Guild Wars 2

lordbachus.6091:

I am actually wondering why none named the Necromancer, sure mellee is a little low with only the dagger auto attack, but its a very good allrounder too..

But personally i think its Guardian thats standing out, and engineer would have been even better if they had a Mellee weapon option added.

Engineers do have a melee option, with the tool kit. I actually use it from time to time… because I’m weird, and for the comedy value.

I keep meaning to make a fat Norn called “Norn Versus Food”

Errr – you are aware that WvW has something very like DAoC’s realm points already, with the difference that it only buys abilities that are purely WvW-based (so nobody goes and feels forced to grind WvW for PvE advantage)?

With a billion dollars? I’d have the team go and make ten different AAA games, aimed at ten different play styles (a raiding progression game, an arena PvP focused game, a pure WvW game etc.) That way everyone can go and play the game that bests suits them instead of insisting that a game that has to cater to a diverse audience is dedicated solely to their own personal likes and dislikes.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

You know, my ranger tried asking the charr smoking the meat about where it came from but he looked over, noticed my ranger was a human and leered before asking: “You sure you want to know?”

I don’t go to Butcher’s Block anymore.

When I asked, the charr just told me “What does it matter? It’s tasty.”

Then he looked me over and went “And so are you…”

I’m going back for the booze, but I’ll stick to the pickled wurm eggs food-wise.

If you’re level 5 doing level 10 with some friends then you get level 5 rewards (and go up to level 6). So you don’t have to find a group at exactly the right fractal level any more, you can join a group at any level if you can cope with the difficulty. Contrariwise, if you join a group LOWER than your fractal level you will now get bonus karma.

Make sure your group aren’t trying to over-specialise. In WoW, a dungeon group has one guy who is built for survivability (the tank), one guy who does mostly support (the healer), and three DPS guys who ideally have glass cannon builds. That game has moved away from people trying to do a mix of the three roles with the same character and has encouraged people to be very specialised in one role. GW2 is different. Everyone needs to pay some attention to their own survivability, every character can (or at least should) provide some support and everybody should be contributing some damage. That’s not to say everyone does all three in equal proportions… but everyone should be at least thinking about all three.

Simple check – if your guild forms a group by saying something like “Bob’s the tank, Joe will be support and the rest are DPS” then they may need to adjust their world view.

Vol.5241:

Ethics.4519:

If they were competitive gold sellers would leave the game eventually. If Anet made it so that gold sellers no longer made money, they would leave and go to a more profitable game. Or at least there would be less of them.

However I think that would be extreme and would crush the economy.

Gold selling is highly profitable, that is why they’re so persistent.

It costs them, what $40 per account? They can make that back really quickly.

Arenanet would overall lose more money by pricing down their gem prices. It’s unfeasible and bad business sense.

It’s like telling Gucci to price their $2000 bag down to $50 to combat counterfeits. Totally unreasonable.

Bingo, except that it doesn’t even cost them $40 per account if they use hacked accounts, stolen credit cards or do a chargeback on the cards they do use – all of which are standard tactics.

SevenWhite.4367:

What is there that can be done to address this and make it more worthwhile to buy Gold through ANet?

Well, buying the gold via ArenaNet comes with the added bonus of not getting your account either banned for a ToS violation or hacked by the nice chappie you gave your money to.

Contrariwise, understand that it isn’t ANet setting their gold prices HIGHER than their ‘competitors’ – what happens is the opposite, the gold sellers set their prices LOWER than the official ones. They have to, because if they cost as much as official channels nobody would buy from them and risk all the bad things that can happen when you do. Because of the way most gold farmers operate, their actual costs are very low so no matter how low they set their prices they’ll make a profit.

“Look at these blast points. Only Imperial Engineers are this precise.”

pkbot.1345:

Why is this as an issue? Because one of the BIGGEST reasons for playing an RPG is to progress to higher power levels consistently, and feel powerful.

Tell me… just between us… do you feel you have to compensate for something?

Kraggy.4169:

Writetyper.1985:

Why do people want the level cap to increase, btw? It’s just the same game with bigger numbers

And I suggest most games players want more than arriving at the destination (ie. the level cap) then sit there forever running the same content.

