Guild Wars 2

ozma.3498:

Another sad thing is that since Heart of Thorns was released, there have been 112 gem store skins added to the game (Dominator, Soaring, Timekeeper, Merciless, Plasma, Immortal, Improvised). No problem allocating resources to that, was there?

And if you look at the publicly available income and profit data for the MMO genre, GW2 and its parent company are some of the more lucrative games in the genre. And yet they’re paying second-rate writers, utilizing 5 and 6 man teams for entire branches of content, and now cutting or holding those branches indefinitely? Shouldn’t they be more than capable of recruiting talent to satisfy these promises?

Something’s wrong with the management and talent allocation at ANet. And it’s been wrong for months, if not a few years now. GW2 was magic at launch. By HoT it’s become a soulless cash-grab.

Gaile Gray.6029:

We wanted to let you know that this year’s Halloween Festival will be ending on Wednesday, November 4.

We hope you enjoyed the celebration! I know I had a blast!

Unless Endless Batwing Brew drops are upped or a forge recipe is added to convert the normal brews to endless brews, almost no one is going to have time to farm the absurd 25,000 bags needed in time. You could add a week to the event and that’d still be the case.

There’s no reliable way to earn the tonic with cobs or lesser batwing tonics, so you’re forced to grind bags or grind gold. So much for that mighty anti-grinding manifesto 3 years ago, huh?

I start opening doors when bad commanders take bad routes or make bad calls on stuff like lich. When three doors open south and commander goes north out of OCD to run in a clockwise route I just go do the doors myself.

synk.6907:

Every door but the Lich’s is soloable, so I’d wager folks opening doors in other locations are just doing their thing, farming ToT bags, rather than any kind of malicious messing with others in there.

As to opening two next to one another, that’s not so bad, unless you’re fighting the Viscount, and it’s still manageable with a group. I’d chalk that up to naivety first, then f’in with the zerg second :P

Lich is very soloable. It’s easiest to kill solo because then only one player has to worry about dodging his two big attack telegraphs. He spawns no skeletons and does next to no damage if you reliably dodge his stomp and his grasping shadow.

The unacceptable parts of the recipe are the RNG tonic and batwings.
I’ve farmed hundreds if not thousands of trick or treat bags, enough for thousands of candy corn, and not one single permanent batwing brew has dropped, and its price WILL shoot up the second the event ends and it’s no longer obtainable. The smart thing for ANet would be to add a recipe that uses normal batwing brews to make the permanent brew since the non-permanent brews are fairly regular drops AND undervalued on the TP.

Note: This isn’t a bug report. It’s a discussion on the topic of the systems the game runs on.

It seems like the bigger the event the more likely it is to crash or DC. Two of the three world bosses I did today for collection achievements crashed me or DCd me right as they died. It’s getting to where I feel like I should be running the repair shortcut every week because I can’t think of any other way to take steps against this.

It’s incredibly frustrating to wait around for a boss, take the time to do the fight, then as you’re running towards that reward chest you get a crash pop up or get kicked to character select. And of course when you log back in you’re in an entirely different server shard because it’d make too much sense to save peoples spots for this exact situation, which reliably will happen to thousands of players every day across the world.

I feel like no matter how hard it would be to preserve someone’s event participation, server shard, etc, the development effort would automatically be worth it because ALL players will eventually experience a crash or loss of connection, most players many more times than just once. So why in 2015 are we still losing 20-30 minutes worth of work over being kicked to character select or forced to spend 30-60 seconds restarting the game? I’ve had to replay some of the least fun story missions in the game 4 times just because I got kicked to character select during my first three attempts, not to mention the loss of rewards in other situations.

Working for a payoff and then having it snatched away because you had to relog against your will undermines the core purpose of a game. Why would someone play a game that does this routinely?

I wrote this 12 hours ago but didn’t publish. I’m publishing now because 12 hours later I re-fought a boss that DCd me and got zero reward for it because apparently the game credited me for the first chest EVEN THOUGH I NEVER GOT TO LOOT IT.
Because for some inane reason the collection credit is an intangible loot item that goes directly into collection credit, not your inventory. So even though I’ve killed a boss twice for the collection, I’ve not gotten credit for doing so.

(PS: The character limit in titles is absurdly small.)

PvP Missions are a mess. My guild tried to get about 5 teams in and only 2 or 3 managed to get any rewards for winning their conquest games. Some groups were in guild teams, others weren’t. But even people in teams didn’t get rewards in some cases.

Found the last of Rox’s signs on Sign Cutting. Quest is hanging and won’t progress. Tried relogging, changing character, changing zone, and even changing from HoT story to LS2 and back or quitting Chapter 14 and restarting it have all failed to resolve it.

In this boat. Few Labyrinth groups because only about 7-10 people in a given map. No one to do events and challenges with in the jungle because not many people around there either. No clue where everyone is.

Alteraphim.4629:

But that level up mechanic exists in all MMOs when an expansion is released. GW1 had new skills to grind with each expansion, WoW and many others have a higher level cap, eve has new skills to train, and so on and so forth. There needs to be some driving force beyond player preference to experience each piece of content. Gating that content using the mastery system is the same as having a content gradient across a level cap increase, we just get different ways to complete our journey.

Not at all. In most other MMOs you’re exposed to it at a comfortable pace. You’re given challenges you can handle with the skills you have. You’re not constantly forced to waste time running down trails that dead end because you don’t have the right mastery, you’re not constantly killed by enemies and mechanics you don’t have the mastery to handle, and you’re not deprived of your core kit so much.

Someone a full day into HoT probably still only has 1-3 skills unlocked in their elite spec and half or less of their traits to choose from. That’s absurd. No one wants to tackle hard new content with a kitten spec gated behind a tedious 16+ hour grind that you have to do on ALL characters.

There are plenty of ways to allow people to progress in the new expansion. Collections are a good example of that. New currencies and crafting are another great example. But gating core gameplay, your new elite spec, feels malicious to players. Not just bad, but punitive.

Eos.6951:

The Mastery System is Arena Nets way of increasing the level cap without actually increasing the level cap. If you think of it that way, it makes sense why continuing through the story requires mastery levels.

Think of it this way, do you get to fight Zhaitan at level 1? No. In fact, most of your personal story comes in “chunks” and you have to level up between story missions.

This is the same exact thing as leveling to continue your personal story.

Your skills are not an endgame story boss and you should be ashamed for such a grotesque false equivalency.
The main complaint is that so much is gated behind them. Half the jungle, some story missions, your elite spec via hero challenges, all hidden behind mastery that’s very slow to earn.

The solutions are simple: ANet could’ve designed the first bit of jungle play to NOT be so heavily gated, or ANet could’ve made initial mastery acquisition much faster and kept the later segments slow. Mastery may well be a good system, we don’t know if it is yet, but we do know that the first taste we get of it is extremely unpleasant. You fix that by reducing the demand for the system early on, either by just not employing mastery as much right off the bat or by allowing players to gain the first masteries more quickly. But as it stands, the masteries look to get even more grindy as you go deeper.

