It is worth mentioning (again), that ascended armor is not required for raids. The same goes for the mastery, that allows you to benefit from the adrenaline mushroom* . The difference in DPS, that ascended armor gives you (as opposed to weapons and/or trinkets), is marginal compared to knowing the mechanics and dealing with the logistics of having 10 people not fail horribly.
*I don’t have it and yet I always pull my weight at Vale. Haven’t done the other two though, because of a lack of time.
Without the enrage timer, raids stop being a test of your skill, since everyone can just facetank it and slowly whittle down the bosses.
This really gets my goat because it’s so patently not true. If you screw up the mechanics, the raid wipes; doesn’t matter what gear or what build, if you don’t stack in the green field/get off the platform/beat the boss before the platform is destroyed then the raid wipes. Removing the enrage timer just means that you have to beat the mechanics consistently more often, the fight goes longer but no matter your gear you can’t face tank the bosses because the mechanics will kill you.
At the moment there is literally no choice, you have to run zerker (or condi equivalent) or your raid will fail. That, to me, is bad design; enrage timers are a lazy gear/meta check, nothing more.
You’re right, I should have worded it differently: Without the enrage timer, the only thing left to do is taking care of the mechanics, while slowly [….]
Without the enrage timer, raids stop being a test of your skill, since everyone can just facetank it and slowly whittle down the bosses.
Removing these item sets from the game is obviously a bad idea, since outside of raids players are free to choose whatever setup they prefer and we still have PvP (WvW and tPvP).
As to your last point: Raids are not intended to be completed by the majority of players, as such, it is probably not in ANET’s mind to open them up to “more than just the zerker meta”.
Not sure I understand what the “when was that?” was in reference to, but if you meant when did we return to the game it was 2-3 months ago.
Yeah that’s what I was referring to, since getting ascended gear is substantially harder now. Not that I am siding with or arguing against any of the OPs points, I just wanted to point this out.
(edited by Veydar.5017)
What’s always hilarious to me is that people who have never actually played Wildstar always bring it up about why raids alone are what killed it.
That game a myriad of problems with it long after launch
So true, in fact WS raids were pretty fun. If WS had launched with megaservers it would have been fine.
@OP: I, my wife, and 2 friends just came back to the game after years of absence. Within 2-3 months we have the ascended gear we need to raid, and I’ve formed a guild with 30 people in order fo us to all avoid pug’ing it. I feel like your post is a little alarmist.
When was that? As the OP mentioned, getting ascended gear has gotten significantly harder* (edit, how could I miss this word? lol) with the HoT release and the changes to ingredients, gold income and fractal drop rates.
(edited by Veydar.5017)
I know very well what it feels like to be left out or left behind. When Fractals were released I so wanted to spend the weekend pushing to level 100, but then I was invited to my GF parents place. After that, it was very hard finding guild mates, since everyone was either ahead of me or individual progress was varying wildly. With raids it is somewhat similar. Even though I was present the first evening, I simply can’t spend 10 hours per day doing it.
I am not angry about any of it, since it is completely understandable. If you’re not available, you can’t expect people to wait. You can’t expect them to go through the same explanations over and over again either. I wouldn’t want to fail 10 times because half of the raid is new, when I could just as well do it with people who are as experienced as I am.
Ultimately this is not a gaming related issue it’s just life, as frustrating as it may be.
KING had several raid groups, I can only speak for the one I was part of: we made it about that far as well. We were fairly casual in regards to gear and class choice (I was on a PS warrior without the elite spec), so our DPS wasn’t good enough to compensate for the occasional death. It was fun though and I think it’s just a matter of everyone getting used to the encounter, so the right decisions are made instinctively (muscle memory, spatial awareness).
Mesmer: alacrity (that should be enough), quickness, boonstripping, soft cc
Engi: DPS, fields+finishers
Ranger: DPS
Thief: DPS
Necro: DPS, Boonstripping, soft cc
Ele: DPS, fields & finisher
All classes have the potential to tank.
FTFY
I had to google it, but now I can appreciate what you’ve done.
Many deaded horse, much beat.