You don’t have to raise the level cap to add new content, you know. There’s always the option of adding new content at the same power level as the existing stuff so players (GASP!) have a choice of what content they want to do. See DAoC’s Shrouded Isles expansion as an example of a major MMO that did exactly that.

Ugh… no. To try and eliminate gold selling you would remove the chance for people to help out friends or newbies by giving them stuff, and institute a locked-down command economy. Unfortunately, thanks to a little thing called the 20th century which some of us actually lived through (the latter part of), we have some pretty good evidence out there that command economies don’t work very well for the people living in them. Stuff that the ‘official’ price is set too low for (compared to what the freee market would result in) will sell out rapidly, creating shortages… ever seen those pictures of queues for bread in Moscow? Stuff that the official price is too high for just won’t sell as nobody wants to pay that price. And stuff that has the ‘official’ price set just right… well, I suppose that’ll happen occasionally, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

However, this still won’t actually eliminate RMT – if they can’t sell gold, they’ll sell power-levelling services. How are you goung to stop that – by banning players from grouping or cooperating in any way?

MethodicMockingbird.6520:

When I buy gems (and I’ve only done it once or twice, for character slots), I am not buying a good or a service; I am converting a currency.

Wrong. You are buying a service – tokens for virtual items to enhance your game experience. If gems were a currency… and could be exchanged for gold… and gold is earned from random drops in the game world… then the logical legal conclusion would be that ArenaNet are running a casino, which opens up a whole world of pain from lawyers and tax accountants. Nobody is going to want to go there.

Guardian is definitely like a paladin of some sort – note that exactly what “paladin” entails varies from game to game or setting to setting. WoW paladins are not identical to D&D paladins are not the same as DAoC paladins which have some differences from the paladins in Elizabeth Moon’s “Deed of Paksenarrion” but all combine warrior skills with magical light or holy abilities.

The other way you can think of guardians is as being a bit like Star Wars jedi knights – again, a character who blends weapon skills with ‘magical’ power into a fighting style that uses both.

I would just take that to mean that sylvari normally have a vegetarian diet at home, which makes sense given their plant-based “technology” which makes it easy to produce fruit and vegetables. When they visit other races territory they’re exposed to alien cuisine – I know more than one vegetarian in real life who admits to being tempted by the smell of bacon.

I wonder how a sylvari would react to visiting the charr Meatoberfest?

Kain Francois.4328:

I actually wondered this too. Are Karkas edible? What do they taste like?

Like chicken. That’s ALWAYS the answer to that question

Price definitely is up from where it was before the drop rate increased. I was getting unidentified dyes at a fairly stable price in the 3s50c region before the, ah, unintended over-supply. Prices dropped to 2 silver something due to increased supply, but is now up over 8 silver.

3 possible explanations (excluding conspiracies theories):

1) The ‘fix’ to drop rates over-corrected and dyes are scarcer than they used to be. Not convinced, as I’m still getting them reasomnably often as drops on my alts ( top level characters never do seem to get as many dyes).
2) There’s a market bubble caused by speculation – lots of people bought dyes to hoard knowing the fix was coming, but as that has driven up prices more people have bought dyes to get in on the ever-increasing prices. 8 silver might seem like a high price now, but if prices keep going to 10 silver or higher it’s a shrewd investment. Bubbles burst – at which point anyone who bought late or didn’t sell early enough will ose money.
3) The period of cheap dyes stimulated demand – more people got into buying and trying out dyes, and they’re still doing it (albeit grumbling about the higher prices). In that case the permanently higher demand will result in a stable higher price for the given supply.

Which is true? I don’t know, although ArenaNet may have data to make a more educated guess. My gut feel says ‘bubble’ though, so I’m putting my dye habit on hold ffr a couple of weeks to see what happens.

slash.5428:

Well, don’t tell me go play another game, seriously. I want to see that in Guild Wars 2. I want to do some BIG EPIC battles with many friends ! BIIIIIIIIIIIG battles for **** sake !

In that case, I suggest trying WvW which has lots of BIG EPIC battles and has the advantage that because they’re against other human beings they’re different every time instead of just following some scripted dance steps that you got off a Youtube video.

