difficulty in general. this game needs tanks. neverwinter fixed their easy mode by making everything in dungeons one shot anything thats not a tank. it required the traditional roles again. which is needed for teamwork.
Out of everything people are complaining that’s wrong with this expansion, difficulty is not one of them. Sure, it’s not difficult but GW2 was never sold on being hardcore.
Why do you need traditional roles for teamwork? We don’t have traditional tanks for raids and that involves quite a bit of teamwork.
But it is hard to play with people. I have played with two friends since GW1 started and now we are FORCED in to large groups, FORCED to do certain activities, FORCED to leave out small guild.
GW2 has lost its heart.
I’m not sure how you can design raid content for 2 people or somehow accommodate map-wide metaevents for 2 people.
I mean, its a MMO, the massive is in there forva reason.
If you wanted character advancements through stats, no, this game isn’t for you because the last time they tried to do that with Ascended gear, that riled up the playerbase for months. The entire franchise was built on opposing the gear grind.
If you want character progression through unlocking new skills, sadly no, not on that front either. They don’t want to split PvP from PvE and so they rarely add new skills because as you can see from the expansion, that tends to wreck PvP balancing.
And raids are nothing like Arah. Lupicus is hard but you can get carried and all the mechanics are essentially dodge the red circles. Raids place more individual responsibility on players (especially on the 3rd boss, where 1 weak link in the group could easily lead to a wipe) to perform their own assigned roles and mechanics are more complicated.
Xae there is peak times yes. But if you don’t play those times, it can be very frustrating to get anything done with out groups. You are Not able to solo this content.
June 28, 2012- December 15, 2015
RIP
When’s ‘not-peak’ time? Because even when I take a day off work and play in the morning, maps still get filled up.
At this point the HoT is pretty much over. Finding a map with enough people to do the events is very hard and seems to get harder. Maybe at launch it was worth it to get the addon but now it’s not because you can’t play a lot of the content if there are not enough players around. It looks amazing though. The Art team did a stellar job creating a stunning environment. The content is mediocre at best and the story is .. ugh .. it’s bad
TL:DR
nope
Wait what? I must be seeing things when I see all the taxis for AB, T4 VB and DS fill up like boxes on an assembly line then.
I have to question if the people claiming the game is dead even played since HoT.
I don’t want anything other than to wish you good luck and all the best.
EDIT: I’d also recommend giving The Secret World a try, if you haven’t already. I walked from that one for various reasons, but still think that the earlier part of the game, writing, story, voice work and skills/build system is absolutely second to none.
It’s not for everyone but it might be worth giving it a look.
I would definitely recommend that but I would say start off playing it as a single player game and just take it slow and enjoy the whole thing. The story is amazing (the DLCs are much better than the core game in my opinion).
It does get boring quite quickly however as their team is very small so content updates are slow.
I sometimes wonder if they should have just never put this thing in the game.
The matter of the fact is that some players like having a skin which is hard to earn and has some prestige to it so giving an easy alternative would ruin that. People find that fun, and Anet caters to them by having this skin in the game.
I’m all for complaining about the 10k achievement because that’s neither fun nor challenging to get as it just a check of how big your wallet is but I’m not seeing the problem of having the JP as a part of it.
It’s not like there’s nothing else that came with wintersday or you are entitled to get this skin.
^ why don’t we give everyone a full set of ascended gear? Why don’t we put ghostly infusions in a vendor for 1 gold each? Why have all the sinister accessories be locked behind story achievements? Why don’t we just give out legendaries for logging into the game?
It won’t affect anyone.
If don’t like the JP, don’t do it. You don’t need that one shoulder skin. I don’t enjoy swearing aloud at my monitor for a hour straight either and so I don’t have any intentions of completing them but you don’t see me going on the forums and calling it to be made easier.
Nor would it affect you if players had a second option available to doing the achievement for winters presence…
You are also embellishing things to make an argument and that argument falls flat.
This event has a limited time frame unlike all those things you mentioned, plus this is a holiday event that is supposed to be inclusive to ALL players and to thank them by doing something nice and festive for them…
It is very inclusive. This is one single cosmetic added there to reward players who put the effort in and can master all the content.
