Guild Wars 2

I just want to add to this discussion as someone who has been negatively impacted by the RNG in this game. I’ve been playing since launch, probably about 2k or 3k hours total played, and I’ve thrown about 2000 rares into the MF. I’ve never received a precursor. The odds of not getting a precursor after 2000 forges are about 6%, however when you take into account the odds to receive a precursor from a drop or a chest, my unluckiness is even worse.

Wasting all of my money and getting nothing back in return really depressed me and sucked a lot of the fun out of the game. You can see that the MF method of obtaining a precursor is broken because whenever anyone asks if they should MF for one or just buy it off the TP, the resounding answer from the community is to just buy it, and I wish now that I had followed that advice.

I think a possible way to fix the issue would be for there to be a maximum number of eligible MF attempts in a row that can fail to produce a precursor. Right now, there is about a 50% chance to obtain one from your first 500 forges, and about 75% from your first 1000. Why not make it a 100% chance in your first 1000? Have the game keep a counter of how many forges it’s been since someone last got a precursor, and when that number reaches 1000, they automatically will get a precursor. Or, have the odds to obtain a precursor improve with every forge that fails until that person gets one, then resetting the odds back to baseline.

I don’t think that implementing mechanics that will effect legitimate players is the answer. I think the answer here is better GM policing, and giving us options for more detailed reporting. If the same player is getting a lot of reports, a hidden GM needs to be observing them, and issuing either verbal warnings or bans. Most of these characters are probably alternate accounts, but losing your $45 account might be enough to stop some people.

For others, perhaps you can look into linking IP addresses to multiple accounts. Most people won’t risk their main account to a banning.

Dadnir.5038:

Remember LB#4 (worst skill to spam in dungeon).

Unless you’re using it to pin a boss against a wall.

Eh, it doesn’t really take a math genius. Basically, with the old mechanic, it was a 70% chance on each hit to increase your damage by 10%. That’s an average 7% dps increase. There was always a 10s ICD on the tooltip, but it never actually had the ICD, and doesn’t make sense to. With the ICD turned on, the actual value you will get will depend on how fast you attack, but it will be around .7%.

The spirit now only procs once every 10 seconds, instead of having a chance every hit like before. This has made it an effective .7% dps increase when traited, vs. the 7% that it was before. That means that it is a traited utility skill that is worse than a single stack of vulnerability.

This is a big problem for all Ranger players that needs to be fixed immediately. It completely nullifies the reason why people take Rangers in dungeon parties.

You might have had poison as well. The banner technically is not a “rez,” it is a skill that heals you up to your rally number and then like 10% or whatever of your normal health. If you are poisoned, it reduces the “heal” of the banner, so you probably won’t be rallied by it.

Frost Spirit and Spotter were the major reasons why Rangers were desired in PvE before the nerf. FS was basically our banners. Even if Ranger’s personal dps is higher now, and is said to be comparable to Warrior, they took away our banner when they “fixed” Frost Spirit, so Ranger is still objectively not as good as a Warrior in a group. Without the group support, Ranger’s personal dps is meaningless, because there are still 3 or 4 classes who do more and also provide more to the group.

Honestly, Ranger is actually in a worse place in PvE now than it was before the FS change. A single Ranger was a staple in most speed clear comps, but that will no longer be the case without Frost Spirit. Traited FS was a 7% damage increase for your entire party. Even if they raised Ranger’s personal dps by 40%, it still would not make up for the amount of group damage we lost with the FS nerf. It was seriously HUGE.

I think that none of this is anything that long time Ranger players don’t already know, so those previous paragraphs are mostly to highlight how drastic of a negative change the nerf to FS was for newer Rangers or those who are not very familiar with the theorycrafting side of the game. Long story short: despite whatever buffs Ranger just got in the patch, the class is overall much weaker in a group setting, which is very bad for Ranger, who has always struggled to be accepted.