Also and slightly off-topic – how did online games ever get to the point that 10 players was a “raid” and a “big epic battle”? Whatever happened to “big epic battles” meaning that most of the major guilds on a server had to cooperate, like DAoC dragon and Legion fights? 10 players was pretty much “one full group” back in those days…

Seconded. Very nice bite-size pieces of group content that mix and match, tapas-style to form a banquet of content. Here’s hoping Anet cook up some more courses to add to the menu soon.

Enough with the food analogies – I’m getting hungry…

Scutilla.3072:

Tremayne.6734:

MF gear isn’t optimal stats-wise from your group’s point of view, but being an optimal player is more important than optimal gear.

And yet an optimal player with optimal gear will be better than an optimal player with sub-optimal gear.

I didn’t say it wasn’t However, there’s optimal (the very best) and then there’s sufficient, and they are rarely the same thing.

The optimal team of people for me to work with in my job in real life would all be highly motivated, intelligent, creative industry veterans with no pesky families or outside commitments to get in the way of their availability to work. Unfortunately I have to work with human beings – some of whom are inexperienced, some of whom do OK at set tasks but lack initiative, and some of whom need a bit of supervision to encourage them to get on with the job at hand.

Likewise, when you put together a dungeon group you may find some are wearing magic find gear, or rares/greens instead of exotics, or are a bit slow on dodging. It’s OK. the game isn’t balanced around perfection. You can complete the dungeon as long as the people with you come up to a reasonable standard – that’s REASONABLE, not OPTIMAL. Insisting on optimal when it’s not required will just give yourself an ulcer and delay actually getting underway. It also smacks of a “all those scrubs should be perfect like me” attitude which doesn’t make anyone any friends.

Fight smarter, not harder.

Have you seen the recent Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes films, where you get to see him planning the entire fight out in his head before destroying someone in hand-to-hand? THAT’S how an asura warrior fights.

It’s even better if you can actually do that, of course

Mythazor.4570:

Don’t play with bad people -> problem solved.

If you want to do dungeons then find some friends to play with.

You are calling the dungeon a complete fail because you can’t find any decent people to play it what. That makes no sense.

I’m at difficulty 5 now and we haven’t wiped once.

That’s not an option for the OP. If he’s had over a dozen groups in a row which fail due to “bad people” then statistically speaking it’s certain that the “bad people” is the OP himself – either because of his own lack of skill, or because the attitude he’s throwing around means that nobody who has a choice would ever willing group with him so the only people he CAN group with are the hard luck cases.

There are three different issues at play here, and some people are getting them a bit confused – magic find gear, glass cannons and the initial example of a clueless player.

Magic find trades off some of the stat points on your gear for better loot – so yes, technically wearing it makes a character weaker. However, this is not a cutting-edge progression raid in That Other Game. I’ve yet to see any dungeon encounter that is designed as a gear check, and the way that GW2 combat works makes being able to play competently (by using interrupts, not standing in red circles, watching out for conditions etc) MUCH more important than the stats on your gear. MF gear isn’t optimal stats-wise from your group’s point of view, but being an optimal player is more important than optimal gear. My personal poiont of view – loading your gear down with tons of MF is a selfish act but it’s not worth kicking someone from a group, especially if that’s their normal PVE farming set and they don’t have a full second set of gear. Acting like a gear fascist in a game that really doesn’t require it by design is far more jerklike behaviour.

Glass cannon refers to a build that is all offence, no defence. It’s popular for DPS classes in other games because its optimised for their role. In GW2 its possible to be a glass cannon but you have to work harder at staying alive compared to a more balanced build. If you’re good enough at doing that, a glass cannon is a useful group member. If you aren’t good enough, you’re a dead weight on the party, literally, because you do no DPS when you’re dead (or downed, or running back). It can be a valid choice, but use with care.

Clueless player is clueless player – as stated above, any problems with his gear pales into insignificance compared to being unable to play the character effectively. I do my best to be patient with those who are new to the game or dungeon and still learning, or not as nimble-fingered, or just not as hot at gaming as others around them. My patence evaporates if it becomes clear that the guy isn’t pulling his weight because he just doesn’t care or he thinks it’s funny to get others to pull his weight.

TL;DR summary for the Internet generation – it’s not the gear, it’s the player.

Darek.1836:

What should we do in the case of a golem uprising?