I feel like ANet dove in headfirst into this concept they mentioned about trying to “stretch” content so there’s less pressure to produce new material and as a result packed every last square inch of the game with gold sinks and time sinks, not thinking about how that degrades the actual gameplay experience. Everywhere I turn in HoT I’m met with hurdle after hurdle after hurdle. There’s NOTHING in this expansion to just dive into. It’s all gated behind gold, or masteries, or hero challenges. All of it.

You can’t try the new PvP amulets or runes without paying a horrendous 10g a pop for them. You can’t advance the personal story without grinding out gliding mastery. You can’t play your elite spec. You can’t start a precursor collection. You can’t do anything at all without first paying a massive price in time or money to “unlock” it.

And there was feedback on this in previous BWEs. And there was feedback on the elite spec unlocks prior to launch. And no one likes having to pay 10g for the few amulets and runs already gated in pvp. Players have zero indication they were interested in this approach and numerous indications that they were opposed to it.

And somewhere here we are anyhow.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hmmm, new amulets. Aside from zealots, anything else you folks think would be interesting?

I know this is too late but how about literally ANYTHING that’s not a huge gold sink? Can GW2 have just one area of the game not dominated by them?

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Spurrlock.3219:

The common denominator is not “I don’t want to play to unlock this,” its “I don’t want to grind masteries for 20+ hours and burn through new PvE content to enjoy the rest of the game with new elite specs,” such as dungeons, fractals, wvw, etc.

Example:

• When you create a new character, do you expect to go off and kill Zhaitan at level 1?
• In real life, do you expect to register for college, and walk away with a 4 year degree on your first day of school?

Simply play the game. HoT is an expansion that offers new skills. Logically, your character would need to learn and master the new skills, not just walk around and instantly become Elite. If you really want to get those new skills, you gotta earn them.

Your build is NOT content!
Your build is how you PLAY content!
Being arbitrarily blocked from experiencing content because of MULTIPLE overlayed gatekeeping systems isn’t fun, creative, or engaging no matter how you attempt to twist it. So why are you defending it?

Andred.1087:

Gewd.8125:

The pacing is way too slow for me. It takes hours just to get 1 mastery doing the same events over and over again.

It is a hassle to get anywhere, and you have to spend quite a bit of time just to figure out if it requires a mastery you don’t have yet.

What the hell do you want then? To finish all of it in a couple of weeks? So you can come on here and whine about being bored?

Getting real tired of this false dichotomy. There is a middle ground between effortless and punishing.
There’s a middle ground between “giant grind that makes you not want to bother with the expac you spent $50-100 on and anticipated for months” and “so quick and forgettable you’re gonna run out of things to do after a few days.”

They are vastly, vastly overtuned. I keep running into Champions that hit for 50-90% of my hp. Usually with friends. In the middle of nowhere. No other players around. I stumble onto a hero challenge, activate it, and get faced with a champion I have to kite or die immediately to, while evading and killing its adds that hit almost as hard but luckily are only veterans, BUT THE CHALLENGE IS ON A BROKEN AIRSHIP so the floor is diagonal and my character constantly either gets rooted trying to walk up the terrain or falls and can’t use abilities when walking down it.

Not to mention the wyverns that 1-shot you elsewhere in another hero challenge.

I was really, really upset at the massively obscene, disgusting 400 point requirement just to unlock your full and now that I’m actually hunting for hero challenges and running into this kind of group-oriented BS left and right it’s justifying all the salty feelings I had to begin with an multiplying them.

I cannot fathom how a thinking, sentient game designer sat down and thought ANY of this was a good idea. From Hero Point to Hero Challenge, the ENTIRE pathway of unlocking your elite spec in HoT is pure, 120% garbage. Grade A rage fuel. It’s the single most common complaint I’m hearing from friends as well. Most of the people I know aren’t even using their Elite specs even if they have them partially unlocked because they feel too kitten in the hard jungle content to go without.

I can’t imagine this is something ANet wanted. For players to ignore their elite specs and rage endlessly at how every time they go through the trouble of doing a mini jumping puzzle to get to a skill challenge they get immediately slaughtered by a champion and give up instead of going through the trouble of reclimbing the plateau or wreckage and dying again.

Doing the Wyvern Egg event in Verdant Brink, I feel like I, as one of the few with gliding at the time, was 20+% of event participation because I’d run up the cliff with swiftness, grab an egg while blocking wyvern attacks, then glide down and turn them in.

However, I missed out entirely on event credit because the time it takes to run back to the event is greater than the inactive debuff timer. Meaning every time I died, which was about 3 times, I got the inactive debuff for up to a minute before I could make it back up the cliff to grab another egg. The event finished during one such window and I got zero credit even though I contributed at least 10% of the event bar if not 20+% and was constantly pursuing the event even when dead.

ChavaStark.9147:

ColinJohanson.2394:

PlatinumMember.5274:

Unless I am mistaken just to unlock half of the training line, we need 212 hero points?

It’s 400 points total to unlock everything in an elite spec training line – I just can’t remember off hand how many points folks have currently if they have done all the existing ones, but it’s right around 200. The rest you’ll need to earn in jungle to unlock the deeper skills/traits/etc. in the training line.

You only need 60 hero points to begin using your elite spec, the points you spend after that continue to unlock more skills, traits, skins, etc.

Again, hero challenges are worth 10 points each in the jungle. So no you don’t need to go do 200-400 jungle challenges.

Okay Collin literally said hero challenges are worth 10 points each in the jungle. so we need to do 10 challenges per 100 and that means 40 challenges for the 400. So stop freaking out this is not as bad as it seems. If we do not have a lot of challenges in the jungle and I highly doubt it then it is something to freak over. But right at the moment I do not find this to be a grind and it is not even that bad.

It is bad when people first stepping into the Jungle feel like they need to skip events and content and chase down hero points, or use a guide to find them all, so they can start HoT off with a full Elite spec traitline. That’s horrible. Especially when they go to play an alt and think “aww man I’ve gotta go running through the forest ignoring everything around me, collecting hero points, if I want to play with my Elite spec.”

Or worst of all “I really want to take my Engi to this daily fractal as a Scrapper but I’d have to go bouncing through the jungle grinding hero points just to unlock all the options. Why bother?”

This is how alts get shelved and stay shelved.

Halvorn.9831:

Tasao.4623:

Halvorn.9831:

Tasao.4623:

Core gameplay should NOT be gated behind a grind.

What are you even talking about? In the core game, don’t you have to level to 80 in order to go to cursed shores? So cursed shores is gated behind a grind as well, isn’kitten

There’s plenty of other content other than Cursed Shore to do when you’re not at 80.
But that’s to be expected while leveling. But if you want to dive into the jungle, or do world bosses, or do halloween content, or anything else out in the world on an alt, being faced with a big grind just to unlock your elite spec’s base functionality is absurd. The CONTENT is what should occupy you. Not the unlocking of the abilities and traits you want to use on that content.

Do you require your elite specs to go to the jungle? No.

You want to do it. Like someone who just starts the game and wants to go to Arah.

What the heck did you all expect the content to be? Of course there has to be some sort of time drain. No company on this planet can provide you with thousands of hours of non-repetitive endgame content.

GRINDING HERO POINTS IS NOT “CONTENT”. Especially if you have to do the same grind 9 times to cover every class in the game.
And reducing or removing that grind still leaves 99% of the HoT intact.
Your character is your avatar. Your tool. Your bridge between yourself and the content. Blocking off a chunk of that bridge for literally no reason does NOTHING to enhance the content you’re playing, and reducing or removing those blocks does nothing to cheapen all of the content they’re adding.