After fixing the zerker meta, could you aid ANET in fixing the [insert new meta]? And like TheRandomGuy implied, you can already facetank everything by going tanky. I don’t know why you’d like to fix something that isn’t broken.
Great thread, this is the kind of community interaction I’d have wished for one or two years ago. Thanks!
… the time to neckbeard for suits of armor…
Today I learned a new verb: “to neckbeard for something”
This is a good day.
It’s one of those human things to do something with the path of least resistance and danger, especially when there is a reward at the end. I could make enemies never drop their aggro on players and force them to fight every single mob, but I don’t see that as a viable solution right now.
I think the better solution is to look at why people are skipping things, and approach from a different angle. Trash mobs have too much HP, and can’t be counted on for lucrative drops from a Risk/Time vs Reward, so people interested in making money (most groups) aren’t incentivized to do it, whereas the end chest/boss are more guaranteed and accountable returns on time and risk. I also think there is something to be said about interesting trash mob mechanics making them more enjoyable of a fight.
I can’t make the rewards from trash mobs so lucrative though that people just farm the first couple trash mobs/boss in a dungeon and then rinse/repeat. We encountered this when people just farmed the first boss in an instance and then restarted it (earlier around launch time), and we had to adjust the content as a result. It’s a fine line you have to walk to encourage players to get to the end, but make the process of getting there rewarding enough as well.
I don’t imagine this next update will resolve all the skipping behavior. The path of least resistance is engrained in people, and even if I do everything I could to incentivize people, there will still be those who skip stuff. I have been fixing exploits that will require players to complete more of the events in dungeons, but I am sure people will still skip what they can to get to their end goal.
For now I would encourage those not looking to skip to find some folks who don’t like skipping and make a guild with them… or maybe look for guilds that are dedicated to not skipping, and tag along with them. I’m in a couple of them (anonymously), and it really is an effective solution to playing the game the way you want to play it: Find other people with similar interests and band together with them.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Will-the-new-update-stop-skipping/first
…
I play an ele, and I really know how to put out damage and stance dance to keep bleeds and burns up but going in to a dungeon I end up playing a boring 1 attunement rotation because anything more and I get aggro and spend half of the gd time laying on the ground bleeding out and the other half running back from dying.
…
Added the bold type for emphasis
I am torn between applauding the fact that a mob is now intelligent enough to aim a projectile at a bunch of creatures literally standing right in front of him and …. oh well actually I’m not torn at all. I like the change!
I just cleared the first zone as elementalist, level 17 now, and I gotta say,
You can’t be serious… right?
I don’t see a problem with that if theres people buying it. You’re buying 15-30mins of content skipped (probably a lot more if youre buying) and getting more unique rewards than from say arah so ~10g seems appropriate.
I agree with this analysis and support the poster. On an unrelated note: Hi Rag!
Here’s a list of things that one could rework, in order to make dungeons take longer and be more challenging:
- Make trash mobs interesting
- Require killing trash mobs to progress
- Make bosses tougher
- Change the dodge mechanic (no invincibility frames)
- Implement boss mechanics
- Add “*2” at the end of every line of code that affects enemies, because it will totally work and speed up enemy autoattacks! /sarcasm
- Include jumping puzzles in boss fights and/or dungeons (inb4 kittenstorm)
- ….
This is spontaneous list in no particular order and the items may or may not be feasible but what I am trying to point out is that, in my opinion, the traveling speed is about the last thing that should be changed.
I like all of the people who use the excuse “I like to look at her butt instead of a guy”.
Not sure about all of you guys, but the amount of time I spend actually looking at my character as they are running or fighting it pretty small. Most of the time I’m looking at my target, my surroundings, other players, my skill CDs, inventory, foot placement, etc.
I have female characters because I have male characters too and wanted a balance. Their derriere did not enter into the mix.
Some people honestly sound like they can’t play a male character because they can’t control staring at their butts and thus must play a female character, because if they are going to stare at butts, it might as well be lady butts (I feel like Tina from Bob’s Burgers lol). Butts….
I don’t think the majority of those in favor of female characters were speaking about any uncontrollable urge to stare at butts. I would guess (I can’t know for sure) that most of them – like me – simply prefer to look at an aesthetically pleasing female body.