Build better, more loyal golems to fight the rebellious ones. The asuran response to any technological problem is, of course, more technology.

Also, find the hapless asura whose mistake led to the uprising and make scathing remarks about his stupidity and incompetence. If there’s one thing asura like more than inventing stuff, it’s putting each other down…

Flamethrower is good for waving around in the middle of a zerg fight and spreading the damagey love around. Elixir gun is very handy for chasing down fleeing enemies. Grenades are excellent for area denial when attacking a keep – pick a stretch of wall and bombard it and the defenders will stay clear, or if they’re very stupid and/or slow they’ll die. Dropping a supply crate on the head of some poor shmoe who’s wandered into your grenade kill-zone complements this tactic beautifully.

And yes, if you’re traited for permanent swiftness then engineers are indeed super at running supplies to build and repair stuff. You know, acting like combat engineers

Lysidian.4653:

Personally allowing easy(ish) access to full exotics to most players is a perfect system,
Allowing players to heavliy out stat each other would destroy WvW and the way mobs work in zones and discourage skilled players who simply dont have the time,

Might not have been your intention, but this sounds like the special Olympics or a peewee baseball game. It screams “lets celebrate mediocrity.” Its a socialist system at best. Lets give everyone a medal for just showing up. There is no opportunity for skilled players to stand out and above those that are not.

It could be argued that cosmetics are that gold medal to strive for, but why not better gear? Why is it ok to grind for cosmetics but not upgrades? From my perspective, people that use this argument are giving a skewed opinion due to their lack of play time to compete with those who do have more play time.

Wow.

So, designing a GAME, that is a piece of entertainment, so that the people who play it can actually enjoy it is “socialist”? To quote a certain movie – “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.”

What’s especially laughable is this idea that grinding is equivalent to an Olympic gold medal. Gold medals go to the best of the best – having one proves that you excel in your chosen field. Grinding proves nothing except that you can devote an excessive amount of time to a video game. You don’t have to be especially smart or talented or skilled to grind, you just need to have no job and no social life. Giving rewards to people based on purely on time spent without any regard to skill or merit… that sounds a lot more like socialism and the Marxist concept of the intrinisic value of labour.

Giving the best gear to drooling mouth-breathers who sit there in their basements, grinding while other players are out at work, so said mouth-breathers can ‘win’ with their overpowered gear and feel good about themselves… now THAT’S ‘celebrating mediocrity’.

Cik, quoting Syncaine as not liking a theme park MMO doesn’t prove anything except that, well, Syncaine doesn’t like theme park MMOs. The man is infamous for having a very specific personal taste for free-for-all, sandbox MMOs and being very negative about any MMO that isn’t either EVE or Darkfall – in his view, if a game doesn’t pander to his personal taste in games then it’s a bad game.

Given that Syncaine’s preferred style of game has actually been tried a number of times, and all of the attempts have either closed down (Shadowbane) or taken years to claw their way up to the status niche game (EVE, Darkfall) I would have to class the man as the standard bearer of the “forward to the glorious past” brigade.

Oh, and tip for the OP – the “many of my friends are quitting too” line is tired and over-used. Nobody believes that the kind of attention seeker who posts “the game sucks lol” threads actually HAS many friends.

As a general rule of game forums – if there’s a class forum that ISN’T full of people complaining how the class sucks, then that class is horribly overpowered and genuinely does need a nerf. Forums are always full of guys trying to get themselves an edge by persuading the developers to buff their class for them, and quite a few will resort to exaggeration, misrepresentation or flat-out lying, as well as just whining incessantly on the assumption that the squeaky wheel gets the oil. In other words, things are never as bad as people claim on the forums (and never as good as the guys on the OTHER class forums say you have it, either).

Personally, I’m playing an Engineer as my main and I love the versatility. The class plays very differently depending on whether you use turrets, weapon kits, elixirs or gadgets. It’s not the highest DPS class out there, but you have a huge range of different tricks available to you to do damage, support your allies or control the fight. That, and you can have a flamethrower. There’s nothing quite as SATISFYING as fanning a flamethrower over a horde of zombies.

