Guild Wars 2

Hadrian.7921:

Hey all!

So I don’t have too much time on my hands now a days because I have work, school, taking care of my body etc. and I thought maybe getting back into GW2 could destress me and give me some fun here and there. I has been a while so I was wondering if you guys think playing right now would be a grind to get the right gear/skills to be viable and prepared for end game activities? Pretty much, can it be done and worth by a casual player?

Yes. This is the best time in the game’s life, and it’s really easy to get the gear you need for endgame stuff. Your level 80 boost for HOT gives a full set of Exotic gear. If you need more Exotic Armor, you can run Verdant Brink and get Exotic pieces from the vendor to save a little money.

For ascended; you do the following;

Weapons: You can get Ascended weapons from the Specialization collections. GS for Necro, Staff for Thief and Ranger, Torch for Warrior, Shield for Mesmer and Revenant, Warhorn for Ele, Hammer for Engineer and Bow for Guardian. There’s a Current event going on now, you NEED TO HAVE BEATEN THE STORY JOURNAL FOR HOT TO UNLOCK IT, where you can get a Sword, Shield, Scepter Dagger or Greatsword. The only weapons not covered are Pistol, Short Bow, Focus, Axe and Rifle; and all of the Aquatic weapons. Those you generally need a crafting skill at 500 for.

The Backpiece; you can get a Rare from progressing through the HOT story. The Rare+ Backpieces have an infusion slot. You can also get Ascended Backpieces from the new LWS3 zones(bloodstone fen and Ember Bay). You can also get Rings and Accessories from them.

Fractals are a really good place for you to get ascended gear. They are also very low minimal time investment. If you can cover 3 infusion slots from your weapons and backpack, you can buy the Agony resistance you need for all of tier 1 for less than 7 gold(you can get 2 gold per day just from your daily achievements), you probably won’t need to buy all those infusions, but you can if you need to.

Rings you can get from turning in Pristine Fractal Relics, which you get from clearing a Fractal, with a daily cooldown on that particular fractal. Buy the time you get to Fractal Scale 20, you should have enough for 2 Rings.

For Raids, most people expect you to show up with ascended Weapons and Trinkets; the proper runes and sigils(which will probably cost you about 25 gold); food and utilities.

Armor is the pain to get; because you pretty much need 500 crafting to get it.

If you want to do raids, I recommend building a Hammer Support/DPS Guardian as; 1) All the weapons are covered from solo PVE 2) Heavy Armor is the cheapest for ascended 3) It’s a ridiculously simple-to-play role.

Heibi.4251:

Fatalyz.7168:

Heibi.4251:

Fatalyz.7168:

Heibi.4251:

xikira.3264:

I think legendary armor should be avaliable to obtain in some way in every game mode pvp, pve and wvw. Yes it should be extremely hard to get in any type of game mode. But it should not be locked behind a game mode a majority of guild wars dosnt play.

This sums it up in a nutshell. I certainly hope ANeT is actually reading this thread instead of tooting their horn. It seems like they ignore the concerns of players who dislike the raids.

Why would they listen to complaints about having to do Raids to obtain Legendary armor, when it was announced 2 years ago that the first Legendary armor was going to be locked behind raids. I don’t see them changing the current model, however I do see them developing armors for other game modes.

No, apparently they won’t with the current way they ignore the concerns of the MAJORITY of players.

As soon as it was announced that they would lock something that players were actually wanting behind a game mode most players dislike ANeT could have said they would be also developing armor for outside the raids. But they did not. Instead they did what they did with WvW when they decided to turn every borderland into a desert and ignored the feedback they instantly received. You see, with the desert BLs they had done so much work developing them that they sure as kitten were not going to shelve the project. Now it is the same with Legendary Armor. They’ve put too much work into how to get them, along with design, that there is no way that we will see anything outside of raids coming to our game mode any time soon. So I’m not holding my breath that ANeT will actually announce that they will create a non-raid way obtain Legendary Armor. Thanks for ignoring us, ANeT.

Sounds like you were ignoring what Anet was telling you they were going to do, hoping that community would be able to sway their opinion, and on somethings, they have. Been when they flat out tell you what it is and how it is to be obtained, if you objected to that, you should have not bought HoT.

ANeT ignores the majority at its own peril. They received the negative feedback on WvW for a long time and lost thousands of players due to inaction. Many, if not most of those players, have not returned. It’s very evident with the current WvW situation.

Now, as for non-WvW players, many are getting bored. I hear it from guildies and friends that have played this game from Day 1. So ANeT ignores the complaints, feedback and suggestions of long time players at their own peril if they wish to stay in business. Happy and involved players buy gems.

You are presenting the absolute opposite of reality here. WvW was a matter of them ignoring primary WvW players(minority) over WvW inclusive PVE-primary players(majority), but sure, force that to fit your narrative.