So we, as Ranger players, need to make more noise about this change. If it was changed by mistake, it needs to be fixed ASAP. If it was a purposeful change, then Anet needs to explain why they thought it was a good idea to completely hamstring the class’ group synergy.

ilr.9675:

Wraith.9426:

I think they unlocked them for everyone, because I don’t have HoM unlocks and I suddenly have the black moa and black widow.

As someone who had to devote a year to unlocking both…. I find this news troubling

@ the op: you basically can’t do it in a reasonable time frame without owning all 3 chapters which means playing all the way through all 3 chapters too. Or approximately 80 missions and a bunch more farming.

I may have been wrong, I never realized that they were always unlocked in PvP, and that’s where I had noticed them the other day.

The frost spirit is now only a .7% dps increase even when traited, making it a utility slot that is worse than a single stack of vulnerability. I’m going to give Anet credit and assume that this is not an intentional change, because it would be an incredibly stupid decision if it was.

This is a high priority item that you need to fix asap, because Ranger is not viable in PvE without a working Frost Spirit. It becomes probably the worst PvE class by a long shot without it.

I think they unlocked them for everyone, because I don’t have HoM unlocks and I suddenly have the black moa and black widow.

Frost Spirit has to be fixed, Ranger needs it to be viable in PvE.

Slither Shade.4782:

only way it works is if we all respect each others lfg

but i just wanted to suggest that wars develop an attitude…. they begin to believe that they must be pro because the class is so good it goes to their head…. the only example i have to back this up is myself … i had a bit of an attitide on my war

This is the correct answer. People play Warrior and see the huge numbers of Hundred Blades or the quick numbers on axe, and with the natural durability that Warrior has they assume that Warrior does the most damage. They see the Ele get downed next to them and think they’re a noob who sucks, not realizing that the Ele has already done more damage in the fight than they will do for the whole fight. I remember a Warrior in a reddit post once scoffing at the idea that a Thief could out-dps him and his 30k HBs. HB is a 4 second channel. A Thief can land a CnD, backstab, full auto chain, and another CnD backstab combo in 4 seconds. On a zerker Thief that’s probably going to be about 45k damage total. And that is Thief’s regular rotation. So a Thief in his regular dps rotation does 50% more dps than a Warrior doing his “burst” skill.

One thing I will definitely give Warrior, however, is that it excels at trash skipping because of the great mobility and durability it has. I think this is a larger reason why I see so many “warrior only” posts for runs like Arah, some of those trash runs can be difficult for lighter classes that aren’t as mobile.

choon.6308:

Long cooldowns of other classes like ele. I’ve been pugging dungeons for years now and 2-3 warriors in a group ALWAYS had more dps than 2-3 ele

Oh man, now I know you’re trolling. That’s hilarious. Btw, lava font has like a 5 second CD. But yeah, even if we take FGS out of the equation, 3 Ele will still out-dps 3 Warriors by a pretty far margin. It wouldn’t be very close. If you take FGS into account, which you would in the real world, one Ele might out-dps 3 Warriors.

Rage.9723:

Two guardians are nice with at least one hammer guardian.

A warrior for banners.

Mesmer for extra utility.

Last slot can the variety part. A dagger/pistol thief can provide to many enemies almost permanent blind. Thief must be traited nicely and can provide excellent buffs if fully steal traited. Steal cooldown reduction helps keep the buffs up even more. Also stealth and nice single target DPS.

You can also bring a second warrior or another class if the person has a good amount of skill and brings something nice to the table.

No, you go sword/pistol on Thief for trash pulls, dagger doesn’t cleave but sword does. Thief brings constant blinds for trash mobs, group stealth for skipping, and high single target dps for bosses.

Jedbacca.6297:

I present to you….the closest thing to a victory video we can come up with from SF…with…Love??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzkh6ToH9XA

Guys, we can’t let them keep the PPT from that pole. BRING OUT THE OMEGA GOLEMS.

morrolan.9608:

Well the part about it not being honourable kind of offset the congratulations. I dunno why you BG players after what happened with your S1 video do not get that it comes across to others as chest thumping.

