Guild Wars 2

I have a Necro in both GW1 and GW2.

I think the disposable pet concept is much better, however, it is hard to pull off with the very limited combat system where the weapon determines what abilities you have in GW2.

Necro should have had defined roles, ie Condition, Power, Utility and Minion Master. Then, you should have enough trait options so you could really go down any trait path and have abilities for any rank that you desire irrespective of the role you wish to play.

I think Lich Form should have been the bread and butter trait for the Minion Master, it should have given you the abilities to fully weaponise your minions, to direct them properly and to give them purpose.

As it is now, you can fill your bars with minions and all that does is give you a swath of really stupid AI minions that don’t even do a great job of keeping mobs off you.

Sadly, it is the fundamental problem with Necromancer, the elements are there for a strong class that is fun to play but nothing really was executed properly. This class through beta was powerful for so long due to Death Shroud that the lack of polish on everything else was glossed over. Once Death Shroud was ‘balanced’ the cracks in the design became chasms.

The only end-game I am experiencing is levelling alts. Not sure what I am going to do when I am done with that. I WvW enough to clock up monthly achievements. I don’t mind it in small doses but I wouldn’t log in every day just to WvW or sPvP.

Orr is a nightmare to get from A to B, it is awesome if you are a bot though because you don’t really have to move to find mobs, they cover every square inch of the zone.

It is not too bad doing stuff in a group, even just one other person makes a world of difference. If I am on my own I prefer Frostgorge to amuse myself.

I have a big norn guardian with a greatsword that is massive and I am struggling to hit destroyable objects, i just get chain misses and i have to jump around doing acrobatics just to land the odd hit.

This is very frustrating. I have to switch to a weapon that does a ranged attack.

Should have bought gems with your saved up gold when they were cheap and sold them during Halloween when the price was high. You would have doubled or tripled your money.

I wouldn’t mind new races or classes. If I wasn’t levelling alts then I probably would struggle to find things that interested me.

I have a massive Norn Guardian and my greatsword is the size of 2 humans.

Try fighting trolls, i got 2 keys in 5 minutes heading through the zone off trolls going to a story quest and i don’t know what they are for. :P

Necromancer (not bugged build)

Traits that currently work properly, even if the tooltips are all wrong.

You lose agro when you go down, then the person who tries to get you up gets agro.

I just hope the war on botters does not make life harder for normal people. It seems the world has become a lot poorer in terms of drops since the botters run amok.

Underflow servers?

Necromancer would be super tough, if half the traits actually worked and didn’t heal your enemies. :P

I like the jumping puzzles in the game, I just don’t like them combined with ADHD level time limits. I would have preferred to see some fighting along the way instead with more than just one jump path, even include mobs that telegraph knockbacks so you have to jump through the fighting to avoid getting knocked down, made it interesting and have some reason why there are so many other players in my face.

Praxis.6289:

I don’t trust anything thats not updated in the tooltip, the +20% bonus bleed duration trait(Hemophilia) as well bonus bleed duration on sigils.

Pretty much nothing works as advertised with the Necromancer class. It helps if you re-create your character with a character builder and link that so we can see specifically everything in play.

So I tested Hemophilia at first by itself and it worked properly, 0 increase in effectiveness on default scepter attack. (4 ticks, since 0.2*4 < 1, not enough to give additional second). Adding +5% more on warhorn gave it additional tick. This is on a level 20 necro with only hemophilia and weapons with +5%.

That is correct. Condition damage is rounded down to each full second. So 25% of 4 seconds = +1 second.

Then level later keeping my previous lowbie weapon for testing and comparing I’m somehow always getting 1 more tick. Hemophobia and just one 5% duration weapon gives me now 6 ticks on default scepter attack(that is equivalent of 50% duration increase coming from 25% total). Tested over 10 times carefully no crits no autoattack.

Do you have points in Spite? Conditions never crit btw.

Also without Hemophobia and just 5% bleed duration, default scepter attack now gives 5 ticks as well. Strange. This additional tick appeared after I bought 5% bleed duration sigils and equipped it in my new weapons(old weapons with same 5% bleed increase bonuses in backpack)

Would be nice to know what exactly going behind these duration increasers that dont update tooltip.

It sounds like you have 25+ points in Spite now. :p Which would explain the extra tick. Do you have any runes on your armour which affect conditions?

I use the Fleshy with a condition build, he is good for pulling mobs for me. If he sees a red out in the distance he goes over to say hello.

They should have given you some minor trait options, less than what exists for major but enough so that you don’t have things popping up that you don’t want around.