Also: If I choose to equip her with revealing clothes, this does not mean that I am turning the game into a source of sexual pleasure to replace real life.
Yall do know Raid Dungeons are coming right? Its in the works…
Sourcerino?
Hope and imagination. All we know so far about “challenging group content” is open world boss pve zergfest. Many hope it’s otherwise, but really, unprobable.
I got excited for a moment :[
redacted
I think one of the first thing developers should look at are health pools: they are just too small for decent group compositions.
Longer fights would both reduce the impact of some opening tactics/rotations (which is HUGE more often than not) and increase the punishment on failure, and it comes with barely any downcome as long as they design enjoyable enough fights (t’s not like they should apply this on HotW bosses :P).
Fractals already have this. The fights against Archdiviner or Mossman are quite long when compared to dungeon bosses and yet the meta is still pretty much the same.
I am not as eloquent as other more esteemed members of the dungeon community but I think we already established that changing the “zerk meta” without touching the core mechanics that define this game’s combat is a bit of a futile effort. After all, in any game (regardless of trinity y/n), DPS is more or less always king. It’s why other games have enrage timers or DPS checks. It’s about bringing as much defense as necessary while mainting as much DPS as possible.
The reason why “as much defense as necessary” often equals 0 in GW2 (with 0 being the base defense the meta builds offer) is probably because the content allows for it since PvE is too easy for really skilled players (Attention: Personal opinion!). One way of changing this would be for example changing the dodge mechanic. Right now it offers invincibility frames (IF) which allows you to dodge through AoE fields. You could reduce the number of IF or remove them altogether, which would effectively reduce dodging to a means of getting from A to B quickly. Instead of dodging through AoE you’d have to dodge out of it or get hit. Furthermore, by altering some of the core mechanics of the game (locking targets, free aim vs tab target etc) you could put more emphasis on individual aim, mobility and spatial awareness and thereby lower the viability of just looking at your skillbar while performing optimal rotations as long as you have aegis. (Think TERA, although my knowledge of the game is very very limited)
These changes would not empower tankiness, they’d just raise the skill bar thereby making tankiness a bit more enticing.
Ultimately I’d like to mention something that (I think) Nike has stated several times: Why is the current dominance of offensive builds bad?
All of the above are just a couple of quick thoughs and just my personal opinion. It may contain errors, hyperbole or simplification.
(edited by Veydar.5017)
Yall do know Raid Dungeons are coming right? Its in the works…
Sourcerino?
It’s been a while!
/leans back
Not a fan of dressing up female characters in underboob, butts and such either. Why should I get excited about pixels while I can have it in real life?
I have absolutely no idea how the two are related! Can you elaborate this please? How many sexual partners per month does it require to invalidate dressing up your character in attractive clothes? Is there an intermediate area that allows tight skirts but forbids revealing upper body attire?
Massive bump
Because I like looking at girls.
Lord of the bump
No one can justify life by linking happy moments into a rosary
3D has bugs and obviously performance issues. Make sure to maintain 60+ fps for 3D (100+ would be way better though). If you want to use custom convergence setting have a button combo to deactivate 3D on the fly, otherwise you can’t navigate the map (‘M’) since waypoints etc. are rendered at the wrong depth. This is not an issue when using the predefined convergence setting!
Some shadows are rendered at the wrong depth (as in not rendered in 3D at all), as in literally (/hyperbole) every game that is officially supported by NVidia
I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.
Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.
So 22,5 minutes as average value?
y u do dis? :[
5/10 for sarcasm though
I think that compared to dungeons, fracal rewards are much worse and this should change.
Well, considering that a fractal 50 usually takes about 20 – 25 minutes max, the rewards are actually not that bad.
bump o/
/15charsforglory
But we all know that the average guild group takes around 20min for a super casual lv 50 run no scope. So increasing rewards would make it more worthwhile than dungeons and totally ruin everything including cantha /s
groups that can do this, can do p1 & 2 of arah in 20 minutes and get 6.5g
So upping the lvl50 gold reward to 5g would still be below par for regular dungeons.