Elite Specs are a TOOL via which you experience content. They are hardly content themselves and any grind to unlock them is automatically unwarranted as a direct result. People just want to play HoT, or do Halloween, or run dungeons, or fractals, or WvW. But this decision to gate off elite specs behind an arbitrarily huge hero point hurdle directly inhibits a player’s ability to do that content as they choose to do it.

This is bad design. Period. You don’t like my comment, don’t read em, don’t respond to them, don’t use this forum at all if you disagree with literally anyone at all. THAT is the logic you’re telling us to use when we criticize this design decision.

The one to Rule.2593:

Black Box.9312:

The one to Rule.2593:

I just don’t get people. first it was " we need something to do! living world sucks!" Now it’s “OMG I HAVE TO DO THINGS??”

This is a dumb point, because people were planning on doing the content anyway.

This was a dumb post, because I was planning on replying anyway. See how useless both of our comments were now?

People have explained repeatedly exactly what’s wrong with what you’re saying. People don’t want to have to grind to just USE their elite spec. They want to be able to jump on their Engi, train Scrapper for a reasonable amount of points, then go do WvW, guild missions, fractals, etc. NO ONE wants to be forced to go grind and regrind hero points before their class is usable aside from the minority of people who have one single main character and zero fear of having to do this process over and over and over on all their characters.

Alukah.2063:

Seera.5916:

Alukah.2063:

14 pages of complaint because people don’t want to do a few hero challenges to get new skills… I’m perplexed.

It doesn’t take years to do 40 hero challenges, not months, not weeks, maybe a couple days.

Try 320 hero challenges if you want to try out all of the specs and see where people are having some issue if they had been expecting to do so on or near day 1.

Now that’s your problem, they cannot dumb down the game for everyone else because little john over there has dozens of alts and doesn’t want to put any effort into the game.

I mean, you guys act like this is a new situation, if you want another class you already have to do all that work leveling it, it’s not instant level 80, nor it comes with everything unlocked, same with waypoints, map completions, etc. Work on one spec at a time and you will have all the hero points in no time, there’s no need to have everything unlocked on day 1 after it’s released.

Delius.1968:

I don’t understand why they’re doing this. It’s bad for players and bad for developers.

For instance, I main an ele but at this point I won’t even bother unlocking tempest to try it as I think it will be a waste of time given the info we have so far. So I am better off switching my main to something I really want to play since it takes such an investment for alts / changing main.

It’s not bad for neither players nor developers, it’s not unheard of in the gaming industry that you have to play new content in order to access new abilities. You’re just plain lazy and want everything unlocked on day 1.

Tasao.4623:

Zypher.7609:

All I am reading is a few people upset about the change that keep posting every few post trying to say how bad this will be.

I understand this is a casual game, but logging on and getting everything for every character is just not going to happen. There is nothing wrong with having to play the game on each character to get the elite specs.

The issue being this decision forces players to NOT play the game they want to play. This decision forces players to go play content they might not want to play or replay in order to just access the base functionality of elite specs.
Imagine you’ve gotten Maguuma Map Mastery on one, two, or even three characters. Maybe you have all 3 new legendaries. Now imagine you have 6 more characters you WANT to play but you’re sick of grinding the jungle and don’t like WvW.

You have no choice. Your only option is to grind out a lot of content you’ve already completed or that you just don’t like in order to play your Elite specs in raids, against world bosses, in dungeons, etc.

Again, hero points don’t take that long to get, you’re blowing this way out of proportion.

They have always made decisions that force people to try out different parts of the game, this is nothing new, and honestly this is mild compared to the old requirement to have WvW for world completion, or legendaries requiring you to literally play everything the game has to offer, even things you might dislike.

Reminder that this isn’t a sandbox game, this is a themepark and you are still playing in whatever way they want you to play.

Those are COSMETIC accomplishments. You don’t need to complete the world or make a Legendary to play your class. They actually originally said “Legendaries will be a big deal that few people will have the guts to grind through and we’re ok with that. They also don’t change the game. Their stats aren’t any better than standard gear.”

Now imagine if you had to do world completion to unlock all of your utilities, or all of your trait lines. That’s closer to the current situation with Elite specs. Basic gameplay functionality for your elite spec is now gated behind a grind. Nothing has been communicated to us as to how quick you’ll actually unlock the core function of the specs and how much is just fluff like weapon skins.

Zypher.7609:

All I am reading is a few people upset about the change that keep posting every few post trying to say how bad this will be.

I understand this is a casual game, but logging on and getting everything for every character is just not going to happen. There is nothing wrong with having to play the game on each character to get the elite specs.

The issue being this decision forces players to NOT play the game they want to play. This decision forces players to go play content they might not want to play or replay in order to just access the base functionality of elite specs.
Imagine you’ve gotten Maguuma Map Mastery on one, two, or even three characters. Maybe you have all 3 new legendaries. Now imagine you have 6 more characters you WANT to play but you’re sick of grinding the jungle and don’t like WvW.

You have no choice. Your only option is to grind out a lot of content you’ve already completed or that you just don’t like in order to play your Elite specs in raids, against world bosses, in dungeons, etc.

PopeUrban.2578:

Tasao.4623:

This is just flat out terrible. Core gameplay should NOT be gated behind a grind. Some of us play 9+ characters. You want to shut cosmetics behind grinds? You want to shut toys and vanity items behind grinds? You want to shut proportionate rewards behind grinds? Sure. Cool.
But it’s just plain bad design to shut core gameplay for the expansion specs out behind a long grind.

If you can unlock all the traits and skills in short order, that’s fine. It’s ok for the special skins to then take another 200+ points to unlock. But people are going to despise running around for the first week with a half-finished traitline and missing abilities.

Feeling forced to dash off into the jungle and skip content and rush hero points so I can fill out my trait line is going to directly reduce my desire to play GW2. When I think “I feel like playing my Mesmer now that Chronomancer is available” and then remember I need 100+ more points to unlock Chronomancer abilities and traits and the only way to get those points is to grind WvW or to skip jungle content in favor of focusing on hero challenges, I may well just not bother. Because this issue won’t just come up for Chronomancer. It’ll come up for Reaper, and Daredevil, and Berserker, and Tempest. It’ll come up for every single spec.

This is an incredibly alt-unfriendly design decision.

Yeah, like adding new classes, new skills in GW1, new levels in insert your favorite level cap increase MMO here and generally any system that adds character advancement.

This is the most alt friendly game in existence by a large margin. I’d rather have systems that are compelling for people that want something that feels like an accomplishment for one character, than a system that is watered down to an insignificant amount of content or effort just to be “alt friendly”

It is a character advancement system and the last one left in the game since the introduction of scrolls/tomes from dailies.

Why is it such a bad thing to have to, y’know, play characters to advance them a bit?

There’s a vast difference between “playing a character for a bit” and “you don’t get your full elite spec at all until you grind out hundreds of mastery points.”

What’s so hard to understand here? People want to play Reaper, Scrapper, Dragonhunter, etc. They DON’T want to play Necro, Engi, and Guardian in jungle content they’ve already done on other characters just to unlock Reaper, Scrapper, and Dragonhunter.