We don’t care. It’s a game, we’re trying to have fun. You guys all take this so seriously, you need to lighten up and have some fun. Make your own videos and thump your chests all you want. The whole idea is that people who either don’t play gw2 yet or who don’t play WvW will see these and want to get involved. Instead, you guys would have us quietly sit here and play the game without giving it any kind of publicity until it eventually dies. We’re not only trying to hype up our own server, we’re trying to hype up your servers and people who don’t play WvW. If you guys can’t see that through your blind hatred for a group of people who’s characters happen to be stored on a different piece of hardware than yours, then you really need to take a step back and realize that this is just a game, and it’s meant to be fun. The 2v1 in general and all the vitriol we get on these forums is really ridiculous considering.

This is the problem with the state of WvW in this game right now. We post a video to hype up the finish of the season, congratulating JQ on their victory and thanking our server for not giving up despite all odds, and you all have a problem with that? How are we going to attract more people into WvW if no one is hyping it up and making it look fun and exciting? Why is BG the only server actively trying to do this? Instead of coming into this thread and throwing around your negativity, GO MAKE YOUR OWN SERVER VIDEO! We need people to see these and think, “Oh kitten, that looks kinda crazy, I want to try that out.”

And on all your tired complaints about us “blobbing,” if we stopped running in large zergs, would anyone else also stop? Of course they wouldn’t, because running in a large highly mobile group is the most effective strategy in most instances. If we split our forces into 2 or 3 groups on a map, that will just result in those smaller groups getting steamrolled by JQ or TC’s map zerg. BG will stop running in large groups when it is no longer the most effective way to play, and that will require some mechanics changes by Anet for that to happen.

Blackgate is love. Blackgate is life.

Hey, my vote for you would be Mag. There are some great GvG guilds on there that you could learn a lot from.

Please Anet, +1 to getting rid of hobosacks. This is a game that focuses on cosmetic appearance, and here we have a class that is forced to wear a giant ugly backpack. There should really be an option in the hero panel for engineers to turn off the hobosack.

Yeah, this just happened to me tonight on my Ele. Tazza was focusing me down, and whenever my party members would get me back up, she would immediately go back to attacking me. Once I died, she immediately started focusing the other Ele in the group.

Berserker is the highest damage gear set, and the current status of PvE in the game is that dps is the only thing that really matters. Your heals from your cleric set are doing nothing for the group’s effectiveness. Your extra durability from your Solider set only means that the boss is staying alive long enough to make more attacks, which means that the odds are greatly increased that someone will miss a dodge and a wipe will occur. I can dodge or evade Alpha’s attack every time, but eventually if he’s not killed fast enough I might run out of endurance and not be able to dodge, in which case I’ll probably be downed in one hit. This is why group dps is so important in the game.

The problem is not Berserker gear, or even the attitude of “elitists.” They are correct that berserker is the most efficient gear to successfully complete most PvE content, and it just doesn’t make sense for you to purposely play in a bad build or gear set. The problem is the current state of PvE, being that almost everything in the game is a dps check, and that successful dodging can negate most incoming damage from bosses.

Honestly, I suggest to you, OP, that until different mechanics are introduced to the game that would favor more defensive stats, you should just get a set of berserker gear for your character. You will immediately notice how much faster and more smooth dungeon runs go, and that is why people only want zerker builds.

Just to clear up a sentiment on this thread: the 2v1 going on now in T1 is not like the natural 2v1s we would see as a part of map politics, or two servers both focusing a third. This was a planned, colluded, alliance between two servers, where they reportedly even are sharing a TS, and taking turns finishing first each week while not allowing the third server to even play the game by both spawn camping them. They are fixing the matches instead of playing to win each match. This is not something that has ever happened in this game before, and it is not a good precedent. If this kind of cross server alliance starts to become the norm in WvW, I could see it destroying the game pretty quickly. Servers are not supposed to collude with each other like this, it is supposed to be a 3 way battle.

