a timed dodge is skillful play. >>
Conversely, should a player be rewarded for _wasting a dodge?

I’m not going to say yes or no just yet, but it’s the inverse question that’s necessary to ask.

And no, I’m not one of those elitists or tryhards. I suck at dodging. I ‘waste’ them all the time. :P

Why is it more skillful to dodge at the last moment, and thus being in your dodge animation when they arrive, rather than say, predicting your opponent’s gap closing attack at range, and dodging out of its reach early so that you’re free to attack while they’re animation locked?

Learning the skill animations and understanding where the small window to get an evade is absolutely more skillful than hitting your dodge button in reaction to the wind-up. The former requires an understanding of mechanics while the latter is just a reaction to your opponent moving.

It’s hardly a small window, it’s a simple twitch based reaction to when you’re going to be hit. It barely impacts people who just hit dodge when they see an attack.

Predicting the opponent so that you can maneuver into the optimal position with the right timing to punish their mistake requires far more experience fighting against opponents of each class than just seeing the attack and pressing dodge (Assuming you don’t have high latency)

The change is like modern fencing, where it’s pushing a single aspect (touching your opponent first in the analogy, getting an evade marker in this case) rather than what the actual objective should be (A reasonable representation of killing your opponent without getting killed yourself in the analogy, killing your opponent’s character in this case.)

Shrug I’ve been running Kinetic Battery on my enge for quite a while now. At first it was hard to get the trait to proc, but it’s a regular part of play now.

Besides, if there’s already a “large window” to get these traits to go off, why make it easier?

It’s not about whether or not it’s easy.

It’s about the fact that it punishes skillful play.

If you dodge out of the way, that’s time spent dodging that you could have otherwise spent attacking your opponent while they’re vulnerable if you had gotten out of the way before the attack happened.

I prefer to view it as emphasizing one aspect of skillful play over another, which is fine for a specialization, no? I never suggested that there wouldn’t be an element of sacrifice as you re-prioritize when and how you dodge, but what’s the point of a new spec if it doesn’t make you play differently?

I’m not suggesting that it’s a skill cap issue either. I’m saying that you guys sound like me a couple months ago when I first saw kinetic battery :p. I believe that this mechanic is one of those things that an average player will be able to get, given time. I did, and that’s on a class without NEARLY as many evade frames as my Teef. Keep in mind that this trait line looks to be tied to a specific weapon with an indeterminate amount of built-in dodges…

I like the mechanic. Don’t knock it until you try it.

Eponet.4829:

Silentsins.3726:

Eponet.4829:

Rauderi.8706:

B-But a timed dodge is skillful play. >>
Conversely, should a player be rewarded for _wasting a dodge?

I’m not going to say yes or no just yet, but it’s the inverse question that’s necessary to ask.

And no, I’m not one of those elitists or tryhards. I suck at dodging. I ‘waste’ them all the time. :P

Why is it more skillful to dodge at the last moment, and thus being in your dodge animation when they arrive, rather than say, predicting your opponent’s gap closing attack at range, and dodging out of its reach early so that you’re free to attack while they’re animation locked?

Learning the skill animations and understanding where the small window to get an evade is absolutely more skillful than hitting your dodge button in reaction to the wind-up. The former requires an understanding of mechanics while the latter is just a reaction to your opponent moving.

It’s hardly a small window, it’s a simple twitch based reaction to when you’re going to be hit. It barely impacts people who just hit dodge when they see an attack.

Predicting the opponent so that you can maneuver into the optimal position with the right timing to punish their mistake requires far more experience fighting against opponents of each class than just seeing the attack and pressing dodge (Assuming you don’t have high latency)

The change is like modern fencing, where it’s pushing a single aspect (touching your opponent first in the analogy, getting an evade marker in this case) rather than what the actual objective should be (A reasonable representation of killing your opponent without getting killed yourself in the analogy, killing your opponent’s character in this case.)

Shrug I’ve been running Kinetic Battery on my enge for quite a while now. At first it was hard to get the trait to proc, but it’s a regular part of play now.

Besides, if there’s already a “large window” to get these traits to go off, why make it easier?

Teutos.8620:

A free core game would first of mean a bigger player base (only time will show how much it will grow tho). This is definitely the most most important thing we currently need (on second place is the upcoming league system).

Possible problems:

• Using multiple accounts just for the daily login reward to make money. (general problem, not pvp specific).

• Bigger community means more toxicity. Banned for a few hours on one account? Well, let’s just play on my second! (I hope ArenaNet will handle that.)

Question for the community:
How do you think, those f2p-players will feel about being locked out of playing parts of the profession (specifically the elite-specializations)? Should there be a system in place, that they can unlock the elite-specializations through gems (and therefore through ingame currency gold)?

They’ll probably put HoT in the BL like they did with the deluxe edition of the base game, so it should technically be available for gold as well.