Dagger/Power does more damage but you are in the danger zone being that close to mobs/players.

The problem with Condition build is it has no synergy with DS. Also, conditions can be fairly easy to ditch for most classes, so the ability to extend duration is not as appealing as increasing the damage output.

I did everything at least once and spent about 15 minutes on the clock tower, which obviously wasn’t enough but I didn’t enjoy it so moved on.

I am generally not a fan of RL holidays and events celebrated in fantasy games, even if they are twisted to fit into whatever game world. I would enjoy some unique game events and holidays not tied to RL ones. Having Halloween related things detracts from the immersion for me but I realise very few people care much about the story, theme or whatever.

I think the clock tower stuck out in terms of difficulty, given the rest of the event you could do in a coma, the clock tower had some kind of absurd difficulty ramping. I would have preferred if it was tuned down a little and everything else tuned up, a lot.

Stevoli.8795:

Well there you go, some people enjoy a challenging game that requires patience and lots of trial and error. I remember playing old console games (back in the 90s) non-stop until I beat certain parts. Some of the older NES games were brutal, way worse than this.

Tetris is a good game for hand-to-eye co-ordination and skill. There is nothing really about GW2 that is really challenging in that respect. The clock tower just seems out of place with the rest of the game and seems to go against their own design belief.

I still play Tetris now and then, just a browser version. But it is not something I would want in an MMO, especially a game like GW2 which is not what you would call one of the challenging MMOs to play.

You just run around and face roll all the content, from PvE (including the big dragon fights) to sPvP to WvW. The clock tower just sticks out like dogs balls.

I wasn’t referring to myself, my computer isn’t that old. I just don’t have the care factor to flog my way through it like my life depended on it. :P

If it is not doable in a few attempts, it is not fun in my definition of fun so I am outta there. Good luck to those that put themselves through it. I am not busting my kitten to get all the achievements, just the ones that are fun for me.

This event is just not fun for me or most people I know. Someone else can’t tell you what you find fun, it is an opinion each person has.

If I wanted a super hard challenge, I would go climb mount Everest. I just like to relax and have ‘fun’ with computer games, not blow a valve like someone people have been experiencing. :P

I did it with one character, once was enough.

I thought this event was just some visual scripted event which you can watch on youtube, is there actually going to be anything interactive?

pudin.8735:

Guys, i dont know why all that confusion in all topics about the puzzle. This is NOT THAT HARD, you only need to concentrate and try again and again. Try to walk by the right and turn your camera while walking this will help. Or just check some youtube video to see where you need to jump.

The problem is that if you have latency, it is less responsive, especially graphic latency. By design it is significantly harder the worse your computer is. With other jumping puzzles you can compensate by taking longer to do the jumps and wait for others to go past if they make it significantly harder for you. That isn’t an option.

Some people also just don’t have the twitchy reflexes that others do, for some people this will be extremely trivial. Of the 40 odd people in my guild, nobody has successfully done it. If it was reasonable in terms of difficulty then I think some people should have got it that I know of.

You need to look at the average audience when making game design decisions. This game isn’t generally a challenge for those who love twitchy games, it doesn’t really need one out of the box encounter when it will only be around for a limited period of time.

If you have super leet jumping skills, try and find someone you know who has close to minimum specs and try it on their machine so you can experience the difficulty in challenge from a good gaming PC to a minimum spec one.

For those that are finding it easy, try it on a minimum spec PC and come back and tell me how many times you ace it. :P

This event should be as easy/hard for someone with minimum spec as it is for someone on a high-end machine. If it isn’t then it is a bad design, plain and simple. My machine is well above the minimum spec but it is not an ideal gaming setup. Trying to rush the jumps however just increases the difficulty factor tenfold and I am sure it is considerably worse for other people.

They should have realised their chosen design would have issues on a lot of their players.

I am all for making hard content, but find a way to do it that doesn’t make it significantly harder for those on lower-end machines. It can’t be that hard to do, seriously.

It is too easy to win at present because too many people don’t know the rules and just wander in to your tower and you can kill them easily when you have a mess of skeletons on your side.

Can anyone pull it off with what are advertised as the minimum system requirements to play the game?

Intel® Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, Core i3 OR AMD Athlon 64 X2, or better
2 GB RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800, ATI X1800, Intel HD 3000, or better (256 MB of video RAM and shader model 3.0 or better)

I am curious if this is even doable with a 2gh I3, with 2gb ram and an inbuilt HD3000.