So now you want them to do the same and expect different results.

Casual-Open World-snobs are ironically, demonstrably the cancer of the game. Even now when they are getting quite obviously the most skewed attention towards them in the history of post-game development, they are letting their bizarre, skewed, inaccurate representation of the game ruin it for themselves, they have been camapiagning to ruin the game for others ever since HOT.

Honestly, it’s obvious to me as someone who is world-event primary, everything else inclusive type player. It’s digusting, it’s even more exclusionist than ANY raid group I’ve been in since playing MMOs(back since late-Karnak Everquest) and it makes me ashamed to be part of the fandom.

My problem with it was just that they had respawn timers on them.

I had a lot of fun with the event. Some of my favorite content in the game.

Jski.6180:

But no they had to put work into making it look different and what sounds like years of work too. Why not put that work into making the game play better or balancing out classes better.

Why would they put animators and aesthetic designers on skill balance?

Copy pasted part of my post from the Leather Armor feedback thread:

Well, to be fair, I think leather armor has the most challenges to work with. Especially the chest pieces, which is the only real complaint I ever hear of.

Light armor is not armor, so it can literally look like anything; or nothing.

Heavy armor has the advantages of having a high substance ceiling, the biggest surface area(for details), and highest variety of real life bases to work on.

Crafted medium armor is based on Leather. And the only leather armor that ever existed was Cuir Boulli, which would look like plate armor. Then you’d have the problem of armors looking like boring Heavy Armor, largely because hardened leather can’t support the same level of ornamentation. Standard fantasy armor leather armor is usually limited to studded leather(which really has no variation to speak of, and a few exist already in game) hide-type armor(which I agree are underused), but the variation of those are limited by fur patterns, and also, honestly, would be the hardest to animate, and has limited ornamentation; since this kind of armor’s aesthetic isn’t “fitted”, its just kinda thrown onto your character. Leather jackets I suppose are underused, but they are literally just coats without the bottom half, meaning less room for ornamentation.

Another option, which isn’t consistent with leather material is chain or ring coats and shirts. The material really is a non-issue with non-crafted armor. This option would work fine with vendor, reward, collection or Mystic Forge skins. But variety is very limited inherently. I personally don’t see how you can make ornamentation on it aside from arm or neck flair.

I think that the reason that they use Coats so much is because they have the following advantages 1) They are consistent with the materials used to craft them, leather 2) they have a high surface area for more ornamentation 3) they animate most impressively

Blaeys.3102:

Cyninja.2954:

Astralporing.1957:

Cyninja.2954:

Jski.6180:

The big thing HoT did wrong was making raids way too important to the over all game. Classes live and die off of the balancing to raids aimed builds but for some reason it effects both wvw and open world pve. In a way anet is giving up there old game types for a new one and much smaller / less played. HoT kind of messed things up in that way.

Open world pve doesn’t need balance, it never has and never will unless arenanet moves away from gather 50-100 people, zerg down event, done.

That’s exactly the thinking that leads to raids’ overblown importance in this game.

No, there’s no content that “doesn’t need balancing”. Not unless you treat it as completely unimportant.

No that’s the type of thinking which realises that open world content in this game is not designed around certain classes but certain amounts of people doing said content. Yes, some classes are easier/stronger in open world (necromancer for example) and others are inherintly more difficult (mesmer comes to mind) but guess what, that was the case before raids were introduced and it would remain to be the case even if raids were to be removed.

The only difference is we now actualy have some sort of balance being done. It doesn’t change that the difficulty in open world content is about as hard as finding your 1 key and targeting stuff with it.

Raid balance has literally 0 effect on class viability in open world content at this point in time.

But it does have a real impact on how the professions feel and play. My biggest concern is that, by focusing too much on balance for raids, the developers will end up homogenizing the professions to the point that they all basically play and feel the same. That would be very bad for the game.

Your hypothetical concern for the future is invalid as a critique of the present game

zealex.9410:

phys.7689:

Astralporing.1957:

flog.3485:

Astralporing.1957:

flog.3485:

Amaimon.7823:

Astralporing.1957:

zealex.9410:

good think they mainly dont focus on raids then eh? ^^

If only that were true.

Good thing it is

Hmmm let’s see: 4 raid wing versus 5 LS updates and many fractal updates + 2 new fractals + caladbolg update. Yes good thing it is

So, a single side content meant for a small subgroup of players gets comparable rate of updates as everything else in this game together.
Yeah, they surely don’t focus on it at all [/sarcasm].

Comparable? What are you on about. Nine months separate wing 3 from wing 4 lol

You were the one that choose the content to compare, not me. Interesting how you changed your argument as soon as you were pointed out what your comparison means in terms of content importance.

it literally just a bunch of boss fights tuned for 10 players, its a small team. I agree they are efficient, and consistent, but that is not a high bar. Your real complaint should be, why cant anet deliver new content consistently that is as satisfying as raids appear to be for their constituency, with much greater resources.

i think they said raid team is 5 people? 5 people isnt even 5% of their staff.