Are you suggesting that the elite-specs should be sold a la carte? I wouldn’t buy something like that if I were new to the game (I’d just spring for the package deal), but there’s ALWAYS people who prefer having the option to focus on one class…

Eponet.4829:

Rauderi.8706:

B-But a timed dodge is skillful play. >>
Conversely, should a player be rewarded for _wasting a dodge?

I’m not going to say yes or no just yet, but it’s the inverse question that’s necessary to ask.

And no, I’m not one of those elitists or tryhards. I suck at dodging. I ‘waste’ them all the time. :P

Why is it more skillful to dodge at the last moment, and thus being in your dodge animation when they arrive, rather than say, predicting your opponent’s gap closing attack at range, and dodging out of its reach early so that you’re free to attack while they’re animation locked?

Learning the skill animations and understanding where the small window to get an evade is absolutely more skillful than hitting your dodge button in reaction to the wind-up. The former requires an understanding of mechanics while the latter is just a reaction to your opponent moving.

The F2P revolution is finally taking it’s toll, I feel.

There is LITERALLY more free gaming than any single person could enjoy in a lifetime at this point.

Ralanost.8913:

I will say this. I would buy the parts I’m missing of Season 2 LS if I could actually play through LS S1.

They should do a re-run of the first season (maybe both?) leading right up to the expansion release. Man, that’d be sweet.

Do a recolor of all the related limited edition gear/wardrobe/pets/ect. for a second sell-through in the tp and a second run-through of events/dungeons. They’d get business from both players that missed the events and completionists that would want both versions, and they’d be able to preserve the “rarity” of the original versions at the same time. A win all around.

Beldin.5498:

Silentsins.3726:

I’m a big fan of water combat and I hate to see it go. I feel that it’s getting a bad rap due to the inconsistent implementation. Hopefully, they can revisit water combat in the future and give it the attention it needs in order to thrive.

Do you know any MMO with good underwater combat ? I remember in EQ2 it
was horrible especially as thief classes wo needed to use stuns and then get
behind mobs .. what simply didn’t work under water.

In Champions Online, that had maybe the best underwater combat imho, since it
was exactly like fighting when flying on land, even there most players totally hated
the underwater zone Lemuria.

And in GW2 i think the whole slow movement problem underwater will always
be a problem .. much as the problem with thieves in EQ2.

This game had the best underwater combat so far imo, since most MMOs I played had it as an afterthought if you could even get underwater at all.

The slow pace of water combat IS something that a lot of people didn’t like, but it’s also something that they could do away with, if they chose to. If my character has access to a molten jetpack and a mechanical rebreather then a personal propulsion system is not farfetched.

One thing that seems like one real problem is getting combo fields to work in 3d, because positional requirements.

Your question caught me off guard It got me thinking though: Isn’t it strange that flight is highly requested across MMOs and underwater is almost equally hated, yet they’re so mechanically similar in a lot of games?

Azala Yar.7693:

If anything it’s more a class balance issue than an underwater is broken issue.

You’re right that it’s a class issue in that almost every single class would need some form of overhaul to really integrate water combat into something that makes sense for at least the majority of builds for each class… but the difference seems pretty academic to me.

It seems to me that the devs couldn’t decide if water combat should be entirely it’s own thing with it’s own weapons/traits/spec or just smaller part of the character’s “main” spec, and they just did an awkward hybrid of the two.

If the devs had made water combat the same as overland combat except with another axis, water combat would not be broken.

If the devs had made an entire set of traits/gear/ect exclusively for water combat and they took the time to properly introduce these features, water combat would not be broken (but there would be more stuff for a player to figure out).

I’m a big fan of water combat and I hate to see it go. I feel that it’s getting a bad rap due to the inconsistent implementation. Hopefully, they can revisit water combat in the future and give it the attention it needs in order to thrive.

Cynz.9437:

Udai.7805:

All I see is tears from people who prefer crying over trying to counterplay better & trying to adjust to the metagame and wish to be competitive but fail at doing so.

not everyone enjoys hybrid tank staring at hybrid tank for 15 min playstyle, punching dummy is probably more exciting than current gameplay… except meta forces you into that garbage

Bruiser builds exist because this is a tab target game. Tab target means that there will ALWAYS be free white damage and auto tracking skills, which also means that there will be discrepancies between classes that can do large ranged damage vs those that can’t, classes that can break targeting vs those that don’t, ect.

VIRTUALLY EVERY TAB TARGET BASED GAME, THE PVP STAT IS A SURVIVABILITY STAT (WoW= resilience, SWOTR = Expertiese, Rift = pvp tree full of defense, Aion, LoTRO, ect.).

2,3,and 5 are very much what is broken.

2. Quite a few of the best burst combos in the game auto-face the character for you, gap close, and track (thief steal, mez shatter, ect.).

3. Int and battle sigils are the REAL backbone for the bruiser builds. Without those 2, no one is dying to 25% crit/1800 power/condi damage. I’m astounded that int sigil was actually BUFFED in the same patch as the sigil changes. No one’s complaining about these because they’re “fun”, and people are calling for a more offensive meta, but they’re the real problem.