GW2 Minimum system requirements is:
Core 2 duo 2.0ghz I3 with 2gb ram and an Nvidia 7800 or HD3000 with 256mb ram.

Get that system up and do the clock tower, no need for zooming in or inventory. That is what would impress me.

lol it was hard when there were people around? You don’t say. :p

You also are fortunate that you don’t have the video latency the vast majority of people are experiencing. Take out the video card and put in something that isn’t going to make it so smooth.

If it wasn’t timed, then people wouldn’t be as impacted by their hardware limitations.

I like jumping puzzles, even the really hard ones. I am not a huge fan of a timed one because as we have seen there are factors that make it more difficult. If you have video latency or are a smaller model the presence of larger ones impact the stability of the camera.

It wouldn’t be an issue if the event wasn’t time based, they should have made it ultra hard without the fog, then you can just let the ‘wide load’ characters jump/fall ahead of you.

It is not your fault, but the presence of large models makes it significantly harder for smaller model players to learn the event.

Cheekyrozza.3275:

tell me about it, just hope Anet fix it in time… fingers crossed

I wouldn’t hold my breath, my character is bugged so my core mechanics don’t work properly, like condition duration for my Necromancer and support refused to even look at it, when they eventually got around to responding.

Do the video with an Asura with fat assed Char and Norn driving your camera crazy. :P

That is a shame, if it doesn’t auto-correct when you get the last event then you are boned.

It would be a lot easier if fat kitten norn and char weren’t around or if the camera didn’t go crazy on smaller height models. If my camera was as stable as the guy in that video it wouldn’t be half as bad, it just goes nuts whenever some fat character sticks its kitten in your face.

It is easier to just report what is working right, it would be a shorter list.

Necro hasn’t been remotely competitive in sPvP since BWE1 and then we were OPed because DS was godly. Beating up on bad players doesn’t count. :P

Frotee.2634:

With the amount of QQing going on, you’d think the necromancer was unplayble at the moment – which it simply isn’t.

Nobody said this game was overly difficult, but having so many bugged abilities doesn’t add to the enjoyment, especially when other classes are largely functional if not balanced.

There is not enough challenge getting into the game…

“At the character selection screen the necromancer icon will correctly avoid being clicked by sliding the icon across the bar when the mouse pointer gets close.”

Condition is typically better for levelling in my opinion, go with Carrion gear which is Power, Vitality and Condition damage and you will do fine irrespective of which weapon or abilities you use. You just wont have brutal crit damage.

You mean the Tie Fighter sound?

I haven’t opened any chests, I was waiting for the kittentorm of tears to hit and for the bugs to be flushed out before I blew my load of keys.

At least we are consistently bad at everything. :P If we were really awesome downed our class might play better if we deliberately get knocked down. :P

Engineer or Mesmer don’t seem to have our isses. Ranger is functional but it is like watching paint dry to play. I can’t even get my conditions to calculate properly, I am losing about 30% of my dps as if it wasn’t bad enough to begin with.

I have imposed a 12 month ban on any monetary purchases for anet and ncsoft, if it goes another month with no major fixes then it is up to 3 year ban, if it goes 3 months without the class being fixed then it will be life ban.

Don’t release products this badly tested and don’t drag your feet fixing the issues, instead deciding to focus on holiday events. Get the game working properly first.

Anet might want to review the ‘no news is good news’ policy.

This will be moved to suggestion, the thread nobody reads. :P

The other professions I have played seem okay in terms of bugs, am sure there are a few minor ones but the Necormancer is horrendously tested/executed and months of waiting to get any of them fixed is disappointing given how quickly bug fixes were changed over the BWEs, did they fire most of the staff?

Like all MMOs, GW2 will be a vastly superior product in 1, 2 or 3 years time. There will also be more content and more features built in, eventually it is going to a fantastic game, I just feel MMOs at launch are not in a finished state and the last few AAA MMO titles released have been lacking in terms of what you are meant to be doing once you finish the character level cycle.

For the time you sink into them you would probably get better loot just killing level 80 trash mobs, for those that do it for the loot. That is assuming you can kill at a decent speed.

It is a loaded question given what people waste money on. MMO by design are intended to soak up hundreds/thousands of hours of gameplay, even if they are horrible games. To say it is great value because you have spent the time isn’t a true gauge, it just means the timesink components are functional.

I think it is a hit for the casuals and those who like competitive leaderboard PvP, but for me the game lacks depth. I think knowing what I know now about the game would I purchase it again? Probably not. I don’t mind pottering around, especially with friends but I can waste the same amount of time playing Solitaire and I didn’t pay anything for that.