MMO’s consist of lists of things to do. Some of those lists have rewards at the end of a task. Those rewards are usually gained by the completion of repetitive tasks because MMO developers make a great deal of money by keeping players p(l)aying (whether that be sub or store). This is the nature of MMO’s. If you don’t like repetitive tasks, don’t do them, but realize that the rewards that you want are there specifically to encourage that repetition. MMO’s will be like this until either the genre fades away or until development tools are created that make generating new content trivial.
I dont know about that, please again…do correct me if I am wrong. But I remember Gw2 tryieng to stay away from that?
The rewards was gained by doing hearts instead of quests, where you dont have to hand anything in, you could do a whole map, which might require some time, but it would not be repetitive, because the tasks would simply be different(they simply hid the repetitive tasks that take just as long time behind something fun). Again I might be wrong, but seems like it was not like this, or at least, more well hidden than this?
But again, some streamers (WP too) explained that the world might be the disappointing part, because having an endless leveling curve was an amazing detail to Gw2, the reason people left was because there was nothing to do after 80, the world was amazing, but they needed a thrive. Thoug they would need to implement a lot more stuff to make people keep playing
The only rewards you got from doing DEs and hearts from the vanilla game were experience and karma. Experience wasnt very useful because getting to 80 was very fast for a MMO and karma had about as much use as bloodstone dust.
The rewards until Silverwastes came out came from either doing some very lucrative event until Anet realises were it was and nerfed it or spamming the same dungeons over and over running the exact same zerker builds.
A LOT means about 2 days of average playing even if you didn’t do squat in terms of Tyria mainland hero points completion to fully unlock Elites if that’s what you’re focusing on.
What do you consider average playing? I spent 3+ hours and got 10 or 20 hero points. It takes quite a while to unlock the mastery required to get the hero points in Maguuma.
I can’t see how it would take 2 days of “average” playing unless everyone is required to look up a guide on the most efficient way to farm the masteries and then grab the hero points. But if an element of the game that should be fun requires a guide, and is gating “game changing” content that you should have access to at start, there’s probably a problem anyways.
So either it was poorly designed, or it was meant to take a lot of time.
All you really need is basic gliding and updraft usage and look up the quickest hero points to get on Dulfy.
Yes, its not the fun way to do it but that’s what you can do if you really want to get them down fast.
And yes, it is supposed to take a while to fully unlock Elites because its essentially the leveling aspect of the expansion.
^ why don’t we give everyone a full set of ascended gear? Why don’t we put ghostly infusions in a vendor for 1 gold each? Why have all the sinister accessories be locked behind story achievements? Why don’t we just give out legendaries for logging into the game?
It won’t affect anyone.
If don’t like the JP, don’t do it. You don’t need that one shoulder skin. I don’t enjoy swearing aloud at my monitor for a hour straight either and so I don’t have any intentions of completing them but you don’t see me going on the forums and calling it to be made easier.
GW2 has deviated soo much from the original game, all games are suppose to evolve but I’m not sure if this is the right direction, I don’t even think GW2 is an MMO if I’m completely honest, I’m not even sure what it is…. is it a platform game? (sheer amount of annoying jumping puzzles and super adventure box.), mobile device game in a desktop format? (adventures, and let’s not try to glorify them with the term “adventures”, they’re mini-games), the first person mode.. is it a FPS now?! is it a solo RPG? with co-op elements.. so a co-op rpg?!… is it a MOBA of some kind (dragon stand/ tangled depths lane type metas), and not to mention the massive push on the gem store over the past few months, but really what makes this game an MMO? it certainly doesn’t feel like one..
I loved the GW universe and adored the original and it’s expansions, but GW2 just seems like a distant world from that.
I’m peeved with their idea of adding everything in a bundle on the gemstore as well but…
What defines a MMO in today’s world? The only big MMO release of recent years which goes by your definition of MMOs was FF14. All the other ones had action combat, jumping, a aiming recticle or all of those combined.