As already stated, ArenaNet have made a conscious decision that this is a game about “good guys”. It’s possibly to be a good guy who uses icky powers in a good cause, and it’s possible to be a “good guy” who is WAY too fond of using violence and intimidation… again, though, in a good cause. Ultimately, though, it’s about your character being one of the heroes who steps up to the plate and faces the evils threatening to destroy the world. sorry, but you don’t get 100% freedom in choosing your character’s stories.

Having said that, I’m quite happy with a “no evil characters” policy,. Evil player characters in RPGs tend to go one of three ways.
The first, as mentioned by Nageth, is where “evil” means “licence to be a jerk”. Usually used as a fig leaf by griefers who claim they were “just roleplaying”. Can do without those people.
Secondly, there’s the “evil is sexy/ooh, ain’t I BAD!” crowd. Evil isn’t actually evil, it’s code for rebelling against society’s norms. This sort of ‘evil’ character is too busy wearing long, flowing black satin outfits and declaiming equally long, flowing sophomoric dialogues about relative morality to actually do anything truly evil.
Finally, you’ve got people who manage to create a truly believable character who does horrific things (i.e. is actually evil in practice instead of just carrying a Chaotic Evil Club membership card in case a passing paladin asks for his ID). This character might be insane, amoral or just willing to do whatever is necessary to serve what he sees as a ‘greater good’ – but whatever the reason, there is a reason for his actions. Unfortunately, people who can write or roleplay such a character are few and far between. The benefit of allowing these few their freedom unfortunately is outweighed by the downside of having to deal with the jerks and poseurs in the other two categories.

UgaBuga.6457:

Calavera.1086:

UgaBuga.6457:

Calavera.1086

Why am i suddenly a troll. please gtfo my thread, if you have to be an moron.

In the other thread you bashed a post because the guy complimented Anet saying if he wanted to do so he should call Anet and not open threads in the general discussion forum.

If you’re not a troll you’re very good at looking like one.

Because i dont see the point in making a thread thanking GW2, in a discussion section.

But ofc, its much better to be you, going around to posts, that you dont like, and calling the author a troll..

So you don’t see any point in anyone making a positive post around the game – presumably you think forums should be reserved for unbridled negativity.

Not a troll. Right. Gotcha.

EnaiSiaion.8072:

…WoW veterans who are disappointed that the game doesn’t have enough of a grind, and GW1 veterans who are disappointed that the game has a grind.

Insert massive Anet facepalm here.

Fortunately, those people who genuinely want the grind (as opposed to just using to as an excuse to moan in these forums) have a whole expansion of all-new grind going live for them in less than 24 hours.

Got nothing for the guys on the other end of the spectrum, I’m afraid. At least there’s the consolation that this game has very little MANDATORY grind. If you want to waer the armour skin that shows you’ve run the same dungeon dozens of times then, well, duh… you have to run that dungeon a lot. But it’s not as if you’re gated from large portions of the game by not having done that grind – I mean, a design like that would be insane. all it could ever do is alienate a chunk of your player base and result in much development effort going into content that the majority of players would never get to see

I’ve never, EVER understood why people would actually want PvP to be a gear arms race – all that does is change a contest of skill into a gear check (OK, so people who aren’t terribly skilled but can put in the time to grind the gear like it). I would want to know that I beat the other guy because I’m better at playing my class, not because I had a higher average item level. PvP gear in WoW was a necessary evil, because without it the PvE progression raiders with the best gear would dominate in PvP (as we did back in the vanilla WoW days). In a game that has – hallelujah! – pretty much disposed of gear progression as a PvE endgame, you don’t need gear progression in PvP.

What I really don’tt understand, though, is why you “don’t see the point” of sPvP with the gear given to you, when you say it’s the small-scale fights that get your heart pumping. Isn’t that reward enough? Can you not do PvP just for the joy of it without loot-whoring?

Carighan.6758:

“You’re dumb. You’ll die, and you’ll leave a dumb corpse.” -> Initiating combat, I think against humanoids only. Also used very infrequently.

I get this one on my engineer occasionally when swapping kits (which I do a lot, juggling elixir gun and flamethrower in combat).

Male asura necromancer summoning minions:
“Arise, my brainless! ARISE!”