5 needs little explanation at this point. The op nailed it.

Everyone is asking for a more bursty meta, but every offensive meta we’ve had so far have been broken as hell. Bruiser builds are a step in the right direction, and I feel that this would be made clear if they removes a lot of the procs/passive cheese from the game.

CalamityO.2890:

chemiclord.3978:

One part that WAS a handy improvement was the weapon skill unlocking. Yeah, for all the spite it received, getting to level 10 and having ALL weapon skills unlocked for ALL weapons at that point… I liked that. No more having to grind through every weapon. So yeah… the haters are wrong here. Sorry guys. This way is better.

^ This. As experienced / vets – weapon skills should be second nature as to what they do (alts should be loving this). This is literally cruise control for the experienced / vet. I really don’t understand why they are heavily against this. It makes less work for the exp / vet players. They should be using it to their advantage.

As another poster stated, the NPE does need some adjustments to make it more palatable for everyone.

Eh, they just changed it to how other MMOs do it already by tying skill unlocks to levels. The difference is that other MMOs give you at least 2-4 skills immediately, while we’re stuck spamming 1 through the intro… bleh. That’s 10 minutes just running around letting the autoattack kill things for you, 20 (ish? dunno how long it takes a completely new person to hit level 4) with essentially 1 button to press, then however long with 2 buttons to press… that seems really, really boring.

As a vet I have no problems with the changes, but a new player gets dropped in a blank map with no idea what everything does, and the intro literally gives zero direction as to what to do next. Are new players supposed to just wander the map aimlessly for 10 levels? How 1999.

Holding off the second chapter of the living story until level 10 makes absolutely no sense, ESPECIALLY since the next couple chapters also doubled as tutorials. Early game is all about introducing players to key concepts and mechanics. The living story is supposed to be one of the major features in this game… but ANet is making new players wander around for at least an hour before they see chapter 2. I can’t see any logical reasons for a complete lack of goals in the early game when most other single player and multiplayer games are designed with a more guided early experience, including THIS one before these changes.

If the reasons for gating the story are because of key farmers, then they should’ve gated the story chapter that awards the key to level 10, since it was several chapters in… problem solved.

Reverence.6915:

The cursor disappears when you right click. Just letting you guys know

Both left and right click. A REAL annoyance for mouse turners. To the devs: could we have the option to keep the cursor visible on mouse click?

nearlight.3064:

I mostly wish we had a better idea of the direction this game is going in, since there really hasn’t been much since the wardrobe quality of life update. And its frustrating when so much isn’t really known.

Rezz.8019:

This game favours tanky builds with a lot of damage right now.
Hambows that is.

MMOs as a whole favor tanky builds, thanks to tab targeting. That’s why MMO pvp gear/traits/ect. tend to be sustain.

Most of the skill in this game is in the avoiding of damage, not in the executing of it imo, and there’s a few builds that trivialize even that (dodge and stealth specs, mostly; perma-vigor, ect).

I’ll just leave this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3y62pCQs-Y

Holy trinity will never happen for this game. What this game needs is a full realization of the original vision.

Incurafy.6329:

I honestly do want to go back to the days of four burst and one bunker, it was the most enjoyable meta imo thanks to the twitch gameplay and skill involved in avoiding a burst combo or three.

There was skill involved in avoiding burst combos, true, but there was a massive imbalance between how much effort was involved in avoiding and executing these combos. Quite a few burst combos in this game have auto-facing, auto-tracking, and even gap closing properties— a common trait in tab-target based games. That’s a big reason why a large number of MMOs have a special pvp stat that happens to be survivability based: between pve scaling and basic mechanics, there’s always a lot of “free” damage coming out of your character that can easily be the deciding factor in matches instead of skill.

There’s a huge difference between the above and MOBAs/FPS games where you have to “earn” your burst damage since actual aiming is involved.

Personally, I don’t have any particular preference between a more bursty game style and games with an overall slower time-to-kill as long as it’s done fairly; I’ve enjoyed and done well at both styles of play. That being said, I feel that the previous burst meta was as dysfunctional as the current one.

I’d like to see more skill shots and clearer tells in the game weather the dev team goes more towards twitch style gameplay or a comparatively slower paced MMO model.

@ the OP: As you said already, middle-of-the-road kinda tanky kinda DPSy builds are already the dominant force in the meta right now, and most of the buffs/nerfs seem to be moving even further in that direction. I wouldn’t worry too much, if bruisers are your cup of tea…

Immensus.9732:

im not sure about that, the only problem is that people use overflow to do them, and instances will solve the problem of getting DC and then not being able to get back in again

People use overflow in order to get an exclusive instance for the people that they want to play with with minimal interference from people going afk near the event who increase scaling without contributing; and other undesirables…
It’s kind of telling that the groups that have any reasonable chance to complete these events are circumventing the system in order to create and “instance-like” environment, is it not?