Halvorn.9831:

Tasao.4623:

Core gameplay should NOT be gated behind a grind.

What are you even talking about? In the core game, don’t you have to level to 80 in order to go to cursed shores? So cursed shores is gated behind a grind as well, isn’kitten

There’s plenty of other content other than Cursed Shore to do when you’re not at 80.
But that’s to be expected while leveling. But if you want to dive into the jungle, or do world bosses, or do halloween content, or anything else out in the world on an alt, being faced with a big grind just to unlock your elite spec’s base functionality is absurd. The CONTENT is what should occupy you. Not the unlocking of the abilities and traits you want to use on that content.

This is just flat out terrible. Core gameplay should NOT be gated behind a grind. Some of us play 9+ characters. You want to shut cosmetics behind grinds? You want to shut toys and vanity items behind grinds? You want to shut proportionate rewards behind grinds? Sure. Cool.
But it’s just plain bad design to shut core gameplay for the expansion specs out behind a long grind.

If you can unlock all the traits and skills in short order, that’s fine. It’s ok for the special skins to then take another 200+ points to unlock. But people are going to despise running around for the first week with a half-finished traitline and missing abilities.

Feeling forced to dash off into the jungle and skip content and rush hero points so I can fill out my trait line is going to directly reduce my desire to play GW2. When I think “I feel like playing my Mesmer now that Chronomancer is available” and then remember I need 100+ more points to unlock Chronomancer abilities and traits and the only way to get those points is to grind WvW or to skip jungle content in favor of focusing on hero challenges, I may well just not bother. Because this issue won’t just come up for Chronomancer. It’ll come up for Reaper, and Daredevil, and Berserker, and Tempest. It’ll come up for every single spec.

This is an incredibly alt-unfriendly design decision.

Not seeing anything that makes Druid attractive to a Ranger that doesn’t want to be a healslave. Read: Most Rangers. The spec is still missing offensive functionality. At least the other specs got lines of traits dedicates to different roles. If that were the case for Druid it’d have a major, master, and grandmaster trait each dedicated to offense. Instead it’s still almost entirely heal, support, heal, and more support. What other profession got told to not bother with their elite spec if they weren’t part of the minority wanting into a support niche that’s mostly only useful in high level content?

This spec seems to be 150% crammed into one tiny design element with only cursory consideration for the roles the majority of Rangers actually play. All but ONE Ranger I know in-game is switching to Guardian already because DH does more of what they wished Ranger did.

Nothing. You do nothing. Any decent Ele will have more mitigation than you have damage or CC and even if you make them blow it all, they’ll have more mobility than you and just teleport/sprint/lightning rush away and heal up somewhere else. There’s a reason they’re Meta^2, and that reason is because a good Ele can 1v4 and still walk out, heal, then come back in at full health if played right. It takes great team coordination to lock down a properly played Ele. Solo, all you can hope to do is make them blow one or two extra cooldowns.

What I wanna know is why all the income is concentrated into grinds right now. If you spend hours exploring the world, completing maps, doing jumping puzzles, or even doing WvW or sPvP, you’re lucky to make as much gold in a whole day of playing as you get from just an hour of grinding Silverwastes or Dungeons. The most fun, varied, versatile content is the least lucrative, while the most tedious, repetitive, grindy content makes the most money.

I dunno if HoT’s gonna change that but I really hope so.

I’m having this bug. It’s the second time it’s happened to me. Once, several weeks ago I was doing the story on another character and it got hung up on “Discuss what to do next with your friends.” and I had to redo the whole thing.

Now I’m redoing it for Nomad’s trinkets and it’s happened again. I didn’t talk to anyone, though. I just stood and waited as the last of the inquest died and the laser defense went off. Talked in gchat a bit. Noticed nothing was happening. Talked to everyone. Nothing. Ran all over the instance. Still nothing.

I’m here for the No Tricks achievement, so I didn’t use the previous two consoles, which made the instance take longer than it normally would, and I’m really not eager to relog just to redo all of that all over again. It’s already a tremendous hassle having to replay the same instances 2-4 times each for some achievements. After scrambling up Zephyr’s Ascent and missing the hay bale a few times this was supposed to be the easy achievement on my list but it looks like I’m slowly hacking through a crowd of inquest that spam chill grenades with huge AoEs yet again.

Whoever designs achievements at ANet needs to check out the Extra Credits video on Challenging Content vs Punishing Content. Because GW2 tends to confuse the two a lot and punish the player over and over in the name of “challenging” the player.

https://youtu.be/ea6UuRTjkKs

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

There’ll be more supportive damage for Celestial Avatar by launch… possibly from trait modifications or from skill changes.

An issue which should not be decoupled here is that Celestial Avatar felt gated behind staff use (and troll unguent), which left a ranger with one damage-focused weapon option and one support weapon. I’m making some changes to astral force rate gain to try to address this. Ideally it should be possible to build up your astral force without -needing- to run staff, but running staff should speed up the process by nature of the heals it provides. This would yield the option of running two non-staff weapons while still having Celestial Avatar available.

Celestial Avatar healing is the best available by a decent margin right now. One issue that came up is that the healing coefficients are so insignificant that running with healing stats yields very little reward.

The best healing in the game being available without using any healing power; this is not good for the game.

The berserker meta not be the only consideration requires that other stat combinations be rewarding.

Being able to run two more damage-focused weapons (if that’s your thing) and still have Celestial Avatar available should address some of your offensive concerns if you want to play a bit more offensively as a hybrid. If you want to focus on being the top offense then you probably shouldn’t be selecting the Druid specialization.

That’s all I’m going to say on the subject for now (though I will continue to read constructive feedback here and elsewhere) as there is plenty to be done in order to address these and other issues. /me ducks back to work on Scrapper and Druid.

But do any other Elite Specializations not serve as good all-round improvements to their base class? Has any single other class but Ranger been told “yeah don’t bother with your Elite spec if you want to focus on damage”?

Personally, I found 2/3rds of the Druid traits to be unattractive. Natural Stride and Ancient Seeds were my constant picks because the other 2 choices in each tier were so meh that even if you combined them I wouldn’t have taken them over Stride and Seeds.

The melee emphasis on the glyphs also seemed totally at odds with the design of the entire class and spec. Is Staff Druid, with its 1,000 range or so, supposed to run into melee range so it can hit enemies with its short-range glyphs? Why not make them ground targetable and give em a medium to long range?

My only takeaway is: Eles, Engis, to a lesser extent Guardians, and probably Revenants, all have the ability to “shift gears” between damage and healing. It’s one of the great contributors to their success. It’s versatile. And now Druid is being designed away from that to force you to take Healing Power? Will Eles no long heal well without Healing Power? Will Engis? Will Guards? Or are ONLY Rangers going to be hit with this stipulation that your heals should be weak if you don’t spend item budget and traits on them?

Lazze.9870:

Natural Stride should be a minor. It would simultaneously solve the problem of wasting minor traits if you’re not a healbot.

I can’t +1 this hard enough.

For my part, I was dreaming that “Guard!” becomes “On Me!” and brings your pet close to your side, stealthing and possibly granting protection to both of you for the duration, like a police or military K9 unit trains to stay close for the protection of the handler and the dog, sometimes even stalking between the legs of the handler as they both move around an area.