To the guy “who sucks at jumping puzzles”? Dude. I have 4 guys I play with regularly. Two of them ROCK at jumping puzzles. Most often when we do one to get the achievement or “for fun” one of these guys pretty much holds my hand leading me through said puzzle. They can finish a puzzle, then come back to find me trying to get past the 20th jump or where ever it is that I’ve come back to for the fourth or fifth time.
The point being… both of my Bad * jumpers AGREE that Wintersday Gauntlet is right up there w/ the Mad King’s Clock Tower and the South Sun JP. NEITHER OF THESE GUYS HAS COMPLETED ANY OF THOSE THREE.
For the record, the farthest I have EVER gotten is the EIGHTH SNOWFLAKE. From the start. Frustration doesn’t even cover TEN tries and not even being able to get near the First safe point. Is there one? I wouldn’t KNOW.
Really? The third hardest JP? It took me 2+ hours to get mad kings clock tower. It took me less than 15 minutes to get this one. They are not even in the same league. This jump puzzle (imo) is one of the easiest in the game, there are a few noob traps, but really it is all about jumping fundamentals. .
Just putting down their opinion. Maybe you didn’t read the post. Maybe you MISSED the part where 1) In NORMAL, non crazy puzzles, It takes me MULTIPLE (three or more) tries to complete them 2) the part about the EIGHTH snowflake from the starting platform. Just how many are there, anyway?
It’s like being tone deaf. Or blind. Or being an amputee. There are Just Some things that YOU CANNOT DO, no matter how hard you try OR how badly you want to. I PvP, I play WvW, I do fractals, I even do Jumping puzzles IF they don’t have crazy stupid timed BS insanity.
One more time… there needs to be an NON-TIMED, NON melting snowflake version of this puzzle. Call it the beginners or kids version, I don’t care. The ONLY award I want for completing it is the Snowglobe award for the Winter’s Presence.
Otherwise I will NEVER EVER complete that collection. Which to me is totally BOGUS. You don’t design things like collections with JP’s. Cause some of us JUST CANNOT DO THEM.
Theres a lot of things many people can’t do. I can’t do the achievements for Season 2 final to get my sinister ascended accessory. Do I go rant on the forums that they need to make them easier or even better, just put the accessory in a vendor?
It’s not uncommon to see 75-125 people at one of the bigger world bosses (Teq, Claw of Jormag, Taidha, etc.) and probably around 50-60 players fighting the smaller WBs (Ulgoth, Shadow Behemoth, Fire Elemental, etc.)
You see so many people because they merged everything into Mega server and kick people out of low pop shards to make it look like the population is booming. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not doing poorly, but they’re putting in a lot of effort to make sure it looks that way.
@OP, if you have 3+ hours to play consecutively at least a few days a week it’s probably worth coming back. Otherwise, you’re going to spend most of your time grinding crap just to get to the crap you wanted to grind. Also going to spend a LOT of time in your old spec before you can get to elite spec, so don’t expect nice new things for a while.
After you get past the initial grind it’s not as bad though.
Have you ever tried to do Tequatl or go into a Dragon’s Stand map. Or join any of the more popular metaevents? They all end up in multiple full maps.
A LOT means about 2 days of average playing even if you didn’t do squat in terms of Tyria mainland hero points completion to fully unlock Elites if that’s what you’re focusing on.
I do feel that weapon skills shouldn’t consume energy because it just restricts skill usage too much as it is.
The sword autoattack does also feel a tad too strong but I do think that’s a product of it being the only skill you have that doesn’t consume energy, so it kind of substitutes for the rotations of other classes.
As for whether it’s a boring class, I’m kind of used to auto attack spammers in GW2 PvE. The game as a whole isn’t exactly known for complexity in PvE.
Has anyone tried to confirm what the actual coefficient for this skill is?
The tooltip really doesn’t seem right, and it appears to do a bunch of small hits and then a big hit the damage of which doesn’t stack with the little hits.
Just looking at the damage I deal, the tooltip appears to only show the big hit (the lack of x9 on it suggests this as well), and the coefficient is around 2. Given its 1.4 sec cast time, this would make it a DPS increase over the RS autoattack.