Rezzet.3614:

Palador.2170:

Rezzet.3614:

the lack of “Collision” is proof the playerbase chose to be able to move through units as it shows they disabled the Melee Assist box which does exactly what you want = stop players from running through others

Wait… what? There is such an option? Did I turn that off when I started? (I had someone tell me “disable this, enable that” to make the game more playable right at the start.)

Anyway… I don’t think collision is the way to deal with stacking. I have my own idea on how to solve it, but I think it would horrify most people if ANet did it. (“Most people” includes the ANet Devs.)

always been an option

Mhm… It’s pretty amusing seeing all these people say “there’s no way that it will be done” when it’s already in the game, eh?

For those who haven’t used it before:
-It makes it so that ANY hostile you have targeted obeys collision rules, even other players who don’t have the option selected (which is pretty funny when someone tries to run through you in PvP and gets confused).
-Any target you don’t have selected can pass through you normally, and you can pass through them.
-If the target selected is a player, they can still dodge through you normally.

The tactical value of the current implementation is actually somewhat high while the risk for abuse is pretty low, since frendlies can’t body block you (or grief you in LA) and even enemies can still be dodged through, yet it’s possible to do GW1 style pulls in group content similar to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8NgsqRolAk&list=LLROrad6zXswzD1A3G3tbXZw
except in a more limited fashion… you simply let a ranged squishy drop a long range AOE and send in the melee to cleave down the mobs that uselessly try to run through them. The ranged puller then dodges back and forth through the melee to keep the mobs nice and balled up… That being said, it’s tougher to pull it off in this game than GW1 and not really needed for most content though…

I believe that the potential for abuse is actually the least of the concerns though, the bigger issue is that collision mechanics are pretty resource heavy. WvW already has lag issues with big crowds, I wouldn’t want to see what happens when two zergs run into each other when every player has this option selected…

lordhelmos.7623:

Geff.1930:

As a MOBA player I can tell you that this game will not be as balanced and as competitive as esport games unless the devs redesign the game’s systems from the ground up with a focus on balance. That will not happen because a large portion of GW2’s players are mmorpg players not moba players, they are accustomed to a high level of customization and a low level of balance. By contrast moba players are accustomed to a low level of customization and a high level of balance.

Balance and customization cannot co-exist, they have an inverse relationship with eachother. Moba games have many heroes/champions/gods but each individual hero has a limited pool of capabilities. Itemization provides low customizability, but the base capabilities remain intact. Furthermore, each hero has a access to much fewer active skill CDs at any given time. This encourages strategic use of CDs and not “wasting” CDs and making yourself vulnerable. But, at same the time each CD is much more impactful and can change the team fight dynamics extensively if used properly.

Health is a much more valueable resource in mobas because of the lack of access to heals, lack of a downed state and low access to damage immunity from dodges/invul/block. This encourages very strategic play and heavy consideration about positioning.

By contrast you have GW2 where a majority of skills are macro spammed when they come off cooldown. You get hurt, but you heal back up reducing the impact of any damage you have taken.

The two factors of spamminess and high sustain feed off eachother. You have high sustain, therefore players have to throw a slew of non-stop CDs at you. You have a slew of non-stop CDs therefore players have to have high sustain.

Mmo players should be familiar with this setup, but by no means is this e-sport material. Again, given that a large portion of GW2 playerbase is made up of mmorpg players this makes sense.

To obtain balance Guildwars needs to simplify. Distinct roles, tells for high powered skills, a limited pool of abilities to choose from.

MMO players require a high level of customization, more skills, and a large number of stats to crunch. Without this they get bored easily.

I think the MMO nature of Guildwars and ESports are at odds with each other.

I’m glad that I came to the thread and a couple people had already said what I’d planned to, but better.

I feel that while it’s perfectly possible for the devs to create fun and competitively interesting PvP in GW2, it’s specifically the watchability for spectators that’s at odds with the “MMO nature” of the game. Closest example that I can think of is Smite, a MOBA with an MMO style hotbar and 3rd person view. Despite every character being limited to 4 skills, an auto-attack, and 2 actives (all of them have to be aimed, including the autos. No tab-targeting.), it STILL gets somewhat hard to follow as a spectator during the team fights. Since each character in GW2 has 15+ skills, runes and sigils that occasionally have their own animations/attacks, ect. There’s a hard upper limit on how visually uncluttered the devs can make the game without removing vital tells that players need just to know what skill is being used against them.

The problem that I see is that saying “GW2 needs to simplify” is easier said than done. If anything, there’s a bunch aspects where I feel that GW2 needs to get MORE visually complex in order to be fulfilling on a competitive level; skills such as Necro staff 2-5, the entirety of the Enge’s Bomb and ‘Nade kit skills, the ele’s diamond skin, ect. should have more distinct animations so players have a better idea of what to react to… but that is at odds with making the game more visually clean so that spectators have an easy time watching.