The /s was meant to indicate sarcasm. There was a post about this topic a month ago that eventually got deleted since people were just boasting of top tier Fractal clear times and assumed these were a decent average for merely “good” groups discussing Fractal clear times.
But we all know that the average guild group takes around 20min for a super casual lv 50 run no scope. So increasing rewards would make it more worthwhile than dungeons and totally ruin everything including cantha /s
This would not please those who spent legendary size fortunes on the Perma Kit.
I have crippling lag every weekend. Sundays I can’t play at all. It’s a known problem for some people from Germany so I wanted to use a VPN. However, with AirVPN active, I can’t log into my account anymore (both game and forums). It says wrong username and password although both are 100% correct. It also asks me for the authenticator code which I correctly enter but with VPN active it doesnt work.
Fractals need to be more rewarding, currently they’re less rewarding than farming SW or dungeons, that’s wrong.
Whats wrong, would be turning it into another dungeon tour. The rewards should not be THAT good
Why? It’s the hardest content in the game.
Like I said in a previous post, personally I just don’t want the dynamic of the fractal community to change. When it becomes all about farming and the gold you create a different mindset in the people running it. Look at dungeons, many people ONLY care about running them quickly, if it doesn’t go smoothly they get kittened off immediately and start raging. Fractals currently have that expectation of failure. Why? Because it’s not about gold/hour, it’s about getting it done, whatever it takes.
I’m all for making it more rewarding in a way that isn’t the universal gold currency. I’d love to see more fractal based rewards. More account bound stuff like ascended. More rewards would be awesome. But, making it into a gold farm… not so much.
I think this is at least one of the reasons there are people who enjoy fractals more than dungeons. It’s a different goal. I don’t check my gold after running a few fractals. I don’t try and calculate my earnings. I simply had fun doing it. I look for better ways to run them for the fun of it. When I get frustrated it’s not “OMG their DPS sucks” it’s simply me being frustrated with my own lack of performance on encounters, it’s the fun I was missing before I embraced fractals. I don’t want that to change.
I realize some people have everything they want from fractals. Well, maybe we can get them to release different hues of the weapons? Maybe whole new skins? Who wouldn’t want a set of fractal armor? Maybe this is asking too much but we can hope right? Ok… the pessimist in me is saying who am I kidding, but I will say I would much rather fractals stay out of the goldfarming agenda and more in it’s own rewards system. I don’t want the idea of gold/hour to even be mentioned when talkinga bout fractals, or at least if it is that people are continuing to say it’s bad, because I don’t want that to be what it’s about.
I don’t know this “Fractal community” that you speak of because I don’t PUG, so I can’t really comment on the existence of this community.
The reason why people have a more lenient attitude towards failure in Fractals is probably related to them being harder and longer. It’s easy to disband a group in a 10min dungeon but not after a 60min PUG fotm 50 when people keep dying to the shaman simply because you’ve invested 60 minutes and it would take longer to find a new group. I don’t think this leniency would change if Fractals were more rewarding than dungeons for extremely experienced and ambitious hardcore PvE players (and only for them).
I want (yes, just me personally) Fractals to be more rewarding than dungeons because they are the hardest content. Simple as that. Since I don’t participate in any sort of community this is of no concern to me. Rewarding in this context does not mean monetary though, I would rather have a predictable way of acquiring skins (and maybe armor in the future).
and I haven’t seen a single LFG asking for an ele outside of high level fractals and ascalon. So who are you to tell me what’s the meta in the EU?
If you are basing your assessment of what’s meta on the LFG tool requirements then there’s your problem. You should run with hardcore PvE guilds to see what’s the current meta. This usually trickles down to the more casual players to some degree (guides, youtube, reddit, forums) but the LFG tool will never be an accurate representation of the group compositions favored by hardcore guilds in casual daily runs.
These runs almost always use Berserker gear (+ Assassins) and the standard meta builds with a few slight variations. For example, the Guardian “meta” 45005 will often be altered a bit to 46202, 46400, 46004 etc. (not a full list of Guardian builds)
Whoever thinks GW2 dungeons are toxic and have a steep learning curve should give Wildstar a try. The first boss of the first dungeon (before the latest patch that introduced Prototype) wipes so many people that most groups who don’t make it to the end of the dungeon actually disband right at the beginning (Stormtalon’s Lair).