Raid creators just know their audience and can give them the essence of what they want.

And yet each lw release is 2-3 days tops worth of content.

Raiders, as a generalization, are inherently not averse to running a relatively small and incredibly linear amount of content repeatedly. What you are portraying as a high drain on developers resources, is actually a manifestation of raiders having a much lower standard expectation than you on a specific criteria.

Raid wings really are only a few hours worth of content, it’s just that raiders don’t mind repeating that content over and over again.

I’d be pretty impressed if someone actually got all the achievements and all the skins from the new area in 2-3 days, assuming they had other responsibilities.

Shovel Face.4512:

Ashen.2907:

Kyvrn.4209:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not all skins will appeal to everyone.

Well that’s obvious.

To be fair, so was your title. Of course legendary armor was going to disappoint some people.

Not some, majority.

The Armors look awful, I know it, you know it, Anet knows it, everyone knows it.

Medium armor is another trench coat when medium armor wardrobe is 96% trench coat. Where’s the diversity? People have stated they HATE trench coats, yet Anet keeps pumping them out.

So much for legendary, I’ll just transmute them. 2 years of awful, hideous crap.

Well, to be fair, I think leather armor has the most challenges to work with. Especially the chest pieces, which is the only real complaint I ever hear of.

Light armor is not armor, so it can literally look like anything; or nothing.

Heavy armor has the advantages of having a high substance ceiling, the biggest surface area(for details), and highest variety of real life bases to work on.

Crafted medium armor is based on Leather. And the only leather armor that ever existed was Cuir Boulli, which would look like plate armor. Then you’d have the problem of armors looking like boring Heavy Armor, largely because hardened leather can’t support the same level of ornamentation. Standard fantasy armor leather armor is usually limited to studded leather(which really has no variation to speak of, and a few exist already in game) hide-type armor(which I agree are underused), but the variation of those are limited by fur patterns, and also, honestly, would be the hardest to animate, and has limited ornamentation; since this kind of armor’s aesthetic isn’t “fitted”, its just kinda thrown onto your character. Leather jackets I suppose are underused, but they are literally just coats without the bottom half, meaning less room for ornamentation.

Another option, which isn’t consistent with leather material is chain or ring coats and shirts. The material really is a non-issue with non-crafted armor. This option would work fine with vendor, reward, collection or Mystic Forge skins. But variety is very limited inherently. I personally don’t see how you can make ornamentation on it aside from arm or neck flair.

I think that the reason that they use Coats so much is because they have the following advantages 1) They are consistent with the materials used to craft them, leather 2) they have a high surface area for more ornamentation 3) they animate most impressively

So, the issue here also not so much “What do all the other outfits look like”; it’s also, “What’s the best pick for what is supposed to be the most detailed and impressive piece of medium armor in the game”?

I think with all that in mind, the only legitimate choice would be a coat. The only other thing that could look impressive, IMO, would either be a hide-type armor, which would be limited in ornamentation; or a “fake plate” type, which would inherently be immediately accused of being derivative of heavy armor.

TLDR; I agree that leather coats are overused, but they are really the best option for a Legendary Armor piece.

Shovel Face.4512:

Ashen.2907:

Kyvrn.4209:

Ayrilana.1396:

Not all skins will appeal to everyone.

Well that’s obvious.

To be fair, so was your title. Of course legendary armor was going to disappoint some people.

Not some, majority.

The Armors look awful, I know it, you know it, Anet knows it, everyone knows it.

Medium armor is another trench coat when medium armor wardrobe is 96% trench coat. Where’s the diversity? People have stated they HATE trench coats, yet Anet keeps pumping them out.

So much for legendary, I’ll just transmute them. 2 years of awful, hideous crap.

Well, to be fair, I think leather armor has the most challenges to work with. Especially the chest pieces, which is the only real complaint I ever hear of.

Light armor is not armor, so it can literally look like anything; or nothing.

Heavy armor has the advantages of having a high substance ceiling, the biggest surface area(for details), and highest variety of real life bases to work on.

Crafted medium armor is based on Leather. And the only leather armor that ever existed was Cuir Boulli, which would look like plate armor. Then you’d have the problem of armors looking like boring Heavy Armor, largely because hardened leather can’t support the same level of ornamentation. Standard fantasy armor leather armor is usually limited to studded leather(which really has no variation to speak of, and a few exist already in game) hide-type armor(which I agree are underused), but the variation of those are limited by fur patterns, and also, honestly, would be the hardest to animate, and has limited ornamentation; since this kind of armor’s aesthetic isn’t “fitted”, its just kinda thrown onto your character. Leather jackets I suppose are underused, but they are literally just coats without the bottom half, meaning less room for ornamentation.