I started out with high expectations, but at this point, I’m skeptical that E-sports can be done justice on an MMO platform, for reasons you guys already covered.

Forestnator.6298:

This my friend, is a PvP discussion. Ostrichegg – the OP – is a high rank pvp mate which you can’t know because I never saw you in PvP. Also his build is a PvP build as you can see it is geared with PvP gear.

To be fair, the entire thread started out as a discussion about runes of speed, and power shoes is the exact same thing in trait form.

While I feel that there’s little contest in 30 alch > 30 tools, 20 alch vs 20 tools is a more interesting discussion since Protective Shield/Stabilized Armor + Automated Medical response is comparable survivability to almost anything 20 alch can give you, and 200 toughness + healing power let you go from Rabid ammy to Rampager’s for better game against Diamond Skin/Automated response.

As a theorycraft, a build like this for example:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqelIq6ZHxSfF1LJSIFF29BqQ9JqQ+95hcxWQIA-TsAg1CqI+S9l7LzXyvsfN844xcBA
Has a similar level of survivability and damage as pre-nerf builds. While I’d hesitate to say that it’s better than the builds already shown, there’s definitely enough positives for serious consideration. I find that you lose quite a bit of chasing poweer with runes of speed/power shoes, so I still like bombs and Elixir S toss for escapes (and all the other adept explosive traits are poopie). Necro runes still because of condi duration. Pistols because not enough power for rifle. The build is tanky enough to survive necro condi bursts and thief backstabs, and most condi bunkers are favorable. Tanky warriors with Clensing Ire feel like they are playing with a freaking cheat code against you since their toughness counters your power and they can still beat your condis by spamming burst skills.

Then again, builds like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fcAQJAqalIq6dHxy5F1LJy4DcWIFF29BWwnHvFbBhA-TsAg1CqI0SplTLjWStsaNE5IycBA
are simply a BLAST to fool around with.

To O-Eggs: have you given modified ammunition a shot yet? You figure, the build already has the trait point spread for it…

A.E.D. Needs moar stability.

Is the toolbelt skill instant? If so, has potential.

Delryn.7235:

People hate on “busywork” so much but those small things add to the experience. If a game has only one thing for you to do through out its entirety then something that would be considered epic will end up being mundane and possibly boring if everything you do is just more of the same “epic”.

If the game had just events it would be even worse off than it is today. The hearts though some tedious manage to add to the experience. They’re used as a mean of breaking up the repetitiveness of the game.

They break up repetitiveness by… adding repetitiveness? That seems off-base. I see busywork as a cheep way to pad game hours while filling up the xp bar; it’s a way to add rewards to the game on a relatively fixed interval since that tends to be highly addictive on a psychological level (what I like to call “The Ding”). Quests/hearts simply give you a reason and reward for killing those 10 rats when you’ve been killing stuff all game, or to pick those flowers that have a unique graphic but are mechanically the same as all the other clickable widgets throughout the world. I can get on board with the idea that hearts aren’t rewarding enough and don’t “flow” very well in terms of story, and that’s the reason that I tend to skip them.

One thing that quests really do well that simply can’t be repeated with hearts is the environmental object type of quest where you get a new set of skills (like http://www.wowhead.com/quest=10347 since these types of quests are basically mini-games). There are a lot of hearts that allow you to use special environmental weapons to complete the requirements, but the devs stated that they didn’t want people to be running around the map with these things instead of using their regular skills, so they neutered their power and thereby killed the specialness of these types of events. The power level of environmental objects tends to be much less of a concern in a quest type of structure since they can much more easily leash off the area that you can use the objects or take it away when you turn in the quest, while the free-form structure of hearts makes it so that these objects need to be more readily available. I wish they’d change their design philosophy on these types of objects, since their worthlessness kills all the fun of using them in the first place.

Stooperdale.3560:

These hidden ‘quests’ are in the original design. Nearly all the jumping puzzles are hidden. They are probably too hard to find and most players would have missed them entirely if there were no achievements and net spoilers. There are also mini dungeons that can be completed solo or with a friend. They don’t have a big alert in the top of the screen saying “Quest here! Do it now! Do not ignore this message!” but they are in the game. Some of the open world events also tell short stories and take players into little adventures that do substitute nicely for quests.

Also worth mentioning: the explorable achieves. Everything you mentioned + explorables seem to be exactly like what the OP is talking about with hidden areas. I enjoyed finding these, so I wouldn’t complain if the devs added more to the game…

Delryn.7235:

When you hear the word quest you think “oh no I don’t wanna start running around killing 10 wolves”, when in reality that’s not what quest means, that’s just busywork. We already have busywork in the game – it’s called hearts and events.

I happen to really like events, and feel that they are a definite upgrade to traditional quests. I only have 2 complaints about them, really. One is how linear most event chains are since success or failure are often the only 2 things that determine the next event in the chain instead of having multiple possible objectives within the events themselves, and the other is that most NPCs tend to be oblivious to events just around the corner except for the ones that run up to you and tell you that an event is going on.