RS 1 is a melee AoE spell and even with higher AS it still has lower overall DPS then DS 1 which is ranged.
Someone decided to add dhuumfire to an AoE spell and use it for single target… as a meleer… instead of having higher DPS at the safety of range.
Can you show how did you come to that conclusion. Even just looking at pure coefficients, DS 1 has a c/s of at most 1.0, which is about the same as RS 1 even without Reaper’s Onslaught.
Then if you add in factors such as (as far as I know) DS still uses the weapon strength of your equipped weapon and RS’s faster attack rate procing more traits, RS blows it out of the water.
The only argument you can make is that DS is ranged, but that’s like saying thieves have higher DPS with a pistol because daggers are melee.
I just did a quick check. With onsalught, I’m getting a total attack chain time of 2.075. Round up or down as you see fit. With no gear equipped, this comes to a raw tooltip DPS of (235 + 235 + 469) about 438. The sword auto attack does 469 raw tooltip DPS (391 + 469 + 547 over 3 seconds), and the dagger does 473 raw tooltip DPS.
Did you pull the cast times from the wiki? Because the 2.5s stated is out of date on there. BWE 3 reduced the aftercast by 0.2s and the wiki hasn’t updated yet.
In other words, dagger/GS/RS w/ RO all have the same DPS.
Well, how else would they handle it? If they just have you your elite spec with all the traits and utilities, why would anyone bother with the hero point challenges?
If you had all the useful masteries unlocked off the bat, why would people do events?
The matter of fact is that non-sandbox MMOs have always been driven by the carrot in front of players and GW2 isn’t a sandbox.
Map Completion.
Due to fact that you earn HP through WvW, could introduce NPC which is trading HP for various goods, both in PvE and WvW.
Problem lies within Anet wanting to do it.
Map completion only matters to people who wants a legendary, which I would assume is a relative minority.
You’ll end up with two possibilities with introducing a vendor:
1. You provide a few cosmetics or very situationally useful items: it ends up being basically karma 2.0.
2. You have very useful items and resources for sale: it either makes it into a requirement to farm it, invalidates some other content in the game, or distorts the market. If it doesn’t do the above 3 in some form or the other, then it means it isn’t worth you time farming for them.
Well, how else would they handle it? If they just have you your elite spec with all the traits and utilities, why would anyone bother with the hero point challenges?
If you had all the useful masteries unlocked off the bat, why would people do events?
The matter of fact is that non-sandbox MMOs have always been driven by the carrot in front of players and GW2 isn’t a sandbox.
Really hard to justify the trait overall because of its competition, but yeah that’s why its taken.
I take it on Reaper. Unyielding Blast ain’t worth the slot on Reaper unless you’re the sort of plebeian who uses Decimate Defenses and I don’t use Staff so Soul Marks does diddly.
Just to be clear, you’re talking about PvP/WvW right?
Back in BWE1 the philosophy behind ES seems to be that it becomes stronger than Gravedigger at low HP, but that’s no longer the case since the Gravedigger buff. Now Executioner’s Scythe is weaker than Gravedigger as an Execute regardless of HP.
I would be rather silly to nerf Gravedigger back down so, should ES get a buff to maintain the old philosophy?
My only complaint is taking so bloody long to be able to use your elite specialisation in any form of a viable state. I would’ve liked it far better if it didn’t take any hero points to unlock one trait from each line, and then you had to unlock the rest of the traits and utilities yourself.
The new maps are beautiful but I’m rushing through them with ‘gotta unlock Reaper fast!’ In my head.
I don’t see the rest of the grind as a problem. You’re playing a MMO, if you aren’t expecting grinding, you’re playing the wrong genre.
I didn’t PvE since the frost bow nerf. I think the only enjoyment I had playing PvE was using frostbow 4 and giving frost bows to people, knowing I was helping make those boss battles a few seconds shorter for everyone…
I can’t imagine how tedious PvE must be, waiting for your Meteor Shower to recharge over and over.