Another option, which isn’t consistent with leather material is chain or ring coats and shirts. The material really is a non-issue with non-crafted armor. This option would work fine with vendor, reward, collection or Mystic Forge skins. But variety is very limited inherently. I personally don’t see how you can make ornamentation on it aside from arm or neck flair.

I think that the reason that they use Coats so much is because they have the following advantages 1) They are consistent with the materials used to craft them, leather 2) they have a high surface area for more ornamentation 3) they animate most impressively

So, the issue here also not so much “What do all the other outfits look like”; it’s also, “What’s the best pick for what is supposed to be the most detailed and impressive piece of medium armor in the game”?

I think with all that in mind, the only legitimate choice would be a coat. The only other thing that could look impressive, IMO, would either be a hide-type armor, which would be limited in ornamentation; or a “fake plate” type, which would inherently be immediately accused of being derivative of heavy armor

Cyninja.2954:

Jski.6180:

The big thing HoT did wrong was making raids way too important to the over all game. Classes live and die off of the balancing to raids aimed builds but for some reason it effects both wvw and open world pve. In a way anet is giving up there old game types for a new one and much smaller / less played. HoT kind of messed things up in that way.

Open world pve doesn’t need balance, it never has and never will unless arenanet moves away from gather 50-100 people, zerg down event, done.

There is 0 requirement for group or tactical play in open world pve. The only fight that comes close to requiring a small amount of organisation is the 3 headed wurm, and even here class balance makes no difference. The only thing raids have done is add some form of balance to the game besides spvp. Before that, classes were all over the place, now at least they get adjusted to fit some objective.

All of the HoT maps require organization to get the highest tier.

It’s true that classes are more or less irrelevnt at open world, but the idea that people can pull off a Tier 4 Verdant Brink, or a Dragon’s Stand without at least commanders is ludicrous.

I don’t agree with a lot of what he says, but I watch him because his enthusiasm is infectious.

I think his opinion is considerably more informed than the average player, as he takes suggestions on what to cover from his fanbase, and therefore plays in ways he’s not personally inclined to.

Bearhugger.4326:

He made a lot of very strong points about elite specialization.

100% agree that they’re basically handing roles to the wrong classes.

It’s great that chronomancers and scrappers get the option to be good tanks with their elite specialization, but warriors and guardians should also be competent tanks (their class fantasy) and yet they are not, because their tanking does not come from an elite specialization.

The same goes for healing, nobody made a ranger to heal. Instead you’d expect that to be given to water elementalists and guardians, yet those are poor healers in comparison because it comes from an elite specialization, while the elementalist and guardian healing is a core class component.

In the long term, elite specialization could create a strong dissonance between the class fantasy and what they are actually good at. It seems to point to my warrior being more likely to get competitive at healing than at tanking, which is complete nonsense. And if that’s how it’s going to be, I would prefer elite specializations to enhance a core function of the class instead of expanding into new roles and areas of expertise that are more or less related to the players expectations of what that class can do.

I just want to point out that the original Ranger, Aragorn, was a healer. Short of Mythic tier characters like the Elf-Lords, Rangers were the best healers in that setting.

OriOri.8724:

I disagree that character bound masteries would have been a better approach. All it would have done is spread out the grind somewhat. But eventually it would require more grind to get all of your characters their masteries than it currently requires.

Not necessarily. Make it 1/9th the required XP and they would have effectively matched the experience, with the exception of altoholics(like me) who have multiples of the same class.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

This was true . . . after the leaks. And after their official public relations blitz. But for the longest, as I recall, people refused to believe it. Honestly, I’ve never seen an expansion with fewer maps and content. And I’ve been playing MMOs and the like for a long time.

I laughed at the time, but some even suggested that ANet worked on the expansion for over three years . . . since the game’s launching. And defended that position viciously.
While I agree personal expectation and speculation is one thing, common sense and experience tells what an expansion should also be as opposed to what it isn’t.

Therein lies the reason for the silence, I think: better to be quiet than criticized.

But that’s just my opinion.

I just think that the expectation of content per price is getting out of hand. I mean, people say that it “cost as much as a full game”, but it really didn’t. I think the industry has gotten to the point where we should really look at $60 games for what they are; a starting point in a flex-spending structure based on DLC and not a full game at base price. It’s gotten so obvious in the last two years that the price point is not an appropriate one anymore.

I honestly thought it was worth the price at launch, it’s just that games have cost $60 for so long that it’s considered set-in-stone, while the price “of a full game” is arbitrary.

Anet was pretty transparent about the amount of content being 4 new PVE zones, 2 Guild Halls, and a WvW map. Raids were expected to ship with the expac but it took a little longer.

If people expected more than that, it was really their own expectations running wild based on speculation.