They said in giving Engineers a stealth gyro and anti-stealth toolbelt skill they wanted to open up stealth gameplay and give it more counters. Ranger already has some stealth, and hunters rely a lot on stealth, so I think it’d be great to give Rangers more stealth and counter-stealth.

What about a trait that revealed enemies you burned, making torch and fire trap and sun spirit anti-stealth abilities for the Ranger, for example?

I feel like most Ranger utilities need attention. Trying to build a working kit is harder on Ranger than any other profession because they lack coherent theming and synergy. The closest I’ve been able to get is like “bleeds” with sharpened blades, spike trap, entangle, and crits traited to bleed, but that happens to share a trait tier with improved traps.

If you wanted to focus on burning you’d want fire trap and sun spirit and torch, but iirc the trait for those are spread across 3 trait lines so if you trait for improved fire trap, improved torch, and improved spirits, you’re left with no wiggle room.

I had slightly more luck making a Chill Ranger with the axe trait to make winter’s bite AoE and frost trap, skipping frost spirit since it only chills on activation. But then your only sources of Chill aside from pet abilities and sigils are winter’s bite, frost trap, and finishers out of the chill field the trap creates.

And none of these builds cover the class mechanically. They always miss out of stunbreak, condi removal, mobility, etc.

It feels like a lot of the trait consolidation that helped out a lot of classes didn’t do as much for Ranger. And even in design, you can play, for example, a Stance Warrior or Cantrip Ele or Elixir Engineer or Meditation Guardian and have all major mechanic needs met. You can have defense against major forms of attack, be it direct damage, conditions, control abilities, etc, then also have a steroid ability or burst damage, stunbreaks, immunities and evasion, mobility, etc. The closest Ranger gets to that is Survival skills. The other utility families don’t offer up diverse mechanic coverage. I really don’t think it’s a coincidence that the strongest PvP specs are the ones with the best mechanic coverage and the ones that struggle are the specs with one or two gimmicks.

As for shouts specifically:
“Sic ’Em!”
The best utility shout by far. The only one that feels really usable. I only wish it did more for the Ranger, like applying vulnerability when your pet attacks, or cripple.

I think about what a dog trainer has in mind when they train a police K9 unit or pitbull to attack a target. They want that dog to tackle them and subdue them for its handler. If “Sic ’Em!” could cripple, immobilize, daze, or even stun the target when the pet catches them, it’d make it a lot more attractive and it’d make players care more about the pet rushing at them, which they should if they’re fighting a Beastmaster / Shout Ranger.

It might also synergize well with the traits that make dazes/stuns last longer, and trigger bonus damage after dazing/stunning, AND synergize with the Druid trait that triggers Entangle after controlling a target! It’d be great.

“Protect Me!”
I’ve actually tried to use this one lately in PvP as part of a Shout build and it just didn’t seem to work a lot of the time. I dunno if it has an unlisted range requirement and my pets were getting too far away or what. But on top of that possible bugginess, the trait’s just boring.

But it’s important to shouts as it fills the crucial stunbreak/immunity role. I would like to see the pet rush to you when you use it, and maybe give you Retaliation, so players hitting you with it up take some damage. Or perhaps short term Weakness on the level of 3 or 4 seconds. A duration increase might not hurt either given the damage is not actually mitigated, but instead seems to feed directly to your pet. I’ve seen my pet melt in 2 seconds after activating the skill, but that may just be the massive AoE in a PvP teamfight.

In that light, maybe if the ability gave you, and maybe your pet, protection it’d be a bit more attractive.

“Guard!”
I actually have no clue what this ability is even designed for. I’ve heard you can combo it with Sic ‘Em! and Signet of the Wild or Signet of the Hunt or Quickening Zephyr to have your pet pop up next to someone and burst them but the execution, in practice, seems like a lot of work for little payoff. In PvE you probably do more damage just rushing your target, and it’s likely the same in PvP on top of the fact that your target may well rush past your sneaking pet to slap YOU in the face. Which will require you to have defensive abilities slotted, but you used all your slots on pet burst and just used most of em so now you’re a sitting duck.

I like the idea of pet stealth and protection, but the execution seems impossible.
If this skill stealthed and protected you BOTH it’d be incredible. It’d automatically become a favorite utility among Rangers, who sorely lack in the camouflage/stealth design elements. But ALL Ranger players want to be the camouflaged hunter that uses stealth to ambush enemies and to reposition between volleys of arrows. Runes of the Trapper, which are sorely lacking from sPvP, play on this desire.

Stealth and Protection would also synergize very well with Resounding Timbre giving you Swiftness and Regen, and it seems like Beastmastery favors close range Ranger combat. It has Greatsword and Axe traits, after all. If “Guard!” also stealthed you, it’d set you up to land Hilt Bashes and point blank Whirling Defenses in the middle of team fights. It’d function very well on a Ranger built to run into the thick of combat. It’d probably need its cooldown doubled, though.

“Search and Rescue!”
It’s a neat idea but it’s very barebones and the cooldown is extremely long. And now Scrappers are getting this ability, plus an execute, all on a shorter cooldown, without taking a large chunk of their damage and utility out of the fight. This ability probably needs a rework more than almost any other in the game.

It seems to epitomize that feeling that Ranger is lacking in polish. Consider also that the Ranger +10% res time trait simply triggers Search and Rescue. Nothing else. No neat shield, no bubble, no stealth, no well of blood, none of the cool things other professions get. Healing Spring might be nice, and I think the Ranger revive trait used to do that.

I can’t think of how I’d improve Search and Rescue. It seems bad at its core. What does Ranger need in that last Shout utility slot? Condition Removal and Stability. Perhaps Mobility.
If the ability, probably renamed to just “Rescue!” or “Steady!” (voice acted as “Steady…!”) or something, gave you and your pet condition immunity and stability for a few seconds it’d be a lot more useful.

That leaves Resounding Timbre. I like the trait but it doesn’t really help the Ranger heal at all. (I say that keeping in mind Druid is coming, but base Ranger and future Elites might not all be heal-heavy.) Regen is slow and in PvP it’s highly corruptible. I’d like to see a condition removal per shout, honestly. I’m not sure if Trooper runes work with Ranger but even if they do, it’s unreasonable to make a spec, in this case a Shout Ranger, sacrifice its runes just to be functional.

And right now conditional removal is critical. Playing in sPvP or Verdant Brink without a way to cleanse immobilize, bleeds, torment, confusion, poison, etc, is a quick, easy way to die. So most Rangers need to run something with a lot of condition removal, which is traited Survival skills for most, and Signet of Renewal for some. Which is a bad utility, imo, because it sacrifices your pet. Transferring 16 burning stacks to your beloved companion doesn’t feel very Ranger-y to me. The alternative is just to die every time a Burn Guardian or other condition build looks at you.

As an aside: It might also be neat if Resounding Timbre were changed to apply Shouts to nearby allies as well. In the event that Shouts get reworked a little, if Guard! stealthed all allies or Steady! gave them all condi immunity and stability and Sic Em! gave em all swiftness and might or something, that’d be cool.

