Guild Wars 2

Personally im just treating this game like a true f2p now. Coming from a long history of subscription based games, which i never minded paying, i was more then happy to contribute with a 800 gem purchase every month. However with the ridiculous visual nerfs on our base skills parallel with adding more visual clutter with legendary effects and elite specs, they can’t really expect me to swallow their excuse of qol change that was in demand and not an esport related change. So no more gem purchases for me until Anet cease trying to make their game visually less appealing than it did 3 years ago. The simple fix of a slider bar or restrictive visual options has been asked for and suggested for years, seems obvious by now that Anet do not want to consider this route. With additional visual “improvements” seemingly on the horizon i find myself wondering which of my awesome animations are next to disappear.

Aye having a long term goal is great at bringing some players together, in this case one can see the detrimental effect of an unreasonable long term goal. Many small roaming guilds have disbanded, joined larger ones or are farming away and the results of these changes are rather apparent in wvw. Its nice to know that in a year or two we can potentially see our hard work invalidated yet again with the next expansion and you can all look forward to a new long term guild goal.

As a small guild of rl friends and mostly wvw roamers i found the guild costs to be rather unreasonable. I’m suitably impressed that Haleys guild managed to level up their guild so fast considering the materials asked of them without real grinding, without a decent starting capital of gold and resources and without much time. I’m just not convinced that a guild should be asking so much of their members for the rewards offered. This was a game that advertised belonging to multiple guilds for whatever reasons be it social, different game aspects etc. as a feature. The old reward system though in dire need of an overhaul at least rewarded you for playing together and required not much more then going out and having fun enjoying whatever content you so desired. As a guild leader i feel im now asking players to sacrifice too much. They have to hand over their own personal end item progression and possible raid access in the form of ascended crafting materials. They have to hand over their own personal rewards from pvp tracks, logging in bonuses, wvw currencies etc. Then im pretty much dictating what content they need to play be it mindless shovel farming, alt cycling flax farming, quartz mining from the 4 nodes available, meta event farming pretty much everything except for the content we originally formed up to play. Then they must hand over potential inventory space upgrades, donate future alt levels, legendary crafting mats, ascended collection mats etc. We can now see the exact costs of all upgrades, scribing bonuses etc and the level of personal taxation demanded in terms of material costs, wealth, time and forced content involvement in order in many cases to reacquire what we already had before is rather ludicrous. As a guild leader i couldn’t in good faith ask for so much and return so little so i personally suggested finding a bigger guild to join where the the new personal taxation system would not be so punishing.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_hall

1. 6-8 rl friends. pre-hot = active wvw roaming with occasional pve content. With the announcement of HoT and the claims of encouraging small scale roaming parties we had hoped to increase our activity. Alas 4 members quit completely without purchasing HoT, 3 of us remain but are no longer able to wvw with the state that it’s in.

2. The +5 supply was the only thing that felt essential for such small roaming groups.

3. Alas the guild pretty much fell apart. But as a small ~10 man guild we did not find the upgrades reasonably obtainable.

4. With differing lifestyles amongst the guild members time management was always tricky, so any time we could all play together was precious. The need to grind pve content, events, flax farming etc to advance the guild just meant very lil actual time to play the content we enjoyed. As a guild leader i was also loathe to demand players sacrifice their own personal rewards, ascended progress and often time spent doing content they didn’t enjoy, just so they could enjoy a few benefits.

5. Well the new system has had a rather negative impact obviously. Prior to this rewards and guild progress were a byproduct of working together and having fun. I could manage the guild easily without unreasonable demands meaning what time we did have could be maximised playing the content we enjoyed the most.

6. Personally if i could change anything it would be that wvw upgrades were obtainable via just wvw if desired. Also it would be nice if guild upgrades scaled depending on the members, even if they had just a few set options 1-25, 26-50, 50+ etc with adequate warning stating that you couldn’t increase the guild size once committing for those small guilds of close friends/family who never had any intention of getting any bigger anyways. That was always the great thing about Guild Wars 2, being able to belong to multiple guilds that catered to varying content etc. Now i struggle to contribute to my own guild hall never mind belonging and donating to multiple ones.

Just imagine what this game will look like in a few months. Think it may be the only game that is actively trying to make itself less visually appealing. 3 years later and spell animations are getting worse, really.? Lets also promote tempest with a certain look and feel, and now that you’ve bought the game we shall prune that down and tear that look apart. Reduce shouts, auras and overloads, still feeling like a tempest.? It sets a very worrying precedent, are we to get “noise reductions” every patch. If our very character animations are not safe what is, are legendary effects next?

And to think many of us bought Hot assuming this would be a feature that would be reasonably accessible to us. I just wish they’d mentioned the ludicrous costs and time investment required for both the scribing and guild features.