They put in environmental Easter egg hunts and achievements that aren’t a grind with each new map.

I mean, if you want a game to be able to have enough content to continuously play day-in day-out; you are going to have to have some “grind” in there. You have to be really naive to expect anything else.

The biggest question is, if you don’t like grind, why are you insisting on so much content? Isn’t it better to just accept that general limitation and consume the content you like and let the game lay aside until more comes out(which it always does).

Leveling is trivial. That’s why you get a level 80 boost and tons of times of knowledge. Anet is done with the leveling aspect of the game. They aren’t going to put any effort into it.

Astralporing.1957:

Cyninja.2954:

Myhr.9108:

WP videos are well-constructed and presented, but I gotta disagree with a lot of what he’s saying, especially concerning raids (to clarify, I’m not against raids, I think there is room for them in GW2, but he tends to imply that it’s the best thing to ever happen to GW2, which is highly subjective)

Anyway, it brings more publicity to GW2, so it can’t hurt, as long as it’s not the only voice that is heard.

This is exactly the way to look at raids from a non raider perspective. Raids have added another layer of content to open the game up to more players.

There’s another side to this though. They scared away a lot of players as well. Remember, that, while for some potential players Raids are a content that can help bring them in, for others it will work in exactly opposite direction. They will hear about raids, and decide it’s not a game for them.

And, before someone will speak up about how Raids are only a part of the game, and there’s so much other things to do, remember that this won’t matter. It’s the perception of things that will decide whether those players will want to join. As far as the outside world is concerned, GW2 is now a raid game. With all the positive and negative consequences of that classification.

So, from non-raider perspective, it doesn’t mean that the game will bring in more people. It means that the game population profile will shift away from the playing style the non-raiders prefer.

From my completely anecdotal and subjective experience, that’s not at all the perception of GW2. All of my friends that have played GW2 have only been casual fans of the game, and when they heard of raids, they still thought of the game as “GW2 with raids”, not “Raid centrilized WoW clone #xxx”. They still think of Fractals and WvW as the primary endgame content(although a couple of them aren’t aware of them), with expectations of living story updates.

One of my buddies, a big WoW player, is the exception, and he got the game with a HoT sale. Even he didn’t buy the game with the expectation of a “raid game”.

At this point I don’t see why Anet would bother. People are clearly unhappy with whatever level of hype there is.

It definitely trivialized content, including the Chak Gherent with the exception of the SCAR lane.

Fatalyz.7168:

Blaeys.3102:

Fatalyz.7168:

Blaeys.3102:

There is room for both – they just need to finally realize this and implement a story mode into the raid model.

How would they go about accomplishing both, hire more people, take more time in between content releases, lower the quality of what is being delivered, or deprecate more content to free up resources?

They can likely do both without expending a single additional resource – a point that has been brought up before.

Simply shift the resources that went into the challenge motes from the last raid wing (that are pretty much universally disliked anyway) into a story mode or mote system. Make the harder version the proper raid experience and use the mote system/resources to implement this greater accessibility.

Of course, Im speculating that the resources spent would be roughly the same, but I think that is justified by common sense.

I think that it is safe to say that there were minimal resources put into the challenge motes, and I think it is better for those resources to be spent on making the proper challenge the best experience that they can.

It also took 9 months for them to deliver that second raid wing with the challenge moltes, I’m pretty sure that we don’t want them taking that long between future releases or even longer.

There’s an expectation of quality for the challenge motes though. I’m saying there should be zero expectation of quality for easy mode.

Nerf the bosses into elites, that’s the extent of the nerfing I’m talking about.

Moonyeti.3296:

Ticky.5831:

Fatalyz.7168:

Blaeys.3102:

There is room for both – they just need to finally realize this and implement a story mode into the raid model.

How would they go about accomplishing both, hire more people, take more time in between content releases, lower the quality of what is being delivered, or deprecate more content to free up resources?

I’m honestly more inclined to agree with the “raids are ok” attitude; but I honestly think it would be a trivial amount of effort to implement an easy mode.

Just nerf the easy mode into oblivion and don’t give rewards for it. If all the players want is to see the story, gameplay quality should be trivial. They are just going to be playing it once and then be done with it.

I could see doing it like a reverse challenge mote – pick the story only mode and it switches to the easy mode no loot version.

Yeah, that’s my idea entirely.

Blaeys.3102:

Vayne.8563:

Sartharina.3542:

Vayne.8563:

Anet said directly that fractals replaced dungeons as challenging five man content. Not like this is something I’ve made up.

While they replaced dungeons as the challenging content, they didn’t carry the spirit of dungeons. Raids did.

Except they didn’t. Dungeons had multiple paths, raids don’t. You could do story mode and see at least the inside the dungeon, even if you didn’t see every boss. Not true for raids.