Might raises one last point from me: Ranger has poor boon generation compared to other professions. In a world where several classes can stack a lot of boons, including 25 might, fairly easily, Ranger is still stuck popping out 3 might every 30 seconds. We Heal as One seemed to help that slightly, very slightly, but it still left the entire class sub-par. And yet it was still nerfed.

Unless your intent is to shaft Rangers into being Druid Healbots and you’re intentionally wanting them to be bad offensively, several things need to be revised in the class.

Not even King.
Even with that messed up build, that sacrifices so much, Ranger was STILL bad.
It was still lucky to see 3k crits. They even nerfed the might sharing as if multiple other kitten classes don’t get to sustain 25 might on themselves permanently already. All of which outdps ranger. Because everything out DPSes ranger.

There is no way Druid with all its healing is also gonna magically deal any damage. I can only assume ANet has intentionally sidelined DPS rangers in favor of making the profession all healing.

I like all the balance changes previewed. I asked for several of those in feedback posts myself. Here’s hoping poison is good without having to use venom share to hit 20 stacks now. With the Healing meta possibly on the horizon thanks to Druid, Ventari, etc, poison may be a lot more important in HoT than it has been.

What I wanna know is whether or not any thought has been paid towards making healing turret less of a “drop it and pop it” mechanic, and whether all turrets have had a look to see about making them less useless. Net Turret seems like an obviously strong choice for Scrapper, for example, because it nails things down for you to smash, but as it stands, turrets are pretty ineffective and die to even minor AoE so turret builds are just not worth it.

Are you guys noticing engis are also getting more stability and might? And that it synergizes with Flamethrower? Which is the best weapon to use to catch a Thief in stealth with Lock On, which Reveals stealthed enemies for 6s and gives them 10 vuln at a 1200 range? And that engineers regen health “rapidly” with swiftness and have a popular trait that gives them swiftness every time they use a kit?

So you’re looking at perma-stability, effortless might stacking, swiftness, multiple regeneration sources, mobility, stuns, dazes, not one but TWO good stealth detectors, etc etc.

Have fun with that. :p

In Silverwastes my Thief is Sinister accessories with Carrion armor and weapons for a bit more survivability. Dagger/Dagger+Shortbow. Deadly Strikes, Acrobatics, Shadow Arts at the moment but the second two change a lot.

Acrobatics keeps you from getting pinned down by giving you a lot of Vigor and by breaking stuns and the constant immobilizes mordrem like to spam with Hard To Catch and Don’t Stop.

I’m using Shadow Arts right now for the two Venom traits, which gives me a ~30-40 second CD on major condi burst damage that scales based on how many allies are around me. I use the poison, torment, and stun venoms. Which I think is Spider, Skelk, and Basilisk Venoms.

The stealth helps even though my only stealth abilities are the passive stealth on ressing an ally and my heal skill, since my last utility slot is spent on Signet of Shadows for the 25% speed boost and aoe blind.

When not using venoms I usually use Trickery instead of Shadow Arts and take Caltrops, Dagger Storm, and maybe Needle Trap. Then trait for tricks to cure conditions and have a shorter CD, and for steal to give might, fury, swiftness, vigor, and to daze or confuse enemies, and for dodging to drop caltrops.
I sometimes switch Deadly Arts traits to support traps as well. You can have your heal drop a needle trap, and make all traps applies 5 vuln to enemies and 5 might to you. So you can double need trap enemies and really ruin their day.

Shortbow gives good area coverage with Choking Gas and Trick Shot pinging everything. Shortbow5 provides superior mobility.
Dagger/Dagger gives bleed stacks AND evades for surviving in melee with Death Blossom. Dagger5’s stealth also helps escape sticky situations and Dagger4’s thrown knife helps tag enemies and cripple multiple enemies with its bouncing, which also applies venoms in a pinch.

I tried this build with Daredevil last BWE and it worked very well. I took Hide in Shadows, Caltrops, Disabling Daggers, Shadowstep, and the Elite combo. Was able to dodge a lot and spam condis while doing it, then switch to Death Blossoms or Shortbow3s for evades while regenerating Endurance, then start dodging again, then use more evading skills, etc, to be largely untouchable during fights.

Lots of aoe condition coverage, but Steal + Disabling Daggers + the Elite combo allowed me to still pick out and focus down high priority targets liked Mordrem Snipers. And even when that spike combo was down, I could still use all of my evades and teleports to jump past the other enemies to get my hands on the priority target for destruction. And even if I couldn’t, if they were inaccessible, I could evade something like a Sniper’s Rapid Fire for long periods of time while dealing damage to the more immediate enemies.

With the above setup I sit at 17.3k hp, poison (and weakness as a result) and bleed constantly, sprinkle on some other condis like torment, have high vigor uptime for dodging, get swiftness when dodging, automatically break incoming stuns every 30 seconds and refill endurance, cripple and chill have 50% reduced durations, and incoming immobilized turn into cripple instead once every 10 seconds.

Makes it very easy to survive in the Silverwastes. Venoms also leech life and because of the waves most events use to spawn Mordrem in the zone, they’re frequently back up for each new wave.

Edit: Holy Wall of Text. Sorry about that. Got carried away.

Primary Concern:
Shortbow 2 seems really clumsy to me. I liked the concept but the execution is very difficult a lot of times. With the wrong camera angle it can be hard to time precisely (I frequently try to make a quick, tricky shot, detonate when the shot is over the target’s head, only to realize it was still several feet away because I was shooting at max range, making the arc low, and since I was aiming over my character’s shoulder I had poor depth perception), and in a zerg or group event or even just a 5 man dungeon things can get far too hectic for you to monitor your shot in flight and detonate it at the right moment. So its main use for now is spamming on fields under your own feet to proc blast finishers without detonating it.

What I’ve been dreaming of for a while now is Shortbow 2 firing the 3 bombs by default, sort of how engineers throw multiple projectiles themselves. So no need to worry about detonating them right before they hit the ground. Their spread could be variable. No need to make them all blast finishers, but it would be cool if one shot were still a finisher. Maybe make the other 2 explosives spiral around the core one with the blast finisher.

Or maybe just give it a single projectile that explodes into three explosions.

Then there’s the idea of a sticky bomb. Lower the arc and increase the speed on the shot and make it stick to what it hits, or if terrain interaction is too hard to swing, require a target, and after a second or two it explodes and bleeds foes in a small radius around the target the shot stuck to. Maybe it explodes and drops a few smaller bombs around the target. Again, the core sticky explosive could be the blast finisher and the little ones around it wouldn’t be finishers.

Secondarily, it’d be nice to see a Shortbow trait somewhere for Thieves.
Maybe one that returns the blast finisher to it if Cluster Bomb were to change.

Or one that proc’d swiftness on crit for like 3 seconds.
Or one that tormented or confused on crit.
Or a generic range increase.
Or -1 initiative cost to all shortbow abilities.

Or Trick Shot/Surprise Shot now splits into two arrows on the first bounce and hits two nearby enemies instead of just one. (Maybe make each of those second bounces also split. That’s 8 hits. I’m not sure Trick Shot damage is so high that 8 hits would be an insane amount of damage but it could always be lowered to compensate.)

Or Trickshot/Surprise Shot now confuses/torments (or both!) each enemy hit for a few seconds.