Not a fan of hearts, since I see them as the exact type of “kill 10 rats” type of thing that makes the traditional quest structure so tedious. I guess it’s pretty tough to pad out an MMO without this kind of busywork somewhere in there however… I tended to skip most of the hearts on my alts though.

Bump for guildie

Xae Isareth.1364:

Not really. Claw of Jormag can drop both the Breath of Jormag, which is quite expensive to craft, and precursors. I barely see anyone bothering with him.

And they can simply make Tequatl’s unique Ascended skin cost something like 100 kills of Tequatl.

I’m not sure a direct comparison can be made at all. EVERY change to Jormag has only served to make the fight longer and less rewarding — nothing new has been added to that fight in the slightest.

If the fight mechanics are genuinely compelling, people like me will be willing to run it regardless of rewards. That, + people seeking the unique skins should keep the completion popping for a while. Aside from that, NO content is popular forever, and it would be silly to expect it to be so.

Eh, as implemented, it just looks like people are going to be salvaging greens and blues for a short time before ignoring them completely all over again. I don’t see it as a grind as much as a minor distraction. Seems like a bit of a waste, since it adds nothing to the game except for a little bit of busy work.

I wonder if low level gear will be dropping MF motes on salvage as well. If so, I wouldn’t be surprised to see new players capped before they even hit 80.

TheDaiBish.9735:

I can’t say I fully agree with this statement.

I’d say it’s harder to, but the more players you have, the more aspects to the fight you add in order to keep the . This way everyone has to take note, the collective group has to organise, smaller groups are given their own roles ect.

It’s been tried. Many, many times. Even this game has the cannon in Teq, the portals for the shades in Balthy, ect… but they’re of limited relevance to the actual fight. This is open world content. Do they design it with guilds talking to each other on a voice chat in mind or an impromptu group? If the latter, how do you challenge the former? How vital do you make each individual role, when you don’t know how coordinated or experienced each group/individual member is going to be?

What about technical issues, can the lag caused by a big group make you fail the encounter (nothing sucked more than failing a Lilandri attempt in the pavilion thanks to the zerg down below causing a spike at a bad time)? Even old school open world bosses that were designed for cutting edge groups were limited to 3-4 attacks for this exact reason. You see the same out of Teq, Shatter, ect.

Open world content is never going to be as nuanced as a traditional raid, both due to technical reasons and because open world content is simply not a controlled environment.

Something similar to guild missions might be possible… but that in itself is somewhat gated off, which was the large part of my point to begin with. Also, even the current guild missions are relatively simple content.

Morrigan.2809:

That would be great- open world content that rewards some strategy- complicated event chains that rewards participation and has fail consequences.

I would laugh myself to death while cheering if they added open world content that wipes a zerg because it is a zerg.
Don’t know how that can be done- but boy it would be awesome to see.

There’s an upper limit to the complexity that they can give to open world bosses, for various reasons. This has been demonstrated in multiple games throughout the genre from EQ to WoW to Rift to this game, and countless others. Perhaps the most complex open world encounter that this game can muster is Bath temple, and that’s barely as involved as a first tier lair raid from just about any equivalent MMO. Without complexity and a demand for teamwork, the only way to increase challenge is through numbers, i.e. hit points, damage, ect. Is it a surprise that the end result is zergy?

I would love to see a GW2 version of Elite Areas, such as in GW1.

Been watching the gw2 twitch channel in the background at work and on down times on my phone for the last week or 2 http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2pvptv (They run continuous streams of players from top level teams), and the question of the state of the necro inevitably comes up quite often. Every single streamer so far, including the ones who play necro, have stated that necros are OP right now. Every. Single. One.

If the current best players in the game all agree on that necro is currently over the top, it MUST be a “L2P” issue. Obviously.

Sleuth.7964:

Silentsins.3726:

Support works perfectly fine in dungeons. Damage works perfectly fine in dungeons. It’s control that is broken, thanks to the defiant mechanic. That’s what the guy in the video stated, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

If support worked super fine then it would be needed to do fights not people killing the hardest boss in the game in 48 seconds with pure zerkers

You think that would actually be possible without shared buffs and heals? I’m not sure why you’re raising a point that has already been addressed both in the video and in the thread.

Support works perfectly fine in dungeons. Damage works perfectly fine in dungeons. It’s control that is broken, thanks to the defiant mechanic. That’s what the guy in the video stated, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Knote.2904:

You’re kidding me right?

Right now the easiest, most mindless activity in the game POSSIBLE is the most rewarding, how is that combating bots?

Anyone can technically bot with this, I can go afk with auto attack on and get loot.

Simple, bots function by running a very specific path and performing a small range of scripted actions. Not only do the maps change every hour for this event, but you have the event circles being completed at different times by different groups, ect., meaning that there is no “set path” to run.

I suppose you could AFK for the rewards at the end… it would be a stretch to call that the most profitable use of your time though.