There needs to be something that shows you which dungeon paths you have already done in a day, and are therefore ineligible to receive a daily for. I actually come across this problem from time to time, where I do a bunch of dungeons at night, and then the next day I get home from work a few hours before dailies reset and I don’t remember which paths I can still do. This would be a really nice quality of life improvement for us dungeon runners.

Tachii.3506:

I’m back to pugging daily for most of my dungeon runs.

All I write is p1/2/3, lv80s/be experienced pls.
I could care less if they’re zerk or not in AC/CoF/SE. Stuff starts to become somewhat of an issue in TA. I’ve seen tons of pugs getting dropped by the vine champ, or just dying really early with the knockdown while running.

There’s really nothing to add here that could salvage the issue. DPS is part of the issue, but there will always be pugs that has no idea what the dungeon is about despite what you write on LFG. As a rule of thumb, it’s usually those under 1k ap. Anyway, I’m impartial to non-zerkers/zerkers. In that like the OP, I ain’t going to waste the next few minutes kicking players and verifying gear when a non-zerk warrior group could’ve done half of the dungeon already.

Unfortunately without a consistent group I no longer do Arah or Aetherblade since puglyfe is certainly not adequate to handling either of these without the occasional frustration.

Oh man, the Vine… There have been so many groups where everyone in my party has bailed to go to ranged when it got a little hot in there, leaving me the only one still meleeing it down. And half the time they still die before me. Had they just stayed there fighting, we could have killed it easily, but people get scared. Can’t be afraid to get downed sometimes, just do as much dps as you can before you do.

One that really gets me are the “no necro/ranger” posts. I can kinda understand the stigma with Necro, it needs some love for PvE, but Ranger is kittening awesome to have in your party if they are playing right. Spotter? Frost Spirit? Hell yes! I have 7 80s and play pretty much all of them, and I really enjoy my Ranger.

Staff does more dps than LH. Go 30/20/10/0/10

2v1 is fine, they are allowed to do that if they want. I think it kind of goes against the spirit of the game being a 3-way free-for-all, but it’s still smart strategy. The DDoS attacks on our TS, however, are not cool and need to stop. Things like that, hacking (not accusing anyone of this), or having spies on enemy servers that purposely destroy golems or throw down junk siege to cap the siege limit are all stepping across a line that is no longer fair play. I’m sure that the majority of JQ don’t know who’s doing it, so there’s probably nothing they can do, but it still sucks.

KcB.6890:

Wraith.9426:

You look at what we do and see nothing more than a large zerg running around the map. This is why you failed this week. You need to stop making excuses about why you’re losing and come up with a way to win. You won’t beat us if you don’t give us any more credit than the numbers. Even when you match our numbers you still won’t beat us, and that’s because you can’t understand anything that’s going on beyond just the number of players. So in short: stop complaining on the forums about why you’re losing and try to organize better so you can compete in T1.

It boggles my mind how clueless you are.

Would you care to elaborate? I watched the video, and I’ve seen this same guy commenting on the gw2wvw.net forums. He’s kitten that he can’t compete, so he records a couple times where his group played well so he can try and denigrate the ability of BG. What he’s not showing you are all the times where his guild hit a brick wall and got mopped up. He even said on the other forums that his guild can take a BG guild at a 2 to 1 disadvantage. That’s just absurd and preposterous.

And then people come in here and talk about how they don’t care about PPT… That’s the entire point of the game, why are you playing WvW if you don’t care about the outcome? What would you think about a player on your favorite basketball team saying in an interview, “I just want to have some good isolation matchups with the other team’s best player, I don’t really care about the final score or if my team wins.” Fans would probably want him to go find another team if he doesn’t care about winning. How do you think the people on your server who actually do care about winning feel when they hear you all say that you don’t care about winning or PPT? How are you ever going to inspire your server’s players or attract guild transfers if you just don’t care about the game at all?