I personally found the content rather lacking, needlessly gated behind masteries to extend its life. Amusingly enough by the time i unlocked the masteries, whose sole purpose is to streamline map navigation and exploration, i was also rather sick of said maps. However i also understood that this was the merely the foundation on which more content was to be built and added upon. What i did not bargain on was the content i assumed i would be gaining access to namely guild halls, scribing etc were so unbelievably expensive and grindy as to render them virtually unobtainable. So as a member of a 5 man rl friends guild we were rather excited for all that HoT had to offer, amazing guild halls, great upgrades for our wvw roaming, scribing to make the guild halls our “own”, and an arena so we could practice (much needed for some) our pvp skills. Little did we realise that HoT would not only take away the buffs and benefits we had already worked hard for over 2-3 years but they’d put these, and all the new exciting features that we had assumably paid to gain access to, behind such an insane grind in terms of materials, gold and more importantly time that achieving these seemed increasingly unlikely. Previously the process to leveling our guild was admittedly a slow one, but it did not require sacrificing personal rewards, farming of mats or donating ones personal wealth, we just needed to play together and occasionally go kill some elusive bounty mobs. So maybe we also need to take into consideration how much of this new content is reasonably accessible and what content has been taken away only to be added back as “new” content. Even the recent trend of effect noise reduction has resulted in iconic profession animations been “taken” away (not sure what game aims to be less graphically appealing after 3 years). I still love guild wars and have no intention of leaving but the new direction is bound to leave some players with concerns, an mmo is a huge personal investment after all.

Keep popping in here in the hopes of seeing a Dev comment that this change will be reverted soon. Surely they can’t actually be claiming that this was done to improve performance and reduce visual clutter after they just introduced some of the “loudest”, flashiest animations ever. Hopefully this "noise " reduction doesn’t become too much of a trend as I recently upgraded my rig on the assumption that animations and effects would be improved upon. Having your animations looking worse after a 3 year expansion is not something you’d expect.

The animation had more of an impact to my gameplay then i thought, strange how you get attached to a certain look and feel of your spells and abilities. The new animation looks and feels so weak and pathetic i’m almost ashamed to even be seeing casting it. As a long time staff ele please revert this change and restore the look and feel to the weapon and playstyle that i love. Let me once again be a mighty wielder of the elements and not some peevish child flinging matches at weeds.

The worst thing about this is that its in the one attunement we need to sit in, on the one attack that we get to see over and over again and for many of us an iconic spell that drew us to staff ele in the first place. I play on my reaper and see enough green, black spinning, whooshing effects that i can barely see my target but my eles fireball gets turned into this, Hell plants vs zombies peashooters firing though a firestump looks more like a fireball then this. Maybe its just anets way of encouraging us to play warhorn, they seem to be nerfing lots of old content to “encourage” us to play their new shiny content. Oh well time to put the old match flinger in storage.

Just out of curiosity what are these eventual buffs after all this grinding and contributing. ? Do the eventual buffs actually outweigh the sheer cost of their production?

Its easier for ones mental well being to abandon all hope as soon as possible. Bugs have been up here from months to years without any attention. Perhaps if bug fixes were introduced to the gem store we’d finally get some support. I know i’d pay 400 gems to not have to drop target for arcane brilliance. Im sure every necro would pay 800 gems+ for minions that had an ai. The worst is seeing months go by with new outfits, fancy mining tools and plastic wings getting added as your characters base skills/traits remain broken. I know they have separate teams but one can clearly see where the priorities lie. Learn to make peace with your broken skills and mechanics, they may be with you a long long time.

With all these extra fields could we get finally get a fix for Arcane Brilliance.

4, was hoping for a specialization that would benefit all weapons/ranges not just melee, so as a staff ele i won’t even be considering it. If only overload could be targetable with a trait as opposed to on character.

My biggest concern is how this new specialization will work with ranged playstyles. With the overload elements being caster centered and the shouts obviously very melee oriented and damage based as opposed to buff based, i just feel the spec won’t bring anything to staff or ranged scepter users. Hopefully they have a trait that makes the overload elements targeted so that i can carry on playing the staff playstyle i love with the tempest spec i like the sound of.

Out of curiosity how long has Arcane Brilliance been faulty for, there seem to be posts going back 9 months or more. It’d be nice to get a dev confirmation that these long standing faulty profession skills will eventually get attended to.

Weirdly enough it also affects the launch pads @ the Tequatl event, so after the hylek turrets stack a minute or so of quickness, the pads will only launch you 50% of the way. Without quickness full distance covered, with quickness half the distance covered and if we could get slow during the event one assumes the launchpads will send us even further.

At the end of the day the skill is not working as it should be and really should be fixed already. If its going to blast at your target it should at least do the damage and apply elemental surge at your target.