Knote.2904:

darkace.8925:

Knote.2904:

darkace.8925:

It seems to me ArenaNet is approaching (or already at) a crossroads. They’re going to have to decide whether they want to make the game they originally wanted to make (the game many of us signed on to play) or pander to the “MOAR LOOT!” crowd. I honestly don’t see how they’re going to be able to do both. One glance at the new Achievements overlay they just added to our character select screen tells me they’ve already made up their mind.

They can and SHOULD do both.

Easy, make everything in the game lucrative, just like they did for champion loot.

Then everyone can do whatever they want and still get money. And if someone wants to put in the effort to get extra amounts then they can do the more challenging stuff.

It doesn’t work that way. If everything is lucrative, then nothing is lucrative. Inflation is funny like that.

That’s my point, then there won’t be 1 or 2 boring things that’s the only way to make money and everyone can just do activities they find fun and “progress” in the economy.

My thought is that making everything lucrative doesn’t mesh well with the war on bots. Look at the latest batch of group events: Karka queen, Queen’s Pavilion, Scarlet Invasion; for us players, these aren’t any less “mindless” than running a large circle killing easy mobs, but the event locations and times are variable. The mobs actually kill people. Perhaps that makes it more difficult/impossible to bot.

That being said, I fail to understand why Orr Temple event completions aren’t much more lucrative than they are now.

Erasculio.2914:

Now, I’m sure everyone has realized what the true issue is. It’s not a matter of making less champions spawn (wasn’t the goal behind the champion loot to make more people play events, so more champions would spawn?). It’s not a matter of making a few champions to not drop loot, as done in the Jormag event.

ArenaNet has to remove the Champion loot boxes from the game, and give those rewards to events instead.

I don’t agree with your conclusions at all. That solution just gates the rewards behind another layer of time sink similar to dailies, affects other areas of the game, and would punish the people who are getting DCed.

I DO agree that the problem is that 2 differing playstyles are in conflict here, even though neither is more “right” than the other.

The more elegant solution would be to allow the mob kills to continue to progress the event.

ESKan.6782:

I don’t like how she graduated from all three colleges. For an asura, it is an incredibly important decision in his/her life which college to join, since it decides your entire future. And here we have Scarlet, without previous mention whatsoever, being possibly the first and only person to attend and GRADUATE from all three colleges. In record time, even.

If that isn’t Villain Sue, I don’t even

Agree completely. Killed my suspension of disbelief completely.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Though . . . there are compelling arguments for Thrawn also being a villain sue, this is not the place to debate that detail.

Thrawn is a Magnificent kitten… and a very good one, at that.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Magnificentkitten

Here’s what Xeph of team paradigm, the current top EU team, had to say about stealth in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Current-state-of-the-meta/2452809/quote

Xeph.4513:

Stealth, is another issue in this game and plays right into the same category, it’s just so difficult to punish, and there is no real other counter for stealth than another stealth, there is no intelligent play behind; it’s just a free “do what I want” card.
If there was a reveal mechanic or a way to counter it, then you would see a lot more intelligent play and thought process put behind stealthing, but at the current state of the game there just isn’t.

That sounds awfully similar to the OP’s comment.

joshisanonymous.5270:

The problem I had with visible ground targeting is not so much the extra time it took to press “1” again but the fact that I couldn’t remember how many times I had pressed the key for a grenade when I was in the thick of things. I’d be trying to throw a chill grenade then a bleeding grenade inbetween spamming the normal grenade and accidentally just target the first, without actually throwing it, before moving to the second. This can’t happen with fast-cast.

You can also fire off the grenade with left-click. There’s a bit of a rhythm to it, but it’s slightly faster than double-tapping 1 as well; it’s second nature for me now to fire off the grenades so fast that the green reticle doesn’t even show up most of the time. That way, I can still mouselook with right click and the aoe reticle is still there for those precision throws… only drawback is occasionally deselecting your target, but I use “call target” and “take target” to get around that.

Fast-cast definitely has it’s upsides, but 2 things are a deal breaker for me: this game has high particle effects, and the cursor disappears on mouselook. Me no like.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Just to clarify a bit, as Mike said there are numerous teams beyond our Living World teams, and some of them are working on much longer term projects which we’ll go into details on much further down the road.

It’s entirely possible some of the types of content which you might traditionally find in expansions would be released through an expansion in the future for Gw2, and it’s possible we’d try something different when it comes to integrating those type of releases.

We have no final plans one way or another about expansions at this time, and certainly haven’t ruled them out, it’s something we’ll discuss more in the future.

Edited to add: Our primary focus right now is on making the core Gw2 experience as strong and compelling as possible, we’ll release a blog post later this month detailing more specifically our plans for Gw2 in the second half of 2013.

Appreciate the reply, and what you guys do.

Is any of this “expansion type content” appearing in the near future? New large maps, new skills, classes, ect? I feel that, right or wrong, that tends to be the general expectation out of the playerbase at a year + into an MMO. It seems to me that most of the worries about the lack of expansions REALLY boil down to thinking that the above might not be in the works.