Challenging content should be a part of the game – but not when it serves to exclude people from the experience/story/etc based on how they choose to build and play their character.

Ok, I really can’t agree with this line of thinking. GW2 has the most elastic character build system I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s far more elastic than it was at launch.

At launch there was respeccing for trait lines; you unlocked your skills non-linearly. Now it’s just swap out your traits and skills. Maybe have an extra gear set.

With that in place, I see absolutely no reason why it should be any issue whatsoever to accommodate a raid group.

And besides, “dungeons” had the same “problem” with people demanding the speed run meta. That was before raids, that was before damage meters.

I’d honestly recommend watching this WP video. He’s talking about how damage meters actually increased build variety. The reason being, even without the empirical data from DPS meter figures, people were still running metas off word-of-mouth. He actually found that running a non-meta build (power engi) performs adequately, even exceeding practical performance of other players running the meta engi due to less demanding gameplay, allowing people to focus on the mechanics. And he knows what he’s talking about, being under demands from his viewership to play in ways he wouldn’t be inclined to play normally.

Fatalyz.7168:

Blaeys.3102:

There is room for both – they just need to finally realize this and implement a story mode into the raid model.

How would they go about accomplishing both, hire more people, take more time in between content releases, lower the quality of what is being delivered, or deprecate more content to free up resources?

I’m honestly more inclined to agree with the “raids are ok” attitude; but I honestly think it would be a trivial amount of effort to implement an easy mode.

Just nerf the easy mode into oblivion and don’t give rewards for it. If all the players want is to see the story, gameplay quality should be trivial. They are just going to be playing it once and then be done with it.

Is it worth playing? Yes. Absolutely.

Is it worth investing time in? As with every other game in existence; ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!

No game is a good time investment. If you look at them like that, unless you are the extreme exception of someone who is talented enough to play competitively, you are going to be disappointed 100% of the time.

Games are meant to be enjoyed, either presently, or with the anticipation of goals met in the near future. Doing anything else(especially worrying about when it will die) is only going to undercut your enjoyment of any game.

FrizzFreston.5290:

Fatalyz.7168:

Hjorje.9453:

Crinn.7864:

Then ya’ll should have no problem with raids.

Raid wipes are going to be from mechanics, if you are failing dps checks you where probably having mechanics issues.

The dps checks are so small that I cannot fathom how you could possibly not meet them without failing mechanics first.

Lets look at the from a different angle. I raid outside of my guild. I have no problems with the raids, with rotations, or with mechanics. I consider myself a pretty decent player. But the player with in my guild have their own set of limitations that make the mechanics hard for them, or they are slow on skill usage which lowers the DPS. Raids require a different kind of coordination then fractals or dungeons do. I can get a group together of just my friends and knock out any dungeon path in 30min or less mostly less. Me and my friends can go into a fractal and knock those out, but when we start adding others to the group the times go up, not because they are bad players, they just have other limitations that slow things down.

Then those players are not the target audience for that content, and that is OK. Just because people that are not the target audience are not able to complete it, is not a reason to change the content to suit them.

And before anyone says that you aren’t asking to change the content, that you want to increase the accessibility, there are two scenarios for that to happen: 1) they create an infantile-like mode, but do not increase dev resources resulting in either poorer quality or increased time between releases, or 2) they increase raid dev resources by bringing in devs from other departments/areas, Raids are now able to get multi-layered content but content in other parts of the game now has reduced quality or increased time between releases. Neither of those situations is conducive to “adding onto”. You could say that there is a third option, hire more resources, and while I don’t see that happening, I’ve been wrong before.

I wonder how much of an issue it is if time between raids increase, to be honest. As long as they consider how much content they put out for everyone. Because for some reason I feel that the longevity of raids is much better, also due to goals like legendary armor and time gating rewards to once a week.

While playing the living story episodes, those seem to be play once and maybe some minor repetition in the zone, explored it and then pretty much done. It doesn’t have that same longevity perhaps? I feel many players come to Raids as the only other thing to come to they haven’t played through at least once, expecting just a good time and maybe some repeating it for shinies. But it obviously might not be their thing

I think dungeons and fractals and raids are all separate things, comparing them is alright, but they have very different target audiences. I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit less focus on raids, and more on slightly more accessible group content that is challenging but not so challenging that you need to practice and practice. (I mean, it is a game, alot of players just want to play leisurely not practice) Not that I don’t think current raiders deserve their challenges or anything, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of the player base is still waiting for challenging content that is suited for them. (It might be tricky to determine what is challenging for a bigger audience, I suppose)

Going on a tangent here, but in a way I guess fractals is sort of nice with different challenge tiers in that way. Though I wouldn’t mind if fractals as “small instances in the mists” started existing more as “small instances in Tyria” As for most people that might make a more interesting story. It would be setting up fractal-like instances up as 4 difficulty tiered mini raids outside of the mists, which could actually work as an extension of the fractals themselves. As a complete out of the blue concept ofcourse and It would mean it is less tied to fractals which then would receive less updates tied to the fractal hub in the mists and more tangible in Tyria rather than the Mists. So ehh I dunno.