Ryuujin.8236:

Frosty and Frosty Law Firm.4981:

IF this were to happen:

Golems can be colored using acquired dyes. Their abilities are assigned out of a list tailored by you(Using skill points) to fit your build. However, they may lack certain traits that living animals have.

And at this stage we’ve moved clear of “Asura having a racial pet style” to “Asura having a drastic racial advantage over other races”

Well of course we do. We’re Asura, duh!

Sorry – I actually 100% agree with the point quoted, but couldn’t resist giving an Asuran answer

On the one hand, I do occasionally enjoy dueling in MMOs with friends to test our skills against each other, or even in player-organised tournaments.

On the other hand, I can live without the idiot kiddies who go around spamming duel invites (usually against people much lower level than themselves) and who then spam abuse or emotes at anyone who declines their invitation.

So on balance, I’d be in favour of ArenaNet adding a duelling system – but only after they’ve added a system to automatically detect and ban morons. Sound fair?

RebelYell.7132:

Phy.2913:

Kungkonung.6758:

Phy.2913:

Kungkonung.6758:

Yeah, this game has no issues whatsoever.

That’s your opinion, however wrong it may be.

I edited my comment. Read it again :P

I understood it the first time, but chose to take it at face value because it has nothing to do with the OP. Anyone that’s spent time on the forum knows how accurate the OP’s post actually is.

The OP’s “template” actually a huge strawman designed to shut down intellectual discourse. Cheers.

Actually, I read the template as a work of satire intended to shut down (or at least mock) all of the troll threads that masquerade as intellectual discourse.

So of 35 “pro” reviews garnered by Metacritic, 32 were in the 90+ range, and the remaining 3 (from sites I’ve never heard of) are still 80+?

I’d say that’s pretty fricking awesome. Even with the grade inflation of video game review scores, over 80% is seen as a good, solid game. So even the reviewers who least liked GW2 think it’s worth playing based on those scores.

August.2678:

I disagree. It’s not caving in for ANet to listen to their playerbase.

We players are the most important voice here. It’s us they should always listen to.
Especially to listen to our criticism. We are the ones playing the game and we are the ones experiencing the good and the bad.

And of course they should evaluate what we say and make up their mind with a “non-biased” and logical approach. But this speaks for itself.

Depends what the playerbase are saying. I’m reminded of a post by the Queen of MMO Community Management, Sanya Weathers:

http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2011/07/19/metaphorically/

ArenaNet are making cookies here. Suggestions on how to improve the cookie recipe are welcome. Demands that they make ice cream instead are pointless – other people make that. In fact, I believe there’s a new flavour of ice cream out in a week or so

Norek.2736:

I think what Tremayne is getting at, is that you are going to be able to take a lot more damage from all the smaller attacks that go on in a fight, but when you have an ogre (just an example, pick any over sized creature in the game) winding up their weapon to smash your heavy plate wearing butt 4 feet into the ground so you look like someone from a cartoon half stuck into the floor…. even the most sturdy warrior is going to think “hey, maybe I should dodge this”

While I will be first in line to say that some things in combat need to be fine tuned (all games fine tune for ever, as they should) one of the main things about combat in this game is that it is meant to be very active, so dodging is a requirement regardless of build.

Norek gets it. The original poster doesn’t. Refusing to dodge in GW2 will get you about as far as someone playing a warrior in WoW who refuses to use any of the abilities on his action bar “because auto attack was all I needed in Everquest”.

It’s an addiction if it starts becoming so important to you that you neglect other things that, objectively speaking, should be more important. If you lose your job because you keep pulling sickies to play the game, if you refuse to see your friends and family at Christmas because you just want to stay in and grind your dailies, if you stink because you can’t bring yourself to go AFK long enough for a shower… it’s an addiction. If, on the other hand, you regularly rack up 40 hours a week in-game whilst still seeing your friends and attending to your real life responsibilities, then it’s just that the game is more interesting than what’s on TV (at least now The Newsroom has finished its run).

Torcan.2314:

The Mordred PVP server went against Mythics game philosophy as well, but that didn’t stop them from having 1(!) server where these rules would apply. What I’m trying to say is that a lot of people want a more hardcore environment MMORPG – or at least try it out for the lols. It doesn’t even affect the regular servers in any way. Of course, when it comes to the PVP-levelling, I understand some people don’t like it – and that’s fine, bash away, it probably won’t get implemented. But don’t come here stomping my thread with your subjective opinion on how the game should be played. How the game can be played is a much much more constructive approach.