Getting them guaranteed will turn fractals – the only place which is not afflicted by this – into something resembling a regular workplace.
That is your opinion. For me Fractals are exactly like dungeons -> a grind. The only reason why I enjoy dungeons a bit more is because I get guaranteed rewards that are useful to me (gold). Fractals are just as much work, but without the guaranteed reward that I consider worthwhile. I don’t see how giving players a guaranteed way of achieving their goal would make it more like work.
It doesn’t really matter if you spam Fractals to get more relics or to get more dice rolls, the latter just feels less rewarding and gives less people an incentive to run them, since they might get nothing in return.
The Panda is elusive, you should give it a couple more tries!
Thanks guys! It’s good to have times to shoot for, or at least compare to.
Enjoy comparing your runs to Goku. inb4 sad panda
SteamOS has not even released yet,(only be able to download beta version of it from some secret website that isn’t publicly announced) but now become like top 20 among many linux distros and its amount of population is still increasing.
I’m skeptical that SteamOS, or Linux in general, would be a highly profitable market to port GW2 to. Linux has a whole only has about a 1.34% market share, and I’d say (completely anecdotally) that a not-insignificant amount of those users run some form of Windows on the side, especially if they’re gamers. SteamOS will definitely encourages some growth of Linux-based gaming, but “only able to download beta from some secret website” isn’t exactly a firm foundation at the moment.
Android is also another linux distro for just arm cpu, so it becomes
47.06% (mobile) + 1.34% (desktop) = around 48.40%
In fact, around 48.40% of all the people in the world use Linux actually. you just don;t realize it lol
How is that even remotely relevant? We’re talking about an MMORPG, I don’t see how quoting statistics from the mobile device market has any meaning to this discussion. It’s a computer game and therefore we should stick to the operating systems available for computers. In that regard, Linux’ market share is tiny especially considering gamers.
inb4 someone quotes server OS market shares
To get back to what the OP was saying, if we could buy skins with tokens we we would at least be making constant progress and fractal runs in which you don’t get a useful skin wouldn’t be a complete waste. Right now the chance of getting for example the daggers is equal for someone doing his 1st level 50 fractal and someone doing his 1000th. The latter just had more dice rolls.
And yes like spoj is saying, and I agree with that, fractals are the closest to hardcore pve endgame content we have, so their rewards shouldn’t be scaled to new players. I have a gazillion rings and I’ve completed the ascended armor collection long ago so a fractal run in which I get a scepter skin or a healers chest is a complete and utter waste of my time.
snip
So you don’t think that all the useless rings, chests and skins in combination with the meager monetary rewards are underwhelming? (It’s an honest question and in no way condescending/aggressive/negative/to be interpreted as ad hominem)
I would be content with Fractal rewards if I could choose which stats I get from ascended rings and chests and which skin I get.
I understand that some people perceive Fractals to be very rewarding when veterans link the 20 ascended healers chests they have in their bank. These people have to realise that these items are completely, 100% worthless for any ambitious PvE only player who uses berserkers and assassins gear exclusively.
Doing the hardest content in the game only to get something you might as well destroy when the same group can probably do a full CM run in 20 minutes feels underwhelming.
It would be interesting to calculate whether it’s faster getting 20 slot boxes and backpieces from Fractals as opposed to dungeon running. Dungeons give so much loot if you account for the exotic insignias and the ecto you get from tokens plus they have a guaranteed gold reward that is actually pretty decent.
My girlfriend has never played a video game. When she wanted to try that “game I spend my life on” she was overwhelmed by moving the camera and the character at the same time. She could either walk in a direction with wasd or move the camera. Imagine how she would feel about quests, stats, dungeons, LFG, raids, ganking and all these gaming or MMO related mechanics and words.
Fractals /15chars
Character select
Target Name: 206-127-146-56.ncsoft.com
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Date/Time: 2/1/2015 3:21:34 PM to 2/1/2015 3:23:49 PM
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It’s always the kittening level3 in Frankfurt. It’s caused more than one major internet outage in this part of Germany.