I don’t think thats really that unique since ele’s can conjure weapons and engi’s swap kits. Truthfully this would only be really useful in PvP, kinda useless in PvE.
Very useful actually. Free access to a ranged option and blast finishers without having to actually equip the weapon? Yes please.
I know shortbow is useful. I don’t know why having 2 mêlee weapons in PvE would be game changing useful. Tell me about some scenario’s were it would shine.
A boss with constant add waves.
You would go DD for the boss, s/p or staff for add waves.
Or if you need heavy boon stripping for parts of a fight, you would carry s/d in your second slot.
It was justified having higher damage because it can only use 1 sigil. Now, there is no reason to.
Ehhh, I don’t know about that. If you look at the damage coefficients for the GS, it works out to be 10% less per/s than daggers, giving them both the same DPS.
^if PvP can handle the Warrior axe autoattack and necro’s dagger auto, I don’t see why it wouldnt be able to handle a buffed RS 1 because RS1 WITH Reaper’s Onslaught is about equivalent to those two.
I suppose RS might have a wider cleave but if there’s 3 people on you at once in sPvP, I really question what the heck is the other team doing, especially if the three people in question nicely arranged themselves into a perfect line for you to autoclave them down.
Well, see, it’s not so much what they’re doing as it is what you’re doing. A reaper makes a wonderful distraction for 2+ opponents
In which case the extra cleave doesn’t really help. I’m not even sure if it has more cleave.
^if PvP can handle the Warrior axe autoattack and necro’s dagger auto, I don’t see why it wouldnt be able to handle a buffed RS 1 because RS1 WITH Reaper’s Onslaught is about equivalent to those two.
I suppose RS might have a wider cleave but if there’s 3 people on you at once in sPvP, I really question what the heck is the other team doing, especially if the three people in question nicely arranged themselves into a perfect line for you to autoclave them down.
I don’t think thats really that unique since ele’s can conjure weapons and engi’s swap kits. Truthfully this would only be really useful in PvP, kinda useless in PvE.
Very useful actually. Free access to a ranged option and blast finishers without having to actually equip the weapon? Yes please.
I personally don’t think its even a close comparison between blood and anything else if we are talking about a group environment seeing as blood contains the only unique group support effect in necromancer. When it gets to necros 3+ then its a consideration (aura already covers entire raid), or if the necro is going to be in range of only one or two other players (which would give a high probability of vulnerability and might not being fully stacked).
I dont know what future raid encounters are going to be like but in dungeons and fractals, as I commented previously, leech support barely makes any difference so I personally prefer to just maximise my damage over it.
Ehhh, on a dagger weapon strength basis, making RS 1 have a base untraited 1.2/s would give it a 1.2*1.15*1.1 = 1.518 coe/s.
Gravedigger has 3 coe with a cast time of 1.7, giving it a 1.76*1.1= 1.94 coe/s on dagger basis, so that’s far stronger than RS1 even with the suggestion.
I was under the impression that Gravedigger spam was ~2s damage-to-damage (including the very substantial aftercast), giving it (3/2=1.5)*1.1 = 1.65 coe/s relative to dagger. Although that’s still stronger than the traited RS1 you calculated.
Ehhh, on a dagger weapon strength basis, making RS 1 have a base untraited 1.2/s would give it a 1.2*1.15*1.1 = 1.518 coe/s.
Gravedigger has 3 coe with a cast time of 1.7, giving it a 1.76*1.1= 1.94 coe/s on dagger basis, so that’s far stronger than RS1 even with the suggestion.
From the quick math I have done as long as you take dhuumfire RS auto is the strongest auto of the lot, without its the weakest. This is more so the case with flame legion runes, especially on targets with high toughness. Fore pure auto attacks i got: RSauto+Dhuumfire>Daggerauto>=GSauto>RSauto
Also from quick math GS>dagger/horn overall because of nightfall and grave digger with relative weapon damage differences. Not sure if what is better to use above 50% though but below 50% its GD spam all the way.
Is that calculated with hammer strength and the 0.2 sec aftercast reduction in mind?