Ever read this?

http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/02/19/the-mordred-problem/

In case you’re not aware – Scott Jennings was one of the DAoC devs so there’s a chance he actually does know what he’s talking about there

ArenaNet don’t seem to think it’s worthwhile making a free for all PvP server. It’s not hard to see why. FFA PvP games tend to fail pretty thoroughly; FFA servers in other games tend to end up with their populations disappearing rapidly as the vast mass of wannabe wolves realise they’re actually the sheep, get bored of losing, and quit. Also, it’s hard to square GW2’s vision of all of the players being heroes with a set-up where they’re a bunch of sociopaths murdering each other. The “hardcore PvPers” aren’t a worthwhile market to support because there aren’t actuallyy that many of them, no matter how loud they may be on forums, and because when they do get what they want a lot turn out not to be that hardcore after all. Take a look at how Shadowbane’s doing (oops, closed down), or Darkfall (not exactly taken over the MMO world). Heck, even EVE Online has 300k players, i.e. about a third of the those that SWTOR still has, the majority of whom never leave hi-sec space and thus presumably aren’t there for the PvP.

As for the DAoC comparison – I was there for the glory days of DAoC (i.e from the beginning up until the Trials of Atlantis era). Nobody I knew did RvR for the realm abilities. They were nice and useful, but realm ranks came so slowly after the first couple that you’d have to be insane if that was your main motivation. We did RvR because it was fun, and for realm pride – because that keep over there was OURS and we weren’t going to let the filthy Mids occupy it. WvW is actually the closest I’ve seen yet to having that recreated.

“OK, see, that’s being what’s called a ‘fragile speedster’, the melee counterpart to the glass cannon. If I wanted to play like that, I would have put all my points into like Arms and Discipline I guess and run around with a Greatsword.

You’re basically confirming what I said; that building defensively doesn’t pay off and it’s down to killing them before they kill you.

Which is fine if you want to play that way, but not if you want to be a heavily armored juggernaut/mighty glacier. The fact that’s not a viable option is what I find lacking.”

I’m sorry – but if you actually want to stand there and let your opponents hit you then I’m afraid GW2 doesn’t support that style of play. A defensive build is invaluable in reducing effect of the lesser hits and incidental damage that wear people down, but nobody can, or should, just stand there and take the big hitting attacks. Those are exactly what your blocking, interrupting and dodge abilities are for. If you want to be defensive, you have to use ALL of your defences.

Look, the endgame has always quite clearly been… that you get to continue playing the same game you played from levels 1 to 79. This shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who’s still playing by the time they get to level 80 because obviously you’ve enjoyed it up to that point, otherwise you would have quit playing. I mean, nobody in their right mind spends over 100 hours on an activity they don’t enjoy without getting paid for it.

Given the size of the world and the nature of dynamic events, even when you hit 80 there’s still a lot of stuff out there you haven’t seen yet even without sPvP and WvW to throw into the mix.

Greatsword puts big damage numbers up directly – however, when I tried it I didn’t find myself killing stuff noticeably faster in PvE than I do with my usual sword/sword or even sword/shield set-up. The difference is that the one handed sword set-ups cause a steady stream of bleed damage, so it doesn’t have that “OMG! I hit for OVER 9000!” factor that captivates the easily amused skritt-like players

The filter is there as a last line of defence for people who don’t want to see profanity; it’s not a licence to spew offensive language. If you don’t want a ban, don’t use offensive language in public chat channels, whether spelled correctly or not. And if you can’t speak without profanity, or can’t figure out what is going to be offensive to other people before you say it… learn. You’re going to have real problems getting through adult life if you don’t.

What Ceallach said. This game really has one role – “adventurer” and involves a mix of doing damage, supporting your allies, taking hits (or better yet preventing them) and minding your own health. The mechanics do not support the over-specialisation that a lot of other games are designed around.

If you need to make bronze when crafting, the tin ore is sold by the merchant next to your crafting station. Don’t do what I did and spend two beta weekends looking for tin ore nodes out in the world!