After a quick cursory glance, I kinda like most of the changes, except this one;
Elixir R: This skill is no longer a stun breaker.

Vayne.8563:

That’s not to say they shouldn’t get drops at all…but to come and complain about something as if they’re entitled to it, in that spot, just because it was there before is something I will never understand.

Heh… maybe you’re not trying hard enough then.

DIRECT copy/paste from the link I posted:
—-
A related phenomenon, called “behavioral contrast,” occurs in chimpanzees, among other species. A chimpanzee is doing a simple task such as pulling a lever and is being rewarded with pieces of lettuce, which they like to eat. After doing this for a while, one pull is rewarded with a grape, which they really love to eat. On the next pull, the chimp is given lettuce again and they get very upset, throwing the lettuce at the experimenter. They were perfectly happy with lettuce before, but the presentation of the grape creates new expectations and when those expectations aren’t met, frustration and anger invariably results.

The moral here is that reducing the level of reinforcement is a very punishing thing for your players and can act as an impetus for them to quit the game. It needs to be done carefully and gradually, or there may be an undesirable backlash.
—-
Humans reacting according to nature shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

This article might be of interest to anyone who’s mused (or complained) about RNG in this game:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php
Intervals, ratios, extinction, and ESPECIALLY behavioral contrast applies here.

It’s my speculation that A-net put itself in a very weird place by emphasizing RNG over skill in this game, and then lost sight of the principals above in their war on bots.

Chaba.5410:

Engineers are somehow the Jesters of Versatility (I didn’t make that up). Who else has a ram’s head that shoots out from the belt with a pelvic thrust?

This guy

Kisses.1054:

there are also a lot of achievements where the achievement name sounds liek a title.. but it’s not a title. pretty boring to just see the same ones.

Yep, some of those achievement names are pretty clever as well… how many dev resources could a request such as the one presented in this thread really take?

Rama.6439:

I’m with you on this, I think that they don’t actually care what the players really want, at least most of Anet don’t, cause I myself and a lot of the other players I talk to don’t care much for “temp” content, cause it upsets new players, and they don’t get to be involved in past “temp” content. It’s like punishing them for not being here from the start. And that is very lame.

Eh, I’d be more inclined to believe that the devs simply put an inordinately high priority on the economy and the war on bots. How many games can claim to have an in-house economist on the payroll? The problem with that is that the economy in this game is pretty poor overall:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/04/29/virtual-world-economist-says-guild-wars-2s-pre-endgame-economy/
… and perhaps they’re underestimating exactly how negative an effect a lot of their anti-farming changes have on the average player. People get grumpy when their variable-ratio reinforcement schedules get tampered with after all, and the perception that in game activities aren’t worthwhile is pretty damaging.

The regular world drop rate should be close to where Southsun was with the Magic Find buff imo, either that or cut some of the mystic forge recipe costs in half. Earning these items purely through drops should feel more like a tangible goal than it does now.

-They’re invulnerable for the first 5 seconds on activation.
-Hitpoints appear to be increased significantly (~20k in a level 55 zone)
-Drop rate for coffers appears to have been reduced (3 coffers per node on average with no MF, 1 coffer per node this morning w/no MF)

Really, this practice of “fixing” things by making it more grindy is getting WAAAYYY out of hand. Stahp.

Kaaboose.3897:

I’ve got a whole post and video going over this very point. It’s in the “Fix the (Un)Holy Trinity” thread in the Suggestions area for those interested.

Why not just link the thread so everyone is on the same page?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Fix-the-Guild-Wars-2-Un-Holy-Trinity
Anyways…

One thing that that’s so maddening about this game is that the combat system is so fundamentally rock solid, yet held back by game-breaking decisions such as defiance and unshakable. the changes you suggested in the video are relatively minor, but would have a HUGE effect on how the game plays.

A revamp of defiant and unshakable (as well as combo fields, but I digress) is past due. I see one of the best MMO combat systems available in this game… I also see wasted potential since it plays out too simplistically.

Karizee.8076:

Absolutely. Don’t know why anyone would pay a sub these days.

Heh… I would’ve gladly paid 15/mo for this game…

Infernia.9847:

The more people that give up on farming mats equates to the supply of T6 mats shrinking and the prices increasing.
It’s easy to say: “Don’t farm the mats just farm the gold and buy them” but unlike buying gems and exchanging for gold, mats don’t appear from thin air. They are obtained by completing activities in the game that less and less people do because of the poor return for their time.
Someone has to farm them or supply will become negligent. Also more people simply farming for gold means that prices on popular items will rise due to the fact that a large majority can afford the higher prices and are willing to pay them.

Mmmm hmmm…

One would think that shifts in the market such as these would begin to benefit those with limitless time and energy to farm mats endlessly, such as bots. Most of the competition for these spots would be gone too.

Oh, the irony…