Population cap should not be lowered, no one wants longer queues. I don’t like large map blobs, and I think most of our commanders would even agree, but it’s effective. If I split up my forces into two groups, either group will get crushed whenever it encounters the full force of the other server’s zerg. This was what happened in T1 when the blob was first used by SoR back in the day, and everyone else had to counter it by consolidating our forces into a large group as well. Even if you lowered the cap, you would still have zergs, they would just be slightly smaller.

The answer is to have some kind of game mechanic that encourages splitting up your forces. As it stands, map zergs are able to be mobile enough to respond to attacks all over the map if they get proper warning from scouts. If the maps were larger this might no longer be true, meaning that forces would have to split to cover different areas of the map. I agree that dividing up needs to be encouraged, but lowering population caps is not going to achieve this, and is not a good idea in general.

I’ve mained a Thief since launch, and all the stealth crying is just laughable. Glass cannon Thieves are incredibly squishy. If they fail to kill you in their initial burst, or you can CC them in any way, they are dead. The permastealth Thief, on the other hand, can’t dish out a lot of damage. That was always a scouting build for survival. Of course they are annoying to kill, that’s the entire point of that build. I’ve actually had the most success with a condition build, and I think that’s the strongest Thief roaming build, yet no one complains about that on the forums.

Bottom line: If you further nerf stealth, you have to increase the Thief’s base HP. It’s really too low as it is. Warriors, for instance, start out with twice our effective HP, but we don’t do twice their dps. Guardian has more defense from their higher armor class, but they also have passive health regen. Even Elementalist, the only class with a lower base eHP than Thief, has options to increase their armor rating or gain passive healing. Thief is already the squishiest class, nerfing their defenses should not even be on the table.

You look at what we do and see nothing more than a large zerg running around the map. This is why you failed this week. You need to stop making excuses about why you’re losing and come up with a way to win. You won’t beat us if you don’t give us any more credit than the numbers. Even when you match our numbers you still won’t beat us, and that’s because you can’t understand anything that’s going on beyond just the number of players. So in short: stop complaining on the forums about why you’re losing and try to organize better so you can compete in T1.

Toughness, Vitality, and Healing Power.

I also think it would be great if there was some way for us to come up with our own stat combinations. Like, for instance, if a set of gloves had 150 total stat points you could allocate however you liked. That would really open up more diversity, with people trying different combinations of stats.

This is an interesting build, but it wouldn’t be really viable in larger scale skirmishes. I mainly play a Thief in one of the major WvW guilds on BG, and the problem I see with your concept is that we really don’t stop to rez people, and there are a couple reasons. First, Warrior and even Ranger elites are much better for rez’ing if you get a few people downed. Also, an even better way to get people up is to kill an enemy so they rally.

I think I’m kind of in the same boat as you, though. Thief is a great scout, maybe the best, but I haven’t been able to find a really great use for it as part of a zerg. I tried toying around with venomshare builds, and found them pretty underwhelming. Glassy builds are just too fragile and I get downed too easily.

That said, I’ll probably give your build a try anyway. It looks like it would be very effective in small skirmishes, but I do have my doubts how well it will work in ZvZ play.

Please, for the love of Dwayna, start making new game types other than conquest. I was an avid BG PvPer in Swtor when it launched because they had several different interesting game types. I was one of the first War Heroes on my server, back when that meant something. I love GW2, and it’s clearly a much better game all around than Swtor could ever dream of being, but sPvP’s lack of diversity is a problem. Instead of making more maps for conquest style matches, start making new modes, like attack and defend an objective, capture the flag, a huttball type game, team deathmatch, etc. There are so many possibilities.

This is an amazing idea.

If I had to guess, they will unlock higher levels in Fractals when they release the 3 new fractals later this year.