Assuming RS uses hammer weapon strength and the coefficients calculated is correct, if you took Onslaught, RS 1 would have 2.4/(2.3/1.15)= 1.2 coe/second.
GS auto is also 1.2/s. Dagger is 1.33/s but taking into account of dagger weapon strength, the 3 are very close to each other.
Personally I think RS1 should have 1.2 as base instead of with Onslaught, given that Shroud needs LF to run and the 10 second cooldown on entering shroud means there’s a potential opportunity cost involved. So it having higher trained damage would be rather fair.
Hey, if Anet really can’t come up with any ideas, they can pull a vanilla WoW :p
Have the boss have a mechanic where it needs to be chilled and then burnt to deal damage to it. Necros would be right at home.
… I liked those mechanics (was an EQ guy here but we had it there too).
I remember one where you had to alternate, been a LONG time but I want to say if you did more than a couple of the same in a row you’d buff the boss or have it reflect or something like that, so you had to alternate fire and ice to keep it vulnerable and maintain that alternating otherwise face the consequences… I remember it being pretty fun.
That’s an actual mechanic. I was talking about the non-mechanics like that boss where you had to kill it with ice damage otherwise it will stay on 1 HP. Stuff that didn’t really make players do anything different but just required certain classes or gear. The stuff that was there either just for lore/logical reasons or just because they wanted people to get a certain type of gear or use a certain class.
imo we dont need a buff. engi needs a nerf to get back in line with the rest of the classes.
if youve seen the only condi damageable vale guardian you know that u need condi burst not sustain just so u know.
i think the class that needs the most love for raids is definetly the thief because they have absolutely NOTHING for raids. eles are atm not wanted because revenant+engi combination is just a 100% upgrade from ele but i think if engis back in line with the other classes people will take eles again. i have seen like 5 vale guardian kills and countless of trys and there was only 1 thief and he didnt really do a lot. necros are just fine imo.
I’m pretty fine with engi being top DPS because out of all classes out there, they need the most effort to play.
I’m more concerned with revenants being a heavy armour class which can achieve DPS that high by just spamming autoattack. It’s not even like Heartseeker or Gravedigger spam where the animation and cast time has potential to screw you over (not much, but its there).
DEKeyz recorded Reaper cast times and coefficients in BWE2, and Robert Gee told us the full details of the BWE3 changes, so you can just calculate it yourself.
I’ve never really found vampire builds to be worthwhile in PvE, because the dodge or die design combined with the zerker meta means the small heals from your traits don’t really make much of a difference. Perhaps raids will be different, haven’t tried it yet but I’m hearing reapers don’t have a place in it.
Personally though, I am hoping they buff RS1 so we get a more complex and I retesting rotation involving juggling dagger 1 and RS in between skill cooldowns.
Dodge or die for dungeons for sure, no sympathy for those that need the healing, but for higher level fractals some extra support is always nice, plus invuln enemies still take leach damage
One of the guilds that beat the raid used a reaper, they won with a minute left, I’d hardly count reaper out as an option, optimal ehh, who knows, but surely an option.
I don’t really see why someone would take a Reaper for vale guardian but maybe later bosses have mass add killing phases or mechanics which forces you to tank damage.
The only thing to add here, that most people forget, is sword 1 usually only hits 1 target unless your enemies are stacked together. And sword 2 has really low dps compared to the rest of the chain. Only 3 hits 3 targets with a lot of force.
The 2nd attack of the chain (which I think you’re talking about) actually hits quite hard, since the projectile hits both coming and going – it’s a total of 1.05 power ratio for a 0.75s animation, for a 1.4 ratio/second that puts it above every other attack chain in the game. Every single attack in the chain is crazy good, there are no holes.
Brutal Blade is being reworked to be a standard slash attack. So this could really go either way as far as how it affects the DPS, but it will likely cleave now, thankfully.
I do think Revenant DPS needs to be toned down a bit. Or at least needing the player to perform a more complex rotation to achieve that DPS.
A heavy armour class which can achieve highest DPS by basically just spamming the autoattack seems a bit wrong to me.