The LW episodes have repeatable content in the form of achievements.

LTTP so sorry if I missed something relevant.

At this point their priorities are obviously Gem Store>Expansion(most likely)>Living World(S3, Current Events, New Zones)>Raids>Guild Halls>Fractals>WvW>QOL Improvements. Even sacrificing from other areas in favor of LW. They completely restructured their plans for Legendary Weapons and sacrificing Festival improvements in favor of Living World.

They are coming out with Living World update at a MUCH higher content-to-release time ratio than they have ever been.

Doam.8305:

How do you expect people to care at all about future story segments?

By reading the in-game S1 primer.

None of these are plot holes, just plot threads. And the answer is when they become directly relevant again.

A doormat is someone who is easily emotionally manipulated by an aggressive manipulation. People are calling the PC a doormat, when all that is happening is that the PC is failing to convince Brahm to follow their course of action. This is simply Brahm not being a doormat, and actually having agency.

This is what happens when Bioware’s PC-Rando NPC character dialog, where the NPCs have essentially no agency, is universally praised. That kind of Dialog, to me, ends up feeling like:

(Kung Pow “I implore you…” scene to save those familiar some time)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEyrg0WU5Ao

I agree more dialog options would be nice. I’m just annoyed at this (IMO) overreaction. Not saying it’s great writing, but at least it’s not a different kind of bad writing.

Grief doesn’t have to make sense. It never does IRL.

Congratulations man.

Fancypants.9705:

- We are releasing a journey to make legendaries easier and cheaper to create…

You have 6 developers working on legendaries?? FIRE them all, its takes them 2-3 years or however long the game has been out for and they come up with 4?? 1 of which (the shortbow) I am sure has been copied from Aion.

1) Actually, the intention was never to make them cheaper, just to make them non-RNG

2) Apparently, for what it’s worth, I don’t think the Legendary team is to blame for this. Apparently they weren’t solely working on the Legendarys and were also tasked with working on other things. It sounds like they were just grossly mismanaged to me.

Guhracie.3419:

Well, Vayne, you managed to respond to my last post without seeming to have read any of the words in it. I would respond, but I am baffled as to how to interpret your post, without any context about what questions and points you’re even answering. I don’t mean to be insulting, I just want to be clear that I would like to respond, but cannot.

All my best!

Ticky.5831:

Ashen.2907:

A drought does not mean a complete absence, but rather an insufficiency. I live in an area that has been in its worst drought in over a thousand years, but we still get rain.

I do not think that the existence of raids means that there is not a content drought.

Well, raids are pretty much the only thing MMOs(in general) are expected to come out with between expansions.

So by the general standards, either it’s not a content drought, or MMOs in general are in a constant state of content drought.

You want to argue with Mike O’Brien, the man who brought “content drought” into this conversation and also started this thread? Okay, yeah, that’s totally reasonable.

This MMO gave the expectation that things other than a couple of raid bosses were going to be released. This is the MMO that claims to do things differently. This MMO was built around the idea of regular content updates and a living, breathing, world. In short, you’re arguing that Mr. O’Brien is wrong about the state of his game and instead chose to literally suggest that players be angry about the content drought.

That response seems uncharacteristic, to say the least.

My line of thought is; “There is no content drought, so I don’t see the point in suspending Legendarys to address a content drought”.

Endless Soul.5178:

DoctorDing.5890:

A noisy motorbike mount would be useful for drowning out some of those annoying legendary weapon sounds ;p

(Edit: flood control is now 5 minutes between posts????)

Now THAT’S an idea!

~revs~revs~

http://40.media.tumblr.com/1f67ee94130fa353bf0b09756adafa13/tumblr_mz5du6A39W1rlo1q2o1_1280.jpg

I enjoy the Jumping Puzzles.

There are very few required for map completion.

However, since so few of the do, it would probably be a positive change for them to just make it so that none of them are required for MC.

Dante.1508:

Because the leveling up is the fun part of the game, exploring the world getting map completions etc..

End game is the end.. move on try a new game, i don’t enjoy PvP, WvW, Raids, Dungeons or fractals, the whole aim of the game is leveling up…

So don’t buy HoT.

Problem solved.

graymouser.4698:

If someone has an idea why primitive weaponry is still being used in Tyria, please add this to the discussion!

Cheers!

Gray

I’m guessing they aren’t obsolete because it’s fantasy. For whatever reason(magic, materials, “Human’s” not being “Earthlings” and being harder to penetrate with projectiles for whatever reason, etc), there isn’t the gulf between the levels of effectiveness that exists in our world.