You really should create cinematic cutscenes to retell the plot of the Living Story. This will be really important for people who are joining the game later and missed story elements, or people who took a break and missed things. Perhaps put them in the My Story tab. The story and lore of the game needs to be better delivered, and cinematic trailers to recap the story so far would really help.

Dredlord.8076:

dont kid yourself buddy, I see repeat offenders in wvw day after day.

They probably won’t last long. There are some safety precautions that one could take to avoid notice with these, but if you have personally seen the same person multiple times, then they aren’t being safe with it, and will probably be banned sooner rather than later. If they are circumventing the automatic detection, Anet relies on you to report them so they can investigate, so you need to report these players. And yes, they do take action if they can prove without doubt that the person used a third party program.

Let me clear up something that a lot of you are confused on. These hacks are only able to manipulate the client, so anything done client-side can be manipulated. It then sends this manipulated data to the Anet servers. This includes things like character position (speed, teleport, flying hacks), clipping (walking through walks), and the camera (zoom hacks). These hacks cannot manipulate anything done server-side. This includes damage calculations. So no, someone was not using a hack to do crazy damage to you, or take less damage, or attack really fast. Just because someone killed you 1v1 doesn’t mean they were using a hack.

That said, a lot of people who were using these hacks actually have been banned. Anet has pretty good detection for teleports now, so you should all stop complaining. Sure, you might still see someone teleporting occasionally, but odds are that that is someone who just got the hack and is using it for the first time, and they will probably be banned within 30 minutes.

I actually don’t feel squishy on Ranger at all, it’s pretty similar to zerk Warrior in survival with its evades and Regen. Try playing a zerk Ele or Thief, those are squishy. But what other people here are saying is true: if everyone in the party is pulling their weight in the dps department, it won’t matter how squishy you are. On the other hand, I’ve been in groups where I’ve felt squishy even on Warrior because things aren’t dying fast enough and I’m pulling a lot of aggro because I’m the only one doing damage. It really depends on your team.

Everyone is completely missing the point of his thread. He is talking about the nerf to getting 60 tokens on alts, something that I’ve written posts about too. I don’t care if they keep the gold bonus account bound, there was no reason to nerf tokens on alts. Keeping the gold account bound would make running a variety of dungeons more profitable, but not everyone is running them just to make gold. Some of us farm tokens to gear up our characters with different stat sets or cosmetic sets. Obviously, if you are going for a cosmetic set it doesn’t make sense to do a variety of dungeons, you just want to do the one for the set you want. Getting full token rewards for alts was a way to reward those of us who put a lot of time and effort into leveling and gearing multiple characters. That reward has been taken away from us. Does it make sense that a person with 1 level 80 should be able to acquire a gear set in the same amount of time as a person with 6 level 80s, when the latter person obviously needs 6x as many pieces of gear?

Yaki.9563:

Boohoo why can’t I do dailies with my alts and get the extra laurels!

Boohoo why can’t I do my monthly with my alts and get the extra laurels!

I’m sure there’s other crap too but circumventing time limitations by abusing alts leaves me with little sympathy.

Now those who legitimately want to get gear from a dungeon for multiple characters, that I can understand the complaint. Maybe make it so that tokens are character bound…problem solved!

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I have 6 level 80s, so I have 6x as many weapons and pieces of armor to get as someone with only 1. Why is it such a big deal if I can gear them all in the same amount of time as a person with 1 gears if I put in 6x the work? With this change, I’m not allowed to put in more work than someone with 1 character, and instead just have to do it for 6x more days.

I’m not sure if this is a bug or is something you intended, but you only get the full 60 token reward from your first run of a path now, and doing the same path on another character no longer gives you 60 tokens. This drastically cuts the amount of tokens you can get for people with multiple level 80s. There have been several posts in other sections where people are not happy with this change/bug, so I’m posting it in here just in case it was unintended.

I really want to see a dev respond in here and tell us their reasoning for this change.