Or maybe pick a few of those out. The sort of trait I’d expect to see is the -1 initiative cost coupled with the swiftness on crit. That’d just be par for the course. The kind of trait I’d dream of seeing in game would be “Trick Shot applies confusion and splits after the first target. Shortbow criticals apply torment (with a small ICD).”

It’d hit the first target and bounce, then each secondary target would not split, but still get the second bounce, for 5 total hits, all would trigger a bit of confusion, and crits would provide slightly more condi coverage.

Thirdly and lastly is a more general concern about poison. It feels pretty weak. Likely in exchange for its healing debuff, which doesn’t seem all that helpful outside of PvP. I try to use it on Mordrem Menders and the like and they heal for so much that a debuff doesn’t really dent their output much. So you spend all your initiative on stacking poison clouds, get like 10 stacks up, and those tick for 1k-2k max. It seems like poison effects need their duration increased or their damage increased. Personally, I like the idea of them being even more of an attrition condition than bleeds.

Burns are explosive. They damage you hard and fast.
Bleeds last longer and do more moderate damage.
Poison is brief AND weak. But what if it had a long duration and medium or low damage? That fits the theme of poison to me a great deal more. Most poisons in the real world take a while to set in and slowly cause their damage.

To circle back to the initial point: The reason you end up spamming Choking Gas is because Cluster Bomb is so hard to use in group play. There’s no much going on it’s just easier to stack some poison on everything than try to follow your bomb and detonate it perfectly. But this causes problems in that your poison field might well prevent a more desired field, like a fire field, from comboing for people.

So I’d like to humbly put forward these suggestions, and request other players do the same. Shortbow seems like a mainstay in most Thief builds because of its versatility, but it’s also one of the less well-polished weapon kits in the game. I’m curious about what other players think of the skillset.

And it seems to me like this current period of finalizing the various professions for HoT launch might be the best time to make such changes.

For leveling, soloing, open world content, etc, dual pistols work fine, especially if you trait for them. If you play a stealthy build your pistol 1 sneak attack is basically another p/p 3 for free, so that’s fun to throw out.

In underleveled areas you can easily run around hitting 3 and instantly kill lower level enemies if you’re in berserker or assassin gear. I did map completion on my thief with Pistol/Pistol and Dagger/Pistol sets. Centaur runes, swiftness Sigils. Ran around 1-shotting enemies in a hail of bullets, maintaining 3 minutes of swiftness nearly all the time.

But against enemies closer to your level, you’ll have to be good with your utilities, or use another weapon set heavily, like switch to Sword/Pistol or Dagger/Dagger after enemies close in on you, after you wear them down a bit from a distance with your guns. Traps work well in this regard because you can just drop em and take a step back and enemies will have to cross them to get to you and you can trait traps to give you 5 might and put 5 vuln on the enemy.

Karl McLain.5604:

Ricochet in its previous implementation is not slated to return at this time.
When the trait system was condensed, the standard was set in that each weapon set could only have one trait. Being that a player might want to receive increased damage from pistols, but not necessarily inherit the RNG bounce attacks from the secondary trait, this secondary trait was cut.
I will say though that pistols are something we’ll be looking to improve, being as they feel under-tuned at the moment.

-Karl

Imo, part of the issue is also that Shortbow is just amazing. One of the most versatile skillsets in the entire game even if just for Infiltrator’s Arrow. So it automatically wins ranged weapon set comparisons.

But even if the two were somehow comparable in utility, the greater issue is, I think, that Thief has poor AoE. Shortbow allows you to blanket an area and tag a lot of enemies or ping several players. What would make pistol most viable aside from a niche mechanic like Shortbow5, is a decent AoE melee weapon for Thief. So you could cleave in melee but burn single targets down from a distance. I’m hoping staff covers that niche but I’m not so sure yet.

Still personally skeptical about how condi DH will work. Mono-condi is pretty weak, especially with some enemy types being completely immune to burning. And I’m still not sure if Virtue of Justice even works the way it normally does as a Guardian when you slot Dragonhunter. Burn Guardians don’t like to trigger the Virtue because it stops their burn procs. I didn’t get a sense of the virtue working very well with Longbow on my Condi guard last I test it.

Love the Mallyx changes. Never liked the self-condi spam, but I did enjoy Mallyx more than Shiro, Ventari, or Jalis by far anyhow.

I’m very skeptical about the poison trait, though. Poison does really poor damage and from what I recall, Rev only applies poison on the last hit of the mace auto chain, and only for about 3 seconds at a time. I don’t see how that 3 second poison tab and 6 seconds of poison every 20 seconds are going to be remotely competitive.

Salty about losing Stability on that shout, but the Augury change is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for and everything looks sweet overall. Can’t wait to try the changes out.

Gotta agree.
I wanted armor skins. Armors are always better than outfits because they let players get creative and mix them up.
Stuff like a bunch of bank access items were just insulting.

I regularly topped 10 stacks by sticking around. The key is choosing which defense events you actually do. If you choose an upscaled event with mobs that are level 27 in a level 19 zone, causing all your attacks to glance, you’re gonna spend way too long on those. But if you go for the reasonably leveled events, and the shield events in particular, you can 100% those without leaving and easily get a lot of stacks.

Mitch.4781:

Wow awesome…When was this introduced????

Recently. With the LA rebuild. When the new LA was added a scavenger hunt was included which rewards Princess.

There’s a third item, called the Star of Gratitude, that consumes Empyreal Fragments, but it’s a Wintersday thing, iirc.

I’ve gotta complain again about the DCs. Not just in this event, which just cost me 12 stacks, the daily, and 20 minutes of my playtime, but in ALL of the game. Getting DCd at a 90% Silverwastes usually puts you back into a 20% SW when you relog. Farm that one to 80% and get DCd again 20 minutes later? Log back into a 0% SW. Without keeping a player locked to a shard for a period of time after a DC, all future events that work on a timer will continue to be garbage for people without perfect connections.

Some way to temporarily preserve what instance you’re in and what boons you have at the time for brief periods of no connection would really, really help nearly all areas of this game.

The DC costing me everything did illustrate that key flaw in the event everyone has been repeating: Because not one single portion of the event provides any kind of reward aside from the end of the meta event, all 20 minutes of my work fighting the mordrem was basically deleted because I lagged for about 20 seconds, got kicked to character select, and had to log back in.

I’ll repeat that: Because of the changing fall weather and high winds in my area causing a brief (<30 seconds) disconnect on my end, 20 minutes of working on this event got taken from me because GW2 doesn’t sustain that information between connections. My character was possibly still standing in the same spot they DCd, with 12 stacks on them, near an event, to everyone who passed by, the disconnection was so short. And when I relogged I was put into another shard and lost all of my stacks.

That’s a really, really terrible feeling as a play. I have absolutely nothing to show for logging in on the last night of the event so far.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hello,

I asked the head of the GW2 Design Team about whether we would be making changes and rerunning it, extending it, or repeating it as it currently is designed. At this time, we are not going to extend the event, nor do we have plans at this time to repeat it, either amended or in its current form.