Basically the math of the game accurately represents the effectiveness of the weapons in Tyria. If a sword is as effective or more than a rifle in Tyria, the fact that a sword isn’t as effective as a rifle on earth is irrelevant. Therefore, they are still modern weapons on Tyria.

And that may seem like a total handwave and copout, but according to the lore; it’s unusual for Tyrians to NOT fully manifest magical ability by the age of 5. In a fantasy world that throws our basic model of metphysics out the window, our assuption of them are absolutely worthless.

Nuggi.7861:

….

If I spend money on the game it’s because I want what I bought today. The mindset of being uncomfortable with a purchase in hindsight is really bizarre to me.

Cerby.1069:

….or exotic gear…..

They already have been, for ages, via login rewards. Both in the form of a monthly chest, and from the laurel fendor

It punishes the players that want to go through the gw2 experience….for sure. Especially since they know they could just click a button and activate god mode and just run through everything faster and more efficiently with 0 effort.

No it doesn’t. It’s a single level 80 character. You can choose to do that on any subsequent character. You can choose not to use the item in the first place. You can choose to create a character solely for the purpose of deleting after using the item.

Nobody is forcing you to use it.

I’m stoked about this, because I have 7 level 80 toons and now my late-comer friends don’t have to worry about catching up to me. It’s fantastic.

And let’s be real here. It been a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time since being level capped has been a sign of prestige… in ANY MMO.

eye floater.7140:

So now a new player can join the game, use this boost and get instantly to level 80.
On top of that, it also gives you a complete set of soldiers armor, weapons, trinkets, food items, utility items, and unlocks certain waypoints in every level 80 map?
This is just… what?!
Don’t get me wrong, I like the new shared slot, but what’s the point of even playing the game if you’re instantly given everything you need? Doesn’t that just inherently defeat the purpose of playing the maps and lower-level content?

Is Anet that desperate for new players? Please help me understand, because I’m so lost on this one.

You need to buy the expansion to get the boost. The expansion is all level 80 content. So they give you a single boost. Other MMOs have done similar things, and GW2 has been giving out XP scrolls as birthday presents since day 1(well day 365 technically).

And world completing is necessary for crafting legendarys(gifts of exploration, and lots of collection items), and still the best way to get Black Lion Keys and Transmutation Charges.

graymouser.4698:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

graymouser.4698:

But simply the statement: “we don’t need horses because we have fast travel” is a 1oo% non-argument for me

We should base ourselves on immersion and lore when making a decision on horses.

It’s the ‘immersion and lore’ argument that doesn’t hold any water, sorry. In RL horses for travel all but disappeared because of the automobile showing up… cars are faster, easier, and cheaper to use. If cheap and accessible teleportation were to become widely available, automobiles would go the way of the horse.

Well, in GW2 there IS teleportation, as well as modes of travel that are cheaper and easier to use from an immersion standpoint. Horses/mounts are absolutely irrelevant in this context.

From a business standpoint adding in mounts would be time and energy spent making something that’s NOT special in comparison to other MMOs, and thus just ‘reinventing the horse.’ Faster travel that is special to GW2 (such as teleportation and gliding) is a much better use of ANet’s labor than being derivative. It’s that fact that gives the “we already have teleportation” argument more validity, even if you (and others) feel it’s a non-argument.

~EW

You made a decent point there but its not a strong one: if teleportation takes away the need for mounts, then why are npc’s still using oxes for transporting materials?

Lore says that shipping through Asura gates is prohibitively expensive.

In a pre-mechanised world mounts are simply a realistic development.

Irrelevant. GW2 is mechanized.

If the purpose of this thread is about deciding on a starting character. I always recommend Sylvari.

You get a lot more out of the story(even pre-hot) from a Sylvari perspective.

Look at the patch notes we got yesterday.

I think it’s pretty fair to assume the reason they weren’t concerned about fixing or punishing that exploit was because it was all hands on deck, and SAB was only going to be around for a few weeks.

I’m not opposed to it. I just don’t see a need for it.

Norn. The one thing they are good for is making cool rangers.

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

Was able to log in no problem pre patch

Now getting a message:

Unable to verify the Guild Wars 2 executable. Please try again. If problem persists, uninstall and reinstall the application or contact customer support

Copied my working old GW2 Backup file and pointed my launcher to it instead and the patch corrupted that file too.

Out of options now. Hopefully they fix this soon.

There is a repair utility, I forgot how to use it, but I know it exists.

Also, TC, keep in mind that all original-release maps have value… in making legendarys.

lilypop.7819:

…as imo these maps are of the very best quality,

Just an opinion of course.

I’d only agree with Caledon and Metrica Province.

The rest are pretty bleh(relative to other maps) IMO.

Both have probably been mentioned but…

1) It’s a one-time thing

2) It’s only available to people who bought HoT, which is entirely level 80 content