Yeah, this is a something a lot of us agree on. The current implementation of Defiant makes any kind of CC build completely pointless.

Shortbow on Ranger isn’t very good anyway, Sword/Warhorn is where it’s at.

Also, the endgame for a lot of us is WvW. This game is called Guild Wars, not Dungeon Wars. WvW is where the guilds across servers do battle. This is very clearly a PvP-centric game. I do agree that they could add more PvE content, but the vast majority of players in the game do not want a gear treadmill, so if you want something like that, this is not the game for you.

Cassio.9507:

Wraith.9426: Thank you for a very well phrased post. Also, thank you for trying to give an example of what keeps your interest up.

I just personally feel that already being done w/ my character (so to say, cosmetics aside) leaves very little left to help stimulate enough of an interest. The story of the game has however always been interesting. I just wonder if it will ever be enough again to actually restart my interest. I miss the game a lot actually, and it’s frustrating.

I think I kind of understand your feeling, and what I did was just make a lot of alts. I have 6 characters now, and I’m only missing a Necro and an Engineer. I’ve barely even touched most of their personal stories, though, so I still have a lot there to do. I’m still kind of working towards a legendary, although I don’t even know which one I want. I won’t lie, I took like a 2.5 month break from the game, but I had hardly done any dungeons, so learning the different dungeon paths and perfecting my skill at each has been fun. I also do a lot of WvW since I’m in a major guild on a Tier 1 server. The drama of Tier 1 WvW is always interesting.

Beyond that, I keep playing because I believe in Arenanet. I trust them to put out good content and tell me an interesting story. People rave about the stories from GW1, and I wish I had played that game to experience it.

Ok, but we’re all telling the two of you that you are going about this game the complete wrong way. In those other MMOs, you were playing the game so you could get better gear. And for what? So you could have bragging rights about your stats. You didn’t “need” the gear to do the new content, since obviously you had to beat it without it to get the gear in the first place. It didn’t unlock any new content (other than whatever would be the next release a year down the line). On the contrary, it would make content obsolete. Things that used to provide a challenge for a group would become trivial.

So really, the stats were just a carrot on a stick that they used to force you to play the content, and you had to play it whether you enjoyed it or not, or else you would be “g!mp.” (apparently that word is filtered here, lol)

The entire concept of GW2 (and GW1 for that matter) is the exact opposite. You get the gear with the best stats really easily, and then you go out and enjoy the content. THIS GAME IS NOT ABOUT OBTAINING NEW LEVELS OF POWER THROUGH YOUR GEAR, IT’S ABOUT EXPERIENCING A DYNAMIC WORLD. Think of the ramifications if they began introducing power creep. The entire game right now is balanced around a certain stat ceiling. Everything in the game would become obsolete if all of us were suddenly more powerful. This is exactly what happens in other MMOs, and you know it. This is not what Anet wants, they want the content they launched with to always be relevant. They want to build more content to add to what is already here, not have to replace obsolete content with expansions every year.

On the topic of a long-term motivator, one of mine is just to see what happens next with the story. They are putting out new content for me to play every 2 weeks, and the story is really unfolding quickly. A lot of us have started putting the pieces together with how the Molten Alliance, Canach, and the Aetherblades fit together. Mai Trin mentioned someone named Scarlet who seems to be pulling the strings behind all of these events, and I have a feeling she is going to show herself very soon. This is the excitement of this game, it is a dynamically unfolding story that we all are experiencing at the same time. Who the hell cares about gear stats? It’s so trivial.

That said, I’m not going to disagree that I would like to see more permanent content. I certainly don’t want Anet to rest on their laurels. They have said they are developing their own version of raids, and I’m excited to see what they come up with. I would like to see some new dungeons, and I’m looking forward to the new fractals (although I wanted the fall of Abaddon fractal…). So while I agree with you that there is a lot of room for more, I definitively do not want that to include any kind of power creep.