The Mordrem Invasion event will run through its allotted time. It ends at 9:00 AM tomorrow, Monday. As explained in my earlier thread, no changes will be made to the event beyond the fixes that were made on Thursday and, of course, the distribution of earned rewards for those who were impacted by that bug. (The bug ran from 9:00 AM until about 4:00 PM Pacific time. If you earned blooms during that period but did not receive them or received fewer than the intended amount, they will be sent to you via in-game mail. NPCs will remain in place — particularly in the Priory.

I hope this info is helpful to you. And thanks to those of you who provided constructive suggestions about the event — your thoughts are very appreciated. What’s constructive: “Rewards might be [this]” or “I like the rewards in [that] and suggest you adopt that system for this sort of event.” What’s not constructive: “Rewards are bad” (with absolutely no suggestions for how they might be improved).

I think you guys get it, and I understand that some of you are pretty “hot under the collar” about the event. But please try to give us ideas we can work with — that’s to everyone’s benefit.

Main feedback, as always:
Dedicated players should be able to get many of the rewards, if not most. It’d be nice to see currency income or reward price match that goal. Let casuals pick one or two out. Let the dedicated get a few rewards. Let the hardcore afford many or even most.

Implementation could be as minor as raising bloom reward or lowering bloom cost (especially that insane gold cost that seems entirely out of place), or as complex as adding wiggly chests per event with blooms based on bronze/silver/gold participation and a chance of getting a reward like scarlet’s box or a mini egg, again based on participation.
This might keep people on events rather than tagging and running, and might keep people active throughout the event time frame rather than rushing 10 stacks of the defender buff and then AFKing somewhere safe until it’s all over.

Specific feedback to ANet:
I don’t want to sound rude, but I think one of the reasons players are “hot under the collar” on this topic is It feels like you’re not communicating. We players have no idea how an event like this made it into the game. We have no idea what the review process was like when the complaints began pouring in. And we have no idea why you would decide to leave something like this completely unchanged.

Is it as simple as “Busy on HoT, we’re all putting in overtime to meet the deadline”?
Could it be “No one’s in on the weekends so the event could not be changed much after it went live”?
Perhaps “The event actually worked out exactly as we had planned and we’re satisfied enough with the outcome that we see no point in adjusting it”?

It might be unpopular for ANet to come out and say “we didn’t want new players to get speed-leveled by events and flooded with karma” and “we wanted to keep old skins and effects somewhat prestigious for the sake of the people who earned them when they were new” but some kind of explanation of thought process and reasoning would go a long way towards relaxing the community.

By my reckoning players have provided dozens of pages of feedback and have received in return a handful of defensive replies with the intention of encouraging players to be more constructive rather than provide players any new information beyond the bare minimum: “This will be patched.” “Devs know about the feedback.” “Event will not be changed.” None of the context around those things has come to light. It makes me feel sorry for the community team squeezed between unhappy players and devs that’re probably worn thin by their upcoming deadline.

If I could see the event improved in any way, this is what’d I’d wish for:

I’d like it if there were some minor rewards for doing the individual events. Blooms or scarlet boxes/dust cases or other things from event enemies or from reward chests resulting from the actual events. Even just some silver would be nice. The dream would be blooms + silver per event with a chance at getting a bonus box based on your participations. So gold is a decent chance at a scarlet or dust box. Bronze is a not so good chance. So you can balance between tagging a lot of events or really working hard at fewer events, but getting gold on those.

I’d like it if the events scaled in enemy number rather than upscaling some enemies so hard they become super tanky while the normal enemies die before you can even tag them.

I’d like if there were a flow to events, so rather than race all over the map and often show up too late to participate, you could comfortably stop and fight and do event mechanics without feeling like you need to hurry up so you can go tag another event.

Which leads directly to my biggest wish: That the rewards were more reliable, perhaps based on overall map completion rather than individual stacks. It’s so hard to hit 20/21 stacks for the 5 extra blooms that it’s often best to just get 10 or 11 stacks then idle for 40 minutes until the next zone is about to start up, then do 10 or 11 more stacks there.

What if rewards scaled by overall zone completion, and your stacks gave you a stacking defensive bonus against the mordrem or/and a stacking rewards bonus? +10% chance at rare rewards per stack? Or +1 bloom per stack and your main bloom reward came from total zone completed? So 40 events completed in the zone = 40 blooms total?
So you can play casually and not race and get 8 stacks and a 40-zone total would mean you get 48 blooms plus maybe the daily blooms.

Then it takes you like 10 maps to unlock the 450 bloom rewards. Sounds fair to me.

Likewise, if you rush and get 20 stacks in that same zone that did 40 total events, you get 60 base blooms. 1 per stack and 1 per zone-wide event counter incrementation. Encourages people not to rush or zerg, but to spread out and cover as many areas as possible to quickly knock the events out.

Another area of my feedback would be the timing and pacing itself. The 30 minute races with 30 minutes of downtime are pretty unfun to me. I’d rather there be like hour-long periods with rolling events across a zone, and when that ends it jumps to another zone and starts rolling. Maybe include a pause between the final zone and the cycle restarting. This would probably not be compatible with my previous feedback on bloom rewards but either change would be nice.

And finally, the actual cost of the rewards is disappointing. If someone goes all-out on all 4 days of the event I feel like they should be able to obtain most of what they want. As it stands, that’s impossible. And on top of the high relative bloom cost, the gold cost tacked on feels really insulting. I know a new player that was excited to learn the selfless potion could give her a halo, until she went to the vendor and saw it also cost 10g on top of hundreds of blooms. She doesn’t have the time to sink into the game to make it to enough events to gather that many blooms, and as a new player she doesn’t have 10g to spend on a vanity potion either.

It seems like the limiting steps built into this event punish new and casual and poor players very heavily, while the rewards for the hardcore are mediocre.

So my (attempt at) constructive advice would be to simply cut the gold cost heavily or completely and either scale down the bloom cost or scale up bloom income.

The expense of the rewards is really the tipping point on this event. If you could reliably grind out blooms for the items you wanted most people wouldn’t even care how broken or unfun the event was. But because the event itself isn’t good, for reasons listed all over the place, and because the rewards are hard or sometimes impossible to get, players feel slighted. They were promised a fun event. Shiny skins and potions and minis and other goodies were put on display in front of them. And then the method of acquisition turned out to be hideous. So it feels like betrayal. Like a bait and switch.

I like that they brought back some old gear a lot, especially right in time for new players. But the lack of rewards during the event, the incredibly harsh scaling penalties, the racing across the zone, and then the poor bloom income really, really suck.

I have two friends new to the game, one returning from a long hiatus and the other brand new from the f2p announcement. They were both psyched to get some cool new skins since they have none so far. They did two maps then called it quits and switched to another game because the event was punishing, tedious, and neither of them had 5-10 gold to blow on the rewards for spending HOURS grinding through these event windows.

It really seems to me like there should be no gold cost, and that the events should roll constantly across the 3 zones and give more rewards at regular intervals so players could hop in and play for an hour then log out and come back later for more.

Logging in for 30 minutes windows then afking for 30 more only to come back and race for 30 more is really, really unfun game design. I don’t want to race to build buff stacks with break points so huge you can essentially stop playing halfway through each event because getting from 10 stacks to 20 requires abandoning events to go tag others. I want to take my time defending a location, accumulate rewards for that, and move on when I’m ready. Like they do in Silverwastes and Verdant Brink.